On 5/10/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Unfortunately that doesn't reflect the reality of things, as anyone who has worked on areas subject to systemic bias (and thus a lack of sources) can tell you. Johnleemk

Which is why I said "in theory". I'm well aware that practice doesn't work that way, but it should still be the goal of the FA system to be more inclusive and try and achieve the theory.

On 5/10/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: And there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that GA lost sight of its original purpose very early on, and became a mini-FA. I've had decent articles on subjects where not much can be written because of lacking sources rejected from GA - even in its first few months - and so I've given up completely on getting such articles recognised as being "good quality, but can't really go anywhere because they don't have sources or for some other reason can't make FA". In the end, these articles cannot be distinguished from the rest of the tripe that is normally on Wikipedia, and as such complicates things when, say, we want to compile articles illustrating the breadth of our coverage, since this practice effectively accentuates systemic bias.

On 5/10/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, I mean articles like, say, [[Karamjit Singh]]. There aren't many (if any) sources about his personal life - where he was born, where he went to school, normal biographical stuff. So does this mean he should be excluded from consideration for things like GA because he can't fulfill the normal requirements of a biographical article? I'm not talking about articles which don't have any sources at all. I'm talking about articles which can source all the existing statements fine, but can't be expanded because of lacunae in reliable sources. Should these articles thus be disqualified from being marked as above the quality of a typical article, when most of our articles don't even have sources for all their statements, and we've become known for things like that illustrated in the webcomic below? http://www.wondermark.com/d/291.html Johnleemk

On 5/10/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: When I worked on FAC, I tried hard to work with articles that were about non-mainstream areas, such as video games, DJs, simply because these articles are not likely to have traditional sources, and will need to rely mostly upon web sources. It was a bit tough, and the editors often steamed off from my critiques, but when they listened and we worked together within the guidelines, Wikipedia got excellent articles in the popular culture arena. The biggest problem with FAs about pop culture topics is not, imo, lack of sources, but getting the editors to understand the need to write something a mid-Western great grandmother could understand. When the editors do this, and they have sufficient sources for the particular article, something really worth seeing and reading on the front page comes up. KP