I've had this intuition as well, and tried to put it to use when redesigning the Ubuntu Software Center's ratings system. Ratings are fundamentally ordinal data -- higher is better, but the difference between 4 and 5 is not the same as the difference between 3 and 4.
This implies that the arithmetic mean is a broken concept, however the _median_ should still survive intact. I thought about ways to implement this in Software Center, however I'm still not quite sure what a good algorithm for ordinal rating data would look like.
This implies that the arithmetic mean is a broken concept, however the _median_ should still survive intact. I thought about ways to implement this in Software Center, however I'm still not quite sure what a good algorithm for ordinal rating data would look like.
Please feel free to post ideas on this stackexchange question: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/19115/how-do-i-sort...