Hello,
The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on Recent Changes:
Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in the world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing the focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles that we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.
Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over 230,000 without any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these articles an hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all … and this does not include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain spurious information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.
Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]] (who fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc. These articles are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia.
This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to shift the focus. I therefore propose two solutions:
1. The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested feature articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus should be on improving existing articles.
2. Regular contests should be held to promote article improvement. To that end, I will donate $100 in books and media from Amazon to the person who most improves an unsourced article related to history or selected from [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. The contest will end on October 7. A panel of judges will be selected to decide on the entries. For more information about what constitutes an "unsourced article" please contact me. For historical reasons, this will be known as "Danny's third contest."
I hope to see as many people participating in this contest as participated in the previous two.
Danny
Frankly I agree with you. I've always been annoyed that the current maintenance collaboration is to create articles that have been requested for over a year. Articles are constantly requested, yet there are always requests being filled. So what do we do with the requests we cannot fill? I propose: 1. Article requests be cleaned up very thoroughly, with entries deleted if they can't be filled adequately or should not be on Wikipedia 2. Focus of experienced editor efforts be on clearing out merger backlogs, voting per specific policies in AfDs, clearing out speedy backlogs (sysops, obviously) and the like. 3. Attention be paid to the cleanup taskforce and wikification backlogs. That way we can increase the quality of the encyclopedia. It would be good if unneccessary stub articles (careful attention should be paid to whether or not the article should be deleted, but either way [[Wikipedia:Articles for undeletion]] will pile up with incidents) could be cleared out, and vandal fighting tools spread to the masses (every CVU member should know about Lupin's tool or VP/VP2/VS/MWT, for instance).
You mention that we should aim for 100,000 featured articles. I assume [[WP:ARCAID]] (merger of [[WP:COTW]] and [[WP:AID]] for those who weren't informed) will help, however I propose it be expanded so that there is more advertising of the ARCAID around Wikipedia and experienced editors are encouraged to contribute. I'm not aware of other broad attempts to improve the quality of articles (by broad I mean broad, so SCOTW and the like do not count)
How about we start a wikiproject for the cleanup taskforce? I've already established one for the wikification taskforce, it has worked very well and the wikification backlog is being cleared out quicker every day. A formalisation of the process in a wikiproject would encourage people to join in, not only to cleanup articles, but to assist in other measures like publicity for the cause which could eventually lead in many more people helping out.
And then we could have bureaucrats force 1FA upon RFAs :)
As for your competition, I suggest you give the winner the chance to donate $100 to Wikimedia instead, its an option I'd personally prefer.
-- Akash/Draicone
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Hello,
The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on Recent Changes:
Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in the world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing the focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles that we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.
Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over 230,000 without any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these articles an hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all … and this does not include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain spurious information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.
Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]] (who fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc. These articles are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia.
This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to shift the focus. I therefore propose two solutions:
- The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested feature
articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus should be on improving existing articles.
- Regular contests should be held to promote article improvement. To that
end, I will donate $100 in books and media from Amazon to the person who most improves an unsourced article related to history or selected from [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. The contest will end on October 7. A panel of judges will be selected to decide on the entries. For more information about what constitutes an "unsourced article" please contact me. For historical reasons, this will be known as "Danny's third contest."
I hope to see as many people participating in this contest as participated in the previous two.
Danny _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
COTW and AID were merged? Obviously not well published because it took this message for me to notice. Where was this discussed?
On 9/12/06, Akash Mehta draicone@gmail.com wrote:
Frankly I agree with you. I've always been annoyed that the current maintenance collaboration is to create articles that have been requested for over a year. Articles are constantly requested, yet there are always requests being filled. So what do we do with the requests we cannot fill? I propose:
- Article requests be cleaned up very thoroughly, with entries
deleted if they can't be filled adequately or should not be on Wikipedia 2. Focus of experienced editor efforts be on clearing out merger backlogs, voting per specific policies in AfDs, clearing out speedy backlogs (sysops, obviously) and the like. 3. Attention be paid to the cleanup taskforce and wikification backlogs. That way we can increase the quality of the encyclopedia. It would be good if unneccessary stub articles (careful attention should be paid to whether or not the article should be deleted, but either way [[Wikipedia:Articles for undeletion]] will pile up with incidents) could be cleared out, and vandal fighting tools spread to the masses (every CVU member should know about Lupin's tool or VP/VP2/VS/MWT, for instance).
You mention that we should aim for 100,000 featured articles. I assume [[WP:ARCAID]] (merger of [[WP:COTW]] and [[WP:AID]] for those who weren't informed) will help, however I propose it be expanded so that there is more advertising of the ARCAID around Wikipedia and experienced editors are encouraged to contribute. I'm not aware of other broad attempts to improve the quality of articles (by broad I mean broad, so SCOTW and the like do not count)
How about we start a wikiproject for the cleanup taskforce? I've already established one for the wikification taskforce, it has worked very well and the wikification backlog is being cleared out quicker every day. A formalisation of the process in a wikiproject would encourage people to join in, not only to cleanup articles, but to assist in other measures like publicity for the cause which could eventually lead in many more people helping out.
And then we could have bureaucrats force 1FA upon RFAs :)
As for your competition, I suggest you give the winner the chance to donate $100 to Wikimedia instead, its an option I'd personally prefer.
