I recently came across two articles in the last 24 hours that were candidates for Featured Article status. Both asserted that because they were GAs, FA was the logical next step.
Only one big problem...
The articles literally sucked and shouldn't have been GAs in the first place.
The GA criteria is a good criteria, but it's only as strong a standard as the standards applied by the most lenient promoting editor. Either the process needs to be reformed, or more oversight over the GA list is needed. I also fear there are many articles masquerading as GAs that have not gone through the process legitimately. Either someone unilaterally promoted their article to GA, or nominated for GA and had a friend do the promoting. These are usually obvious from my observations.
I'm intending to go through the GA list later this evening and into the night and sweep out a lot of the non-GA-worthy articles. Delisting en masse articles that are blatantly not meeting the requirements of the criteria. Sure it might look slightly arbitrary, unilateral and subjective...but then again, the entire process is just that. I'll try to do this as objectively as possible, with plenty of notes as to why these articles should have failed GA.
I estimate that an objective clean sweep might remove at least 10-20% of the articles currently listed at GA. 10%, or about 170 articles, would be a good conservative estimate.
Any comments?
If anyone wants to join me in this endeavour, many hands do make light work. For instance, I'm not much of a science or mathematics guy. But my forte is geography, literature, history, philosophy and social sciences. So if we can have a few people with various expertise join in, this might work out for the better.
Regards,
Christopher D. Thieme cdthieme@gmail.com User:ExplorerCDT