[WikiEN-l] Featured churn

[Steve Bennett]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 5:01 PM, Matthew Brown<morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> My long-time observation is that the people who obsess about FA over
> the long term want to keep the number of articles with that status
> approximately constant by making the standards more and more difficult
> to meet.

Yeah, we see that on FPC (featured pics) - and RfA (admins) for that
matter. There's probably a term for this somewhere. I don't think it's
malicious, but a fact that when you constantly review stuff, you get
jaded, and compare each item to all the great examples in the past.
It's almost like a drug, you need bigger highs each time to register.
Or maybe it's just perfectionism - it's very easy to quibble over tiny
flaws, and miss the bigger picture.

Here's a great example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/Face_of_a_Southern_Yellowjacket_Queen

What an incredible image. This is a *wasp*, and we have great detail
of the *hairs* on its forehead. Stunning sharpness, and this photo
would not be out of place in a good science magazine. Yet two editors
managed to oppose its promotion to "featured" on the basis of the tip
of one antenna being obscured by an out of focus leaf fragment.
Another, neutral, came up with "An amazing detail and sharpness...with
a clumsy framing and cropping ruining an otherwise excellent picture.
... I will not support the promotion as I find little excuse for those
flaws."

These would be perfectly apt comments if we were voting on National
Geographic's "photo of the year". But Wikipedia "featured picture"?
Whee.

Steve