Wikipedia:100,000 feature-quality articles

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WP:100K

By size, the English Wikipedia has the text of several dozen Britannicas. It continues to add several thousand articles per day (net, after deletions): at present, the article count (live) is 2,627,513 total Wikipedia articles (average revisions per article: 100.91).

During Wikimania 2006, Jimbo challenged the English Wikipedia community to work more on quality than sheer quantity. In July 2006, Danny wrote an essay, What next, on the subject, and in September 2006, on his contest page, said:

"Rather than getting another million articles, I believe that we
need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles."

This essay discusses the challenge of accomplishing that goal.

Contents

Where things stand now

The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team has a summary table for assessments that have been done by WikiProjects:

All
projects		 Importance
Top High Mid Low None Total
Quality
Featured article FA 268 412 473 289 969 2411
Featured list FL 25 132 170 234 244 805
A 81 295 149 46 223 794
Good article GA 299 653 1281 900 2078 5211
B 3334 8740 13310 8293 16189 49866
C 494 1739 3783 3506 3437 12959
Start 4032 19963 68005 129119 169500 390619
Stub 1367 11251 71538 349402 648487 1082045
List 1566 1001 2548 7583 13318 26016
Assessed 11466 44186 161257 499372 854445 1570726
Unassessed 282 824 2410 5874 346179 355569
Total 11748 45010 163667 505246 1200624 1926295


As of January 2008, less than half of the 2.1+ million articles in Wikipedia had been assessed. Of those assessed, 54,000 were assessed as "B" class or better.

Note: There is some double-counting in the table above, where articles "belong" to multiple WikiProjects. For example, on January 4, 2008, Wikipedia:Featured articles said that there were 1,789 FAs, while the table showed 2143, about 20 percent more. That means that the actual number of (assessed) B class or better articles is probably between 45,000 and 50,000.
Update: On 11 November 2008, the featured-article count was 2,298 FAs, up 509, so the daily rate was 1.63 FAs per day ([2298-1789]/313) or 595/yr. The time period includes any summer-break activity, so used as a year-long predictor, the goal of 100,000 FAs would require 164 more years (97,702/595). Processing FAs 82x faster (more people) could handle that in 2 years.

Defining the task

Official FA definition

Wikipedia:What is a featured article? lists the criteria for a featured article (FA):

  1. It is well written, comprehensive, factually accurate (and verifiable), neutral and stable.
  2. It complies with the standards set out in the manual of style and relevant WikiProjects, including:
    • (a) a concise lead section that summarizes the entire topic and prepares the reader for the higher level of detail in the subsequent sections;
    • (b) a proper system of hierarchical headings; and
    • (c) a substantial but not overwhelming table of contents (see section help).
  3. It has images where appropriate, with succinct captions and acceptable copyright status.
  4. It is of appropriate length, staying focused on the main topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).

Additional considerations

  • A subject-area expert should be able to look over the resulting article and subjectively rate it "pretty good, no glaring omissions" at the least.
  • Accomplishing the proposed goal does not necessarily mean putting 100,000 articles through the current featured article candidacy process. That process requires too much editor time, per article, in reviewing candidates, to be able to be scaled to handle a doubling or tripling in volume.

What is needed

  • This will require a lot of good research and good writing. Really good writing.
  • We may be able to get by without the writers and researchers being subject-matter experts themselves.
  • How many editor-hours per article? One FAC regular estimates 50 editor-hours. That estimate assumes one editor; two or three editors teaming up could do it faster if working in coordination—or much slower, if they spend their time arguing!

Easy steps any editor can do right now

There's a lot of low-hanging fruit:

  • Take a look at articles that did not quite achieve featured status and fix them.
  • Take a look at any of the lists that exist for vital articles, pick one and fix it.
  • Look through the projects and portals and see what needs to be done.
  • Take a 1911 Britannica article and make it a uniquely Wikipedia article.
  • Look through the categories of articles needing citations and find the citations.
  • Pick a topic you know little about, go to the library and learn about it, then write about what you learned. It can be very rewarding.
  • If you speak another language, translate. (It would be interesting to see what the ratio of FAs per total articles is on other languages as compared to English).

Splitting the work among editors

This goal may require setting up an assembly line for feature-quality articles. That would let us break down the tasks so people of different skills can contribute in different ways:

  1. Research
  2. Rough outline
  3. Note-taking
  4. Writing up the researched outline
  5. Writing Rough Draft (stub)
  6. Expanding article
  7. Use correct citation techniques
  8. Polishing the prose
  9. Copyediting and formatting per manual of style
  10. Feedback
  11. Back to step (7)

Many of these steps can be combined into a single pass by a single editor.

Such an approach requires coordinating people's efforts and strengths. How can an editor who loves to and is good at, say, polishing prose find those articles that need polishing and are worth polishing? (Both parts are important. A few clicks of Special:Random will generate articles which seem to need polishing, but not everyone might find it worthwhile to ensure 100% deathlessly captivating prose on, say, a random Pokémon character's article.)

