Reader feedback mechanism

Here a "Point" type set of question:

• Is this article informative?
• Is this article interesting?
• Should this article be kept?

@Randomran Surveys are meant to be of limited duration are else it would be pointless because the article evolves thus what is evaluated can have drastically changed between the start of the survey and the end of if if the survey takes too long.

I dunno -- I have a strong bias in favour of rate-this-article functionality on all articles in perpetuity :-)

Imagine all the many uses for that data. It would help us know which articles are poor, so editors could direct their energies towards them. Chapters could develop grant proposals for money to systematically increase quality in categories that rank particularly low. Editors who care about BLPs could identify the lowest-quality ones and dedicate sustained attention to fixing them. Professors could assign their classes to help clean up the 10 worst articles in their subject. If a particular language version was rated overall extremely high, other language versions could try to discern and emulate some of its practices. If a language version were rated particularly low, editors who speak that language could stage a quality improvement campaign helping it. Etc etc etc. The possibilities are endless :-)

I am afraid getting a number of negative ratings of an article would act pretty much demotivating for the principal editor of this article. Definitely, it would act in such a way on me, and it happened to me in the past (for instance, when a bunch of trolls recently coordinated an attack on my FA, even though I knew these are trolls).

Possibility are endless, yea :)

Permanent article rating feature is workable if we can have the rating evolution across time so we can see the difference between earlier ratings and the most recent ones.

I'm a little worried about permanent article rating... but here's a thought...

Most of the benefits of permanent article rating are to flag low quality articles, not to identify high articles. (Just what I'm gathering from looking at Sue's list.) But when it comes to exploits, I'm much more worried about people up-rating a biased article, and then using that as a reason to exclude new contributions (you're lowering the quality). I'm not as worried about people down-rating an article. What's the worst that happens? You force more people to give it their attention.

So instead of a permanent rating system, what we need is a permanent "flag an issue" system? Something that helps us identify areas that need improvement, and cannot be used as a way to hold a bad article in its current form.