Measuring quality (narrow focus)

Concur with Yaroslav. This is a baseline intended to help improve the 2 million articles and establish an expectation that all articles quickly meet a baseline standard. The few articles where an average user cannot judge good baseline, are outliers (ie, exceptions, or "1%" as Yaroslav says). They aren't in any way the majority or even a large minority. They will surely need specialist editing and review as Slrubenstein says.

The aim here is to establish "should/must meet baseline" as THE expectation, for all content, to the point ideally that no editor would think of allowing articles to not meet that standard, like no usual editor would think 3RR is inactionable. A bright line.

The fact that bright line will not sufficiently check 100% of articles but only 99%, is not necessarily a problem for the while. I think it was Philippe who said "perfect is the enemy of good". Once we get most content that way and the expectation that "all articles must be quickly made to meet baseline and kept that way", then we can look at what more (if anything) is needed for the exceptional cases.

@ Randomran: agree in principle. Perfect NPOV is not trivial because it means reviewing and knowing the field neutrally. But a basic level of neutrality should be attainable as a minimum, to the point where a reasonable editor peer reviewing the article feels it's not glaringly unbalanced. As you say, a can of worms, but the guiding principle is a good one and will help. We can discuss the rest in a few years time, once that step's achieved :)