[pmwiki-users] Recipe stability

Dr Fred C drfredc at verizon.net
Wed May 2 11:16:31 CDT 2007


Ben Wilson wrote:
> On 5/1/07, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
>   
>> This does bring up another thought...  as opposed to having
>> "ratings" or "voting" on recipes [1], what if we called them
>> "endorsements"?
>>     
>
> An advantage to endorsements is the ability for recipe authors to feel
> out their contributors; at least those who own up to using the recipe
> and liking it. :-)
>   
    Why must pmwikites always reinvent the wheel?  The existing standard 
for evaluating online stuff is to provide two, if not three, means of 
both subjectively and objectively evaluating the value of a product, be 
it downloadable recipes, You Tube clips, golf clubs, or other services...

    * # of times downloaded (sometimes detailed to since ab/cd/0z,
      and/or latest version) -- This is perhaps the most objective form
      of info.  Should be dirt simple to set up something to track. 
    * Expert Rating / sometimes with a link to a review from a selected
      panel.  IMHO, this would be very nice for PMwiki recipes.
    * EndUser Rating -- with optional reviews. 
    * Many sites also include info about the overall rating of a store. 
      In pmwiki recipe terms, I suppose one might include the overall
      rating of a programmers code for the downloadables they provide. 
      IMHO, this might perhaps discourage some from participating --
      however it might also promote folks to provide and maintain higher
      quality code. 

----

    With a dual download & rating system, if something is found to have 
lots of downloads, but only a modest rating, then that might identify 
that niche as something which there is demand for, but few suitable 
options for, or something that needs additional improvement.  Without 
the # of downloads, folks might not recognize it as something that is 
popular, in spite of  some shortcomings. Without the rating, folks might 
not recognize that it's got some flaws or shortcomings that need attention.

    The implementation problem would seem to be how to connect the any 
of the various ratings data with each downloadable recipe or skin so one 
might search for something and get results displayed by some means other 
than alphabetical names of the resulting recipes.  While somewhat of a 
novice when it comes to some of the powers of the pagelist template 
commands, it would seem that perhaps something along this lines might 
work to fill this niche, stringing together a recipe with it's rating 
and download info.  It would seem to require some sort of an alternative 
(page-list template) search engine for recipes and skins than the 
current generic pmwiki search engine.   The data handling tools may be 
there, but implementation may be around the corner..

-- 

Always, Dr Fred C
drfredc at drfredc.com




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