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Veteran
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| I was just reading the early posts in the Adding Lists and series thread, funny to think the lists have only been around for two years 
I came across the suggestion that WWEnd makes its own top 100 list. I still think this is a great idea! Consequently I think it needs its own thread.
I am thinking specifically of a list derived from what wwend members collectively think the best books are rather than a list like the top noms list which is derived from aggregate data about other lists (although I would like to see more of these too).
What do other people think?
If others like the idea (and more importantly if the admins like the idea), what would be the best/easiest way to implement it?
1. You could use peoples favorites to populate the list.
2. You could use novel scores.
3. You could build a new voting interface (quite a few ways to do this).
4. A combination of the above.
Personally I favor using the favorites, its pretty simple to implement. I would also have a snapshot system where the list is produced on a specific date, so the list would be the "2012 Members WWEnd Top 100 List"
Scores are problematic, how do you compare a book with 1 reader and a score of 10 with a book with 100 readers and an aggregate score of 8.2? Some sort of aggregate score x popularity metric may work?
Do enough people use favorites for it to be useful? If not this is a pretty good incentive for members to start favoriting books and for non members to join 
Dave, out of curiosity, could you do a database query for all the SF favorites counted and ordered by frequency and post it here? |
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Veteran
Posts: 207
| I notice Emil had the same idea
Edited by htaccess 2012-02-05 11:13 PM
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Uber User
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Location: SC, USA | This is all an interesting thought. Now that WWE has topped 1400 users I wonder what percentage of users do tag favorites in the BookTrackr. |
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Admin
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Location: Dallas, Texas | @htaccess: I really like the idea of doing some more lists based on our member data. As Rhondak101 says, we've got over 1,400 members now and over 4,000 books so there's plenty of data to work with. What do you all think of these: List option 1: WWEnd 100 Member Favorites - Simple list of the 100 books most often tagged as a favorite. Maybe more folks would tag some favorites to see their faves move up the list. List option 2: WWEnd Top Rated Books - The books that have the most 10 ratings. We'd have to look at the data to determine what the cutoff would be for a book to make the list. Twenty 10 ratings? 50? Whatever number gets us closest to around 100 books. This list could be a little bit of added incentive to get folks to rate their books too. Both lists would be "live" lists in that they would fluctuate as members tag their favorites or rate books a 10. We'll update the lists every month or so. Books on the bottom might drop off to be replaced by something else and there would liekly be a bit of movement at the top end too. Thanks for bringing this idea back up! We haven't looked at this in a long time and now's a great time to try this out. |
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Location: UK | If they're live lists, it's going to be difficult to try to complete them.
(I need to set some favourites) |
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Admin
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Location: Dallas, Texas | DrNefario - 2012-02-07 3:02 AM If they're live lists, it's going to be difficult to try to complete them. (I need to set some favourites ) I thought about that and you're right of course. It will be more difficult as the list will change but I suspect it will be relatively minor fluctuations overall. Books will move up and down the list like a power ranking with a few dropping off the end to make way for new ones. I doubt there will be much movement other than that. It would take a lot of additional/changed ratings and favorite tagging to really affect the list drastically. Of course that's all speculation. It'll be interesting to see. We talked about some different methods for making the lists this morning. I'll post more info here when we figure it out. |
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Veteran
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| @DrNefario I agree, live lists are harder to complete, an alternative is to do the snapshot method, where you generate the list on a specific date and then label the the 2012 edition or whatever. You can then update the list annually or bi annually or whatever. It then becomes interesting to see which items on the list have moved compared to the last one, identifying newcomers to the list etc. This analysis makes great blog post fodder I also think that having editions makes more sense in that you can publish a definitive list which others can reference, which is good advertising for WWEnd. The petersykes topscifi list suffers from this dynamic list issue (http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_books_rank1.html).
In terms of which one I would like to see first I think the "List option 1: WWEnd 100 Member Favorites" is the more interesting one.
