[WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

Tue Sep 12 13:44:28 UTC 2006

On 9/12/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on Recent
> Changes:
>
> Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as
> possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in the
> world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing the
> focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles that
> we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million
> articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.
>
> Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over 230,000 without
> any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles
> without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these articles an
> hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all ... and this does not
>  include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain spurious
> information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.
>
> Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some
> examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]] (who
> fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc. These articles
> are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia.
>
> This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to shift
> the focus. I therefore propose two solutions:
>
> 1. The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested feature
> articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus
> should be on improving existing articles.
........
> Danny

Impossible. Featured articles are determined by FAC, which is as
ridden or more so with politics as AFD, DRV, and other such eyesores:
standards are constantly shifting and unevenly applied. Good Articles
itself has turned into a mockery of FAC.

Most Featured Articles are great articles, but most great articles are not FAs.