Wikipedia:April Fools/April Fools' Day 2022/Horrible article criteria

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Horrible article nominations

The horrible article criteria are the six standard or tests by which a horrible article nomination (HAN) may be compared and judged against to ensure it is a horrible article (HA). A horrible article has met (and does not exceed) the horrible article criteria, and may not have been deleted.

Criteria

The six horrible article criteria are not the only aspects that should be considered when assessing whether to pass or fail an article. However, it is essential that a 'pass' is applied only to an undeniably awful, terrible, or completely unreadable article.

Immediate passes

An article can, but by no means must, pass without further consideration if it meets the following criteria:

1. SEO farming:

a. The page is clearly used to bump the page rating of other sites as part of a SEO farm service.

b. The page contains entirely of external links

The six horrible article criteria

A horrible article is:

1. Terribly written:

a. The prose is unclear, self-contradicting, and contains verses written in the first or second person;

d. Deceptive in wording or formatting;

c. It's grammar and spelling does not exceed elementary or middle-school expectations; and

b. It is difficult to discern useful or encyclopedic content from the text within the article.

2. Unverifiable or Original:

a. It is a complete work of fiction or difficult to verify in any sense;

b. Citations are either unreliable or cite other horrible articles; and

c. It has notable or obvious plagiarism.

3. Biased or a WP:BLP violation

a. If it is a biography of a living person, it must contain libelous, false, or otherwise 'dirty' information on the subject;

Tip: A good sign of a BLP violation is frequent edit-warring over an {{Unbalanced}} template.

b. It clearly contains personal agendas or beliefs of the editors involved in the article; and

c. One or more of it's editors should actively be breaching the WP:PAID or WP:COI guidelines.

4. Terrible aggregations

a. If the page is an aggregation, it should be considered a bad or useless aggregation;

b. It should contain comparatively few entries, or none at all; and

c. The topic the aggregation is performed upon should be trivial, useless, or completely inappropriate.

5. Unstable

a. It must have major layout, formatting, or information changes within a considerably short span of time; and

b. Information is updated without regards to citations.

5. Illustrated, if possible, by crayons.

a. It must illuminate the topic in a confusing, confounding, or irrelevant manner; and

b. It should contain works in a subpar quality, such as screenshots.

What should I nominate as a horrible article?

• Disambiguation pages, stand-alone lists, and portals may be nominated if you believe they meet criteria 4,
• Wikiproject pages if you disagree with the Wikiproject's motive, goal, or members,
• Stubs, especially if their topic is nonsensical or ridiculous.

What cannot be a horrible article?

• Featured articles, good articles, and deleted articles: These inherently, simply by their nature, violate the principles that a horrible article is based on, and cannot be nominated or accepted for horrible article status.
• Redirects: All redirects are protected by and under the jurisdiction of the Redirects for Discussion page.
• Drafts: As drafts must be reviewed for quality issues before they are accepted into Mainspace, drafts cannot qualify for horrible article status.