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New Sidebar Recommendation
I think it would be a great idea to show how many people have read an article, to compliment the rating. In addition to say an article having a high rating, say 50 people could have read the article, but it's only rated by 3 people. These other 47 people could have not rated for a number of reasons, of which the number one would be time it would take to log in, then rate the article.
In addition to complimenting the rating and making it more relevant, it would also help someone to find out an interesting article as well, in addition to highest rated, and most discussed, not to mention that alot of articles are rated by 1 person and in soem cases, a high rating. If an article is rated by only 1 person with say 4, and been read by 100 people or times (you may decide), then it gives it more weight.
What could be even better, but you see like how there is a Highest Rated Articles column, well then one more sidebar piece - "Most Read Articles".
Something to think about.