At Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:24:39 -0400, Timothy Falconer wrote:
Hi all,
Let's talk more directly about the reasons for ranking . . . early today I wrote:
It also gives us more colored dots.
And Yoshiki wrote:
And the explanation of why this is a good thing is not described yet. Kathleen wasn't happy with it and I think your response wasn't answering her concern.
I'll try to be clearer.
There were more in the discussion...
As I see things, there are three related issues that are getting combined in the same conversation:
- showing individual rankings (which is what I think she's most
concerned about ... google "Punished by Rewards")
- showing levels of ongoing community involvement (aka, "top ten
contributors")
- sorting things so the good stuff stays on top and the lesser stuff
falls to the bottom
The colored dots next to people's usernames are really about #2. You can get points by voting, by commenting, by submitting projects, etc. It is *not* merely a measure of your project vote points. It's not an average either. One person who submits ten projects that gets 5 points each will earn 50 points, which is the same as another person who submits two projects that get 25 points each. There's no way to tell which person got 25 points apiece and which got 5 points apiece. In a normal grading situation, the 25 pointer would clearly "win out" over the 5 pointer. The Squeakland showcase measures *sustained effort*, not specific performance.
Displaying the colored dots is a motivational thing. When someone sees a comment by "yoshiki with the purple circle", they can see you're an Etoys enthusiast with a history. It's not "Yoshiki who get's straight A's", it's "Yoshiki who's put in a lot of effort over time and has earned that purple circle." Seeing the purple circle is a reward to you for effort, and a signal to others that your opinion might matter more than "puppetAccount31252" with a white circle. The colored circles are a measure of credibility.
But one of the concerns was that one can lose the colored dot visibly to everybody even when you are doing as much as you have been. When others are saying that "that is de-motivating", you just repeat yourself to say "it is a motivational thing". As Kathleen repeated, coercing people onto a linear scale is not the way to motivate different kind of learners.
The external "reward" for some effort in learning settings should be other people's honest and insightful feedback and getting more ideas (and internally "learn" something), but not a dot.
Your #2 above is not separated from #1, and the 5-6 levels of dots have way more meaning than "top ten contributors". #3 doesn't mean you need to have a visible dots for individual persons, but merely projects should be sorted.
Which leads to the most important reason for them .... people with higher levels get asked to rank other projects. They get asked because they've earned the right to have a say in what's valuable.
But that doesn't mean that person's dot should be visible to everybody.
Some important things to keep in mind:
- no one ever sees your votes
- no one ever knows how their project was ranked, only that it places
higher or lower than another project
- there are no displays of "raw points" anywhere ... only relative
levels. Today the top points is 362. In a year, it might be 23,252. No one ever sees this.
Well, I know that.
As for the more general question of why do we even want to rank projects (#3), the answer is quite plain ....
because when there's 250,000 projects on the server, it'll be a big mess that's useful to no one unless there's some ordering that's generally useful.
The Squeakland ranking system is an attempt to sort with a measure of actual worth, not mere popularity. The way to gauge this worth should be tied directly to sustained merit.
This statement is not an answer to why people should be visibly ranked, and they should lose the rank easily.
-- Yoshiki