Thread:Talk:Article feedback/IMDB rating: Only consider trustworthy users/reply (7)

If my goal was to find the one True™ answer about the article's status, then I could build a case for banning practically everyone except myself from rating articles. You say that you'd let anyone decide whether an article is well-written, but I might say that only people who share my views about comma splices and run-on sentences should be able to determine whether an article is well-written. If I want the True™ answer, then zero readers who are not native English speakers should be permitted to rate this item, and people who claimed to be native speakers would have to pass a written grammar test first.

But that's not my goal. I actually want to know what other people believe about our articles. I want to know this not because they're smart, or right, or because I've forgotten that half of them have below-median IQ, but because I want to know what these millions of users—nearly all of whom are unregistered—believe about the article. Wikipedia's future depends on keeping readers, not on keeping a couple of high-powered editors. If the article is written at the simplistic level that I associate with 12 year olds and our readers like that, then I want and need to know that. I want them to get the information they need and want far more than I want to show off my vocabulary.

I've already got a "trusted" user assessment system. I don't need AFT to find out what someone like you thinks about an article: you're going to tell me on the talk page, either by using the separate WikiProject assessment system or by leaving a written comment. AFT is my "untrusted" user assessment system. So long as I'm not such a fool as to confuse the two, then I'm getting the best of both worlds.

This means that I'm going to interpret "well-written" as meaning something like "I understood most of the stuff on the page", not as "This page should be submitted for a literary award". I'm going to interpret "complete" as meaning something like "Whatever fact I wanted to know happened to be on the page". I'm going to interpret "Trustworthy" as meaning "The names of sources, which the user probably didn't even look at, don't sound completely stupid" rather than meaning "The sources are actually high-quality and the material is actually supported by them". I'm going to interpret "Objective" as meaning "The page doesn't sound like it was written by a complete crackpot and the information sounds factual to the reader" rather than meaning "The page truly reflects the balance of high-quality sources".

And, by the way, I see no evidence of fan or hate votes at the dashboard. It's dominated by popular pages, but that's a function of its selection algorithm: unpopular pages are never displayed on the dashboard. That a page on a controversial figure like George W. Bush gets a 2.7 for "objective" (the dashboard apparently doesn't reflect the most current figures) tells me that we've probably hit the balance about right in the article—since one gets that kind of moderate score by pleasing neither the "pro" nor the "anti" readers. If that article was rated 4 or higher, I'd expect to find obvious bias in it—bias that just happened to line up with what most of our readers believed. Apparently unlike you, I don't expect "untrusted" users to have checked their personal biases at the door. I actually expect these ratings to reflect their biases and average ignorance, and consequently I account for that when I'm interpreting the results.