Thinking about that voting system for articles I proposed in my last post, it might be simpler if people could only transfer their vote to articles, not to other people; but they could do so based on the (public or not) advice of other people. This way there is much less of a privacy issue, and votes can be completely anonymous. No one but the owner of the vote will know which articles are supported by his or her vote. If a person wants to give his or her power of voting to another person, a group or a combination of others, they can use a system which automatically votes based on the published recommendations of these others.

I wonder if this will all sound like nonsense to me by the light of day? I wouldn't be surprised!

It does seem a bit troublesome that in order to assign a vote to a new article, one will have to subtract some vote from other articles. I guess this could be done automatically (and evenly) by default, that wouldn't be too bad.

In general it would probably not be a good idea to support too many different articles, perhaps 10 per person would be a sensible number at any one time.

Withdrawing support from an article need not necessarily mean that you don't think it's important; just that it's no longer a focal point of current importance. For example, once a decision has been made, the proposed options are no longer news.

The system could remember the time-profile of articles' rankings (at least approximately, perhaps every 30min or denser near the present), this could be historically interesting, and people could choose to read `older news', or look for the all-time peaks of importance, etc. People would not be forced to use the ranking system. Alternative ordering systems would be encouraged.

Even on matters of importance, I suggest that people should not be -required- to vote - but a one-time vote for a particular other person or party who publishes their voting recommendations would not be difficult for any person. I think ordinary people would likely be less disaffected and apathetic with a voting system where they could make more difference - and even submit articles themselves that other people could vote for.

ok, must get sleep!