I've been spending some of my time over the last few days looking for articles on Wikipedia that could be added to [[Wikipedia:Good articles]], & noticed an interesting pair of statistics. The first statistic comes from the results of a number of Random page tests that have been performed & recorded over the past. From the list at [[Category:Random Page Tests]], & adding to this my own survey of 20 pages found at random & Alphax's survey of 10 he posted to the list, I came up with a sample of 230 pages, 16 of which the participants rated as Good or better, which works out to a proportion of a little more than 5%. This sample is large enough I feel (based on my own admittedly feeble knowledge of statistics) to suggest that about 5% of all Wikipedia articles are of "good" quality or better. Now while some people will use this as proof that Wikipedia badly needs improvement and eoter rant that we need to work on our quality, or dismiss this finding as belaboring the obvious, a little math will show that if the 5% figure is correct then there ought to be at least 42,000 articles that are Good in quality -- or better. That's not a bad statistic, especialy when one considers some proprietary encyclopedias don't have that many articles *in total*. The second statistic comes from my search for Good articles. Now I admit that I like to find the easiest solutions to problems, & the hardest way to find Good articles would be to click on the "Random article" link, & hope that at least every 20th article is worth listing. A far easier way would be to find the articles that have gone thru the Featured Articles Candidate process, & examine the rejects to determine whether any would be a "Good article." And so last night I started to add up all of the articles listed in [[Category:Old requests for peer review]] & found this category contained only 1328 articles. In other words, for every *40* Good articles in Wikipedia, only *1* article gets any special attention to be singled out for consideration and review! And it's a plausible assumption that a good chunk of the articles submitted to Peer review should never have been considered a "Good article" to begin with -- which makes the number of Good articles found & considered for this process even smaller. Let's stop making assumptions, and do some more math: more articles are listed & debated on AfD than on Peer review. It's hard not to conclude from that simple calculation that Wikipedians are more motivated to remove an article than to improve it. Small wonder, then, that so many people complain about the quality of the articles on Wikipedia: that's what they look for -- the bad articles instead of the good. I know this would be unenforceable, but wouldn't it be a good policy that before an editor nominates an article to AfD, they have to also nominate an article to Peer review? And that before an editor adds to the debate at AfD, they have to contribute to the debate at either Peer review or Featured articles candidates? Maybe that might make some people complain about those fora like some people complain about AfD now, but it just might help uncover more of those 42,000 unrecognized Good articles. Geoff