geni wrote:
2008/11/15 Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net:
To put it plainly: The product this Project is putting out has become incredibly sloppy, both in content and presentation.
Become? Quite the reverse in fact. Sure there are poor articles out there. Always have been always will be but fewer are critical articles and individual articles are tending towards improvement.
An example UK canal articles have across the board improved from the tiny stubs I was putting together 4 years ago.
It has always depended where you look. In the bigger picture, you need a good model of content and quality.
From the FA standpoint the best content is no more than a handful of currants in a big cake.
From a WikiProject point of view, content is divided into around 1500 (?) "counties", surrounded by badlands. Counties differ greatly: this is the Wild West metaphor, I suppose, with us pushing out content as redlinks are turned blue.
From that simple idea of links filled in, you see plenty of [[ribbon development]], which is kind of ugly. Sort of railheads pushed out into wilderness, to continue on a geographical metaphor.
On ratings, it may be that the transition from B to A class is the big step in actual usability. Not enough attention is given to this transition.
The "stub" is a traditional idea (incomplete info flagged up). We could look at a more discriminating system for that.
My point would be that in some sense all these trends have been around for five years. Parts of the site still feel like 2003 to me.
Geni is right, certainly. And compliance with guidelines is a side issue, not central. Let us not get carried away by "production engineering" as a comparison. If people want more views, see Ayers-Matthews-Yates on the life cycle of an article.
Charles