I've long been of the oppinion that node reps should be publicly viewable. On the one hand, it does create the problem of people voting "with the crowd", and thus making node reps even more meaningless then they now are. On the other hand, node reps give useful information. People downvote nodes with bad information and upvote nodes with good information. That's useful for readers to know.

(In fact, you know how newbies tend to write perl monks discussion nodes suggesting changes to site policy? That was mine. Let the gates open wide was once < -30, IIRC. (It's now at -8, which lends some creadance to node reps being worthless.))