I want to see both ratings and reviews. Either alone is useless.

What do you know, and how do you know that you know it? touches on the value of reviews (and how I process them). Let me say something more specific now.

Knowing that someone liked a module tells me very little. Knowing why John Doe liked it tells me a lot more. Knowing that merlyn liked a module tells me more still. Knowing what merlyn liked about that module is really helpful.

The aggregate opinions of strangers whose level of information I don't know has some value, but only if I have no knowledge of my own to bring to the table. If I know Perl reasonably well, just reading the documentation tells me more of value. Since most of us can assume some level of Perl expertise, for many of us a random rating is useless. Good, bad, indifferent. I don't care if I can't tell whether I should care about what you think.

If I bring some knowledge to the table, a review is much more useful. From a review I can judge something about how much this reviewer likely knows, what the module proved useful for, and whether or not it works as the author promises. You can also read that as a list of what I would like you to establish in a good review. Note that it does not take a lot of space to establish this information.

Of course if my aditional knowledge includes knowing about who cares about the module, that opinion has a lot more weight than the most carefully written review can.

And finally, if I know that a person is knowledgable, I'd really like to know why that person liked a given module. There are two reasons for this. One is that it is feedback for me on how to effectively decide whether a given module is good. Secondly it really helps me decide whether this module is going to fit what I need.

In the end, of course, what I really want to know is not how great a module is, but whether it solves my problem. I can live with a module I dislike that just happens to do exactly what I need acceptably well. (I've used Mail::BulkMailer and would again.) I have no use for the best module in the world if it solves a problem that I don't have right now. (Sorry Text::Autoformat.)

So quality is only one factor in deciding whether I'll choose to use a module. An important one, but only one.

In reply to Re: CPAN ratings without reviews harmful or not? by tilly
in thread CPAN ratings without reviews harmful or not? by Solo

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