Think about how useful these two features together could be at
OpenACS.org. Suppose, for example, that you were interested in
learning more about how XML works in OpenACS. You pull up
everything in the "XML" category. You'd get web pages, FAQs,
discussion board threads, wimpypoint presentations, file
storage docs, etc.
Now, you have a lot of stuff here to look at--probably too much, in
fact. So next, you sort your results list by ratings to see which of
these content items seem to be the most highly rated. Perhaps
there are other ratings sorts you could use, too. For example,
maybe you want to sort by those items that have been highly
rated by the core development team. Or maybe you want to see
which ones have been rated (or written by) the community's XML
guru.
Or maybe somebody new to the community wants to find out
who to ask about an XML question. It would be great to search
on community members and sort them by the number of highly
rated content items they have submitted in a given category. They
could find out that, say, Dan's postings on XML are very highly
regarded.
For those proponents of self-organizing systems (like Wikki, for
example), I think categories + ratings gives the community much
more powerful, interesting, and orderly ways to evolve the
semantic connections on the site than does an "edit this page"
feature. If you add general comments, bboard, FAQ, file storage,
and wimpypoint into the mix, you have plenty of ways for
community members to contribute and, perhaps even more
importantly, plenty of ways for the community to self-organize.
Rating a content item is, in fact, making a significant contribution
to the community's knowledge by helping other community
members place relative values on the various pieces of content
that grow on the site.
