On 10/2/05, Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
While you are entitled to your opinion, you are simply wrong. The featured articles have many-fold benefits. Not only are they wonderful for public relations (because when people ask "How the hell can Wikipedia produce something of quality?" we have a ready-made answer), but the featured articles also encourage people to produce higher quality writing *instead* of medeocre ones. In other words, it gives us a very visible way of "pushing" the manual of style and other good writing habits onto people. (If it were not for the featured articles, who would bother to cite references in an article?)
I agree with Mark completely here. Striving for perfection is one of the things that subtlely drives the entire project. Three glorious things that I cherish that Wikipedia has pioneered are: the distributed featured article, the distributed news essay, and the distributed writing class. Each is worthy of real praise. All three require talented individuals to produce model content for others to emulate, and require the development of simple policies so that people three steps removed from the models can still contribute productively.
I'd like to know at what point WP has produced half of the world's "writers familiar with good encyclopedic style." We're probably a few years away from that yet.
SJ