Story: ID cards under fire after HMRC debacle
The real meaning of article ratings
To answer your question, if an article is rated as 7/7 - that is, seven people out of seven rated it positively, then it means that seven people clicked on the tick at the bottom of the story and nobody clicked on the cross. In other words, everybody who cared to deliver an opinion, found the story useful.
It's useful feedback for the writers and editors too. We use a pretty comprehensive reporting tool which, among many other things, tells us how many impressions a story generates. But we want to know more than simple page impressions: Without the reader feedback the only metric we have to measure a story's appeal is the traffic it generated (of course we also look at things like where people go after reading the story).
Adding reader feedback into the mix gives us a much more qualitative feedback mechanism. For instance, if a story only does low traffic but gets a high reader rating that indicates people found it very useful, it may actually be more valuable in some respects than a story that does astronomical traffic but alienates readers to the extent they give it a very low rating (I don think it has happened, but say 1 person out of 500 found it useful).
Obviously we strive for traffic, because we pay our wages by selling advertising on the site. But we try very hard not to put traffic targets ahead of our readers' interests, and the tick/cross device helps keep a reality check.
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