Re: [WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

If [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] were wonderful, featured articles then he could have picked any of the dozens upon dozens of other biographies of major figures who haven't had a full editing treatment from many knowledgeable editors. The "find crappy articles on Wikipedia" game is not one we can ever win -- the person looking for crap will find it. The *real* criticism would be to look at featured articles and find the crap in them. To say that "even in the self-described best of the best, they can't get it together." When people do that -- okay, there might be a real cause for concern. But if they're looking at articles which just haven't had the benefit of a swirl of interested and informed attention -- well, that's always going to be the majority of the encyclopedia in the way things are done here. There's no point in which the numbers on that will ever really change. Wikipedia is not going to ever be valued for its "completeness" or its "coherency" -- it will be valued for its intellectual property model, its breadth, its concept, its speed, and, in the end, some aspect of its "usefulness", which is a moving target. But if we are truly worried about some articles being "bad representatives", it might be nice to really explicitly prioritize some of them. We do have that list of "100 articles which should be in every encyclopedia" or something like that for all of the new-language Wikis to consider as a starting point -- maybe we need to re-apply that to EN and really get out there to encourage people to find things on that list (or another list of some sort) which are important to get into a "featured" state *not* because the article is necessarily horribly flawed in some way, but because the *topic* of the article is of a high-enough priority to the world-at-large that if we goof on it, it'll look like a bad thing. It would also be a good way to march towards 1.0 if people are still interested in that. (If this is somewhat incoherent, I apologize -- it has been a long day.) FF On 10/6/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: