[WikiEN-l] Taking your eyes off the ball

Sat Oct 1 00:39:07 UTC 2005

You are right.

On 10/1/05, Mark Pellegrini <mapellegrini at comcast.net> wrote:
> I'm going to grouse a bit.
>
> I think far, far too much attention gets paid to the worst articles on
> Wikipedia - the studs, the vanity articles, the stuff of debatable
> notability (schools!!) while not nearly enough effort goes into making
> crappy articles into good ones.
>
> People on AFD love to argue about the crappiest articles. (It also tends
> to spill over to this mailing list) On the other side of the spectrum,
> the percentage of featured articles (number of featured articles / total
> number of articles) has been rapidly declining since March.
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_statistics).
> And yet no one seems care. Sometime this month, percentage of featured
> articles will drop below 0.1% -- less than 1 article in 1000 being a
> featured article.
>
> So while our article count is exploding [due to a massive influx of
> less-than-steller new articles.... think - traffic circles] and while
> the number of contributors has been steadily increasing, the number of
> new featured articles being produced has been a fairly steady 30-40 per
> month.
>
> Am I the only one who thinks we have our priorities out of order? We are
> we spending so much energy arguing about the horrible stuff that (for
> all intents) will never be seen or noticed when our important articles
> (think - Michael Brown, Tom DeLay, John  Roberts) are, well, not very good?
>
> -Mark
>
>
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