I said upfront that it wasn't my model *g*. Nevertheless, the following axioms make it, if not a neccessarily exact measure of S/N, at least well-ordered:

• You can't lose XP for having one of your articles moderated upward, and you can't gain from having one moderated downward.
• You can't gain (or lose) more than one XP for each point of moderation applied.

Thus, we can at the very least use the sum total of all the moderations of all of a user's articles as an upper bound for the amplitude of "signal", and still compute an S/N ratio based on the value of that bound -- think of it as a "Peak S/N Ratio" within the space of all the possible values "signal" could take on for a given user.

Spud Zeppelin * spud@spudzeppelin.com