"Ulrich Fuchs" mail@ulrich-fuchs.de schrieb:

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.

Without a validation system, "poorly researched content" will be hard to spot. The only way that that is found is when someone tries to validate and finds it is b******t.

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.

You can't do one without the other. Deletion is on itself a rather strong form of negative validation. It has exactly the same problems you state for validation: Either we let one person get more power than the other, or we get a sort of voting system. Both a voting system and a system where experts have more power is better than the current system, which basically hands the decision to the person with the longest breath in controversial cases, and the person who happens to write something the first in uncontroversial ones.

Andre Engels