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