Patent ID: 8195522

Claim:
A method for a computing system of an online merchant to assess users who provide content to the online merchant, the method comprising: receiving multiple pieces of content that are created by multiple author users and that are supplied to the online merchant for use by customers of the online merchant, the pieces of content each being a user-generated item review for one of multiple items available from the online merchant and at least some of the author users being a subset of the customers of the online merchant, each of the multiple author users creating one or more of the multiple item review content pieces; assessing the multiple item review content pieces by, receiving multiple evaluations of the multiple item review content pieces from multiple evaluator users who are customers of the online merchant, each of the received evaluations being from one of the evaluator users for one of the item review content pieces and including a numerical rating of the item review content piece for each of one or more of multiple predefined rating dimensions, each rating dimension related to an aspect of the item review content piece such that a numerical rating for the rating dimension indicates an assessment by the evaluator user of a degree to which that aspect of the item review content piece is satisfied, the received evaluations including one or more evaluations for each of the multiple item review content pieces; and automatically determining a quality rating for each of the multiple item review content pieces and for each of at least one of the multiple rating dimensions based on the numerical ratings of the one or more received evaluations for the item review content piece; for each of at least some of the multiple author users, automatically generating an author contribution score for the author user based at least in part on the one or more item review content pieces created by the author user, the generated author contribution score for the author user being based on a quantity of the one or more item review content pieces created by the author user, on the automatically determined quality ratings for the one or more item review content pieces created by the author user, on a recency that the author user supplied the one or more content pieces created by the author user, on a quantity of one or more of the evaluator users who supplied evaluations of the one or more item review content pieces created by the author user, and on a recency that the one or more evaluator users supplied evaluations of the one or more item review content pieces, the automatically generating the author contribution score being performed by one or more configured computing systems; and providing one or more indications of at least some of the generated author contribution scores.