ZooChat Composite Top 25 Rankings?

mweb08

mweb08

Well-Known Member
I saw some complaining in the thread regarding the USA Today top 20 zoo rankings, and for good reason as those rankings are poor at best IMO. So I thought it would be a good idea if we colletively put out a yearly ranking of the best North American Zoos.

Some of you may be thinking that we have various threads reviewing and ranking zoos so how would this be any different, well the main difference would be that this wouldn't be one person's rankings, rather it would be a composite of many of our rankings. Also, instead of simply ranking zoos we have personally visited, most of us would have to consider establishments we have yet to visit. While that is not ideal, we do have the excellent resource that is ZooChat at our fingertips.

I think it would be cool to be able to say zoo x is the #1 zoo on ZooChat and I'm planning on visiting the #17 zoo. It would also be great to have a colletive list that we respect much more so than these popularity contests we see on various sites that don't specialize in zoos in the slightest.

Lastly, this could be done once a year and if its kept up, would be really fun to track over time and would become its own invaluable resource to zoo nerds like most of us that love to compare and contrast zoos.

If anyone is interested in composing their rankings for inclusion, please let me know. If we can get enough participants, I think this will be worthwhile and I will volunteer to calculate the rankings.

I'm also very open to a number other than 25 as I choose that only because it's what's used in college sports rankings.
 
Even if the max isn't 25 I think, can we allow people to submit rankings even if they have not visited the rankings number?
 
Also, I think we should do best safari-park / park that isn't exactly a zoo or aquarium, in order to accommodate for places that a lot of people think aren't zoos, like Disney's Wild Animal Kingdom.
 
The_UltimateBea said:
Even if the max isn't 25 I think, can we allow people to submit rankings even if they have not visited the rankings number?
Click to expand...

I think it would make more sense for people to include zoos they haven't visited. Otherwise, I'm not sure how useful a sample it would be and I don't see how we'd break that down into fair or accurate rankings. Like how would we place a zoo in the rankings that almost everyone ranks compared to one where like 25% of the people have ranked?
 
The_UltimateBea said:
Could we do awards in multiple categories? Here are my suggestions:


Best Exhibit

Most Improved Zoo

Best Zoological City

Conservation Achievement

Best Animal Care

Best Small Zoo

Best ZooChatter

Best Open Range Zoo

Best Aquarium
Click to expand...

Those are good ideas, but with the possible exception of aquarium rankings, I'd like to first see if there's adequate interest in simply doing the zoo rankings rather than get that ambitious to start. But by all means, run with the idea if you like.
 
mweb08 said:
I think it would make more sense for people to include zoos they haven't visited
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I do not think that is a good idea, because judging zoos from pictures is just not the real thing. It is kindof the opposite problem of what websites like tripadvisor have where people rate mediocre zoos quite highly, because that is the best they have seen. It is like a situation where somebody who has never eaten a proper burger says that McDonalds hamburgers are the best thing ever, because the only other thing he has ever eaten is rice with beans (and even then rice with beans could possibly win :p ).

The problem is though that there might not be enough zoochatters who have seen a big enough sample of the US zoos to have a good overview themselves based on actual visits...
 
lintworm said:
I do not think that is a good idea, because judging zoos from pictures is just not the real thing. It is kindof the opposite problem of what websites like tripadvisor have where people rate mediocre zoos quite highly, because that is the best they have seen. It is like a situation where somebody who has never eaten a proper burger says that McDonalds hamburgers are the best thing ever, because the only other thing he has ever eaten is rice with beans (and even then rice with beans could possibly win :p ).

The problem is though that there might not be enough zoochatters who have seen a big enough sample of the US zoos to have a good overview themselves based on actual visits...
Click to expand...

It's not going to be perfect, but I do think there are enough resources on this site between pictures, videos, reviews, and rankings, for those of us who have visited a significant number of zoos to be able to reasonably compile a list including some zoos we haven't visited.

It would also likely encourage the voters to try to visit more of the contenders.
 
If this is to represent Zoochat, their needs to be some minimum number of contributors, I think. If seven people decide it then does it represent Zoochat?
Of course we'd never get 9,700 Zoochatters to participate but a sensible sampling ought to be required if it is to mean anything more than all the previous ranking threads.
 
It doesn't have to be an official representing of ZooChat.

I do think having 7 people who take this seriously would produce something worthwhile (more participants would be better). But that certainly wouldn't mean it should be taken as gospel.

Ultimately, I think this would be a fun thing to do once a year and see how rankings change over the years.
 
This sounds fun. I believe ranking based on all zoos eligible instead of ones you have visited would be best. I’m sure there will be a geographical bias anyway. An agreed upon criteria would also help control bias. This reminds me of college football rankings.

The amount of participants, I feel, is not important. If everyone in the us votes in an election or very few do, the law or person is passed or elected. Doesn’t matter how many choose to participate or not.

I would suggest:

A list of eligible facilities in each category.

Criteria of attributes to be considered when voting.

Possibly having geographical primaries for regional nominees if there are to many concerns of bias or under representation, although I feel folks here are capable of being objective.
 
I’ll participate. I think weighting should be done- both by whether or not a person has visited the zoo in question, and perhaps by how recently.
 
Cool. I'm really not sure how weighting would work, though unless an individual like snow snowleopard has his entire rankings receive extra weight since he's been to all zoos that would be considered. I'm not a statistician, but it doesn't seem to make sense to have different weights within ones rankings.
 
So far we have the following people who said they're in:

Me
TheWalrus
jayjds2
Pleistohorse

And I assume UltimateBea and timmychompchomp and maybe ZooElepantsMan?

Anyone else interested? It would be good to get a larger sample size.

It would be nice to collect rankings and average them out in the near future so we have a 2017 rankings. (Again, this wouldn't be an official ZooChat ranking so no need to get all worked up because like all other rankings, this won't be perfect).

As for criteria, I personally don't think we need to get too specific since part of the fun of something like this is that different people value different things. I do think it should be based on visitor experience, though. Not the funding level of the zoo, or how the zoo is run behind the scenes, or what they do to help out with global conservation for instance. That's not to say those things aren't important, but I think this should simply be based on everything that actually impacts a visitors experience.

I'll start working on my personal list in the near future and hopefully we can get this rolling soon.

Obviously as far as resources to utilize, this site offers a great deal with all the pics, reviews, and individual rankings already out there. Snowleopard, perhaps our most prolific North American zoo visitor, certainly has several threads of his road trips with detailed reviews that can come in handy.
 
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