@Ez_and_not_so_Fast said:

Not forgetting, of course, the obvious bias of the veterans that by leaving out a huge collection of voices, namely those new to Phish and those younger fans who may or may not be having a completely different experience, the implication could be interpreted that you're weighting yourselves and your votes and opinions as potentially more valuable than those of noobs or those who are less active online. So a more extensive clarification on the sampling method would be welcome to explain and recognise the bias in the data collection part of the experimental design there. Regardless, I truly and sincerely laud the effort, most especially because I don't personally care about the results of ordinal-level data concerning these specific qualities of a nearly arbitrary collection of Phish shows.
-Another question: Why 2013?

Not sure why everyone is down voting the above, it seems a sincere series of questions. I'll try to answer them.

The main reason we surveyed who we did was because we are the Phish.net working group. Yes, it does introduce many biases, especially because most of us are long time fans. But I would argue that the data is more accurate than any one particular person's list, since everyone in the group brings a slightly different viewpoint. If you are more interested in what the general public thinks, check out the star ratings here on Phish.net, since they are open to everyone.

The methodology was this: given a list of every show from 2013, assign a rating from 1-10 (note: the vast majority of these ratings were in the middle of the range, indicating that most of us think the vast majority of Phish shows are pretty damn good). This was done by 15 or so of us. The top 11 scoring shows were then pulled out and ranked in order from 0 to 10. The average ranking was then used to put the shows in order.

Why 2013? Because it was freshest in our minds. We might go on to do other years.