Hi Walter - Thanks for posting your site and describing the changes you've made as well. It's interesting that you've focused on spelling/grammar errors (despite it being a slang site), and still haven't noticed any improvements.
We have a lot of members from around the world, who may not have English as their first language. We've thought about correcting some spelling/grammar programatically, but since we have a UGC site, and each review is tied to a real person, it seems disingenuous to rewrite someone else's words.
"Grammar, punctuation and style are part of how we decide if a review is credible. For Zappos to artificially inflate the credibility of reviews by changing those qualities is a form of fraud IMO."
I don't know if I'd call it fraud, but it certainly artificially inflates the credibility of reviews, and that's something (in addition to the rewriting someone else's thoughts part) we don't feel comfortable doing.
(For your site, since it's a dictionary, seems like a better fix and I'm surprised that it hasn't yielded any improvements)
We have a lot of members from around the world, who may not have English as their first language. We've thought about correcting some spelling/grammar programatically, but since we have a UGC site, and each review is tied to a real person, it seems disingenuous to rewrite someone else's words.
I recently read an article about how Zappos uses Mechanical Turk to correct grammar and spelling in user reviews (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110428/02453114067/zappos...), and one of the comments that stood out to me was:
"Grammar, punctuation and style are part of how we decide if a review is credible. For Zappos to artificially inflate the credibility of reviews by changing those qualities is a form of fraud IMO."
I don't know if I'd call it fraud, but it certainly artificially inflates the credibility of reviews, and that's something (in addition to the rewriting someone else's thoughts part) we don't feel comfortable doing.
(For your site, since it's a dictionary, seems like a better fix and I'm surprised that it hasn't yielded any improvements)