On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Steve Bennettstevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Agreed -- I don't think the numerical counts of featured content mean very much in terms of measuring quality improvement overall, because of this effect. The showcase pieces, the ones that do get past the ever-increasing hurdles, are great -- and I'm glad we have a process for identifying them and bringing them into wider public view, both because the creators deserve the recognition and because the public ought to see it. But tracking the number doesn't give veyr much information except as a comment on the process itself.
-Kat