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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by RunedChozo (talk | contribs) at 18:57, 14 February 2007 (→‎From the [[Philosophy]] department). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Comments

Wikipedia doesn't claim to be reliable. Read the disclaimer. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 18:44, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The issue is what it aims to be, not what it claims. Encarta and Britannica have disclaimers too. That can hardly be taken as the mission statement. Try reading Wikipedia:About and links therein. Worldtraveller 19:52, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The other issues, of slipping quality and such, should be helped with the introduction of the stable versions system in a few months. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 18:46, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That's been talked about for years. Always a 'few months' away. WP:STABLE is marked as inactive. Worldtraveller 19:52, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Random Article Test Results

I performed a Random Article test, and here are my results. The comments only reflect my personal opinions, of course.

10,000_Shots - an album from 2005. Not encyclopedic quality. But it is interesting to note that the article exists. I don't know too many encyclopedias that list album information for Canadian Celtic Punk bands.

Diego_Alvarez_Chanca - one line about a physician of Columbus. Not encyclopedic quality.

Yugoslavia_at_the_1932_Summer_Olympics - 2 sentences about the event. Not encyclopedic quality.

Mesoridazine - a pharmaceutical removed from the US market in 2004. A couple of paragraphs. Not a bad article.

TAUVEX - a space telescope array designed and constructed in Israel - pretty good article, IMHO.

Pietro_Badoglio,_2nd_Duke_of_Addis_Abeba - I am not sure who the Duke of Addis Abeba is, and this 3-line and 1 table article didn't really help. Not encyclopedic quality.

Galung_language - Two sentences about an entire language. Not encyclopedic quality.

Fraser_Valley_Action - not a bad article about a soccer team. Lots of charts and team rosters. It seems that the comment stating that articles about pop culture that do not need an expert are plentiful and more complete has some validity.

Cathedral_of_Christ_the_Saviour_(Moscow) - Pretty good article. I'd say of encyclopedic quality.

Andrew_Holmes - 3 sentence bio of an American officer in the War of 1812. Not encyclopedic quality. - but again, would this article even exist in any other encyclopedia?

Chad78 17:34, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thread moved from the Village Pump

[previously posted at WP:VPM#Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_failing]
Wikipedia doesn't claim to be reliable or reputable. Read the disclaimer. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 18:45, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well if people don't even believe that the aim of the whole project is to write a reliable and reputable reference work, no wonder there are severe quality problems! Worldtraveller 19:52, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
See this. DurovaCharge! 23:31, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe I'm being too impatient when I worry that it will take a century to produce a quality encyclopaedia of any substantial size. I'm not being melodramatic - it actually would take about 150 years to generate 50,000 featured articles. Wouldn't you like a quality, reliable and authoritative free encyclopaedia before that? Worldtraveller 00:32, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but that's not going to happen. The fact remains, no matter what you do, this encyclopedia is run by volunteers, which means that you can not incentivise your writers to go faster. If you try to make people go faster, they ignore you or they quit. And something really doesn't have to be featured to be good. -Amarkov moo! 03:11, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Wikis have inherent problems with reliability and authoritativeness. I'm not sure how you extrapolate your prediction about featured articles - it seems to proceed from a premise that featuring will happen at a constant rate. With a growing editor pool, and with existing articles collecting improvements and citations, I find it hard to predict what that curve will be. Also bear in mind the standards for featuring: compare Pericles to the comparable article at Britannica or Bartleby's or Encarta. None of the others have line citations - they'd be rated B or A grade on our scale. Yet the Wikipedia article has over 150 line citations and an extensive bibliography. What any encyclopedia strives to provide is a basic introduction to a subject and a starting point for further research. Arguably, Wikipedia already does that very well although the quality here is uneven. DurovaCharge! 03:18, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

you can not incentivise your writers to go faster - speed of writing is very much not the problem. There are over 600 million words in the English Wikipedia. The problem is the lack of incentives to write better. I'd far rather have an encyclopaedia one tenth of the size of what we have now that had ten times the number of high quality articles. The system at the moment just encourages prolific creation of mediocre to dreadful articles, and the very slow raising of a very small number to featured standards.

I'm not sure how you extrapolate your prediction about featured articles - yes, I assume the rate is linear. That's been the case for the last 16 months, during which time the quality content has slipped from representing 0.1% of the encyclopaedia to 0.077%, according to WP:GAS.

None of the others have line citations - they don't need them. We need them because, as you say, wikis have inherent problems. Interesting to see that actually Pericles cites Britannica, several times. That's very poor practice. And that's a featured article - my analysis assumed that all of them actually are top quality.

What any encyclopedia strives to provide is a basic introduction to a subject and a starting point for further research - but according to many statements, we're not just trying to provide basic introductions, we're trying to build something britannica quality or better. Many teachers now tell their students not to use Wikipedia. That's a pretty shocking state of affairs. Worldtraveller 11:06, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

May I suggest moving this thread (from below the original notice) to the talk page of the essay? -- Ben 16:24, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

[end of moved thread]


Teachers tell their students not to use Wikipedia primarily not because it doesn't have enough Featured Articles, but because all articles are subject to radical change and insertion of incorrect information at any given time. That has nothing to do with insufficient incentives to write better, but with "anyone can edit". You're conflating two different criticisms. --AnonEMouse (squeak) 15:49, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In the university setting at least, students can't use WP for the same reason they can't use Encyclopedia Brittanica or the World Book or any other encyclopedia - because encyclopedias are not scholarly sources. Even the most elementary freshman paper is expected to rely on primary and secondary sources rather than encyclopedias. There is nothing unique about WP here, except that it is more visible for some reason. CMummert · talk 15:53, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The basic premise here seems to be that in order to be a quality article, an article must be a featured article. There is also an implicit assumption that every article should or will eventually become a featured article. These assumptions are both wrong. The FA process is not designed in such a way to encourage all articles to become featured articles, and in many cases it is not clear that the benefit of getting an article to pass an FA review would be worth the time and effort required to do so. If the entire "featured article" designation disappeared overnight, it would not mean that there were suddenly no quality articles at all... CMummert · talk 02:30, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think that in order to be a quality article, an article must meet the featured article criteria, whether it's passed through the process or not. I also think that any encyclopaedia would surely want every single one of its articles to be of high quality, however it defined that. I think you've made a very significant point when you say that FAC is not designed to encourage all articles to become featured. 99% of editors are content to ignore it, and the criteria, because their article is up on one of the most popular websites in the world no matter how awful it is. There is an almost total lack of incentives for people to produce quality, encyclopaedic work, and by whatever reasonable definition of quality you come up with, there is a frightening dearth of quality content here.
Let's imagine that there are ten times as many 'quality' articles as there are featured articles, and that they're produced at a proportional rate. That would give us 12,000 currently and 11 more every day. To get to a respectable 50,000 quality articles, we're going to be waiting ten years. And if no more articles are ever created, it would take 400 years for them all to be of good or excellent quality.
A further problem is that, say we get to 50,000 quality articles, those 50,000 are not actually going to form a useful reference work based on current trends. Even after six years of work, not even one in twenty of the vital articles has been brought up to excellent quality. Very few core topics are being actively worked on. Worldtraveller 10:51, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Added essay tag and shortcut

For the sake of clarity and ease of reference, I've added "{{essay|[[WP:WIF]]}}" at the top of the essay, and created WP:WIF as a shortcut to it. -- Ben 16:16, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree

I haven't been here long, but my impression is that it isn't failing at all – far from it. We could probably use a little more funding, and I'm not going to pretend that there aren't issues, but I think that given the inherent limitations and problems of the wiki model, it's doing about as well as anyone could ever expect. Fixing any of the major problems would introduce others – for example, we could disable anonymous editing, which would reduce vandalism and improve reliability, but would drastically reduce growth. Large though it is, I think Wikipedia is still limited enough in its coverage and depth that we need to encourage growth as much as possible. Remember that the project is and always will be a work in progress – Qxz 19:13, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In essence my argument is purely numerical. 94% of the so-called 'vital articles' do not meet the standards that are expected of them, and more than 99.9% of the whole work is sub-standard. I would have a lot more time for the 'work in progress' argument if those numbers weren't so high. It begins to look like this work in progress, having not even built the foundations properly, will never come anywhere close to producing the goods.
As for coverage, I really can't see how 1.6 million articles could be described as limited. The problem, I think, is that there is if anything excessive coverage, but without any widespread quality. The incentives present in the system encourage the creation of so many articles that only a vanishingly small fraction will ever be brought to high quality. Worldtraveller 19:55, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
"Building the foundations" is as simple as creating a stub. We have a lot of stubs, and they're generally well-organized (a vast amount of effort seems to go into stub sorting, for example). Coverage is good, and possibly even too thorough in some areas, but is very lacking in others, particularly areas outside of popular culture and Western history, in which the majority of contributors are not well-versed. There are many, many thousands of important topics that do not have an article at all, or have only a very short one. The article count needs to be far, far higher than it is now – I reckon at least ten million articles – before we can consider coverage to be even approaching acceptable, and certainly not "excessive". Excessive perhaps in some areas (Pokemon springs to mind), but certainly not across most of the project.
As for the argument about vital articles, that depends very much on your definition of "vital". Ask a group of people to each come up with a list of "vital" topics and there will be a lot of disagreement. Our "featured article" standard, too, is somewhat arbitrary, and the intention is not to bring every article up to featured standard. Thousands and thousands of articles are perfectly adequate for their purpose without being "featured" or even "good" in some cases – obviously more featured articles is a good thing, but I think it's wrong to declare the project a failure just because the number isn't as high as we'd like.
Put it this way: if we deleted all the "stub" and low-quality articles, the proportion of featured and high-quality articles would be vastly higher, so by your metric the project would be succeeding. But we wouldn't be better off for it – quite the opposite; we would be lacking information on hundreds of thousands of topics which, though not perfect, will still be useful to thousands of people. A short article is better than no article at all – Qxz 22:57, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think any editions of Britannica have more than 100,000 articles, so I am not sure how you can say that 1.6 million articles would not be enough to be considered extremely comprehensive. Of course, we touch on another problem here which is that so few experts edit Wikipedia that topics that require expertise are generally deficient, whereas those like fictional characters and pop songs which do not require expertise proliferate.
I wouldn't agree that the definition of an FA is arbitrary at all. In fact, I can't see that any other definition is even possible. Well written, neutral, verifiable, of appropriate length, etc - these are actually more like basic requirements than something by which you can identify the very best. A long time ago I asked on Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates whether FA standards were something every article should aspire to, and almost everyone said yes, every article ultimately ought to be an FA. The discussion is here.
You say that 'thousands and thousands' of articles are adequate for their purpose - how are you making that estimate? If this is the case, there should be some means of rapidly identifying and listing them. This was the idea behind WP:GA, which I imagined would pretty quickly generate a list of 10,000 excellent short articles. Unfortunately, it soon transpired that they don't exist, and after well over a year of GA existing there are only 1,700 of them listed.
You're absolutely right that you could increase the proportion of quality content without actually really improving anything. But it's the absolute numbers that are very disturbing. Just 1,300 articles of the highest quality? Is that enough, after six years of work by many thousands of people? Another 1,700 defined as articles that are OK but not as good as what you could find in other reference works, and then over 1.6 million that are unassessed, and whose quality is often abysmal. Please do read 10 random articles, and see for yourself how many are excellent, encyclopaedic articles.
To me the numbers paint a bleak picture. Wikipedia is not producing anything like a large number of high quality encyclopaedia entries. It is not on course to become a reputable and reliable reference work within the next decade or even the next century. If it is not to be superseded by other interactive reference works which will surely arise, then everyone involved with it needs to consider whether somehow the culture and incentives of the project need changing to allow it to achieve its aims, or whether it would just be better to aim for something else, and no longer claim to be producing a reference work. Worldtraveller 00:50, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
From a purely statistical viewpoint, going by the numbers at WP:1.0/I (which are, admittedly, somewhat limited; there's still only around 300,000 articles assessed), we have about 25,000 "usable" articles (where "usable" is defined as B-Class or higher). Extrapolating from those numbers, I would say that Wikipedia as a whole probably has around 100,000–150,000 such "usable" articles.
The numbers do, however, break off rather sharply once you get to anything above "usable" (GA-Class and higher); there are only about 3,000–3,500 such articles in the assessment system at the moment. Kirill Lokshin 01:43, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

