Thread:Talk:Article feedback/more effective to engage casual readers on talk page?/reply (8)

"When" I go to IMDB to check a new movie? Well, I don't really know, because I don't do that. I can count the number of times that I've ever been in a movie theater on my fingers. The last time was more than ten years ago.

In similar systems, however, I think nothing at all about such ratings, unless I'm specifically looking for other people's opinions—and even then, I usually wonder whether my view would be the same. In my experience, the correlation between other people's ratings and mine is moderately weak. For example, book reviews for paranormal romances tend to average four stars or higher over at Amazon, and I'd give the whole genre a "minus twelve" rating if I could.

In particular, if I have already read a book, and I'd rate it X, then I do not chuck my opinion out the window if I happen to discover that other people have rated it as Y. Since this tool is placed at the end of the article, readers encounter it after they've read the article. The natural path in the tool is to first rate the article and then (occasionally) to look at other people's ratings. I don't believe that readers are going to rate it as five and then say, "Well, everyone else rated it as a two. I'll go change my ratings to match those idiots."

This is the fundamental difference between our ratings and IMDB's: The purpose of the ratings at a place like IMDB or Amazon is to help people decide whether or not to see the movie. We're showing them the entire "movie" first, and then letting them rate it. The ratings will not change whether or not the person decides to read the article.