Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/YouTube/1

YouTube

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Delisted There is only really one decent review of the article provided here that judges it against the criteria and very few of the issues raised have been addressed. This has been open a long time so there has been plenty of opportunity for editors to address these issues. Therefor I am delisting this article. It is not far from being a good article so hopefully someone can use this reassessment to get it in shape for another nomination. AIRcorn (talk) 21:49, 19 March 2018 (UTC)}[reply]

This was sitting in the backlog following a GAR request template placement. It was awaiting reassessment when an IP vandalized the template. After the reversion, AnomieBot placed it fresh in the list. As a result, I am starting an immediate reassessment of the article, but since this is such an important article, I have opened it as a community reassessment because I would not like to do this alone. I will not let an IP delay an article's reassessment like that, that's not fair. dannymusiceditor ^{Speak up!} 12:32, 11 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I get that this is a hugely important article, but is it truly necessary that the article need be 188,000 bytes long? Holy crap. There must be some irrelevant content in here. I smell a serious criterion 3B violation here. dannymusiceditor ^{Speak up!} 12:38, 11 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The readable text in the article actually isn't that long. It looks larger than it is because the "Comparison of YouTube media encoding options" and "Countries with YouTube Localization" have been hidden and make the HTML look larger. If these are taken out, it removes around 60,000 bytes. The article is not of excessive length when read through without the tables. The readable text in the article is around 115,000 bytes, which isn't hugely excessive per WP:SIZERULE. There are Featured Articles at 150k or more.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 19:31, 15 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Oh? Is there any other issue you see here? dannymusiceditor ^{Speak up!} 19:35, 15 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not overly concerned about the length of the actual text as explained above, but will have a detailed read through of the article.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 05:14, 16 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with this Good article reassessment, as YouTube has good quality and readable text in the article. I think that YouTube should stay as GA. Jamesjpk (talk) 14:44, 31 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Feel free to disagree. I began this reassessment because it was listed under the ones possibly needing reassessment, and was unfairly delayed. The number of bytes was at first concerning, so I wanted to check with the community. dannymusiceditor ^{Speak up!} 15:16, 31 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I vote Keep. I think that this article still meets good article criteria. It provides broad, balanced scope and is very well cited.StoryKai (talk) 17:39, 2 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Delist unless issues below are fixed: though much of the article is very, very good, I believe there are significant issues relevant to GA criteria 1, 2 and 3. I've only skim-read much of the article so I'm sure there are many more small problems with the article that should be fixed, but fundamentally I think the biggest problems are with due weight and out of date or poorly sourced information. But the article doesn't seem that far off GA so I will reconsider my !vote if significant improvements are made. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 20:50, 15 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Full review by Bilorv

Major issues

The article contains a lot of statistics and examples that are probably out of date. For instance, "YouTube's revenues in 2007 were noted as "not material" in a regulatory filing." (under "Revenue"), "In 2010, it was reported that nearly a third of the videos with advertisements were uploaded without permission of the copyright holders" (under "Revenue to Copyright Holders") and "the White House's official YouTube channel being the seventh top news organization producer on YouTube in 2012" (under "Social impact"). Now obviously in the Company history section or when discussing past events, facts like these are appropriate but old information used to support facts presented in the present tense (e.g. "Google does not provide detailed figures for YouTube's running costs") should probably be removed or replaced and there are probably others.

Why is there no section on prominent YouTubers, or explaining the types of content YouTube has in it? The "Social impact" section has quite a few very minor examples of things like a presidential debate using questions from a YouTube video or the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, but unless I missed it when skim-reading, there is no real mention of what the majority of content on YouTube actually is – e.g. categories like amateur musicians, home videos, people recording themselves playing video games, informative channels like MinutePhysics – or some notable examples (with a "Main article: List of YouTubers" link). I think this violates WP:UNDUE.

Minor issues

The lead's "Available content includes ..." sentence seems to mention things not covered later in the article e.g. "short and documentary films". This violates MOS:LEAD.
No source for current headquarters being in San Bruno, California (mentioned in lead and infobox), and not mentioned in Company history section.
Current CEO not source / mentioned outside infobox.
Programming languages are mentioned in infobox but JavaScript is not sourced and what makes this source that it uses Python reliable? But more basic than that, surely the language YouTube was written in should be mentioned somewhere in the body of the article, with more information related to both the original development and current maintenance of the site.
In the "Uploading" subsection, the "12 hours in length" and "normally through a mobile phone" facts are not mentioned in the given source.
The section "Comparison of YouTube media encoding options" does not seem reliably source; two of the sources are tagged and the only fact the other sources seem to verify is that YouTube uses 1080p (just one datum among four detailed tables).
"Countries with YouTube Localization" seems to have some dates which are unsourced or unknown (marked as "?").
In "Social impact", "YouTube channels launched by The Ellen DeGeneres Show and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon became two of the most subscribed." seems unsourced and I'm very confused by what it means. List of most subscribed users on YouTube has those channels at 18th and 43rd, respectively. Perhaps they are supposedly the two most subscribed channels in the context of production companies, but this seems like OR without a source.
"Assuming pre-roll advertisements on half of videos, a YouTube partner would earn 0.5 X $7.60 X 55% = $2.09 per 1000 views in 2013." (under "Partnership with video creators") seems like OR based on the $7.60 figure mentioned in the reference following.
"NSA Prism program" section seems completely out of place – could it be expanded (what was its role in PRISM? What reactions were there when it was made public that YouTube were involved in it?)? Should it be merged into another section?
"April Fools" section is LISTCRUFT and given too much weight. Could possibly warrant a paragraph somewhere in the article with a couple of examples, but currently giving it a full section is too much.

I've also made a few edits to fix some other minor issues I found; if no-one else fixes the problems above or objects, I will also try to fix some of the issues I've listed here where I can. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 20:50, 15 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I know we are looking at narrowing it down a bit, but: I would like to see some mentions of Youtube's recent policy changes regarding monetization, firearms, and conspiracy theories as these are issues that have sparked a lot of conversation and that many on the internet are unhappy with. The Thought Police (talk) 20:32, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

So basically, things that regard YouTube's staff becoming people like you (Thought Police). dannymusiceditor ^{Speak up!} 20:45, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Bilorv: Have your concerns been satisfied? AIRcorn (talk) 20:29, 19 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Some of them seem to have been addressed but several remain, and those were after only a cursory look through the article. My biggest concern is the lack of due weight / mention of specific YouTubers or popular channels; I think the article sorely needs a section covering the most viewed videos/channels, people who gained notoriety through YouTube etc. There seem to be a plethora of links in the "See also" section which should instead be summarised appropriately in the article. It also concerns me that it has been 9 years since the article's promotion to GA and it has received thousands of edits since then, and a lot of significant YouTube-related events had not happened yet then. So I am not happy with the article staying as a GA at the moment, particularly when the last thorough review of it took place in 2009. — Bilorv_(c)(talk) 21:06, 19 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]