I'm going to grouse a bit.

Very good. Now I'm going to just rant a bit (ok, a lot) :).

I think far, far too much attention gets paid to the worst articles on Wikipedia - the studs, the vanity articles, the stuff of debatable notability (schools!!) while not nearly enough effort goes into making crappy articles into good ones.

YES. Finally someone says the real problem.

People on AFD love to argue about the crappiest articles. (It also

tends

to spill over to this mailing list) On the other side of the spectrum, the percentage of featured articles (number of featured articles /

total

number of articles) has been rapidly declining since March. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_statistics). And yet no one seems care. Sometime this month, percentage of featured articles will drop below 0.1% -- less than 1 article in 1000 being a featured article.

OK, there are a lot of reasons with this. One are the new higher standards that are being imposed. Between Me, Tony1, and SimonP the standards are quite high - just look at the number of featured article candidates (FACs) - now there is around 10 - just a few weeks ago there were like 40 and then people were complaining because there were too many!!!

Another thing is the inevitable controversy. When working on something that a lot of people have opinions on you run into a lot of heated debates. In addition, on many of those articles you're going to run into obvious POV pushers who just don't get it - see my long response at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Redwolf24#Pop_singer_fancruft to someone distressed because (s)he was trying to clean up pop singer articles. It really is not a rewarding experience most of the time to deal with articles like that.

For example, when I was trying to clean up the autism/asperger's syndrome articles I was accused of a "premeditated act of malicious child harm", equated to a Nazi more than once, and accused of suppressing peoples' views. In addition, you run into people from extreme internet groups that come to WP for the sole purpose of having their group's POV pushed on any related wiki page in addition to the group itself having a page for recognition. Then there are the daily battles to keep it accurate and the original research people out (its difficult to get original research deleted on AfD, ironically :)). Its quite the circus and requires an unreasonable amount of time from someone, and really isn't that satisfying at all. Plus, just editing these articles often will give you the dooming "controversial" label, giving you to many oppose votes on your RfA or what have you (generalizing), so many people who are good editors just don't bother running.

So, in the end its a lot easier just working on uncontroversial articles that are usually highly techinical in nature (SimonP's mercantalism masterpiece comes to mind).

I mean you look at a high-profile article like Microsoft. I remember my first edit was to the talk page of that article complaining about the obvious POV ranting on that page back in march - I didn't even have another edit until late july because I thought it would get "fixed"... - of course I ended up having to do it all myself... which seems to be a common theme around here. I mean just yesterday I did a complete rewrite of the hacker article because it was a mess and just wrong in a lot of places. It only took me an hour, so I don't quite understand why with 10,000 or so viewers of the page no one else bothered. Whatever happened to WP:BOLD?

I really do think the FAC process itself is great though. It has two real problems: 1)Hit and run opposers - if you are going to oppose you don't need to help with the article but you need to pay attention to updated comments. 2)People who just nominate an article and never change it during the FAC. For some reason this happens with like half of them and its really annoying. 3)People who oppose because they don't like the article or don't like the type of article.

There is also peer review - which as everyone who visits there knows I'm rather prolific at :). I think people should be restricted to nominating one article per person per two weeks - otherwise you have the A Link to the past flood of 30 peer review requests in the same day. As the point of peer review is to get the article to FA status - which is not easy and is not supposed to be! It should take you at LEAST two weeks to get one article up to FA status, maybe less with help.

Am I the only one who thinks we have our priorities out of order? We

are

we spending so much energy arguing about the horrible stuff that (for all intents) will never be seen or noticed when our important articles (think - Michael Brown, Tom DeLay, John Roberts) are, well, not very

good?

OK - there is a systemic problem with these pages as well. Its not all that obvious - its that people seem to come to wikipedia to debate politics instead of discuss actual content. Wikipedia is a horrible place to debate politics - discussions are fractured and are archived fast. People need to stick to content and stick to NPOV through comprimises. Also, as evidenced by the Bush article, going back and forth between various POVs doesn't work that well - that content needs to be balanced and it needs to stick to neutral language and cite reputable sources.

OK, sorry for the long rant :).

RN