There are currently 4,468 Good Articles listed at WP:GA.
The backlog at Good Article Nominations is 95 unreviewed articles. Out of 150 total nominations, 40 are on hold, 14 are under review, and one is seeking a second opinion. Please go to WP:GAN and review an article or three as soon as you have a chance!
The categories with the largest backlogs are: Sports and recreation (22), Theatre, film and drama (13), Music (12), Literature (11), and Transport (10).
The GA Sweeps process is progressing nicely! During the month of June, a total of 82 articles were reviewed. Of that total, 61 were found to continue to meet the GA criteria, 17 were delisted, and 4 were exempt from sweeps (due to either being promoted to FA or previously delisted at WP:GAR).
We are once again recruiting new sweeps participants. Candidates should be very strong and comfortable in reviewing GA and familiar with the GA processes and criteria. If you are interested, please contact OhanaUnited for details.
GAN Reviewer of the Month
For the first time, we actually have TWO GAN Reviewers of the Month (probably because of the intense quantity of good reviews during the past 30 days). So, I am pleased to announce that, based the assessments made by Dr. Cash on the number and thoroughness of the reviews made by individual reviewers, Nikki311 (talk·contribs) and ThinkBlue (talk·contribs) are the GAN Reviewers of the Month, and thereby awarded the Good Article Medal of Merit! Nikki311 is an art history student at the University of Georgia, also minoring in Anthropology. She has been editing Wikipedia since November 19, 2006. ThinkBlue has been editing Wikipedia since December 1, 2006, and is interested in articles dealing with Friends, Will and Grace, CSI:Miami, Monday Night Raw, Coldplay.
Other outstanding reviewers during the month of May include:
This WikiProject, and the Good Article program as a whole, would not be where it is today without each and every one of its members! Thank you to all!
GA Criterion #4 - Article Neutrality
So, you've completed your review of an article, and it meets the first three criteria: it is "well written", "verifiable", and "broad". But what about criterion #4? How do you judge whether an article meets the neutrality requirement to be listed as a good article? This can sometimes be a little tricky to judge, but should certainly not be neglected. After all, the neutral point of view is one of the Five Pillars of Wikipedia, so one would think that means it's somewhat important, right?
Most articles will probably be relatively easy to judge. For example, an article on a simple biological organism, like a Cheetah, probably isn't going to be very controversial. But watch out! Does that article you just reviewed on the Spotted owl discuss the environmental and conservation issues related to it? Neglecting that, despite the fact that you might be a Republican that disagrees with those issues, is still nonetheless not meeting the neutrality requirement. And that great review you've done could wind up at the reassessment desk within a day or two! Hint: if you do have strong feelings one way or the other on an issue, it might actually be a better idea to bow out of the review due to conflict of interest, rather than attempting a one-sided review.
Perhaps the first thing to look for when examining an article's neutrality, is to make sure that all aspects and important points of the article are covered. This actually overlaps somewhat with the "broadness" criteria (#3), and to help with this, it might help to check some of the guidelines that have been organized by several of the wikiprojects. For example, does that article on abortion that you just reviewed cover both the Pro-life and Pro-choice viewpoints? Or is it seriously slanted in one direction over the other?
Another major thing to look out for is the presence of any obvious edit wars, both in the article's history itself, as well as in the article's talk pages. While lots of recent page reversions in the edit history is reason enough to fail an article on criterion #5 (stability) alone, some more subtle clues to help judge the article's neutrality can be found by reading back through some of the past discussions on the talk page (especially the very heated ones). Have these talk page discussion issues been resolved, or are they still fighting about them today?
Hopefully, this helps to clarify some of the better ways to review one of the more tricky criteria at WP:WIAGA. Good luck!
... that, per criterion 6 of the Good Article criteria, that the mere presence of images is actually not required for an article to be promoted? It is recommended, but not explicitly required.
... that there are six criteria items listed good articles, while there are only four criteria items for featured articles?
From the Editor
Apologies for the slight belatedness of the July newsletter, partially attributable to the Fourth of July holiday in the United States, and partially attributable to the sudden increase in the number of reviews during the month of June! This required a bit more time to go through each one of them to determine the GAN Reviewer of the Month (and yes, I really do go through each one and look at them ;-). During this process, I noticed that the overall quality among the vast majority of reviews appears to have increased, although I did notice a few minor errors with using the templates. For example, several reviewers forgot to include the link to the GAN review subpage in the {{GA}} or {{ArticleHistory}} template. Please remember to include this link, as this is very important in assuring the accountability of the GA review process!
