"Ulrich Fuchs" <mail(a)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