[WikiEN-l] Taking your eyes off the ball

Sat Oct 1 00:33:16 UTC 2005

I'm going to grouse a bit.

I think far, far too much attention gets paid to the worst articles on 
Wikipedia - the studs, the vanity articles, the stuff of debatable 
notability (schools!!) while not nearly enough effort goes into making 
crappy articles into good ones.

People on AFD love to argue about the crappiest articles. (It also tends 
to spill over to this mailing list) On the other side of the spectrum, 
the percentage of featured articles (number of featured articles / total 
number of articles) has been rapidly declining since March. 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_statistics). 
And yet no one seems care. Sometime this month, percentage of featured 
articles will drop below 0.1% -- less than 1 article in 1000 being a 
featured article.

So while our article count is exploding [due to a massive influx of 
less-than-steller new articles.... think - traffic circles] and while 
the number of contributors has been steadily increasing, the number of 
new featured articles being produced has been a fairly steady 30-40 per 
month.

Am I the only one who thinks we have our priorities out of order? We are 
we spending so much energy arguing about the horrible stuff that (for 
all intents) will never be seen or noticed when our important articles 
(think - Michael Brown, Tom DeLay, John  Roberts) are, well, not very good?

-Mark