Ian Woollard wrote:
I definitely agree, but I think the nupedia experiment tells us that formal reviews are bad for the wikipedia though.
Depends what you mean by that. Featured article nominations are formal reviews in some sense, or about as formal as one gets on a project whose culture trends to the informal. Formal reviews aren't bad per se, but Nupedia had a poorly designed workflow. Now that we have the community and the tools to produce large amounts of content, it makes sense to try to see if we can't adjust the tools to also allow for better review processes.
Incidentally, historically speaking your characterization is backwards. It's Wikipedia that was the experiment relative to Nupedia, not the other way round.
--Michael Snow