No group of moderators, large or small, can claim to be the experts on everything. So if the quality control falls on the shoulders of a single group of people, they'll tend to mold the site into their own world view, and they'll ban material that contradicts it. For example, on Wikipedia the world view is the general consensus. This works well for an encyclopedia. Sometimes users complain that their posts have been rejected or incorrectly criticized by moderators unfamiliar with the topics. So OK, Wikipedia moderators are not universal geniuses. But this isn't really a show-stopper on a site dedicated to the consensus, since reasonably intelligent people can do a reasonable job of quality control, even outside their fields of expertise, just on the basis of what appears to be consistent with well-known principles. So for all but the most obscure of topics, the Wikipedia process works reasonably well. In mainstream topics, it works fabulously.
Yet we want to do open-access original research, where the consensus is no longer a constraint, and even the experts frequently disagree. In this context, the conventional model for post moderation just isn't going to work.
People doing new research need to be able to post whatever they want (to the limits of the site rules, which exclude obscenities, slander, fraud, and sedition), unencumbered by the consensus, because progress by definition always defies the consensus, and in the absence of the approval of any sort of authority, because by definition there aren't any existing authorities who already know how to evaluate new research.
Yet if anybody can post anything, it goes without saying that before long, there will be a huge list of unsorted original works. Such lists are already in existence, and will do nothing but get longer as time goes on. Unfortunately, there is so much material out there that the Internet isn't delivering on its promise to make new works available to all, because ground-breaking works are getting buried under the huge volume of other works out there (potentially all good, but not necessarily of interest to any particular individual). We need a way to sorting all of the stuff out, such that people looking for new work on a particular topic can find it.
There are many existing strategies for this, but all of them break down out on the frontiers of science. There is no Dewey decimal number for new research, which defies all existing classification schemes, by definition. And there are no existing authorities who can certify which works are legitimate versus uselessly deluded. Any attempt to hammer new works into any sort of rigid structure will either break the structure, or suppress the creativity of the new works.
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