On 4/10/06, Ryan Delaney ryan.delaney@gmail.com wrote:
There are many other symptoms of this behavior which I think is centered around this notion that a featured article is somehow inherently better than others, or that getting an article featured is more of an achievement than making good edits. We have Wikipedians who are bragging on their userpages about their "number of featured articles" and so on. That seems very backward to me; it's editing Wikipedia for recognition, not for its own sake.
Is it helping the encyclopaedia get written? As long as they don't excessively game the system, draw attention away from other articles, then I would say yes. Wikipedia isn't a charity or an ideology - it's a job we have to get done, by one means or by another. If we had the funds, we would pay people to write articles. As it is, we have to motivate them however we can.
Don't you agree?
Steve