I think your two points are valid, but a big factor in the relative importance of the content vs. the author is the type of information.

• If you want recommendations on a good beer, you want to attribute more weight to those referals from people you know to have similar taste (hence the "people who bought this widget also bought..." lists frequently found on sales sites).
• If you want to know the current temperature, you want to know the basis for the author's assertion, perhaps his/her location or reference.
• If you seek a mathematical proof, then the author is truly irrelevant if you have the skill to read and verify the proof. If you just want a theorem then you might want to know where the author got the information.

Bringing this back to The Monastery, knowing who the author is can give you valuable hints as to what your next move will be. For certain monks here, I am best served by assuming they are always correct (i.e. I will rarely have to backtrack due to failure in their information), for others monks I seek backup or other opinions, and for anonymonks I am left with whatever skill is evident in the presentation of the information, but I will usually seek more verification than if it is attributed to a monk I have prior experence with. Then there are the monks for which you must always look for the hidden text ;-)

Finally, let's not overthink this - it isn't much different from judging the information you may get from a family member, cow-orker, pimply-faced kid flogging DVDs at an electronics chain, or a stranger in the street. All you need is critical thinking. You still have to ask yourself whether what you are hearing makes sense, whether there is any reason to check on it (e.g. the level of risk involved), and whether they have any reason to be dishonest. The only difference here is you can't (always) hear the stiffled giggles from the author who is typing.

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser