The overriding principle that I use when voting on nodes is to see the Monastery as a respository of knowledge. Each node in the Monastery has a reputation which measures how useful and accurate the information in it is. I therefore vote up nodes that make useful points and demonstrate interesting methods. I vote down nodes that contain bad advice. Sometime, if someone else has already made the point then I won't explain my down-vote.

A side effect of this policy is that I am quite happy to vote up or down Anonymous posts as they are just as likely to contain good or bad advice.

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me