Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2020 November 12

= November 12 =

Rolling Stone magazine
Hi, sorry to come back for the final question: ok, as for the polls aimed at readers, these, can write their choices on the comments page of Facebook or Twitter. But here’s my question: how does the magazine staff fill out the votes? The counting mechanism, can happen automatically with a program that I know...? Thank you very much. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.41.100.198 (talk) 20:05, 12 November 2020 (UTC)


 * According to the answer given to the same question asked before (Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2019 September 19), the staff must then compile these various sources of readers' choices for their final lists. (Just repeating that answer; I have no personal knowledge of the matter.) Given the free format and the limited AI abilities to understand natural language, the only feasible way would be to do that by hand. --Lambiam 09:20, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
 * You'll generally want a human in the loop to ensure everything looks kosher, and maybe do some formatting, but this can be semi-automated with the mountains of text processing software available. Just something like grep, or anything else that lets you match regexes, will count up the votes for different options. --47.152.93.24 (talk) 23:10, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
 * In a poll such as "What is the best Neil Young song of all time?", grep counts work when each comment mentions only one song title and it is not misspelled (as in Cinamon Girl or Cinnaman Girl). Quite a few people will mention several titles, though (Young is at his best when he is protesting so let it be Ohio. All his songs are great though, I could as well have chosen Powderfinger or Old Man.). Many predictable misspellings can be accounted for in a regular expression, but comments that weigh several choices before settling on one are not handled (or even detected) that easily with the standard text-processing toolset. --Lambiam 09:34, 15 November 2020 (UTC)