[WikiEN-l] Featured churn

[Carcharoth]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 10:38 AM, Charles
Matthews<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Kat Walsh wrote:
>>  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.
>>
> Yes, in a way it's sad we have so much attention on gatekeeping and
> absolute standards (well, as has been said, high and upwardly mobile
> standards), and so little recognition on great added-value edits, the
> ones which take an article into a different class of usefulness. As far
> as I know the transition from B class to A class is still considered to
> be the most transforming, from the reader's point of view.

Absolutely. And also the transition from unintelligibility (or poor
stub or no article) to something with more frameworking and attempts
at comprehensiveness. A *good* transition from stub to start-class can
be vital to the future "health" of an article, just as a bad
transition (or poor initial creation) can lead to trouble later.

Indeed, something looking at the traffic and flow of articles up this
quality scale would be good. I think the main thing discouraging
people from doing that is the unreliability of the assessments outside
of FA, A and GA. But in any topic area, making clear what the
"internal" standards are for stub, start, C, B, and A class articles
and sorting articles into those categories is good, but it HAS to be
followed up with attempts at improving the articles. Otherwise it has
been an exercise in paperwork, in the (sometimes vain) hope that a
writer will come along and improve the articles.

Maybe a wikiproject with a strong and reliable history of *both*
assessment and improvement of articles could give a narrative and
timeline of how their articles have improved?

Carcharoth