Just got a good eyebrow raiser out of Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Mary Seacole. See especially Testing times' and Giano's comments.

Thoughts?

You can only steal something someone else owns.
Which is half the problem with all FAs.

lol he tried to take credit for it. How cheeky!

If we are going to play observing the society rules, it is interesting that this is entirely internal, and is one Wikipedian harming another - we didn't get a look in .

I suspect we will see some backtracking and the self-nom will be explained away as a conflict of interest - nominating an article that he had made a few edits on. So arguably the nomination is ethical. I guess if you did a run through FAs there would be quite a bit of double counting if you looked at started, brought up to, happened across and claimed the glory.

Giano is right though to try and keep the currency of FA authorship pure - it is a far more valid test of worth than barnstars.

Closed as unsuccessful, after some factual innacuracies in Rudget's work were noted, as well as some prose issues.



Agreed.

I know one other user who claims to have 2 FA's, who simply copyedited the articles and added two sentences. If only "copyediting" was to be considered to be "materially contributing to a FA", I could claim <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clem_Hill>, a fantastic biographical account of a very notable cricketer, although that would be distinctly unfair on Mattinbgn.

An interesting question to ask is: what do people gain out of claiming they write a FA they really don't "write"? Link it with an impending RfA (which obviously isnt the case with the instance that sparked this thread - this is hypothetical) and you have yourself an answer.

Again, without suggesting that it's the case here, there are plenty of other "ranks" that require community election, and (generally) by extension, will give the candidate a stronger chance if they can point to an FA.

Fair point. Subst. RfA for RfX/ACE/etc.

Now you're on the trolley.