people recognition. But I would be happy to hear about other people opinion on that matter. I also know that several people have good ideas on this as well. So...
If we all would agree that we are working on an encyclopaedia, not an everything-goes-in-wiki, not a website, if we would all agree that its needed to delete poorly researched content and articles on silly subjects (like "the xyz drum produced by company A") while there aren't articles on the main subject ("Drumming"), then we wouldn't need to talk about those "validation" concepts, because the validation would happen all the time - the wiki principle would do.
A validation process can operate in two ways: either there is some was of a democratic voting sytem, which will lead to mediocre article (science is not democratic). Or there are some people which are more trusted than others - and that's the capitulation of the wiki principle.
Our problems is not validation. Our problem is that the goals are not clear (what goes in, or perhaps: what goes in in which edition), and that editing (which means: deleting a lot of things) is considered bad habit.
Uli