It's been a few months since I've reviewed any GA nominations, and in this time I've given some thought to the process. I don't mind reviewing other people's work, and I often find it rewarding. But I've found that GAN reviewing is more difficult than FAC reviewing, and there's a lot happening here that might be discouraging GAN reviewers, including myself. Compared to FAC, I've found a few things that are more challenging with reviewing GANs:
It requires a more active commitment from the reviewer. With an FAC, you'll typically have three to five reviewers plus an FAC coordinator to make sure the review goes smoothly. From the nominator's perspective, GAN is "lightweight" as we often hope it is, but the opposite is true for reviewers. You're managing the entire review and have to handle every aspect from open to close. On FAC you can do anything from a drive by comment to a full page prose, image, and source review, but on GAN reviewers have to do the maximum or none at all, often making none at all the more appealing option. This is especially troubling for inexperienced reviewers, whereas it's easier to take baby steps in getting into FAC reviewing.
The content starts at a lower quality. If something is nominated to FAC, you can be almost sure that it's already very good content and just needs some polishing or a little reworking. Anything less than this is easily turned away. But with GAN, you never know what you're going to find. There have been a few times where I recommended the nominator take it straight to FAC after passing, but more often I've seen GANs that aren't quickfail-worthy but they're still weak enough that I either don't bother with them or regret taking them.
Even when articles are low quality, there are few options besides shuttling them through. This is more about GAN culture than the actual requirements, but the result is the same. It's been discussed before that nominators often feel entitled to a pass and that failing noms can create drama. If I see a nom that I would probably quickfail, I'm more likely just not to bother with it. It's uncomfortable going to all of the trouble of initiating the review just to say "not good enough" and immediately close it, knowing that the nominator will be frustrated after their five month wait. There's also no clear distinction of when to quickfail and when to undo the nomination. Then when you get a nom that's not at quickfail level but still needs a lot of work, it's really easy to get into a WP:FIXLOOP and hard to get out of it. There's no clear procedure for when exactly to throw in the towel on a review or how to do so tactfully. Ideally, I'd like to see a more streamlined procedure of telling the nominator where they should take the article before GA, whether it be WP:GOCE, WP:PR, or a relevant WikiProject, but that would require these things to be efficient as well.
Source evaluations make it more labor intensive. There's a reason why FACs typically have one dedicated source reviewer and then other reviewers for the rest of the article. Compared to content and style, reviewing sources is intense. This more than anything has stopped me from reviewing GANs, just because I know that committing to reviewing an article also means doing a source review. I dread evaluating criterion 2, and I'd rather not review at all. I suspect I'm not the only one in this camp.
To a certain extent these things may be intrinsic to GAN, but these are things that we should think about if we revisit anything about the GAN process. GAN is definitely better than FAC for nominators: there's a lower barrier to entry, it's less cliquey, and you don't have to "campaign" for reviewers to prevent your nom from timing out. But from a reviewer's perspective, GAN is much less appealing. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:25, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
I haven't been reviewing GANs in quite awhile either. I've mainly only been doing them lately for the backlog drives. Some of the criteria take quite awhile for me to look through (grammar check and neutrality comes to mind). That's why I've been doing FLCs nowadays as I can focus on 1 criteria (verification check) and don't have to worry about the rest. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 00:36, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
I agree with everything you've said, Thebiguglyalien. Among the reasons I stopped reviewing GANs (beyond no longer having access to a university library) is that some editors are less conscientious that you and they don't mind just skipping the source check and calling it good because, as you say, it's not FAC-level. I just hate seeing folks get rewards during a backlog drive when they almost certainly did not do half the work you described. I find that my love of holding the line enables me to fail bad nominations because the system expects someone to play the bad guy; many folks just don't like that job. I am glad that you kept your integrity rather than compromise, because the system cannot otherwise help you. Chris Troutman (talk)01:04, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
@Thebiguglyalien I do fewer GA reviews than I'd like, because the source check is quite time-consuming, but I have to admit that your bullet #3 strikes true. There's the WP:FIXLOOP problem, sure, but also it's a real bummer to put all the work into reviewing an article only to end up failing it. -- asilvering (talk) 07:05, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
The requirement for a source review was only added in March 2023 (Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023/Feedback#Proposal 2: Make spot checking a requirement) I have done many source reviews at FAC and A-class. This is possible because I have access to multiple libraries and databases, and a sizeable collection of military history books right here. Because to perform a source review, you must be an expert on the subject area. In other words, the intent of this change was to drastically reduce the number of GA reviewers. Hawkeye7(discuss)07:43, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
I suppose I don't quite understand how a review should be considered helpful or worth much if the article isn't compared against its sources to some extent. Remsense诉07:45, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
I started reviewing before March 2023 and it was clear to me from the GA criteria alone that source-checking was required. I have no idea how anyone would read the requirements otherwise. -- asilvering (talk) 07:53, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
To perform a full source review perhaps you have to be a subject-area expert, but the requirement is only to spotcheck sources, which you can absolutely do without being an expert. In order to check that an article actually meets the GA criteria it's necessary to check sources to some extent – formalising it may have put people off of reviewing, but at least in theory adequate reviews should already have done it. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 08:49, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
Sure. If you have access to get behind paywalls. I use two university accounts and a National Library account to do this. To perform the source check for the article on Elizabeth II I had a dozen books pulled at the National Library and spent a Saturday morning going through them. This has to be balanced against the article creation work you can do in the same time. Hawkeye7(discuss)09:11, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
With respect, I would usually just pick out references that I do have access too, rather than do a random source and get stuck behind offline or paywalled material. I do agree that a GAN is high work, but I haven't had any issues failing articles at GAN. Lee Vilenski(talk • contribs)09:56, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
Given the range of the Wikipedia Library these days, I would expect most people would have access to at least some of the sources used in a GA nom; if you want to check a particular source it is also possible to ask the nominator to provide you a copy. I'm not saying that the source spotchecking requirement doesn't discourage people from reviewing; I just don't agree that people can only do GA reviews when they are experts. (And again, this was already a requirement to do an acceptable GA review; the only difference is that we are now enforcing it!)
Yes, reviewing e.g. Queen Elizabeth II is more time consuming than reviewing most other articles, but that will always be true whatever the review requirements are. Doing the prose review of that article also takes more time. OTOH, I would expect that article requires much less specialised background knowledge than most. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 15:01, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
To make it easier for me, I reviewed articles where I have access to all of the sources. Otherwise, I couldn't confirm whether every statement was 100% verified.I did this before and after the source check was implemented. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 17:33, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
I agree, you certainly don't need to be a subject-area expert. You just need to be good at reading carefully and critically. -- asilvering (talk) 00:30, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
I think the only area where you might need to be a subject-area expert is the mathematical sciences, for obvious reasons. Otherwise, I can't think of a topic where a simple spotcheck is beyone the average editor's capabilities. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:37, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
Yes. As much as I don't love the spotcheck requirement, I think people in this discussion are making it out to be a bit more than it is. Doing a spotcheck does not require that you read every source in intricate detail, not even at FAC. Use your judgement - pull a few sources you can access, as Lee says. Focus on a couple that are the most relied on, for any claims that strike you as unusual or unlikely, and, for copyvio/close paraphrase checking, where the phrasing is unusual. If you find issues, then you might want to start going back with a fine-toothed comb, but if you don't, you've done your due diligence. ♠PMC♠ (talk)01:06, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
I've only been reviewing for about a year or so, but was also a bit confused by the spot check requirement. It was surprising to me that we potentially didn't need to check refs before?? How could that be? When folks had reviewed my couple dozen noms over the past decade, I was always asked to revisit refs, swap some out, clarify which information each ref sources, etc. I do the same for the noms I review. The new "spot check" requirement then felt weird because it was asking that I prove I did something that was honestly quite obviously done when reading through the article. Bold claims, quotes, superlatives, and the like are always things that you need to verify.
