Wikipedia talk:Featured article statistics

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[edit] Featured lists

These statistics don't take into account that we have 87 featured lists. Factoring in those, the percentage of "featured content" would be closer to 0.1%. Coffee 14:52, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Main page

Just a thought.. one article is featured on the Main Page per day, so presuming that we don't want to duplicate any, we need the delta-FA for any day to average to at least 1. Over the last year (June 2005 - May 2006) the delta-FA is 371, so it's barely above 1. There is, of course, a buffer of quite a number of FAs which have not been used though. -- Mithent 01:05, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Older stats

Is there any place to find out how many featured articles there were in previous years? Xaxafrad 14:43, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

There were no FAs prior to January of 2004. Raul654 16:42, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
But didn't the Brilliant prose category serve a similar purpose? As an aside does anyone have any idea which article was the first to receive FA/Brilliant Prose status? Lisiate 01:54, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
The very, very first revision of wikipedia:featured articles (here) dates back to Larry Sanger in 2001. I recognize the articles in the list in that revision as forming the core of the Brilliant Prose articles. Raul654 02:02, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A little math regarding the FA proportion

Just a few math notes on the FA proportion:

(eq 1) P(t) = \frac{FA(t)}{A(t)}\,

Let the FA proportion equal the number of FAs divided by the number of articles (where t is time, in units of months). So take the derivative of the above with respect to time:

(eq 2) P'(t) = \frac{( FA'(t) * A(t) - A'(t) * FA(t) )} {A(t)^ 2}\,

FA'(t), the change in FA count with time, is defined as:

(eq 3) FA'(t) = PromotedFAs(t) - DemotedFAs(t) = \Delta FA \,

Substitute equation 3 into equation 2:

(eq 4) P'(t) = \frac{(PromotedFAs(t) - DemotedFAs(t)) \times A(t) - A'(t) \times FA(t)}{A(t)^ 2}\,

The FA proportion isn't significantly changing now. The numerator in equation 4 must, therefore, be 0. Therefore:

(eq 5) (PromotedFAs(t) - DemotedFAs(t)) \times A(t) = A'(t) \times FA(t)\,

It's well known that the article count is exponential:

(eq 6) A(t) = P \times e^{r.t}\,
(eq 7) A'(t) = r \times P \times e^{r.t}\,

Substitute 6 and 7 into 5:

(eq 8) (PromotedFAs(t) - DemotedFAs(t)) \times P \times e^{r.t} = r \times P \times e^{r.t} \times FA(t)\,

Divide both sides by Pe^(rt)

(eq 9) (PromotedFAs(t) - DemotedFAs(t)) = r \times FA(t)\,

Divide by r

(eq 10) \frac{1}{r} \times (PromotedFAs(t) - DemotedFAs(t)) = FA(t)\,

And there you have it. The FA proportion is constant when the FA count and delta FA reach this state. From the data on this statistics page, we see that PromotedFAs(t) - DemotedFAs(t)\, (aka, \Delta FA\,) is roughly 30 for all t.

(eq 11) \frac{30}{r} = FA(t)\,

Raul654 19:05, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Um, and so the number of featured articles as a function of time is a constant? -- ALoan (Talk) 19:28, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
The FA count is not constant, but the proportion is (see the graph) It's been virtually flat for 5 months (6 counting February) Raul654 19:39, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Also, I think you might be confusing FA(t) with FA'(t). FA'(t) (aka, months promotions minus monthly demotions) is roughly constant, at about 30-ish per month. Therefore, FA(t) - the integral of a constant - is linear. And the graph bears this out pretty well too Raul654 19:46, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree that the FA count is not constant, and is increasing linearly with time, at a rate of about 30 articles a month. But I don't think eq.11 says this.
Correct me if I am wrong, but FA(t) is the number of featured articles, as a function of time, t (presumably in units of a month); FA'(t) is the derivative of FA(t) with respect to t; A(t) is the total number of articles, as a function of t, and P(t) is the proportion of featured articles to total articles, as a function of t; no? And r is a constant (the exponent in A=P*er.t)?
Yes, everything you say is right so far. Raul654 02:15, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
So FA(t)=30/r means that the number of featured articles is a constant? (30 is a constant, and so it r, so 30/r is a constant, and has no dependence on t).
Equations 5-11 describe the conditions necessary to keep the FA proportion constant. As long as FA(t)=30/r is true, the FA proportion will stay constant. Raul654 02:15, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
A better conclusion might be to start with ΔFA = 30, and so integrate directly to get FA = 30 t + c (i.e. the number of featured articles increases linearly with respect to time); or with ΔFA r × FA, which implies an exponential increase in FA, I think. -- ALoan (Talk) 23:21, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] FA delta

