Improving Wikipedia’s important articles
This is just a quick hash-together of my thoughts on TCO's paper.
I can see only one way forward to getting our most-viewed Vital Articles up to the kind of quality we want.
The real problem lies in that the most vital articles should cover an enormous amount of material, in-depth, and at very high quality.
This is impossible to do within the constraints of FA criteria. An individual article mustn't be "too long".
For example, it would be quite impossible to have Science being both a FA and covering the subject comprehensively, in-depth, and at high quality. That wouldn't be "an article". It would be an encyclopaedia all by itself. It's not possible even to make a FA which also provides sufficient in-depth coverage from Physics, Chemistry, Biology ... etc., for exactly the same reasons.
Physics alone would be a shelf-full of books. And each book would be broken down into chapters, and each chapter into sections.
In order to attain the desired goal, therefore, what we need is a hierarchy of supercategories for the "Featured" process, somewhat along the following lines:
Featured Project (Science)
edit- to reach FP status, 75% of the sub-projects should be FSP/GSP level
Featured sub-project 1 (e.g. Biology)
edit- to reach FSP status, 75% of the Project Areas should be FPA/GPA level
Featured project area (e.g. Genetics)
edit- to reach FPA, 75% of the articles should be FA/GA level
Featured sub-project 2 (e.g. Chemistry)
editetc.