Fastfission wrote:
But if we are truly worried about some articles being "bad representatives", it might be nice to really explicitly prioritize some of them. We do have that list of "100 articles which should be in every encyclopedia" or something like that for all of the new-language Wikis to consider as a starting point -- maybe we need to re-apply that to EN and really get out there to encourage people to find things on that list (or another list of some sort) which are important to get into a "featured" state *not* because the article is necessarily horribly flawed in some way, but because the *topic* of the article is of a high-enough priority to the world-at-large that if we goof on it, it'll look like a bad thing. It would also be a good way to march towards 1.0 if people are still interested in that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_articles_all_languages_should...
I created the above page for this specific purpose - en: has all these articles (or something like them), but very few are up to featured quality.
One problem I see with the FA process is that a lot of the articles are incredibly esoteric. If you're a specialist in a field, you're highly motivated to write a REALLY GOOD article about something you know well. There seems to be less motivation to get the *really general* articles up to featured status. God help the person who tries to get [[Earth]] past the present FAC process and keep it under 200KB.
- d.