Dave's Free Press: Reviews
http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/reviews
being why I think things suck and/or rocken-usZ Star ratings revisited
http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/reviews/id/star-ratings-revisited
<a href=/david/journal/id/star-ratings>Just over a year ago</a> I started awarding books and things that I reviewed shiny gold stars. I also retrospectively scattered stars on some of my older reviews.<p><!-- ack '\[\% stars' `grep -l keywords:.*books *txt`|sed 's/].*/]/;s/.*\[/\[/'|sort -r|uniq -c --><p>I thought it would be a good idea to see how many of each I'm awarding, and so how well I'm sticking to my rating system. I'm expecting a <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution>normal distribution</a>, with the mean somewhat above 3 stars to reflect the fact that I deliberately don't read shite, and that lots of what I read is because other people have raved about it. Well, the results are in ...<p><table> <tr> <td>17</td> <td><img src=/david/journal/images/green.png width=170 height=10></td> <td> - Excellent: 5/5</td> </tr> <tr> <td>24</td> <td><img src=/david/journal/images/green.png width=240 height=10></td> <td> - Very good: 4/5</a> </tr> <tr> <td>24</td> <td><img src=/david/journal/images/green.png width=240 height=10></td> <td> - Good: 3/5</a> </tr> <tr> <td>19</td> <td><img src=/david/journal/images/green.png width=190 height=10></td> <td> - Meh: 2/5</a> </tr> <tr> <td>1</td> <td><img src=/david/journal/images/green.png width=10 height=10></td> <td> - Rubbish: 1/5</a> </tr> <tr> <td>0</td> <td></td> <td> - DANGER: 0/5</a> </tr></table><p>I think this is good. It's roughly what I'd expect given my reviewing criteria and the small number of options available. If I had a larger scale to work with - if, say, I was awarding marks out of 20 - I'd expect a smoother drop-off, and at both ends instead of just at the bottom end. 2011-06-20T12:26:54Z