Is there some easy way to see this broken out into # promoted and # demoted? I know how to find both the number promoted and the list of articles in question but I am more intrested in a log of which articles were demoted in which months. Is this avalible somehwere? Dalf | Talk 05:05, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

I'd imagine the archives for the newly promoted FACs and demoted FARs. Raul654 08:05, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] FA percentage decline

The graphs show that the percentage of articles that are featured has been in a steady decline. Any thoughts about why this might be true? JoshuaZ 18:35, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Actually, as I reported to the signpost - I think we hit a turning point in February. In February, for the first time in 2 years, the proportion increased.
As to the reasons, I did some mathematical analysis on this page (two sections up). Raul654 18:37, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
PS - I have expanded and updated my ideas. Raul654 18:49, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Given the 114 article backlogue at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests, Wikipedia:Featured article statistics should include statistics about the number of non-FA FA-class status articles. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 22:45, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

non-FA FA-class status articles - I have no idea what this means. Raul654 03:36, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
What do you call all the articles at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests that are awaiting FA days? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by TonyTheTiger (talk • contribs) 20:34, 11 March 2007 (UTC).
I call them featured articles that have not yet appeared on the main page. Raul654 22:12, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
I call them lucky; they haven't yet been vandalized on the main page :o) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:13, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article size

People with bots/more knowledge than I have of perl et al: Can someone automate the process of grabbing the sizes of all FA articles and listing the 10 largest, 10 smallest, and getting us mean, median, and mode? MrZaiustalk 09:11, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Talk to Dr pda (talk · contribs) — he already has an article size script. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:59, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
Any progress on this front? I was looking here to find out which is the shortest FA. - Gobeirne (talk) 10:50, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
None that I am aware of. I can dig up the longest FAs, but not the shortest. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:15, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
I came across this page a couple of days ago following what links here, and have actually started working on a script to do this. Hopefully it should be finished within the next few days. Dr pda (talk) 20:45, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
I've finished the script, which works for any template transcluded on an article page (so it can also be used for stubs, infoboxes, cleanup tags etc). Documentation can be found at User talk:Dr pda/generatestats.js. Below is the output for {{featured article}}. A couple of caveats: The size is the size of the wikitext, not the readable prose size. Calculating the prose size requires loading each page, whereas the wiki text size is stored in the database, and can be accessed via the API interface. It would be possible to run my prose size script on the top ten articles to see what their actual prose sizes are. Also I note the total number of articles is four fewer than the FA number; possibly there are some recent FA's which don't have the star yet. I'll look into this. Dr pda (talk) 01:54, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
No, no, no :-) This doesn't identify all the long ones per prose size. I have them somewhere, but you missed, for example, B movie and Ketuanan Melayu. Looking at readable prose per your script would be very helpful. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:03, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
Also, we should not be off by 4, because Gimmetrow checks regularly; it would not be in recent promotions, because four is too few. Maybe it's a glitch in WP:FFA, or someone removed a FA template. Gimmetrow can help there, because his scripts check regularly. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:06, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
Four FAs don't have {{featured article}}. I don't add it. Gimmetrow 09:28, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
I added lengths from the script for the ten Dr pda listed, plus the two Sandy mentioned. I assume the size Dr pda listed was "Wiki text size" but it didn't match exactly so I didn't add that number in the two additional rows. I assume that by "readable text" Sandy means the number the script gives as "prose (text only)". I also resorted the list by that number. Mike Christie (talk) 11:12, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
Thank you, Mike; I prefer to look at article size via readable prose, since we shouldn't "penalize" well cited articles. I think that includes now all the extra-long articles, but if I remember another, I'll add it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:53, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
I remembered one: History of Russia was defeatured with 72KB of readable prose. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:00, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Twelve longest articles

