Imagine waking up tomorrow with the solution to the Voynich Manuscript.

[rikforto]

How do you distinguish a genuine discovery from the endless stream of speculation, projection, fraud, and self-proclaimed breakthroughs?

Honestly, I don't believe it's necessary to convince everyone, or even a majority of people to have your solution seriously considered. 

I do strongly expect a "school" to pop up if a solution is on the right track. Solutions to date have been largely idiosyncratic, in that they rely on the beliefs and interpretations of their progenitor, but fail to win anyone who can advance the theory from a similar starting point. People able to continue and add to that work would be a strong indication that the theory has struck fertile ground. This is neither necessary---there are examples of theories languishing for being premature---nor sufficient---schools have grown up around failed theories. But it is a useful social heuristic in this kind of situation.

Within our little niche community, there is a growing school around the idea that the manuscript is meaningless. Even though I personally think it's premature to declare them correct, I think the fact that multiple people are finding confirmatory lines of evidence of this separate from any one person's understanding of the object is a good sign for that work and reason enough to take it seriously. There are features about that particular hypothesis that makes it easier to build consensus, so this observation is only good to its limits, but it stands out from other active theories that are largely in play on the force of personality of a single individual.

I think of this in line with the notion of a "second" in parliamentary procedure. Is there a second person willing to vouch for the merits of the debate, in this case not just for the sake of debate and foment, but on the substance of proposal? Vanishingly few "solutions" win that first convert. To pick a particularly high profile example from earlier this year, I don't think a single person stepped forward to support phonetic Irish, despite the fact she was shopping around for a coauthor. Again, there can be reasons for this besides it being wrong, and we should be sensitive to that, but it is a bad sign for how convincing it is.