Separately, I agree that I now feel a bit discouraged from reviewing and I think that is the result of the nom order in part. It was always exciting knowing that you were finally at the top of the queue and now I have a nom from July that's buried in a random subsection. I no longer feel part of something. When you finally start reviewing an article or have your nom reviewed, there are these conflicting feelings of expediency, lost interest, impatience, etc., and the process just feels weird. I've also found the back and forth with other editors to be way too slow and oftentimes combative. I wish there was more of a push (or requirement) that reviewers make routine grammar, spelling, formatting changes as they go instead of writing a talk page essay about it. It comes off a bit petty to say "remove extra word in the third paragraph". Grk1011 (talk) 15:13, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
It wasn't quite obviously done. The reality is that reviewers often assumed good faith on sources. To me, this is WP:CREEP, and the root of the problem is that instead of being a low bar and the first step in the review process, GA has become the last for projects lacking A-class, resulting in calls to tighten requirements at GA. Hawkeye7(discuss)23:55, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
I think there's definitely a conversation to be had about the sort order; I don't think it has improved the reviewing statistics in the slightest (what it was meant to do), and it is clearly less intuitive than the old system. I would be in favour of reverting that change. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:40, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
Perhaps by giving more weight to time on the queue. The MilHist coordinators used to act on articles that had been there too long. I only notice now that one has been there since September, but is ranked 19th in the queue. Whereas one of mine from last month is 18th, and has been picked up. (I note that articles that subsequently pass FAC do not count, so should advise MilHist people not to send those to GA.) Hawkeye7(discuss)23:55, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
Grk1011, can I ask for a bit more about your reaction to your position in the nominations queue? One of the things the sort order was meant to encourage was for nominators to review the nominations above them in the queue, which would move them up in the queue, both by removing the nomination above them and by improving their own reviewing ratio. With the old sort order, did you find yourself reviewing nominations above you to help your nomination move up? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:15, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
@Mike Christie I'm not a prolific reviewer, so I haven't weighed in on this before, but I will say that I've completely stopped reviewing from the "queue" because of the changes to its organization. It's now basically impossible to glance at the list and see if there's a new article there you might be interested in reviewing, since it's no longer ranked by age. I'm also not motivated to go save one of the reviews that's been waiting for ages, since I can't easily tell what those are. As a nominator, I would certainly be more motivated to review something above my article in the queue if they were ranked by age. Now that they aren't, it's not at all clear that reviewing another article would bump mine in the queue, since it seems that a new submission might be placed in front of it basically at random. -- asilvering (talk) 02:30, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
@Mike Christie I also agree with Asilvering above, but to answer your specific question, I was encouraged to review a certain number of nominations to improve the position of my nominations; however, that only worked for a while because in my most popular topic, I realized I now have to review 175 more noms (I only have 20 reviews right now) just to break position 10. I'm totally unmotivated by that. I could do a couple more to go up a handful of positions, but middle of the pack is middle of the pack. I'll never be a new nominator at the top of the list and I have enough reviews to not be at the bottom either. Grk1011 (talk) 02:40, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
@asilvering: I was one of the proponents of the new sort order, but I'm well aware it hasn't fully solved the problems it was intended to address (though I believe it has had a small effect). I hoped those who reviewed more would be rewarded by being at the top of the list, and that reviewers would pick from the top of the list in preference. The lack of any incentive to review was a real problem with the old sort order, but the inability to see what the newest nominations are is something I can sympathize with. Were you aware that there are alternative lists that do provide the ability to see new nominations? They are linked at the top of the GAN page. Do those address your wish to see new nominations, or is something still lacking? @Grk1011: what if the ratio only referred to the last N months, with N at perhaps 12 or 18? That would make any nomination's position on the list much easier to improve by reviewing. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:58, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Personally I'd prefer to just go back to the old way instead of adding additional complexity. There was a sense of fairness to it without gamification, which I understand to be something people felt was critical to change to encourage reviews. At this point, I think enough people have their qualms with the nom order (whether they align with my specific concerns or not) that there should be another large discussion/!vote; then everyone could air their grievances. I don't feel comfortable spearheading any particular tweak when I'm not a power-reviewer to begin with. I appreciate your willingness to explore my views though! Grk1011 (talk) 03:12, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
I've said this before, but messing around with the algorithm isn't going to make anyone happy. Any change is just going to provide more opportunities for people to complain. I for one will be extremely irritated if my review ratio tanks from no longer counting older reviews. I've been doing reviews steadily as I go since I started doing GANs in 2017. I know there are other editors in similar boats.
We should go back to sorting the main list by nomination date. It's transparent, obvious, and impartial. If we still want to highlight review ratio, maybe we can do that another way - color code nominators or something. ♠PMC♠ (talk)03:12, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Oh, nevermind, I just realized at least part of the answer: it's sorted by ORES topic, not the topic people actually sorted things into when they nominated. There's an athlete in "food and drink" right now. -- asilvering (talk) 17:39, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
I didn't list it above, but the sort order definitely doesn't help. I don't feel particularly excited about reviewing the noms above my own if new ones can pop in above mine at any time, undoing any "rising" that I invested hours into. I'd be more incentivized to review the noms above mine if it guaranteed me a higher spot on the list (although my other issues with reviewing would still exist). Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:13, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Alien, I sympathize with your general feelings. It sucks to be the bad guy failing a nomination that simply isn't ready. I think as a community we need to be more aggressive with failing articles that don't meet the standard. The more articles we correctly fail, the less there will be an expectation that all GANs will pass, and a higher failure rate may discourage some half-assed nominations. On the other hand, I will say that I've made a point of doing a large number of quickfails and fails over the past year or so, and have only gotten pushback from a couple nominators. Once you get past the guilty feeling of being the "bad guy", it's actually not so bad. ♠PMC♠ (talk)03:21, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
They commented their intentions on the talk page beforehand, and no one seems to have disagreed, so I'd say not. They were also active in responding to the previous (abandoned) review. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:36, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
Can someone delete this page? The nominator seems to have been confused as to how the Good Article process on English Wikipedia works. (For context, Vietnamese Wikipedia's GA process is similar to our FA process.) Spinixster(chat!)10:06, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
Hello, I am hoping that someone here has an expertise in image licensing. I am doing a GAN review on the Randy Travis article and I questioned this image. It was in the article to show the mural but I know that the US does not have FOP for 2d. For now, the nominator has removed the image from the article, but if it is allowed I am sure it would belong in the article. Thanks. Lightburst (talk) 15:43, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
US does not have FOP for public artworks at all. So unless we have more information about the mural being out of copyright or freely licensed, I think we're out of luck. I have replaced the image in this discussion by a link to the image out of an abundance of caution. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:00, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
User talk:ScarletViolet
This editor, ScarletViolet, has unilaterally nominated an article to GAN (which I created/expanded), where they had zero input and contribution, and at the same time initiated a review of said article. I'm quite stunned by the lack of awareness for the GAN process displayed the this editor, but also saw this coming considering this user has a history of this type of behavior, and I have made repeated warnings on the editor's talk page.
As a note, this user has had this behavior within the TFA and FAR.
Nominating Mariah Carey's article to TFA and then withdrawing it because said editor could not not address issues to improve the article [2]
With regard to second bullet, nominating the FA article for Featured Article Reassessment without being able to raise concerns at the talk page [3]
I would like to request that this nomination be deleted, as I have no immediate plans to bring this up to GAN at this time, as this isn't ready just yet pending some rework/copyedits. Pseud 14 (talk) 14:06, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
I have removed the nomination, and requested a speedy deletion of the review page (reviewers are not allowed to review their own nominations even if the nomination is by the rules). BlueMoonset (talk) 16:59, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
That should be the main job - BlueMoonset will be updating the count as they can, and mass-message sending only needs to be done a couple times. As long as you don't check your own reviews, and do a thorough job, we would love to have your help! —Ganesha811 (talk) 02:55, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
Quickly skimming through, the criteria may very well be met, but you have to do a prose, source, and image review even when an article passes. Read through the text and make sure that there are
@Cocobb8: The point of doing the review page is for you state what you checked and that the article passed each criteria. You cannot just close the review as "passed" because we can then doubt your honesty. You claim to have checked sources for verifiability but with no notes, how can we be sure about statements like rivalry in the console market? Did you check the images for licensing? Please take a look at my past GA reviews to orient yourself to expectations. Chris Troutman (talk)15:37, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
Ah, I see what you're getting at. I didn't know I had to write about what I had been reviewing! Thanks for letting me know. Is there anything I need to do now? Cocobb8 (💬 talk • ✏️ contribs) 15:42, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
I see, thank you. Is anyone able to move the article back to B-class for the time being? Thanks! I will also be letting the nominator of the article know about this. Cocobb8 (💬 talk • ✏️ contribs) 16:04, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
It's not necessarily the case that the article has to revert to B-class. Could you post on the GA review page notes that show what you reviewed, including what you spotchecked? It sounds like that might be enough to meet the GA instruction requirements. If there's still an issue we can talk about that then. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:05, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
@Cocobb8, if it helps, this is an example of an easy GA review I did recently where the article was a very obvious pass. The review is still 13,000 bytes long (and I don't request any minor grammar changes - these are only questions/edits I couldn't sort out myself while reading). Furthermore, it's worth keeping in mind that even if you think an article is an obvious pass of the GA criteria and don't have any changes to request to get it up to that level, it's a good idea to give some feedback for improvement. (Just don't imply that these are necessary for the article to pass review.) For a lot of articles going to GAN, this is really their first moment of collaboration. It's not just about putting a seal of approval on an article. The more constructive you can make it, the better. -- asilvering (talk) 20:11, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
Reading this discussion, I can't help but think about the fact that my own reviews can be quite short when the article is in good shape. I just looked at my last twenty or so reviews; this is the shortest, but there were two or three others not much longer. Would that be an acceptable review under current standards? I did check all the criteria; I just didn't say so. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:17, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
OK -- then I don't think we should be asking new reviewers to do more than that, either. I understand that for a first-time reviewer we want a bit of extra confidence that they did check the criteria, but if they list what they spotchecked and the article doesn't seem an obvious fail, should we be pushing new reviewers to write more than I would write? I'm asking because (as discussed here many times) every time we raise the bar, we drive away another small percentage of reviewers. I think perhaps both I and Chris T overstated above what Cocobb8 ought to be putting in their review. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:31, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
Thank you all for the feedback! How about I complete my review (I will aim to write quite a lot), and then you guys can give me some feedback? Also, where can I find some templates for review instead of writing out everything from scratch? Thanks again... Cocobb8 (💬 talk • ✏️ contribs) 20:48, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
@Mike Christie I think it's clear enough, and it's 1500 bytes, so that's very short, but not so short that it would be disqualified in next month's backlog drive, for example. In this case, the article itself is also very short, so I wouldn't expect a huge review. You could use one of the checklist templates if you wanted to make it more obvious that you'd checked everything. I would say that personally I don't think spot-checking only three footnotes is sufficient. Others disagree with me on this, but I literally always turn up something in source-checking, so I would never stop at three. Sometimes it's only minor stuff, like the review I linked in my previous comment. Often though, I find something that suggests to me that the article is missing something important, so I don't check off "broad in coverage" until the source checks are over. -- asilvering (talk) 20:36, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
Has there ever been a discussion on how to handle articles awaiting review if the nominator is inactive? It seems unfair to the reviewer if they're working on a review where the comments are unlikely to be addressed, especially if the reviewer didn't notice the inactivity warning. I wonder if hiding the noms or moving them into a separate section (like when a nominator has too many noms) might be a good idea. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:03, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
I boldly remove noms with 50+ days of inactivity, with a comment stating what I'm up to and why, and directing people to revert me if they choose. No ping though. Seems to work reasonably well. ♠PMC♠ (talk)23:11, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
There was a discussion on this on the 2023 proposal drive, which led to inactive nominators being flagged by bot. My opinion is that valid nominations (made/approved by significant contributors) deserve to be reviewed properly. If you know a reviewer is inactive then you should assume that the article is static and that you will either need to fix minor problems yourself (in order to pass) or explain what the major issues are (in order to fail). Sometimes you might be surprised to see a nominator respond after several months of no edits, and you can also notify a relevant WikiProject early in the "on hold" period to see if anyone can action feedback. — Bilorv (talk) 22:50, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
Ariana Grande was poorly quickfailed by a very inexperienced editor yesterday. I have reached out to them on their talk page and they agree that it was not a good review, and don't wish to carry on any further. Since there was commentary, however minimal, I've opted not to G6 the review. Instead I've ticked the count up by one, again, and left it (hopefully??) in the queue in its original position from July last year. ♠PMC♠ (talk)01:06, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
Potentially non-thorough GA review
My nomination St Melangell's Church, Pennant Melangell was recently promoted to GA after a pretty short review which didn't give me very much feedback - I'd like a second opinion in case there's anything pressing I should improve about it, so that it truly meets the criteria. I've gone and done some tweaking and cleanup since the review, & fixed some of my own mistakes, just to make sure it's in the best shape it can be. Thanks! sawyer * he/they * talk01:44, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Option 1: by age, with oldest nominations at the top of sections and newest nominations at the bottom (the pre-2023 system).
Option 2: by the nominator's ratio of reviews to nominations, with higher ratios placed at top and lower ratios at bottom (the current system, adopted after the proposal drive in early 2023).
Option 3: as at option 2, but with the ratio calculated using only reviews and nominations from within the previous 18 months (an adaptation of the current system proposed above by User:Mike Christie).
Option 1 I supported the change to the current system at the proposal drive. A year and a month on, I do not think it has accomplished its aim of encouraging reviewing. The older system was fairer to all and just plain simpler; the added complexity introduced by the new sort order was not great. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 04:04, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 1 Ultimately, I also think the current system is a bit of a failed experiment. It's pretty hard to understand what exactly makes a GAN "score" higher. And moreover, often times being good at reviewing and being good at content creation are separate skillsets (although they often overlap). Generalissima (talk) 04:54, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 1. Like Airship, I supported the change at the proposal drive, but have come to see it as a mistake. The sharp increase in backlog can be dated almost precisely to the end of the proposal drive, and I can't see it as unrelated. The dated sort order is, as I said above, transparent, obvious, and impartial. ♠PMC♠ (talk)05:07, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 1 Currently, there are 228 articles that are 3 months or older at GAN. Of these 228, 57 are 6 months or older. Currently, the oldest nomination (9 months) is in the middle of the Politics section. Therefore, I think reordering by nomination date to show the backlog would be more helpful. Perhaps the ratio can be revisited once the backlog of nominations has been lowered to 3 months and under. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 05:15, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 4. The change to review order has led to significantly faster reviews for my noms, which is very pleasant and has encouraged me to keep my reviews-to-noms ratio high. However, I believe nominations should slowly rise to the top with age. Let's have both instead of one or the other. —Kusma (talk) 09:15, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 1 I don't think it will make any difference in the review rate, but I agree with some comments above that there is some value to having a simpler system that folks can understand at a glance. I'd still like a reviewer's ratio of reviews:nominations to be visible as I personally prefer to review articles from those who contribute to the process. I'd also support finding some way to highlight newcomers' nominations for review, though I'm not sure what form that should take. Ajpolino (talk) 14:49, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 1 is simplest, easiest to understand, and neutral. The experimental order has been interesting but as others have commented has not reduced the backlog, rather the reverse, though whether it was the cause is not easy to determine. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:44, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 1, but I think Kusma's idea is probably worth trialling. I think it will be a more useful test if there's a reset to the earlier status quo and a backlog drive between now and a change to Option 4, though. -- asilvering (talk) 17:36, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 1, the most straightforward of all. Also not opposed to Option 4 or still showing the ratio between reviews and nominations. Skyshiftertalk17:42, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 2. I like the current prioritization, and especially the way that it groups all nominators by a single nominator together. Option 1 doesn't have that feature. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:02, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
@David Eppstein Hypothetically speaking, would you prefer this option or one that's grouped first by nominator? Right now they're grouped into headings by topic before being grouped by nom. I think it would be interesting to see GANs grouped by nom, in order of review ratio (highest reviews:GAs at the top), without the articles being sorted out by topic first. -- asilvering (talk) 20:39, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
I definitely want them grouped by topics first. That is the first thing I look for when finding nominations to review. Most of the big popular topic categories are of no interest to me and having to wade through their nominations to find the ones I care about would be very off-putting. Grouping by nominator is secondary to that. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:41, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 1. To the extent there's any perceived need to organize these by some other method for certain purposes, that might be something automatable with software (e.g. generate it on another page, or use the same page and render a sortable table, or whatever). — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 13:06, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 1. I find the old way fairer and more straightforward. I do think there are ways to keep nudging people to review, which was ultimately the reason for the previous change. Definitely keep showing the numbers of reviews and GAs for each nominator. Suggest maybe bolding the nominations of new nominators? A goal was to help keep the backlog down, but I'm not sure that we were accomplishing that since there was no direct reward for your efforts. I'd rather see a predictable GA backlog drive schedule and closer coordination with other efforts such as the WikiCup, or new pages patrol drives. Let's think outside of the GA silo and more about editor engagement overall. Grk1011 (talk) 19:11, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 1 for now but I'd be open to Option 4. The current system results in some nominations just not ever being picked up because they appear low-priority despite being among the oldest, while flooding the tops of the lists with 0/0 nominators whose submissions are often well below par or are drive-bys that don't warrant high priority. We should encourage new nominators, but not by burying nominations by experienced nominators who have kept good review/nomination ratios below loads of low-quality 0/0 submissions. Hog FarmTalk15:53, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 2 - I believe that prioritizing newer nominators and incentivizing frequent nominators to review is worthwhile, and the benefits of this outweigh a possible reduction in total reviews completed. However, I can see that Option 1 will likely be re-adopted, and it does have the genuine advantages of simplicity and clarity. —Ganesha811 (talk) 20:16, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
Option 1 – Age should take precedence, and the current system doesn't add enough weight to push older nominations through. SounderBruce00:16, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
I like option 4 in theory, but in practice I believe option 1 is most practical. I share the thoughts of those who previously supported the change (I was one of them) but it seems clear to me it has led to a major increase in old nominations. As long as the nominations/reviews ratio remains visible, I have no issue with the change since I can still ignore nominations by those who refuse to review. My ultimate preference would be a sortable table making this entire issue moot. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 21:17, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
Of course, many thanks to Mike Christie for giving so much time and effort to allow us to fiddle with the sort order in the first place. Your efforts are much appreciated. Ajpolino (talk) 14:53, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
For what it’s worth, the current system encouraged me to do my first two GA reviews. It’s nice to see an immediate impact of my reviews by looking at the queue. If we go back to a simple time-based sorting, I think it’s worth exploring more ways to positively reinforce reviewing GAs. Ghosts of Europa (talk) 20:31, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
One thing I've noticed about the current system, that I'm guessing is an unintended side-effect, is that it incentivizes quickfailing nominations to boost one's own review statistics. I've certainly been much more inclined to review clearly-premature nominations as a result—it is a much more modest commitment of time to identify disqualifying issues than to rule them out (let alone highlighting them and making sure that they are resolved before closing a nomination as successful). Whether this is a good thing is perhaps something people can have differing opinions about. TompaDompa (talk) 21:04, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
Consensus seems to be clear already, and this RfC can probably be closed in favour of option 1 before the full 30 days (per WP:NOTBURO, and it might be useful for those competing in the current backlog drive), if anyone is willing to do the closing. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:31, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I've updated the guidelines (which are transcluded at the top of GAN) to remove the explanation of the sort order, since we're now sorting by age again. The guidelines still have a box that shows the "5 highest priority" unreviewed articles, with priority defined by the old sort order. Do we leave this in, and change its description, or just remove it? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:22, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
You did. You can update the first two lines of the running totals yourself (the Articles reviewed & Old nominations reviewed). No need to WP:CROSSPOST however :). —Femke 🐦 (talk) 21:02, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
The bot execution environment on toolforge is changing in a way that will stop ChristieBot from running in mid-March unless I make some changes. I'll be working on trying to switch over to the new environment today, which mean I'll be intermittently stopping and starting the bot, and there may be periods of one or more hours when it is not running. If I don't get it switched over today, I'll start the existing version up again and work on it again over the weekend; it looks like just a few lines of code need to change but who knows what rabbit holes I'll find myself going down. I'll post updates here, including when it's done. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:00, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
ChristieBot is now down and I don't know when it'll come back up. See here for the technical issue; I have a query in to the WMF as well and I hope one of those channels will resolve the problem, but I can't say when that will be, I'm afraid. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:55, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
Mike Christie, thank you very much for keeping us informed. I've added a post to the backlog drive talk page, noting that the daily Progress updates are on hiatus until ChristieBot is back up. I hope that they answer your query soon! BlueMoonset (talk) 01:08, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Can someone please explain in detail how I might change the category of a GAN after it's already been nominated (but no one has started reviewing it yet)? I know I can change the subtopic parameter on the {{GA nominee}}, but will a bot "see" that and move it to the correct place on WP:GAN? If not, if I manually move it, will that break something? The article is Tyler1 if it matters. Thanks! Mokadoshi (talk) 23:40, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
If you change the subtopic in the GAN nomination on the article's talk page, the bot will pick it up and move it for you. Manually moving it is not possible unless you have template editor rights, and is pointless anyway as the bot would just rebuild the page with the previous version. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 07:05, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
Hi, I'm currently working on my first GA review at Hackaball and would appreciate a second look. I'm not done, but I'm getting there.
I specifically have a question about image relevancy. Looking at the space image in particular, I think it should be removed. It's meant to illustrate how the companion app is styled. Without a screenshot of the app, and since the article's subject is primarily about a ball, I think there is too much indirection here for it to be relevant. But, it's more relevant than the examples given here, so I'm not sure. Mokadoshi (talk) 01:27, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
Besides this outstanding question, the review is done. I'll wait a bit before officially marking it complete though to give time here for feedback. Mokadoshi (talk) 21:24, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
Welcome to GA reviewing, Mokadoshi. It looks like a good, thorough review to me, with useful feedback and clear engagement with the sources. As for the image: I agree that the image of space is a bit unnecessary, especially as it only vaguely resembles what I can see of the app from an image search. Since toys are copyrightable per c:COM:TOYS and therefore a free image can't reasonably be created, I think an NFCC image of the hackaball might help readers visually identify the item. (Alternately, you could suggest the user email the creators and ask for them to release an image under a free license, but that would be going above and beyond what GACR asks for.) ♠PMC♠ (talk)07:14, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
Hi @PMC: I've been keeping an eye out here while the review concludes and, as I say there, I have no strong feeling on keeping that image. I did mention possibly using a more standard constellation diagram, but on further thought that might cause confusion as the app is very stylised. Would appreciate thoughts here. Regarding a picture of Hackaball itself, I did contact Made by Many a while back to no avail, but I can find a suitable NFCC sometime today. All the best, Schminnte [talk to me]08:11, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
I've had a look for suitable images: I think that the first image from the Kickstarter would do nicely (direct link, a more specific link is www.kickstarter.com/projects/hackaball/hackaball-a-programmable-ball-for-active-and-creat, which I will request to be partially cleared from the blacklist that covers Kickstarter). This also includes a partial view of the app, which bypasses the need for a second image entirely. I think this would pass the NFCC but would like a peer review since this is my first time dealing with NFC. Thanks for the help and all the best, Schminnte [talk to me]18:00, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for looking into this. In the meantime, how about we remove the generic space image from the article so the GAN can be approved? Mokadoshi (talk) 20:10, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
If a certain editor no longer wants to review an article and wants it pass to another editor, what's the procedure? To close the review and start a new one? The Blue Rider17:46, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
It depends on whether a review has been started properly. I believe, if there is nothing in the review yet, we typically delete the review as a WP:G6. Otherwise, the review is usually set to second opinion. A note here may help to find a new reviewer. What review are we talking about? —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:08, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
At the moment, only the reviewer's name is preloaded on an actual GAN page; I am proposing that the nominator's name also be included in future nominations. The result would be something like the following, open to further formatting/tweaking:
The reason: saves editor time, helpful for record keeping, basic identification standard. Oftentimes many people are commenting on a GAN review, or during the beginning of active reviews, the nominator hasn't even commented yet. A simple indication at the top saves editor time in identifying the nominator, otherwise the nomination often has to be read through to find who they are. This is already done at FAC, FLC, FGTC, FPC, etc.
Support, sensible, have also wanted it previously. I wonder if any notes posted on the GAN template should be carried across too. CMD (talk) 07:47, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
Comment. The only caveat is that if the reviewer who creates the review page deletes the "Reviewer:" line, for some reason, the bot won't know where to put the "Nominator:" line. I don't think this will be technically hard. However, because of real life commitments and travel plans I am unlikely to get to this for two or three weeks. I'll plan on doing it in late March or early April unless objections are raised here. It would be easy to add the nominator note too, as CMD suggests; I'll plan on doing that as well unless there are objections. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:26, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
Support: I've always thought this would be useful, rather than having to go to the GAN page or the article's talk page. One question for Mike Christie: for backward compatibility purposes as regards parsing, would it be better to list the reviewer first and the nominator second, or is the more logical order given above fine? BlueMoonset (talk) 15:29, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
Either way is equally simple technically. I think nominator first is more logical, and I don't think that would cause any problems, but if there's a preference for putting the nominator second it can be done. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:35, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
Support. Adding my support to say that it would be even better if it could be applied to other review pages retroactively for archival purposes, assuming this is possible and it doesn't risk seriously breaking anything. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:25, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
Indeed! Mike and I spoke about this. I think for now, we get the nominator going on future noms, then I'll plan to do a second proposal in a few weeks to see if others want to do a big sweep for archived noms. Aza24 (talk)22:43, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
I have no intention of opposing this proposal, but could someone explain why identifying the nominator at a glance is seen as essential, when the bot does the notifications? Nikkimaria (talk) 04:24, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
It isn't essential per se, but there have been a few times when digging into old GAs where having the nominator name easily accessible would have saved needing to dig through talkpage history. CMD (talk) 07:52, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
Sometimes to see if an older editor is still around, sometimes to help figure out where a lost GAN comes from (often due to not being moved with its parent page), once or twice when looking into some sockpuppet things. There are probably other reasons not coming to mind right now, but it's very much a matter of convenience for those GAs which either get passed or failed with no discussion. CMD (talk) 15:37, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
Support, this is convenient for example if you have finished a review, the nominator has not responded yet and you want to check whether the nominator has been recently active. Sure, you can find out from talk history, but it is a tiny hassle that would be avoided by the proposal. —Kusma (talk) 14:58, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
Support: useful for identifying a potentially interested editor if there are later changes, issues or GARs; useful for awarding things like WP:FOUR and WP:TRIPLE; useful for reasons given by others. — Bilorv (talk) 23:01, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
support - like others, i've also found it mildly annoying that it's not displayed more prominently. sawyer * he/they * talk00:41, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The first thing I've noticed is that your review is over 1,200 words long but you have only covered the 1st criteria so far. I want to make sure you are aware that you are allowed to fail a nomination if it is far from meeting any one of the criteria. If you believe that the article is so far from achieving criteria 1 that you couldn't even begin reviewing the other criteria, then failing is definitely an option. A fail is not a punishment, the nominator can renominate it again. Still, it is great that you're willing to put in so much effort to improve the article, so let me continue.
Second, I want to make sure you've read WP:GACN? The reason I ask is because I'm seeing a couple instances where, in my opinion, you are asking for changes to be made that are not required in the criteria. For example, I see some comments about whether a DES is a "tube" or not. Criteria 1a means The meaning of each sentence or paragraph is clear and not confusing, even if you might have phrased it differently. From Google it looks like the average person would not be confused by it being called a "tube." I also see some links to MOS guidelines that are not part of the five MOS guidelines required for GA. It is still a great idea to offer those suggestions, but please make it clear that they are optional.
Lastly, I saw a comment that a source wasn't reliable because it wasn't indexed by Pubmed. Why would this make the journal unable to be used as a reliable source? I'm not suggesting you're wrong, I am simply unfamiliar with medical article guidelines. Mokadoshi (talk) 04:52, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for your feedback. Repointing me to what GA criteria are not was most helpful. You, and anyone, are welcome to take more part in the discussion. NikosGouliaros (talk) 22:38, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
Ivanka Trump
Talk:Ivanka Trump/GA2.... We're going to need some eyes on this. Brand new editor reviewing the article. Don't think new editors should be reviewing articles at all....but especially not contentious articles. Always feel bad for the person who wants a GA review when this happens. That said it looks like it passed all criteria with flying colors... Not one concern raised.Moxy🍁 01:59, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
Not quite a simple checklist review, but no source checks seem to have been made. (At a brief glance the article doesn't seem in that bad a shape, although I'm surprised it's so short (including an empty section), and it has a bit too much WP:Proseline to meet GA1.) Noting that none of the close processing has been done, so there is nothing that needs immediate examination outside of the review page. CMD (talk) 03:40, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
I've left some comments. I have been on a wikibreak for a bit and am a bit disconnected to recent discussions here on such reviews, so other input is appreciated. CMD (talk) 03:59, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
@Moxy Well I did request User:Tim O'Doherty to review the article but User:CtasACT wanted to review it and Tim requested me, the article's GA nominator, to give the new user a chance. I will greatly appreciate it if you, @Moxy, could help with the article and its potential upgrade to GA status. I have already requested @Chipmunkdavis to help me on the GA review page. Hope to get help and have a successful GA going forward. Regards MSincccc (talk) 12:50, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
Mathematics articles and adherence to GA criteria
When nominating articles for WP:GAR as part of WP:SWEEPS2023, I am rarely faced with opposition. However, when I nominate mathematics-related articles, I often find myself having to defend the GAR process as a whole against editors who see it as a waste of time (see e.g. the GARs for Derivative or Vector space). As I understand, these editors often feel that WP:BLUE and WP:CALC covers nearly everything mathematics-related, and so adding inline citations is an optional extra, rather than a necessity. Do they have a point?
