The baby was tossed with the bath water. There are countless possibilities to create a rating system (or a system that describes the qualities of an article) I have only seen a tiny number.

The shortest description of the thought is: The meta data is more important than the data.

Back when google indexed peoples websites the organic ranking wasn't bad at all. People wrote niche articles about original topics, if you searched for one you would find those blog postings. I was often amazed by how specific the content addressed what I was looking for.

How well it works depends on the type of rating. It should probably start with things so obvious they are hard to game. Even self rating could work, something like: professionally affiliated with the topic 0-5 in the range 2-5 you get to provide an url.

I liked parts of PICS3.

I could see a system where we run our own rating service and rate things with a mix of original and unoriginal qualities. You use the bookmark list it generates or enjoy the persons work then subscribe to their ratings and add weight to it. We make collections of such subscriptions and use them the same way. When visiting a page the url (or other identifier) is passed around and a rating is returned. Similarly, people you've subscribed to crawl around the web and we arrive at a set of pages you should probably visit. If there is crap in the list a single click reduces weight on everything that endorses it.