Community Scoring (Page Rating)

User rates page content / provides feedback

Here is the page rating component in the Deuce skin (click for full size):

Page rating asks "Was this content helpful?". Users answer by voting, under the following restrictions:

• User must be logged in, with view permission on the page. Talk pages cannot be rated. Unauthorized users see a popup dialog requesting them to log in to vote.
• Users must choose from simple up/down voting
• Users can vote once per page
• Voting statistics are displayed. If the user is first to rate, a general message is shown ("Was this helpful?").

The display goal is to have a clear, non-intrusive way to make a rating and see current ratings. The "2 of 3 found this helpful" style shows information without unduly influencing users. Raw percentages, even when tempered with a vote count, are difficult to keep in the "helpful" range. While 2 of 3 looks fairly helpful, but 66% looks like a poor pass rate on a test.

When a user rates a page poorly, an optional input field will appear, allowing users to post a public comment about what could be improved about the page's contents to offer constructive feedback on improving the page's quality:

See visual states to see all possible UI states for the rating component.

It's convenient to rate a page after reading -- there should be another rating component at the bottom, using the same icons as the floating rating bar.

User searches site

When a user searches in MindTouch, the result set is automatically sorted with additional weighting given to highly rated pages. The improved search experience may choose to display rating information. The goal is to use ratings as a guide without confusing users about the ordering of search results.

Editor can get reporting on content quality for editorial review

Users, through curation dashboards, will be able to access a dashboard that contains a list of pages of the most lowly rated content (given in absolute terms of number of negative votes). This view will contain:

• Computed page rating (sortable)
  • Trend information ("is this page trending up or down?")
• Page title (page hierarchy)
• Last edited date
• Number of edits
• Number of comments
• Keywords (tags)

It will also supply an editor the ability to "wipe" the ratings of the page to allow for the page to be reset (this needs to be stored in the page history somewhere)

With the reporting on metrics, it will be critical for the statistics service to be able to pick these values up and display them in a historical manner.

Users develop a quality score rating based on contributions

Every content rating applies a score to the previous contributors of a page to give users an aggregate score of their contributions to a site. This score would then be exposed through the user profile service, with the ability to see the top contributors of a page and throughout the site. User ratings can likewise be negatively impacted by poor ratings, which would be a way of socially engineering active cleanup of the site of bad content (especially content you have authored).

GET: pages/{id} (modified response)

The current computed rating for a page is returned in the verbose page XML document. If the current user has rated the page their rating is also included in the XML. This way the UI has enough information to ask the user to change their rating rather than rating it for the first time.

The following XML block will be included in the verbose page XML if the viewing user has rated the content:

<rating score="{float: 0..1}" count="{int}" date="{datetime}">
  <user.ratedby id="x" score="{float: 0..1}" date="{datetime}" href="users/{userid}" />
</rating>

A page that has not been rated has the following added XML

<rating score="" count="0"/>

POST: pages/{id}/ratings (new feature)

Allows users to rate a page

<rating score="{float: 0..1}" count="{int}" date="{date}>">
  <user.ratedby id="x" score="{float: 0..1}" date="{date}" href="users/{userid}" />
</rating>

Table: Ratings

This table stores raw rating information. If a user changes their vote, the timestamp_reset column in the row representing their current vote gets updated with the current timestamp. Resource_id and resource_type allows concepts other than pages to be rated such as files, pages, users. 

CREATE TABLE `ratings` (
`rating_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`rating_user_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
`rating_resource_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
`rating_resource_type` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL,
`rating_resource_revision` int(10) unsigned default NULL,
`rating_score` float unsigned NOT NULL,
`rating_timestamp` timestamp NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
`rating_reset_timestamp` timestamp NULL default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`rating_id`),
KEY `resource_id_type_resetts_user` (`rating_resource_id`,`rating_resource_type`,`rating_reset_timestamp`,`rating_user_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Table: ComputedRatings

This table has the current ratings already computed. A unique key constraint applies on resource_id and resource_type ensuring that only one current rating exists for a resource. Rows in this table are updated when a new rating occurs. 

CREATE TABLE `ratingscomputed` (
`ratingscomputed_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`ratingscomputed_resource_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
`ratingscomputed_resource_type` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL,
`ratingscomputed_score` float unsigned NOT NULL,
`ratingscomputed_score_trend` float unsigned NOT NULL,
`ratingscomputed_count` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
`ratingscomputed_timestamp` timestamp NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
PRIMARY KEY (`ratingscomputed_id`),
UNIQUE KEY `resource_id_type` (`ratingscomputed_resource_id`,`ratingscomputed_resource_type`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;