There is nothing special about words typed into articles labeled as mathematics that exempt them from verification.
(Sorry, but in my personal opinion GAR is a kind shaming process that is pointless; GA invests too much effort on one article. So perhaps the pushback is not what you think it is). Johnjbarton (talk) 22:43, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
My main argument is that you, AJ29, seem to see GAR as a personal crusade to remove the GA status from as many articles as possible, as quickly as possible, ostensibly as a kind of devil's advocate, but don't really seem to care about engaging productively to make improvements to those articles or actively doing any substantial amount of work to fix the problems you see. It seems to me mostly like a power trip.
I haven't seen a single example where you started by making a talk page discussion, went source hunting, cleaned up prose you thought was unsupportable, etc. Instead you basically lead with the threat "I'm AJ29 and I'm here to take your green badge away". Even the criticisms are vague and low-effort: [I don't think this type of short vague "review" is useful. R]ather than carefully going through and checking sources, calling out specific passages you find [considered] problematic, etc., i.e. something like a peer-review with specific and actionable feedback which would take some effort and demonstrate your good faith, the critiques are along the lines of "violates subsection A.X.5 of the updated GA code" or whatever. These criticisms don't generally seem based in whether the article is clear in scope, well organized, helpful to readers, well written, etc., and in my experience the [challenged] articles you challenge seem generally better in quality than newly promoted GA I have seen. Other editors are forced to scramble, setting aside whatever else they were working on to spend probably 10–100x more effort than you have[a challenger has] to spend to make the demands in the first place. For you [the challenger,] making the challenge takes a few minutes, but you expect other editors [are expected] to spend tens of hours of work satisfying it.
I think this is a demotivating waste of time which undermines the concept of "good articles". Instead of trying to work through the long list of mediocre articles on the site and bring them up to a high quality standard, with some kind of marker to show that progress, GA becomes an exercise in repeatedly jumping through adversarial trials to prove that ever changing bureaucratic checklists have been satisfied.
In my opinion the best way to fix this process would be to (1) encourage GAR fans to start by fixing simple problems they see and start specific talk page discussions about problems that can't be quickly fixed, instead of kicking off threatening formal processes, and (2) require a GAR "review" to be an actual review, akin to the review stage of an initial good article nomination, where a reviewer leads off with a detailed examination of the article, actually going through sentence by sentence or at least section by section and coming up with some detailed feedback, and then goes back and forth with other editors to fix whatever problems were found. –jacobolus(t)22:56, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
Impugning another editor's motives as you have done here is an egregious assumption of bad faith. I am politely asking you to strike your accusation that he is on a "power trip" and acting out some kind of vendetta. ♠PMC♠ (talk)00:34, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
jacobolus, you are correct that the current system has speed as a major priority. You may not be familiar with the previous versions of GAR as a process, which was rather close to your proposed system. It was also so ridiculously slow that reassessments were often simply forgotten about indefinitely. In the end, after discussions like this and the 2023 proposal drive, the process was reorganised so that everything could be carried out much faster.
You may also be unfamiliar with the situation outside of the articles I notify you of. Aside from maths articles, military history articles, and articles on important subjects, most GARs do not get much participation at all (you can see this from the archives). Thus, as with the GAN quickfail procedure, it is a bit odd to demand a full review for an article that clearly does not meet the criteria, and which probably will receive no attention anyway.
I know that you hold the requirement for inline citations in contempt, but as it was added rather recently after a well-attended RfC, and the community consensus is clear that it is as important as being "clear in scope, well organized, helpful to readers, well-written, etc." and that articles without them are, in fact, part of the "long list of mediocre articles".
At the end of the day, all GA is is a classification system. If you don't want to bring the article up to the standards of a set of criteria you hold in open contempt, you can ... just not. I assure you that my ego will not be affected. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:44, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
The current system seems to have "remove as many green badges as fast as possible as its current priority". Which seems like a waste of time without particular value added to the project.
The part that adds value is the actual work being done, whether concrete and actionable critique or serious effort to improve articles.
odd to demand a full review
The only folks demanding anything of anyone are the "GAR" reviewers. Other editors generally just want to spend their effort on improving articles. I just think it's pointless to have a "review" that doesn't involve any actual reviewing. At the end of that process you remove some badges, but what good does that do anyone? It hasn't made the articles better. It hasn't really encouraged anyone to contribute who wasn't already. All it does is (sometimes) distract people from whatever site improvements they thought were most important to instead redirect their attention to making defensive marginal improvements based on what one GAR reviewer thought was most important. But if the GAR reviewer cares so much, they should put in some of the work.
The categorizing scheme of "these articles ticked off a list of features and these don't" does not correlate especially closely with article quality and scattering little badges on that basis does not provide any particular value to readers. The part of the GA and FA process that is valuable is the direct peer review part, where someone takes the time and effort to closely read an article and provide clear and direct feedback. I thought the whole point of the process was to facilitate that and encourage people to try to do good work. From these discussions it generally seems like the folks involved at GAR don't actually care about thinking deeply about / working deeply on article quality. So you're right, at that point I think it's a waste of attention. –jacobolus(t)02:23, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
At the end of that process you remove some badges, but what good does that do anyone?
In practice I just don't find that to be true. I routinely find "unbadged" articles which are excellent and GAs and FAs which seem incomplete, poorly organized, poorly illustrated, misleading, confusing, ... But hey, at least every sentence has a footnote. –jacobolus(t)02:31, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
"GAs and FAs which seem incomplete, poorly organized, poorly illustrated, misleading, confusing" This is exactly why GAR exists, so we can delist poor-quality GAs. I don't why you're arguing against making GAR more streamlined if you want all GAs to actually meet the GA criteria. AryKun (talk) 03:33, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
Because the specific articles which have been challenged have been better on average than the ones left alone, and the challenges have been non-specific and based on changes that take disproportionate effort to fix for marginal benefit. Are you asking why I don't just drop a vague "this GA should be cleaned up or else..." GAR every time I come across a GA which seems mediocre? The answer is that I don't think it's very valuable unless accompanied by a detailed and specific review, and I don't have the time to be doing that all over the place inre articles I don't care much about / which don't seem very important. And for articles where I care, I'd just as soon either fix issues myself or start concrete talk page discussions instead of kicking off a threatening official procedure. –jacobolus(t)05:18, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
jacobolus are we really going to have another favourite merry-go-round? The one where you tell me "you're an anti-intellectual egomaniac time-waster on a power trip" and I tell you that your arbitrary, WP:V-excluding definition of article quality is at odds with everyone else's? Really? I just wanted to know about how far to tale WP:CALC, for heaven's sake. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 02:46, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
No, this is totally unfair. AJM is very good with being clear and concise in his review work Every nom of his I've seen was adequate or well-deserved.
