User:Bucs/Featured article criteria

My main passion as a user on here, is FA. So naturally I’ve been well informed of the FA criteria. Here are a few thoughts on each of them.

1a:prose

Without question the most difficult the all the requirements to achieve. Mainly because no one seems to be sure what exactly you need to do. I’ve been trying to get a certain article to FA status for a while now and this is the one requirement it, apparently, has not met. But I personally don’t see it. I’ve read existing FA in the past and IMO their prose doesn’t appear to be much better than that of the article I’m trying to write. Yet their prose was apparently good enough for FA status. Did they just slip though the net? I highly doubt it because this is such seen as such an important requirement. The confusing thing is that with some articles prose appear to get approval from well-established users but others will say it isn’t good enough. Which further promotes the theory that no one is really sure what exactly is needed. It also doesn’t seem to matter how many ce you give an article, the will never be good enough. Some have suggested that users are liable to be biased in favour of there own writing but I don’t agree with that at all. From my point of view I’m always looking to improve my own writing so that someone else doesn’t have to do it for my later, which makes me feel a bit of an idiot.

1b:Comprehensiveness

For the most part I don’t have much of an issue here. Kind of prevents you from writing or reviewing FA where you know nothing about the subject. But I don’t much of that anyway. I one thing I don’t understand though is, what if you can’t find a ref for it? You are put in an impossible situation to either enter Incomprehensive info or entering un-referenced info, which of course is a big no-no.

4.

The “unnecessary detail” part of this is something that puzzles me. I am constantly told that articles must be written for someone who knows nothing about the subject, makes senses. But to what extent does this hypothetical reader know nothing about the subject? For example, do they know anything about the core topic of the article? Apparently they do, articles about specific film, for example, don’t explain what a film is. Wikilinks and categories see to this issue for the most part. But I see a problem here: How do we know the linked article contains the appropriate info? The FA criteria says nothing about the articles it links to being of good quality, it doesn’t matter if they are all stubs. Another problem is, sometimes the info in the linked article is also providing in the article linking it. Makes sense, saves the reader having to go to another article. But how much info is “unnecessary detail”?