-- Akash/Draicone
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Hello,
The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on
Recent
Changes:
Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in
the
world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing
the
focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key
articles that
we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.
Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over
230,000 without
any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these
articles an
hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all … and this
does not
include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain
spurious
information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.
Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]]
(who
fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc.
These articles
are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia.
This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to
shift
the focus. I therefore propose two solutions:
- The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to
"Requested feature
articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article,
the focus
should be on improving existing articles.
- Regular contests should be held to promote article improvement. To
that
end, I will donate $100 in books and media from Amazon to the person who
most
improves an unsourced article related to history or selected from [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. The contest will end on October 7. A panel
of judges will
be selected to decide on the entries. For more information about what constitutes an "unsourced article" please contact me. For
historical reasons, this
will be known as "Danny's third contest."
I hope to see as many people participating in this contest as
participated
in the previous two.
Danny _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I don't know, I wasn't aware until I saw the redirect happen when running AID maintenance. I'm sure it was discussed on some random talk page, just not brought to everyone's attention.
On 9/13/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
COTW and AID were merged? Obviously not well published because it took this message for me to notice. Where was this discussed?
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
- The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested feature
articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus should be on improving existing articles.
Why? Is there any reason to believe that improving a crappy article into a featured article is better than creating a featured article from scratch? Maybe most crappy articles are still crappy because they're not a very useful topic in the first place.
There's nothing wrong with creating brand new articles, as long as you're creating *good* brand new articles. To that end I think we should insist that all new articles are sourced. After a while that should be extended - all major additions to old articles must be sourced. Only then, once we've stopped the addition of new unsourced additions, can we truly start to tackle the old unsourced information.
Anthony
On 12/09/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
- The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested feature
articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus should be on improving existing articles.
Why? Is there any reason to believe that improving a crappy article into a featured article is better than creating a featured article from scratch? Maybe most crappy articles are still crappy because they're not a very useful topic in the first place.
This is answered in Danny's original message, which I will therefore assume you didn't read before hitting 'reply'.
There's nothing wrong with creating brand new articles, as long as you're creating *good* brand new articles. To that end I think we should insist that all new articles are sourced. After a while that should be extended - all major additions to old articles must be sourced. Only then, once we've stopped the addition of new unsourced additions, can we truly start to tackle the old unsourced information.
I think what will happen is that the volunteers will do whatever the heck they feel like.
- d.
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/09/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
- The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested feature
articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus should be on improving existing articles.
Why? Is there any reason to believe that improving a crappy article into a featured article is better than creating a featured article from scratch? Maybe most crappy articles are still crappy because they're not a very useful topic in the first place.
This is answered in Danny's original message, which I will therefore assume you didn't read before hitting 'reply'.
He gave examples of exceptions, but nothing to suggest whether or not these were special cases or the majority.
There's nothing wrong with creating brand new articles, as long as you're creating *good* brand new articles. To that end I think we should insist that all new articles are sourced. After a while that should be extended - all major additions to old articles must be sourced. Only then, once we've stopped the addition of new unsourced additions, can we truly start to tackle the old unsourced information.
I think what will happen is that the volunteers will do whatever the heck they feel like.
That's awfully narrow-minded. Volunteers will, of course, not do things they don't feel like doing. But there is usually a large range of things which volunteers are willing to do.
Anyway, in my opinion adding new unsourced information into the encyclopedia makes the encyclopedia worse, not better. If certain volunteers are only willing to do this, then we should respectfully decline their contribution.
Anthony
On Sep 12, 2006, at 10:28 AM, Anthony wrote:
He gave examples of exceptions, but nothing to suggest whether or not these were special cases or the majority.
Anthony, please stop pontificating to actually look at things occasionally. Danny offered the list at [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. Go look at it, and you can see how many are featured, how many are good, and how many require cleanup.
In the meantime, I'm placing you on moderation on this list. Posts that obviously fail to engage what people are saying, or that otherwise fail to engage reality in a sufficiently useful way will be rejected.
Best, Phil Sandifer sandifer@english.ufl.edu
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
On 9/12/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Sep 12, 2006, at 10:28 AM, Anthony wrote:
He gave examples of exceptions, but nothing to suggest whether or not these were special cases or the majority.
Anthony, please stop pontificating to actually look at things occasionally. Danny offered the list at [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. Go look at it, and you can see how many are featured, how many are good, and how many require cleanup.
That list has absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking about. Danny suggested that "Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus should be on improving existing articles." I asked why. Yes, there is a list of articles which need improvement. There is also a list of articles which need to be created. Why is one list more important than the other?
In the meantime, I'm placing you on moderation on this list. Posts that obviously fail to engage what people are saying, or that otherwise fail to engage reality in a sufficiently useful way will be rejected.
Whatever is easier for you.
Anthony
That was uncalled for.
On 9/12/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Sep 12, 2006, at 10:28 AM, Anthony wrote:
He gave examples of exceptions, but nothing to suggest whether or not these were special cases or the majority.
Anthony, please stop pontificating to actually look at things occasionally. Danny offered the list at [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. Go look at it, and you can see how many are featured, how many are good, and how many require cleanup.
In the meantime, I'm placing you on moderation on this list. Posts that obviously fail to engage what people are saying, or that otherwise fail to engage reality in a sufficiently useful way will be rejected.