former FAs

Most former FAs were unfeatured because standards have gone up, not because the articles have declined. Hesperian 01:54, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What's your evidence for that assertion? Worldtraveller 01:57, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No evidence; that's my observation, take it or leave it. Hesperian 02:10, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I had a look at WP:FARC. Of the 18 current FA removal candidates, 16 were nominated not because they have degraded, but because standards have changed, especially with respect to referencing. I realise the current FARC list is only a small sample, but 89% is a pretty compelling figure. Hesperian 02:19, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Disclosure - this from only a cursory examination of each nomination. No doubt attributing a single reason to each nomination is oversimplification. Still, it would appear that the failure of old articles to meet current referencing standards is overwhelmingly the main concern at WP:FARC right now. Hesperian 02:24, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
OK, that's interesting. If that's the case, we also need to ask ourselves why no-one improved them when they were under review. It's a significant problem if no-one is prepared or able to improve old FAs to meet current referencing standards.
My own observation on maintenance of standards is based on seeing what happened to the 24 featured articles I either wrote or collaborated on, during three months in which I didn't edit them at all. Here's what's happened to some of them:
  • Sun's lead section was butchered by someone who thought they were improving the article when they weren't.
  • Mauna Loa lost a whole section for a month because no-one spotted some vandalism.
  • Comet Hale-Bopp is currently in a mess, due I think to a revert that somehow restored one section and deleted another, and a word was removed from the first paragraph ages ago and has not been restored, so it doesn't make sense.
  • Almost all the images have been removed from Cat's Eye Nebula and Planetary nebula
  • Crab Nebula suffered a sustained attack from someone who bizarrely claimed that it wasn't a supernova remnant.
  • Venus has been given a paragraph beginning According to Alex Alemi and David Stevenson and ending it remains to be seen what sort of acceptance it will achieve in the scientific community., which is poor style and an overall detraction from the quality of the article.
  • Surtsey's lead section is now only two paragraphs instead of three.
I should note the honourable exception in the ones I've looked at, which is that Herbig-Haro object has not declined in quality but has a nice new section about infra-red counterparts. You could very well say to me, "well why don't you go and fix up the problems you've identified, right now?". I could, but knowing that inevitably exactly the same kind of detrimental editing is going to afflict them in the next three months really kills my motivation. Why bother writing high quality content if it's only going to get slowly ruined? This is why some sort of static version is desperately needed. Worldtraveller 10:11, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I suspect that collaboration on Wikipedia is largely illusory. Very nearly every exceptional article is written and maintained predominantly by a single person. Not to diminish the value of other contributors, but if you take away an article's key author/maintainer, it is condemned to decline. Hence the neglect at WP:FAR: I'd bet my boots that these are articles where the key author/maintainer has left Wikipedia or lost interest in the topic.
Read Who Writes Wikipedia for non-speculative statistics about the nature of collaboration on Wikipedia. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.243.56.98 (talk) 18:35, 14 February 2007 (UTC).[reply]
I think I see where we differ. We agree that article quality is ephemeral; that your best work will begin a process of gradual decline the moment you stop maintaining it; that all you get for all the effort you expend on an article is an extended period during which it shines brighter than most. But I don't think this makes writing articles pointless, and I certainly don't think it means that Wikipedia is failing. Hesperian 11:25, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. But yes I'd like to see a stable version system brought in. Hesperian 11:35, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I think in the end no article would lose featured status if its primary author had been actively maintaining it. So what drives primary authors away? It is very important to first attract the best editors and then retain them. If this is not happening, that's a significant problem.
I don't think we should accept that quality will always be ephemeral. In the end, if an unwatched article will decline in quality, that means that if I want 'my' featured articles to stay excellent, I've got to watch them closely. So the more I write, the more time I have to spend watching, reverting, working out what to do with poor edits, etc, and the less time I have to actually write. In the end, writing high quality content does become pointless. If nothing at all is done to protect high quality content, then it seems like the project doesn't really value that quality content.
If there were many thousands or tens of thousands of quality articles, I'd be a lot less bothered because at least there would obviously be large numbers of dedicated, able editors actively working on articles. But there's only just over 1,000, and only one more a day is added to the list. Much more important than the decline of existing quality content is the painfully slow rate of production of new quality content.
Wish I knew whether anyone is seriously working on a static version system. I've heard plenty of talk, lots of 'in a few months', but nothing concrete. Worldtraveller 00:57, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I agree a lot with Hesperian, here. I don't think it's as gloomy as Worldtraveller suggests. I do think standards both for FA and GA have gone up - and someone recently proposed raising the standard for B-Class assessments. Just two years ago very few articles had references, and now most decent length articles have several, often inline. A standard criticism at FARC is to say, "Oh, it was passed in the old days" implying that it wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of passing now. As for vandalism generally, two years ago I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time just protecting a few articles, yet now there are bots, popups and AWB zooming in to eradicate many of the routine problems. All the articles I contributed to making decent (FA/GA) a couple of years ago are still comparable IMHO - maybe some have had weak additions, but some have been improved. Even when I don't police them I see my colleagues at WP:Chem doing so.
It's also a mistake to say that only FA (and perhaps A/GA) standard articles are worth anything:
  • In my field, chemistry, many chemical compounds are listed as Start-Class, yet you often can still find the main information you want - the melting point, the formula, etc.
  • Take a look at an outsider's view of one article. The article in question was probably Start-Class at the time, albeit with good refs (chemists do tend to be good at refs!).
  • That translates overall across the whole of Wikipedia to a vast database of information that has made it the no. 1 reference website in the world. OK, so Sun may not have such a well-written lead as it used to, but that doesn't mean people won't find the article useful.
  • I looked up my home city, Newcastle Upon Tyne, in an old (1970s) copy of World Book recently. I was surprised how poor the entry was. Firstly, despite being one of England's eight "core cities" it was basically a stub. Secondly, the article was very out of date even for the 1970s. I suspect that the article would be better now - but at the time, that was the bestselling encyclopedia, providing an out-of-date stub on a major UK city.
As for VAs, I can accept that little progress has been made. However, there has been definite progress over at Core topics, partially because of the Collaboration there. I can think of a couple of Starts that are now an FA and a GA after the collaboration, and many others have seen some improvement. The folks over at WP:COREBIO also seem to be making progress.
I think the effects of the assessment system have yet to be seen fully, but I think it does help by stressing the importance of improving quality over quantity of articles. There is now more of an incentive to see your peers recognise your work as you take an article from Stub to Start to B to A.
So, overall I think Wikipedia is gradually improving. I hope that in time we will be able to implement Stable Versions (latest I heard was not optimistic), as well as some of the ideas on article validation. Till then, we are still helping more knowledge reach more people every day. People will forgive us the poor grammar, most people I speak to in my profession seem to really value our greater mission. Walkerma 04:20, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(de-indenting) I partially agree that Wikipedia is gradually improving - in the sense that the overall number of high quality articles is slowly rising. But the problem is, the number of not very good articles is increasing far faster, and the rate at which high quality content is being created is extremely slow. Although of course B-class and start class articles are not useless, they are falling considerably below the standards we set ourselves, and other encyclopaedias could do a better job. You're lucky that your fellow chemists are on the case with chem articles - my astronomy articles have suffered with lack of maintenance, even though there are several active and highly able astronomy editors, because the volume of edits is so great that it's simply impossible to keep on top of it all. Sun, Mercury (planet) and Venus in particular bear the brunt, because everyone thinks they need to add something and few people have anything truly worthwhile to add. Worldtraveller 16:20, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Have you actually looked at Encyclopedia Brittanica articles? They tend to be very short and very shallow for anything above the junior-high-school level. For many science and math articles, the text that EB has would be stub or start class if it was evaluated here. Compare, for example, aldol reaction, crab nebula, or group theory. CMummert · talk 16:37, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Immediately helpful small step for FAs

I've suggested before, but it would be helpful if the FA template linked to the particular version that was passed. Reverting to that version would be made easier, and the "passed" version could be updated after a FAR. A random editor who knows little about the topic when confronted with a Featured Article that seems to have picked up problems, would then have the ability to easily revert to the reviewed version. Jkelly 23:16, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good idea. It's something I really miss on the FA template, much better than the link to the history page. Garion96 (talk) 23:24, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
As soon as all the {{ArticleHistory}} templates are installed (Gimmetrow and I are working on it), the approved version will be linked in article history. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:26, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Great! Jkelly 23:28, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Credit to Dr pda, Gimmetrow, Kirill, and Raul654; entire article history will be given in the template. For an example of a recent promotion with a "history", see Talk:Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:33, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Nice, very nice. Garion96 (talk) 23:35, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Or, for an article with a more interesting history, see Talk:DNA. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:36, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

POV

Goodness, no mention of the single largest (IMO) failing of Wikipedia: one that really matters? The ease with which special interest groups can, and do, push an agenda right up to the top of Google? [1] In my limited time on Wiki (one year), I've found that the following policies and guidelines are rarely enforced: neutral point of view, verifiability, reliable sources, and no personal attacks. My two cents is that the issues have little to do with featured status, although featured articles should at least set the example.

Also, it's incorrect to judge that most FARCs are because of citations; articles may come to WP:FAR for lack of citations that may not be attended to, but those articles often have additional problems, due to the neglect of not being on anyone's watchlist. The articles that are FARC'd for only citations—and have no other WP:WIAFA failings—aren't common. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:20, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting essay

I think this is an interesting essay that deserves some serious consideration. However, I somewhat disagree that the goal should be to get every article up to Featured Article status. The FAC process is time-consuming, and although I would like to send many articles there, I am reluctant to do so, simply because several of the FAC reviewers either don't understand the subject material they are reviewing (leading to some "interesting" objections), or have personal interpretations of WP:RS or other guidelines. For me, FAC is a daunting and occasionally absurd process, albeit one I'm forced to use twelve times a year, for lack of a better process. I'm not certain that the consensus that an article is of Featured quality is the same thing as an article being Featured quality, and have mostly turned my attention to the GA process. I think this essay could be improved by de-emphasizing the FA aspect. Firsfron of Ronchester 23:51, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I asked some time ago whether FA was intended to identify a small subset of the very best, or whether it was a standard to which every single article should aspire, and everyone agreed it was the latter. The relevant discussion was linked to a bit further up this page. The FA process is clearly a bottleneck, because despite vast increases in the size of the encyclopaedia, FAC's throughput has remained essentially constant for well over a year. You're absolutely right that it's time consuming, and I'm more and more convinced that it's not the best way to generate high quality content. Many articles which have become FAs have significant failings.
But for the purposes of this essay it seems reasonable to me, as a first approximation, to equate 'quality content' with 'FA'. There are not enough FAs, they are not on the right topics, and their numbers are not increasing at anything like the rate we need. Worldtraveller 01:04, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps it would be helpful to distinguish between the vital articles and the rest; does the article on a 70s television show need to meet the same quality standard as the one on James Joyce? Some of the articles on (for example) minor movie/comic characters include pretty much all the detail that is available about that character, so there's really no room to improve them, but I don't think anyone would claim that they should be featured. --TALlama 17:33, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

the view from this heading

Worldtraveller has provided a very reasonable assessment of the situation. I don't think we need to engage in math related to the proportion of articles that are "good/featured/whatever" to establish the problem. Some sampling and observation are enough to see that, to the extent that this project's goal is to match the coverage of a standard encyclopedia, it's pretty hit-or-miss.

