I would also mention that a group by the name of Featured Article Drive
(FAD) is also trying to help work on articles to get up to that standard,
and they have done a good job so far. But, this is a problem where I run
into and others do: we write about stuff no one cares about. I had some
FAC's fail because no one would comment on them or they do not want to fix
things like the grammar themselves. We should try to point out that at FAC
that though the nominator might say "I think that this article should be FA"
and those coming to the FAC should work with him all they can, instead of
just objecting then leave.
Regards,
Zachary Harden
From: "Ryan W. (Merovingian)"
<bigwiki(a)earthling.net>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
To: wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Taking your eyes off the ball
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 21:08:24 -0500
I couldn't have said it better myself. I think by now that some series of
articles should be updated together so that they are all featured. For
example: nations of the world, US presidents, British monarchs, etc.
There's plenty of information that we have, and plenty that we've
overlooked. Coordinated efforts to bring articles up to featured status
need emphasis. The Collaborations of the Week are a good start, but the
track record of past CotW's is poor.
--Ryan
From: Mark Pellegrini
<mapellegrini(a)comcast.net>
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Taking your eyes off the ball
I'm going to grouse a bit.
I think far, far too much attention gets paid to the worst articles on
Wikipedia - the studs, the vanity articles, the stuff of debatable
notability (schools!!) while not nearly enough effort goes into making
crappy articles into good ones.
People on AFD love to argue about the crappiest articles. (It also tends
to spill over to this mailing list) On the other side of the spectrum,
the percentage of featured articles (number of featured articles / total
number of articles) has been rapidly declining since March.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_statistics).
And yet no one seems care. Sometime this month, percentage of featured
articles will drop below 0.1% -- less than 1 article in 1000 being a
featured article.
So while our article count is exploding [due to a massive influx of
less-than-steller new articles.... think - traffic circles] and while
the number of contributors has been steadily increasing, the number of
new featured articles being produced has been a fairly steady 30-40 per
month.
Am I the only one who thinks we have our priorities out of order? We are
we spending so much energy arguing about the horrible stuff that (for
all intents) will never be seen or noticed when our important articles
(think - Michael Brown, Tom DeLay, John Roberts) are, well, not very
good?
>
> -Mark