Please be restrained with moderation.
SJ
Best, Phil Sandifer sandifer@english.ufl.edu
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Hello,
The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on Recent Changes:
Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in the world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing the focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles that we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.
Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over 230,000 without any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these articles an hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all ... and this does not include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain spurious information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.
Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]] (who fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc. These articles are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia.
This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to shift the focus. I therefore propose two solutions:
- The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested feature
articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus should be on improving existing articles.
........
Danny
Impossible. Featured articles are determined by FAC, which is as ridden or more so with politics as AFD, DRV, and other such eyesores: standards are constantly shifting and unevenly applied. Good Articles itself has turned into a mockery of FAC.
Most Featured Articles are great articles, but most great articles are not FAs.
On 12/09/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.
Impossible. Featured articles are determined by FAC, which is as ridden or more so with politics as AFD, DRV, and other such eyesores: standards are constantly shifting and unevenly applied. Good Articles itself has turned into a mockery of FAC.
Raul as Featured Articles Dictator might apply the cattleprod enema a bit more thoroughly. If FAC has gone off into one of those weird genetic drift zone of ten people agreeing to 'consensus' that drives others out and fails to serve Wikipedia, and if GA has done the same (considering GA was supposed to be the process-light parallel to unclog FAC), then burning it down and building something that actually gets back to the really quite short and reasonable FA criteria might be well in order.
- d.
With FA nominations often missing out on basic criteria (at least the last time I checked in there), rules are apparently needed. It stops additional work in de-featuring work that should not be featured to begin with if criteria are too lax.
Mgm
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/09/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another
million
articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality
articles.
Impossible. Featured articles are determined by FAC, which is as ridden or more so with politics as AFD, DRV, and other such eyesores: standards are constantly shifting and unevenly applied. Good Articles itself has turned into a mockery of FAC.
Raul as Featured Articles Dictator might apply the cattleprod enema a bit more thoroughly. If FAC has gone off into one of those weird genetic drift zone of ten people agreeing to 'consensus' that drives others out and fails to serve Wikipedia, and if GA has done the same (considering GA was supposed to be the process-light parallel to unclog FAC), then burning it down and building something that actually gets back to the really quite short and reasonable FA criteria might be well in order.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 13/09/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
With FA nominations often missing out on basic criteria (at least the last time I checked in there), rules are apparently needed. It stops additional work in de-featuring work that should not be featured to begin with if criteria are too lax.
Yeah. But it's gotta be more of a checklist and a general Request For Shrubbery Demands.
- d.
On 13/09/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/09/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
With FA nominations often missing out on basic criteria (at least the last time I checked in there), rules are apparently needed. It stops additional work in de-featuring work that should not be featured to begin with if criteria are too lax.
Yeah. But it's gotta be more of a checklist and a general Request For Shrubbery Demands.
... and *less of* a general Request For [[Shrubbery]] Demands.
- d.
On 13/09/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/09/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
With FA nominations often missing out on basic criteria (at least the
last
time I checked in there), rules are apparently needed. It stops
additional
work in de-featuring work that should not be featured to begin with if criteria are too lax.
Yeah. But it's gotta be more of a checklist and a general Request For Shrubbery Demands.
David, what exactly are you referring to here? Most of the minor detail type things that come up in FACs are pretty easy to fix (such as formatting and consistency issues). Other potentially bigger problems that are still somewhat debatable are things like prose quality and reference quality, and these can take more time. But in the end, the resulting work is usually significantly superior to the old version (at least as far as I can tell, being someone who thinks WP:RS and WP:CITE are indispensable). Which of these do you see as shrubberies, or am I missing another option?
Nathaniel
On 13/09/06, Nathaniel spangineer@gmail.com wrote:
David, what exactly are you referring to here? Most of the minor detail type things that come up in FACs are pretty easy to fix (such as formatting and consistency issues). Other potentially bigger problems that are still somewhat debatable are things like prose quality and reference quality, and these can take more time. But in the end, the resulting work is usually significantly superior to the old version (at least as far as I can tell, being someone who thinks WP:RS and WP:CITE are indispensable). Which of these do you see as shrubberies, or am I missing another option?
Objections which are answered by the nominator but which the objectors can't be found to cross off lead to the nomination failing, for example. Go read WT:FAC, there's an example listed. The nominator in that case was told "gee, go away and try harder."
My objection is to a process which the regulars can straight-facedly say to someone who just got an FA and is objecting to the personalised shittiness of the process, "go away and learn to write properly" and have this tolerated as a response. Does that encourage the content creators to actually bother, or to say "screw you guys, I'm going home"?
- d.
- d.
On 9/13/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Objections which are answered by the nominator but which the objectors can't be found to cross off lead to the nomination failing, for example. Go read WT:FAC, there's an example listed. The nominator in that case was told "gee, go away and try harder."
My objection is to a process which the regulars can straight-facedly say to someone who just got an FA and is objecting to the personalised shittiness of the process, "go away and learn to write properly" and have this tolerated as a response. Does that encourage the content creators to actually bother, or to say "screw you guys, I'm going home"?
