So how's this: each user gets one "opinion" of each other user. The opinions can be changed at any time. An opinion is positive,

negative,

or neutral. The individual opinions are private, and accessible only by the users who hold them. This encourages honesty and avoids flame wars. Each user has a reputation rating based on other users'

opinions

of them. Opinions are weighted: opinions held by users with higher reputations have greater influence.

Wikipedias first task as an encyclopedia is starting new and improving existing articles. So we should encourage users to edit and start articles by including this actions in calculating the reputation of a user. Perhaps this can be combined with the proposed article rating system, as for 'good' rated articles resulting in a higher reputation than 'worthless'-rated articles.

Regards, Andre