Kirill Lokshin wrote:
On 9/12/06, geni geniice@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