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If a user has greater reputation, then their votes should be worth more than votes of someone who is less reputable. It will ensure that people who the community gives more credibility to are more respected in their answers. Either that, or allow people to see the reputations levels of the voters.

(Inspired by this comment that I made)

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I disagree. Every answer should be addressed on its own merit, not on the merit of the person answering the question.

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    I don't think the proposal was that votes count differently depending on the reputation of the answerer: I think it was that votes count differently depending on the reputation of the voter.
    – msh210 Mod
    Jul 16, 2012 at 6:07
  • @msh210: good point.
    – Menachem
    Jul 16, 2012 at 6:27
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

The most successful search engine (and possibly most successful company period) agrees - rank importance by the importance of those who give it importance.

The logic behind this is the same logic that gives reputation in the first place - the community trusts your opinion. So you are granting trusted users the ability to leverage the trust they have been granted.

In general, much of "Jewish learning" is related - someone with experience in how to learn will generally have a better idea of what fits into the system and what doesn't. Someone who has earned 50000 reputation is probably not a bumbling fool who happened to answer a few questions about how to translate words on a medallion. But someone who has 500 reputation might be.

Someone who has earned a high reputation gives some indication of their experience and exposure to Jewish knowledge, and one does get a sense of the methodology of Jewish thought, and what just seems questionable. It isn't a hard science, but you do get a feel for Torah Judaism's thought patterns. Granted, this wouldn't make sense to differentiate between the guy with 250 reputation and the guy with 500, but demarcations could be drawn - say, less than 5k, 5k - 30k, and 30k+? I'm sure the SO brainiacs could run some kind of diagnostics to figure out what numbers would make sense, per site.

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    Assuming the downvote was either because of lack of justification or because of points made in another post, edited. May 21, 2014 at 17:32
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So my vote on an answer about, say, the Ramban (don't know much, but not totally ignorant so might vote sometimes) should be based on the reputation I've earned from answers about, say, Shabbat (about which I know rather more)? And even if you somehow did it based on tags, some tags are pretty broad and it wouldn't be much more meaningful (e.g. halacha).

The best ways for people knowledgable in a topic to respond to answers on that topic are to (a) vote and (b) comment. If I, as a reader, am trying to figure out how much to trust a given answer from somebody I've never heard of, if I see a comment (either amplifying or disputing) from someone I do know (who knows about that topic), that helps me. I'm not saying that people should go around sprinkling "+1 I agree" endorsements all over the site; that's not what comments are for. But comments, responsibly used, can help.

Weighting votes, however, is a bad idea.

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  • I decided to respond by editing my own post instead of leaving 3 comments. May 21, 2014 at 17:32
  • This is kind of related to this other discussion that we had. May 22, 2014 at 17:21

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