How long as this been in use? Has it ever been added to any of the battleground articles?

I don't know, but I've been having great fun rating any and all wikipedia articles with a "one" rating in all categories. Gawker called this the end of Wikipedia.

Let's hope that they're right...

They've been rolling it out for a year, mostly to a select crew. But latterly to everyone, X 1000 articles a day are being given the treatment.

That's weird, because I've been going to some of the very worst articles, by anyone's standard, and giving them straight 5's across the board.

I'm hoping that the lunacy of the whole system will begin to dawn on even the 'pediots.

See, this is how the system wins. Your "crowdsourcing" will average itself out and in the end they'll be able to say that Wikipedia articles are "while not perfect, better than Britannica" or some nonsense like that. You need to coordinate on this stuff - either all 5's or all 1's.

Edit: for the record I've been actually rating articles "honestly". Which means it's probably not that far off from FieryAngel's approach.

What is better is going to articles that see much less traffic (easier to find now that the feedback box is going to every article) and then constantly adding ridiculous ratings for those.

The piece originally referenced in this thread is worth reading, despite the title.

I rate this thread at one star.

Just to be contrary I gave it 5.

As for the Wiki feature, it just seems like a self-congratulary circle jerk. Nothing new I guess.

I doubt there is any defined process for using the ratings to improve content, nor do I see how the ratings they are collecting could be used for any meaningful purpose anyway.

I suspect the purpose of the rating tool is twofold: to boost participation, and to give the appearance of caring about quality.

Actually, I think the purpose is very clearly to increase participation and any appearance of caring about quality is just a bonus. The assessment tool roll-out included testing of various "calls to action" such as editing or creating an account. You can see some results of those tests here. I think that link should make the purpose clear.

I don't know how much "action" the WMF will accomplish, given that serious topics aren't motivating a whole lot of feedback:

• Jesus had 44,600 page views in the past 5 days, but only 15 ratings given
• European Union had 42,300 page views in the past 5 days, but only 11 ratings given
• John F. Kennedy had 60,500 page views in the past 5 days, but only 5 ratings given
• Libertarianism had 15,500 page views in the past 5 days, but zero ratings given

Then again, you have your fancruft articles that elicit much higher response rates, though still very low, relatively speaking:

• WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) had 77,600 page views in the past 5 days, and 748 ratings given
• PlayStation 3 had 43,700 page views in the past 5 days, and 526 ratings given
• Michael Jackson had 100,800 page views in the past 5 days, and 336 ratings given

So, we might conclude that the new Article Feedback tool motivates somewhere between one in every 50 to every 16,000 visitors to a given Wikipedia article to leave a rating behind, depending on the nature of the article.

Note, I was not allowed to participate on the Wikimedia Foundation's "Research Committee" because I was unable to demonstrate to Gerard Meijssen's satisfaction that I have any credentials in the area of research.

Yup. Once again we see that the proper measure of success of an encyclopedia is the number of people recruited to "write" for it, regardless of competency. The quality of what they write is entirely irrelevant.

Sad but true.

Anarchist. People like you are the cause of the death of civility and responsiblity on teh interwebs. You just have no respect. Like, you think it's a JOKE.

I was talking to a cell biologist the other day about her Ph.D. dissertation work, and I couldn't resist asking her if she'd had any thought of putting any of it into Wikipedia. She laughed and laughed. She said no, she'd never edited. So I asked if she'd read it. "Occasionally." Under what circumstances? "Well, I guess if you didn't know ANYTHING about a subject, and wanted a quick overview that you didn't depend on, it would be okay."

There you are. I've gotten that answer from a LOT of folks. And it's sort of forced on them by Google, so it's not a surprising one. I'd give it a 5.

Pet Peeve, Not Noticeable Until I Became an Outlaw.

It can be a serious pain to create an account now. It frequently takes me many tries before I come up with a name that isn't being used.

Suddenly occurred to me: Go through the user list and pick a name first, don't just try the name with the create an account screen, which means I have to enter another Captcha if the name is taken....