I have noted that the "process" orientation and philosophy of many users interested in the "wiki" ideal is often at odds with the goal of building a good encyclopedia. As Worldtraveller notes, we don't even have a way to consistently maintain the best articles. Why?—because any such method is deemed "anti-wiki". The question that really needs to be answered, at this point in the project's history, is: is this a wiki first, or an encyclopedia first?

Worldtraveller has proposed the "random article" test. I propose this test: look at the last 200 Recent Changes, and count how many of them are unabashedly, directly building the encyclopedia. That means observing reasonably sound content being added (and not under a Trivia header) to an article that is not a bordline AfD candidate. (The info on bytes added/removed narrows the search quite quickly.) If you can find one substantive article-space change in 200, you're doing good. (Quadruple bonus points if it's not a "pop culture" article.) –Outriggr § 01:20, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

How depressing. I just looked at the most recent 50, found just one substantial building-the-encyclopaedia edit, then deleted it as a copyvio. :-( Hesperian 01:24, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
That's a good way of sampling what is currently being done, and the results are not at all what I expected - definitely cause for concern. Worldtraveller 15:07, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Semiprotection of GA and FA content

I'd like to see stable versions implemented as per other people here, but in the interim until this is available (it certainly doesn't seem on the near horizon from what I can tell) why can't we ensure our higher quality articles are a little more protected from inexperienced users and vandals by automatically semi-protecting them? It is currently far too easy for random people to negate the hard work done by people to bring an article to these higher standards. Over the long term, to prevent a high quality article from deteriorating you really need to have specialist knowledge related to the article itself - otherwise, besides the obvious vandalism it's difficult and time consuming to judge whether individual contributions are correct and improvements to the article. Does anyone think it's realistic for such experts to monitor their pet articles day-upon-day for the next X years or decades while Wikipedia exists? Semi-protection isn't a panacea, but it would raise the bar to help minimize the work of maintaining article quality, at least until something like stable versions arrives. (MichaelJLowe 01:50, 13 February 2007 (UTC))[reply]

I like this idea, in theory at least. High-traffic Featured Articles like Dinosaur are hit with nearly constant vandalism and unhelpful edits. We recently had a fellow who replaced the entire text of the article with bulleted points, and who got very indignant when his contributions were reverted. It's hard to maintain FA articles while trying to build up new ones. Firsfron of Ronchester 02:55, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The problem of new users making well-intentioned but obviously unhelpful changes is indeed a tricky one. Obviously, such changes need to be reverted aggressively, but you don't want to scare people away. Unfortunately, there is no clear place to ask for help in fending off particularly persistent editors of this sort. In general I think we should be less hesitant about reverting our featured articles. Aggressive reversion has a bad name but is the most powerful tool in the quality-maintainance toolbox for FAs and GAs. In many of the cases identified a few sections up, simply reverting to the featured version would have helped the article a lot, even if it rolled back a few positive edits as well. Christopher Parham (talk) 06:33, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well said, Christopher. Unfortunately, reverting back to an earlier version cannot seriously be done for more than a few weeks or months. In the case of articles with information which is always evolving and ever-changing (such as the previously mentioned Dinosaur), it may not even be the best solution, though I cannot say what the "best" solution is. For now, the article remains on semi-permanent semi-protection, because of the near-constant IP vandalism. Firsfron of Ronchester 08:56, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Automated protection schemes

In order to reduce the amount of time spend patrolling for juvenile vandalisms I'd like to see page protection automated in an algorithmic manner based on page status, edit history and past protection. For example, a page that has N reverts of edits by anonymous users within a period of M days should get automatic semi-protection for P days. The values of N, M and P would vary based on past protection history and the GA/FA status of the page. — RJH (talk) 18:09, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What to do about it

The essay (intentionally) leaves the solutions unstated. If there is a lack of quality articles, what should be done about it? CMummert · talk 02:12, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I hope that if I can persuade people that there are serious problems, there might be an appetite for radical change. These are my ideas.
  • Unassessed articles should not be publicly visible, so that some form of assessment is compulsory for any article whose authors want it to be seen.
  • Assessment should be a multi-stage process. Basic assessment would simply check for grammar, spelling, style and layout. Intermediate assessment would check for comprehensiveness snd appropriate length. Advanced assessment would include rigorous checking of facts.
  • Anyone would be able to edit an article during its assessment, but only trusted editors could edit articles that had passed all assessment stages.
  • Articles that do not have any references a week after they've been created should be speedily deleted.
  • Stubs that are still stubs six months from today should be deleted.
  • Unreferenced articles that are still unreferenced six months from today should be deleted.
To me, the central cause of the problems I've outlined is the incentives in place. The fact that whatever you write is instantly visible on one of the most popular websites in the word provides an enormous incentive to write, but no incentive at all to write well. The FA process provides far too little incentive to write well. We need to change the incentives, and if articles did not become publicly available until they'd been assessed, that could turn the situation around very quickly. Worldtraveller 15:32, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with your notion that there needs to be some kind of incentive for good writing, not just writing in itself.
However, I would counter your first suggestion with the fact that most new pages are at the very least screened for nonsense, hoaxes, completely non-notable, etc by people doing new page patrol, which by the limited numbers of new articles, is possible to do for each page. A new policy of non-visibility could very well discourage new editors from joining, which over the long term is likely worse for WP than a few articles that slip through the cracks.
I would also disagree with your last point about deleting unreferenced articles in a specific time frame. Unfortunately, many unreferenced articles find there way to AFD after a while and are deleted, but lack of references is not in itself reason for deletion, so long as such references do exist.
Certainly a new assessment process for all articles (some of which occurs in Wikiprojects, Peer review, FAC, etc.) could be of benefit. Limiting the number of editors may work well once you get to the FA level, but if you move that bottleneck farther down the editing process, you risk choking off the process of improvement. Joshdboz 14:58, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
On the references point, my idea about deletion, if implemented, shouldn't really result in many deletions at all. Ideally it should just result in every single article getting at least one reference. We cannot afford to allow completely unverifiable content to just sit around indefinitely, and it would just provide a very strong incentive for articles to be made verifiable. I really don't think we need to worry about numbers of people joining, seeing as Wikipedia is among the 20 most popular websites in the world. What we need to worry about is quality writers joining, and I think non-visibility of unassessed pages would encourage much better standards from the off. Worldtraveller 16:05, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Here is what I suggest.
  • Articles should go through a stepping process in which who can edit the article changes
  • Articles that don't exist yet or are essentially stubs should be open to anyone
  • During this stage if the community views an article as important they can submit the article for expert review, otherwise an article remains open to all
    • It may be that an article remains this way forever due to lack of professionals willing to edit the article or because the community wants the article that way
  • Once an article is in expert review it is essentially locked, no one but the person(s) in charge may edit the article. Someone or a group are given responsibility for editing/adding to the article for content, clarity, and truthiness
    • Here the talk pages become more important. People who want to submit to the article but are not in charge or in the group can do so through a special section in the talk pages
    • During this stage if the reviewer(s) become errant people can vote to have them kicked out and someone else given charge of the article
    • Stagnant articles that do not move to the finalized stage can be moved back to the open to anyone stage
  • Once an article has grown large enough and the reviewer(s) are satisfied an article may be voted and moved to the final stage. Articles in this stage are featured.
    • This is when an article is given to a governing body to maintain. Whether this is a hierarchy of body -> maintainer -> community, where the community submits new information and edits to the maintainer who reviews and adds it but who answers to the governing body, or its body -> community I dunno which is better.
    • Discussion and disagreements with the article are again made within the talk pages
    • An article in this stage can be voted to be moved back to review stage.
I think all important articles should move to the final stage, however, the rest should remain open to all as community articles. Wiki in my mind is not just about competing with big named encyclopedias, it is about the community and working together to share information and opinion.
Dharh 16:12, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that most articles are written by only a few people, and in some cases only one editor is responsible for most of the content. Certainly you can say that once an article reaches a certain point it should be placed under the authority of a wikiproject or some group akin to that, but that it would likely become unwieldy if thousands of articles are restricted in this way. The real problem I see with bringing many articles through assessment stages is this: Because of the number of articles that would need to be assessed and then maintained, the process would have to be decentralized. But who decides which editors have the authority for which articles? -- Joshdboz 17:36, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think you have identified one of the main problems: Where is the incentive to write good articles? And so, in my naiveté (for I am unfortunately not a regular contributor here) I propose a solution: put people's reputation and voice at stake for writing poorly, or rather inaccurately. As a very frequent user of Wikipedia I often don't care if an article strays from the standard formats and style guides slightly, but that the information is accurate and that the immediate source links at the bottom of the page are up to date. So each person gets one account and one account only. They can have it display their real name or not, it doesn't matter so long as they're held responsible for what they do. Vandals, well intentioned or not, can be flagged so their edits don't get used until some peer review process approves the edits. Or some set of editors can sift through a list generated by the flagged user edits. Maybe even have a list for first time editors, and one for regular commiters? So the incentive comes to exist by the nature of accuracy. If someone is not accurate or relevant in his edits, then they lose the privilege to freely edit all topics.
I don't mean to go beyond the scope of this discussion, but I am starting to see a need for centralized knowledge-building structures. In other words, a place to find Truth. I think Wikipedia is well poised for such an endeavor if we can get past the issues at hand. I look forward to doing what little I can to make it happen. J.H. Gorse 18:38, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My comments

  • Just because an article is not FA or GA does not mean it is not quality, therefore some of the assumptions in the article are invalid. How many articles have even been rated by wikiprojects in total?
  • Not all subjects need or deserve more than a few sentences.
  • "Core" articles = who cares. If they were all that "core" then people would be interested in them and improve them. There are plenty of resources on the interweb that cover them, why rewrite that which is written. Wikipedia's stength lies in its coverage of topics that normal -pedias miss.

