User:The Disco King/FARsub

Wikipedia now has over one thousand featured articles, of varying quality. The concept of the Featured Article goes back to the days of "Brilliant Prose"; since then, attaining FA status has become progressively more difficult as standards have gradually been raised. Many of the articles which fail WP:FAC today might have passed a year or so ago; perhaps many articles attaining FA status today will seem inadequate a year from now.

Once an article has reached FA status, however, it is often quite tenacious in holding onto it. Having survived the ordeal of FAC, an article is given the benefit of the doubt. Until recently, WP:FARC existed to deal with FAs which had dropped significantly below standards. Now, WP:FAR performs a similar function, attempting to rehabilitate articles and removing their gold star when this proves impossible.

One issue of contention when it comes to the removal of featured status is the use of inline citations. Inline citations are now mandatory for FAC; an editor on the FAC page, upon noticing that a candidate article has no inline cites will often oppose purely on this point, as this is sufficient reason for rejecting an article. By this criteria alone, nearly three hundred and fifty of our roughly one thousand Featured Articles would be unable to pass FAC today. Another one hundred and twenty (approximately) would also be unlikely to pass for being "inadequately referenced", having ten inline citations or less.

This issue mirrors a similar issue from over a year and a half ago. In 2005, when references became a requirement for featured articles, Taxman left notices on the talk pages of all the unreferenced FAs, informing them of the new requirement. The articles were given time to add references, or else face removal. Five or six are still unreferenced.

Now, many editors feel that the requirement for FAs to have inline citations should be applied retroactively to older FAs which have none. This is not going to be a swift process. There will be no mass defeaturing of all 350 FAs with no citations. As with before, this will be a slow, gradual, forgiving process. Our goal is not to defeature based purely on arbitrary rules, but rather to ensure that Wikipedia's featured articles meet the first (and most important) criteria from WP:WIAFA - that they exemplify our very best work. It's important to recognize that many of these articles are very well-researched, well-written, and in general good articles. Adding inline citations arbitrarily and at random won't add some mystical veneer of quality to these articles. If they are well-cited, however, they will be better than they are right now. Careful and thoughtful improvement is key here. In trying to build a quality encyclopedia, very high standards are necessary to ensure very high quality. This is an opportunity to improve the best that Wikipedia has to offer.