Thread:Talk:Article feedback/Please stop/reply (68)

One of the most important things in designing an interface - any interface - is that it should behave consistently, every time. This falls into the Principle of Least Surprise.

While I see your point about randomizing the access to the voting panel (to avoid gaming situations), doing so would clearly make the tool unpredictable, which would be a rather bad user experience.

There are better ways to detect and handle gaming (mostly done on the server side, by tweaking the calculation maths). This is something that I and Dario are interested in a great deal, and if anyone has any suggestions as to how modify the calculations, we're all ears. I must confess that gamification problems are low on the list of issues, since (as with all things in Wikipedia), they end up solving themselves over time (like spates of vandalism or errors in the text).

An article may be gamed for a short period of time (say, a couple months, or even a year) but eventually people will stop caring about that and move on and the ratings will adjust back to normal.