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Organizing Reviews

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Renegade:
So how about this as a meager beginning for a review:

1) Post about a very narrow category of software to review, e.g. Help file authoring tools
2) Include a few examples (continue with this throughout up to step 6)
3) Define the major features / categories
4) Define minor features / categories within the majors
5) Define "extras" or unique features
6) Build complete list. List has these columns:
Feature Name
Yes/No
Rating
Comments
(Columns could be tables as well, e.g. A comments table)
7) Volunteer to review a piece of software (at anytime up to here)
8) Post review for later aggregation

Well, that's a brief outline of a methodology.

I'm up for reviewing H&M...

Perry Mowbray:
Well, that's a brief outline of a methodology.
-Renegade (August 18, 2007, 08:46 PM)
--- End quote ---

I like it!

But I wonder if a Wiki may not fit the bill better? If you start H&M can anyone else add to your Index/Introduction page?

I'd also consider grouping the features into Classes such as the standard Functionality, Usability, etc and average out to give overview ratings across software groups.

I really like this idea.

Darwin:
A donationcoder review wiki - I like it! There would not doubt be issues, but this would a very interesting experiment  :Thmbsup:

Perry Mowbray:
A donationcoder review wiki - I like it! There would not doubt be issues, but this would a very interesting experiment  :Thmbsup:
-Darwin (August 19, 2007, 07:34 PM)
--- End quote ---
I'd imagine that it wouldn't be a full Wiki as we'd want to limit edit rights to members or certain members, but apart from very granular Forum permissions, I can't see how we could maintain a living page as the Introduction/Index to the software categories?

And that's where I think the benefit of DC doing something like this is: we have a large number of expert/well informed/opinionated  ;) members, that if we were able to produce an aggregation of their usage/opinions/mini reviews into something larger it would be a fantastic resource.

It's the living nature of something like this that appeals to me: software changes, versions change, etc, etc and not always for the better. What's the point of reading a comparative review that recommended Software X over Software Y if Software Y's development has overtaken X's?

The review is out of date. Where as, if we had an Introductory Page that listed Feature Rankings for the reviewed versions then the comparison would take care of itself. Having the ability to have multiple reviews of the one software by different people would be wonderful  :-*

mouser:
I have given a great deal of thought to creating a nextgen review system, with a hierarchy of editors and using wiki-like technology.  I'd love to work on it but we are talking about a very big project and i haven't yet found a way to either fund it and i dont have the time to work on such a large project without funding.

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