On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, Sj wrote:
On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 14:35:17 -0700 (PDT), Geoffrey Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, [ISO-8859-1] �var Arnfj�r� Bjarmason wrote:
Any unbashed viewpoint hurts our credibility.
True. See what you think of the current revision.
What is odd about this article in my eyes is that it appears not to have passed thru the normal process of being nominated, debated, then approved as a "Featured Article". I admit I made a rather quick search on the history
What's that? Checking the featured log quickly brought up the history; search for "Russian".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Featured_...
Okay, once I found _page_, I was able to backtrack & figure out just how to find information like this in the future.
I may have been on Wikipedia for quite a while, but I find its structure -- specifically its interface & how meta-discussions are laid out -- keep changing. I tend to keep to my own parts due to lack of time, & whenever I take a moment to look around at the wider picture, I feel as if I've just started scratching the surface of Wikipedia.
There's enough going on not only in terms of conversations, but in developing new tools, user & contributor helps, & other such activities that for every hour I spend contributing to the actual text, I should spend another hour combing thru all of the other anicilliary pages to stay informed.
And then there's abundance of contributors: not only have I found people writing articles I have been struggling to get to myself (& sometimes better than I could do), but sometimes finishing projects that I've only just begun. (It can be frustrating working from a dialup connection.)
But back to my experience attempting to research what happened with this article. Since I didn't see the link to [[Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Featured_log]], I went back the original article, looking for some sign that someone had added or removed the tag {{fac}}, which showed it was a Featured article candidate. had I seen that tag, I would have gone back & looked harder for that link, or some sign that there had been a discussion.
My point is that, for me at least, the interface failed to help me find what I was looking for in 10 to 15 minutes of searching. While I admit that my technique for doing my research could have been better, it would be a great help if there was more documentation on how to find these things. (And hopefully the system didn't change too greatly to frustrate attempts to keep it up to date.)
It's worth noting that most commenters recognized its NPOV problems at the time, but were content to feature it anyway. Another reason to encourage further serious editing and improvements to FA articles before showcasing them on the main page... perhaps 24 hours' notice is not enough. I like the way Featured Pictures are decided on a week in advance.
Once I found the discussion, I could then compare the article history, & I could see that there were some attempts to adjust the POV language in the article. (And I also noticed one particularly uninformative comment to one minor change.)
Geoff