RE: [xwiki-users] Rating documents

Vincent: While I agree that adding an object to a page would probably be the simplest way to do this, it has the drawback of requiring edit permission on the page. It doesn't take a great leap to imagine wanting to allow users to rate pages that you don't want them to edit, just like adding comments. I haven't looked closely at how tagging is implemented in 1.0, but it looked like it puts a tags field in the document class itself, which would have the same problem: that tagging a document, like commenting on it, is primarily a means of recording what viewers think about it, and so limiting the ability to tag or rate a document to those who also have the right to change it would not be optimal. Rating and tagging both record a user's personal association of semantic values with a document. The association can be entirely independent, as with all of the public tagstores on the net. The contributor's biggest need is for ease of adding ratings or tags in the context of viewing the document; the consumer's is for ease of finding them in that same context, and for the greatest possible number of contributors. Of course, ratings and keyword associations are not the only kinds of metadata that we want to associate with documents; there is a large and growing need to provide general metadata stores for lots of current and future indexing needs. The bottom line (and in only one screenful; pretty good for me!) is that I actually think that your existing servlets, to which you can simply provide links in your view templates, can evolve independently into a general-purpose semantic indexing tool of a kind that will be useful beyond XWiki. For example, our XWiki's header.vm template adds a link to the page menu to publish tags for the current page to our in-house instance of Scuttle, an open-source del.icio.us-like implementation. Likewise, we provide a bookmarklet, like the one provided by del.icio.us, and Scuttle provides a Firefox extension to add tagging to the context menu - both of which offer the advantage not only of tagging any page with Scuttle but of taking the text selection, if any, as the comment text for the tag record. We'd actually use del.icio.us itself except that many of our links are internal and neither useful to the general public nor acceptable for publishing. So while I am a great and loyal fan of XWiki, I really believe that the jobs of tagging and rating should be provided by tools that are external to, and independent of, any given application, even one so broad and flexible. Alternatively, you could just make each possible rating a special tagname that is hidden from the usual tag views, e.g. rating1, rating2, etc... brain[sic]