[Foundation-l] Article validation

[Toby Bartels]

Ulrich Fuchs wrote:

>If we all would agree that we are working on an encyclopaedia, not an
>everything-goes-in-wiki, not a website,

This doesn't make any sense to me.
The whole point of an encyclopaedia is that everything goes in it.
That's the meaning of the work "encyclopaedia".
The (unfortunately common) phrase "This topic is unencylopedic."
is nonsensical.

Of course, "everything" is a vague term that requires a context.
So a general encyclopaedia rightfully covers every ''subject'',
but this doesn't mean that it should include personal homepages,
or commercial advertisements, or other "things" of that nature.
However, I believe that we all agree on that much.

>if we would all agree that it's 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.

I can't imagine how the existence of the article [[Drumming]]
would make an article on a particular brand of drum more or less appropriate
(especially considering that the more relevant [[Drum]] is quite old).
Certainly, an article on drumming is more ''important'' to have
than an article on any particlar kind (brand, or other division) of drum.
But we're not paying our contributors to write the most important articles;
beggars can't be choosers, and they write about what they want to write about.
(That said, we already have an article on drumming: [[Drum]].)

This is rather specific discussion that we probably don't need
to carry further on the general foundation mailing list.
But it shows why we're not all going to agree with you about everything.

>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.

I agree, which is why Wikipedia as such doesn't need validation.
Anybody that produces an abbreviated selection of Wikipedia
(whether the Wikimedia Foundation does it or somebody else does it)
will need some criteria of inclusion.  Peer review,
or some other kind of validation, may be reasonable.
But Wikipedia itself -- the big wiki at <wikipedia.org> --
does not need this, I agree.

Even the current deletion method
is a partial capitulation of the wiki principle.
Does anybody else remember Wikipedia's first deletion policy,
when only Jimbo, Larry Sanger, and Tim Shell were allowed to delete?
And Manning Bartlett (hardly a radical inclusionist) wrote:
>...>I do not want to see this list of "deleters" expanded.
How much we have changed! ^_^

>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.

BTW, are we talking about Wikimedia in general here, or only Wikipedia?


-- Toby