[WikiEN-l] Deterioration of Featured Articles

[Bryan Derksen]

Ben Greenberg wrote:
> The biggest problem that wikipedia is facing right now is deterioration.  I 
> really don't find the featured article review to be effective enough to 
> prevent featured articles from getting worse.  What ideas do you guys have 
> for how we could prevent featured article deterioration?
>   
Deterioration might not be so bad. In evolutionary optimization (for 
example via genetic algorithms) a concept that's often mentioned is the 
"fitness landscape", a graph showing the relative fitness of all 
possible solutions to a particular problem. The landscape for most 
problems is usually hilly, with peaks around the solutions that are 
relatively good and valleys where they're particularly bad. But peaks 
may only be locally optimal, with higher peaks elsewhere. If an article 
reaches a quality peak we shouldn't be too devoted to keeping it there 
since somewhere else there might be an even better possible version to 
reach. For example, new material might be added covering some aspect of 
the article's topic that wasn't covered previously, but the new material 
has bad grammar and sparse citations and is "bad" enough to knock the 
article off of Featured status. The best approach in this case is not to 
just revert to the old version, but rather clean up the new material to 
result in an even better article than it was before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape#Fitness_landscapes_in_evolutionary_optimization 
has a nice diagram.