On 10/2/05, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: If this is an accurate statement of the problem, and the reason for it, then I fail to see a real problem. Articles whose quality degrades over time can be reverted to an acceptable version. If the problem is rising standards, stop raising the standards. And adopt a more productive process. The current process is sterile, masturbatory and in my opinion does not produce articles of high quality, but rather encourages editors to indulge the stylistic quibbles of a few voters. What if we took 100 articles every day, chosen at random. Debate whether they are not worthy of featured status. After five days all articles *except* those for which there is a consensus that they aren't featurable are raised to featured status. There is no reason why we shouldn't treat any random article as featurable on our front if there is not a good argument not to. We could delete AfD and redirect to this process. I'm only half joking. Think of it as a Modest Proposal. If the problem is that keep voters on AfD are squandering their talents on borderline articles, get them to refocus on cleaning up potential FAs. As a test, here are the first ten articles I obtained just now by pressing the Random Page link. I did a quick cleanup where on the first one (Mis-Teeq) but left the others alone. I see no reason why any one of these, save one, shouldn't appear on our front. They're all informative on their subject and correctly represent Wikipedia as a very eclectic work in progress. Come on, who ever thought there'd be a law case called " U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._v._One_Package_of_Japanese_P… "? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mis-Teeq http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Abkhazia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society_of_Wildlife_Trusts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swingers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod_Hunt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Belli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Chi_Alpha The exception of the ten is this one, which in my opinion needs extensive cleanup and expansion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_contraception

On 10/2/05, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: short not enough references [etc] Quite. All of these failings could be addressed in a five-day AfD-like process where 100 articles are listed at random and either improved to presentable standard or, if consensus exists to reject, marked as in need of attention. There are many, many articles that are nearly ready for the main page; a process that produced more than 100 featurable articles per day would be feasible and would probably be a better use of the copious resources expended on AfD. Afd is unnecessary. Hoax articles and other unverifiable stuff could be listed and processed in a WP:CP-like system. Verifiability should be added to the key policies of Wikipedia to facilitate this. An unverifable article should not be retained on Wikipedia no matter how many people vote for its retention.

On 10/2/05, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: This isn't a problem. It's what has made English Wikipedia one of the largest reference works in the English language. Articles on subjects in which nobody shows any interest should probably not be on our main page.

On 10/2/05, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: We don't want "not very good articles" on the main page. I still don't see how your observation of people's personal preferences supports your argument that this is a "problem". If as you claim only one person is interested in it, what's it doing as a FA?

On 10/2/05, charles matthews &lt;charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote: I know how it works. I'm suggesting that articles of no interest to anyone except the author (and I don't happen to think the example given comes anywhere near qualifying for that particular condition) probably shouldn't be FAs. Conversely, articles of wide interest, even though imperfect, should probably take precedence over polished articles on less interesting subjects. The main page isn't really the right place to showcase solely writing and organisational skills, because really those are very much subsidiary to making useful information accessible to all. In short, the answer to worries about having too few featured articles is to feature far more, many many times more, articles on the main page. Even those ten randomly chosen articles wouldn't take much work to make them perfectly acceptable for the main page.

On 10/2/05, Tony Sidaway &lt;f.crdfa(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: No. of people interested in it is not a featured article criteria. Remember in thoery any article if it is of a high enough standard can become a featured article -- geni

Ray Saintonge wrote: This is an idea I've been toying with myself - giving the parts of the community concerned with a topic (WikiProjects, basically) more autonomy in their respective fields. We already do that in some ways - [[WP:MUSIC]], [[WP:SFD]]. Of course, this could lead to a certain "inbreeding" / "groupthink" mentality. grm_wnr

On 10/2/05, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: You're proposing that Wikipedia's greatest strength is a problem. In general terms, I couldn't disagree more strongly. People write at Wikipedia because they want to. First, we should recognize that they want to write about what they're interested in and strongly encourage them to do so. This gets them involved here. Then, we must recognize that volunteer editors will only write about articles they aren't interested in if they're motivated by another related interest. I had no prior interest in [[Sigurd Syr]] before contributing to the article on him. What I did have an interest in, was improving Wikipedia, and making an apology to User:Briangotts, and he selected [[Sigurd Syr]] as my assignment when I offered to make a referenced, content contributing, good faith edit to an article of his choice. Although I think I did a pretty good job with Sigurd, I never would have done so if I'd not been interested in the other goals of my edit. A second example: in an edit summary on the [[FairTax]] article, I thought I was a little harsh, so I apologized to User:Morphh, who until that day, had only ever edited FairTax, FairTax talk, and the talk pages of a few other editors on that single article. Well, I made my offer, and gently insisted that I wanted to do an edit for him. He assigned me my choice of articles in the topic of [[Life extension]] or [[Transhumanism]] and I chose [[Roy Walford]]. As a direct result of this, he posted on his talk page, the following: "Very nice. A side effect of your proposal is my own exploration of wikipedia. I've added half a dozen sections to my watch list. I've already made small edits. I don't have the time to make good contributions to many articles but its fun to get involved. The amount of information available on this site is amazing." And now Morphh has begun to edit outside of FairTax. So the puzzle is NOT to prevent people from writing about what they're interested in, but to find newer and more creative ways to get them interested in a broader range of topics. -- Michael Turley User:Unfocused

On 10/2/05, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I have not closed any AfDs for some weeks and I have no plans to participate in AfD, excepting a vote here and there, in the future.

On 10/2/05, Tony Sidaway &lt;f.crdfa(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Or start a new system. Current system is to focused on the main page space. -- geni