ratedalike

Ratedalike is a proposed standard for aligning rating scales used by online platforms to rate content, products, or services. By normalizing different rating schemes, ratedalike aims to enable apples-to-apples comparisons of scores across platforms, categories, and time periods.

The concept specifies a common rating range and a formal mapping from local scales to that range. It also requires documentation of rating context (what is being rated), sample size, and any calibration adjustments applied. In practice, ratedalike might define a 0-100 scale with explicit anchors for each interval (for example, 0 representing "no value," 50 representing "median quality," and 100 representing "exceptional quality"), and a standard procedure for handling outliers and partial items.

Governance and adoption: ratedalike is not a universally adopted standard at present. It has been discussed in academic literature and industry forums as a framework to improve cross-platform analytics. Some platforms implement internal calibration processes and use crosswalk tables to approximate ratings from one system in terms of another, as a pragmatic alternative to full adoption.

Impact and limitations: if widely adopted, ratedalike could improve search, discovery, and recommendations by reducing rating bias across domains. Critics argue that normalization may erase culturally or contextually meaningful distinctions, and that obtaining reliable data for calibration can be challenging. Privacy and licensing considerations also arise when sharing rating data across platforms.

See also: rating normalization, cross-platform interoperability, data calibration, apples-to-apples comparison.