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:

[EricBarbour]

How many times do I have to tell you clowns: "the whole thing is broken"!

If they just took the FAs and GAs out and put them on a separate wiki, editable only by credentialed
experts but readable by all, they would have a really nice encyclopedia right there.
But that will never happen.

[Ottava]

How many times do I have to tell you clowns: "the whole thing is broken"!

If they just took the FAs and GAs out and put them on a separate wiki, editable only by credentialed
experts but readable by all, they would have a really nice encyclopedia right there.
But that will never happen.

I talked to Durova about doing just that. Many of the FAs (like Simpsons articles) are worthless. But yeah.

What about the Emperor, think he would be willing to host a second Wiki of just GAs/FAs on some standard topics and only have a few people able to edit it on request, and find out how well it does after a year or so?

[Alison]

I talked to Durova about doing just that. Many of the FAs (like Simpsons articles) are worthless. But yeah.

What about the Emperor, think he would be willing to host a second Wiki of just GAs/FAs on some standard topics and only have a few people able to edit it on request, and find out how well it does after a year or so?

Wasn't that kinda what Veropedia was all about? It was a noble effort on the part of Danny Wool, but it ultimately failed.

[Peter Damian]

I talked to Durova about doing just that. Many of the FAs (like Simpsons articles) are worthless. But yeah.

What about the Emperor, think he would be willing to host a second Wiki of just GAs/FAs on some standard topics and only have a few people able to edit it on request, and find out how well it does after a year or so?

Wasn't that kinda what Veropedia was all about? It was a noble effort on the part of Danny Wool, but it ultimately failed.

Wikipedia works by the 'network effect'. For the whole thing to work, you need the Google effect, and for links to all the other parts of the encyclopedia to be available. Did Veropedia have that?

[dogbiscuit]

I talked to Durova about doing just that. Many of the FAs (like Simpsons articles) are worthless. But yeah.

What about the Emperor, think he would be willing to host a second Wiki of just GAs/FAs on some standard topics and only have a few people able to edit it on request, and find out how well it does after a year or so?

Wasn't that kinda what Veropedia was all about? It was a noble effort on the part of Danny Wool, but it ultimately failed.

Wikipedia works by the 'network effect'. For the whole thing to work, you need the Google effect, and for links to all the other parts of the encyclopedia to be available. Did Veropedia have that?

I suspect the trouble was that its supporters had narrow interests, looked after their owned articles and then lost momentum as they were a pretty narrow clique and had no visibility outside the vaguely interested subset of Wikipedians. These other encyclopedias never have the manpower to get to critical mass.

In the end, the trick would have to be that it would be a layer over the top of Wikipedia - so that dead links in the Veropedia were redirected to Wikipedia, and any links from that were intercepted and checked for the Veropedia. You would also want Google to take the Veropedia version in preference to the Wikipedia version which would require Google to hack its algorithms.

If WMF owned both versions, then they could work such tricks, but anyone else would be at the whim of Google to try and make any impression - I doubt anyone much goes to Wikipedia through its main page.

[Jim]

I doubt anyone much goes to Wikipedia through its main page.

Precisely.

Spend as long as you like massaging your content and prettifying your pages - if you're not Google's "goto" friend you're not even in the race.

Rarely does an internet phenomenon get replaced by something basically the same, but slightly prettier or more accurate - that's just not the way paradigms are redefined.