Rate with your Short Story or Someone Else’s

We attempt to achieve rating consistency by first categorizing, and then associating multiple criteria with each category. Each category is considered a rating dimension, and each criterion within a category aims to capture a specific aspect. Each criterion is rated on a 1–5 scale, from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

The big idea

Everyone rating something does so on the same set of short stories, aka criteria, with the same verbiage. An entity may be rated any number of times, on any number of categories, and on any number of criteria within each category. Each user’s latest criteria rating is used when they elect to rate an entity more than once using the same criteria.

Rated criteria are rolled up to category, and rated categories are rolled up to entity, which determine its overall rating. Of course, both category and criteria level ratings are always available for consumer review.

Freedom to create

If you are unsatisfied with the available categories or criteria within a category, you may add new criteria, either within a category or under “Other Category”.

New categories and criteria are added in a pending status and are only visible to you, the person who created them. They go through an approval process before being activated for general public usage. We will find a way to express our appreciation for your contribution, we just don’t know that that looks like, yet.

Note: authentication is required to rate things. We use Google and Facebook sign-in options for this purpose. This page is the only place within the site that requires authentication.

Coming up

In the next article, I’ll dive into the page titled Ratings where you can review things that have been rated either by you or others. Until then, feel free to go rate something. Let your friends and neighbors know how you feel about places that might be of interest to them. Also, please let us know how you feel about this rating concept.