-Ravedave (Adopt a State) 02:59, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Your first point is true, but we do need some measure by which we can estimate how many quality articles we have, and I can't think of a better one. WP:1.0/I shows that 290,000 articles have been assessed by projects, of which just over 2,000 are FA or A-class.
I very much agree with your second point. I don't want every single article to be 32kb or more, and I think the mania for articles that are 60-100kb in length is very damaging to the FA process. You could write 10 15kb articles in the time it takes to write one 60kb article, and while some topics of very great importance do deserve 60kb, tens of thousands of topics need nothing more than three or for paragraphs. These, though, still need to be of high quality.
As for core articles/vital articles, you ask why rewrite what's already written? But that's what we do with all articles. We summarise what is known, taking our information from Wikipedia:reliable sources. What we produce is distinct from what the rest of the web already has because it is freely licensed and freely available to everyone. But if we fail to produce good articles where other encyclopaedias traditionally succeed, then we're failing in our mission. Worldtraveller 09:31, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Some poor assumptions.

Lots of the things that this essay says are dubious assertions:

  1. FA's that are downgraded are overwhelmingly because standards have risen.
  2. The idea that you can measure the quality of the encyclopedia by counting FA's is ludicrous. Many editors I've spoken to refuse to push their articles through the process because it is so painful. Hence there maybe large numbers of FA-quality articles that simply haven't been through the process. Ditto for GA quality.
  3. If you measure success by counting FA's and uses that as the basis of directing our efforts then you might well end up with an encyclopedia with a couple of thousand perfect articles and 1.6 million terrible ones. There has to be a balance between pushing up the quality of lesser articles so that they at least don't stink too badly. Sadly, this doesn't help your statistics - but it's certainly arguable that pushing every single Wikipedia article up to at least (say) B-class would be preferable to pushing a few hundred up from GA to FA.

As to what to do about it - let's try to be constructive for a bit. Here are some thoughts:

  • I think politics and Wikipedia-space stuff in general in growing out of all proportion to the actual job of creating a quality encyclopedia. I would go through Wikipedia-space pruning off anything that's not directly needed to keep the encyclopedia running. We need to get people off of spending every waking hour arguing about whether fair-use photos of aardvarks are or are not replaceable - we need to quit babbling on about whether to reassign unusued user account names or whether to allow user-boxes to be in template space or not. All of this is unnecessary babble - and it's cutting into the time people spend doing constructive work. We should prune out most of the Village pump sub-sections - rip out large swaths of non-official essays on policies that don't exist. Be bold, be brutal.
  • As for the GAC and FAC processes: People who comment with things like "as per WP:MOS, number and units should be separated by a single non-breaking space" are wasting everyone's time. It would take far less time and effort for them to simply fix the problem themselves. This would cut down dramatically on the stress levels involved in getting an article through that hurdle. Also, nebulous comments like "quality of english not good enough" should be banned! If you can't tell me exactly what is wrong with the text in words I can understand - and if you can't fix the problem yourself - then it's not a problem! We have to switch from an adversarial model to a cooperative model in getting articles through GAC/FAC. These measures would greatly improve the number of articles submitted and the rapidity with which new GA and FA articles could be created and passed.
  • Drive-by tagging. Nothing annoys an editor who is working hard on an article more than to see someone who has no previous or subsequent contact with the article cruise by and litter his article with a cloud of little tags. It makes the article look like a complete mess to our readers and it does nothing whatever to help the article quality. Once again, rather than spend your Wiki hours self-righteously sticking little tags into articles - crack open some books and add facts and references yourself. Tags like "this article does not belong to any categories" for example. Are you seriously telling me that the person who adds that tag couldn't spend a couple of minutes to track down the appropriate categories? Argh!
  • More generally - let's get rid of the destructiveness inherent in our processes and channel that energy into creativity. All of those people who read and comment on FARC and who seem to think it a victory when they manage to get an older FA de-listed should be spending their time pulling those same articles back up to the required status. There shouldn't even be a de-listing vote. It's terribly demoralising to the guys at the coal-face hewing new FA's out of the ether to find others tearing them down faster than they can be put up. Take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Automobiles - that project has just three car articles up to FA status - and three more that have been de-listed! It is literally the case that they are being de-listed faster than we can create them! This is not a good thing for editor morale!
  • Protect good editors. Right now, if you spend most of your time editing articles, you cannot get adminship (trust me - I tried - I was shot down in flames because I hadn't spent enough time whittering on about nothing on Wikipedia: pages!). This is ridiculous. Adminship is a tool - not some kind of honor to be bestowed. The admins are supposed to be there helping out the editors - but when a well established editor needs to have their article sprotected or to have a disruptive person banned, or some other piece of administrivia dealt with, it's a major struggle. We need to switch around the seniority levels here. People who spend the majority of their time editg and who have GA's and FA's under their belts need to be given a 'status' that clearly places them above the admin strata. Admins can deal with background work - but they should realise that their sole function in life is to help the successful editors and not to create annoying roadblocks.

Without good editors - we are a mere talking-shop full of hot air.

SteveBaker 04:58, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You are rightfully concerned about wasted effort, but have you considered the effort required to keep at bay the hoard of vandals, school-kids and other contributors who either intentionally or unintentionally degrade the quality of B, GA and FA articles? There are quite a few articles I would invest time improving to GA or FA standard, but until I can be sure that I won't need to monitor these articles every day until eternity to prevent the degradation from happening, there is no way I will invest the time required. Wikipedia needs to take some lessons from the process used for open source software development projects (Mozilla, Linux and the like). You should only allow your trusted editors to make direct changes to your most valuable content; all contributions can be filtered through these trusted editors. (MichaelJLowe 05:28, 13 February 2007 (UTC))[reply]
Read my penultimate paragraph. I would give editors-in-good-standing (perhaps those with at least one FA and multiple GA's substantially attributable to their work) the ability to go to an admin and require support for sprotection of these articles and for direct support in banning persistant vandals. SteveBaker 13:45, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There are some remarkably poor assumptions about the FAC and FAR rooms in this section titled "some poor assumptions". SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:37, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Please explain. Just saying "You're wrong" is not progressing the debate. SteveBaker 13:45, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
"People who comment with things like <X> are wasting everyone's time. It would take far less time and effort for them to simply fix the problem themselves."
That seems an inaccurate and short-sighted view of the process. Most often, the issues either would not be that easy/fast for another editor to fix, or there are questions of judgment that should be decided by the original editors. When they are easy to fix, usually someone does just fix them. An example is when there are WP:MSH issues; renaming the sections should be up to the involved editors. Further, whenever an editor comments on something that needs to be done—instead of just doing it—a record is left by which other (current or future) editors can learn guidelines and policies. I didn't know the difference between hyphens, endashes and emdashes until I saw another article reviewer referring to WP:DASH. On the other hand, many reviewers do help do easy fixes when asked. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
" ... would greatly improve the number of articles submitted ... "
There is no lack of articles submitted; probably a third to half of the articles that come to WP:FAC would have benefitted by first visiting WP:PR. Strengthening peer review would help. Also, most FAC reviewers also pitch in at peer review, so suggesting that they have time to fix issues as well as point them out isn't quite right. Half of the articles that come to FAC fail probably because they weren't even close to prepared, and have issues that could have been raised and addressed on peer review. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
"people who read and comment on FARC and who seem to think it a victory when they manage to get an older FA de-listed should be spending their time pulling those same articles back up to the required status. There shouldn't even be a de-listing vote."
Who are these people you refer to who think it's a victory to get an article delisted? The people who pitch in at FAR do spend their time pulling articles back to status, whenever they can and whenever there is an involved editor knowledgeable about the topic, and often even when there's not. Most reviewers and participants at FAR work very hard for every keep. In fact, the entire FAR process was revamped to allow for a full-month review, so that editors would have time to bring articles to status. When work is ongoing, that time is often extended (to as much as two months). It is very intensive work, and many people pitch in selflessly to work on articles that they may have no personal interest in. Most articles that are FARC'd lose their star for one reason only; the original editors are gone, the article is abandoned, and no one is able to fix it. So far this month, FARC has had more keeps than demotes—a fine record, because we are finally gaining enough helpers to work on abandoned articles. And there isn't a de-listing vote; in fact, FAR is not a vote. Articles which are being worked on are allowed to stay on FAR virtually indefinitely, even if there are multiple Remove votes. Articles are FARC'd when there is no ongoing progress. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
"Take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Automobiles - that project has just three car articles up to FA status - and three more that have been de-listed! It is literally the case that they are being de-listed faster than we can create them!"
Take a look at the reviews on all three of those cases. Do you see the notification to the Automobiles Project? Do you see a single bit of feedback, response, or effort to improve the articles from either the Project or the original editors? No. I certainly don't have the resources to fix Ford Mustang; it is sad that in spite of the intense effort we put into notifying Projects of articles that come up for review, most articles that end up FARC'd are simply abandoned by their Projects and by their original editors. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
To your second point, I agree that the FA standards are at a point where the changes they demand often provide benefits so marginal as to be worthless, e.g. non-breaking spaces between numbers and units. This is one good reason why the number of FAs becomes an increasingly worse measure of the number of high-quality articles -- many of the requirements at FA have only little bearing on article quality. Christopher Parham (talk) 06:43, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No - that's not what I said (and I disagree actually). The formal FA requirements are just fine. I have no problem with requiring non-breaking spaces between numbers and units - or any of those other seemingly trivial rules about the length of the introduction, that links should only be made the first time the word is encountered...a million other things. That's no problem because I can zip down that list very quickly as the last thing before FAC and fix them. What I do have a problem with is when I put an article up for FAC and see that someone has written something like:
  • Reject - You don't have non-breaking spaces between numbers and units and the standard of English is generally poor. ~~~~
...because trivial matters like non-breaking spaces could have been fixed by that reviewer quite easily - making that part of the complaint a non-problem. This is what I mean by a 'collaborative' rather than 'adversarial' model of GAC and FAC review. The second half of this hypothetical complaint is one I've seen in lots and lots of failed FAC's. The problem with it is that you can't disprove it - and you can't fix it because it's far too vague. I'm no English major - and my grammar and sentence structure may well be sub-par - but there is no way that I can address this complaint. This gives me the impression that I am simply incapable of producing FA quality articles - which is a strong disincentive to bother submitting them. What is needed is (again) either that the reviewer fixes the problem - or is much more explicit about the nature of what is going wrong with my writing style. Personally, I'd already have gone through the article a hundred times looking for problems prior to FAC, I've played tricks like reading it aloud and I've done things like making sure that several other experienced editors have read through it - both at GAC and in Peer Review and because I asked them to. But still I see complaints that the quality of English misses some unspecified standard in some unspecified way. This is a useless comment - yet this exact thing sinks a vast number of FAC's and dissuades otherwise great editors from coming back to the process. SteveBaker 13:45, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Steve, I agree very much with the idea of emphasizing collaboration in the FAC room and getting rid of the adversarial overtones. FAC reviewers often seem to act as if they've been given the right to disregard the person on the other side of the nom (who, in good faith cases, has invested many hours in their work). I too cringe when I see "oppose - blankety blank minor concern". Too many editors, and I include myself, are guilty of doing everything but reading the article. There are so many wiki policies to apply against the article, making sure it conforms, that what the article actually says is often the last thing anyone cares about. –Outriggr § 01:42, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I can't agree that reviewers have a general obligation to fix what problems they find; 'this sentence is badly written' is much more helpful to me than a ham-handed attempt to rephrase it. On the other hand, some of these trivial 'my copy of the MOS is written in stone' objections are not productive and amount to {{shrubbery}} demands. Still, notice the trend that well-written, copyedited, and nicely formatted articles - those that really "look ready" - actually get fewer nitpicky objections than articles that were prematurely nominated or have sloppy formatting problems despite good content. Clearly reviewers should actually read, rather than just look at, the article, but the culture should also emphasize that reviewing an article (unless it's an obvious WP:SNOW situation) involves some degree of commitment toward helping the nominator resolve the objection. Opabinia regalis 02:53, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think steve has raised some good points, we have the same problem in mathematics. Old FA get delisted at about the same rate as new one are created. The major reason for the delisting is because the FA standard has risen, not because of vadalism or gradual erosion of quality. Yes it is demoralising to see this happen and its putting editors off the whole FA process. Generally maths articles on FA review seem to attract little attention, its less fun trying to maintain an FA status than getting a new article through FA. Some interesting psycology here: gaining FA is something you want to do, keeping an article at FA is something someone else (i.e. FA reviewers) want you to do. To me the FA bar does seem to high, great for those interested in a single specific topic (Say KLF) who are prepared to put all their time into a single article, less good for those in projects with large numbers of article to maintain. --Salix alba (talk) 16:09, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
"The major reason for the delisting is because the FA standard has risen, not because of vadalism or gradual erosion of quality. " I'd have to disagree; if you peruse the math articles defeatured at WP:FFA, you'll see that most of them have experienced prose and quality deterioration, and there was little attempt to correct the deficiencies. In general, their problms are not rising standards, but poor quality of prose. The Math project could benefit from having copyedit review of their FAs. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:39, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that reviewers don't have "a general obligation to fix what problems they find" - clearly that would be unreasonable. The standard I would apply to their obligation would be something like: (1) Where possible, the reviewer should simply fix trivial layout/formatting/spelling/grammar problems than complain about them. (2) In the event that a problem is too deep-seated or technical for the reviewer to "just fix it", the complaint must be very specific - with multiple examples quoted from the text so that the article's maintainers know precisely what to do to fix it.
The first rule addresses the "We need non-breaking spaces between numbers and units" kind of complaint - the second rule addresses the "English not good enough" kind of complaint. Eliminating those kinds of complaint gives an honest, committed editor the tools he needs to get the article through GAC/FAC with a minimum of stress. If this were an enjoyable process - carried out with respect for the editor - then he's much more likely to go on to find other articles to bring to FAC. Right now, it's a stressful, largely non-helpful process that scares most editors off.
My personal experience with this was that my first ever FAC (which passed fairly painlessly) was Mini (about an old British car). That encouraged me to use my expertise to use the same 'formula' to push MINI (BMW) (a more modern British car) to FAC. As far as I could tell, both articles were comparably good - but MINI (BMW)'s FAC died under a flurry of "English not good enough" complaints. I begged and pleaded to get some explanation as to what specifically I needed to do - but I was told that it wasn't the job of reviewers to do that. But what happened? I wrote most of Mini and everyone loved that - had something snapped in my brain and caused me to put out gibberish? I had no clue. The FAC failed - and I was very put off from trying again...I mean what do you do when the article looks great - GAC loved it, PR loved it, all the same gang of people worked on it. So I pretty much gave up and went back to being a WikiGnome - fixing stuff here and there - and the MINI (BMW) article has degenerated somewhat (mostly because a ton of new information has had to be added to it - and that new stuff ain't FA quality yet).
So recently, I thought to try again with another FAC - and I pushed Mini Moke (yep - another obscure British car with 'mini' in it's name) through GAC, PR, etc. It's stagnating in FAC right now - a flurry of enthusiastic supports - with some easily fixed problems (which I fixed) - and one big stinking "English is poor" kind of complaint. To be fair, this last one is a little better than the useless complaints that afflicted MINI (BMW). There are a few specific complaints about paragraph length and such - but I hold to the mantra that each paragraph should be a separate statement of related information. Gluing short paragraphs together just to meet some arbitary standard when those paragraphs don't relate to each other is kinda pointless. I'd argue about this with the guy who gave that review - but we are warned in several of the "How to get an article though FAC" not to argue with the reviewers....Argh! SteveBaker 17:20, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What should be done?