  1. Ketuanan Melayu (prose 128 kB, prose (text only) 85 kB)
  2. Campaign history of the Roman military (125 kB, prose 143 kB, prose (text only) 74 kB)
  3. Bob Dylan (125 kB, prose 126 kB, prose (text only) 71 kB)
  4. Byzantine Empire (129 kB, prose 114 kB, prose (text only) 71 kB)
  5. B movie (prose 91 kB, prose (text only) 63 kB)
  6. Intelligent design (163 kB, prose 103 kB, prose (text only) 61 kB)
  7. Sound film (118 kB, prose 79 kB, prose (text only) 59 kB)
  8. Ronald Reagan (116 kB, prose 89 kB, prose (text only) 50 kB)
  9. 2005 Texas Longhorn football team (146 kB, prose 86 kB, prose (text only) 47 kB)
  10. Che Guevara (125 kB, prose 78 kB, prose (text only) 47 kB)
  11. AIDS (117 kB, prose 68 kB, prose (text only) 42 kB)
  12. Belgium (124 kB, prose 78 kB, prose (text only) 34 kB)

[edit] Ten shortest articles

  1. John Day (printer) (8 kB)
  2. Hurricane Irene (2005) (9 kB)
  3. Bam Thwok (11 kB)
  4. Pilot (House) (11 kB)
  5. Warren County Canal (12 kB)
  6. "She Shoulda Said 'No'!" (12 kB)
  7. Common scold (12 kB)
  8. ROT13 (12 kB)
  9. 2000 Sri Lanka cyclone (13 kB)
  10. Cincinnati, Lebanon and Northern Railway (14 kB)

[edit] Statistics

  • Number of articles: 1704
  • Mean: 46.772 kB
  • Median: 43.444 kB

[edit] Chart

This chart is overall size, not readable prose per WP:SIZE. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:58, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Page audit

Sandy, Rick Block, Gimmetrow, and myself have finished auditing this page (the grunt work was done at the now-deleted user:Raul54/test). The numbers are more accurate and (for the FA proportion) more precise. Raul654 14:48, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Clicking on an end of month diff may result in a different FA count than shown in this chart; the numbers on this chart are accurate. If clicking on FA promotions or FA demotions yields a different number than shown in the chart, please let us know, as that could indicate vandalism or another problem; those numbers should match the archives exactly. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:51, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Outstanding work, folks. Thanks for taking the time and energy to get these stats clean-up - much appreciated. -- MarcoTolo 03:41, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Oldest continuous FA

From first iteration, I checked them all for oldest FA:

I didn't check article history in between the first December 2001 iteration of WP:FA and the January 2004 RefrshingBrilliantProse (RBP); that would be way too much work since there are no good records and it would involved stepping through WP:FA diffs one at a time. So, if any of these article were defeatured and re-featured between Dec 2001 and Jan 2004, I didn't pick that up. (Kudos to Yannismarou and Ceoil for maintaining Wiki's oldest FAs to current standards!) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:53, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article size again

I modified my article statistics script to calculate the "readable prose" size. Unfortunately the only way to do this is to load each article, so it takes about an hour to run over the ~1700 featured articles, as opposed to the 20 seconds or so if one just uses the wiki text size from the database. For this particular application (finding out which are the longest and shortest FAs) prose size is the way to go, but for other applications of the script (e.g. finding out which are the longest articles with a particular stub tag, or getting an idea of article sizes in a very large category) wiki text size might be sufficient. The article sizes given below should match the prose size returned by my prose size script; there may be differences of up to 1kB due to differences in rounding, since I had to rewrite the algorithm. Btw the discrepancy User:Mike Christie noticed above was due to me using 1000 instead of 1024 to convert to kB; I have now fixed this. The articles which I missed because they didn't have the FA star were Hurricane Dog (1950) (promoted November 5), Andrew Cunningham, 1st Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope (promoted September 9), Sargon of Akkad (promoted July 24), and Society of the Song Dynasty, though someone's added the star for that now. I've also got the complete list of FA's sorted by prose size; if anyone's interested I'll put it in my userspace. From this one can see that just over 75% of all FAs are 32kB or shorter. Dr pda (talk) 01:27, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Instead of ten longest, can you give us everything above 50KB? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:55, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
By the way, whenever I check for and remove {{featured article}} from non-FAs, I can get a list of those FAs without the star. Three recent FAs don't have it yet, for instance. Gimmetrow 01:58, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
The full list is at User:Dr_pda/Featured article statistics.
I'm not too concerned about the FAs without a star, I was more worried about whether there was a bug in my script which was missing articles for an unknown reason. Dr pda (talk) 02:06, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
Wow. I'm really surprised we have that many huge articles; I only knew about a fraction of them. I'd raise this at the talk page of FAC, but I sense no one else cares. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:11, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Is there anyway you can write a program to read through an article and count how many inline cites there are in an article [including multiple invocations of the same ref]? I think that would be useful so that we can calculate the ref/prose ratio and see which articles need to be reffed properly. I did it manually for all the Australian FAs to see which ones were underreferenced (needless to say it is only a guide or rule of thumb, since an article can be sourced with few cites if all the info is derived from the same chunk of book over and over). Blnguyen (bananabucket) 02:19, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

