Carcharoth wrote
Indeed, something looking at the traffic and flow of articles up this quality scale would be good. I think the main thing discouraging people from doing that is the unreliability of the assessments outside of FA, A and GA. But in any topic area, making clear what the "internal" standards are for stub, start, C, B, and A class articles and sorting articles into those categories is good, but it HAS to be followed up with attempts at improving the articles.
I think you're probably right that a new departure needs to be made: we're at best mediocre at devising new "recognition mechanisms". How about a project aimed (since we are coming up to three million articles) at shifting the balance of stubs and other really substandard articles before we get to four million? We'll get to the end of the first decade of WP in 2011 before that happens. And I think we need some kind of two-dimensional plot, not single scale: urgency assessment as well as quality assessment.
I do spend more time on upgrading stubs than I used to, and I guess this will be true of anyone who is driven by what they find on the site. When we last discussed total article numbers, four million seemed a good enough guess for the "plateau".
Charles