On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Oh - and when I speak of 100,000 Featured Articles, I quite definitely don't mean articles that run the gauntlet of FAC as it presently stands. I just read all of this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_candidates
That's just from the last month. Note the excellent start, where someone complaining about the idiocy of the process is told to go away and learn to write ... and has to point out to the objectors that he'd just scored a couple of FAs.
Any process that promotes this much bile and vitriol is fundamentally damaging to Wikipedia's community operation and in need of severe process-culling for sheer poisonousness.
The problem is hardly one of excessive process, though. The purpose of FAC, fundamentally, is to find problems in articles -- the idea being that we're looking for articles that none of the reviewers can find fault with -- and this naturally doesn't sit too well with people who don't like having flaws in their writing pointed out to them. Occasionally (as in the example you cite), one of said people will become extremely agitated and start running around shouting about the evil FAC process; but, for the most part, article writers take their lumps somewhat more stoically.
The underlying issue is that the FA process is wearing two different hats. It's based on criteria that people want to use as a checklist for *all* articles -- hence the idea of having 100,000 FAs -- but at the same time fills the role of selecting our "very best work" (with all the prestige implicit is that) and serving as pretty much the only formal recognition for articles available in Wikipedia.