Ben Greenberg wrote:
The biggest problem that wikipedia is facing right now is deterioration. I really don't find the featured article review to be effective enough to prevent featured articles from getting worse. What ideas do you guys have for how we could prevent featured article deterioration?
Deterioration might not be so bad. In evolutionary optimization (for example via genetic algorithms) a concept that's often mentioned is the "fitness landscape", a graph showing the relative fitness of all possible solutions to a particular problem. The landscape for most problems is usually hilly, with peaks around the solutions that are relatively good and valleys where they're particularly bad. But peaks may only be locally optimal, with higher peaks elsewhere. If an article reaches a quality peak we shouldn't be too devoted to keeping it there since somewhere else there might be an even better possible version to reach. For example, new material might be added covering some aspect of the article's topic that wasn't covered previously, but the new material has bad grammar and sparse citations and is "bad" enough to knock the article off of Featured status. The best approach in this case is not to just revert to the old version, but rather clean up the new material to result in an even better article than it was before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape#Fitness_landscapes_in_evoluti... has a nice diagram.