Maple ranking
1796I must admit that I have a lot of fun looking at the evolution over time of the Maple Rankings. I'll use this blog entry for some commentary, because it's fun to record these snapshots.
But first, a suggestion and a pet peeve. Suggestion: I would like to be able to get to the ranking page in less than 2 clicks (someone's rank, then the 'here' link). Then the pet peeve: 'here' links! Go read well-designed hyperlinked pages (Wikipedia being generally good); you'll notice that click 'here', 'link' and other such mechanisms are almost never used. The links are actual words in sentences, structured so that things flow. This is good style. Note how the point information page does not flow. Or the recent post about the latest maplecast - bad web style again. Compare that with say the main Maplesoft page and the difference is clear.
I will actually start the commentary in a reply to this, to keep this blog post useful for ongoing commentary.
- JacquesC's blog
- Login or register to post comments
- riff
7 hours 40 min ago - How's this for pseudo volume rendering
8 hours 26 min ago - computing a permutation: use of table for O(n)
10 hours 50 min ago - computing a permutation
18 hours 26 min ago - Hello.
I would greatly
20 hours 36 min ago - listdensityplot
22 hours 43 min ago - dealing 2-card hands
23 hours 9 min ago - same location
23 hours 13 min ago - Thank you for the reply,
23 hours 57 min ago - dividing matrices and determinants
1 day 28 min ago
Comments
Front page
Recently, getting on to the front page has gotten just a little harder. Both Karel Srot and Nitroxxx have 45 points, which is a fairly high bar. Others, like TomM and Tim Van Dusen were also in the low 40s until recently, but have move up. By doing so, they displaced others (like jakubi and jan) who were on the front page rather recently.
Unfortunately, we have not seen quite so much action in the leafs. Robert Israel recently got his bronze leaf -- he's moving up, I predict we'll see him on the front page shortly. It would be nice to see a few more people with gold leafs.
Shall we open the bidding as to when we think that a silver leaf will be necessary to get to the front of the rankings? Note that this is tricky, because only the people with less than a silver leaf can have an effect on that!
I don't mind being displaced
I don't mind being displaced from the front page. If I really wanted to get back to the front page, I would write a couple of books (at 5 points each) and that would be enough to get me back to the front.
This really raises an interesting point about the ranking. Why is a book worth 5 times more than a regular post. I could search wikipedia for some random place that is related to math and write it up as a book. Is this worth 5 times more than answering someone's question?
A better approach, that would actually reflect the value added, would be to weight each submission by the number of times it has been read. So the total points that a user had would be calculated as a sum of all the views of their post.
Jan
Troubled waters ahead
All the points schemes that I have seen have flaws of one kind or another. Mostly they reflect they author's biases. In this case I'd say that those who designed this were hoping that the "collaborative books" would take off, and thus gave it more weight. Similarly, starting new threads in a blog was regarded highly. And, as far as building a community is concerned, I can understand that.
books
Considering that the book entries I have made took considerably more effort than a quick response to a question, it seems reasonable that a book entry gets more points. Naturally this could be abused, but it's not like we're getting a rebate at the end of the year. Still, weighting by number of views seems like a good idea, at least in theory. If collaborative books were the goal, the better approach would be to have a wiki system.
Wiki!
I think a Wiki would be great. There is a lot of accumulated Maple knowledge out there that is hard to find -- even on mapleprimes. A Wiki could help put that somewhere much more accessible.
wiki
As do I, which is why I'm disappointed that there hasn't been an enthusiastic response to the suggestion (besides yours). It seems like it would be a good fit, and potentially quite useful.
hell lot of work ... and needs time
it would be really great :-) and a lot of work ... at least for me
that's a problem (besides typing) ... time ...
Does need time
And I know I would probably get suckered in even though I should be working on something else. That seems to be part of what makes Wikipedia work. And MathWorld and PlanetMath and ...
number of times a blog entry has been viewed
With a view that what people write is important, I miss the feature that showed the number of times a blog entry has been viewed.
