Is reputation the answer? (Score 1)

OTOH, fanatics would find it too troublesome to fake an interest in subjects other than their favorite and their karma would suffer from that.

Wikipedia already has a sort of informal reputation system where moderators and select users form groups to keep control of articles and squash dissent.

I'm trying to make a social networking site in my spare time and the idea of community reputation is a lot harder than it seems. If we use reddit as an example it's had a problem for awhile now where a core group of very vocal users organize to have any anti-bush/republican links modded up to the front page no matter how crackpot crazy they are. Redditors are generally pretty left wing so you get stuck in this situation of apathy where the average user doesn't disagree enough to mod it down.

Fanatics are a willing to put a lot more time and effort into gaming a system than your average user. I haven't yet seen a reputation system that solves this problem well.