Re: [Xconq-general] Xconq Ranking at Sourceforge

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald@phy.cmich.edu>]

Erik wrote:

> When I saw that formula  it was obvious to me that it does not weight the 
> data. Since I found that strange I searched for the documentation. And it 
> says: "We are aware that the current formula does not actually weight the 
> data aggregated for rankings (the formula was misdesigned and has not yet 
> been replaced)."
> 
> [http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=14040&group_id=1]

Well yes, I saw that too; it is the document from which I quoted in my 
previous message. I wasn't offering a critique on the relative merits or 
flaws of the existing formula. I was just explaining how it is that we 
ended up with the ranking we did. I think it would be understandable if 
another project was a bit annoyed because it had 100 times the downloads 
but was active in fewer of the areas that logs are taken of. And, as 
Matthew points out in the next message in this thread, the 
multiplicative factors inside the logs are the same as adding small 
constants outside the logs; definitely not a good "weighting" scheme.

Eric

P.S. The Sourceforge expression is actually a bit simplified, since 
log(0) must be avoided. Thus it is not a pure formula, but some logical 
selection must be occurring as well. The other thing to note is that 
projects that have between 1 and 3, inclusive, new downloads per week 
would seem to be actually penalized in the scoring, unless there is 
logic that says to apply the downloads calculation for only those 
projects with 4 or more downloads per week.