I'm assuming free-form textual data here, if you're doing something more constrained (like CDDB data) this will probably not be helpful. You can push the probl

I'm assuming free-form textual data here, if you're doing something more constrained (like CDDB data) this will probably not be helpful. You can push the problem around with technical features, but I believe this is a meat-space issue and needs to be treated as such. Hacker News (so far) is one of the best run sites I've seen in this regard. My belief is that the community is focused on a small enough segment of content that it doesn't bring in contrarian intellect points (i.e. OMG LOLCAT, political bickering black holes). Explicitly defining a charter for the site -- giving users a target to moderate to -- is probably the single best thing I can think of.