For a large part of the first year of this site, when it was "beta", each blog entry had such a number displayed at the bottom, alongside its other action links.
acer
Hmm, Didn't notice
I didn't even notice that that feature is gone. I don't know where it went. I certainly see the value in having the number of views available and will look into bringing it back.
____
William Spaetzel
MaplePrimes Administrator
Software Developer, Maplesoft
I did
Yes, I too miss that rating. The disappearance of the "Most Viewed" sidebar is probably reasonable since once an entry got on there, it tended to stay, due to the extra hits it generated. But it is nice to be able to see how many times a particular page is accessed.
This week's movements
I go away for a day and I miss Joe Riel's 500th, darn. Next one to watch out for will be Will's 700. I guess he'll get that when he announces the Wiki for mapleprimes ;-).
There was some action at the top of page 2 of the rankings as well -- which is the place to look to see who will likely come in to the first page next.
So close
Look at that, I am two points away from 700. So It'll only take two comments...
____
William Spaetzel
MaplePrimes Administrator
Software Developer, Maplesoft
where is the other one?
A Double
Two of my blogs on the front page at the same time.
That's a first for me.
Also, I'm catching up to you acer. :-)
Congrats
It means that you're making quality blog posts. I know I have enjoyed reading them.
This week's movements
Dave L moved up a lot -- and from the 2nd to well into the first page. This has had the secondary effect of pushing Nitroxx to the second page, but more interestingly, to now make the minimum ranking of 51 to be on the first page. And a few more posts by Karel Srot will move that up (to 55 anyways).
During this week, Will hit 700. And Mariner overtook roman_pearce! acer and dcasimir were once closer together in ranking, but acer's been posting more, so dcasimir has some work to do to catch up. Scott03 is continuing to move up slowly, while DJ Clayworth seems to have stalled.
Last 2.5 week's movements
I missed commenting on this for a while, but since this comment will put me at 700, it seemed fitting to use it to look at what has happened.
Will continues to nibble towards the top spot, but his posting rate has slowed a lot. I just may get there first...
Mariner and roman_pearce are still tied, and are both heading towards the top ranks. Not to be outdone, Axel Vogt and gkokovidis are also steadily climbing; they may actually have a bit higher rate than Mariner and roman_pearce, so may well catch up to them.
acer got his gold leaf this week (congrats!). dcasimir, you've got some work to do. Scott03 and Thomas Madden continue to post steadily.
In this time-frame, it is in the bronze leafs that we've seen the most movement. Dave L, Tim Van Dusen, and Alex Smith have all been quite active. And of course, we now welcome william budd onto the first page!
700
Congratulations on 700, and thanks for putting that much time and effort into helping others at this site. It is greatly appreciated.
Thomas
Many congratulations
Congrats to roman_pearce on his 400, and dcasimir on his 200. So nice to see the number of gold leafs stay constant!
There has been interesting activity at the bottom of the first ranking page too. First, DJKeenan kicked Fred Chapmann off the first page, but then soon thereafter, pchin kicked DJKeenan back down to the second page! Just to keep things interesting, Schivnor in the meantime also sped past Fred Chapmann. To get onto the first page, now one needs a rank of 64. Question is, how long before Marvin Ray Burns and william budd are themselves booted off the first page? At this rate, it does not seem like it will take very long.
At that point, making the first page will meant having a high 60s score. I am guessing that before the year is over, there will be no more bronze leafs on the first Ranking page.
Lots of movement
It has been a very long time since I have jotted down notes on movements in the rankings. Many (too many to list) people have hit a lot of milestones. The number of people with red Maple leafs is quite large now.
But what prompted me to write this note is that with Dave L's post today, the silver leafs have now spilled onto the 2nd page! This is a real, quantitative comment on the fact that this site continues to be useful to the Maple community.
1000
I must post too much - this one is my 1000th 'comment' on this forum.
Re: 1000
You are completely wrong.
Your comments are almost always helpful and informative, and I am far from alone in being glad to read them!
I.e. you do not post too much, okay?