On 4/10/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: I'm familiar with this problem, but do you know of any detailed (if not particularly formal) analysis to see if it applies to Wikipedia, or even wiki editing in general? Not infrequently you hear people say "this article is a mess, nothing short of rewriting is required here". But I'm not convinced. Is it not possible, given an article in state T0, where state Tp is perfection, find small, realistic changes T1, T2 etc? In this particular instance, it seems that you could add *some* of the new material in a small enough block that the lack of citations or poor copyediting does not knock the article off its FA perch. Then, when that material has been brought up to scratch, add the next batch. Wholesale additions of poor quality material are generally quite destabilising for an article, and tend to piss off existing editors, who wonder when it will all stop... Steve

On 4/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote: Someone should do some analysis of Wikipedia article development cycles/processes. For some articles, I think in terms of an accordeon model. People add content, which is full of air, redundancy etc. Then more people add content in the same style. Then someone comes along and squeezes the whole lot down to its basic essence. A 500 word paragraph becomes a 200 word paragraph, almost without losing information. Other times, I see a huge slab of prose which has become so big that people feel uncomfortable adding to it. They see that the "History of X" section of the article is so long, they shouldn't touch it any more. I simply insert subheadings by year, and suddenly they realise that the period 1950-1960 is totally blank. I don't have a name for that model. Then other times, someone creates a stub, then someone else sees how to structure the article, and creates a whole structure full of subheadings, but with no actual text. But it actually constrains future editors, who wouldn't necessarily have used that particular structure. I came across a good example of this recently but can't find it now :/ There are probably lots of other models...a bit of analysis and we could find solutions to some of the problems, identify the models that work best etc. Steve

On 4/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm really getting confused now. You just described the whole process of how articles get improved on Wikipedia, and then say that they don't only get improved. I mean, yeah; sometimes people add stuff to Wikipedia that doesn't follow the style guide / is badly written, typos etc / isn't wholly neutral / isn't referenced / etc. And then someone else comes along and makes it better. That's the whole purpose of the collaborative process. Isn't that what it means for an article to "always get better"? Isn't that what we are doing? Maybe I am missing the point here, but... To put it in the strictest theoretical terms, an Wikipedia with zero edits is worthless. Wikipedia with infinite edits is perfect. I really believe that, mind you -- I believe that after infinite edits, Wikipedia will be perfect. Of course, we'll never get there, but each edit puts us closer. So all this talk about "deterioration" is puzzling to me. Ryan

On 4/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote: Deterioration is bad. But is it sufficiently common to be a problem? What are the relative rates of FA->non FA vs non-FA->FA transition? Steve

On 4/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote: Usually it's because the standard for featured articles has gone up. Ryan

On 4/10/06, Sam Korn <smoddy(a)gmail.com> wrote: [[Garry Kasparov]] was a personal favorite of mine. Check out its original FAC nomination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Garry_Ka… How many support votes do you see? Hmm... Ryan

On 4/10/06, Mathias Schindler <neubau(a)presroi.de> wrote: I'll tell you how you can achieve that goal immediately: Lower the standard to such a degree that all articles are included. Seriously, I don't think there is much point to such goals. Sure, they improve the encyclopedia, which is great. But people will cite statistics like "Only 0.1% of our articles are featured!" as if this means that Wikipedia sucks or something. No, it just means the standard for featuring is high, and if the gap between articles : featured articles is increasing, that just means the standard is going up. It has nothing to do with the objective quality of the encyclopedia; it's only the relative quality. That is, the relative quality between articles. Ryan

On 4/10/06, Mathias Schindler <neubau(a)presroi.de> wrote: You're doing it again. It's difficult to tell whether this kind of statement is pessimistic or driven toward endless improvement. But saying that the articles are crap is a subjective assertion that really says more about your attitude toward them than anything about the articles themselves. Personally, I don't agree that the average article on the English Wikipedia is crap. I think the average article on the English Wikipedia is probably decent, and likely to have more basic information about the topic in an accessible format than even a Google search would have produced. For example, if I am searching for information on something that is likely to be in Wikipedia, I'll often skip Google alltogether. IMHO, if an initiative is able to draw more attention to quality related Yeah, I agree with you there. But I'm sceptical about whether putting the focus on the featured article process is the best way to do this. Frequently people become obsessed with featuring the article they are currently working on and may attempt to game the political system as a way of getting a leg up on the FAC process, for example by recruiting their friends to support the article. I've also seen people object in a FAC by giving general objections and then the nominator responds that because there are no specific objections, the objection is "not actionable" and therefore invalid. When specific examples are given, the nominator corrects them but leaves many more still in the article, but expects the oppose vote to be withdrawn. There are many other symptoms of this behavior which I think is centered around this notion that a featured article is somehow inherently better than others, or that getting an article featured is more of an achievement than making good edits. We have Wikipedians who are bragging on their userpages about their "number of featured articles" and so on. That seems very backward to me; it's editing Wikipedia for recognition, not for its own sake. Besides, I react when people cite the number of featured articles as if it had something to do with the quality of our work. It really doesn't. Probably thousands of those articles are on subjects that just aren't interesting enough to get featured anyway. How many articles on train stations or stamps got featured? Not many. But that doesn't mean the articles are bad. Sometimes, creating a lot of short stubs is the right thing to do, in my opinion. Ryan

On 4/10/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sure, but only the ridiculously high 50% of the population with an IQ less than 100 would say that... Steve

On 4/10/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote: 50% of the population has an IQ less than 100. An arbitrary percentage chosen much as defining an FA to be in the top 0.1% of articles would be. Personally, I think we should stick with defining fixed criteria for FAs, and considering Wikipedia complete when 100% of articles are FAs. Steve

Steve Bennett wrote: If you mean "fixed" as in "feel free to specify or improve", I agree to the first part. If the world would stop spinning around, scientists stopped their work, wars ended and so one, Wikipedia would be complete when 100% of the relevant things and concepts in this reality would be FAs. It could not hurt to accept that wikipedia will never be finished. Approximation to this idea by various means might serve as a goal. Mathias

On 4/10/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: It'd be a sad day if Wikipedia were complete, but even so, I don't think that FA should be a goal for any or every article. The goal should be to get every article to FA quality; whether it's been featured or not is rather irrelevant in the long run. --keitei--