I guess I would be hesitant to judge the overall FAC process based on the interaction between Francesco and FAC regulars. Rare are FACs that get so heated (I recall the GNAA and Bulbasaur FACs, and that's it). In this case, it seems both sides (I include myself in this) got defensive when they perceived that their opinions were under attack (for Francesco, that his writing was poor, and for Tony/Sandy/Me, that the standards we've been applying to FACs for months are faulty). In the end (which occurred after Francesco's initial complaints on WT:FAC), I think pretty much everyone agreed that the article was at least somewhat better than it was when the nomination started. And everyone was much more calm, that's for sure.
As for people disappearing and not striking their objections, yes, that happens, but in my experience Raul usually ignores these after several days if the nominator makes a note under the objection saying that he/she has addressed the objection. Of course, sometimes it doesn't work out that way, especially for nominations receiving few comments.
Nathaniel
On Sep 12, 2006, at 9:44 AM, maru dubshinki wrote:
Impossible. Featured articles are determined by FAC, which is as ridden or more so with politics as AFD, DRV, and other such eyesores: standards are constantly shifting and unevenly applied. Good Articles itself has turned into a mockery of FAC.
Most Featured Articles are great articles, but most great articles are not FAs.
The usual solution in these cases would be to create a lightweight, no bureaucracy version, akin to PROD. Article rating was a nice technical solution that had a few major bugs like not actually working, but what if we strayed away from version rating and had general ratings on articles? i.e. instead of the database nightmare just let articles all have 1-5 ratings, with some option like "if ten people vote to clear ratings, the ratings are reset" so as to not have articles sandbagged with ratings of ancient versions?
-Phil
On 12/09/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
The usual solution in these cases would be to create a lightweight, no bureaucracy version, akin to PROD. Article rating was a nice technical solution that had a few major bugs like not actually working, but what if we strayed away from version rating and had general ratings on articles? i.e. instead of the database nightmare just let articles all have 1-5 ratings, with some option like "if ten people vote to clear ratings, the ratings are reset" so as to not have articles sandbagged with ratings of ancient versions?
Write it and get the code past Brion?
Put together an implementation in templates? Presumably to be put on the talk page.
You might also want to see if the various 1.0 pages have useful ideas.
- d.
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Put together an implementation in templates? Presumably to be put on the talk page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:1.0/I
~80,000 articles assessed ATM, with another ~190,000 in the backlog.
(The proviso here is that this is done by WikiProjects, which may have slightly different procedures or standards for how the ratings are applied. Reading the relevant project's instructions before making major changes is highly recommended!)
On 9/12/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Put together an implementation in templates? Presumably to be put on the talk page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:1.0/I
~80,000 articles assessed ATM, with another ~190,000 in the backlog.
(The proviso here is that this is done by WikiProjects, which may have slightly different procedures or standards for how the ratings are applied. Reading the relevant project's instructions before making major changes is highly recommended!)
-- Kirill Lokshin
That's nice. Those ratings could be a good way to seed a more software-based method: if an article is rated good, seed it at 7/10, FAs at 9/10 etc...
--Gwern
While I'm hovering dangerously close to instruction creep by suggesting it, I think there should be some sort of mini-review process where instead of automatically resetting the rating, an admin has to look at it first (i.e., there would have to be a reason given for clearing the rating). This would especially be the case for an FA where it had around 1,000 votes (i.e., consensus).
Also, there should either be a minimum threshold for rating (e.g., 10 votes to be eligible for GA, 20 for FA) or a system where the max rating is unavailable until x votes (e.g., on a 10-point scale, the max could increment by .5 on the scale, maxing at 20 votes, with fixed thresholds for GA and FA). If such a system were not in place, then an article could hit FA status with only one vote.
Carl
On 9/12/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Sep 12, 2006, at 9:44 AM, maru dubshinki wrote:
Impossible. Featured articles are determined by FAC, which is as ridden or more so with politics as AFD, DRV, and other such eyesores: standards are constantly shifting and unevenly applied. Good Articles itself has turned into a mockery of FAC.
Most Featured Articles are great articles, but most great articles are not FAs.
The usual solution in these cases would be to create a lightweight, no bureaucracy version, akin to PROD. Article rating was a nice technical solution that had a few major bugs like not actually working, but what if we strayed away from version rating and had general ratings on articles? i.e. instead of the database nightmare just let articles all have 1-5 ratings, with some option like "if ten people vote to clear ratings, the ratings are reset" so as to not have articles sandbagged with ratings of ancient versions?
-Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 12/09/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
- The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested feature
articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus should be on improving existing articles.
Impossible. Featured articles are determined by FAC, which is as ridden or more so with politics as AFD, DRV, and other such eyesores: standards are constantly shifting and unevenly applied. Good Articles itself has turned into a mockery of FAC.
Yes and no. GA is often a mockery of FAC - I am currently musing over one near-incomprehensible objection to an article of mine - but it doesn't have to be; all it needs is someone to list the article and someone else to say "yup, sure, that's decent".
There's no real reason the process can't be decentralised further, by having most of the review work done by individual wikiprojects or the like, and just listed centrally for some transparency - it's just we seem to have fallen into this highly centralised system which plays up the FAC-like issues.
Most Featured Articles are great articles, but most great articles are not FAs.
Indeed. Perhaps we just need to ask Raul to be a little more sharp with silly objections
On 9/12/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
Impossible. Featured articles are determined by FAC, which is as ridden or more so with politics as AFD, DRV, and other such eyesores: standards are constantly shifting and unevenly applied.