Not to belabour the point too much, here's a quick summary of my (very drastic) solution:

  1. Ban anonymous and new editors from editing, and make Talk Pages MUCH more prominent to allow them to still contribute constructively to the 'pedia. (This is a perennial proposal and will almost surely never be accepted.)
  2. Increase the suffrage period for new editors from 4 to 100 days, this will have given them enough time to become familiar with policies and guidelines before submitting content to the 'pedia that often ends up being deleted.
  3. As an alternative to the above, a new trust hierarchy for editors should be established, with editing powers increased as trust level gets higher. At the moment the only mark of trustworthiness is adminship, which as pointed out above, is not even given to the editors that do the most constructive work on articles.
  4. Stable versions or even better, LOCKED articles for when everything encyclopedic has been said and there is no need to improve an article in terms of content, grammar, presentation etc. Can be unlocked if new info comes along.
  5. AfC process for ALL new articles. Don't allow articles to be created so easily, and ensure they enter the 'pedia in an already wikified and referenced state.

All these suggestions are to ensure that back office operations such as reverting and AfD do not detract from what we should be doing. To use myself as an example, I should be out there researching and rewriting sports car- and South Africa-related articles into brilliant prose. But what do I actually do? I patrol my watchlist, RC, NP and AfD. All I do these days is revert, discuss, delete, etc. Why? Because the articles I watch are continually edited to include fancruft, POV, vandalism etc. I'd like to edit an article and leave it knowing that subsequent additions are improvements by well-established editors. It gives no satisfaction to know that your volunteered time and effort will eventually be vandalised, and Wikipedia owes it to the contributors (us) to take reasonable steps. Patrolling changes and getting rid of junk wears me out, and I'm starting to get sick of it.

Wikipedia is a work in progress as most of us accept. But surely ask yourself, what the fuck are we progressing towards? "Final" fact-checked CD/DVD release every few years? Stablepedia? Citizendium? Or are we just a perpetual online work-in-progress never getting anywhere? Zunaid©® 11:35, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well said, I fully agree. We're facing exactly the same problem on the Indonesia Wikiproject. There are a very limited number of experienced editors knowledgeable in the subject matter, yet there are at least 1500 articles under the project. It’s a constant battle between the good guys trying to keep out the rubbish, and the never ending supply of vandals, POV pushers, advertisers, editors without English skills, editors without knowledge of any Wikipedia processes, etc. As you say, keeping out the crap has become a full time job and little time is left for improving anything. Instead of calling Wikipedia "the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit", it would be more appropriate to call it "the free wanna-be (but never will) encyclopaedia designed especially for any and every bozo to fuck up the hard work of others as easily as possible". The current state of affairs is very rapidly wearing out my enthusiasm for the project. The open approach to editing was great for getting Wikipedia started and filling the database with lots of low-mid quality articles, but I think we've reached a point where it's causing us to loose traction. I fully support your the aim of your proposals, but to have them implemented we’ll need to overcome a lot of institutional inertia and ideology. How can we achieve the sort of policy changes needed? (MichaelJLowe 13:08, 13 February 2007 (UTC))[reply]


  • Ban anonymous and new editors from editing, and make Talk Pages MUCH more prominent to allow them to still contribute constructively to the 'pedia. (This is a perennial proposal and will almost surely never be accepted.)
For anonymous users, I would prefer to allow these people to edit until the very first time their IP is tagged with any kind of a {{test2|xxx}} or greater tag - and then ban that IP from editing forever without creating a username. That would allow honest IP editors who don't share their IP with anyone else to continue to do what they do. New editors must be allowed to edit. They contribute a microscopic fraction of the vandalism - and whilst we might expect this to increase if we lock down anonymous editing...the situation would at least be greatly improved.
Once an article reaches say B standard, is it really worthwhile allowing IP based editors to make contributions? Take a look at the history of Krakatoa, a B article, or 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake a FA article. The vast majority of IP editors are contributing nothing more than vandalism and other crap day-after-day. I also find it frustrating that you can't send a message to IP based editors who have a dynamic and constantly changing address to query them about their edits for example. (MichaelJLowe 01:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC))[reply]
I think it is clear that IP address editors do little to assist and often a great deal to harm wikipedia. They should be banned from editing. New registered editors should start off participating on article discussion pages for a week or two, then should be allowed to edit.--Fahrenheit451 14:41, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Increase the suffrage period for new editors from 4 to 100 days, this will have given them enough time to become familiar with policies and guidelines before submitting content to the 'pedia that often ends up being deleted.
No - that's far too long. I would prefer to maintain the current period - but have article creation be routed through a hierarchy of menus that would say something like "Click here to create an article about a living person...Click here to create an article about a musical group, an album or a song...Click here to create an article about...." for about a half dozen of the most popular AfD candidates. Then, when you choose one of those, you are presented with a second layer of menus that asks specifically about each policy point: "Click here if this living person an Athlete or Sports personality...Click here if this person is a TV or movie star...etc" - then, finally "Click here if the person has won at least two major athletic events or has an Olympic medal....Click here if they don't". Finally - you are dumped into the article creation page - or given a polite message that explains why this person is not considered notable. We can't expect people to EVER read through the rag-tag collection of policy documents. I've been playing around in Wiki for a couple of years now and I'm pretty sure there are a ton of these policies that I'm not familiar with. However, if you ask a series of click-through questions, you'll force people to think about each of the notability criteria in turn - explicitly accepting or rejecting each one. I think this would have a dramatic impact on the number of junk articles out there and is a much better alternative to locking people out for long periods.
Such a process would be an improvement, though it wouldn't stop the determined spammers. It should also apply to images WRT asserting the ownership/permission for images. I think you also need to give the Wikiprojects more control over what gets created (or deleted) for articles in their domain. (MichaelJLowe 01:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC))[reply]
100 days rings of arbitrariness and is absurd. Increasing to one week would be reasonable, possibly two weeks.--Fahrenheit451 14:34, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • As an alternative to the above, a new trust hierarchy for editors should be established, with editing powers increased as trust level gets higher. At the moment the only mark of trustworthiness is adminship, which as pointed out above, is not even given to the editors that do the most constructive work on articles.
Yes - I can see the attraction of this. But we need some automated way to confirm that trust - the last thing we need is another place for a bunch of self-righteous folk to sit around typing Accept and Reject all day.
The best people to judge who are trusted editors are the editors they have worked and corresponded with. Maybe there could be a system whereby an "untrusted editor" after X months and Y edits is invited to become trusted editor. The wikipedia system would automatically determine 5-10 trusted and currently active editors who have worked on the same articles as them or have corresponded with them, and asks them to vote whether they should be promoted as per some set of criteria. (MichaelJLowe 01:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC))[reply]
I think that is a very bad idea. That creates an opportunity for the formation of an old boy group to control an article and fosters elitism. --Fahrenheit451 14:28, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Stable versions or even better, LOCKED articles for when everything encyclopedic has been said and there is no need to improve an article in terms of content, grammar, presentation etc. Can be unlocked if new info comes along.
No - I think that's a bad idea. We need people to know that they can fix a typo or correct an error and see the change immediately. Locked to untrustworthy editors - yes - but we need to be able to refine categories - provide better photos - correct broken links - update to fit new standards. Even 100% perfect articles still need those things.
  • AfC process for ALL new articles. Don't allow articles to be created so easily, and ensure they enter the 'pedia in an already wikified and referenced state.
See above. Wikipedia comprises three or four kinds of editor - working in a little dance. One kind provides raw knowledge - another Wikifies, another combs through looking for references - cleaning up. There are many stages to making even a B-grade article. You can't expect the first contributor to do all of that at the get-go. That's not going to happen.
SteveBaker 15:11, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
That would just slow the legitimate editing process down. Nonsense articles can always be deleted, but impeding the creation process would retard wikipedia.--Fahrenheit451 14:30, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

All that needs to be done...

