Discussion

Hi Zoran! I like this very, very much. Really cool stuff your are doing for Moin! I have just tried it out and it seems to work perfectly. Maybe it is a problem, that one and the same person can rate several times on the same subject on the same page. This could lead to wrong rating results. Maybe an option for Rating macro "VoteOnce=True" which is by default "False" can help here. If the option is turned on, when voting also the username is saved to the voting file and not only the voting results (2, 7.0, 3.5). To ensure privacy maybe it is also possible to move the file with the voting results from the attachment dir to the cache dir (or somewhere else) so that people cannot view/change the file with the voting results by simply opening/viewing the attachment. However that's a matter of taste. Sometimes it could also be a problem when rating what 1 and 5 means. When doing surveys in social science, you normally would write behind the questions "Is it Comprehensible? (1=Yes ... 5=Not at all)" or "How does it make you feel? (1=Very Bad ... 5=Very Good") or "Moin is a well-thought wiki engine (1=I fully agree ... 5=I fully disagree)". This makes it more clear to the person who is rating. Or what do you mean? -- OliverSiemoneit 2007-10-27 12:58:54

• Hi Oliver, and thanks! It's always a pleasure to get feedback - especially when it is positive and, more over, constructive like yours.

  Of course, I have thought about the "abuse" potential when people are allowed to vote more then once. But I had the feeling that prohibition is not in the wiki spirit. I feel wikis are the kind of empowering environment based on voluntary adherence to an etiquette, in contrast to directing and controlling environments based on enforcement of predefined work flow. In that sense - since empowerment requires informed decisions - I've been planing for a feature to inform a user that he has already rated in the first place (and what his personal rating was). Of course, once the system knows whether a user has rated or not, it may prohibit further rating as well. However, this requires the storage and management of by far more information than there is now, and scattered, file based storage is likely to be inefficient for that. I am currently experimenting with a database solution (though I'm a bit ambivalent about whether using databases in moin is "p.c." or not).

  Regarding the meaning of particular rating subjects - to me, a 5-star rating is a sort of "grade" - the more stars, the better. That's the reason why ranks are sorted in descending order in the rank table. So I would postulate: "Is it Comprehensible? (1=Not at all ... 5=Yes, very)", and: "Moin is a well-thought wiki engine (1=I fully disagree ... 5=I fully agree)". (Indeed, I was a little bit confused at first about your interpretation - to me, it felt quite "counter-intuitive". So yes, you are perfectly right with your intention to clarify the meaning of a rating on per-subject basis - different people obviously have different perceptions about this. ) Of course, this is all up to your intention about a particular rating. You may also chose the opposite way (like you did above), but consider that a higher rating increases the rank, and that a higher rank moves the rated item up the rank tables.

  Hey, what I am starting to grasp right now is: There are two alternative ways to view at a rating - as a survey, or as evaluation. I think, you've been viewing it as a survey, while I've been viewing it as an evaluation ... I'm going to give it some more thought and write more about that soon Thanks again for your valuable input. -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-10-28 10:17:14

  • many thanks for this plugin! for the rating i think a lot depends on the question. but it would be great if anonymous single voting/evaluating would be possible. especially in less wiki thinking worlds these features decide if it is adopted or not. -- ThurnerRupert 2007-10-28 11:36:09

    • Rupert, many "thanks" for "refactoring" my page markup to a state of no-recognition - and moreover, making all sorts of mistakes doing it! I had hard times fixing them all, especially because meanwhile the conversion to 1.6 markup has taken place. (Perfect timing, pal!) Please do not "help" me "find my style" any more!!! (Couldn't you imagine that I could have reasons for doing things the way I do? I have noticed you've already been repeatedly warned not to go around "refactoring" the wiki. Perhaps you should take that advice seriously.) -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-10-29 08:11:49

    Hi Zoran. Thanks a lot for this macro! I was looking for such functionality to get some feedback on how to improve my intranet wiki. But I agree with Oliver that the same user should not be able to rate multiple times. However, I do think that first time users might want to correct their rating. Because, when I tried this I was expecting a pop-up window to vote when clicking on the stars, so I just clicked anywhere. Only then I realized that I had already rated. I have also tried the ranking table. Are you aware that unrated topics appear on the top of the list and not at the end? I think this should be changed. Anyway, this is really great and I hope you don't mind my comments from the end-users point of view. -- AnkeHeinrich 2007-10-29 10:59:00

