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 dat

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. Please feel free to post ideas on this stackexchange question: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/19115/how-do-i-sort-an-ordinal-list-of-user-generated-ratings-data http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/19115/how-do-i-sort...