User talk:Grondemar/Essays/FAC/End user expectations and process capability

Comment by Karanacs

This is a good essay, but I have a few issues with this part:

In the past three years, 2581 FACs have been submitted. 1390 have become Featured Articles; 1191 reviews were archived without being promoted. Think about that for a moment. Think about all the effort expended by nominators on over 1000 articles over the past three years, in order to bring them to featured article status. Think about how discouraged they must feel, having come so far and invested so much toil and sweat, only to see the ultimate prize denied. Clearly something is wrong when so much effort expended by so many editors goes to such waste.

I suspect there were far fewer than 1000 articles that were archived - many of them were nominated more than once, and some of those that were archived once, twice, or more were later promoted. So that part of the stat is not completely accurate. Also, a lot of them (not all by any means) were archived because there was not very much effort expended into getting them ready for FAC - hence wny they didn't meet the criteria. Karanacs (talk) 04:22, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You may well be right regarding multiple nominations; I used the raw monthly counts at the Archived Nominations page and did not check for article repeats. However, another way of looking at the situation is that if a nominator needs to spend time reworking an article to prepare for a second or subsequent nomination, he/she is using time that could have been used working to bring another article to featured status. Obviously we can't say that this would have happened in all situations, but I think that is true at least some of the time. You are probably right that a significant number of archivals are due to the articles being clearly underprepared at the time of nomination. The exact percentage of which this is an issue compared to other archival reasons I plan to explore in the essay on why FACs fail. Thanks for your comments; I appreciate the feedback. –Grondemar 16:51, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That is assuming that efforts on a second or third article would be enough to get that article up to a higher quality as well....We're assuming a level of competence that may not be justified. One could also argue convincingly that if I chose not to bring a particular article to FAC at all then I could use the increased time spent working on that article to bring another article from C to B class. Interesting statistical analysis overall, but I don't think there's evidence for the conclusion you reached above. I'm very interested to see the results of your further analysis. Karanacs (talk) 17:56, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I see some comments I made on the FAC talk page are repeated here. On Karanacs point, I know Doc James has recently stated he has realised FAC is beyond his abilities (quality of prose) and so aims for GA, at which he is very productive. So we've got a combination of the effect of a high bar (without judging that it is too high) and the consideration that lots of good articles may be preferable to few excellent articles. Part of the analysis should consider that not all "workers" are actually able and willing to produce FAs. And (though some may regard this as heresy) I don't believe all articles are capable of becoming FAs (for example: insufficient sources, too vast to cope with, too contentious to deal with). Colin°^Talk 20:11, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Maclean25

First, a small complexity:

Over the same period, an average of 8.9 FAs per month have been demoted at WP:FAR. This results in an average FA monthly increase of 29.7 ... As of today, FAC is not capable of meeting the takt of Today's Featured Article.

Articles can only appear once on the Main Page. FAR demoting articles that have already been on the MainPage are irrelevant to TFA.

Secondly, I disagree that "General readership" is a customer of FAC. The common reader doesn't know what an FA is and provides nothing different in exchange for consuming a FA, relative to a B-class article. It is my view that FAC process is only directly relevant for editors. To link it to readers requires several intermediate steps. Also, the FA criteria doesn't care if 1 person (or a million people) read the article; the FA process is independent of whether anyone in the general readership actually consumes it. Perhaps "customer" is not the most appropriate term?

maclean (talk) 07:51, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comments! Your first point is a good point: I did not consider whether an article had already appeared on the Main Page when considering the impact of the FAR rate on the FA promotion rate relative to the Main Page takt. It would be more accurate to determine the Main Page appearance ratio of articles demoted at FAR; if more than a small minority of FAR demotions had already appeared on the Main Page, it would mean that the number of Main Page-able FAs was in fact increasing quickly enough to meet takt after all. However, since so many editors have expressed an interest in having a takt significantly higher that the Main Page takt, I recommend focusing our analytical energy on other more productive avenues.