    • Hi Anke, hi Zoran! Here some rough thoughts on that: 1.) To avoid newbies clicking on the rating star and unintentionally triggering a vote, it might be useful maybe to have a new macro which only displays rating results as stars but which you can't click?? So you can add a link to another page where the voting takes place? 2.) Futhermore to keep users from clicking in the rating star, it would be helpful to state same information on that, e.g. "Is the new moin markup comprehensible? (click on the stars to vote)". So there is no need to change the software and introduce a correction mechanisen. Maybe it suffices to give above another best-pratice example of how to use the new rating system for Moin so as not to confuse users and keep them from arbitrarily clicking in the star becaused they are just uninformed 3.) Yes, wikis should be free and everybody should be able to do everything. However there is one big difference: you can change pages in wikis, the changes are stored in the page history. In case of vandalism you can revert pages. All changes are transparent. This is not the case with the rating system. You don't know who rated how often etc. So the rating result is intransparent, easy to attack an thus not trustworthy. And that's a problem in my eyes. Cheers! -- OliverSiemoneit 2007-10-31 22:24:10

      • Hi Oliver! As I already stated: I basically do see the problem. I just don't think that mere prohibition is a proper solution in the wiki spirit. I'm trying to work out a more wikish one... But just for "completeness": Attachments are not stored in any revision system, right? So vandalism against, say, images in pages cannot be really fought by simply reverting to the "right" version. So then, the logical consequence is that even "usual" changes are not really fully transparent, and not all page content is fully trustworthy... it's a capricious world out there, with or without the rating system. -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-10-31 23:20:59

      Hi Zoran! Thank you so much for the changes. It works really intuitive now That was exactly what I was hoping for. I used the weekend to switch to the 1.5 version. By now I only tried the rating system in my WikiSandBox, so there are no real votes yet. I have also disabled the option for anonymous ratings, because its more consistent with our current write policy (only logged-in users can write). -- AnkeHeinrich 2007-11-05 03:50:00

      • Great! Do you think the anonymous votes option should be disabled by default? -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-05 06:15:18

        • No, if it's all or nothing I would keep the current default, because Moin also allows all users to contribute by default, doesn't it?. However, it would be nice if the rating right for a page would by default be in sync with the user's write right. I don't know if it's possible to introduce a new ACL right for rating. If not maybe it's possible to configure which ACL right should be considered as rating right. IMHO, the write right would be a good default for this. -- AnkeHeinrich 2007-11-05 12:12:00

          • Yepp! Good hint with the write permission. Did that. -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-07 05:48:02

Hi Zoran, can we use this macro for the same kind of rating as doodle is used? -- ReimarBauer 2007-10-29 11:46:07

Wooh, it's so great to get all this feedback, folks... and I've been eagerly looking forward for the wiki mig to finish so I could respond... Many thank to you all!

@Anke,

I'm glad you like it and are using it. As I already responded to Oliver, I am working on a solution that should prevent multiple ratings - but in a way that might be somewhat surprising, and more in the "wiki spirit" Stay tuned for version 1.1.

Regarding your ordering issue: I'm quite surprised! The default sort order is: By subject (alphabetically, in ascending order), then by rating in descending order. This means, ratings are grouped by subject, and within each group, they are sorted by rank - higher rank first. Perhaps it is by accident that subjects which are shown first are not rated yet... BTW, by clicking on the column titles in the ranking table you can change the ordering. (I guess, I should mention this in the description.) Anyway, if you still have an issue with ordering, please put a note and a screen shot in /KnownIssues.

• Oh, I see. My expectation was that the ranking is defined by the ratings and with that in mind I just didn't see that the last line also not fits. It just made more sense to the way I wanted to use the ranking (highest priority first).

  

  I tried your hint for the column ordering, but the generated link does not work in my Wiki. I'm not sure if this is a configuration problem or a bug. My Browser-URL looks like http://host/MyWiki/WikiSandBox. If I click on the column of the ranking table I get the following error: The requested URL /WikiSandBox was not found on this server. I have not been successful in configuring the rewrite directive in apache, but so far everything worked fine without it. Could there be an issue with using absolute URLs instead of a relative ones? -- AnkeHeinrich 2007-11-01 03:21:00

  • Anke, the URL thing is a real issue and fixing it gets a high prio on my action list. Thanks for that input.

    Do you plan to use the rating system for surveys (this is the impression I get from your first screen shot), or as a kind of issue tracking system (which is in the evaluation and benchmarking category, see the description above). Your intention to use it as a sort of priority benchmark suggests the latter.

