I actually wrote the previous comment without reading this particular stream, but a 1-9 break down from say "9=pulitzer material-single best thing I've ever read in my life" to "1=unadulterated crap fit for nothing but gerbal cage lining",for example and then do that for each number 1-9 would be helpful too. Then like I suggested before you could link that chart to the word "Rating" at the top of each writings page.

The ratings are what people make them. Like you said 9 is the best 1 is the worst everything else in-between lies somewhere in the good-to-bad spectrum. Let's not set concrete definitions on something that people should be able to manipulate to represent their opinion towards a piece. 

If you think it is better than bog standard average read then it will be above 5.
If you think it wasn't even of the level of an average read it will be below 5.

Basically I don’t agree with setting values to numbers which people may not agree to, at least this way with the numbers being just numbers people can set their own meanings. Though it’s not hard to see a rating better than 5 means your work is in the top half.

I still think a set of general interpretations of the numbers will help a lot. For every twenty pieces of work I read that have comments maybe one of them has been scored at all. Virtually everything has a score of 0.0 and I think a big reason people don't use it is because they don't know how. Even if you write some super general guidelines and link them to "Ranking" I think the rankings would see more usage, even if it's just what you wrote me. Come on! people need guidance I mean seriously, we need velvet ropes to get us into the right movie theater for cryin' out loud!

ratings.

I'll ask Hedda to add it to the uploaded writings page.

Good Deal! Thanks! I'll be looking for it.

Well, that is kind of wrong with 1. 1 means "Hardly worthy of rating".

Crap is simply ignored and gets no grade at all.

I disagree. But hey, why argue over word choices, anyways? We all speak our own English.

Well, you're just wrong because you aren't describing the current system.

Not rated texts will be placed below texts rated very low. And a text rated high by only one person will be rated lower than a text rated crap by hundreds of people.

A bad rating do lower the score for well rated texts, but adds score for the non-rated ones.

We can't just assume that texts will never be well-rated enough that people who don't like something will be better off leaving it alone than giving it a low rating. But anyways, this thread is a little old, isn't it?

You do realize that I wrote that comment almost 2 years ago, don't you? The administrators have since actually put in an online description of the ratings system, and I like to think that I had at least some small influence on that.  ; )

An admitted problem. The issue with the rating system for me is that it has a base number of minimum ratings (I think it's either 10 or twenty) but even if you get say 6 nines there are still 4 0s averaged into your overall score. This scews all the ratings just like you said. Maybe we should get rid of the minmum number of scores? Or perhaps reduce that number to say 3? This isn't a huge site after all, I think the highest rated piece on the whole thing is still only 3 or 4.