I have to say, though I've heard comments like this before, I'm not sure I agree. Standards do change on FAC, but that change has come in the form of a slow improvement in standards; the last truly major shift was the requirement for inline citations, which came into place around the start of this year. I have never seen a well written, well cited, comprehensive article fail FAC. This isn't to say that people don't raise frivolous objections--they most certainly do--but those objections are generally easily addressed or ignored, and you'll sometimes see FAC regulars pointing out to objecters that, for instance, FAs are not required to have see also sections (or whatever). Likewise, it isn't to say that people don't complain that objections raised against their article are frivolous, but as someone who believes that "this is enirely sourced to poorly written websites", "the prose in the article is subpar", and other ire-drawing types of objections are quite valid, I don't see this as a sign that FAC isn't working. I haven't agreed with the result of every single FAC I've watched or participated in, but the ones I've disagreed with have generally been borderline cases. If someone can bring forward evidence of clearly worthy articles failing (or conversely, of seriously troubled articles passing), please do so, but until such evidence is presented I don't find broad assertions like this particularly convincing.
--Robth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)
On 12/09/06, Robth robth1@gmail.com wrote:
borderline cases. If someone can bring forward evidence of clearly worthy articles failing (or conversely, of seriously troubled articles passing), please do so, but until such evidence is presented I don't find broad assertions like this particularly convincing.
I don't have hard evidence, but after four FACs I have no intention of even trying any more. It's far, far too much effort for something that doesn't seem to make the article that much better to me. If I wanted to make better articles I'd just work my way through the FAC checklist to my personal satisfaction and not bother running the gauntlet. Peer Review is actually helpful but doesn't have people demanding shrubberies.
(Possibly you will tell me it's gotten better since last year. I will of course want evidence ;-p )
So when a writer's done their best to meet the criteria on the FAC checklist (except maybe the vague and subjective 'exceptional' one), is there a mechanism that will not feel like too much bloody work for little gain?
- d.
- d.
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
So when a writer's done their best to meet the criteria on the FAC checklist (except maybe the vague and subjective 'exceptional' one), is there a mechanism that will not feel like too much bloody work for little gain?
Might not an alternative be increasing the gain, rather than decreasing the work? ;-)
On 12/09/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
So when a writer's done their best to meet the criteria on the FAC checklist (except maybe the vague and subjective 'exceptional' one), is there a mechanism that will not feel like too much bloody work for little gain?
Might not an alternative be increasing the gain, rather than decreasing the work? ;-)
Oh, definitely. But basically, if I'm going to put in a FAC's worth of work, I want to know what's in it for the article, or for me bothering.
Good Articles was supposed to be a lightweight alternative, but conspicuously isn't. So, same problem: what's in it for the article, or for me bothering? The FA or GA mark is nice but doesn't seem to justify the ridiculous slog.
To reach 100,000 FAs or GAs - at which point we could in fact look Britannica in the eye on quality - will take a parallel process that isn't turned into stupid amounts of effort for little or no reward.
- d.
- d.
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
To reach 100,000 FAs or GAs - at which point we could in fact look Britannica in the eye on quality - will take a parallel process that isn't turned into stupid amounts of effort for little or no reward.
- d.
Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase of it's good enough articles.
On 12/09/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
To reach 100,000 FAs or GAs - at which point we could in fact look Britannica in the eye on quality - will take a parallel process that isn't turned into stupid amounts of effort for little or no reward.
Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase of it's good enough articles.
Yes, but because our servers are already melting hardly means it's time to stop bothering.
- d.
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase of it's good enough articles.
Alexa ratings are not everything.
On 12/09/06, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase of it's good enough articles.
Alexa ratings are not everything.
Indeed. They're not even the topic of this discussion.
- d.
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/09/06, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase of it's good enough articles.
Alexa ratings are not everything.
Indeed. They're not even the topic of this discussion.
- d.
They do however illustrate the conflict between providing what people want (more articles on sex and pro wrestling apparently) and creating what we believe should exist.
We've comparisons with Britannica are difficult because we are different things. They work from the top down. We work from the bottom up. They are to a large degree a general education. We are tending to head towards the sum of all knowledge.
The sum of all knowledge. Before Wikipedia did anyone really think what that meant?
Of the various Si-fi encyclopaedias they mostly appear to historic encyclopaedias with expansions made for advances in science and the discovery of new planets. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy does well in terms of realising there are areas of knowledge not normally covered by such works but is of course famously light in it's coverage of certain areas. Star trek's Memory Alpha does fairly well but it apparently misses geography and some other areas (incidentally [[Category:Fictional encyclopedias]] is seriously bare).
I don't think we really understand. And article on every school in Africa? An article on every village in India?
Comparisons with Britannica are of limited use because we are not doing what they are doing. We are doing something that has never been done before.
While we not be able to necessarily make a comparison on the basis of content inclusion, there is still something to be said for establishing a reputation for quality on the order of Britannica. I think that was more what was intended than a comment on what articles are included. Theoretically, every article on Wikipedia should be able to be brought to the level of featured article. That goal (and the goal of even 100,000 FAs) may mean that articles which could not be brought to FA level on their own need to be merged (e.g., a single, comprehensive article on multiple schools instead of a stub for each individual article), but there should be a way to bring all content on Wikipedia to the point where there is no need for the Featured Article designation because every article is at the quality level of a featured article. In many ways, that is my dream: for the Featured Article process to be placed on the chopping block because Featured Articles make up such a large proportion of the articles on Wikipedia that there is no longer anything special. Or perhaps for the FA criteria to require so much refinement that all but 1% of our FAs get bumped from that level.
