There are plenty of sites out there that let people vote on things by rating them, then ranking the subjects by rating average. Many of these play out ok over time because they’re open-ended and every entry will eventually get a large number of votes (I guess). But what about closed-ended systems, like a contest, where it is not required that every entry receive the same number of votes, but that will end in a short period of time.
Basically, what is the statistical method to ensure that an entry that gets one vote of “10” (for a 10.00 average) doesn’t win over an entry that has a 9.8 average but had 1,000 people vote for it?
Do you only allow entries to be ranked that receive a minimum amount of votes?
Do you pre-seed all entries with “X” # of average scores, so one vote won’t skew it overly (every entry automatically gets assigned 20 votes of 5.0, for instance)?
Some more sophisticated method based upon total aggegrate votes, or average # of votes per entry (not ratings, but raw votes), that then determines the minimum votes needed to be eligible, or applies a bonus or penalty to low-raw-vote entries?
This math stuff be way over my head