[R-wiki] Beginner - Intermediate - Advanced indicator

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 1/27/06, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:
> Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> > Who puts these on the page?  I would be concerned that pages
> > are mislabelled and also there is some question about whether
> > this is a valid categorization in the first place.
>
> In my mind, author(s) label their pages themselve. This is just a visual
> mark to help spot what is interesting for you (for instance, if you're a
> beginner, just skip pages or sections labelled as "advanced")! It is
> also optional, and there is no way to filter pages according to this
> criterion (in the search page). I don't want to move this towards a
> complex mechanism (vote - page ranking - access statistics, etc...).
> Best,
>
> Philippe Grosjean
>
> > Amazon allows one to comment on reviewers indicating whether the
> > review was useful to them or not but if most pages wind up being useful
> > then a categorization such as this may be irrelevant or not useful.
> >
> > One alternative, if its technically feasible, would be to mark how
> > many times each page has been viewed and allow people to find
> > out which have viewed the most.  The nice thing about that is that
> > it is completely automated.   Or perhas such searching with
> > google does roughly this automatically anyways.
>
> It seems possible to derive such a feature from the 'stats' plugin.
> Also, note that in the search, pages are sorted in decreasing hit order,
> so this is partially fullfilled there.
>
> However, I am against that kind of page ranking. Everybody knows that
> page ranking is biased as soon as you display statistics to the users
> (because they tend to visit most visited pages... and thus increase page
> ranking... of most visited pages)!!!

I believe its possible for a web page to know which page the viewer came
from so those views that came from this source could be eliminated or
downweighted, in principle.