And yes, I dream big.
Carl
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
They do however illustrate the conflict between providing what people want (more articles on sex and pro wrestling apparently) and creating what we believe should exist.
We've comparisons with Britannica are difficult because we are different things. They work from the top down. We work from the bottom up. They are to a large degree a general education. We are tending to head towards the sum of all knowledge.
The sum of all knowledge. Before Wikipedia did anyone really think what that meant?
Of the various Si-fi encyclopaedias they mostly appear to historic encyclopaedias with expansions made for advances in science and the discovery of new planets. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy does well in terms of realising there are areas of knowledge not normally covered by such works but is of course famously light in it's coverage of certain areas. Star trek's Memory Alpha does fairly well but it apparently misses geography and some other areas (incidentally [[Category:Fictional encyclopedias]] is seriously bare).
I don't think we really understand. And article on every school in Africa? An article on every village in India?
Comparisons with Britannica are of limited use because we are not doing what they are doing. We are doing something that has never been done before.
-- geni _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 9/12/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
That goal (and the goal of even 100,000 FAs) may mean that articles which could not be brought to FA level on their own need to be merged (e.g., a single, comprehensive article on multiple schools instead of a stub for each individual article)
I'm not sure I agree. Some articles are going to be short simply because there is not much known or notable about the topic to say. It still helps readers in many cases for the article to be separate if it's a topic that's singular and not easily merged with others. I'm not against merging in most cases, but I'm against one-size-fits-all.
-Matt
On 9/13/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
That goal (and the goal of even 100,000 FAs) may mean that articles which could not be brought to FA level on their own need to be merged (e.g., a single, comprehensive article on multiple schools instead of a stub for each individual article)
I'm not sure I agree. Some articles are going to be short simply because there is not much known or notable about the topic to say. It still helps readers in many cases for the article to be separate if it's a topic that's singular and not easily merged with others. I'm not against merging in most cases, but I'm against one-size-fits-all.
To be a featured article an article should be reasonably complete for the level of coverage we provide... but that doesn't require it to be long.
I've heard that there is a trend on FAC is to encourage the creation of very long articles... even, perhaps, where really long is inappropriate. If this is the case then it's a cause to improve the FA process, not a cause to back away from making more articles featurable.
On 9/13/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
To be a featured article an article should be reasonably complete for the level of coverage we provide... but that doesn't require it to be long.
I've heard that there is a trend on FAC is to encourage the creation of very long articles... even, perhaps, where really long is inappropriate. If this is the case then it's a cause to improve the FA process, not a cause to back away from making more articles featurable.
In my experience I haven't seen this--my most recent FA has only about 10k of prose, and more often than the converse, people object because articles are too long (more than 30-40k of prose).
Nathaniel
On 13/09/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I've heard that there is a trend on FAC is to encourage the creation of very long articles... even, perhaps, where really long is inappropriate. If this is the case then it's a cause to improve the FA process, not a cause to back away from making more articles featurable.
Well, yes. But more so, it's a reason to separate the notion of general improvement in Wikipedia from listing on [[WP:FA]].
- d.
My experience in this is in WikiProject Louisville, where we've tried to address the issue of people wanting to create articles for random elementary schools that don't amount to much more than three lines. So, our [[List of Schools in Louisville]] is a bit more than just a list of school names. We haven't prodded the original articles, but that's one of the things we've been doing to get an article (or list, or whatever you might call it) of some length (we'll split it sometime down the road) that can cover a subject without being a stub.
Carl
On 9/13/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/13/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
That goal (and the goal of even 100,000 FAs) may mean that articles which could not be brought to FA level on their
own
need to be merged (e.g., a single, comprehensive article on multiple
schools
instead of a stub for each individual article)
I'm not sure I agree. Some articles are going to be short simply because there is not much known or notable about the topic to say. It still helps readers in many cases for the article to be separate if it's a topic that's singular and not easily merged with others. I'm not against merging in most cases, but I'm against one-size-fits-all.
To be a featured article an article should be reasonably complete for the level of coverage we provide... but that doesn't require it to be long.
I've heard that there is a trend on FAC is to encourage the creation of very long articles... even, perhaps, where really long is inappropriate. If this is the case then it's a cause to improve the FA process, not a cause to back away from making more articles featurable. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 13/09/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
My experience in this is in WikiProject Louisville, where we've tried to address the issue of people wanting to create articles for random elementary schools that don't amount to much more than three lines. So, our [[List of Schools in Louisville]] is a bit more than just a list of school names. We haven't prodded the original articles, but that's one of the things we've been doing to get an article (or list, or whatever you might call it) of some length (we'll split it sometime down the road) that can cover a subject without being a stub.
In that case, could the named articles be turned into redirects? There was an article each for many of the cameras listed on [[Canon Digital IXUS]], but most were redundant with the table of models, so I took the good info out and made them redirects to the main article. If there's ever even a short article's worth of new info, they could easily be split back out again. (This also saves deletion rancor.)
- d.
