On 4/10/06, Mathias Schindler neubau@presroi.de wrote:
Yes, some people might read those statistics as "Even wikipedia says that 99,8 per cent of the articles are crap" and to some degree, one must agree: The average article is very currently poorly referenced, formatted, sourced, comprehensive and so on (this applies also to en.wp IMHO). It is no help that traditional encyclopedias have even less external references.
You're doing it again. It's difficult to tell whether this kind of statement is pessimistic or driven toward endless improvement. But saying that the articles are crap is a subjective assertion that really says more about your attitude toward them than anything about the articles themselves. Personally, I don't agree that the average article on the English Wikipedia is crap. I think the average article on the English Wikipedia is probably decent, and likely to have more basic information about the topic in an accessible format than even a Google search would have produced. For example, if I am searching for information on something that is likely to be in Wikipedia, I'll often skip Google alltogether.
IMHO, if an initiative is able to draw more attention to quality related
aspects, I generally support it. If an initiative no longer has this ability, it can be neglected or abolished. This is one of the reasons de.wp got rid of this {{stub}} template.
Yeah, I agree with you there. But I'm sceptical about whether putting the focus on the featured article process is the best way to do this. Frequently people become obsessed with featuring the article they are currently working on and may attempt to game the political system as a way of getting a leg up on the FAC process, for example by recruiting their friends to support the article. I've also seen people object in a FAC by giving general objections and then the nominator responds that because there are no specific objections, the objection is "not actionable" and therefore invalid. When specific examples are given, the nominator corrects them but leaves many more still in the article, but expects the oppose vote to be withdrawn.
There are many other symptoms of this behavior which I think is centered around this notion that a featured article is somehow inherently better than others, or that getting an article featured is more of an achievement than making good edits. We have Wikipedians who are bragging on their userpages about their "number of featured articles" and so on. That seems very backward to me; it's editing Wikipedia for recognition, not for its own sake.
Besides, I react when people cite the number of featured articles as if it had something to do with the quality of our work. It really doesn't. Probably thousands of those articles are on subjects that just aren't interesting enough to get featured anyway. How many articles on train stations or stamps got featured? Not many. But that doesn't mean the articles are bad. Sometimes, creating a lot of short stubs is the right thing to do, in my opinion.
Ryan