On 10/7/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
One problem I see with the FA process is that a lot of the articles are incredibly esoteric. If you're a specialist in a field, you're highly motivated to write a REALLY GOOD article about something you know well. There seems to be less motivation to get the *really general* articles up to featured status. God help the person who tries to get [[Earth]] past the present FAC process and keep it under 200KB.
The main problem I see is that's it's *hard* to cover a very general topic both comprehensively and concisely, particularly when any one person working on it probably knows only one or two areas of the topic well -- whereas you can cover just about everything important for a good encyclopedic treatment of a minor subtopic in a couple screenfuls, and without having to read as many references to be sure of getting a good picture.
In many cases a very general topic requires several people working together who are all motivated to feature it, probably all at once if you want to be able to address everyone's objections, where the niche topic will only take one motivated obsessive specialist to push it over the top. :-) Eventualism is nice, but it requires rather a bit of patience...
-Kat [[User:Mindspillage]]
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