[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

[Kat Walsh]

On 10/7/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> One problem I see with the FA process is that a lot of the articles
> are incredibly esoteric. If you're a specialist in a field, you're
> highly motivated to write a REALLY GOOD article about something you
> know well. There seems to be less motivation to get the *really
> general* articles up to featured status. God help the person who tries
> to get [[Earth]] past the present FAC process and keep it under 200KB.

The main problem I see is that's it's *hard* to cover a very general
topic both comprehensively and concisely, particularly when any one
person working on it probably knows only one or two areas of the topic
well -- whereas you can cover just about everything important for a
good encyclopedic treatment of a minor subtopic in a couple
screenfuls, and without having to read as many references to be sure
of getting a good picture.

In many cases a very general topic requires several people working
together who are all motivated to feature it, probably all at once if
you want to be able to address everyone's objections, where the niche
topic will only take one motivated obsessive specialist to push it
over the top. :-) Eventualism is nice, but it requires rather a bit of
patience...

-Kat
[[User:Mindspillage]]

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