The addon records what was on the corpse, not just what somebody took — which is the only way to get a denominator. Pooled across 150,037 recorded clears, that's a large enough sample to settle most of the arguments.
One boss kill with a complete loot capture. Partial captures are discarded entirely rather than counted as a non-drop, which would bias every rate downward.
Ten raiders in one guild produce one observation. Kills are keyed on realm, instance ID and timestamp, then merged.
Icons come from Blizzard's own client tables, served via Wowhead's CDN. The mapping is synced from the per-build DB2 exports at wago.tools.
Every rate carries a 95% Wilson interval. Good enough to settle an argument; not good enough to claim your realm is cursed.