Vital articles debate Options

[Peter Damian]

This may infuriate the “Don’t discuss Wikipedia at all” party and may be send instantly to the Annex, but I’ll post it anyway. There is a proposed article for the Signpost, draft here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wik...articles_debate . It is interesting: the gist is that there have been very few good featured articles since 2008. They are all about hurricanes and US roads and obscure insects. But donors give money to Wikipedia because they they want a better Wikipedia for readers, not editors. Why is Wikipedia incentivising the high production of low importance articles and discouraging the opposite?

This has kicked off a terrible row. The editor proposed to run the story http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=462131614 and there is a furious argument on his talk page. I’m not sure of the politics, but I think the FA crew don’t like the article, for obvious reasons, and are trying to have it pulled. On the other side are the WMF crew suggesting that the FA process be opened up.

This problem would be solved in a real business by having a model with some sort of marketing strategy. Decide what the target audience should be, decide what articles appeal to that audience, and get together a team of people that can write these. Keeping the staff happy (not ‘the community’) would be important, but secondary, and balancing these often opposing forces is the art of good management. But Wikipedia doesn’t have this. As one commenter says “there's nothing that the Foundation or any Wikipedian has to offer that can mechanistically determine which FAs will be written. The motivators are collaboration, reputation and pride of accomplishment.”

[Peter Damian]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Edward B---ner" <peter.damian@btinternet.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 04, 2011 5:49 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] "Vital Articles" underperforming?

Interesting that Theology is not a 'vital article'. As for philosophy, none of the main philosophical schools (nominalism, realism, scepticism, empiricism, rationalism, existentialism etc) are mentioned. Why is this?

----- Original Message -----
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Subject: Your message to foundation-l awaits moderator approval

Your mail to 'foundation-l' with the subject Re: [Foundation-l] "Vital Articles" underperforming? Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval. The reason it is being held: Post to moderated list

This post has been edited by Peter Damian: Sun 4th December 2011, 5:53pm