If a conscientious effort was made to improve the Vital articles and that effort was completed then you'd have a strong base to work from. Those experts would improve the ancillary articles and you would create a core group of articles that experts would be interested in defending. There's no problem with having a sea of silly fun reads, if you know where the island of knowledge is located. FAs could fight for the privilege of being considered a Vital article.-BiancaOfHell 13:55, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

As an example, If I think the Computer Science article should be considered a Vital article, I would first have to get it up to FA status, and then state my case. All current Vital articles will remain so even though they're not all FAs. This is probably a great argument that many Wikipedians want to have. What is a Vital article? And you can only present an article to be considered as a Vital article if it has reached FA status, otherwise people will show up with all kinds of malformed arguments before they even fully know the subject.-BiancaOfHell 14:30, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Once these vital articles are created, how do you expect these articles to be defended against "the unwashed masses" for eternity? The effort required to defend our existing high quality articles is already consuming the time of the editors who could be spending it improving other articles. Besides, any general encyclopedia worth consulting is far more than just a 1000 "vital" articles. (MichaelJLowe 14:35, 13 February 2007 (UTC))[reply]
It's a start. As I said, the pool of Vital articles will increase, and you can only present FAs for consideration. With such a focus on high quality important articles you will find people gravitating towards writing potential FAs that can be later considered as Vital articles. It's a noble effort so you will find more people willing to defend vital knowledge rather than any of 1.6 million articles. There's a little more essentiality to Vital articles than there is to an FA about a song or a video game. And "offense is the best defense", and the sooner this idea gets off the ground the sooner awareness can be brought to a new mission at Wikipedia.-BiancaOfHell 14:45, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think your notion of what is vital on wikipedia is noble, but a little quaint. You only need pick a random article here and then Google for the same term to see that for many articles, whether they meet your vital criteria or not, they are often in the top 3 results on Google. I would consider any wikipedia article which either has a high number of visitors, or is near the top of the Google search results to be a "vital" article. If people are consulting Wikipedia as a reference for a particular topic in preference to alternative sources, we need to be providing them with high quality material. (MichaelJLowe 15:00, 13 February 2007 (UTC))[reply]
Yeah, what is vital is going to be a great argument, and a vicious one. Some people think Britney Spears is vital and can argue well for that, others might think David Mamet is vital, others Computer Science. I think that this argument is extremely important, and needs to be started now. But not here. In the Vital article process.

[outdented] So I see these steps needed to move forward

  1. Come up with an initial idea of what a "Vital article" is, and agree to call them "Vital articles" or something else.
  2. Find someone like Raul654 to run the show.
  3. Start improving those Vital articles to FA status.-BiancaOfHell 15:36, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I also think that the Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great articles need to be permanently protected, with a 10 day wait list or something. A lot of people wouldn't mind improving them, except their efforts would be in vain and terribly difficult because of all the reverts and vandalism. I don't know what the debates are on protecting those articles. Do those unprotected articles help to concentrate vandalism on a select few popular articles lessening damage to less often watched articles?-BiancaOfHell 15:16, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't this proposal just another version of what the Wikipedia CD-ROM project is trying to do? They have already classified and graded a few thousand articles so that they know which ones are vital to a CD-ROM release. Most Wikipedia projects also have a ready-graded importance scale for articles in their fields of interest. Why not simply have people contribute to articles high up on those existing importance scales? Let's simply suggest to editors that they put their efforts into getting the topmost articles up to FA status (well, I think we already are)? What about the Wikipedia article creation and improvement drive? They too have a mechanism to pick the most important articles by some complex voting scheme and then have people pile in to improve the most important article that comes up each week. We don't need yet another layer of bureaucracy. What we are short of is people to actually DO the things that all of this bureaucracy is setting itself up to direct and judge. Dragging more people into this pointless waffling is strongly counter-productive. There are already plenty of ways to direct effort where it's needed and to judge the results - all we are missing is some committed editors to actually do the work. The Wikibureaucracy needs some drastic slimming down - not bloating. SteveBaker 20:17, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
"Few thousand" → "almost 300,000". ;-) Kirill Lokshin 20:42, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If people worked on the most important articles first, that would be great. But the question is a) why haven't they, up until now, and b) how can we encourage intensive work on the core topics? Just saying to people 'it would be really great if you worked on this set of articles' is unlikely to lead to any sudden rapid onset of work on them, I don't think. Worldtraveller 20:37, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Broadly speaking, nothing you do will help. Wikipedia editors are generally here to edit topics that interest them personally; very few will go and work on some arbitrary artile X merely because someone told them it's very important.
On a practical level, a decent approach may be to try and draw the relevant WikiProjects into fixing up those of the vital articles that fall under their purview; but if you really want to see improvements to articles of your choice—rather than those which the editors choose—you'll basically need to come up with some motivating factor beyond "oh, it's very important". Kirill Lokshin 20:42, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
ahem :-) Regarding "very few will go and work on some arbitrary artile X merely because someone told them it's very important", that is exactly the job that FAR regulars do daily :-) I've had the pleasure of working to preserve featured status on many articles I find distinctly distasteful and far outside of my realm of interest. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:50, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
My point exactly: note how many FAR regulars there are! ;-) Kirill Lokshin 20:59, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
ah, point taken. It's hard work to save someone else's abandoned article. Well, then consider this advertising—maybe some folks will come help. Right now I'm in search of a Dutch editor to help Fanny Blankers-Koen. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:01, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think for so called "trusted editors" the bureaucratic process does need slimming down. However for the random IP contributors and new users more sand boxing needs to be put in place to limit the amount of damage they can do, particular to our good quality content, and the effort required by everyone else to fix it. (MichaelJLowe 03:50, 14 February 2007 (UTC))[reply]

[outdented] Having a Vital article stamp would help make the decision for others on what they want to contribute to. It's a goal to achieve. Otherwise, I can tell you no one's going to show up, but if suddenly you have thousands of articles in which you can achieve a VA with, they're going to get more attention. Not only are you achieving FA, but afterwards you can achieve VA. It would work. The reason I improved the Aaron Sorkin article is specifically because I wanted to achieve FA. Now, maybe I'd be more inclined to tackle some of the much more difficult Science articles if there was a possibility of a VA at the end of the road. There are articles which are MUCH more difficult to do than others, and it just so happens most of those articles are Vital articles. Let's reward people for choosing to improve those MUCH more difficult articles.-BiancaOfHell 22:26, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Or endlessly discuss alternatives when it's pretty clear that this VA idea has legs. Will I improve the David Mamet article next, or will I tackle the Computer Science article? Both are FAs, one is also a VA.-BiancaOfHell 22:26, 13 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Your proposal doesn't address the underlying problems with Wikipedia. Nobody develops open source software (Firefox, Linux, etc) using the sort of open free-for-all Wikipedia provides, so what makes you think it is possible to develop a reliable encyclopedia using it? We have a hard enough time defending the 3,000 GA and FA articles, let alone the >100,000 articles needed to build an comprehensive reference. If the systematic problems in Wikipedia can be fixed I think you would see more people willing to contribute to building better quality content. (MichaelJLowe 02:52, 14 February 2007 (UTC))[reply]
The OpenSource software situation has similarities. People work on things that they need - or that interests them. There are 'holes' in the availablility of OpenSource software - things that nobody much wants to work on. For example - Tax preparation software. Everyone would love to be able to do their taxes using Linux and free software - but there really isn't anything out there with much support because writing Tax software is tough and it's boring. Projects like games or game support tools that are fun to work on get lots of support - things that 'scratches an itch' like browers and email clients also get lots of support...but Tax software?!? Hell no. The issue of openness is a little more patchy. Most OpenSource projects (and ALL of the ones I run) will allow anyone to contribute once they've signed up to be a project member...which is a little harder than getting a Wiki account - but not much more. The difference - and the thing that stops vandalism in its tracks - is that each piece of software (think: "Each Wikipedia Article") has an owner - that person lets people into the project and can kick them out and revert their changes if they are a pain in the ass. The Wikipedia analogy would be if some editor "owned" their own set of articles and could ban people from editing his article if they were disruptive. This would be a big problem though because that editor might do a terrible job and have a crappy article - and it would be hard for the community to get rid of that. In OpenSource software this happens all the time - but we frequently have many, many pieces of software that do essentially the same thing but in different ways and with different degrees of success. The end user picks the one that everyone is talking about and uses that...the ones that have no users generally get no contributors - so they die out eventually. The good ones flourish and come to dominate the others. If we followed that analogy in Wikipedia, you'd have to have many articles on the exact same topic - some of them containing utter bullshit - others being really good quality. Somehow readers would have to figure out which version of the article was a good one - and the most popular versions would somehow gain prominance. That's a weird model for writing an encyclopedia - but it would have it's advantages. When there is a major flame war about two different viewpoints - you'd simply end up with two articles - one expressing each view. Somehow, I don't think we can stretch the analogy that far. SteveBaker 17:46, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If getting an FA star doesn't motivate someone to work on nature or science or any other very broad topic, why will getting a VA tag motivate anyone? Particularly when the emphasis is on these very broad articles that historically get little interest, because it's substantially harder in a wiki environment to treat a broad topic superficially than a narrow topic deeply. Opabinia regalis 03:02, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
And there is even an attendant risk that by telling people "Your article isn't vital" - and therefore cannot ever get the ultimate "platinum star with diamonds" of a VA+FA - that you'll actually put people off working on FA's in general. I just don't think this helps in any way - all it does is add yet another layer of WikiBureaucracy - more committiees - more policies - more guudelines - more wasted effort. If this matters so much then there is already a perfectly usable importance system in place in the Wikipedia CD-ROM project - if you want to work on getting 'important' articles through FAC - then go to it - the graded importance list already exists. Personally, I want to write about what I know and love and understand and have shelves full of books (aka 'references') to use in my researches (which happens to be old English cars - never likely to be a VA topic). I have little interest or knowledge or reference books to deal with Automobile (although I've done some pretty serious re-org work on it - there is no way in hell I could get that through FAC). SteveBaker 17:34, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Re: Wikipedia is failing

Almost every time I search through another encyclopedia for my computer science research, I come up empty handed. Wikipedia almost always has something about what I want to know. It may not always be in the right format, or meet some silly guidelines, or even give me all the information I need to know, but usually there is at least something. Thus I can use Google to continue my research, which has even more breadth but much much lower quality.

