Problematic articles

I think baseline quality is best described through qualifiers and exceptions.

  • "Not entirely referenced, but the lead is verified in reliable sources."
  • "Not a comprehensive survey of the subject, but presents at least two perspectives in a neutral tone."
  • "Not complete, but stable."
  • "Does not violate what Wikipedia is not."

If we're going to use a consensus-based process (e.g.: ask a WikiProject) to judge the baseline, we may as well just make it a nomination-based process like a "featured article". Someone nominates the article for the baseline, and a few experienced editors go through the article to check it. That already takes a long time. Once you start asking people to compile entire bibliographies to judge the baseline, we may as well ask them to write a featured article. You're asking the evaluators to do the work of the editors, which is going to make this a huge burden in practice.

Randomran18:37, 23 December 2009