Ask HN: Applying the wiki-model to reviews

1 points by marc28443 17 years ago | 4 comments

Exploring the idea of a game review site with a few interesting twists. One of them is a wiki-type model for user-generated reviews. We would have exactly two reviews, both editable by anyone:

Review #1 "This game is great because ..." Review #2 "This game sucks because .."

For the users this would make things much easier as they will not need to read 10+ reviews, but just these two (which should increase in quality over time).

In our own sandbox testing, this has worked out well and produced condensed and useful reviews. Obviously though we have an inherent bias - we "want it to work" and thus stay civil and arent starting edit wars. So wondering, if this is something that would actually work in the real world? Considering that an idea as wacky as Wikipedia actually turned out to be very succesful.

Maybe we need some ground rules to have any chance. Suggestions?

inerte 17 years ago |

Some users think some game features are great, but others think it sucks. I think a lot of content will be shifted to the "other side" constantly.

You'll also have to deal with "fact". An article on Wikipedia about Gears of War shouldn't contain opinions, as in "the chainsaw effect is really cool!", but it can contain relevant adjacent information "A pool on GDC amongst game critics showed that 75% of them enjoy the chainsaw effect".

The problem with "facts" is that the articles will get edited by the game developers and publishers, removing the negative opinions. Users can revert these edits, but the companies have _an agenda_, they'll load the pages first thing in the morning to see what needs to be edited. And/or write bots.

While I am telling you what could go wrong, I don't have any solutions to offer. But I think you'll need to have these problems solved to make it work.

marc28443 17 years ago | |

Actually the rule "facts only" would not really work for this as the reviews will necessarily be opinionated. So it would be more like, in the positive review "The chainsaw effect is really cool" and in the negative review someone else would write "The chainsaw effect gets really boring after a while".

As for vandalism, I agree that this could be a huge problem, however Wikipedia has similar problems for contentious topics. I guess whats needed are 1) a passionate community 2) clear rules what is acceptable and what isnt.

triplefox 17 years ago |

Meatball Wiki is a good general source of wiki advice: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl

I recall reading on it somewhere the point that there are several possible formats of wiki - namely, the "discussion" format and the "document" format, and that Wikipedia has has made familiar the concept of cleanly dividing the two into separate pages. You might want to reconsider this concept and how it works in the context of a review.

The other main thing to consider is whether you can apply the same template and rules over every page - if you can, it's very straightforward to contribute.

marc28443 17 years ago | |

Thanks for the link, there were some helpful pointers in there. In particular, the WikiDrama model seems a good approximation to what we are trying to do: http://www.communitywiki.org/de/WikiDrama