It's like if you have a health-related question and get answers from two people: A trained surgeon and your mate from the pub (Edit: who's obviously not trained or knowledgeable on the topic, jeez). A priori whose answer is the more insightful?
If you're not knowledgeable and get a number of anonymous answers it may be difficult to get an idea of their relative 'values'.
But put it this way. Trained surgeon A who has 5 years experience and has been on the site for 3 years has 4000 reputation. Answers a question.
A trained surgeon with 26 years experience who joined the site last week and has a reputation of 200 supplies a far better answer with added explanation of why and how etc.
You look at it and say oh wow 4000 reputation he must know more than the other guy. I’ll take his advice over the 200 reputation guy.
If you don't understand how comparisons work, you have a bigger problem to worry about.
> put it this way
The question then becomes... the 26 year veteran surgeon does boob jobs and tummy tucks. The 5 year veteran does emergency room and brain surgery.
Given how complicated something as simple as "surgery" is... how do you plan on registering and ranking something with multiple levels of "experience" for "easy" viewing by users who want to ask questions?
New to site, surgeon, decades of experience, plastic surgery
Been on site, surgeon, years of experience, "real" surgeon
I'm not aware of any discussion forum that has yet come up with an effective way to balance those competing effects. I suspect it would need a more complicated moderation/voting system that grades a comment on multiple scales independently, with credibility/correctness being one of them. But then you have a new problem of how to keep the system manageable so that users can still operate it with negligible effort and without the scoring system becoming confusing and more trouble than it's worth.