If you're someone who has karma coming out of their ears from helping people, it's almost worth mentioning on a resume.
Having more official awards beyond medals for a certain tier of users might provide some value. It would have to be to be difficult to game, and provide proof of some personal quality (technical knowledge, helpfulness, etc.).
The best way to do this might be to have some subjectivity - (semi-)annual awards for the top X users. Of the users with high karma, judges could choose the most meritorious.
The high-karma users there seem to get their karma by spending their entire day not working. I don't know how this would look good on your resume. (Jon Skeet, for example; does that guy do any programming anymore, or does he just tell people who can't read the manual how to do addition in C#?)
Also, a lot of questions are of the form, "What's the most awesome word to describe how awesome programming is?". Before these were forced to be community wiki, people really racked up the reputation points on these.
I only answer questions there because if I don't, someone else will. And their answer will be wrong. (Like, "you can't access databases from Perl." WTF.)
