> BeerAdvocate, of all things, takes on this problem with interesting meta-info like "reviewer's average distance from consensus".

There's a lot to be said for intelligently dealing with ratings and their metadata in ways like this.

For example, the Kappa statistic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-rater_reliability

Presenting crowdsourced ratings as mere averages -- or really any collapse onto a single scalar -- is a big step up from no info at all, but it's hardly the best one can do even with well-known statistical techniques.