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How not to sort by average rating (2009)
Users are rating items on your website. How do you know what the highest-rated items are?
UPDATE, April 2012: Here is an illustrative SQL statement that will do the trick, assuming you have a widgets table with positive and negative ratings, and you want to sort them on the lower bound of a 95% confidence interval: I initially devised this method for a Chuck Norris-style fact generator to honor of one of my professors, but it has since caught on at places like Reddit, Yelp, and Digg. My desktop statistics software Wizard can help you analyze more data in less time and communicate discoveries visually without spending days struggling with pointless command syntax.
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