Thread:Talk:Article feedback/Flawed and just useless/reply (6)

I'm a "Ms WhatamIdoing", not a mister.

The answer's in the FAQ; I suggest that you go read it. Nobody has ever promised that the ratings produced by readers would accurately reflect the quality of the article. It is possible to engage people in a process that produces engagement without producing accurate ratings.

I understand that teachers do things like this all over the world: you try out something that gets students engaged in the class, and you hope that it results in increased student learning. It's entirely possible that any given class assignment will result in increased student learning—and it's entirely possible that it will have no discernable effect at all on student learning, or will even prove to be worse than a more typical teaching method. However, that doesn't mean that the attempt was worthless, or that it won't result in other desirable outcomes, like students being more likely to attend class in the future, or less likely to be disruptive.

Similarly, this tool seems to increase reader engagement—which was its stated goal, so it's successful on that point—but we don't actually know whether it is producing accurate ratings on all articles, on some articles, or on any articles. That we currently can't tell whether the ratings are useful for the highly limited purpose of identifying articles that need improvement doesn't prove that the effort is worthless, or that it won't result in other desirable outcomes, like more readers or less vandalism.