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
They do however illustrate the conflict between providing what people want (more articles on sex and pro wrestling apparently) and creating what we believe should exist.
[snip]
I'm going to take down the wikicharts tool if I continue to see it used incorrectly to argument stupid arguments.
First of all, the tool is not accurate enough to actually provide the relative ranking of the articles due to the low sampling rate and ease of spoofing. It merely provides a list of top articles and a suggestion of their possible relative rankings.
Secondly, we are not provided with any of another important metrics. For example, if a person googles for "penis anal fisting rectum succubus" they'll get [[Anal Sex]] and be counted as any other reader, but I'd be willing to bet good money that 9 out of 10 look at the page for all of 5 seconds before realizing that this is not the hardcore porno they were looking for and they hit the back button. ... We don't know how long people stay, we don't know how they arrived, we don't know if they read anything else.. we don't know if they found what they were looking for....
The fact of the matter is quite simply that we don't know much, and we certainly can't say from the data we have that we have any clue about what people want.
... and I don't think thats a big deal. Nothing about creating a free content encyclopedia or freeing the knowledge of the world requires that we be the number one destination for the news of the day.
On 13/09/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I'm going to take down the wikicharts tool if I continue to see it used incorrectly to argument stupid arguments.
Noooooooooooooooooo! (please)
First of all, the tool is not accurate enough to actually provide the relative ranking of the articles due to the low sampling rate and ease of spoofing. It merely provides a list of top articles and a suggestion of their possible relative rankings. Secondly, we are not provided with any of another important metrics. For example, if a person googles for "penis anal fisting rectum succubus" they'll get [[Anal Sex]] and be counted as any other reader, but I'd be willing to bet good money that 9 out of 10 look at the page for all of 5 seconds before realizing that this is not the hardcore porno they were looking for and they hit the back button. ... We don't know how long people stay, we don't know how they arrived, we don't know if they read anything else.. we don't know if they found what they were looking for.... The fact of the matter is quite simply that we don't know much, and we certainly can't say from the data we have that we have any clue about what people want.
The charts page could do with a note to this effect.
... and I don't think thats a big deal. Nothing about creating a free content encyclopedia or freeing the knowledge of the world requires that we be the number one destination for the news of the day.
Indeed. I really feel our popularity right now is not good for us at all - look at the gross immediatism fostered by BLP, and apparently serious proposals to gut all living bios because Wikipedia is too popular. This directly hampers our efforts to actually write a good encyclopedia for tomorrow as well as today.
- d.
On 9/13/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I'm going to take down the wikicharts tool if I continue to see it used incorrectly to argument stupid arguments.
At this point I belive it is traditional to mention certian cultures not getting irony.
Secondly, we are not provided with any of another important metrics. For example, if a person googles for "penis anal fisting rectum succubus" they'll get [[Anal Sex]] and be counted as any other reader, but I'd be willing to bet good money that 9 out of 10 look at the page for all of 5 seconds before realizing that this is not the hardcore porno they were looking for and they hit the back button.
Perhaps but it is equaly likely to do with long established human tendancy to look up rude words in dictionaries.
The fact of the matter is quite simply that we don't know much, and we certainly can't say from the data we have that we have any clue about what people want.
Judgeing by various complaints people want answers.
... and I don't think thats a big deal. Nothing about creating a free content encyclopedia or freeing the knowledge of the world requires that we be the number one destination for the news of the day.
Perhaps but where else would you suggest that people should have got information on Pope Benedict XVI on April 19, 2005
On 9/13/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
... and I don't think thats a big deal. Nothing about creating a free content encyclopedia or freeing the knowledge of the world requires that we be the number one destination for the news of the day.
Perhaps but where else would you suggest that people should have got information on Pope Benedict XVI on April 19, 2005
I can answer this two ways.. Both are true representations of my position on this subject.
First the general answer: It's great that we can be prompt and that people can use us for information on recent events. I've never suggested we stop that... I only stated that fulfilling that need simply isn't the purpose of Wikipedia.
and then the 'specific to this case' answer: They can read about it from the same places *we* did. Many of our articles (esp current events) are simply sourced from web-available resources.
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/09/06, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase of it's good enough articles.
Alexa ratings are not everything.
Indeed. They're not even the topic of this discussion.
What exactly is the topic of discussion? I thought it was about how best to achieve the highest quality encyclopedia, but apparently not as I got put on moderation for that.
So what is the topic?
Anthony
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase of it's good enough articles.
True. But being respectable is not really the same thing as being popular; and I was under the impression that the former was a more practical concern for us than the latter.
On 12/09/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase of it's good enough articles.
True. But being respectable is not really the same thing as being popular; and I was under the impression that the former was a more practical concern for us than the latter.
Fairly obviously, our real popularity comes from the social networking possibilities of our userboxes.
Oh sorry, they were last year's thing. What's this year's? I forget.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
On 12/09/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase of it's good enough articles.
True. But being respectable is not really the same thing as being popular; and I was under the impression that the former was a more practical concern for us than the latter.
Fairly obviously, our real popularity comes from the social networking possibilities of our userboxes.
Oh sorry, they were last year's thing. What's this year's? I forget.
Worshipping process.
On 13/09/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
Oh sorry, they were last year's thing. What's this year's? I forget.
Worshipping process.
*Still*? That one's been in the charts for *ages*. Must be some exciting *new* bad ideas out there.