I wouldn't be nearly as effective without having Wikipedia as a starting point. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.41.124.25 (talk) 14:14, 14 February 2007 (UTC).[reply]

This is an interesting point that I wish more editors would pay attention to. WP has reasonably thorough and accurate introductory articles on many science and mathematics topics. It is becoming more and more common to hear speakers at scientific conferences say that they looked at WP to get a rough definition of some concept they are not familiar with. WP beats EB both in terms of coverage and in terms of depth. For example, group (mathematics) (a fundamental concept in undergraduate mathematics) is a single paragraph definition in EB, and EB returns no results at all for the more advanced, well-known topic groupoid.
If the rest of WP is failing, as claimed, maybe it would help to analyze why the science and math sections are doing so well? CMummert · talk 15:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Umm, it's pretty obvious. The science and math sections are doing well because Wikipedia is Internet-based, and Internet use is going to be associated with science and math (and especially computer science). Ken Arromdee 17:08, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I agree. I find it particularily worrying that articles like this generate so much consternation. We need to stop focussing on what one person thinks the wiki is doing wrong, and focus on all the things that we all think the wiki is doing right
Sure there's garbage on the wiki, maybe even a lot of it. But so what? There's also some absolutely amazing articles, articles that have no peer anywhere else in the world, either online or in print. To ignore this fact and focus instead on the problems does everyone, not just use wikipedians, a disservice.
And let's be honest, the metric used in this article is arguably useless. GA has been backlogged forever, so using that as a measuring stick is silly. One might then argue that the GA process is flawed, but who cares? Just because someone didn't stamp an article with GA doesn't mean it isn't a GA. And looking over the list in question, I consider every one I saw GA.
So basically, another problem in the making. Maury 15:18, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think I have to expand a bit on this, because the more I read the article the more I disagree with everything in it.

"In fact, of those 1182, only 72 are featured articles. This means that 94% of the essential topics that should have excellent articles fall short of the standard."

No it doesn't, it just means they haven't been FA. FA's are one a day. There are over a million articles on the wiki. This isn't exactly surprising. In fact, its specious.

"131 are listed as good articles, which, according to Template:Grading scheme, means that 'other encyclopedias could do a better job'."

  • sigh* See the first point above. I consider it extremely unfortunate that grading implies a hierarchy with FA at the top and GA below. GA's, IMHO, are just as good as FA's, they're just on topics that aren't important enough to go up on the home page. HiPER meets the criterion, but I would never put it up for FA because the topic is too obscure.

"The rest, presumably, are B-class or start-class on the assessment scale" "This means that slightly more than 99.8% of all the articles on Wikipedia are not considered well written, verifiable or broad or comprehensive in their coverage."

It means nothing of the sort. These (and similar exampels) are grossly misleading statements. Simply put, judging the wikipedia by tagging is a very bad idea. Consider, for instance, the very first article on the VA list, Paul Cézanne. It's not tagged at all. And it's a fantastic article.

Maury 15:37, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The very problem in the first place is there isn't enough focus on what might be going wrong. Just saying 'but some articles are great!' does the project no favours. Sure, some articles are great, but as the numbers show, they're the vanishingly small minority. If the metric used here is 'arguably useless', well, what's a better one? Sorry, but your assertion that Paul Cezanne has an excellent article is not the kind of thing we can use to judge the overall quality of Wikipedia. Similarly GA's, IMHO, are just as good as FA's doesn't help us judge accurately how successful the project is.
As for whether science is actually doing that well, look at WP:VA. According to that, 19 of the 216 most essential science articles are FAs, making 8.8% instead of the overall value of 6%. Mathematics has two out of 59 - 3.4%. Remember, the aim here is Britannica quality or better.
If, as seems to be the claim here, there are large numbers of high quality articles, where is the assessment that shows that those articles exist? WP:1.0/I shows that out of 290,000 articles assessed, 186,000 (65%) are stubs, 77,000 (27%) are 'start class', 22,000 (8%) are B-class, and 1255 (0.4%) GAs. Just over 2,000 are defined as A-class or FA - 0.7%. How can this project be seen as successful when just 0.7% of all articles that have been assessed actually count as high quality? Worldtraveller 15:45, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It seems the point has been missed.
My point is that using FA and GA tags for statistical puposes will fail because those processes are not working as well as they arguably should be. It says nothing about the wikipedia or the articles on it. Remember, GA requires active work on the part of editors who vote on articles that they are not a part of. There's an anti-reward, and as a result it sees little attention. Most articles that I consider great to fantastic never appear on GA in the first place. Check out rope trick effect. It's a fantastic article. Now is it "less fantastic" because the author didn't put it up for GA? No, of course not. Yet that's precisely what this essay claims.
Further, the grading process is relatively new. As a result it is not being widely applied to older articles. Yet those are precisely the articles that are most stable and more likely to be GA or high-grade. And to top it off, you repeat the confusion between quality and FA. FA is not about quality. I've written hundreds of high quality articles that I will not propose for FA, because I really don't think zgrass or HiPER is of wide enough interest to be on the home page. FA implies both quality and many other things, and using it as a metric of quality alone remains a serious problem.
I'll reiterate: using FA and GA is a bad metric. Tagging only slightly less so. That I can't offer a better one doesn't change anything. Maury 17:10, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If we want to discuss whether Wikipedia is succeeding or not, we do need some objective way of judging that. The table at WP:1.0/I seems about the best we can do, with a sample of 18% of the encyclopaedia assessed. What we see is that there are vastly more articles at the bad end of the scale than at the good end. Where are all the high quality articles that you say exist? If there were actually large numbers of great articles, but no-one could find out which ones they were, that would also be a failing.
As for rope trick effect, well, it seems rather similar to this web page. It doesn't seem to offer anything that you can't find elsewhere, and it doesn't provide any references, just external links. It's not bad but it's not amazing by any means. Worldtraveller 17:36, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah - I don't think that's a great example. But look at articles about cars - there are thousands of them, only three are FA's , three ex-FA's and less than a dozen are GA's. Are they all terrible articles? By no means - pick one at random: Audi A8 - not a terrible article. A bit light on references - but then who writes learned tomes about recent cars? Still - it wouldn't take much to make a GA out of it. Trust me, nobody will ever try. Wikipedia:WikiProject Automobiles/Assessment#Worklist is a good snapshot of car articles...look at all of those B-class articles - about 80 of them. The assessment scheme won't push any of them higher than B-class until they pass GAC - but look at them - they are all really close to GA quality. Why aren't there 80+ GA's in the automobile project area? Simple - it's too much pain to go through the process. The author of Mitsubishi i actually told me that it was too much bother to deal with PR, GAC, FAC - I had to work quite hard to pursuade him to take this great little article through the process. That's a GREAT article - 25 references, nice English, nice photos - good mix of technical stuff and interesting background reading. It should be an FA...but it's overwhelmingly likely that it won't ever be. SteveBaker 18:03, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Whether we need an objective "measure" on the success or failure or not, the one you use is a piece of rubbish for the aforementioned reasons. For some reason that defies logic, some other people actually bought the rhetoric and then started the cliched discussion about how to improve wikipedia, including restricting access to editing, which doesn't even have anything to do with the "problem" you decided was so obvious! Sir, the measuring stick you use is useless, and pretty much the results you come to are as such completely bogus. There may or may not be problems to solve here, but this discussion is so... useless and besides the point. Zalle 18:10, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
One more point: "If there were actually large numbers of great articles, but no-one could find out which ones they were, that would also be a failing." If somebody needs to read an encyclopedia article on a particular subject, they'll read it and perhaps think then that the article is good - but no one but encyclopedia geeks want to "find out which articles are good" so that they could then read those articles. You nor anyone else need to tell the reading public at large that some particular articles are good. They'll figure it out for themselves.Zalle 18:20, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Criticism Doesn't Ask WHY

One reason I could see why this occurs is that new editors and a huge group of current editors are really ignorant and unaware of the policies of Wikipedia. I see tonnes of edits made which fails WP:V, don't even rely on references. Then when references are used, it is a blog or a primary source. Rarely does a reference appear that passes WP:RS. I see so much WP:OR it drives me nuts. Certain subsections of wikipedia such as TV show summaries do not follow policy much. They just cite the TV show as a primary source and then write up the plot. Why should we allow such an analysis on Wikipedia without reliable sources? Even worse, these fiction articles seem to produce lazy editors who do not know anything about WP:V, WP:RS, WP:OR or any of the notability guidelines. This is what I precieve to be the real root of the issue. --Quirex 14:39, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say that something like 30-50% of the articles I've worked on don't meet V. You see, V didn't become policy until well after I joined the wiki. I had created perhaps 1000 new/rewritten articles by that point, and I have little interest in slogging through them to go add a ref I've long ago forgotten. It doesn't mean those refs don't exist, nor could you possibly infer the information is any less accurate. All it means is that I didn't post a ref in the currently accepted format. I'm sure you do see "tonnes of edits" that fail V, but I remain unconvinced it has any meaning. Maury 15:04, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
WP:V doesn't require sources to be explicitly cited except for facts that are "challenged or likely to be challenged". It seems to be a fad lately to think that WP:V states that sources are required for every paragraph, or every fact, or something like that. CMummert · talk 15:14, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If people added [citation needed] tags in an article over statements it means the fact/statement is challenged and thus needs a citation. I don't think this fad is bad as it makes OR very obvious. That said whether or not everything has to be cited or referenced doesn't get around the fact people are unaware of the policies themselves and thus make poor edits. If you look at many AFDs people talk about how they feel and not about how this article does or doesn't violate policy. This is especially noticable with anything to do with WP:WEB. This is a general feeling I get. --Quirex 17:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect

This article should be redirected to WP:NOT#Failing. — BRIAN0918 • 2007-02-14 15:41Z

Wikipedia will make it

This essay and discussion are evidence people care. Wikipedia will make it because people care. Every large system, culture, or community has its problems. Wikipedia's problems are being dealt with here, not tucked away. Sometimes, the ripening process is frustratedly slow, inefficient, and abysmal. But that's the nature of democracy.

Wouldn't it be more constructive to criticize Wikipedia with the prospect of success rather than the prospect of doom?

Reward (through status), don't punish (through restrictions)

I'd like to seperate the problem (which exists, but does not bug me much) into two areas.

  • Continued interference from vandals and agenda-pushers.
A lot has been done, successfully, to limit the impact of dumb drive-by-edits. The vandals and agenda-pushers that remain, being much more highly motivated, haven't left. And they won't. Get over it.
Every system is hackable and the Wiki continues to grow in influence/usefulness. Nothing but the most draconian of measures will keep those people out, and even if some sort of super-safe solution could be found, the reputation of Wikipedia would only rise, and the incentive of hack that system and use its reputation would rise with it.
So this part of the problem won't be solved and we should, accordingly, focus on the other.
  • Edits from well-meaning but uninformed people.
As others have observed, some haven't read the guidelines or don't understand their importance. Others don't understand their subject well enough, and that specifically includes the inability to distinguish between facts and the things they've been told are facts, but aren't.
These people are not the problem, their lack of understanding is. From experience, I assume that in many cases lack of understanding is caused by a more fundamental problem: their lack of understanding of the fact they may lack understanding. Unknown unknowns. Psychology has a word for it: optimism bias or the tendency to see the outcomes of ones actions overly optimistically.
This problem is solvable, because it only happens when people need to make their own predictions about their competence. People just need to be reminded, prominently, that there are more competent editors as well as less competent ones, and that they have (only) a certain competence although it may not be measurable in any precise way.

