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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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12 December 2005 - 4:46 pm
One of my pet peeves is rating systems that aren't discrete. For example, if you decide you want to give stars out to movies don't give out 4.7 stars. That's ridiculous and defeats the purpose of using stars. Or, if rating on a scale from 1 to 10, don't give out a score of 7.2. Scores like this imply a rating system that's most likely more accurate than the one you're using and leave me wanting to know how you decided not to give it a 7.3 (or worse, a 7.243).
I understand the problem. Game X got a 7 and game Y is marginally better, so you feel compelled to give it a 7.1. But that's using the wrong metric for what you're trying to do. If you want to rank the items, give me an ordered list. If you want to rate the items, pick a metric and apply it, but don't give me all this wishy-washy stuff. It's like the Siskel & Ebert thumbs up and thumbs down. Roger Ebert complains on his show that the thumbs don't show degrees of like or dislike, but he never gives a movie half a thumb down. Because doing so lessens the value of the rating.
Posted by on 12 December 2005 at 4:37 PM
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