On 17/02/2009, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I love a good metaphor! You're absolutely right, writing articles about very general topics is very difficult. I think the problem comes in trying to balance breadth, depth and conciseness. There isn't an obvious solution - it just needs someone with the right talents to devote a significant amount of time and effort to it.
I believe that there's probably a class of general articles that will never go FA. Some topics will not fit into the combination of guidelines (particularly length), and to the extent that these guidelines are rigidly enforced, then you have no chance.
The only way to get some articles (particularly general ones) past FA is to remove stuff from them, and hope nobody in the FA review notices ;-)