Motivating good writers

Things that motivate good writers:

  • Wikipedia:Danny's contest offers a small prize and a large egoboost for writing successful FACs.
  • Winning at FAC. You might get on the front page!
  • Improving an article in set-out ways.
  • Filling out a subject area
  • The satisfaction of knowing that you have contributed in a lasting way to Wikipedia's quality, not just its quantity.
  • Public recognition (of a sort) that they are good writers. (For example, Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations)
  • Any recognition from peers and other contributors in the form of thanks, plaudits, encouragement and so forth. You'd be surprised at how much this keeps the tired underappreciated editor going.
  • ...

How to generate steps for improvement

  • Peer review provides suggestions for what might be missing from an article aiming for FA quality.
  • Get subject-matter experts to complain about articles. List off the top of their head what's obviously missing. Make that list a to-do list for the article.
  • Ask other like-minded contributors to review the article, particular if they have written articles in a related area.
  • Ask for feedback from a relevant WikiProject.
  • ...

Finding the good articles

Where can we find candidates for improvement?

  • It would be nice if everything that passed the WP:FAC process meets these criteria. But even if this were beyond dispute, the FAC process is not necessarily suitable:
    • The FAC criteria are deliberately tightened over time to keep it to the top 0.1% of articles, or about one new FA per day - to represent only the best of the best.
    • It's an ad-hoc committee of regulars, and committees don't scale as fast as editors and articles.
    • It's adversarial enough to upset people on a regular and ongoing basis; subjecting this to those not expecting precisely that would not be good for community health and integrity.
    • The criteria being applied are not always either the best criteria, or competently applied.
    • Most FACs are very specialised; something about it doesn't get general topics through.
  • Featured articles from other language Wikipedias should be worth checking out. If you write well in both English and the other language, you may be able to do very well for en: by going through the other language's featured articles and bringing the en: article up to scratch.
  • Former featured articles will have many suitable articles. Note that FAs are regularly reassessed by the ever-increasing FAC requirements (e.g. not fitting the current fashion on FAC in reference style), so removal doesn't mean a bad article. Quite a lot of what's been removed from WP:FA by Featured Article Removal would in fact pass our list just fine.
  • Pick an article from Wikipedia:Featured article review (which will have been approved by WP:FAC once already) and correct the identified faults before it loses featured article status. (Unless the objections strike you as pointlessly querulous, in which case improve another article.)
  • A few articles on WP:GA may be featured quality, only with editors who don't want to deal with FAC. If you find a gem, nominate it for FAC and try to defend it there.
  • ...

Assessing the articles

See the standard assessment criteria and the lists of assessed articles (just over 100,000 as of September 21, 2006).

(FA and GA have both become combative trials by ordeal for articles. I suggest rating articles against the featured article criteria, but: no self-nominations. - David Gerard 10:12, 21 September 2006 (UTC))

What would it take to do this by the end of 2007?

For those who are intimidated by all the work this entails, remember — there are a lot of low hanging fruit out there. And it's much easier to do it than to talk about it. And it's much more rewarding than to complain about this or that (person or process) - Danny

Time to review the reality-check provided by The Mythical Man-Month.

Note that Danny has ever successfully nominated only one FA, Donegal fiddle tradition in early 2004, and that it was de-listed before the end of 2004.

Wikipedia reached 1M articles on March 1, 2006 and 2M articles on September 10, 2007.

Wikipedia:Good article statistics and Wikipedia:Featured article statistics provide up-to-the-month FA count history and the GA hopper which, it could be argued, feeds the FA intake. See also Category:Wikipedia featured articles

  • December 2003: ~170 FA
  • December 2004: 473 FA, growth rate: 0.8 FA per day
  • December 2005: 849 FA, growth rate: 1.0 FA per day
  • December 2006: 1208 FA, growth rate: 1.0 FA per day
  • December 2007: 1789 FA, growth rate: 1.5 FA per day

Results: Unneeded extra one million articles added to project, but goal of 100K FA articles not reached in 2007. This project has received little attention for all of 2007, so it is unclear if this article can be credited with prompting the addition of even one FA to the project in 2007.

Here is a more realistic project: Wikipedia:One featured article per quarter (per person), but note that only 47 FA's were reported under this program in all of 2007.

Note that in June 2006, Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-06-12/Thousandth FA was celebrated. At the end of 2007, the wikipedia.org domain name Alexa traffic ranking seems to be holding at #9 with a daily reach of about 9%.

One should keep an eye on the "Media"-based, fiction-based (including entertainment) or "Video games"-based FA articles or whatever you might think is the least "educational" of the FA articles. See "Aldol reaction" reference below for an idea of an important educational article. Another way of looking at this is to aim for at least one out of every one thousand articles to be FA (the per-mille is currently well below that figure and falling). A reasonable question is whether everybody reading this article in 2007 will die of natural causes before the 100,000 FA goal is reached, unless the FA process or criteria are relaxed. We should encourage new people with a focus on technical content to join the Wikipedia process, but keep in mind that reaching the goal will take more work on content-building and less work on community-building formalities.

Other relevant factoids:

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:100,000_feature-quality_articles"

This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

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