• Any user able to comment on a record should be able to upvote or downvote a record.
  • Votes are public, and displayed on the record page.
  • You can only vote on open records.
  • People can change their vote (or undo their vote) freely, as long as the record is open.
  • Requesters cannot vote for (or against) their own records (the request is implicitly a vote).
  • We add a new column showing the percent of upvotes to total votes. I.e., if 9 people upvote and 1 person downvotes, we show 90% favorable. For efficiency, we can track this only for open records.
  • We add a way to sort by favorability (highest first).
nms 12 Feb 2016:

My guess is that downvotes would be rare, and therefore a small number of them would have a large effect on favorability ranking. Some balance changes are controversial, but bug fixes and feature additions rarely are (although there may be disagreement about how to implement them). So you might also want to look at total votes or total upvotes.