Some ideas:
A validation by everybody using points and calculating mean values
presents finally the vote of the average reader. Another average reader
simply learns how himself would probably vote after reading the article.
Ok that's some time saving – better than nothing ;-).
I think it's more interesting to focus on presenting comments of
potential experts. The main problem for the reader seems to be how to
find experts comments easily among others. To check the user page and
perhaps some additional home page in case of a few tens of comments is
cumbersome. But candidates for experts often can be recognized by their
comments. At the moment the space for comments is limited, what seems to
make sense. But not anybody likes to comment for any validation topic,
therefore much space is lost. I like to suggest to offer only one
comment window but with the possibility for several sentences, perhaps
at least 4-6 comments of different users for one screen. The featured
article candidacy page discussions show that often one single well
founded slating review contains more valuable information than 10
supporting comments. But this requires usually more than 2 sentences. In
the planned investigation phase for studying how people use a validation
feature it is perhaps an idea to offer such a larger global comment
window additionally.
By the way I would prefer a general and more detailed point range from
–3 to +3 (-3=very bad, -2=bad, -1=somewhat bad, 0=neutral, 1= somewhat
good, 2=good, 3=very good). Using singed numbers instead of 1 to 7 makes
any number self-explanatory.
Wolfgang Beyer
(Wolfgangbeyer)