How did you come up with those numbers?
Last Updated - November 25, 1998Early in November, 1998, a list member asked the group to list their top 10 artists besides the Orb. Two weeks and 53 posts later, these responses were compiled and are presented here. Since compiling the results was something that occurred to me during the postings, and everyone seemed to deviate slightly from the initial request, I had to adopt some calculations to make sure that each post was weighted fairly...
Each person was asked to list 10 artists besides the Orb. Many did just that. Some listed 10, including the Orb. Some listed 12, or 14, or 17. Two listed more than 50! (These were discarded - sorry). So the method I used was as follows. Each post was worth 11 points - one for each top ten artist and one for the Orb. If a post contained 10 artists including the Orb, then each of the 10 entries was awarded 11/10 points or 1.1. If, on the other hand, a post listed 15 artists, then each entry was awarded 11/16 points (15 plus the Orb makes 16), or 0.69. And so on... As you can see, if a post contained 21 artists instead of the requested 10 (besides the Orb), then each artist listed only got half as many points as those appearing on a list with only 10 artists on it.
Each post was added to an Excel spreadsheet with the appropriate points for each artist. The spreadsheet was then resorted by artist and duplicate entries were combined. These steps were repeated for all 51 entries. The end result was a grid 334 rows by 51 columns (one for each post). The grid was summarized by column to make sure that each post totaled 11 total points. Each row was summarized and sorted to produce the rankings.
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