Help:Reward Mechanism

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Revision as of 00:51, 27 January 2009

We have installed the SocialRewarding extension here at WikiPathways to promote contributor recognition and foster a little healthy competition. This is a brief explanation of how pathways and authors are measured and scored. For an in depth explanation of the theory and implementation of this extension, feel free to download the complete documentation (147 pages!).

Ranking of Pathways and Authors

Where you will see it

There are 3 special pages where you can view the scores for pathways and authors:

• Special:SocialRewardingMostViewedArticles - Pathways ranked by number of views or by size (in bytes)
• Special:SocialRewardingReferencesArticles - Pathways ranked by number of references in bibliography or by points (see calculation below)
• Special:SocialRewardingAuthorsRanking - Authors ranked by contribution points (see calculation below)

The author contribution points are translated into a 5-star rating system for illustration purposes. The star ratings may be seen in other places on the site following author usernames.

How it's done

There are two factors that play a role in the pathway ranking:

• The number of page views, a pathway that is viewed by more users gets a higher score.
• The number of references to literature. Pathways with more references are considered higher quality and get a higher score.

Number of views per revision is divided by the average number of views of all revisions, generating a percentage that is translated to a graded scale of 0-5 points. Similarly, the number of references per revision is divided by the average over all revisions per pathway and translated to a scale of 0-5. These two scaled point values are weighted[1] and summed for each revision.

The size of a revision is calculated as the absolute difference between the given revision and former revision measured in bytes. The age of a revision is also calculated, assuming that newer updates are more valuable, as the difference in time between the date of the given revision and the pathway creation date. These to factors are each divided by the sum of all differences in size or time over all revisions per pathway, and then weighted[2] and summed. This sum is then multiplied by the specific revision points previously calculated based on the number of views and references.

Each revision has exactly one author, so a given author can be allocated points equal to the sum of points for all of their revisions across all pathways.

[1] Number of view and references are equally weighted at this time
[2] Size and time are equally weighted at this time

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