[WikiEN-l] Re: Taking your eyes off the ball

[Mark Pellegrini]

There's a frighteningly large amount of misinformation being thrown 
around here, so let me attempt to inject some real information into the 
discussion.

First, we're promoting slightly more than one article per day (after 280 
something days in 2005, we've promoted something like 295 articles). So 
at the present rate, we could have a new, different featured article on 
the main page every day forever. (Oh, and Mero, last week, we promoted 9 
featured articles, not 4)

Second, the FAC process is designed to expose flaws in an article. 
That's why all objections have to be actionable (and, corrospondingly, 
specific enough so as to be actionable). Someone has to fix the problems 
in order for an article to be promoted, and that job usually falls to 
the nominator. I do not like the idea of forcing the reviewers to fix 
the article - that's just a bad idea.

As for Tony's idea - well, I don't want to put too fine a point of this 
because I respect Tony, but his idea 
(http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-October/029601.html) 
is terrible. Unredeemably bad, in fact. The FAC is a sane, well-mainted 
part of Wikipedia *THAT ACTUALLY GENERATES GOOD ARTICLES*. So, let's 
scrap the process and make it more like Votes for Deletion, eh? Oh, 
wonderful idea...
It introduce a massive bureacracy to what is a rather effecient process 
(and don't take my word on that -- library science graduate students 
studied the FAC process and concluded that it "is not ideal, but it does 
seem relatively rigorous."- 
http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki.pdf -- remind me again 
how many research studies have concluded that the VFD/AFD works well?)  
Tony's proposed changes represent a huge step backwards. Consider the 
example articles Tony pointed at. If those articles "Exemplify 
Wikipedia's best articles", then he has rather low expectations. The 
featured article criteria are the standards we hold articles to, and 
every single one those articles is lacking (as Geni pointed out). Is 
holding articles to a high standard a bad thing? I would hope not.

-Mark