A Guide to Rating Reviews on dooyoo (Rating other's reviews: on dooyoo and beyond)

Member Name: jord121290

Product:	Rating other's reviews: on dooyoo and beyond
Date:	03/03/07 (194 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Important to the community, help writers improve and judge their own work

Disadvantages: Often mis-used when users don't think about their ratings.

I do quite a lot of rating other reviews on dooyoo, and I certainly much enjoy doing it compared to writing reviews, though I do a fair bit of that as well!

WHY RATE?
Ratings are very useful for the dooyoo community. They not only help readers to quickly pick out the reviews which other users believe will be most influential in their purchasing decisions, but also give the writer valuable information on what users think of the current quality of their reviews and show them whether they need to improve the detail and content of their reviews in future.

All you have to do is browse some of the more commonly reviewed products and you will find that those reviews which have been rated Very Useful, and in particular been awarded with a crown, will have been viewed far more times than reviews with just Useful or below. This is because when users are looking for a review that will help them with a purchasing decisions, they do not want to trawl through dozens of useless reviews before coming to one that actually helps them, so the first thing they will do is click to sort the reviews by rating.

Rating therefore not only helps readers that are genuinely interested in purchasing a product, but also means that more dooyoo miles are awarded to those reviews that most deserve them, and as a result members whose reviews are not of the best standard will be enticed to try harder with their next review to get it up to a standard they will progress to the next rating level.

So next time you are logged in and decide to read a review, take just a few seconds to scroll down to the bottom of your page and give the review a rating; in doing so you will not only be helping that individual writer, but the whole of the dooyoo community.

RATING FAIRLY
A fair rater is one who always rates consistently, reads a review fully before making a judgment, takes into consideration what the review is about, and does not lower a rating because what the same member rated one of his/her reviews.

When you come to rating a review, you should think very carefully about a number of factors before casting your rating. Mindless voting often results in reviews being grossly under or over-rated, and either way is very damaging to the efficiency of dooyoo and degrades the fairness of the overall rating system.

One of the things I commonly witness on dooyoo is ‘quantity rating’, where a reader is not really interested in the article and is only visiting it solely for the purpose of issuing a rating, hoping to get a link to his/her own profile in that article and therefore increase their dooyoo miles account. Such readers tend not to read the review very thoroughly or even at all, instead they will simply scroll down the page and give a certain rating depending on how far down the page it extends (i.e how long it is). This is not the way I would like my reviews to be rated nor do I think anyone would, as someone could have spent possibly hours compiling a high quality, for readers to simply skim through it and not really take very much in at all.
I am not saying that I disagree with going round and rating reviews just for the sake of it, indeed this is beneficial to everyone as more dooyoo miles get issued and people are therefore more likely to write more reviews, helping dooyoo to grow even bigger, but all it takes is a mere 2-5 minutes to read most reviews so please do this instead of simply issuing ratings depending on the quantity of reviews.
It is important that reviewers put as much detail into reviews, and obviously more detailed reviews will be longer, but proper judgment of a review’s detail should be made through reading the review and comparing it with how much you think could realistically be written for the product in question, rather than solely through the word count of the review.
A review on a tin of Spam is obviously going to be shorter than someone’s trip report on six months in the Australian outback, but both are likely to be equally useful to people so you should always consider what was under review. I have seen reviews which have been given Very Useful, despite the fact the writer has clearly written about the wrong product, and this highlights how some people are rating without even having a clue as to what the review was supposed to be about!

Before you start rating around dooyoo, you should view a few reviews so you can get a general idea of what sort of quality is expected for the different ratings. Imagine a company that marks exam papers giving all of its examiners a paper to mark, but there is no mark scheme for them to see what quality of answers deserve what marks. You could have the same paper being issued an A by one examiner and an F by another!
This is also what would happen on dooyoo if members went in to rating reviews without knowing what they were looking for when giving ratings. You should think carefully about exactly what the rating you are giving means. By giving a Very Useful, you are saying that you would find the review entirely reliable and conclusive if you needed to make a purchasing decision for the product in question, and at the other end of the scale a Not Useful is declaring that in no way would the review be of any help to a prospective buyer of the product. Not Useful is a very extreme rating to use, and the only times I find myself using this rating is when it is clearly evident that the writer doesn’t know what he is talking about, or when the work he/she has submitted is clearly not their own, or not relevant to the product he/she was supposed to be reviewing (e.g if the writer was supposed to be reviewing Walkers crisps but stated that he preferred Pringles, and then went over the top in explaining why and basically turned it into a review about Pringles crisps instead).
Be generous and friendly when giving reviews, but don’t go on a ‘happy spree’ where you award everything with VUs. There are many great reviews out there that you should have no hesitation in rewarding with top ratings and nominations for crowns, but there are also many lower quality reviews, so you shouldn’t be afraid to give low ratings.

To end, a couple of general do’s and don’ts for review rating:

DO:
-Rate fairly and consistently.
-Put yourself in the shoes of a genuinely interested consumer.
-Nominate truly exceptional reviews for a crown.
-Read the review fully before issuing a rating.
-Think about exactly what the rating means before choosing it.
-Take good quality English into consideration.
-Consider the depth and interest of the review.
-Give extra marks where a reviewer has used originality and humour to improve a review.
-Reconsider your rating if a writer makes changes to his/her review following advice.
-Rate the works of people who have rated your reviews.
-Leave a comment if your review was not Very Useful, saying why and how it could be improved.

DON’T:
-Skim read a review and issue a mindless rating
-Revenge rate (give a bad rating because of a rating they previously gave you)
-Be afraid to give Not Useful to truly deservingly poor reviews.
-Prejudice against a user when rating (either because of earlier reviews by them, your real-world relationship to them or other things they have done on the web)
-Feel bad because your rating doesn’t match the others that have already been given (although if your rating is grossly different, you may want to consider exactly why)
-Give too many Very Usefuls, leave them for the real top reviews.
-Give people in your circle of friends higher ratings than they deserve.

Remember, rating is just as important to the dooyoo community as review writing. So take part in it so that you can help the community prosper, but make sure you are always issuing fair ratings.

Summary: Improve dooyoo by rating the review's of others, but be fair and sensible!