Recently read the thread on the poor quality of the ratings but changing the wording isn't going to have much of an effect. A properly structured questionnaire that then suggests a rating will. The problem with this is the amount of work required to overhaul the database in order to do it. That said the ratings are instead of being objective, which is what wine users and developers want, subjective and nearly useless.
On Sat, 3 Jan 2009, Keith Muir wrote:
Recently read the thread on the poor quality of the ratings but changing the wording isn't going to have much of an effect. A properly structured questionnaire that then suggests a rating will.
Something like a simple rule-based system (platinum = no_special_winecfg_settings && no_dll_overrides && ...) would probably not be a bad idea, yes. Then again, some subjectivity is perhaps not a bad idea, especially in case people start to give wrong information because the suggested rating doesn't match their expectations (for example, strictly speaking Prince of Persia SoT is Silver due to two very minor problems you only notice if you look hard while I bet for most people it's platinum currently). So the submitter should be able to adjust the overall rating manually in any case. (side note: A better visualization of the ratings would be cool - thumbs up/thumbs down etc. - as the "colors" used currently are far from optimal)
Additionally, showing some kind of skeleton for new ratings (putting some text into the now empty text fields when adding new test data) might be good. Since currently the structure is "what works/what does not work" first, this is difficult though. Using some aspect-driven structure (installer/video/audio/network/etc.) with works/does not work for each aspect might be better. Have to think about that a bit more though.
Also being able to update/reply to test data would be cool. I'm afraid all this points to using a wiki instead of a database really. ;-)
The problem with this is the amount of work required to overhaul the database in order to do it.
I don't see why old ratings couldn't just be kept...?
That said the ratings are instead of being objective, which is what wine users and developers want, subjective and nearly useless.
While for statistical purposes AppDB is of limited use currently, for users it *is* very useful I think - however, reading through (multiple) AppDB ratings, howtos, bug reports, and comments per application is quite time consuming. Perhaps using a wiki-like approach at least for ratings, howtos, and links to bugs would be better. Probably not too easy to implement though ;-).
Regards
-
Keith Muir -
M.Kiesel