To prevent abuse of the system, I am not suggesting comments. Something as simple as the ability to rate up (thumbs up) or rate down (thumbs down) would be extremely useful. As a Wikidot user, I would be able to rate someone up if they make a useful contribution to my wiki, and then change my mind later if they "turn evil" on me ;-)

The rating should also be shown alongside a user's name when viewing page history, possibly as a number inside brackets ( ). This way, we can ignore any users with a high rating, and check the edits of anyone with 0 or negative ratings to check for spam.

Benefits:

• Users can gain wikidot-wide recognition for their contributions
• Easy to spot potential spammers on heavily-edited pages
• Administrators can use it as a guide when deciding whether to accept someone's membership application for a site
• If someone receives a significantly low rating (e.g. minus 10) they could be added to a list for review by the Wikidot team (or the designated Spam Killers)

Requirements for this to work:

• An integer needs to be stored for each user. New users would default at 0, and each rating would either increase or decrease this
• It should be easy to rate someone up or down. For example, the pop-up profile for a user could have a thumbs-up and thumbs-down button that appears only to signed-in Wikidot users
• I should be able to change my rating at any time, switching it from a positive rating to a negative rating (or vice-versa)

Future improvements:

• A module, that accepts a username or ID number as a parameter, allowing the rate-up / rate-down module to be placed into a page. This would make it compatible with sites that have Per-site Profiles enabled.