[WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

[Delirium]

Kirill Lokshin wrote:
> On 9/12/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Wikipedia is not popual due to it's FAs and GAs. It's popular becuase
>> of it's good enough articles.
>>     
>
> True.  But being respectable is not really the same thing as being
> popular; and I was under the impression that the former was a more
> practical concern for us than the latter.
>   


I'd personally be more interested in being *useful*, which is an 
eminently practical concern.  From that perspective, a lot of different 
things are important.  Having "good enough" articles on as wide a range 
of subjects as possible is definitely high up on the list---we provide 
information that is difficult to come by otherwise.  Having very good 
articles, especially on frequently-consulted topics or topics where 
errors would be more problematic (biographies; national/ethnic disputes; 
technical subjects) is another important consideration.  More to the 
point, it's quite helpful to allow a reader to quickly identify how good 
we think an article is.

It's not clear to me what role, if any, the GA/FA process plays in any 
of these concerns.  It doesn't tell a reader which articles are good, 
because it rates articles as a whole rather than revisions---FA status 
provides no guarantee that the current article is any better than a 
similar-looking non-FA article.  It appears to provide only a moderate 
and highly beaurocratic method of encouraging article improvement in the 
first place.  On the whole I'd say I personally never pay attention to 
whether an article is "featured", and I don't know anyone else who does 
either.  It simply doesn't solve any of the practical problems that come 
up when reading Wikipedia.

-Mark