[wp-hackers] Reviews for Plugins

[Mike Bijon]

Otto's point about a sign-in API to .org, would help prevent a lot of
self-voting/cheating.

But, I think the current ratings on .org need to be "fixed" before an API
for plugin-ratings is built.

--> end TL;DR (I drone on about "fix" algorithms below)

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Why fix?
Quality scores get diluted when a lot of votes are cast, and turn into
popularity contests. This means the best self-promoters usually end up at
the top of the pile semi-permanently. That's what happened at Digg when it
blew-up, and I don't think anyone wants that for WP plugins, after-all
there's already a separate popular plugins list.

It would be awesome if .org could take a page from ratings that are useful
even when traffic/vote-counts skyrocket: HN, Reddit, Netflix, even Yelp.

How?
Most of those ratings use a probabilistic score instead of just averaging
votes. These formulas have been around a while and there are many flavors:
confidence (Binomial, Wilson) scores or credible (Bayesian) intervals.
They're all pretty easy to implement (usually not in PHP though), and it
might be fun to experiment with different formulas and get feedback from
people on this list.

Does anyone have an idea of how to contribute to the system behind .org?
Would a plugin be a starting point, or is this something that would be best
as an external system that .org would query? Would someone at Automattic be
willing to export plugin-rating data so it could be played-with?