On 10/21/07, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
Yeah and still does. You might try actually looking at some GAs before shooting your mouth off. I've reviewed dozens of GA articles, and most of them are far, far too short to ever be FA. I think almost all GA project people would agree. Examples I have passed: Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (Puerto Rico), Haystacks (Monet), SS Christopher Columbus, Roman trade with India, and the list goes on. The point is: yes, long articles get passed by GA when they should be FA candidates. But that serves as a great stepping stone for those articles, and the short, great articles that never will be FA get to be recognized.
Several articles I've written which are hamstrung by their nature (e.g.howmuch information and references are there about a rally racer from a developing country - [[Karamjit Singh]] - or even an obscure but notable person in a developed country such as [[Karamjit Singh (electoral commissioner)]]?) failed GA within a few months after it was started. It became clear to me that it had already been hijacked by the crowd who like gold stars - nothing wrong with that, except that the niche it was originally meant for remains unfilled. A brief glance at the list of GAs indicates that, as a general rule, you can only be a GA if you're almost an FA.
I'm pretty sure a lot of Wikipedians have a different idea of how GA ought to work, and a decent number including yourself probably review GAs themselves. But as the saying goes, policy is what is done, not what is said - and the de facto standards for GA dictate that an article be not short, have a picture, etc. A look at the recently listed GAs shows only one ([[Robin Starveling]]) which is probably short in some sense.
IMO, a GA should be something which we would not be ashamed to publish in a print or other hard copy version; indeed, that is what it has been used for in 1 or 2 hard copy editions of Wikipedia. The way I see it, GA is nothing more than an FA/PR-lite for the vast majority of articles subjected to the GA process.
Johnleemk