[WikiEN-l] CZ fork: Tendrl

[wiki]

The problem with both FA and DYK is they tend to magnify the obscure rather
than the core subjects.

DYK is basically trivia because the only subject you can find to create a
new article on at this point will be obscure.
FA tends to concentrate on specialist articles - because it is the only
place a FA writer or two can be left alone to work on it without a hoard on
POV pushers and school kids.

It is a pity we can't find ways of getting people to work on bringing core
articles (by which I mean subjects that would be in a 3,000 article max set
of paper encyclopaedias) up to scratch. 

It is ridiculous that we have the best possible article on the somewhat
obscure baroque painter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Wright
(yes, I wrote that single-handedly) or some bit of Italian architecture and,
on the other hand, articles which suck at:

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worship
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament

What about having a new section "today's core article" and featuring
recently improved core articles?



-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tony Sidaway
Sent: 11 December 2010 17:37
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] CZ fork: Tendrl

I know everybody is tired of hearing me bang on about this, but the
whole "Featured article" edifice has always seemed dubious to me. It
seems to concentrate our limited resources on a tiny number of
articles, and the emphasis has always been more on dotting eyes and
crossing tees than improving overall quality of coverage.

At least one intensive study has shown that much of Wikipedia works
best when multiple loosely committed editors (domain experts) add most
of the useful content then Wikipedians take care of filtering and
improving presentation. I don't see anything wrong with that; there's
no way that our relatively small active userbase (and it was *always*
small) could have built this huge encyclopedia.

If we're getting fewer people jumping in and adding stuff, at least
part of the reason is that nearly everything that is worth adding is
already here and by now most people know the line of material we are
likely to reject.

Exponential growth was never an expectation of the Wikipedia project.

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