Thread:Talk:Article feedback/Article feedback is meaningless/reply (2)

How one validates a process depends on what one wants to achieve. Eating five pounds of candy every day is a validated process for gaining weight; it is not a validated process for improving your driving skills.

We will not be able to validate these ratings as providing the One True™ Answer about the article's status. However, that's not actually the goal, and nobody has ever promised you that these ratings will produce the One True Answer for anything.

We can validate this process as being a reliable means of determining what our users (who are mostly non-editor readers) believe about an article. We hope that we will also be able to determine that it is a functional method of increasing the rate at which currently non-editor readers become active editors.