One of the most offensive scores I got on an IRTC submission was 10 10 10. And
on that round, when I voted on others, I made sure my vote expressed exactly
what the artist were doing well (artistic, technical, theme).  This basically
means that everyone else gave me 10 10 10 for the average to be 10 10 10. No
one put any thought into the vote.

For a vote to be meaningful, it has to COST the voter something.  In the old
voting system, one could also give 20 20 20 to one's favorite, and 1 1 1 to all
the ones one didn't like.  Others might give out a strict normalized
distribution around ten, and reserve 20's for once a lifetime beauties.
Average up these two voters' votes, and you're throwing away the careful
voter's analysis.

For the Short Code Competition,  I came up with a voting scheme where you cite
your favorite six entries, and then gave 6 points to the favorite, 5 to their
2ndmost, and so on.  In this way, everyone's opinion is weighted the same.
There are more complicated schemes where folks have an IRTC Dollar to give
away, and they can divide it up any way they want-- all to one or a penny to
100 entries-- I say this is inherently fair, as every voter gets a dollar.

Analogy: My local newspaper once spent a lot of time and effort into a reader
vote on which comics to keep.   They let everyone vote yes or no on keeping
every comic. (Note there's no COST to vote here!)  The comic "Doonesbury" came
in about last, but they never dropped it.  My hunch is they knew that 55%
didn't like it but maybe 10% were passionate about it.  Because the poll didn't
measure user passion, the paper ended up ignoring the results.

As far as WHO votes,  I'd be more inclined to have real people vote than male
nerds who use freeware graphics programs. (DISCLAIMER: I'm one of the latter.)
Maybe it's impractical to line up a set of artistic, educated, and/or
interesting people, but that would be the coolest.



David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:


> I'd like to find a nice way to prevent or reduce voting anomalies in the
> new IRTC web site.  I don't want people to be able to vote multiple
> times in one contest and skew the votes.
>
> So I'd like to know if you have any suggestions on how to do this.
>
> 1) How do we accept new voters?
>  - automatically with e-mail confirmation?
>  - only with admin approval?
>  - other ideas?
>
> 2) Should submitters be allowed to vote in the round they submit to?
>
> I intend to allow voters to rate each image in 4 categories
>  - overall
>  - technical merit
>  - artistic merit
>  - concept and interpretation of theme
>
> Each rating is on a scale from 0 to 10.
>
> 3) How should the scores be combined
>
> 4) Should we allow partial voting?
>  - by this I mean rating some images but not all
>  - I have no assurance that they even looked at all of them
>  - if you rated the first 5 pictures but none of the others,
>   should any of your ratings be considered?
>
> Your thoughts would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks
> David Buck

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