I recently came across two articles in the last 24 hours that were candidates for Featured Article status. Both asserted that because they were GAs, FA was the logical next step.
Only one big problem...
The articles literally sucked and shouldn't have been GAs in the first place.
The GA criteria is a good criteria, but it's only as strong a standard as the standards applied by the most lenient promoting editor. Either the process needs to be reformed, or more oversight over the GA list is needed. I also fear there are many articles masquerading as GAs that have not gone through the process legitimately. Either someone unilaterally promoted their article to GA, or nominated for GA and had a friend do the promoting. These are usually obvious from my observations.
I'm intending to go through the GA list later this evening and into the night and sweep out a lot of the non-GA-worthy articles. Delisting en masse articles that are blatantly not meeting the requirements of the criteria. Sure it might look slightly arbitrary, unilateral and subjective...but then again, the entire process is just that. I'll try to do this as objectively as possible, with plenty of notes as to why these articles should have failed GA.
I estimate that an objective clean sweep might remove at least 10-20% of the articles currently listed at GA. 10%, or about 170 articles, would be a good conservative estimate.
Any comments?
If anyone wants to join me in this endeavour, many hands do make light work. For instance, I'm not much of a science or mathematics guy. But my forte is geography, literature, history, philosophy and social sciences. So if we can have a few people with various expertise join in, this might work out for the better.
Regards,
Christopher D. Thieme cdthieme@gmail.com User:ExplorerCDT
Good Articles should not go a strenous process like Featured Articles simply because they're merely good articles, not judged like a dog at a dog show. However, I agree with concerns that the process for making an article GA is far too unilateral. Maybe it can be nominated for five days -- if there's no (valid) objection after that time, then it can be promoted.
On 1/11/07, Christopher Thieme cdthieme@gmail.com wrote:
I recently came across two articles in the last 24 hours that were candidates for Featured Article status. Both asserted that because they were GAs, FA was the logical next step.
Only one big problem...
The articles literally sucked and shouldn't have been GAs in the first place.
The GA criteria is a good criteria, but it's only as strong a standard as the standards applied by the most lenient promoting editor. Either the process needs to be reformed, or more oversight over the GA list is needed. I also fear there are many articles masquerading as GAs that have not gone through the process legitimately. Either someone unilaterally promoted their article to GA, or nominated for GA and had a friend do the promoting. These are usually obvious from my observations.
I'm intending to go through the GA list later this evening and into the night and sweep out a lot of the non-GA-worthy articles. Delisting en masse articles that are blatantly not meeting the requirements of the criteria. Sure it might look slightly arbitrary, unilateral and subjective...but then again, the entire process is just that. I'll try to do this as objectively as possible, with plenty of notes as to why these articles should have failed GA.
I estimate that an objective clean sweep might remove at least 10-20% of the articles currently listed at GA. 10%, or about 170 articles, would be a good conservative estimate.
Any comments?
If anyone wants to join me in this endeavour, many hands do make light work. For instance, I'm not much of a science or mathematics guy. But my forte is geography, literature, history, philosophy and social sciences. So if we can have a few people with various expertise join in, this might work out for the better.
Regards,
Christopher D. Thieme cdthieme@gmail.com User:ExplorerCDT _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Jan 11, 2007, at 15:52, Christopher Thieme wrote:
I recently came across two articles in the last 24 hours that were candidates for Featured Article status. Both asserted that because they were GAs, FA was the logical next step.
Only one big problem...
The articles literally sucked and shouldn't have been GAs in the first place.
The GA criteria is a good criteria, but it's only as strong a standard as the standards applied by the most lenient promoting editor. Either the process needs to be reformed, or more oversight over the GA list is needed.
<snip/>
Any comments?
Personally, I think GA needs less, less, less oversight. If it sucks, remove the GA status. GA is not FA-in-training; it's a designation for decent articles which aren't exceedingly amazing, but are accurate, reasonably complete, "good" articles. Apparently it was meant to have none of the bureaucracy FAC has... Ha...
I agree the process needs to be reformed, but I'd say that the standards need to be less uptight and less FA-wannabe. Promoting an article to GA should not be complex and neither should delisting it. FA and GA have separate places in the 'pedia for a reason.
--keitei