> So the next logical step is to present the Wilson score directly, but this merely shifts the confusion elsewhere -- the user may find an item they're interested in buying, find it has one 5-star review, and yet its Wilson score is << 5, producing at least the same perception and possibly a worse one.
Though I'm not convinced how big of a deal this is. Even if you're worried about this, a further optimization may be to simply not display the score until there's enough reviews that it's unlikely anyone will manually compute the average rating.
> So the next logical step is to present the Wilson score directly, but this merely shifts the confusion elsewhere -- the user may find an item they're interested in buying, find it has one 5-star review, and yet its Wilson score is << 5, producing at least the same perception and possibly a worse one.
Though I'm not convinced how big of a deal this is. Even if you're worried about this, a further optimization may be to simply not display the score until there's enough reviews that it's unlikely anyone will manually compute the average rating.