I'd be careful about being associated with citation counting. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:22, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
I know. There are some articles that can have 3 refs for each kb of prose yet the refs still don't cover all of it, wheras some have only 1.5 or so and cover everything (usually when the author mostly based it on one book and only has one ref per para). But anything that trawls up about < 1.2 (from about 120 that I did manually) will always have unreferenced sections. Blnguyen (bananabucket) 02:28, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ten longest articles

  1. History of Jews in Poland (88 kB) (no longer featured)
  2. Ketuanan Melayu (85 kB)
  3. Sassanid Empire (79 kB) (no longer featured)
  4. The Cantos (76 kB)
  5. Campaign history of the Roman military (74 kB)
  6. Bob Dylan (72 kB)
  7. Byzantine Empire (71 kB)
  8. Tang Dynasty (71 kB)
  9. Society of the Song Dynasty (67 kB)
  10. United States Marine Corps (65 kB)

[edit] Ten shortest articles

  1. Hurricane Irene (2005) (5 kB)
  2. ROT13 (6 kB)
  3. USS Kentucky (BB-66) (6 kB)
  4. John Day (printer) (6 kB)
  5. Bam Thwok (6 kB)
  6. €2 commemorative coins (6 kB)
  7. Radhanite (6 kB)
  8. Dr Pepper Ballpark (7 kB)
  9. Diary of a Camper (7 kB)
  10. Karen Dotrice (7 kB)

[edit] Statistics

  • Number of articles: 1721
  • Mean: 25.400 kB
  • Median: 23.595 kB

[edit] Chart

  • Fantastic work - many thanks! - Gobeirne (talk) 02:26, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Promote/archive stats

Promoted and archived FACs

Month Promoted FACs Archived FACs  % Promoted
Apr 2008 61 59 50.8% a
Mar 2008 76 68 52.8% a
Feb 2008 69 60 53.5%
Jan 2008 82 62 56.9%
Dec 2007 68 65 51.1%
Nov 2007 81 64 55.9%
Oct 2007 45 41 52.3%
Sep 2007 76 54 58.5%
Aug 2007 62 55 53.0%
July 2007 70 62 53.0%
June 2007 73 72 50.3%
May 2007 56 49 53.3%
April 2007 53 61 46.5%
March 2007 88 74 54.3%
February 2007 52 40 56.5%
Subtotal 14 mos 951 (68 per mo.) 826 53.5%
July 2006 53 107 33.1%
June 2006 43 83 34.1%
May 2006 47 73 39.2%
April 2006 39 88 30.7%
March 2006 44 76 36.7%
February 2006 35 57 38.0%
Subtotal 2006 261 (44 per mo.) 484 35.0%

a User:Ealdgyth checking every source on every FAC SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:41, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Stats on types of featured articles and topics

cross-posted to WT:FA, please comment in general over there, and add more stats here.

Has anyone ever kept track of stats on types of featured articles and topics? For example, I've done some analysis at User:Carcharoth/Featured articles needing regular updates. The list of living people featured articles was obtained with the Cat Scan tool, though the raw list was filtered to focus on single-person biographies. The results (as of 23 February 2008) were:

  • Of 1906 featured articles, 436 were about people or groups of people.
  • Of these, 33 were about music groups, leaving 403 single-person biographies (21%)
  • Of these, 80 were about living people

Would it be worth having a "biography" section at WP:FA? Carcharoth (talk) 02:44, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