Also, regarding your feeling that this undermines the concept of GAs, I feel exactly the opposite. It's nice knowing that the status usually actually means what it says it means, and doesn't also include what are frankly almost always not good articles by the letter or spirit of the criteria. The problem is not that people notice the articles are not up to snuff, it's that the articles are not up to snuff and sit there for years.
You are adamant that cleanup work should be done by the nominator before nomination—just as well, why can't it be done by someone who's worried about articles getting nominated for a review? This attitude borders on childish. Remsense诉00:52, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
Of course anyone can (and should) do whatever kind of article cleanup they think is valuable at any time. But twiddling metadata (e.g. adding cleanup banners) doesn't accomplish any concrete improvement. Only actually putting work in (tracking down sources, comparing them, summarizing them, writing/copyediting prose, making diagrams, checking existing claims, fixing formatting errors, etc.) accomplishes that.
The problem is not that people notice the articles are not up to snuff, it's that the articles are not up to snuff and sit there for years. – the vast majority of articles on Wikipedia are "not up to snuff", including many about essential topics that are viewed thousands of times every day. The only way to improve them is to actually do the work. –jacobolus(t)02:29, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
If anything, I see delisted GAs as low-hanging fruit, so I suppose I don't understand why the badge both matters as a symbol of pride and directs the effort of editors, but whether it's on or off an article is twiddling metadata. It genuinely just seems like a difference in tact between two people wanting to improve the encyclopedia—all of us want the same thing. I genuinely find both approaches helpful and constructive. Remsense诉02:32, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
Anyway, I'm going to go work on articles now. You folks here can do what you like. If everyone loves removing little badges and wants to get in on the fun, fair enough. Don't let me stop you. I'll try to ignore future GAR posts. –jacobolus(t)02:43, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
You just made this new post asking for people to explain why they thought this process was messed up, and pinged WT:WPM, so I responded here for your benefit. –jacobolus(t)03:10, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
What you said was As I understand, these editors often feel that WP:BLUE and WP:CALC covers nearly everything mathematics-related, – that's not an accurate characterization of the critique that editors have presented. –jacobolus(t)04:06, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
No, I believe it is an accurate characterization of a critique which accepts that GAR as it stands has a use, and which thus can be discussed productively. As your critique seemingly necessitates the constant disregard for the consensus that has established that GAR does have a use, in addition to the constant use of ad hominem attacks against others, I don't really regard it as productive. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 04:38, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
I am telling you you are mischaracterizing people including myself, based on a misunderstanding / misinterpretation of the dispute. In response, you are insisting that you are accurately channeling what you imagine they might say if only they thought what you think.... but they don't, which is why there were arguments about it. Nobody ever said anything remotely comparable to WP:BLUE and WP:CALC covers nearly everything mathematics-related, which is an extreme straw man exaggeration.
You can "believe" whatever you want, and nobody can reach into your head and force a change in that. But that doesn't make it any less a mischaracterization. –jacobolus(t)04:52, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
Yes, GAR should be about removing GA status from as many articles as possible, provided that these articles don't actually meet GA standards. Lots of people will ignore improving an article if they see a shiny bronze star or green circle on top of it because they assume it is already good enough for most readers; having the thousands of sub-par GAs that we do actually harms those articles and skews our perception of how well we're doing in terms of having quality articles instead of just a lot of articles. AryKun (talk) 10:36, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
@AirshipJungleman29 Are you referring to unsourced paragraphs in those GAs? I prefer to improve the article, avoiding the articles potentially nominating to GAR. However, from my experience, this seems very exhausting, especially since the work is difficult for me if I have no expertise in some fields of mathematics. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 02:48, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
Assuming you are talking about the articles outlined in my original comment, yes I am. If you would be willing to work on them, that would be much appreciated; could you just note it in the "Notes" column of the table at WP:SWEEPS2023? Many thanks, ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 02:58, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
I can't and I have no idea. I could only provide some sources and improvement only. Sorry :-( At least, I'm trying my best. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 03:53, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
Inre "WP:CALC" per se, math articles are not fundamentally different than any other kind of articles, in the sense that factual claims should typically be sourced to reliable sources. However, there are some differences in the way that plays out in practice: Specifically, it doesn't make any sense to try to add a separate citation to every step in a proof or derivation or every example calculation, which is the kinds of questions WP:CALC is focused on. Sometimes the argument from a paper needs several paragraphs to summarize/transmit in the body of an article, and requiring separate footnotes at the end of every paragraph of this doesn't help anyone. If a published paper contains a quick proof sketch it seems entirely fine (when otherwise appropriate in context) for an article to expand that for the sake of novice readers, and vice versa if the published paper contains a detailed proof it's fine to give a quick paraphrase. It also seems fine to use different variable names, add intermediate variables for legibility, simplify or reorder a proof, do non-novel types of algebraic manipulation, etc., so long as the idea is fundamentally the same.
@Jacobolus I would expect they specifically refer to the unsourced facts. For example, in the Matrix (mathematics), the section about the matrix's size needs citation in order to verify the fact what the source mentions (GACR2b). I do think there are lot of problems before they implemented to GAR.
The claim "The size of a matrix is defined by the number of rows and columns it contains" seems to be pretty WP:BLUE to me. But it also doesn't hurt anything to add a footnote to this paragraph pointed at literally any linear algebra book ever written (just as it doesn't really hurt anything to add a citation for a claim about the sky's color, if someone wants to). I don't think the lack of such a footnote reflects in any way on the article's quality, but if someone enjoys footnotes or has a favorite student-friendly book they (didn't write and) want to promote, they are certainly welcome to add one. –jacobolus(t)04:19, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
Well. I would personally suggest to add them whether they are WP:BLUE or not. For some reason, I would not add sources in the case of calculation and common examples per WP:CALC. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 04:22, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
If you want to ground it in something other than vibes—which would be my initial impulse—intuitionists would find significantly more cause to provide citations for derived statements of mathematical fact. Remsense诉04:33, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
As a concrete example, take Pythagorean theorem#Euclid's proof. I don't think this section is particularly well written: it's disjointed, somewhat stilted, hard for high school students to follow, somewhat anachronistic in the use of algebraic notation, etc. I think we could do better with a complete rewrite. But the sourcing for the bulk of section, in particular the inclusion of the line "which appears in Euclid's Elements as that of Proposition 47 in Book 1", is more than minimally sufficient. Nothing in that section should be attacked for being unsourced, in my opinion, even though there are paragraphs, numbered list items, etc. without footnotes. –jacobolus(t)04:42, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
GA is a very low bar. If a section is not particularly well written, then WP:SOFIXIT but do not take it to GAR. Articles wait for months to be picked up at GAN, but someone thinks that we should respond to a GAR in seven days? Hell no. Seven months is reasonable. And no user should open more than one at a time. If someone says: "I disagree", then there is no consensus, and the GAR can be closed. Hawkeye7(discuss)05:44, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
The more I've thought about this, the more I think we're better off instituting a notification requirement for GAR, like exists with FAR. I really don't see how a week's notification time before sending to GAR would have negative effects and it would resolve some issues with crossed wires. Things like Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/California State Route 11/1 could probably have been handled better from the talk page than at GAR anyway, as well as maybe some of the GARs that request material to be updated when there is a lack of obvious things to include in an update, such as Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Francis Bok/1. A GAR version of WP:FARGIVEN could then be created. Concurrent nomination limits like exist at FAR I think would also be a good idea. There needs to be a balance between removing status for articles that are clearly deficient and making the process respectful and helpful for nominators/maintainers of GAs. I would also say that topic areas like mathematics and physics and such things will have a limited base of editors who are familiar enough with the subject matter to make the needed corrections, so limiting the frequency of nominating GARs in those topic areas would be best to avoid burnout/embitterment among the small number of editors who can actually work on those articles. Hog FarmTalk14:10, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
I agree in general with HF that a more FAR-like system would be helpful here, including the nomination limit and some more extended time. Even in FAR, we sometimes have an issue where too many articles of a particular topic are up for review, leading to burnout of exactly the editors we hope to keep engaged, so no one is handling this perfectly.
