On 1 Oct 2005, at 01:33, Mark Pellegrini wrote:
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?
I dont find the featured article process very interesting. There are
lots of articles that are of that quality
but I dont feel any real incentive to nominate. And quite a few of
the FAs are not very good. Articles that I
care about are getting better, much better and thats more important
to me. What are FAs for? What percentage
of articles do you expect to be FAs?