On 9/13/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I believe this is in fact a standard view on FAC - that if too many articles are passing then they need to be pickier. Which is fine if its goal is to award prizes for exceptional brilliance, but not if it's to pull up the quality of the whole encyclopedia - which is what I meant about whether the amount of editor work it takes to get past FAC is actually worth it for the effect on the article.
Maybe we could use the "A-Class" rating from the WikiProject assessments here? The projects would be in a good position to determine whether an article passed most of the FA criteria; what we'd get, presumably, are articles which are comprehensive, accurate, neutral, etc., but which may have minor faults -- particularly in regards to prose style -- that wouldn't quite meet the "very best work" criterion.
The practical advantages are that WikiProjects can use a less process-heavy method of identifying such articles, and that the rating system is already becoming ubiquitous (at least among the more active projects). All that's really needed is some pushing towards a more consistent and well-defined way for the projects to assign this rating; and hopefully we'll have some working examples of more rigorous approaches to this soon.