wu :: forums - Print Page


    
      
        wu :: forums
        (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi)
      

        riddles >> general problem-solving / chatting / whatever >> People Rankings and their Applications
        
(Message started by: amichail on Jun 5^th, 2005, 12:56am)

Title: People Rankings and their Applications
Post by amichail on Jun 5^th, 2005, 12:56am

Strangely, publicly available people rankings are not that common. But we have for example this:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/mostcited.html

With rankings such as these, we can build interesting applications.

For example, when searching through usenet postings, we might rank the results in a way that takes into account how successful the poster is -- as might be determined by the number of citations in the research literature say.

I am actually thinking of building a ranking of open source developers. Such a ranking might be determined by seeing how successful their applications have been (e.g., # downloads).

Of course, if an application is built by many developers, we have to address the credit assignment problem. Namely, who is primarily responsible for the success of the application? We might examine the CVS repository to see who wrote what.

In any case, once we have this ranking of open source developers, we could then consider various applications:

* usenet search that takes into account how good of a developer the poster is

* code search that returns code fragments written by particularly good developers

Do you think building a ranking of open source developers would be worthwhile? Do you think the applications mentioned would be compelling?

Title: Re: People Rankings and their Applications
Post by towr on Jun 5^th, 2005, 9:18am

Doesn't sourceforge already have a ranking of the open source devellopers on their site?

Title: Re: People Rankings and their Applications
Post by amichail on Jun 5^th, 2005, 2:59pm

on 06/05/05 at 09:18:09, towr wrote:

Doesn't sourceforge already have a ranking of the open source devellopers on their site?

I can't seem to find these rankings on sourceforge. Do you know the URL(s)?

Also, I'm looking for a ranking that is not based on peer review but is objectively computed in an automated way.

Title: Re: People Rankings and their Applications
Post by towr on Jun 6^th, 2005, 1:51am

on 06/05/05 at 14:59:42, amichail wrote:

I can't seem to find these rankings on sourceforge. Do you know the URL(s)?

I think I must have been mistaken, or at least I can't find it either.

Quote:

Also, I'm looking for a ranking that is not based on peer review but is objectively computed in an automated way.

Based on what? Popularity for one is not a good basis for deducing programming skill, a lot of popular software is crap.

Title: Re: People Rankings and their Applications
Post by amichail on Jun 6^th, 2005, 2:31am

on 06/06/05 at 01:51:04, towr wrote:

I think I must have been mistaken, or at least I can't find it either.

Based on what? Popularity for one is not a good basis for deducing programming skill, a lot of popular software is crap.

I think it might be interesting to see what most popular software is really like. I suspect that the code quality of popular word processors (e.g., TeXmacs, LyX, AbiWord) would be quite high. However, the code quality of popular chat clients might not be very good.

I think it has something to do with the size/complexity of the application and the number of developers. So perhaps the measure would combine popularity with some of these characteristics to identify likely talented programmers.