Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Newsletter/November 2012

The WikiProject Good articles Newsletter

The WikiProject Good articles Newsletter Volume III, No. 2 – November 2012 For past newsletters click here

Featured Editorial: A Matter of Time: The Future of Backlog Elimination Drives by Hahc21 Main article: Requests for comment: Future of GAN Backlog Elimination Drives June - July 2012 GAN backlog elimination drive chart Backlog elimination drives have been a part of the Wikipedia community as a whole since several years ago. Many WikiProjects use this method to bring their members on a collaborative effort to reduce the workload and, additionally, to share a very interesting and passionate time with fellow Wikipedians. The Guild of Copyeditors hold drives to reduce their backlog each two months, and other WikiProjects like the Articles for Creation WikiProject, have used this method to reduce a high accumulation of work. Apart from having several social and tactical benefits, drives inside the Good article process have been the subject of hard criticism: Several users have expressed their dissatisfaction with the quality of reviews and the useless backlog reduction, which immediately climbs to its original levels after the drive is finished. The issue is that consensus apparently still supports the existence of the backlog elimination drives at GAN and recently, most of the GA community voted to keep making drives, although a proper consensus was not reached from such discussion. In addition, several proposals for alternate methods and proposals for modifying the way drives are done had been received with overwhelming negative reaction. In September 2012, Malleus Fatuorum proposed an amendment to the good article criteria that would eventually fix the need of drives by including two new quickfail criterias about prose quality and coverage issues. Community rejected the proposal arguing that it was way too narrowly designed to be included as quickfail criteria. One month prior, I proposed several changes for the drives structure that were considered too bureaucratic and with too many restrictions to have a positive impact. Despite of this, several recommendations were made and accepted by community, like the elimination of the barnstars, among others. In a summary of recent events, the June-July 2012 GAN backlog elimination drive brought several queries to the GA community as a whole: Do we need backlog elimination drives? Can we fix the issues that had split community over the drive usage in the past? How do we deal with "rubber-stamp" reviews? Well, by the fact that it has been quite difficult to reach consensus to date, a request for comment will be held this November to see how community answers those questions. First, the RFC will determine the future of the drives: Is community still interested in having backlog elimination drives inside the Good article Wikiproject? And if the answer is yes, How would we tweak the current backlog elimination drive system to make it compliant of what it is supposed to do and avoid all the issues that had split community before. Several proposals included in the RFC are the introduction of a qualifying process, The inclusion of daily review limits, an established disqualifying process and an additional proposal related to how often should drives be held. Of course, additional proposals might be added from fellow Wikipedians who would participate in the process. Notes

There are currently 16,035 Good Articles listed at WP:GA. The backlog at Good Article Nominations is 381 unreviewed articles. Out of 473 total nominations, 20 are on hold, 70 are under review, and 2 are seeking a second opinion. Please go to WP:GAN and review an article! Even just reviewing one will help! The oldest unreviewed articles are: Preuss School, Ali, Texas State University–San Marcos, Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, Ion Creangă. Please consider reviewing these articles. The categories with the largest backlogs are: Theatre, film and drama (98 articles), Social sciences and society (79 articles), Sports and recreation (74 articles), Music (71 articles), and History (47 articles). Please consider reviewing articles within these sections. There are currently 2 articles up for reassessment at Good Article Reassessment. Please help out and go to WP:GAR and review an article! Remember that anyone can review articles that are listed under "Community Reassessment" even if another user has already listed their opinion...the more opinions, the better! As of 19:06, November 2, 2012

There are currently 223 members of WikiProject Good Articles! Welcome to all the new members that joined this past month! If you aren't yet part of WikiProject Good Articles and interested in joining WikiProject Good Articles, go here and add you name. Everyone is welcomed! 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!

There is currently not much going on at this time but there is a very large backlog. We ask everyone to help out by reviewing nominations and helping other reviewers that may need second opinions or just have general questions about reviewing articles. The Future of Backlog Elimination Drives As mentioned in the "Featured Editorial" section, a request for comment has been made about the future of Backlog Elimination Drives. We ask that everyone comment on each proposal so the best final decisions can be made. The official RfC page can be found here.

Each month, 5 random good articles will be choose to be featured here as the good articles of the month. University of Dayton Ghetto Webster's Brewery British Aerospace Sea Harrier The Prestige (film) Duff Cooley

Contributors to this Issue Dom497 Hahc21 A message from Dom497: I would like to thank Hahc21 for producing the new layout to the newsletter. After 5 years you would think its time for an upgrade! If you have any concerns regarding the new layout, have ideas of what to add/removed in future newsletters, or have just general feedback, please leave a message here. If you no longer wish to recive future newsletters from this WikiProject or you aren't yet subscribed (and would like to be), please remove/add your name from this list. Did You Know... ... that this WikiProject once had a collaboration center? ... that all Good Articles listed before August 26, 2007 were reassessed? It took almost 3 years to reassess the 2,810 articles! ... that there are currently over 300 Philosophy and religion good articles?