No, we organize FA by topic (including bios) so people interested in a specific topic can browse like articles. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:46, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
How about suggesting somewhere else to put the list? I'm not trying to be silly here, Sandy, but I've been making what I thought were useful suggestions and analysis around the FA process, and I'm getting the impression that there is some resistance to this from you, or at least some terseness. Do I have to contribute more regularly to reviews to get a better response, or something? For what it is worth, there are biographical encyclopedias out there, so the idea of having a section on "biographies" as a topic is not completely out of left field. Carcharoth (talk) 02:59, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
I'm sorry if my responses seem terse Carcharoth. I missed this comment last time through, and only noticed it now that Gimmetrow posted (below). I admit to being frustrated at following a conversation that's in four places: the talk pages of WP:FAC, WP:FAR, WP:FA and WP:FAS. I'm not sure where to suggest you can put the list, because I'm not aware of what types of readers might want to see that specific grouping, particularly considering the other sources of similar info Gimme posted below. There are so many different and interesting ways of sorting out the FAs that it's hard for me to view bios as having a place any more special than any other grouping. I often toy with different ideas about how we would divide up the FA list when it becomes necessary, and I can never convince myself for one way any better than any other, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I'm also concerned that the title of your list could mislead; as I said at the talk page of WP:FAR, I don't believe that bios necessarily need regular updating any more than several other categories of FAs do. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:26, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
No problem, Sandy. Sorry if I got a bit frustrated there. I agree the title of my page is a bit misleading now. It was intended as a list of FAs that might need regular updating, but I soon gave up on that idea and got sidetracked into cleaning up the biography list. Gimmetrow points out Category:FA-Class biography articles, but my point, made several times now, is that that category (like all the WP 1.0 assessment categories, includes featured lists, which I want to separate out. Easily done (eg. using CatScan) but still annoying to have stuff mixed up like that. More specific to WPBiography is the mixing up of group articles (in this case music group articles) with single-person biographies. It is the latter I wanted to extract, and that took a while, especially as the "musicians" category includes both single-person musician biographes and music group "biographies". I suspect this is a historical feature due to the set up of WPBiography being done by Kingboyk, who is involved in music articles. I have no problems with music groups being included in WPBiography, but I do wish they could be filtered out more easily. Music groups are not the only examples of "group" articles, of course, but they are the most common, I think. Carcharoth (talk) 11:01, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
  • From the above, we can see that 21% of the featured articles are biographical articles in the classical sense (ie. articles about the life story of a single person, as opposed to a band or group of people). I'm not sure whether it means anything (would we expect the figure to be higher or lower?) but I hope I'm not the only person to find that interesting. Carcharoth (talk) 03:14, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
  • My gut feeling (without having done any analysis) is that bios are not unique. There are probably many subdivisions reaching about 20%, like warfare or history (since these are overlapping, not mutually exclusive categories), so I don't know that bios are unique. But I haven't checked. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:11, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Recognized content and Category:FA-Class biography articles. Gimmetrow 06:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for those links. The former is more what I'm looking for, but as I said, the category system at the moment isn't really clean enough and mixes up various types of "people-related" articles with the more normal "single-person" biographies. Anyway, I have some graphs to upload now! They don't include the biography stats, unfortunately, but maybe later. Carcharoth (talk) 11:01, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Graphs delayed until later! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 12:38, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Graphs (February 2008)

FA stats by type (February 2008) barchart, data from WP:FA
FA stats by type (February 2008) barchart, data from WP:FA
FA stats by type (February 2008) piechart, data from WP:FA
FA stats by type (February 2008) piechart, data from WP:FA

OK, I took data from this page version of Wikipedia:Featured articles, and rustled up the following graphs. This sort of thing varies a lot over time as newer articles are featured and older ones defeatured, and as new section "types" are added, so a snapshot at any one particular time is more interesting than useful, but as I'd collected the data, I thought I'd put the graphs up anyway.

It should be noted that the types at WP:FA are broad ones, intended to keep the page clean and readable compared to the more extensive categorisation seen at WP:GA and in the WP 1.0 assessment categories (by wikiproject), and that (by design) there is no overlap between types, though in fact many articles could fit in more than one. Having said that, there are currently 28 types, with more than half the featured articles being made up of the top seven types, and the top eight types having over 100 articles (biology and medicine; media; music; geography and places; history; warfare; sport and recreation; and literature and theatre). There are 6 types with less than 20 articles (computing; language and linguistics; business economics and finance; mathematics; philosophy and psychology; and food and drink).

Possibly doing more analysis than this will not be productive, but one idea I had was to continue trying to work out (using the categories) what the numbers of featured articles are at the very broadest levels, such as portals and topics such as history, science, technology, biography, and so on. Some people have said that Category:FA-Class articles provides this, but in fact that category assessment system (for WP 1.0) bundles featured lists and featured articles together, so (for example), Category:FA-Class geography articles has two articles, a featured article and a featured list, and doesn't include most of the articles under the "Geography and places" section of WP:FA. The useful endpoint of all thise would be to feed through updated lists for portals, such as Portal:Geography, Portal:History, Portal:Science and Portal:Biography to use. Those portals (and many others) change their featured article on a monthly basis, but in some cases there are enough articles available to have the articles updating more frequently, on either a weekly or daily basis. See Portal:Biography/Selected article/Candidates#Automatic rotation for an example of this. I am sure other portals now have enough featured articles available to rotate featured articles daily, and I hope analysis like this will help.

Right, I've written nearly (or more than) enough to go with the graphs. Anyone have any comments? Carcharoth (talk) 21:15, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

First, I'm shocked. I had never actually tallied the numbers, but I thought Warfare and History were the largest categories, and would be the first to require division. Perhaps they just "look" large because their articles tend to have longer titles? I had no idea Biology and Medicine was the largest group. (OK, tooting my own horn, and Marskell, Casliber and TimVickers' too :-)) Anyway, next ... it looks like we have the makings of a Dispatch article. I'll ping Marskell and make sure he's looking in here (I'm not sure he watches this page). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:57, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Ps, can we sync this with WP:WBFAN and find what percentage of those in Biology and medicine were nommed by Casliber, Marskell and TimVickers (and anyone else I don't know about)? I think you've got a WP:FCDW article here. (FAR saves of Tuberculosis and Schizophrenia go to Tim and Cas, btw.) Ah, and the Dino guys; they beef that catgory up, what is that number? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:04, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
An FCDW article? Wow. Please feel free to use the stats for that, but please do double-check my figures. As for the dino articles, I looked at Talk:Acrocanthosaurus and was shocked to see that WikiProject Dinosaurs hadn't updated its assessment tag! In the end, I found a total of 16 that hadn't been updated, which probably means that the WikiProject should get an award for doing more article writing than article assessment! :-) Anyway, the newly updated Category:FA-Class dinosaurs articles contains 23 featured articles and one list. The rest of the section can be broken down into other subcategories, not for the purpose of browsing, I hasten to add, but to help identify trends and hotspots. I'll do that now for biology and medicine. Carcharoth (talk) 23:00, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
The 161 "biology and medicine" ones are: 67 "animals" (including 28 birds), 28 "general biology", 23 "dinosaurs", 22 "medicine", 11 "people" and 10 "plants" (including one fungus). If that helps. I think it would help to get lists separated out from featured articles in the assessment categories. Category:FA-Class bird articles has 43 members, but that includes 12 lists, Georg Forster, Archaeopteryx, and Flight feather, a total of 15 that subtracted from the 43 figure yields 28, the number of articles I've labelled "birds". I think the WP:1.0 people did say a while back they were thinking of doing a separate listing or category for featured lists. Indeed Category:FL-Class articles exists, but it seems the uptake is not 100% yet. maybe that could go in some announcement or report? Carcharoth (talk) 00:26, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

(od) Nice work! The last time I did a dispatch, I whipped it together in half-an-hour on Monday night. Unless Carcharoth has a problem, I'll use these graphs to do the same tomorrow night (mentioning that you compiled them, of course). I think we can segue from the broad numbers to the issue of pop culture over-representation and how much it's been debated (e.g. here). Marskell (talk) 20:02, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Great! Can you park it at Wikipedia:FCDW/February 25, 2008 so everyone participating at WP:FCDW can check in? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:08, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
That discussion Marskell linked was interesting. I note he said there that "The four of 28 FA categories that absorb pop cult—Media, Music, Sport and recreation, and Video games—account for 500, or 26%, of our FAs." - that may be an oversimplification. I had a closer look at "Music" and found at least 26 (of the 153) are decidedly not popular culture (though some of the "Music of..." articles are borderline. See the list here for example. "Media" is more uniformly popular culture, though even that has Film Booking Offices of America, B movie, BBC television drama, Blackface, Kinetoscope, Mutual Broadcasting System and Sound film as encyclopedia articles on more "classical" (non-popular culture) topics. That is 7 out of 159, though the biographies of very famous people would also be "classical" encyclopedia topics (some of the biography articles probably count as "popular culture"). Even "Video games", at first glance irredeemably popular culture, has ESRB re-rating of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, GameFAQs, Nintendo Entertainment System, PlayStation 3, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and Wii, though all those are still about contemporary topics. As for "Sport and recreation", there probably are some in there that are "popular culture", but not really more than in other areas. As you can probably tell, I enjoy identifying broad category areas. One thing I'd love to do is identify the articles on "established" topics, as opposed to articles on "contemporary" topics that may, to be fair, only be transient and not become a noticeable part of history, no matter how 'popular' or 'current' they are today. Something like "pre-1960s", and excluding living people. But that would take a lot of time. It would be nice if the "403 biographies" bit could be mentioned, oh, and that there are 80 articles on living people. Carcharoth (talk) 00:11, 25 February 2008 (UTC)