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From: "John D'Errico" <woodchips@rochester.rr.com>
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.matlab
Subject: Re: New File Exchange download counts
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:45:03 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: John D'Errico (1-3LEW5R)
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"Gavrilo Bozovic" <gavrilo.dot.bozovic@gmail.dot.ch> wrote in message <gt4av3$7nm$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
> Innumerable posts have been made on the newsgroup about how to manage the FEX, i.e. what rules to implement to clean it. 
> 
> However, all the cleaning that was requested was because of Marco, and all the rules that were proposed were merely ways to avoid constantly stumbling on Marco's files, whatever search is launched on the FEX.
> 
> TMW could perhaps save a lot of time to all of the people suggesting these rules by simply banning Marco? I know the talk about freedom of speach, etc. but at a certain point, a decision has to be made...
> 
> In addition, we're talking about the administration of the FEX, not of a country... no one said it had to be democratic ;)

As much as I want to agree, this turns into one of
those slippery slopes. Where do they stop removing
files? This is a problem we had when we originally
tried to clean up the FEX a few years ago. 

Suppose we decide that Marco is obvious spam. Yes,
his crap is exactly that. I'm sure that we all would
like to see it disappear. How about the homework
assignments? While I'd like to get rid of the many
crappy versions of Gaussian elimination, at what
point does a homework assignment become worth
deleting? Suppose that as a student, I find a simple
solution to the 4 color problem (or Goldbach, or FLT,
etc.) posed to me as a homework assignment. I'm
impressed with my solution, so I post it to the FEX.
Should it be deleted?

The problem is that the FEX admin team cannot do
the sorting. They cannot make the choice between
files that truly are crap and the rare gems between
them, because they may not have the expertise to
make that judgement, and they certainly do not have
the time required to carefully assess each submission.

Ratings and reviews make sense here, making the FEX
a peer reviewed site. Only because there are many
hundreds or thousands of people willing to make
an occasional assessment of a few of the many files
up there, can we try to sort out the gems. I've been
pushing for a few years that these ratings should
use some form of reputation measure, so that
ratings become a more valid assessment of the
worth of a submission. I like the StackOverflow
model. Check it out.

http://stackoverflow.com/

Something like this can work nicely on Matlab
Central, where your reputation can be built up
from a variety of ways that a person contributes
to this community.

John