[R-wiki] Beginner - Intermediate - Advanced indicator

[Philippe Grosjean]

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> 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.

Exact! But then, you will tend to increase rank of pages directly linked 
by top ranking pages! So, the bias remains somehow.
Best,

Philippe Grosjean