For programming reputation has a point, but for science articles, each should be judged on their own merit. Ideally you shouldn't know whose article it is that you're reviewing, or you run the risk of preferential treatment.
I wasn't thinking of judging articles by the reputation of the authors. Instead, I was thinking of judging the value of reviews by the reputation of the reviewers.
I think that's actually pretty similar to what we're doing now. Articles accepted by journals of high reputation get a high reputation, and the journals select high-reputation individuals to do reviews. A good distributed reputation algorithm could perform essentially the same function. Leaving review open to anyone could help preserve net objectivity even if some individual reviewers are biased.
But anonymity could be accomplished by releasing articles initially with a timestamp and a digital signature by a new public key. After review, the authors could reveal that they have the matching private key.
