Ratings: Give the regular voter weighting to the regular reviewers

This was suggested by Surendra Mohan but needs its own thread as it could be very useful:https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topi... there is a concern that the weighting given to regular voters is being used for evil by a number of users by adding 1 star votes to films with a small number of votes, that they presumably think has a suspicious voting pattern, hoping to "correct" for any possibly "vote stuffing":https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/tags... highlights a problem with the system - the weighting "rewards" people for being able to hammer in as many votes as possible. While a lot of the regular voters are film and TV buffs merrily consuming media by the bucketload there is a small minority abusing the system, either just chasing the Top 1,000 Voter status (which you can see when you check your votes, even if you don't get a badge for it) or because they think they are some kind of champion, protecting poor old IMDB from nasty vote stuffers (even if I suspect that the algorithm already corrects for this, so the regular voter weighting leads to a double whammy downgrading of the weighted averageI believe that the weighting is still important, as it gives the votes of the most knowledgeable voters more significance which would help give a consistency to the ratings of films. So I wouldn't want to just get rid of the weighting but the score bombing is a problem that needs fixing.As the title says, the suggestion is to give the weighting to Top Reviewers or regular reviewers (the equivalent number people with the highest number of reviews, in the way the regular voters seems to be a larger group than the Top 1,000 Voters, even if it is the latter than gets flagged up on the voting breakdowns, which allows us to see if the 1 stars are coming from regular voters). This would have the effect of:* Rewarding the people who take the time and effort to write reviews explaining their ratings.* Making these votes visible through the person's review history, which has the effect that it can keep people honest (if, for example, someone tried to game the system to get their weighting back by adding in reviews copy and pasted from elsewhere, it' be easy enough to spot and report) - as I've argued for other suggestions:https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topi...* It would also remove the incentive for people to just hammer in these 1 votes - it no longer gets you the weighting and no longer has as much impact in cases of perceived vote stuffing.So win, win, win - the triple winner.Some have suggested only allowing people to rate films when they review them (as is done on Amazon) or at least only have them count if you have a review but I don't think that'd be very useful here (it'd be no more help in addressing the score bombing than this suggestion), it would cause a riot from users, it'd undermine the idea of the wisdom of crowds that powers the IMDB rating and it might actually make vote manipulation easier (as we see from the score bombing, in most cases you can only influence a score when the votes are low).There are a few things that need to be fine-tuned:* Should the weighting apply only to ratings where they have also added a review? or:* Should the weighting apply to all of the ratingsHowever, I'm sure staff can figure that out - the former would encourage more reviews but the latter would make the weighting work better if the aim is to try and get more consistency in the voting across a range of film and TV. Personally, I'd be fine with the second option, but if there was evidence of abuse it could be switched to the second one.