This is just one of many annotation system issues.

Voting/Rating

Public annotations can be used for voting and rating about both the original document and any annotations made to the document.

The following kinds of voting/rating come to mind:

Yes/No Vote Tabulation

A simple yes/no vote tabulation is fairly easy to implement.

Averaged rating Scale (-10 to 10)

A rating scale is also easy to implement.

Rating service

Organizations will form rating services that judge content.

User specified algorithm

Each vote has its value and an owner. The user specifies an algorithm that weights each vote value by its owner and comes up with a composite score.

For example, a user is likely to build up a `Don't Like' list of people whose opinion they never want to see, and a `Like' list of peoples opinion they do want to see.

Other voting/rating algorithms

What other algorithms are there?

Other issues include:

Presentation: How are votes/ratings presented? Are all annotations shown, but with differing strengths? What user control is provided for the presentation?
Scalability: An individual link on a popular document may have thousands of votes. It might me simpler to ship an evaluation algorithm to the HTML server, rather than pull all of the raw vote information over and evaluate it locally.
HTML Extensions: Are any HTML extensions needed?
Libel: Some lawyer may figure out how to sue everybody for posting their opinions. This would have a chilling effect on public discourse.
Herd mentality: Good work may not be immediately apparent to the general populace. It is quite easy to have a `tyranny of the commons'. (For example, the original theories of plate tectonics where not well received by the geologic community.)

What else is missing?

This file, version 1.2 of voting.html, was last updated at 21:14:37 on 95/09/15.