On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 10:38 AM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Kat Walsh wrote:
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.
Yes, in a way it's sad we have so much attention on gatekeeping and absolute standards (well, as has been said, high and upwardly mobile standards), and so little recognition on great added-value edits, the ones which take an article into a different class of usefulness. As far as I know the transition from B class to A class is still considered to be the most transforming, from the reader's point of view.
Absolutely. And also the transition from unintelligibility (or poor stub or no article) to something with more frameworking and attempts at comprehensiveness. A *good* transition from stub to start-class can be vital to the future "health" of an article, just as a bad transition (or poor initial creation) can lead to trouble later.
Indeed, something looking at the traffic and flow of articles up this quality scale would be good. I think the main thing discouraging people from doing that is the unreliability of the assessments outside of FA, A and GA. But in any topic area, making clear what the "internal" standards are for stub, start, C, B, and A class articles and sorting articles into those categories is good, but it HAS to be followed up with attempts at improving the articles. Otherwise it has been an exercise in paperwork, in the (sometimes vain) hope that a writer will come along and improve the articles.
Maybe a wikiproject with a strong and reliable history of *both* assessment and improvement of articles could give a narrative and timeline of how their articles have improved?
Carcharoth