For a while now I’ve had an itchy question about the “Rating” aspect of photos on MinDat.  As ever, I appreciate the community-based aspect of this site and am not criticizing – much – but am more looking to improve.  Note comments here are not aimed at any user’s photos, rather the general process.

What determines what a photo receives as its “Rating” that is used for sorting images at a locality or other searches?  As a regular user, I do not see any way of influencing this unless it is by clicking on the image and adding to its view count – there is no option to “upvote” or “like” a relevant image.

Part of why I ask this is frustration with a locality I know pretty well, the Yerington district in western Nevada (https://www.mindat.org/loc-6712.html).  While there are many folks more expert than me, I did do my master’s thesis in the skarns near Ludwig from 1989-1992 and know a few things.  I’ve periodically sponsored the area.

If I visit the region and look at mineral photos and use the default view by Rating, the piece that comes up is a travertine attributed to the Casting Copper mine (MinID 83E-ERC).  Pretty sure this specimen was tagged here due to an earlier photo I posted of a similar small, crappy piece (CTH-4TL) that I collected and posted a year earlier.  (Note I just fixed the locality on my piece, so they won't show the same as of this post.)

My question is how this other piece became the top-rated image for the Yerington district?  The Yerington district was a major porphyry copper producer that was operating for close to a century and still has lots of reserves.  There’s a huge range of primary and secondary minerals for it, including some fascinating, well-studied skarns on the periphery.  The Ludwig area in particular is famous among knowledgeable regional collectors for its chartreuse vesuvianite crystals that reached 10+ cm in size.

Somehow, though, the top rated photo for the district is a secondary calcite that has basically nothing to do with the region, was one limited seam (as far as I’ve seen), and isn’t even that great of a photo.  If the “Rating” criteria can only be influenced by clicks, however, it’ll keep getting bumped farther up the list because it’s the top-rated image when someone clicks through to the region.  For Yerington, there are so many that would be better choices – personally I like PLF-TE5, because even though Rock left off the size you can see how big the vesuvianites got.

Please note I’m not campaigning for any of my photos here, most of which stink.  There are dozens of photos that better represent the area and deserve to show up as the top rated for the locality.  Looping back to my original question, how can the community influence image Rating?  If it’s only via clicking on a photo, the current system will reinforce selection of the images with the most clicks, even if they are irrelevant to a locality.

Upvoting... just another of those nice-to-have features for which we all should contribute to support somehow!

Cheers,

D.