In past blog posts I've outlined problems with wikis as "collaborative" sources of information. To combat those problems FanConcert is going to have ways to identify the quality of each piece of information that was submitted by users.

A lot of Internet sites that grade the quality of information call this process moderation. It's not a very user-friendly name for it, especially when you consider the many definitions of the word. So instead I've decided to refer to moderation on FanConcert as scoring[1].

Before I get into scoring though, I need to explain the concept of context. When individual bits of information about an object can change, people need a point of reference that never (or very infrequently) moves. For example, on FanConcert a venue has a name that doesn't change[2] because the name is the context. From that name, you can provide values for attributes like the street address, official website, etc. The name can't change because that would change the context that all of the other attributes are based upon.

Imagine if FanConcert didn't enforce this. You could add a venue and fill in all of its attributes, like it's address and website. Then someone else could change the venue name to something that makes the address and website invalid. It doesn't make much sense to allow that.

Wikipedia enforces context with its article titles (and URLs). If you're editing the Wikipedia page for Corel Centre -- which has the distinct Wikipedia URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Centre -- then the information on that page is about a thing called "Corel Centre". The word "Corel Centre" is the context in that case -- there is only one of those in the world.

Wikipedia can also handle many things that have the same name, with its disambiguation pages. Each of those things then gets a separate unique name on Wikipedia to differentiate it from other things with the same English name.

On FanConcert you can change all attributes except the context attribute by editing, a voting process where majority rules. For example, if the majority of people say that the official website of Madison Square Garden is http://www.thegarden.com then that's the value that is used on FanConcert until the majority swings to a different value.

Unlike a wiki that only allows corrections, people can submit the same value for an attribute show that they agree. When a lot of people agree it's harder to outvote a large majority and vandalize FanConcert with bad information. The ability to agree is a very important aspect of FanConcert that wikis lack. If enough people submit edits then FanConcert's data can have higher reliability and correctness at any given time, unlike a wiki like Wikipedia that can be instantly vandalized.

There is one twist though: the original submitter of the venue (the creator) can change the venue's name. I allow this so that users can fix typos, not change the venue's context. This means that the user that submitted the venue is responsible for the venue's context as well as the venue name's spelling and capitalization. Other users can't change a venue name so they can't change the venue's context[3].

BUT other users can agree or disagree with a venue's name by scoring. When a venue has a high score a lot of people are saying: this venue exists in real life and has this official name. Users can disagree with the venue name and provide reasons for their disagreement, such as: the venue name is spelled incorrectly or doesn't even exist in real life[4].

All of the other attributes of the venue -- like the address -- are not related to the venue's score since they can be changed individually. I recognize that this is a little counter-intuitive at first[5]. I'm not sure how much of a problem this will be -- it's one of those wait and see things.

Scoring can be done on each object individually but some scoring can also be done on lists of many objects. In the last week I've changed the search results for artists, venues and concerts so that you can agree with many objects at the same time. This makes it much easier for correct objects to accumulate high scores, which is really important.

Examples:

1. You could compare a list of concerts by an artist side-by-side with the artist's website to verify them and agree with them all at once.
2. You can quickly and easily agree with artist and venue names you know are correct, like "U2".

I also allow users to quickly remove their scores from lists of objects just in case they make scoring errors.

Why not allow users to disagree with many objects at once? Each object has a separate reason for being incorrect and I don't want to trivialize negative scoring. This is not as much of a problem as it may seem: objects that are correct will accumulate high scores easily while objects that people aren't sure about will have low or negative scores. If people are too lazy to dig into the object and disagree with it, the object will still have a low score.

Footnotes:

[1] People could confuse "scoring" with a rating system: how good an artist is, rather than its correctness. I have to keep this in mind.
[2] Venue names do change out in the Real World. On FanConcert, a name change is a new and separate venue because all of the old concert dates should keep the old venue name for historical reasons.
[3] Users with high reputations may be able to change context attributes (like venue and artist names) in the future. Presumably these people would be more careful about changing the context of objects while responding faster than waiting for the original submitter to correct it.
[4] Maybe I will provide a text box so that the user can write exactly what they think the correct name should be when they score.
[5] For example, a highly scored venue could have an incorrect street address -- even though the venue name is correct -- if a majority of people don't bother to vote to change the address to something else. Practially speaking, how often will that happen?