Its an interesting concept, although the definition of 'idiot' is not very precise. As others have pointed out, sometimes brilliant people can't compose gramattically correct english. That being said ...<p>Its fairly easy to identify forums on the web (they have a form which is generally very common, inspired by PhPBB way back when). And you could identify users, take the sum of all their contributions and try to generate some sort of 'evolved' karma score for their posts. Things you might consider are things that academics use, how many times was the post referred to (similar to citations in papers), what sort of traffic follows the posting (similar to counterpoint papers), Etc. But even if you end up with a perfect score, you won't benefit until you've been able to process several postings. If poor quality posts are the norm in your particular research area you will still deal with a lot of junk while the algorithm is learning that it <i>is</i> junk.<p>Finding a way to predict that the posting is going to score high on the suppression scale as its being posted would be helpful but new posters appear quite rapidly mitigating the benefit significantly.