Regarding your second point, I disagree that "The common reader doesn't know what an FA is". The first thing a reader sees on the Main Page is Today's Featured Article, with links that quickly lead into the depths of the FA process; we also advertise our featured articles by placing that distinctive star on each of the pages. There have been academic studies of featured articles unique from the other articles in Wikipedia. Even if the readership's awareness of featured articles is lower than we would desire, we clearly have been trying to advertise and use the FA process to gain reader attention for many years. I agree that FA production is independent of the number of hits individual articles receive, and I certainly do not advocate that there should be any change in focus in that regard. (In fact, I stated I was going to consider that issue out of scope on the main essay page.)

It seems like there is a significant difference between how several other editors and myself define the term "customer"; I did not realize that the use of this word would be seen as controversial. The definition I have always used is that a "customer" is one who receives a benefit from a product or service produced by someone or something else. A person going to a shopping mall and buying a sweater is a customer for that sweater; anyone living in a community with police and fire services are customers for those services. A plant is a customer for sunlight and oxygen in the atmosphere. I have not considered being a "customer" to necessarily involve the mutual barter of value either directly or indirectly; while someone would pay taxes to support their local police budget, the sun receives nothing of value from the plant in exchange for its light. If use of the term "customer" is confusing people and causing controversy, I would be willing to switch to a term viewed more neutrally, if someone were willing to suggest an appropriate one. –Grondemar 17:19, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

General Readership

It is more difficult to judge the customer demand for Featured Articles from the general readership. In the business world, sales is a good arbiter of what customers demand. Since articles on Wikipedia are free, however, this type of metric is unavailable. Page hits provide one kind of approximation, but since the cost of producing the article is not necessarily correlated with the number of hits the article gets, this type of metric is of limited utility. One of the basic assumptions of the FA process is that the general readership does demand high-quality articles; exactly how high-quality is difficult to answer.

There is a lot of discussion here about number of articles. I think the value produced is more related to number of page hits. The service is provided when the article is downloaded and studied. I have proposed that we should try to change the FA process to more encourage production of FA articles on articles that the readers have shown more demand for. The FAC community is mostly hostile to this idea. The main arguments that I have perceived are that the editors want to choose freely what they write about, the aditors' choice of what to write about is not affected by FAC process design, it is much harder to achieve FA for a topic that many want to read about. Important questions in this context are: How much more valuable to the reader is an FA than a GA is? How much more valuable to the readership community is an article that is downloaded more times? How much more effort is needed to raise an article that has more downloads to FA quality? Maybe, if Wikipedia could feedback a realistic picture of what the service is worth for the total readership community, a significant subset of the editors would prioritize articles that more readers benefit from. There is also the possibility that the same amount of effort produces more value if spent on GA than if spent on FA. --Ettrig (talk) 15:26, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

While I think that many of the points you express here are interesting ones, they are really out of scope for this series of essays, especially considering what I wrote on the main essay page. Thanks for your comment. –Grondemar 01:50, 16 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Commnents by Spinningspark

I think you are missing an important aspect from expectations of nominators. As a nominator, I have found the most difficult and frustrating aspect of FAC to be the uncertainty until the very last moment of whether the article is to be promoted or not. Things can seem to be going very smoothly until near the end one is hit with a couple of opposes and the nomination gets archived. Nominations can also fail through lack of reviews. Compare this to the situation at GA, where there is usually a single reviewer who provides a clear list of improvements/changes needed to achieve promotion. True, the reviewer can be a star reviewer, or completely incompetent, but at least it is clear what is required. I don't know what the right way is to go about addressing this, but it should certainly be taken into consideration in any scheme to redesign the FAC process. At the moment it is utter torture for nominators.

Reviewers, their expectations, and workload also needs to be considered here. If nominators are to be considered an end user then so are reviewers, and their activity is essential to the whole process.

You are taking your process variables as quality, cost, and time. However, there is another, frequently neglected variable - risk. Reducing quality, cost and/or time can have the effect of increasing risk. There are many possible risks, such as the possibility that the article may end up containing COI, POV or BLP issues, or may even be a complete hoax. Spinning Spark 16:33, 28 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]