The logical conclusion is some sort of editor rating system. I disagree with those on Slashdot who have said their karma system would be helpful. People are complex, and if they and others are to use a rating system for estimates of their competence in a broad range of areas, the system better be complex. I have in mind something like a list of user templates, which are mandatory parts of user's personal pages. They could look like this:

Status bar for user RandomWikipedian
A member for 3 years, rank 34,120 on the Helpfulness table. This user has made 156 edits, averaging +72 bytes. 6 edits (4%) by this user have been reverted. This user has never been banned. This user has not completed the tutorial. This user is a major contributor to 7 articles. This user is a major contributor to 1 good article. This user is a major contributor to 1 featured article. This user contributed 7 images. This user contributed 1 featured image.

Or something like that. The details would be to be figured out. I'd just like to emphasize that this doesn't just give people clear measures. It is also a rewarding system, and according to all modern learning theories theories, it is thus much more able to produce positive learning effects compared to restricting/punishing systems, especially in the long term.

This is important because almost all ideas for changes previously given focus on imposing some sort of restriction on the current, extremely free editing process. Even requiring the approval of an appointed expert before an edit goes live, is a restriction and a punishment because it will be perceived as an insult.

Restrictions emphasize a conflict of interests and thus cause all sorts of friction, mostly in the form of complaints and negative publicity. Reward systems focus on solutions, on possible avenues for cooperation. And since we want cooperation, not just absence of disruptive behaviour, the system sketched above is much more likely to make Wikipedia succeed than any sort of "protection".Denial 16:33, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It's an interesting idea, but doesn't it already exist in one form or another. Under the above system, anyone could still edit, but it would be easier to differentiate between experienced and amateur editors. But today, as long as editors update their user page, it's pretty easy to get a good idea of who has been here a while and who is brand new. Wouldn't experience have to be linked with greater capability (like admins today) in order to actually affect the editing process? -- Joshdboz 17:43, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that is a good idea. I am not sure if the stats could be retroactive or not, since I am unaware of what, if any, statistical data is recorded on its users by Wikipedia. But, what I want to call the "Wiki Editor Card" (based on the Xbox Live Gamercard), would be a grand idea. I don't know if it should have any weight on what the user can and cannot do - but it would at least be somewhat of an incentive to do good work on here. Chad78 17:50, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to suggest a more fine-grained approach to editorial differentiation: Editing points (EP) and Editor levels. Give each user points based on work that they've done, with deductions for various forms of "bad" behavior, and assign users to levels proportional to log(EP). Unlike karma, there will be no upper limit to the number of levels. Allow editors to lock articles so that they can only be edited by users of the same or higher levels. This would provide a hierarchy of articles with assurances that quality work is rarely vandanized. It would provide an incentive to create and use user-ids to allow ones work to be properly creditted to them, while still allowing the occasional "drive-by" edits of non-mainstream articles. Finally, it would keep all of the "fun" aspects of WP, such as revision wars and POV battles, but with a much smaller number of possible participants. 204.193.75.21 18:01, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]


After a bit of thought, I'd like to suggest that a user's editorial level be equal to int(log2(1+nbr_of_edits-2*nbr_of_reversions) + sqrt(nbr_of_barnstars)). Logged-in users would have the following special abilities:
  • can lock any article against edits by users with a lower level
  • can permanently unlock any article against locking by a lower level user
  • can award barnstars to users with lower levels
By adding barnstars into the equation, we allow quick recognition of new users. OTOH, even someone with a billion edits would only be at level 30, and winning a hundred barnstars would only push this to level 40. Hard-code Jimmy Wales at level 50, and life will be good. 204.193.75.21 18:53, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Bad faith move

I find the moving of this article's title from "Wikipedia is failing" to "Wikipedia is succeeding" to be a bad faith propaganda move. Wikipedia has problems. Those problems need to be fixed, not brushed under the rug. RunedChozo 17:22, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah - well, it's because we got slashdotted. Having a discussion page entitled 'Wikipedia is failing' is misleading to outsiders - but we all recognise it for what it is - a place to discuss some specific issues with article quality. That Wikipedia is the only open/volunteer-driven/non-commercial ever to make it into the top ten web sites on the planet means that we are NOT failing. We are a runaway success - aside (arguably) from the Linux operating system, this is probably one of the greatest free/open projects in history, the greatest repository of human knowledge in history and the most widely read "book" in history. That's a success by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah - it would have been better not to be slashdotted with such a dramatic title. Would they have headlined it if this topic was "Problem with promotion of high importance articles to featured article status"? Hell no! Fortunately, Slashdot readers are generally pretty smart people - they'll see it for what it is. SteveBaker 18:12, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My input

After reading this essay and other editor's commments on it, I feel that many important points have been raised. Will Wikipedia actually fail? I think that depends on what the goal of WP is. If it is to present encyclopedic knowledge; then no, it will not fail. If the goal is to present NPOV encyclopedic knowledge; then yes, it will fail. I think the problem is not in the quality of the writing (some of the best writing I have seen on here is in Pokemon articles), but it is in so many editors trying to push their opinions in many of these articles (especially in "high-profile" ones). Unfortunately, this is something that I do not foresee changing. Through my RC patrol, I have seen countless number of arguments in articles because of conflicting opinions. This, however, is what make WP so good (the fact that anyone can edit). Yet, this is what also makes WP somewhat unreliable in that one side of the argument will "win" if they have a larger faction.

This is very common. I have been abused by islamic editors numerous times. RunedChozo 17:35, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Another reason with why WP could fail may be due to the sheer number of administrators. I strongly feel that admins are a vital, integral part of WP but there seems to be more than is possibly necessary. Through the past couple of months of me editing WP, I have had the pleasure of meeting several knowledgeable, helpful and all-around pleasant admins. However, I have also, unfortunately, met some most disagreeable ones. Not everyone is going to be nice on here, however, I feel that admins should represent WP to the best of their ability and should not abuse those privileges as I have seen on several occasions. That, as a whole, brings down morale here.

I strongly agree with Denial's idea about a reward system. That way, people do get an incentive to be better editors. Several times I have asked myself why do I continue to fight vandals or edit pages that will just be reverted by someone trying to push their POV. I have yet to find an answer. However, I have noticed that after the two times I have received barnstars, my edit numbers went up and I felt good about what I am doing here. Rewards work. MetsFan76 17:31, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The REAL reason Wikipedia is failing

(saw this on Slashdot, originally posted by "kmweber"): from [2]

Wikipedia will fail, yes, but its content model has nothing to do with it.

It is the organization of the project itself that cannot last.

Wikipedia is fraught with pretentiousness, which attracts uptight anal-retentives who simply like to power trip and enforce every last minute consequence of every obscure policy rather than, and sometimes to the detriment of, creating good content--and even if the situation to which they were responding wasn't actually hurting anything.

I believe in the idea of Wikipedia, but the idea of Wikipedia needs to be saved from Wikipedia. To that end, I have created an alternative encyclopedia, Opencycle that I believe will fix those problems. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 216.135.28.176 (talk) 18:26, 14 February 2007 (UTC).[reply]

Not the only reason. I've been blocked from improving Wikipedia by Arbitrators who ignore policy and rules. (SEWilco 18:39, 14 February 2007 (UTC))[reply]
Ditto. The problem is that the administrators of wikipedia, far from wanting to improve an encyclopedia, are here to abuse their powers and get their rocks off harassing people. "Policy" and the rules only apply to you if you don't have a powerful admin friend or aren't an admin yourself, at which point you can do anything you want, call anyone any name, and if they so much as try to protest you'll be backed up and the person you're attacking will be harassed by the admins.RunedChozo 18:46, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
As I mentioned above, I don't think it is all the admins that are the problem. There are many on here that are really very nice and helpful. Unfortunately, there are a few bad apples that do not improve things here. MetsFan76 18:48, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The supposed "good" admins never do anything about the "few bad apples." They're just as bad and just as corrupt for letting the bad ones have their way and even defending the bad ones. RunedChozo 18:55, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
And I thought I was the only one. I gave up on Wikipedia as an organization the day that the Chuck Cunningham Syndrome article was deleted by users who RunedChozo has accurately described. If Wikipedia cannot find a solution to this problem, I hope another organization starts up that will. Proteus71 18:55, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The real Wikipedia is succeding

I think we have to distinguish between Wikipedia as it really is and what its power structure seems to think it is or wants it to be. The real Wikipedia derives it authority from the collective knowledge, wisdom and commitment of thousands of editors, not from cited sources. Most articles are written be people who think they know their subject, not by someone sitting in some library abstracting info from secondary sources. What the V RS OR NPOV NOT et al policies really accomplish is providing experienced editors tools needed to control undesirable abuses of the system. These tools themselves depend on the judgment and good will of the editors and administrators who use them, not rote application. If they were enforced thoroughly and uniformly, most of Wikipedia would evaporate.

Wikipedia is an experiment in decentralized content creation. The result is a resource that hundreds of millions of people use, a resource that no centralized organization could duplicate even if it had billions of dollars to spend. The quality of Wikipedia is best judged, in my opinion, not by reading random articles--there is plenty of junk-- but by selecting topics you know about and topics you've always been curious about and looking them up, then folowing the links from those articles. I've done both many times. Sure, I encounter articles that need work. But I am generally very impressed with what I find. And it is usully easy to spot bad information.

The real question in my mind is whether Wikipedia is sustainable. Will the ratio of good editors to bad stay high enough as the initial excitement wears off and when most of the topics editors know about have been written about. It may be that a new phase will be required where more of the work goes into certifying articles and maintaining stability. Just because such a second phase may be needed doesn't by any means guarantee that there will be enough volunteers to carry it out. What this article demonstrates is the the FA and GA mechanisms have little hope of being what the next phase needs. They are too bureaucratic and labor intensive and, at the end, articles can drift away from the version that was approved.

Maybe what is neded is not a single certification process, but a mechanism for incorporating many such processes and allowing decentralized groups to develop and implement their own. This could include Citizendium, FA, GA and others that might be proposed. Guidelines might be needed to insure some degree of neutrality. We should put more effort into coming up with ways such processes can hook into Wikipedia and encourge experimentation about the certification methods themselves. I think that's the only way we will find out what really works for us. --agr 18:35, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Interesting ideas Arnold. My only problem is that WP is so inundated with guidelines right now that anymore could just cause a meta-physical catastrophe. I think a change is needed to ensure the quality of the writing here but it just seems too many admins/editors are focusing more on guidelines and less on the writing. MetsFan76 18:42, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

From the Philosophy department

I'm interested in the discussion! I've long campaigned for some sort of trust system (no hierarchy, either you are in it or not - I hate hierarchies). Is there a problem? Just look at the Philosophy article which is complete SHITE from beginning to end. It started off not too bad, got steadily worse and look at it now. I have a sample of amusingly bad edits on my talk page, check it out (and check out the Bristol stool scale too).

Something has to give. I've lobbied admins, but the answer is always, it's my fault for not being able to handle trolls. Oh well. Keep up the campaign. Dbuckner 18:51, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Admins don't care about writing a quality encyclopedia, are you kidding? They care about their power base and using it to get their rocks off harassing people. RunedChozo 18:57, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The biggest laugh was when a respected Oxford philosopher turned up one day. He stayed about half a day, and left shortly after being lectured by a complete moron about how he didn't understand ancient philosophy. (His fault for reacting badly to trolls). We have lost another two excellent editors in the last week. Dbuckner 18:55, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Through my RC patrolling, I have noticed the downfall of the Philosophy article and it's a shame. I'm not sure how the admins can help out though as they are always so bogged down with rules and regulations and forget about maintaining the integrity of some of these very important articles. MetsFan76 18:56, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]