I was browsing the IMDB top 250 and looking at the rankings, it shows the forula they alledge to use to work out the rankings, something did not look right though.

Godfather has lower ratings and votes than the Shawshank Redemption but is placed at number 2! WTF?

I checked the top ten and they all looked very suspicious....

So I created a little spreadsheet and stuffed in the data and used their formula to calculate the ranking and got a completely different set of results....here is the top ten ranked by arithmetic mean.

IMDB      IMDB Title                                                                  # Votes
Ranking  Waited
            Results
2 9.1 The Shawshank Redemption (1994)           264,774
4 8.8 Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966)             67,862
5 8.8 Pulp Fiction (1994)                                           227,265
8 8.8 Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)           165,832
19 8.7 The Usual Suspects (1995)                           161,564
3 8.9 The Godfather: Part II (1974)                           126,808
18 8.7 Goodfellas (1990)                                           120,675
11 8.8 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)           113,831
41 8.4 Léon (1994)                                             98,334
17 8.7 Cidade de Deus (2002)                                             71,066

PM me if you want the spreadsheet.

Sorry about the formatting, forms and data don't mix.

The formula used for the top 250 is shown at tyhe bottom of the top 250 listing........