Measuring quality (narrow focus)

Hmm, good point about simplicity. I actually think that "no original research", "neutral point of view", and "verifiability" offer a solid baseline. "What Wikipedia is not", as well. We wouldn't want to go much simpler than that, or else we really throw quality out the window. So it's really a question of translating those rules into a simple baseline standard.

Yaroslav is right that we probably need to throw in some positive things too, like having categories and wikilinks.

I am not exactly sure what we are discussing but I think writing some guidelines should be relatively easy. I am more worried here about the systematic bias issues: for instance, coverage of Israel on ar.wp. But may be we should just let these issues as an apart point and not discuss here (as well as problematic topics on major projects). I beleve even without these problematic topics we cover 99% of all the articles. Problematic articles should be marked as such and treated manually.