[WikiEN-l] Good Articles is a mess...time for a clean sweep.

[Christopher Thieme]

I recently came across two articles in the last 24 hours that were
candidates for Featured Article status.  Both asserted that because they
were GAs, FA was the logical next step.

Only one big problem...

The articles literally sucked and shouldn't have been GAs in the first
place.

The GA criteria is a good criteria, but it's only as strong a standard
as the standards applied by the most lenient promoting editor.   Either the
process needs to be reformed, or more oversight over the GA list is needed.
I also fear there are many articles masquerading as GAs that have not gone
through the process legitimately.  Either someone unilaterally promoted
their article to GA, or nominated for GA and had a friend do the promoting.
These are usually obvious from my observations.

I'm intending to go through the GA list later this evening and into the
night and sweep out a lot of the non-GA-worthy articles.  Delisting en masse
articles that are blatantly not meeting the requirements of the criteria.
Sure it might look slightly arbitrary, unilateral and subjective...but then
again, the entire process is just that.  I'll try to do this as objectively
as possible, with plenty of notes as to why these articles should have
failed GA.

I estimate that an objective clean sweep might remove at least 10-20% of the
articles currently listed at GA.  10%, or about 170 articles, would be a
good conservative estimate.

Any comments?

If anyone wants to join me in this endeavour, many hands do make light
work.  For instance, I'm not much of a science or mathematics guy.  But my
forte is geography, literature, history, philosophy and social sciences.  So
if we can have a few people with various expertise join in, this might work
out for the better.

Regards,

Christopher D. Thieme
cdthieme at gmail.com
User:ExplorerCDT