When you go to the supermarket and you go to the meat counter, do you look to see if the hamburger is red and fresh or do you simply grab a package?

When you go to the bookstore to buy a book, do you simply pick one up then take it to the checkout counter?

Would you like to see your stories, poetry or both in a best selling book?

These questions involve quality or a judgment of quality. There are a number of ways to judge quality. If one is talking about hamburger, freshness is the key. For a best-seller, it is quite obviously popularity.

At PnP we have had a system in place for a long time which our readers can use to guage quality and which also is a measure of popularity. At the moment the system doesn't work very well.

Why?

Some tell me they "don't believe in ratings", yet I seriously doubt that they simply grab a package at the meat counter or would buy a book without looking at it and making a value judgment.

They judge with their wallets...

We have monthly contests here at PnP both for Prose and Poetry. At present there are 24 judges. ratings help them make the final decision.

There is a branch of mathematics, Statistics, which deals with these factors. We have warned people here not to take ratings seriously until there are at least ten on a work. That is why there are two numbers in the ratings; number of raters and rating.

Many systems have been tried to increase the number of ratings on works. Some have temporarily helped and some were miserable failures.

Our system now is totally anonymous. One can rate without commenting. This keeps an author guessing; he can never be certain who rated him, even if he does see a comment. A commenter might not have rated while another visitor may have used the "Rate this" link without commenting.

We also have a system where the Author has total control over who can see his ratings. He can keep them to himself, make them public or even hide ratings from himself if he wishes.

In short, there is no reason for not rating.

Presently only members can rate. We could open that to the general public, but that opens up a danger of skewing the results. Another idea is to not allow comments until a rating has been entered. One other way is to tie ratings to submissions, allow one submission for each five ratings made.

Rating, grading is a part of life. We all do it every day in many things. Here at PnP, we need ratings; we need them badly.

Whenever a change is made here, it inevitable provokes anger from a few. But since ratings are so important to our future, it will be necessary to find ways to be sure there are enough of them to mean something. Very likely in the near future we will implement one or more of the above choices.

bob