    If it is the latter, you might be interested to read that we are already using the rating system for simple issue tracking on our intranet - that was one of the things I "invented it" for. (I guess, as a project manager you might be generally interested about the topic.) What we do is: We put each issue on a page of own, which is a subpage of the page "Issues", and we put a rating form on the issue page regarding the subject "relevance". On the page "Issues", we put a ranking table like

    Ratings(AllIssues, relevance, */Issues/*)

    to get a picture of what's more important. Then we address the most important things first. Simple but effective, right?
    

    • Zoran, I probably need to think more about the definitions of survey, evaluation and benchmark. It's quite hard for me to grasp. What I definitely know is that I'm not looking for a full blown issue tracking system. Most software companies have a specific tool to track enhancements and bugs and the company I work for has just started to migrate to JIRA.

      Having said this I would still want to keep a wish list regarding my Intranet Wiki inside the wiki, because this is where it belongs to and where people would look for it. I have thought about your description of how you track the issues and rate their relevance. However, I think that would be overkill for what I intended. I basically need a list of improvement requests which may or may not be explained in more detail on a subpage. I would then like to get some feedback from my colleagues what they think is most important to them. Therefor I'd like to keep the list items together for the rating, because I think its easier to prioritize the items relative to each other. This has a relatively small scope (at least I hope so ).

      For a full blown issue tracker the list would simply grow to large, so I would also create a page with the rating for each issue. However, you have then to define rules on when to rate something as important and when not. This is usually something from "customer is blocked from using the software" -> Very High to "typo in error message" -> Very Low.

      -- AnkeHeinrich 2007-11-02 23:12:00

      • Oh, yes, we are, too, using a proffesional issue tracker for customer projects, but for "internal issues" (like process and tool improvements) I did want to give this approach - call it "Democracy eXtreme" - a try. Though the rating is not the only criterion for decision, it does have great weight. (We are still at the beginning of it though, and only time will tell what the process is going to result into...) -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-03 03:27:28

    Perhaps (but I have to give it some more thought) I could provide some sort of a mix between surveys and evaluations in the future...
    

    Cheers -- -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-02 07:13:22

    Yepp! I think I fixed it! Hopefully! Does it work for you now? -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-02 09:45:59

    • Yes, it works now. That was quick! I was thinking that maybe you could add a parameter to the ranking table for the default ordering. Because obviously the functionality is already there. -- AnkeHeinrich 2007-11-02 15:26:00

      • Good hint! Thanks. -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-03 03:20:01

@Reimar,

it depends on what you mean by "use it for the same kind of rating". Generally speaking, doodle's goal is to benchmark a set of options with regard to their poularity to a (limitted or unlimitted) group of people in order to achive consensus. Doodle's "way" is to assotiate a binary choice with each option (sort of "yes I like this option" vs. "no I don't like this option"), sum up the yes-opts, and point out the option with most yes'es. With n-star rating, you can also apply a more sophisticated opting allowing for intermediate nuances between "fully yes" (5 stars) and "not at all" (1 star). To schedule an event, try this:

|| Fri 7  || [[Rating(doodle_Fri7)]]  ||
|| Tue 11 || [[Rating(doodle_Tue11)]] ||
|| Thu 20 || [[Rating(doodle_Thu20)]] ||
|| Wed 26 || [[Rating(doodle_Wed26)]] ||
|| Wed 10 || [[Rating(doodle_Wed10)]] ||
|| Wed 17 || [[Rating(doodle_Wed17)]] ||

The only thing you cannot view (yet) is how each individual user has opted, but the sum result is practically the same - you get the most popular option.

At least that's how I am viewing at it right now. However, doodle has probably more (and more specialized) features then this, so... again: It depends on what you mean by "use it for the same kind of rating"...

Did this help?

Cheers -- -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-10-31 23:19:16

• For the at all decision yes, but sometimes its wanted to see who decided what. It would be very good if we can get how the individual (or members of a Group) have opted.

  || Fri 7 || [[Rating(doodle_Fri7, UserGroup)]] ||
  || Tue 11 || [[Rating(doodle_Tue11, UserGroup)]] ||

  The users of UserGroup have to be expanded to get a overall decission. -- ReimarBauer 2007-11-01 22:36:30

  • Wooh. It's sparse but claiming words you've spoken, Reimar. Nonetheless: Nope, that is not the direction this rating system is going to develop in. I might add a macro that expands into a "who-rated-what-how" table, though. -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-02 07:00:33

    Yeah you are right that describes more another wanted feature and not only a rating system. The focus is different. I just got the idea thats it is quite similiar to your work here which I like too Thanks! -- ReimarBauer 2007-11-02 08:13:42

Zoran, after seeing some changes in the ratings on my page I'd now like to see on how many votes the rating is based. I'm not really interested in who voted what, but to get a feeling how seriously my opinion differs from the others it would be nice to see how many votes have been collected. -- AnkeHeinrich 2007-11-05 16:50:00

