Interesting article but it's still arbitrary. I don't think it solves the problem still. What it boils down to is trusting the raters. This is the only way to get by spam, ignorance, and trolling.

I think the solution is knowing who is rating what you're looking at. In the old sense - "Quality over quanitty." I don't need to know what the whole world gave it, just a few people who I've come to trust. We're trying to do this here: www.criticrania.com.

I think this is the only real way around this problem.