[uf-discuss] hReview feedback

[sfam at cyberpunkreview.com]

Just a comment on this.  I'm pretty well connected to the movie reviewer
community, and have been a participant on Rotten Tomatoes discussion
boards for quite some time (I have over 10,000 posts on the discussion
boards).  RottenTomatoes.com (www.rottentomatoes.com) collects the reviews
from all the major movie reviewers in the country, and translate it into a
100 point scale. While this would seem like the majority of the reviews go
from a 0 - 100 rating, if you read the reviews, the vast majority of the
reviewers are using something akin to a 5 or 10 point star rating
(additionally, Rotten Tomatoes' own personal rating system is 1-10).  Most
use either an A through F rating,  a 1 - 5 stars with half-steps in
between, or a 0 - 4 stars with half steps in between (Ebert does this, for
instance).  Ssome just do a 1-4 stars, but this is pretty rare.

The Internet Movie Database uses a 1-10 rating system (and shows the
results in a 1.0 to 10.0 scale), and as has been pointed out, Amazon uses
a 1-5 scheme, but shows the results in half stars.

In terms of "real life" movie discussions (at least as represented on the
various online discussion boards in "best of" lists and the like), the
VAST majority of real folks tend to use the 1-5 star rating scheme with
half stars - so much so that some conversations concern how restrictive
Amazon's 5 star scale is.  This is most problematic for movies in the 2-3
star range.

For my own experience with the hReview format, I wanted to have the
half-star rating, but I found I could make due with a 1-10 scale
(http://www.cyberpunkreview.com).  More problematic for me is, at least in
the wordpress hReview plugin, the absense of an excerpt field.  This is
pretty critical for category pages.  For a real world example of this,
check out Ebert's "one minute review" page:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=oneminute

Also, while I don't know if this is an issue or not, I had the need to
modify some of the fields of the word press plugin to meet my needs.  My
review site is a genre-only site (also fairly common), and I needed to
have a field stating the "degree of cyberpunk visuals" and the
"Correlation to cyberpunk themes."  I could just as easily imagine a T&A
rating field like some of the bad movie sites use, or "number of deaths"
or "blood spurt rating" like some of the horror review sites use.  I guess
the point here is that if you don't already have them (and again, forgive
my ignorance, as I only know the wordpress plugin and haven't examined the
XML spec at all), you need some generic user-defined fields.  If not, they
will be created anyways.

Best,
Noel Dickover

> On Jan 18, 2006, at 12:44 PM, Scott Reynen wrote:
>
>> Ryan King wrote:
>>
>>> As is, hReview sets the default lower bound at 1 (which is what
>>> most examples in the wild use, despite what http://
>>> microformats.org/wiki/reviews-formats seemed to indicate).
>>
>> I'm a little confused about the process.  I thought the actual
>> microformat followed the collection real world examples.
>
> It does. And the current draft of hReview did just that.
>
>> Now you're apparently saying to ignore the real world examples
>> collected and just trust that the microformat makes sense.  Which
>> is it?
>
> What I was saying was that the examples were documented incorrectly.
> Several examples had [0-5], notably Amazon, while in reality they
> should have been [1-5]. I corrected those on the wiki a little bit
> ago, because I realized that it was leading to confusion.
>
> Also, please realize that we've learned a lot about what we now call
> 'the process,' since the time hReview was started. In fact, we've
> learned a lot from developing hReview, as its was the first compound
> microformat that was not an isomorphic translation of a preexisting
> schema, therefore the first that had to go through a thorough collect
> examples, review schemas, brainstorm, iterate loop. In a way, 'the
> process' grew out of hReview.
>
> -ryan
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