[Foundation-l] Article validation (was WikiReader Free Software and Free Contents)

Thu Jun 10 19:28:00 UTC 2004

"Ulrich Fuchs" <mail at 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