Official ZooChat Rankings?

mweb08

mweb08

Well-Known Member
With all the debating done on here regarding what zoos are best, I thought it would be fun to have a ranking system like college sports teams do for instance with their top 25's.

I think there could be two different ways to approach this, one being everyone list the zoos (not just ones you've visited) in order to whatever number we want to go to, and then compute the numbers to get a list. The other would be more fun I think, and easier, but likely not as accurate, and that would be to simply have polls asking which zoo everyone feels is the #1 zoo and then #2 and so on.

Would you guys be interested in this, and if so, which method do you prefer or suggest?
 
I think this is a great idea and would be alot of fun if everyone gets involved in it.I think I would prefer the first option.Lets get this together we could make voting a weekly thing.

Team Tapir
 
team tapir said:
I think this is a great idea and would be alot of fun if everyone gets involved in it.I think I would prefer the first option.Lets get this together we could make voting a weekly thing.

Team Tapir
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Glad you like the idea.

I don't think we'd have to come out with a new rankings every week, or anything close to that. The only real changes there would be based on a difference of voters, not a difference of the zoos themselves. This isn't like college football or basketball where the voters have new information to process every week.
 
mweb08 said:
Glad you like the idea.

I don't think we'd have to come out with a new rankings every week, or anything close to that. The only real changes there would be based on a difference of voters, not a difference of the zoos themselves. This isn't like college football or basketball where the voters have new information to process every week.
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Yeah I guess your right about weekly but it would fun to put up an offiicial top 25 based on majority

Team Tapir
 
team tapir said:
Yeah I guess your right about weekly but it would fun to put up an offiicial top 25 based on majority

Team Tapir
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I agree. It would be cool to see what the list came out to be now, and then see how it changes over the coming years.
 
nahh nowon cared tbh, pehaps asking a moderator to move it to the general forum would get better press but i still love the idea of theese things like
 
Could be interesting, so how would this work? Put up a list of all the zoos that have forum and gallery sections, and members check their top 25 in order, and the poll is open for several months, and then the list is tallied and published until the next year poll? I would love to see the full list after the poll, but it might be wise to only publish the top 25 so as not to potentially drag down attendance at the lower-ranked zoos if the results were actually carried by a media report. Also, it might be best to separate continental areas.
 
I was thinking we limit this to North America. If others want to do Europe or whatever, that's fine, but I only want to deal with N. America. I hadn't thought of this being picked up by a media outlet, but top 25 would be fine with me. We should be able to get it done a lot quicker than several months as well. A couple weeks or so should be enough time for people to list their top 25 or whatever number we choose.
 
I would want it open long enough so that infrequent users would not miss out on it too. With the growing membership, I could see a media source doing a small piece about it, just like some of the magazines have carried stories randomly developed by contributors that list their top 10 zoos. I could also see the zoos that rank on top touting it on their websites:

"Ellen Trout Zoo voted number 1 zoo according to Zoochat, the most popular web source for devoted zoo fans in the know"
 
Ok, well 4 weeks? You say people would be able to check their top 25 in order in a poll, well is their a way to do that? I was just thinking people type out their lists, but if there's an easier way, that would be great.
 
I do not know how it works, but I was thinking that the Poll feature could be used, with a megalist! However all the polls I have seen posted, like the recently replied topics of best hippo and best freshwater otter exhibits, only allow for one choice. If that were used, a top 25 ranking could be calculated easily, but it would not give much of an accurate list past the common top choices. I would rather see the poll feature used only if members could tick 25 of the choices out of 200-or-so institution list!
 
As far as I know, the only two real options are the ones I listed. Either everyone just types out their top 25 or whatever number and then I or whoever calculate the averages, or we do a series of polls starting with what people think is the best zoo, then the second best, then the third, and so on. The first option would be the most accurate, but would be more difficult.
 
So if the second option was followed, there would be 25 polls total? Would each poll have a narrowed-down list of zoos rather than an open field of all 200+ North American zoos?
 
geomorph said:
So if the second option was followed, there would be 25 polls total? Would each poll have a narrowed-down list of zoos rather than an open field of all 200+ North American zoos?
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Yes to the first question. Regarding the second, I think there's only 10 options in a poll, but people can just write-in any zoo they want in the thread.
 
And are people invited to rank and vote whether they have visited the zoo or not? And what if they visited it only ten years ago?
Does the ranking have any meaning if it is about a zoo's reputation and hype rather than actual evaluation by those who visited?
 
Zooplantman said:
And are people invited to rank and vote whether they have visited the zoo or not? And what if they visited it only ten years ago?
Does the ranking have any meaning if it is about a zoo's reputation and hype rather than actual evaluation by those who visited?
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I think the only way we could do this would be to allow people to vote regardless of whether they've visited all the zoos. Otherwise, we'd probably have to just go with Snowleopard, Geomorph, the authors of the best zoos book, and maybe a couple others. And even Snowleopard hasn't been to all the zoos.

Besides, we already have a place to put our personal rankings of zoos we have been to.

I just think this would be a fun thing to do and look at as the list evolves over time. I would hope people would take it seriously and look at pictures of all the zoos (we can wait til Snowleopard posts all his pics so the collection is more complete). That's the primary way people judge exhibits and zoos on here anyway.

So the list won't be perfect by any means, but I wouldn't advise taking it that seriously.
 
"One of these things is not like the other..."

geomorph said:
I could see a media source doing a small piece about it, just like some of the magazines have carried stories randomly developed by contributors that list their top 10 zoos. I could also see the zoos that rank on top touting it on their websites:

"Ellen Trout Zoo voted number 1 zoo according to Zoochat, the most popular web source for devoted zoo fans in the know"
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mweb08 said:
So the list won't be perfect by any means, but I wouldn't advise taking it that seriously.
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