Please forgive me if I'm formatting this post wrongly, this is my first comment to this group. I am involved with the Wikipedia 1.0 team on en, both the Version 0.5 project and the contact with WikiProjects. It might help to let folks know what we're up to, since much of the validation work you mention goes hand in hand with our mission at Wikipedia 1.0. 1. We are putting together an "alpha test" version of the most important articles of Wikipedia (with vetting for quality), with a planned release in the autumn of 2006. For this version, each article is simply nominated by one person, then reviewed by another from a "review team". Anyone can sign up for this team, though in practice only a few who sign up seem to review much. 2. We hope to go on to do further expanded versions after V0.5, but these will almost certainly include review by several independent reviewers, not merely one. 3. Oleg Alexandrov has worked miracles with a bot that uses categories, and this is now generating lists daily with the title "XXXX articles by quality," summarised here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index_of_… Anything from our "core topics" list or our Version 0.5 list is tagged on the article talk page, the bot picks this up every night. Delirium may be interested to note that the bot stores a link to the version it found on the day the assessment was done. We will compare this with the current version, allowing us easily to check for a quality decline when we go to press. 4. This bot was mainly designed to help WikiProjects provide us with information on their articles. This is proving a great success, with new projects being added to the bot's list every couple of days. We recently began a "second round" of contacting projects, and this will bear fruit over the summer and autumn. The Military History project, for example, now has over 4000 articles assessed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Military_… It is my hope that once these assessment schemes become established right across Wikipedia, we will end up with a large body of assessments BY SUBJECT EXPERTS. People who know a subject well are much more likely to know, "This biography should also discuss X's work on Y." 5. This contact we are building with projects will help greatly if we institute a system of expert peer review (no. 2 of Delirium's list) of selected articles - we already have people we know in most subject areas. Regarding Delirium's comments in detail, I don't like option 1 for the same reasons as others. I think option 2 is possible, indeed many groups like Chemistry and Military History are already well down that road, and within a year I expect us to have most areas of en:Wikipedia covered. Giving the work, responsibility and tools to the people who know and care about the particular articles is a very powerful way to do this, and extremely scalable. As for option 3, as Sj points out this is partly what projects like Version 0.5 are doing. Overall, I think it is crucial to distinguish between VALIDATION and ASSESSMENT. Validation is often used rather loosely here, but my previous career in the pharmaceutical industry forces me to consider validation to mean, "How do we know this article is completely accurate?" It goes much deeper than assessment (as done at V0.5), which is merely a 10-15 minute scan of the article- "does it seem complete, are the sources cited, is it written well, etc.?" My favourite example is an article I wrote on gold(III) chloride, listed as a "Good Article." How do you KNOW that the magnetic susceptibility is minus 0.000112 cc/mol, i.e., can you validate this article? I would like to see Wikipedia move towards having validated versions of articles available, articles that have been rigorously checked by subject experts. I'd like to see the standard version of each article still fully available, but for all validated articles I'd like a tab at the top saying "validated" that would allow any user to see a non-editable, validated version of the article. It might be necessary to create a new namespace on Wikipedia to do this. This approach in effect combines options 1 & 2. There is a proposal sitting on Wikipedia that suggests much of this - I don't agree with all of it, but it's a very good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TidyCat/Achieving_validation_on_Wikipedia I am helping to organise a discussion on this very topic at Wikimania in August, I hope some of this group will be there. I think this is a nettle we have to grasp if Wikipedia is to move forward and receive the respect it deserves. The only way to achieve this IMHO is to get a group of people around a physical table (not a virtual one!) who can come to a workable consensus view, and to have people at that table who can also say, "I can write the code" and "I will authorise the changes." Please be there! Martin A. Walker (User:Walkerma)