Are Feature articles worth their salt?, Feature article quality evaluation shows they're a crock Options

[chrisoff]

This has been posted by TCO on the FA talk page and seriously questions the value of FA to Wikipedia on Improving Wikipedia’s important articles!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...nt_articles.pdf

Are articles with high reader page views more important than "niche" articles by FAC regulars that get few views per month?

Is FAC a "walled garden" concentrating on "star collectors" (niche article polishers) that discourages NEW BLOOD and NEW IDEAS?

This post has been edited by chrisoff:

[chrisoff]

But if the FA is on a topic that hardly anyone reads? That is most of the FAs!


"Ian Rose, star collector, has 6 FAs at an average page view of 254 (the lowest average of all 155 FAers, including all the dabblers)."

Malleus brings up the Donner Party as a heavy hitter. But it was an article collaboration.

Collaborated Featured Articles are more relevant than solo-nominated ones. (Monthly page views used to measure relevance.)

Of the 151 FA's analyzed, "46 users had a single collaboration and 90 users had solo FAs only".

Read the study!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...nt_articles.pdf

This post has been edited by chrisoff:

[Malleus]

Malleus brings up the Donner Party as a heavy hitter. But it was an article collaboration.

And in what way does that disqualify it from consideration? I have many FA/GAs that get more than the arbitrary 3000 page views per month. Not sure how many of them I've written this year though. Quite likely you'll tell me though.

This post has been edited by Malleus:

[chrisoff]

Malleus brings up the Donner Party as a heavy hitter. But it was an article collaboration.

And in what way does that disqualify it from consideration? I have many FA/GAs that get more than the arbitrary 3000 page views per month. Not sure how many of them I've written this year though. Quite likely you'll tell me though.

Read the study!

You dismiss the Vital articles like House, but you are answered by Johnbod:

"Well over 100,000 per month apparently, probably mostly with homework, as for many of these articles; but they still deserve a better article than they currently get. Or maybe they want to know why the plumbing is bust, in which case, tough. What really pisses me off is truly dire stubs like [[English Renaissance]], where (until today) some 17,000 readers a month were told that "William Shakespeare, composed theatrical representations of the English take on life, death, and history", which had of course remained unchanged since 2005 (when the article overall was far better than this morning, I now see). That's over a million views. I do think that editors who are able to improve the worst of these without much effort have a responsibility to the project to spend some of their time doing so. At all levels we put far too much effort into new articles, as opposed to the long-untouched rubbish on significant topics we already have.

Is Wikipedia for the world? Or just for you and Ottava?

As the study asks:

Why is production of new FAs dropping?
•Bottlenecks of structure (page construction, time requirements)?
•Reviewer limits (only a few trusted reviewers and no recruitment or training of top replacements)?
•Unpleasant FAC atmosphere? Edit wars dissuading high investment in articles? Desired exclusivity? “Burnout”? Others?

[Malleus]

Malleus brings up the Donner Party as a heavy hitter. But it was an article collaboration.

And in what way does that disqualify it from consideration? I have many FA/GAs that get more than the arbitrary 3000 page views per month. Not sure how many of them I've written this year though. Quite likely you'll tell me though.

Read the study!

You dismiss the Vital articles like House, but you are answered by Johnbod:

"Well over 100,000 per month apparently, probably mostly with homework, as for many of these articles; but they still deserve a better article than they currently get. Or maybe they want to know why the plumbing is bust, in which case, tough.

You are familiar with the TV series entitled House I take It? That's what people are looking for, not some rambling essay on places in which people live.

[chrisoff]

Malleus brings up the Donner Party as a heavy hitter. But it was an article collaboration.

And in what way does that disqualify it from consideration? I have many FA/GAs that get more than the arbitrary 3000 page views per month. Not sure how many of them I've written this year though. Quite likely you'll tell me though.

Read the study!

You dismiss the Vital articles like House, but you are answered by Johnbod:

"Well over 100,000 per month apparently, probably mostly with homework, as for many of these articles; but they still deserve a better article than they currently get. Or maybe they want to know why the plumbing is bust, in which case, tough.

You are familiar with the TV series entitled House I take It? That's what people are looking for, not some rambling essay on places in which people live.

Sorry! It's House as in the structure! Look it up!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House

See http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/House

Remember, we aren't all middle class western academics.

This post has been edited by chrisoff: