Featured status on wikis might not be a reliable indicator, even on
those wikis that have the process.
Case in point Muppet Wiki: they started a FA process, and received a
burst of nominations and approvals for a few months... after a while
though, it became a "meh"... there was no real reason to take time
acknowledging successes, it took away from working on the project
itself. Many of the highest quality articles go unacknowledged,
because no one wants to bother nominating.
(Granted, I'm only guessing at the reasons; I'm a regular contributor,
but I know that the process faded without discussion.)
Nick Moreau/Zanimum
2009/12/3 Brian J Mingus <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu>du>:
The best known predictor of quality is featured article status. Next up is a readability
metric such as the Automated Readability Index. See my website for my research into
quality. As far as I know I've done the most thorough analyses of predictors of
quality, although I haven't been keeping completely up. The later paper is the more
interesting in terms of predictors.
http://grey.colorado.edu/mingus
Cheers,
Brian