[WikiEN-l] Expert feedback on Featured Articles

[Thomas Dalton]

On 27 April 2010 21:33, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Well, the research I remember says the transition from B to A makes the
> most difference to the reader. So I would make that central to any
> system: from 5 to 6, say. I have seen perfectly decent articles labelled
> "Start" - I mean articles with say five paras of solid, verifiable
> factual information. I doubt standards are even across the wiki, but if
> those are "Start" there have to be a couple of rungs on the ladder below
> that.; or Start = 3.  I see that mathematics uses B+ anyway, so that the
> lower side has five grades already. There does seem to be some problem
> with A right now, but abolishing it in such a fashion to reduce
> incentives to push articles up would really be a bad idea (whatever your
> anecdotal example says).

But what is the difference between A and GA? Really, it's minimal (I
think A-class requires the content to be essentially complete, GA just
requires it to cover all the main points, which isn't much different).
You talk about the transition from B to A - is most of that difference
to readers between B and GA or between GA and A (I know the ordering
isn't perfect, but any A-class article should be able to pass GA with
only minimal changes)? I suspect it is between B and GA, so getting
rid of A wouldn't have any significant impact.

One alternative is to scrap the entire system and replace it with a
points system. We have a few categories like "completeness", "style",
"images", "references", etc. and an article gets a certain number of
points in each category depending on how good it is. Once an article
has the maximum points in each category, it is ready for FAC, which
basically is just to confirm the assessment was accurate (the
categories should be set up with the FA criteria in mind). This would
mean people working on the article know what areas need more work, it
gives an incentive to even fairly small improvements and it removes
the arbitrary distinctions between different classes of article.