- d.
Kirill Lokshin wrote:
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase of it's good enough articles.
True. But being respectable is not really the same thing as being popular; and I was under the impression that the former was a more practical concern for us than the latter.
I'd personally be more interested in being *useful*, which is an eminently practical concern. From that perspective, a lot of different things are important. Having "good enough" articles on as wide a range of subjects as possible is definitely high up on the list---we provide information that is difficult to come by otherwise. Having very good articles, especially on frequently-consulted topics or topics where errors would be more problematic (biographies; national/ethnic disputes; technical subjects) is another important consideration. More to the point, it's quite helpful to allow a reader to quickly identify how good we think an article is.
It's not clear to me what role, if any, the GA/FA process plays in any of these concerns. It doesn't tell a reader which articles are good, because it rates articles as a whole rather than revisions---FA status provides no guarantee that the current article is any better than a similar-looking non-FA article. It appears to provide only a moderate and highly beaurocratic method of encouraging article improvement in the first place. On the whole I'd say I personally never pay attention to whether an article is "featured", and I don't know anyone else who does either. It simply doesn't solve any of the practical problems that come up when reading Wikipedia.
-Mark
On 9/13/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I'd personally be more interested in being *useful*, which is an eminently practical concern. From that perspective, a lot of different things are important. Having "good enough" articles on as wide a range of subjects as possible is definitely high up on the list---we provide information that is difficult to come by otherwise. Having very good articles, especially on frequently-consulted topics or topics where errors would be more problematic (biographies; national/ethnic disputes; technical subjects) is another important consideration. More to the point, it's quite helpful to allow a reader to quickly identify how good we think an article is.
It's not clear to me what role, if any, the GA/FA process plays in any of these concerns. It doesn't tell a reader which articles are good, because it rates articles as a whole rather than revisions---FA status provides no guarantee that the current article is any better than a similar-looking non-FA article. It appears to provide only a moderate and highly beaurocratic method of encouraging article improvement in the first place. On the whole I'd say I personally never pay attention to whether an article is "featured", and I don't know anyone else who does either. It simply doesn't solve any of the practical problems that come up when reading Wikipedia.
I suggested the concept of "good articles" long before it happened, but I envisioned something somewhat different. Overall I think it is fairly well implemented, though. The criteria are fairly objective and the process is fairly simple. I don't really like the fact that there's a central page, as it unnecessarily increases the process, but it's not too bad as the instructions are still fairly easy to follow. One big difference is that I had suggested nominating a particular revision as a good article.
The only real problem I see with "good articles", in practice, is that the process doesn't seem to have been adopted. I guess this is in part because it's not as fun of a game as the "featured articles" process.
For whatever reason though, you're right. Good articles doesn't seem to be very useful at the moment.
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
To reach 100,000 FAs or GAs - at which point we could in fact look Britannica in the eye on quality - will take a parallel process that isn't turned into stupid amounts of effort for little or no reward.
Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase of it's good enough articles.
Since when was did being "popular" become a goal of the project?
(I used scare quotes around popular because I don't think I've ever seen data that suggests that we're the most popular resource in any way other than web traffic. ... and if you think that webtraffic is a good metric, pause for a moment and consider that MySpace whoops our ass in that regard.)
On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Oh, definitely. But basically, if I'm going to put in a FAC's worth of work, I want to know what's in it for the article, or for me bothering.
Well, doing anything special for the article -- aside from the shiny star -- would probably involve a great deal of talking and wouldn't go anywhere.
As for you bothering, though, the options are a little more flexible. We probably can't (easily) offer any tangible rewards, but what might be a more practical possibility would be better recognition for those who do the work.
For example, what if we prominently displayed the top, say, 100 entries from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LWFAN on the Community Portal (or on the Main Page, for the truly self-aggrandizing). It wouldn't be much, granted; but it would still be more than what we have now (and would, nicely enough, be slanted towards those who made FA writing a regular pastime).
One of the things that I've noticed is that articles (esp. in technical subjects) are occasionally listed as unsourced when the sources are textbooks (listed at the end of the article) that spend one or more chapters on the subject, the information from which is distributed throughout the article. Is there a policy somewhere that addresses this situation?
Carl
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Hello,
The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on Recent Changes:
Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in the world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing the focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles that we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.
Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over 230,000 without any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these articles an hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all … and this does not include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain spurious information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.
Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]] (who fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc. These articles are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia.
This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to shift the focus. I therefore propose two solutions:
- The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to
"Requested feature articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus should be on improving existing articles.
- Regular contests should be held to promote article improvement. To that
end, I will donate $100 in books and media from Amazon to the person who most improves an unsourced article related to history or selected from [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. The contest will end on October 7. A panel of judges will be selected to decide on the entries. For more information about what constitutes an "unsourced article" please contact me. For historical reasons, this will be known as "Danny's third contest."
I hope to see as many people participating in this contest as participated in the previous two.
Danny _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 12/09/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
One of the things that I've noticed is that articles (esp. in technical subjects) are occasionally listed as unsourced when the sources are textbooks (listed at the end of the article) that spend one or more chapters on the subject, the information from which is distributed throughout the article. Is there a policy somewhere that addresses this situation?
N6, thank goodness - instead, there is common sense: the article is referenced, so delete the tag claiming it isn't.
- d.