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Saturday, April 14, 2007

Amazon.com UnSpun Best English Bible Translation

UPDATE 16th April: This poll has been "got at" by people who have been adding, deleting and renaming entries in it in inappropriate ways. So you should probably ignore the results you see below. UnSpun could be a useful resource for polls of this kind, but only if there was some kind of protection mechanism to stop anyone with an Amazon.com account from making edits which completely invalidate the results.

LATER UPDATE 16th April: Amazon.com staff have rolled back the unauthorised changes and taken steps to stop this corruption happening again. As I write, this poll is again in a reasonable state. I hope this time it remains so.

UPDATE 17th April: More changes have been made to the poll. Some, such as by "who_cares", may have been accidental additions of duplicates. Others were clearly destructive, libellous and blasphemous. I am replacing the link to this poll with a link to a similar poll which I set up, which has now been closed to further edits of the list of translations. But so far this new poll has received relatively few votes. You can still vote on this alternative poll, and I would encourage you to do so if you have not already.

Henry Neufeld has posted a link to the Amazon.com UnSpun Best English Bible Translation. This is effectively a best Bibles poll, with the interesting twist that you can vote Bibles down as well as up. Henry writes:
I think it would be interesting to get the votes of many of the well-informed folks in the blogosphere to vote on this one and perhaps change the rankings a bit.
So, since this is where a lot of you well-informed folks hang out, have a go! Here is the list. If it works from this blog page (as it does from Henry's WordPress blog) you can vote by clicking on the up and down arrows:



It seems to work. Sorry if it slightly overlaps the sidebar.

Henry also writes:
I notice the CEV and the TNIV, two of my favorites, are way down the list.
But after his votes and mine both of these Bibles have moved much higher. No surprise, I suppose, because so far it is based on votes from only 21 people. It will be interesting to see how this changes in future.

For more details about this particular list and its rankings, see here. From this page, if you have or create an amazon.com account, you can rank the Bibles (these rankings are publicly visible) as well as vote for them. I'm not sure if this has an additional effect on the "community rankings".

For more about UnSpun, read these FAQ. It is apparently easy to create your own list.

7 Comments:

At Sat Apr 14, 01:09:00 PM, Blogger Peter Kirk said...

Someone seems to have got at this list, by deleting lots of versions. In fact probably more than one person, for I note that at least one translation was deleted and then reinstated. At one time 22 translations were listed. This has now gone down to 7. And, since the list was in quite a good state before I mentioned it here, this is probably down to BBB readers, or possibly readers of Henry's blogs. Please stop this childishness! If anyone doesn't like a translation, they are welcome to give it a negative vote. But deleting an entry is simply childish. Of course the fact that anyone can make such changes (despite what is claimed in the FAQ) shows that this is not a very good polling mechanism.

 
At Sat Apr 14, 01:53:00 PM, Blogger Peter Kirk said...

Actually part of the problem seems to be that the software is rather buggy. Deleted items keep reappearing, and the system gets confused by attempts to change item names.

 
At Sat Apr 14, 08:02:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

All I see right now is "First place Bible", "Second place Bible", etc. Hard to vote that way...

 
At Sun Apr 15, 04:31:00 PM, Blogger Peter Kirk said...

Wayne I presume, thanks for adding the "update" notice in my absence.

 
At Mon Apr 16, 10:01:00 AM, Blogger Peter Kirk said...

Sorry for some confusion about this post and its comments. The comments got hidden, probably accidentally, but have now been restored. Wayne and I have also been editing the post to make a suitable point.

 
At Tue Apr 17, 06:37:00 AM, Blogger opinion-minion said...

Uhhh...anybody notice that the TNIV has now been changed to "Todays New International Perversion"?

My question: is that the work of KJV onlyists (after all, they coined the original phrase)or TNIV-Haters? (they actually sound very much alike)

Sigh.

 
At Tue Apr 17, 10:02:00 AM, Blogger Peter Kirk said...

Yes, Opinion-Minion, I noticed, plus several other additions including a blasphemous one. Amazon.com has now locked this and won't allow any more changes. I will be contacting them about it again.

 

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