Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Since the Rating is already pulled into a standard field, why do you want it to be customized? And the only real use I see for number of ratings is to decide whether to trust the ratings or not. Which can become a configurable threshold. The user sets it and the plugins only download rating info if the number is higher than that.
|
A couple of reasons. The biggest as I mentioned above is that the way Calibre averages ratings currently means that just about every book I have comes out as 3 stars
. You could have 1000 ratings from a site at 3.98 - and it is 3 stars. You could have a rating from one source of 4 and another at 3.98 - and it becomes 3 stars. Basically the rounding makes every book look the "same". Allowing storing the rating in a floating point field is one of the ways of circumventing this issue.
As for the number of ratings, yeah there is a few ways that could be used. What you suggest is one option. A weighted average would be another. A third is to allow a user to display it if they want to. There is no great surprise to see the first few ratings for a book all at 5 stars as the author/publisher tries to sway things. Seeing that a book is rated at x stars from 1500 reviews vs another from 3 reviews does tend to sway the credence you give to it.
Thanks for all the other comments too btw.