Reading/Multimedia/File feedback

This is just an idea collection page at this moment. This is based on a discussion between Robla, Fabrice and Sage Ross.

The issue
When browsing a category, images are shown in alphabetical order. Usually when browsing a category, you want to see the "best" images first, as they are the one's you are most likely to use. A significant portion of people coming to commons want to find a high quality image of some topic. We should help them by showing them the "better" images first.

Furthermore, there is no complete rating scheme of media on commons. Really good pictures (Quality images, Valued images, featured images, etc) do get identified, but that is only the cream of the crop. We have no information on how good an arbitrary file is.

Potential Solution
Have a rating system targeted at visitors (Not primarily targeted at contributors)

Obviously what is a "good" image is up to much debate, and not all useful images are necessarily "good". The goal would be to get an approximate idea of how well an image compares to other images.

Once we have ratings for some files, we can have a (perhaps) optional mode in categories to sort by rating. We perhaps could even do other sorting methods like sort by how many times this file is used (downside: The extra writes to the categorylinks table could have performance issues), file size, etc. We could also have special:BestRatedFiles and Special:WorstRatedFiles.

Solution A (thumb up/thumb down)
Have a "thumbs up"/"thumbs down" box on file pages

From there sort things using the method described at http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html

Solution B
Instead of getting users to rate files in isolation, have them compare files.


 * Would solve problems of different people having different standards.
 * Could have a special page Special:Which_is_better? that shows two images chosen at random (or from same category?) and asks users which is better
 * Downside, users could be asked to compare apples and oranges (or which is better - An audio recording of an opera or a picture of a firearm).
 * If images chosen at random, could potentially have offensive selections (which of these sexually explicit images is better? Which of these religious figures is better? etc)
 * The idea would be to make it into a bit of a game that could be fun.
 * Issue: How do we tally ratings for this. Would using the Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter method work if we're doing comparisions instead of good vs bad ratings? (Other useful links: Condorcet_method)

Potential problems

 * Users might worry it distracts from serious work of commons
 * Ratings might be considered not useful.
 * There are a lot of files, if images randomly selected