On 1 Oct 2005, at 01:33, Mark Pellegrini wrote:

I'm going to grouse a bit.

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.

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.

So while our article count is exploding [due to a massive influx of less-than-steller new articles.... think - traffic circles] and while the number of contributors has been steadily increasing, the number of new featured articles being produced has been a fairly steady 30-40 per month.

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?

I dont find the featured article process very interesting. There are lots of articles that are of that quality but I dont feel any real incentive to nominate. And quite a few of the FAs are not very good. Articles that I care about are getting better, much better and thats more important to me. What are FAs for? What percentage of articles do you expect to be FAs?

On 10/1/05, Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:

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.

This is inevitable. There is nothing we can do about it and I'd argue that there is nothing that we *should* do about it.

Even if we accept without question the argument that the "best" articles on Wikipedia are those that have been voted on, edited, voted on again, and granted Featured Article status, it's simply impossible for the Featured Article process to keep up with the current pace of addition of new articles.

Does this mean that featured articles are doomed? Of course not. There is no shortage of featured articles, it's just that there is a growing number of articles that aren't.