scaling tool for works

For each work, have a way to associate a numeric value on each of the several Sliding Scales. Useful for a if-you-like-x-you-might-like-y toy.

edited 22nd Sep '10 8:35:31 AM by FastEddie

Yep, better get right on that, Eddie!

Hmm, all I can think of when I read this is that it's going to form another front for edit wars, with tropers incessantly tweaking the scales for their favorite (or least favorite) works. "It's idealistic!" "No, it's cynical!" "It's hard science!" "No, it's soft!" It's also going to cause a spike in people trying to launch scale tropes.

There's got to be some way to keep the democratic element of the wiki while preventing abuse.

If there are ten 'buckets', we display the indicator at the bucket with the highest number of votes from different sources. Or possibly, the displayed graph could could plot the number of votes in each bucket. A jagged graph would actually convey the YMMV factor pretty well.

So, one vote per troper, with the final result displaying the mode? (Is that right? Mode = item with highest votes? Damn my aging statistics knowledge!) Edit: Yay, I got it right!

If you make the scales too granular, it's going to take a lot of votes to damp the noise factor. Displaying the results as a graph is a neat idea, but how many scales-per-work are we talking about?

edited 22nd Sep '10 9:30:16 AM by Fighteer

I'm thinking ten buckets. That is, setting the values is done on a line that has ten stops. A person selects the stop they think is correct. That's their vote.

The number of different scales is arbitrary. Maintaining 1 or 100 for each work would essentially be the same low-impact task. If we had 50,000 works that had been scored for all 100, that would be 5M very small rows. Easy-peasy. Not even our fifth largest table. Also, very slim chance all 50,000 would be scored even once.

I was thinking more of the display factors than the storage requirements. Looking at a page with fifty bar graphs on it would get awfully confusing. Or maybe not, it's one of those personal preference things.

It also certainly sounds like a way to get tropers more involved in analyzing works, not just discussing them.

I'll be curious to see your beta when it gets done.

Pretty low on the list at the moment. Just didn't want to lose track of the idea.

Oh, hey, this idea sounds familiar. Probably need another page-type to indicate which pages are scales.

Well, a list of scales, anyway. I think a good play would be to have a mod intervention needed to mark a trope as a scale. Likely to reduce the flood of new scale types.

Your data storage requirements will multiply if you're tracking votes by troper/IP, something that is rudimentarily necessary. It would probably work similarly to the crowner system in that regard, but limited to one vote per topic per work.

I'd advocate a Get Known requirement, too, just to keep people from gaming the system by voting from multiple IPs without registering. But I've always favored that, so take it for what you will.

We also might want to consider regulating what scales can be attached to which works; for example, it makes no sense to attach Mohs Scale Of Sci Fi Hardness to a Fantasy work. But that might be too tricky to manage.

edited 22nd Sep '10 2:29:07 PM by Fighteer

The trick on vote tracking is to concat the IP/handle to a mass in one mediumtext field, and permit the vote only if the identifiers were not there already. Limits the voting to 16M of characters per 'issue', but that should be okay for our needs.

Yes, voting would be for Known folks only. Attachment/detachment of weird scales can be human controlled, rather than system controlled.

Are you planning on showcasing the mode(the option with the most votes), the mean(the average of the vote values), a chart with each value and how many votes it has, or a combination of the above?

If we have a chart, that'll include graphics, right? Wouldn't that be a little bandwidth intensive?

It would show the mode, as noted above, in a plot. The point plotted would be proportional to a fixed height for the number of votes in the bucket. In other words, a bucket on one graph of 10 votes might have the same height as that bucket having 3 on another graph, because the number itself isn't as important as is its height relative to its sibling buckets.

The graph would be light weight: under 1 or no more than 2K. Not a big bandwidth worry.

Just a note; Scales may be applied to tropes, not just works, I suppose. A desire to do so might be an indication that we have some tropes that differ only by degree, which is a bad thing.

Or a desire to see the factors of a trope spelled out in a different medium. It could be useful to see what people think the trope actually means.