• You'll need the "who-rated-what-how" at the moment you have devided the others by ABC analysis to more importants and less importants. -- ReimarBauer 2007-11-06 05:12:32

  • Reimar, could you explain that, please? What is your intention with a "who-rated-waht-how" table? (As I already stated elsewhere, such information contradicts the anonymity principle, so it is quite a controversy potential therein.) -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-06 06:54:30

    • Sometimes users likes to show how they have voted to the one who did setup the rating. Its not meant to be public to everyone. The reasons are different sometimes people just like to give the ratings a personal touch. For some evaluations sometimes you need to know if one of the vips disaggrees and it is wanted to know that -- ReimarBauer 2007-11-06 22:28:59

      • I get it. An Idea: Technically, VIP-regard could be achieved by adding a "weight" to users/groups and calculating the rank as weighted average of the votes. Ethically, however, this may break any trust in the system when people know things do not go a truly democratic way. (There might be emotional resistance against participation in ratings where some opinions count less then some others.) -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-08 09:43:19

  Anke, technically it's not a problem at all to provide that information. However, it may be psychologically questionable to do so. Why? Because (many? most?) people tend get subconsciously influenced by "majority opinions". (It is a common manipulative trick to let those people vote first who you know they'd vote "in your sense", thus increasing the probability that others would "follow the trend".) On the other hand, that information is very valuable in benchmarking. I would suggest including it in the ranking tables, but not in the rating form. -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-06 06:15:41

  Done! If you nonetheless feel you should view the total amount in the rating form, edit the form template file tmpl.form.vt.html, uncomment line 21, and comment line 20 instead. (Comments starts with ## like in moin). -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-06 06:54:30

  • Wow, you are the best! I will need to wait for the next weekend or late night now to upgrade though. Regarding the "majority influence" I think this is already done by showing the current rating average. At least I would tend to vote somewhere near that _if in doubt_. If I (as a voter) don't see how many votes the rating is based on, I would by default assume that the current rating represents the majority. But I'm no expert in psychology, so that's only my personal opinion. -- AnkeHeinrich 2007-11-06 12:50:00

    • You are right, though I feel that seeing a large number of users next to the average rank induces (much?) more subconscious pressure then not seeing that number at all. -- ZoranIsailovski 2007-11-07 05:48:02

Hi Zoran,

I have had to change for 1.6 because of a changed name for the wiki parser

• edit moin-1.6.0/wiki/data/plugin/macro/MoinRating/main.py

146 from MoinMoin.parser import wiki fails for me in moin-1.6.0/wiki/data/plugin/macro/Rating.py 

it needs to be changed to

from MoinMoin.parser import text_moin_wiki as wiki

cheers -- ReimarBauer 2008-01-08 16:13:36

fixed Version online.

MoinRatings1.6_fixed.zip Regards,

-- BenjaminWeber 2008-01-08 17:23:03

Using MoinRatings-1.6_fixed.zip with MoinMoin 1.6.0, the Rating macro worked, but Ratings did not until I made the change in this patch: main.diff. To find the Rating macros, the code searches for the old wiki markup, [[Rating(...)]] instead of <<Rating(...)>>.

-- JonathanRogers 2008-01-11 21:11:42

Hi I did found a bug today. You can't use Rating on a page/subpage/subsubpage. clicking on a star gives for example

page/subpage/page/subpage/subsubpage?test2_var=1&x=6&y=7#rating-test2

-- ReimarBauer 2008-02-19 15:09:09

• To produce the screen shots, I used a page MoinRatings/Sample/Java, which is analogous to your example, and clicking star 4 gave me this (partial) URL on moin-desktop 1.3.4:

   MoinRatings/Sample/Java?Comprehensible_var=4&x=9&y=7#rating-Comprehensible

  Is it a sort of backward compatibility problem perhaps? -- ZoranIsailovski 2008-04-20 09:47:49

Hi Zoran,

• I think this macro is good and important for me. But I had installed in the Moin 1.9.3 version, a exception was happened as following :

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "E:\moin\data\plugin\macro\MoinRating\main.py", line 32, in execute
    return Run(macro, args or '')
  File "E:\moin\data\plugin\macro\MoinRating\main.py", line 101, in DoForm
    thisForm = macro.form
AttributeError: Macro instance has no attribute 'form'

Might you kindly check what is happended ? Thank you. -- Homer Chen 2010-11-14 17:17:49

I have exactly same problem as above, but mine version is 1.9.5. Do you still update this macro? -- Aarne H. 2013-01-25