On Tue, 8 Nov 2005 kosebamse(a)gmx.net wrote: One detail that attracted my attention in your results was that both times that you id your test, you found exactly *5* articles were of "good" quality or better. Was this the result of an unconscious bias, or would a painstaking study show that about 25% of Wikipedia articles are satisfactory or better? So I did my own survey of 20 articles, picked at random. First result I found was that Kosebamse had better luck than me: of the 20 articles I found, no matter how generous I felt, I couldn't rate any of the articles I found as anything better than "satisfactory". I did check Kosebamse's ratings, & the 4 articles K rated as better than "satisfactory" were arguably good; I added 2 of them to [[WP:GA]]. But the ones I found weren't that good; I rated about 4-6 out of 20 as "satisfactory". Two were on the cusp: [[J. Paul Getty]] was in many ways an adequate article, but most of the article was devoted to discussing a pair of events in Getty's life: the fact that he had a pay phone in his mansion at one time, & the events surrounding the kidnapping of his grandson. The narrative of his life was very thin. The other was [[Santa Clara Drum and Bugle Corps]], to which I had a conflicted reaction: this was an article that I had a hard time imagining why anyone would bother to read it. Now before anyone thinks I would want to remove this article from Wikipedia, I will say that I would never put it on AfD, & if I found it there I would most likely defend it from deletion. However, after I read it, I was still as perplexed as I was at the beginning over why anyone would write an article about it. And that is my criticism of the article, & why I wonder if it will ever reach FAC status: the people who care about this subject have no sense for how to make the rest of us care about the topic. But back to my original point: Kosebamse found 25% of the articles at least satisfactory. I found at worst 20%. I suspect that the number lies somewhere between the 2 numbers. But if Kosebamse's two surveys are a fair sampling, it shows that only 25% of our articles at any time -- no matter how many there are -- would be acceptible as they stand. I find this an interesting suggestion where we need to focus our energies. Geoff

kosebamse(a)gmx.net wrote: Of course this is because the volume has increased so much. I think if you took any random 20 articles and compared them to their predecessors 2 years ago, virtually _all_ articles would have improved. The only articles that might have declined in quality, I think, would be some feature articles which have now fallen into a contemporary edit war, etc. I think this is a brilliant observation. :-) I absolutely do think that acquisition of huge numbers of additional stubs on increasingly narrow topics ought not to be a priority, and certainly ought not to be allowed to get in the way of quality improvement on existing articles. (At the same time, of course, it's worth pointing out that there's an easy mental trap to fall into... assuming that time people are spending working on obscure fancruft could in any way be diverted into increasing the quality of other articles. That's probably not true.) --Jimbo