[WikiEN-l] Some more unscientific findings

Sat Dec 10 06:19:25 UTC 2005

On Fri, 9 Dec 2005, Mark Wagner wrote:

> The reason that far more articles are being listed on VfD than are
> being listed on peer review is twofold: Listing something on VfD
> involves a much smaller time commitment, and there is much more
> material suitable for deletion than is suitable for listing on peer
> review.  At a rough estimate, a VfD listing takes 20 minutes over five
> days, while a peer review listing takes 5-10 hours over the course of
> a week.

And that may be the weakness of the FAC process: articles that aren't
above average will never even reach Peer review, & an otherwise solid
& useful contribution remains unrecognized. Your point is borne out in
the statistics of this process: about two-thirds of all articles that
get to Peer review end up FAs. Add Former FAs to FAs, & the proportion
is even higher. People tend to submit articles to the process that they
are certain will be approved, & not as an inquiry into the quality
of the material.

The process I am trying to describe as "an inquiry into the quality
of the material" is how I use AfD. I often stumble across an article that
I suspect should be deleted, but does not fall under the guidelines of
"Speedy delete", so I nominate it on AfD with a careful argument for its
deletion. At that point, I am asking for advice or more information on
the article, & whether it is kept, deleted, or whatever is not an urgent
matter to me; if someone persuasively explains that I am mistaken about
the article, then I would be more than happy to withdraw my nomination
& fight to keep the article.

Back to my point, which is that Peer review does not work to sift out
articles that are good or even competent. It is used to find only the
Himalayas & Alps of quality, & for the rest of Wikipedia one is left to
assume that it is either a swamp of stubs & cleanup projects, or a vast
nondescript flat plain of mediocrity. If that is the case, then we
badly need something like [[Category:Good articles]] to help find the
competent, yet not excellent work -- at least until the article rating
feature is added. (Although the 2 systems might work well in parallel
for a while.)

Geoff