[WikiEN-l] Deterioration of Featured Articles

[Mathias Schindler]

Ryan Delaney wrote:
> On 4/10/06, Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de> wrote:
>> The current aim of some people is to reach the (moving) target of 0,2
>> per cent of featured articles.
> 
> 
> I'll tell you how you can achieve that goal immediately: Lower the standard
> to such a degree that all articles are included.

There is a third option: Delete several thousand articles that are not 
notable for anything.

> Seriously, I don't think there is much point to such goals. Sure, they
> improve the encyclopedia, which is great. But people will cite statistics
> like "Only 0.1% of our articles are featured!" as if this means that
> Wikipedia sucks or something. No, it just means the standard for featuring
> is high, and if the gap between articles : featured articles is increasing,
> that just means the standard is going up. It has nothing to do with the
> objective quality of the encyclopedia; it's only the relative quality. That
> is, the relative quality between articles.

Well, there are "historical" reasons why such goals can have an positive 
impact. In 2004, de.wp reached 100.000 articles (depending on what 
counts as an article). With all the media hype and more people coming in 
to wikipedia, it was the general perception that de.wp is now more or 
less "usable" for the average reader. There were at least rough 
information heaps on every major topic (nota bene: the more general a 
topic gets, the more likely it was that this was just a bunch of 
wikilinks, loosely linked with small sentences).

The idea was to shift the focus of attention from quantity to quality.

Yes, some people might read those statistics as "Even wikipedia says 
that 99,8 per cent of the articles are crap" and to some degree, one 
must agree: The average article is very currently poorly referenced, 
formatted, sourced, comprehensive and so on (this applies also to en.wp 
IMHO). It is no help that traditional encyclopedias have even less 
external references.

Alexander Bob, the CEO of Bibliographisches Institut & F.A. Brockhaus AG 
(publisher of the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie) said during a debate that one 
must not compare the 300.000 articles from the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie to 
the (in those days) 250.000 articles from the German Wikipedia but 
rather the 300k from Brockhaus to the (in those days) 400 "exzellenten 
Artikel".  Please do :)

IMHO, if an initiative is able to draw more attention to quality related 
aspects, I generally support it. If an initiative no longer has this 
ability, it can be neglected or abolished. This is one of the reasons 
de.wp got rid of this {{stub}} template.

Mathias