Thread:Talk:Article feedback/Please stop/reply (67)

I'm broadly supportive of the Article Feedback Tool, but I think we might be able to tweak it. Wasbeer raises a good point about the potential for gaming - whether it's the Justin Bieber "haters" downvoting the article because they don't like Bieber, or "Beliebers" upvoting the article because they like Bieber, the problem is that people are voting based on their preferences for or against the subject of the article, not on the quality of the article itself.

One simple fix for this would be to make the display of the voting panel much more random. Make it so that there's only a 1 in 20 chance of it turning up, so you don't get people trying to ballot stuff it for or against particular people or things that they like or dislike. Here, Slashdot is the model - on Slashdot, you only get a certain number of moderation points every so often. It is hard to use those randomly assigned moderation points to downvote the stuff you don't like because getting them is such a random thing. This seems like an easy fix for the more popular articles to prevent ballot-stuffing and other concerns that Wasbeer raised.