How to balance number of ratings versus the ratings themselves?

Question

For a school project, we\'ll have to implement a ranking system. However, we figured that a dumb rank average would suck: something that one user ranked 5 stars wou

Answer 1

What you can find on different plattforms is the blanking of ratings without enough votings: "This item does not have enough votings"
The problem is you can't do it in an easy formula to calculate a ranking.

I would suggest a hiding of ranking with less than minimum votings but caclulate intern a moving average. I always prefer moving average against total average as it prefers votings from the last time against very old votings which might be given for totaly different circumstances.
Additionally you do not need to have too add a list of all votings. you just have the calculated average and the next voting just changes this value.

newAverage = weight * newVoting + (1-weight) * oldAverage

with a weight about 0.05 for a preference of the last 20 values. (just experiment with this weight)

Additionally I would start with these conditions:
no votings = medium range value (1-5 stars => start with 3 stars)
the average will not be shown if less than 10 votings were given.