If they wonder why more people don't create an account, it's become far from quick, and a truly new user is not going to anticipate this and try Farfel293621 (T-C-L-K-R-D) right off. There is no good reason to require an additional Captcha. I'm guessing that if new account creation is down, this is a piece of it.

Actually, Farfel (T-C-L-K-R-D) is not taken. There is still some low-lying fruit. Who'd a thunk it?

If anyone takes it now, immediate suspicion of being a sock of Abd. And it would be horrible, horrible I tell you, if someone created the account and then looked at Cold fusion and fixed a spelling or grammar problem, or, for that matter, created one. Enric Naval may see this. Hey, Enric, pphhhtttt!

Probably won't happen, the article is too boring. The field is literally exploding (well, almost literally!) and you'd never know from Wikipedia, unless you look at Energy Catalyzer which is half-way decent, possibly because Brian Josephson took an interest and wasn't intimidated by the cabal, even though they shook their tiny little fists at him.

Hey, what about that E-Cat? After spending a month pouring over the data from the demonstrations, I come up with non erat demonstrandum. Hah! No article there! Opposite of Q.E.D.. Data not adequate to establish the proposition, ambiguous, coupled with logical errors on the part of some observers. We should have a much better idea before the end of the year.

Good point. Those stupid ratings boxes DO have a legitimate use---to mark the fancrufty articles.

Seriously, there is a lot of crap on en-wiki about professional wrestlers.....

In case there was any doubt, another feature of the article feedback tool is that Wikipediots will use it to spy on you.

Arrgh! Have these people no sense at all? You gotta wonder!

With ordinary editing, yeah, the user "ID" is published. But, here, they may selectively reveal what they choose. Here is who voted 5 stars for that article on this famous Nazi. Or who dissed your company article that you paid so much for. Wow! That was the company IP! Okay, time to talk to sysadmin. Who was that?

"Hey, Serio! There was traffic with the Wikipedia page for "We Da Best" at 12:36 UT yesterday. Whose computer did that come from? .... Oh, yeah? You sure? Gar Untulled? Thanks."

"Gar, you're fired for using your computer on our time to edit Wikipedia, that cesspool. Security will escort you out of the building."

The rating process provides no notice that submissions are logged and may become public. An ordinary edit screen provides this for IP:
Just for curiosity, I logged in as Abd and was able to submit a rating. I rated Cold fusion, which has quite low ratings, deservedly.

I can rate an unrated article and the rating is saved. Now, to whom should I complain that the well-known troll, Abd, was able to alter the database, in spite of his account being thoroughly banhammered.

Another piece of information. After rating the article as Abd, I logged out, and was able to rate it again. 2 ratings shown. I could presumably rate it again with new IP, but the test here was to see if Abd IP was detected and compared with the IP user. Apparently not. Not that this would work anyway.

The plan is to have feedback sections for each article. My own complaint is that the box is too big, taking up 2 screen inches of real estate when it could have been done with half that. The "I am an expert" box is just stupid and I'm fairly sure that will go away over time.

I'm interested that the use rate of these is so low, as pointed out in the thread above. I think that's probably a function of the fact that the ratings numbers are not visible unless the user clicks to see the poll.

Eventually I suppose that these ratings will be a good way for work groups to see where further effort needs to be placed. So far I don't see a lot of use in the system, speaking as a Wikipedian.

See, as a chemist, I look up chemical info (especially molar masses) on Wikipedia quite often. This is the type of info that I could (and probably should) be using an "official" source for, but Wikipedia's chemical infoboxes have yet to lead me astray (at worse, they just don't list a property). I say that, and now someone's going to start changing molar masses the same way date-change vandalism is popular now, and I'm going to look like a fool when someone examines my data, and a journal article gets retracted because I trusted an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit" <dusts off CRC for the first time in years...>

On topic, I've yet to rate an article. Maybe I'll start.

What really cracks me up: this is where they post the results of all "content quality" ratings.

Most of those charts seem totally useless to me. Except the ones like this, which implies that both non-experts and experts in a field are both likely to rate an article "3". And the experts are slightly more prone to disagree. Hah hah hah.