[WikiEN-l] 100, 000 FAs as an achievable goal with a plan (was Contest and quality)

[Andrew Gray]

On 13/09/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/13/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I believe this is in fact a standard view on FAC - that if too many
> > articles are passing then they need to be pickier. Which is fine if
> > its goal is to award prizes for exceptional brilliance, but not if
> > it's to pull up the quality of the whole encyclopedia - which is what
> > I meant about whether the amount of editor work it takes to get past
> > FAC is actually worth it for the effect on the article.
>
> Maybe we could use the "A-Class" rating from the WikiProject
> assessments here?  The projects would be in a good position to
> determine whether an article passed most of the FA criteria; what we'd
> get, presumably, are articles which are comprehensive, accurate,
> neutral, etc., but which may have minor faults -- particularly in
> regards to prose style -- that wouldn't quite meet the "very best
> work" criterion.

I've just been discussing this elsewhere, and my proposal:

At the top of the pyramid, leave FA as it is now, but emphasise that
it's a prize for our (subjectively?) "best" articles rather than those
which are objectively above a specific level (inclusive of shrubberies
and other clutter).

This takes FAC in the direction it seems to naturally want to go, and
allows us to make A-class into the "article scoring top marks and
ticking all the boxes" level.

So we formalise A-class, adopt some way of centrally recording all of
them like we do with good articles and featured articles. But what we
don't do is create a formal process for it... rather, we leave it to
the wikiprojects. They know the field; they know what's needed and
what the normal conventions are and so on. There's a central set of
standards, but they can modify those standards to their own fields
(requiring maps for geographical articles, say), they hold the
discussions in a fairly decentralised way, and everyone's happy.

Then the next layer of recognition is our trusty Good Articles, which
at the moment are not quite working as anticipated (1400 articles?).
We throw this open. Nominally, anyone can nominate and anyone can
approve a GA; we want to emphasise this fact. Get projects to do it.
Have ad-hoc committees do it. Have one editor mark some articles as
candidates, then go to another and say "Can you look over this list
and see what you agree with?". Bingo, much more throughput, much more
chance of a good article being recognised as such.

(For good and A-class articles, yes, this could be open to abuse. But
I can think of two or three ways offhand to handle abuses of the
proposed system; it's worth at least giving it a shot)

I don't think this will solve all our problems - it won't magically
create new good writing. But it will help us identify quality and it
will help us appreciate its creators, and that'll bring many
benefits...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk