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Here are at least two of the real questions posed by this article, other than "Trump, blah, blah, Prince". 1) From the list of pages it seems that Wikipedia is

Here are at least two of the real questions posed by this article, other than "Trump, blah, blah, Prince". 1) From the list of pages it seems that Wikipedia is a news site, and a list site, and a calendar site. Yet it uses an wiki format that is ill-suited to any of those tasks. Discuss. Four Wikipedia editors collaborated to rewrite the article on Vincent van Gogh, one of the most well-known painters in Western art, and brought it to ‘featured‘ status, a quality marker awarded only after an extensive peer review process by fellow Wikipedia editors.The effort required to rewrite van Gogh’s article was “enormous,” Wikipedia editor Victoriaearle told us, due to the amount of research, reading, and writing required. This shows up in the number of edits made by the four, which put it at the twentieth-most edited article in the entire year. 2) If it takes such an enormous amount of effort to create one "featured article", it becomes impossible to get all articles to featured status. There simply is not enough time/people to do the work. The question is: where is the quality boundary drawn? Go to any random page and see when it was last updated, or if it has outdated time information. The "infinite monkey" theorem says an infinite amount of monkeys working for an infinite amount of time will come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. But in this case, there is neither infinite time, nor infinite monkeys. I'll call this Sparkzilla's Theorem: Given a finite amount of people and time, the quality of Wikipedia articles will always be suboptimal. It would be interesting for someone with a statistics background to prove this...

sushisource 10y ago
The second point is obviously true, and always will be. Stated more generally: "There are limitless things we would like to do, and limited time and resources with which to do them" The definition of a featured article is quite rigorous, and there's zero expectation that all wikipedia articles will hit that bar.
- halfak_ 10y ago
  Well, we spend about 12 million labor hours per year editing Wikipedia[1]. We've put in like 150 million by now. Right now, we have 5,893 out of 5,095,532 articles in the Featured class. We have another 29,152 that are almost featured[2]. Based on some bold assumptions I just made[3], we could probably finish off Wikipedia by 2262. 1. Geiger, R. S., & Halfaker, A. (2013, February). Using edit sessions to measure participation in wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 861-870). ACM. Chicago 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editoria... 3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/When_will_wikipedia_be_done https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/When_will_wik...
resfirestar 10y ago
1) News and lists get tons of edits, but how much content added to articles about current events survives subsequent revision? How much time is spent adding 10 items to a list, versus the amount of consideration and debate that can go into a single choice of words in something like the van Gogh article? The wiki format is the best one I know of for the places where Wikipedia editors spend their time and energy. 2) Not quite sure what you're getting at. Having standards attainable only through months of concerted effort is a choice to encourage people to expend that effort. The featured article criteria could be made arbitrarily more or less difficult, and article quality wouldn't change as far as people uninterested in the distinction are concerned.
inimino 10y ago
Isn't that the point of "featured"? If they featured everything it would lose its meaning.
vacri 10y ago
1) It is, primarily, none of those things. It's a crowdsourced encyclopedia, and a wiki is ideal for that. 2) We don't need an infinite number of featured articles, we only need one per day. You're also making the mistake of assuming articles that people visit are evenly spread across all the levels of quality. I'm doubting that the thousands of stub articles that are just demographic info on US counties get much in the way of visitation, for example.
deleted 10y ago
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sushisource 10y ago

The second point is obviously true, and always will be. Stated more generally: "There are limitless things we would like to do, and limited time and resources with which to do them" The definition of a featured article is quite rigorous, and there's zero expectation that all wikipedia articles will hit that bar.

halfak_ 10y ago
Well, we spend about 12 million labor hours per year editing Wikipedia[1]. We've put in like 150 million by now. Right now, we have 5,893 out of 5,095,532 articles in the Featured class. We have another 29,152 that are almost featured[2]. Based on some bold assumptions I just made[3], we could probably finish off Wikipedia by 2262. 1. Geiger, R. S., & Halfaker, A. (2013, February). Using edit sessions to measure participation in wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 861-870). ACM. Chicago 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editoria... 3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/When_will_wikipedia_be_done https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/When_will_wik...

resfirestar 10y ago

1) News and lists get tons of edits, but how much content added to articles about current events survives subsequent revision? How much time is spent adding 10 items to a list, versus the amount of consideration and debate that can go into a single choice of words in something like the van Gogh article? The wiki format is the best one I know of for the places where Wikipedia editors spend their time and energy. 2) Not quite sure what you're getting at. Having standards attainable only through months of concerted effort is a choice to encourage people to expend that effort. The featured article criteria could be made arbitrarily more or less difficult, and article quality wouldn't change as far as people uninterested in the distinction are concerned.

inimino 10y ago

Isn't that the point of "featured"? If they featured everything it would lose its meaning.

vacri 10y ago

1) It is, primarily, none of those things. It's a crowdsourced encyclopedia, and a wiki is ideal for that. 2) We don't need an infinite number of featured articles, we only need one per day. You're also making the mistake of assuming articles that people visit are evenly spread across all the levels of quality. I'm doubting that the thousands of stub articles that are just demographic info on US counties get much in the way of visitation, for example.

deleted 10y ago

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