On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 5:01 PM, Matthew Brownmorven@gmail.com wrote:
My long-time observation is that the people who obsess about FA over the long term want to keep the number of articles with that status approximately constant by making the standards more and more difficult to meet.
Yeah, we see that on FPC (featured pics) - and RfA (admins) for that matter. There's probably a term for this somewhere. I don't think it's malicious, but a fact that when you constantly review stuff, you get jaded, and compare each item to all the great examples in the past. It's almost like a drug, you need bigger highs each time to register. Or maybe it's just perfectionism - it's very easy to quibble over tiny flaws, and miss the bigger picture.
Here's a great example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/Face_of_a...
What an incredible image. This is a *wasp*, and we have great detail of the *hairs* on its forehead. Stunning sharpness, and this photo would not be out of place in a good science magazine. Yet two editors managed to oppose its promotion to "featured" on the basis of the tip of one antenna being obscured by an out of focus leaf fragment. Another, neutral, came up with "An amazing detail and sharpness...with a clumsy framing and cropping ruining an otherwise excellent picture. ... I will not support the promotion as I find little excuse for those flaws."
These would be perfectly apt comments if we were voting on National Geographic's "photo of the year". But Wikipedia "featured picture"? Whee.
Steve