That said I would also like to see "List option 2: WWEnd Top Rated Books", I would regard this one as more like popularity x rating.
Edited by htaccess 2012-02-07 4:14 PM
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Uber User
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Location: SC, USA | I like either method. I think my favorites and my high rankings match up. Although, I might have favorite books that I have not given rankings yet. When this discussion started I decided to look at my favorites. I noticed that we could actually rank our favorites.(Move them around like we do the reading lists) I'd never noticed that before. They are listed in the order that I remembered to put them in. So, I guess my question is: if the favorites method is used, will all books count as 1 vote or would the rankings within favorites be considered and the rankings be weighted some how--that seems like that would be hard to accomplish. |
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Veteran
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| I vote for equal weighting for all favourites. |
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Admin
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Location: Dallas, Texas | Rhondak101 - 2012-02-08 8:07 AM So, I guess my question is: if the favorites method is used, will all books count as 1 vote or would the rankings within favorites be considered and the rankings be weighted some how--that seems like that would be hard to accomplish. It'll be a straight up calculation. The books with the most favorites in the system regardless of where they fall for each individual. Most people don't bother sorting their favorites list and the calcualtions would be enormous. We'll need a tie breaker I guess. Perhaps we'll use the overall rating? Ideas? |
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Uber User
Posts: 456
| Yep, favorites with member ratings as a tie-breaker seems like a pretty good solution and should be an interesting list.
I've noticed that some members are more... promiscuous with their affections than others, with the number of favorites being relatively large for some and smaller for others. If favorites roughly equate to a ranking of 10, and 16.4% of all rankings are 10s (from the My Novel Ratings page), then that means that there is a relatively high proportion of books that are designated as favorites. I guess that this is a good thing as it provides a larger dataset upon which to build from. |
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Location: SC, USA | Engelbrecht,
You've made me check my stats. 25% of the books that I rate are 10s. However, I often don't go to the trouble of rating books that I don't like. Maybe I need to start a project to rate all my books, so that I can see what my true percentages are.
Rhonda |
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Admin
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Location: Dallas, Texas | @Engelbrecht: I've got many books on my favorites list that I did not rank a 10 though I think by and large you're right that favorties will tend to be high in 10s overall. Some of those books appealed to me despite their flaws. Conversely, I've got some books I rated a 10 that are not on my favorites list. I can appreciate that they're well written but I wouldn't want to read them again. That's roughly how I determine a favorite. Do I really want to read it again? I think it'll be interesting to see how the 2 lists differ. Might be the same books in a slightly different order but I'll bet there are lots of people who just love Harry Potter or some other book or series that they know is not the best but they love it anyway. The Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs is one of my guilty pleasure favorites! @Rhondak101: The whole rating thing can be problematic. How do you rate a book you adored 20 years ago when you first read it when you know there is no way you'd like it if you read it now? Nostalgia can really affect your ratings! If you decide to rank it a bit higher for old times sake how does that compare to a book you read as an adult with a more critical eye? I tend to rate a book based on my memory oh how I enjoyed it when I read it. Which of course means I've got a lot of high ratings for books that I wouldn't be able to read today. What to do? Well, I find myself constantly tweaking my ratings. Looking at each one individually they look OK but when I look at the "Books I've Read" list in My World I freak out seeing some books compared to others and I just have to rate one up or down to address the imballance which of course creates another imballance elsewhere. It's kind of fun but also feels like the path to madness sometimes. You should certainly start your rating project but be warned, it could drive you batty! |
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Uber User
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| Dave,
That's a good point about the difference between 10's and favorites. I think all my 10's are favorites, with most of them having being reread several times. But I guess I'll have to go back and revisit my favorites and add some more - that will be hard work winnowing those out!
The whole rating thing IS hard! I rely on a decades-old spreadsheet in which I've always recorded a rating at the time that I read a book. But some books, especially some science fiction ones, don't stand the test of time well and some of the ratings start to look out of kilter. Oh well... |
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WWEnd Top 100 List