On 4/10/06, Mathias Schindler <neubau(a)presroi.de> wrote:
Yes, some people might read those statistics as
"Even wikipedia says
that 99,8 per cent of the articles are crap" and to some degree, one
must agree: The average article is very currently poorly referenced,
formatted, sourced, comprehensive and so on (this applies also to en.wp
IMHO). It is no help that traditional encyclopedias have even less
external references.
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
aspects, I generally support it. If an initiative no
longer has this
ability, it can be neglected or abolished. This is one of the reasons
de.wp got rid of this {{stub}} template.
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more still in the article, but expects the oppose vote to be withdrawn.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