ratings for annotations and contributors

Hello, all. I just got done looking at the discussions on rating systems, and I was intrigued that all the discussions I found were about rating the cited resource. What interests me more is knowing the reliability of the contributor and the usefulness of his annotations. I imagine after reading the annotations a contributor has posted for a cited item, there could be an interface similar to FAQ lists in many product support websites where the page asks, "Was this annotation helpful to you?" (Yes/No radioswitch), and then a text box for "Why or why not?", where one sentence would be sufficient.
Then there would be a way to evaluate the contributor, similar to ebay and amazon vendor evaluations.

I agree with those who said a star rating on the cited item is fairly useless; what I care about, especially if I share a zotero group with hundreds of colleagues, is how reliable and useful the annotations are, since I won't know some members from Adam.
  • So just to get the terminology straight, you're referring to Zotero notes and other members of a Zotero group?

    ("Annotations" and "contributors" each mean something different in Zotero-speak.)
  • Yes.

    Additionally, as I discussed this topic with a colleague, it came up that a natural 'rating' for how essential a cited item is, is most times derived from how often it is cited in other literature. I believe there are web sites dedicated to tracking these statistics; can Zotero track this info, or (more likely), could Zotero pull in this kind of information (from some other site) in an automated way? It would be nice, for instance, to have as part of the item's info tab, a line saying "# of citings:", with a link to a site or page that would also list all those known citations. This would be a significant tool in deciding if a particular work would be important for intended research.
  • there is already a third party plugin that queries for google scholar citation numbers and inserts them - currently into the call number field, which is why I'd discourage using it at this point, but that will be the way to go in the future - you'll find it with a bit of searching on the forum (I don't remember name or link, I'm not trying to hide it).
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