Secret Vote Tallying - Trust Us!
6/1/2009
"Various filters are applied to the raw data in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at 'vote stuffing' by individuals more interested in changing the current rating of a
Aside from the <x>, this is an exact quote (at least as of June 1, 2009). Granted it is a movie rating and not head of state, but still it seems rather fishy to me.
"Just trust us"
I like IMDB a lot. I use it a lot. I never ever read the details of the weighted average until I saw this by accident.
It doesn't matter what entry this actually is. But it's a foreign childrens show and not translated to English. This accounts for why it has so few votes. However, in the country that it exists, it is wildly popular. And I do not mean in a Jonas Brothers way. It's much more like Wall-E / Toy Story popular.
When checking out movies, anything above 7.0 and definitely above 7.5 on IMDB I consider a must watch. How this entry could be 5.8 was very surprising. When I clicked on the vote details I was really shocked.
5.8 is IMDB's average. Yet 26 of 32 votes are 6 or higher. That is 81.25% of the votes are above their average, and 25% of them are 10s! That is one heck of a (dead) weight they put on their averages.
IMDB details this a bit more, and Wikipedia goes even farther. Even in defense of vote stuffing etc, it still seems very troubling to see something so heavily weighted, and the "Just trust us sign". More troubling is, this same type of logic has been used to defend closed source polling machines which are used to elect heads of state.
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