[WikiEN-l] Taking your eyes off the ball

[Justin Cormack]

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?