User talk:Physchim62/Situation Normal: All FACked up

Broader impact on the 'pedia?

If the FAC crowd were a closed group who did nothing else then I'd agree with your point that the process only impacts on the 0.1% of articles that are FA standard. But I think the influence is broader for at least two reasons. Firstly even the articles that don't make FA usually get improved; and secondly it isn't a closed group - there are both nominators and reviewers for whom this is just part of their wiki involvement and I suspect I'm not the only editor who has learned a lot from my involvement in the process. Ϣere SpielChequers 06:16, 15 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sojustfixit

Yes there are some reviewers who treat this like a marking exercise, but there are also reviewers who tweak prose, add links and fix errors. My experiences as a reviewer at FAC have been almost entirely positive, and I suspect that nominators are much more open to reviewers who pitch in, and only query things like anomalies and gaps that require knowledge of the sources to fix. I think it also helps if reviewers sometimes respond along the lines of "thanks for checking that, obviously we can't add what we can't source, but I did think it important for FA standard that we confirm that the reason why we've not covered that aspect is because we don't have sourced info for it." Ϣere SpielChequers 06:16, 15 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's definitely better than nothing and has an impact

I feel torn. This place would be a lot worse without the Sandys and the Tony1s. That said, I think there is also some loss in perspetive on how many other encyclopeidas and journals and the like have compiled knowledge. I'm FAR from wanting low standards. REally. That said, the FAC seemed needlessly confrontational. And I've worked with people who were paid editors and Harvard grads and the like. The one thing FAC can take credit for is higher standards. Especially on sourcing and formatting (to include prose). Actually the prose stuff has sort of gone over the top and is being waxed on by people that re not professional verbalists anyway. But I think more of a challenge would be, Raul, WHY don't you have triple the articles? Why don't you have more high value (i.e. high hit count) articles completed. And then you can get very meta and ask why the project has no paid editors but has paid computer operators.TCO (talk) 03:10, 26 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]