Topic on Talk:Article feedback

Article feedback is meaningless

4
Owen S Hughes~mediawikiwiki (talkcontribs)

Article feedback is meaningless, since the incredibly wide spread of users, all with different abilities and values (not to mention prejudices), means that no star rating can ever be truly validated. In addition, the extraordinary number of articles on Wikipedia ensures that a large number of them will receive very few such ratings, even over a lengthy period. I agree with other comments that if this tool is to be of any value at all, and I still have my doubts, it should appear on the article talk page. Lastly, although I feel I could respond to the rating system, I have no interest in doing so because a) see above and b) I would much rather spend the limited time I have available in editing and otherwise contributing to the encyclopedia. (Anyone who has ever used the eBay Review and Guide system will know that it is frequently confused with the eBay Seller rating system, and that both systems are subject to much misuse and abuse.)

This post was posted by Owen S Hughes~mediawikiwiki, but signed as Owen S Hughes.

He7d3r (talkcontribs)
it should appear on the article talk page

Quoting this reply by Jorm (WMF):

Most users of Wikipedia are not even aware that Talk pages exist. Since the goal of the tool is to attract impressions from as wide a range of users as possible, hiding the tool on the talk page is not a viable solution.

WhatamIdoing (talkcontribs)

How one validates a process depends on what one wants to achieve. Eating five pounds of candy every day is a validated process for gaining weight; it is not a validated process for improving your driving skills.

We will not be able to validate these ratings as providing the One True™ Answer about the article's status. However, that's not actually the goal, and nobody has ever promised you that these ratings will produce the One True Answer for anything.

We can validate this process as being a reliable means of determining what our users (who are mostly non-editor readers) believe about an article. We hope that we will also be able to determine that it is a functional method of increasing the rate at which currently non-editor readers become active editors.

Von Restorff (talkcontribs)

Well, it is quite clear that these ratings are not a reliable means of determining what our users (who are mostly non-editor readers) believe about an article.

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