The English Wikipedia has the text of several dozen Britannicas and as of November 2013 adds several hundred articles (net, after deletions) per day. The current article count is 6,816,100 articles with 178 average revisions per article.

During Wikimania 2006, Jimbo Wales 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."

We now have 6,477. This essay discusses the challenge of accomplishing that goal.

Where things stand now[edit]

Currently, there are 6,477 featured articles, and 39,551 good articles.

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

All rated articles by quality and importance
Quality Importance
Top High Mid Low ??? Total
FA 1,556 2,447 2,375 1,890 180 8,448
FL 179 665 761 695 109 2,409
A 354 682 782 579 83 2,480
GA 3,162 7,187 14,510 18,980 1,732 45,571
B 16,557 32,121 53,022 65,370 20,171 187,241
C 16,546 53,040 132,154 295,713 83,987 581,440
Start 18,478 91,808 411,386 1,573,340 395,672 2,490,684
Stub 4,227 31,623 278,223 2,771,601 760,305 3,845,979
List 4,754 16,852 53,021 187,700 66,661 328,988
Assessed 65,813 236,425 946,234 4,915,868 1,328,900 7,493,240
Unassessed 117 480 1,254 19,037 424,438 445,326
Total 65,930 236,905 947,488 4,934,905 1,753,338 7,938,566
About this table

As of December 2014, about eight ninths of the articles in Wikipedia had been assessed - around 2 million are assigned to a project. Of those assessed, 100,000 were assessed as B class or better.

Note there is some double-counting in the table where articles belong to multiple WikiProjects. For example, on January 4, 2008, Wikipedia:Featured articles said there were 1,789 FAs, while the table showed 2,143, about 20% more. That means the actual number of assessed B class or better articles is probably around 50,000.

On 20 December 2008, the featured-article count was 2,408 FAs, up 619, so the rate was a net increase of 1.6 FAs per day ([2408-1789]/397) or 567 FAs per year.

Using 1.6 as a predictor, the goal of 100,000 FAs would require 171 years (97,592/569). Processing FAs 50 times faster than that, e.g. with more people/faster referencing/locating good quality free content, would mean the goal would be reached in 3 years.

The net rate of 1.6 will likely increase as there is currently a high demotion rate due to the 2006 change that meant inline citations are now required.

Defining the task[edit]

Official FA definition

Wikipedia:Featured article criteria lists the criteria for a featured article (FA):

A featured article exemplifies Wikipedia's very best work and is distinguished by professional standards of writing, presentation, and sourcing. In addition to meeting the policies regarding content for all Wikipedia articles, it has the following attributes.

  1. It is:
    1. well-written: its prose is engaging and of a professional standard;
    2. comprehensive: it neglects no major facts or details and places the subject in context;
    3. well-researched: it is a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature; claims are verifiable against high-quality reliable sources and are supported by inline citations where appropriate;
    4. neutral: it presents views fairly and without bias;
    5. stable: it is not subject to ongoing edit wars and its content does not change significantly from day to day, except in response to the featured article process; and
    6. compliant with Wikipedia's copyright policy and free of plagiarism or too-close paraphrasing.
  2. It follows the style guidelines, including the provision of:
    1. a lead: a concise lead section that summarizes the topic and prepares the reader for the detail in the subsequent sections;
    2. appropriate structure: a substantial but not overwhelming system of hierarchical section headings; and
    3. consistent citations: where required by criterion 1c, consistently formatted inline citations using footnotes—see citing sources for suggestions on formatting references. Citation templates are not required.
  3. Media. It has images and other media, where appropriate, with succinct captions and acceptable copyright status. Images follow the image use policy. Non-free images or media must satisfy the criteria for inclusion of non-free content and be labeled accordingly.
  4. Length. It stays focused on the main topic without going into unnecessary detail and uses summary style where appropriate.

Additional considerations

[* Accomplishing the proposed goal does not necessarily mean putting 100,000 articles through the current featured article candidacy process. That process requires a 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[edit]

Easy steps any editor can do right now[edit]

There is a lot of "lower-hanging fruit":

Splitting the work among editors[edit]

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[edit]

Things that motivate good writers:

How to generate steps for improvement[edit]

Finding the good articles[edit]

Where can we find candidates for improvement?

Assessing the articles[edit]

See the standard assessment criteria and the lists of assessed articles.

"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))"[reply]

What would it take to do this by the end of 2012?[edit]

"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

Danny has nominated one FA, Donegal fiddle tradition in Feb 2004, it was de-listed in Oct 2004 and promoted to wp:GA in March 2008. The other main author of this project, David Gerard, has 3 former FA's and one current FA, that being Xenu.

Project status[edit]

100K Results: One million articles added to English Wikipedia by end of 2007, goal of 100K FA articles not yet reached. As of 2009, the goal of 100K FAs still appears to be achievable many years into the future. "Low hanging fruit" seems to cluster in Wikipedia:Featured topics such as hurricanes, the articles of which tend to be imitative of each other in structure and somewhat subject to mass-production. Missing from FA as of Feb 2009 are traditional educational subjects such as math, chemistry (outside of element/compound data sheets), biology (outside of species data sheets), physics (outside of astronomy and geological data sheets) and other hard-science subjects where peer-reviewed journals tend to cluster. A statistic of some constancy over the years is that roughly only one of every 1000 articles is FA.

Here is a year-by-year review of actual WP net FA growth results:

At current rate, a goal of the Wikipedia:Five-thousandth FA would be reached in around 2015.

Wikipedia:Good article statistics and Wikipedia:Featured article statistics provide up-to-the-month FA count history and the GA hopper which can feed the FA intake. See also Category:Wikipedia featured articles Wikipedia reached 1 million articles on March 1, 2006 and 2 million articles on September 10, 2007. By the end of 2007, growth patterns had dipped well below the previous exponential growth as many core notable subjects now have an article. The world marketplace for talented, capable drama-tolerant and bureaucracy-tolerant volunteers who expect no attribution may have by now been saturated by the Wikipedia® brand. A more realistic project to stimulate more FA production might be: Wikipedia:One featured article per quarter (per person), but note that only 47 FAs were reported under this program in all of 2007 and 28 in 2008. Note that in June 2006, Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-06-12/Thousandth FA was celebrated and the 2000th was reached in early in 2008. At the end of 2007, the wikipedia.org domain name Alexa traffic ranking seems to be holding at #8 in 2009 (see here). See also Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-01-03/Editing stats which suggests that editing activity (by editors with more than 20 edits per month) peaked in 2007 at the 15,000 such editors that the world has to offer, the vast majority of whom have not yet produced one GA article, let alone an FA.

Further commentary Perhaps the most daunting FA criteria is that an article must be stable to achieve FA status, so there is no quick pathway to create a lot of FAs. In practice, the dynamics of converging upon an equilibrium (whose stability may be illusory) known as neutrality is also time-consuming because it can only be demonstrated when the editorial contingent has become involved and reached consensus, which can take additional months or years of sincere, talented volunteer effort that, so some degree, pits the less-than-expert volunteers against each other.

See "Aldol reaction" reference below for an idea of an important educational article. Could aim for at least one out of every one thousand articles to be FA – the per-mille is currently well below that figure. 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 factoids:

External links[edit]

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