[WikiEN-l] Re: Taking your eyes off the ball

Sat Oct 1 02:08:24 UTC 2005

I couldn't have said it better myself.  I think by now that some series of articles should be updated together so that they are all featured.  For example: nations of the world, US presidents, British monarchs, etc.

There's plenty of information that we have, and plenty that we've overlooked.  Coordinated efforts to bring articles up to featured status need emphasis.  The Collaborations of the Week are a good start, but the track record of past CotW's is poor.

--Ryan

> From: Mark Pellegrini <mapellegrini at comcast.net>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Taking your eyes off the ball
> 
> 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

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." -Jimmy Wales, July 2004

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