[WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

Tue Sep 12 20:11:38 UTC 2006

On 9/12/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

I have to say, though I've heard comments like this before, I'm not sure I
agree.  Standards do change on FAC, but that change has come in the form of
a slow improvement in standards; the last truly major shift was the
requirement for inline citations, which came into place around the start of
this year.  I have never seen a well written, well cited, comprehensive
article fail FAC.  This isn't to say that people don't raise frivolous
objections--they most certainly do--but those objections are generally
easily addressed or ignored, and you'll sometimes see FAC regulars pointing
out to objecters that, for instance, FAs are not required to have see also
sections (or whatever).  Likewise, it isn't to say that people don't
complain that objections raised against their article are frivolous, but as
someone who believes that "this is enirely sourced to poorly written
websites", "the prose in the article is subpar", and other ire-drawing types
of objections are quite valid, I don't see this as a sign that FAC isn't
working.  I haven't agreed with the result of every single FAC I've watched
or participated in, but the ones I've disagreed with have generally been
borderline cases.  If someone can bring forward evidence of clearly worthy
articles failing (or conversely, of seriously troubled articles passing),
please do so, but until such evidence is presented I don't find broad
assertions like this particularly convincing.

--Robth
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)