I've been doing ratings for the past two rounds, and I wanted to draw attention to the ratings system for writers who may not be familiar with it (I haven't been keeping up with the thread for the past few weeks, so if a similar post was made-- well, I guess I wouldn't be sorry because it's an important subject). This influences whether you are actually getting paid one share per thousand words, or less. This is the standard devtome rating rubric (
http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=devtome_rater#rating_method). It has just CHANGED, and weights links and references for non-fiction article at 30/99 instead of 10/99. While we use an article as an example, the AUTHOR is also being rated.
I've noticed that even when I'm finding really neat articles, I end up docking them a lot of points because of the lack of links and references, and pictures. No links, references, or pictures? Bam, minus 39 points (used to be minus 19 points), right there. It takes a little extra time, but going through and putting in some links to resources, or articles that corroborate or contrast your opinion, and giving sources for your facts is really useful and important. How do we know where all your figures are coming from, otherwise? This is a hypertextual medium, and I'd encourage writers to take advantage of it. Adding a couple of pictures (you can find CC-BY-SA pictures at commons.wikimedia.org or via the search feature at creativecommons.org) also gives you up to 9 more points. Do yourself a favor.
On the other hand, don't rely on sprinkling in a few links and pictures to raise your rating. If I'm assigned an article that's a typo-laden, short-hand outline (which happens fairly often), I'm going to rate accordingly.
I just want to put this out there so people who are writing good stuff can maximize their earnings.
I'm only following the rating system loosely when rating articles. My scoring has been based on page and article formatting, grammar, sentence and paragraph structuring, along with the number and frequency of bullet points. Items noticed or looked for include a proper opening or introduction to the main body of text, a clear coherent flow of information, and the depth of the information upon the page.
If the page being scored is currently being worked on, my rating will tend to be based off of two other articles picked at random. My rating score is not affected that much by links or references as this skews the scoring away from original creative work that are stand alone web pages IMO. Scoring based on references at the suggested 30% of total score heavily skews the results/rewards/future content from non fiction to fiction. However the use of references and links are noted and do lean me towards a higher score, but not at the 30% level.
Where as non fiction delivers information, as long as it isn't opinion, fiction mainly is to entertain or just an exercise that a writer does. The scoring on my rating pages reward those who have put out hard earned information, comprehensive pages on a topic, or fiction that has kept me reading.
My rating does not reflect other articles by the writer, that is not to say that their other work wasn't looked at, but that a writers score was based upon the random page provided by the script. The point for writers, or anyone in any field to remember, is that any one is only as good as their worst piece of work.
The goal on Devtome (for writers) is to provide an opportunity for people to earn currency in exchange for their creative efforts, yet they must be graded against other writers so as to provide incentive for good writers, and for writers who have specialized knowledge, and also to ensure that writers who aren't meeting the standards do not skew the share distribution within devcoin between developers and writers. Writers are needed for the devcoin project to maintain momentum and interest, but to maintain that velocity and integrity, rating is essential to ensure that writers raise their standards and look at their work critically.
