On 5/10/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
No, I mean articles like, say, [[Karamjit Singh]]. There aren't many (if any) sources about his personal life - where he was born, where he went
to
school, normal biographical stuff. So does this mean he should be
excluded
from consideration for things like GA because he can't fulfill the
normal
requirements of a biographical article?
I'm not talking about articles which don't have any sources at all. I'm talking about articles which can source all the existing statements
fine,
but can't be expanded because of lacunae in reliable sources. Should
these
articles thus be disqualified from being marked as above the quality of
a
typical article, when most of our articles don't even have sources for
all
their statements, and we've become known for things like that
illustrated in
the webcomic below?
Ah, now I understand. I've had similar problems with articles about fictional works - the people at FAC want more stuff about the work's place in the real world rather than just stuff about the fictional world and such information often isn't published anywhere. Such articles should be able to be featured. The policy says the featured article director should ignore complaints that can't be fixed - that policy should be followed and often isn't.
When I worked on FAC, I tried hard to work with articles that were about non-mainstream areas, such as video games, DJs, simply because these articles are not likely to have traditional sources, and will need to rely mostly upon web sources. It was a bit tough, and the editors often steamed off from my critiques, but when they listened and we worked together within the guidelines, Wikipedia got excellent articles in the popular culture arena.
The biggest problem with FAs about pop culture topics is not, imo, lack of sources, but getting the editors to understand the need to write something a mid-Western great grandmother could understand. When the editors do this, and they have sufficient sources for the particular article, something really worth seeing and reading on the front page comes up.
KP