QUOTE(chrisoff @ Wed 23rd November 2011, 4:46pm)
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Read the study!
You dismiss the Vital articles like House...
Most of the "Vital" articles are crap topics with little solid academic publications. Things like "House" are so common, wide spread, etc, that making an encyclopedia article based on third party sources is practically impossible. It is like trying to determine the color of the sun by staring at it.
An article like Samuel Johnson (chosen because it is a shared FA of Malleus and myself and you are referring to us both) is a truly "vital" article in the academic sense - it is a major figure that is historic, has a lot of academic sources, and is someone that an encyclopedia should be used to contain information on.
The study merely assumed that those determining the "vital" status actually knew what they were doing, and they ignored other determiners of importance (other rankings or things like "does the traditional Britannica have an article on it?").
One of the problems is that people assume that editors are able to work on any topic and are willing to change topics. Instead, most FAC contributors specialize in a few topics of interest and don't care about anything else. This is good and bad, but it wont ever change. It is like complaining that there are too many people who want to study Math instead of study Biology. You can't really force them to go somewhere that they aren't interested in going.
There was either a short story or an actual news report of a socialistic type society that randomly assigned jobs instead of providing people what jobs they are good at/have backgrounds in. The end result is that it doesn't work. Why? Because it would be impossible for it to work. That isn't human nature.
This post has been edited by Ottava: