[WikiEN-l] Featured churn

[Kat Walsh]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Steve Bennett<stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Agreed -- I don't think the numerical counts of featured content mean
very much in terms of measuring quality improvement overall, because
of this effect. The showcase pieces, the ones that do get past the
ever-increasing hurdles, are great -- and I'm glad we have a process
for identifying them and bringing them into wider public view, both
because the creators deserve the recognition and because the public
ought to see it. But tracking the number doesn't give veyr much
information except as a comment on the process itself.

-Kat

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