You could easily avoid this though with some other cleverness (as other sites do).

For example, the users that post or review on GoKunming are either real or not. Users that are always here posting or reviewing can be considered more real and therefore their ratings are given much more weight.

Conversely people that have only rated or posted once or twice can be considered less of an authority. Anyone that has rated only 1 place should be considered spam, 2 places half spam, only once someone rates 5 times or more can they be considered real. This way you can get a combination of "reviewers authenticity" multiplied by the ratings to create a difficult to influence system. This is just an example of course, you can fudge the numbers to whatever you think is appropriate.

A little maths and tracking what users do (as gokunming does) can be used to increase the functionality and reliability of ratings, so why not do it?

I was just thinking after a posting by Alex, he indicated favourite Kunming eating spots which you could build into your listings section - extending it so it has more functionality.

What I am thinking is you should extend the listing pages to not only be able to refine by type of food (24 hour, American, Bakeries etc) but to include a rating ordering, so we can see the highest rated places first (you could do the tags by star value 5 stars, 4-5 stars, 3-4 stars etc). You would need to come up with a rule probably whereby a place needs to have 3 or more ratings to be able to be included, but setting the rule shouldn't be a problem.

You should also include a map on the listing page that indicates the location of each restaurant by filter.

If you included both functions the listing page for restaurants/activities would include:

Type
Location
Rating

In fact, maybe your default ordering for all listings shouldn't be alphanumeric as well - use the ratings. That way we can see the top rated places in a city just by looking!

Ahhh... isn't this what the review/listing section is for?

When you look at the stats its quite sad about the west though. They estimate 25% of all food is wasted in the west (hard to know here) mostly through the food going past its expiry date (i.e. people throwing out vegetables unused, supermarkets binning old food etc).

If you read up on the subject of food wastage its rather surprising. We could probably all do a lot better than what we do, but we choose not too for a variety of reasons.

An interesting thing I was taught by food scientists (working for a food generation and security NGO) was there is actually enough calorific food value in the human food chain to feed around 12 billion people. The problem is we choose not to use or distribute it equally or wisely for a variety of reasons (political/social/greed etc etc).

Should advertise a bit earlier if you want one, I only saw this now (10:10pm ready for bed!)