For the record, I think the denigration of AJ29's motives and actions has been unwarranted and tragic, and I'm grateful for their efforts to keep some sort of review system running. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 14:22, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
Speaking as an editor who nominates at GAR: I want to emphasise that it is not the reviewer's responsibility to ensure an article maintains GA status, just like it is not a reviewer's responsibility to improve a GAN so it can reach GA status. A reviewer's role is to post concerns so that subject-area specialists can address them. If a fix is minor, the reviewer probably should fix it themselves, but analysing sources to include new prose and inline citations is not a quick fix. Requiring reviewers to look for citations and add additional prose is basically asking the reviewer to take hours, days, or even weeks away from their own projects to fix "your" article of interest. In my opinion, this is unfair; I try to maintain the articles which I want to retain their status, so I believe that if others want an article to retain a status, it is their responsibility to maintain them. Z1720 (talk) 16:04, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
Sad. I'm not sure what I'd suggest except neutral posts here seeking more input. Hopefully our GAR coordinators are holding the line on delisting if no one steps up to save the article.
Articles don't have owners, cf. WP:OWN. All of the articles under discussion here were edited sporadically by a wide range of people, many/most of the most active of whom are no longer active on the site. If there's an implicit GA criterion of "needs to have several editors permanently commit to rewriting the article within a week any time the GA criteria change and a challenger demands it", that should be stated explicitly. From what I can tell there aren't enough people interested in indefinitely closely maintaining an unbounded collection of GAs from across the site, especially technical articles, so under the current GAR scheme the likely result is that over time the number of GAs will gradually dwindle and end up mostly focused on niche articles with few readers and limited impact. That's fine I guess. We should then calibrate our goals; it ends up being a better use of editors' time to do reviews and improvements of ordinary articles about topics of central importance independently of the GA process, aim for "B" class, and leave the GA badges to people with the time to play point-scoring games full time. –jacobolus(t)16:54, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
It is up for discussion because while the distinction between reviewer and nominator is basic, it is frequently violated at GAR, where the same person sometimes performs both roles. The person who nominates an article for GAR should not be not the reviewer. Hawkeye7(discuss)22:23, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
So what I'm hearing when you write that is that you think the role of nominator is to be a drive-by make-work-for-everyone-else busybody. That is not a constructive thing to be. If that is what our process pushes people to do, we should fix the process to be more constructive. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:05, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Your point about GAR reviewers sometimes playing dual roles is a good one. If there are reviewers that are closing their own contentious GARs, that's a problem worth looking at. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 04:09, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
When a nominator thinks that their only effort should be to attract subject specialists, without any sourcing effort themselves, for a process that concludes in weeks, in a subject area where new nominations typically languish for literally months for a subject expert to take interest in reviewing, we have a broken process. If that's the process, then why not simplify it to "we should delist all mathematics articles because we don't have enough subject experts jostling to be the first to respond to a GAR". That would be faster and less painful. Instead, we get demands for the attention of a limited pool of editors who have better things to do than to find citations for 1+1=2 (hint: "a thousand pages" of detailed mathematics in Principia Mathematica) because the nominator doesn't understand the subject even at the level necessary to recognize WP:BLUE topics. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:13, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
I have to agree. The number of editors who are both fluent in the subject matter and passionate about inserting footnotes is very small. Each GAR sprung on this population is a demand for a large share of a scarce resource. Moreover, just speaking from my personal experience, the improvements required to get a pass at GAR come down to citations nearly entirely, but the work that the article actually needs to be "good" for readers are in other aspects (flow, organization, etc.). At GAR, it seems that one is always being graded on a small portion of what actually matters, and the grading of that small portion is done in a mechanical way. Trying to "save" an article at GAR is only partially aligned with writing a lowercase-g good article. One is then faced with a choice: spend time at GAR instead of working on pages that are in some ways more important, or stop caring about whether math articles have green stickers. XOR'easter (talk) 02:03, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Readers don't care about copyright. They don't care about violations of WP:BLP. They don't care about whether the images they see are correctly licensed. They don't care about WP:NOT. Wikipedia does though—that is why all of them, and WP:V, are classified equally as policies.
If you only care about what makes "a lowercase-g good article", I have a solution: grab a copy of your nearest maths textbook, and straight-up plagiarise the relevant sections and post it on a blog. I guarantee that readers will find it absolutely damn perfect. But Wikipedia is for what Wikipedia deems important, and GA is for what Wikipedia, not the readership, deems good. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 02:47, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
If you only care about what makes "a lowercase-g good article", I have a solution: grab a copy of your nearest maths textbook, and straight-up plagiarise the relevant sections and post it on a blog. I understand that you are being facetious for rhetorical effect, but even without any problem with copyright, this would be a terrible solution. (a) The math book already exists and math books are not hard to obtain on the internet. Anyone who wants to find math books and papers can trivially find more than they can shake a stick at. But (b) text copied directly from math textbooks usually does not make a good encyclopedia article. Math books and encyclopedia articles serve substantially different purposes with substantially different audiences. They have different focus, different organization, different expected prerequisites, expect different levels of commitment and interest, and so on. Concretely, encyclopedia articles are intended to be reasonably concise summaries of single topics which can read at multiple desired levels of detail from skimming the first paragraph for a basic concept through use as a reference source to look up particular details up to detailed close study and use as a bibliography to find other external sources, whereas math textbooks are intended to be extended summaries of a large topic requiring months of 10+ hours/week focus, usually without much link to other sources.
The important (and hard) part of technical Wikipedia is writing clearly for a general audience, especially when many of the sources being relied on are written very tersely and at an advanced level and often go into extreme technical detail, directed at a specialist audience. Figuring out how to name articles, how to split topics between articles, how to organize each article with some narrative flow, how to include enough prerequisite material for context without getting bogged down reprising a whole course, etc. involves a ton of choices with often sharp trade-offs. Further efforts such as creating good figures takes a tremendous amount of work, for me sometimes hours to make each diagram; a (lowercase-g) "good article" should often include 10+ diagrams. The formal GA criteria focused on putting yet another redundant footnote to the next page of the same few sources after each sentence don't really have anything to do with it. –jacobolus(t)03:53, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
I am well aware of the difficulties of writing for a general audience. See for example my top-to-bottom, year-long rewrite of Genghis Khan, which incorporates top-level scholarly sources in an article which 10,000 readers look at every day, when any reader could just go to history.com. Nevertheless, during that rewrite, I placed the WP:V policy just as high as copyright/NPOV/clarity/any other criteria you wish to define, because the Wikipedia community has seen fit to enshrine it as a central policy. Without rigid adherence to WP:V, Wikipedia is not Wikipedia, and a "good" article can never be called such. That is my position at least; if nothing else, this discussion has convinced me that we will forever disagree on that. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 04:07, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Wow. That is an incredibly hostile response to a comment I made in the best faith possible. It seems to presume that I don't care about WP:V or WP:RS, which is far from the truth. Did I say that they don't matter? No, I said that At GAR, it seems that one is always being graded on a small portion of what actually matters, and the grading of that small portion is done in a mechanical way. In other words, referencing is part of what an article needs to get right, but elevating rules-of-thumb to rigid codes and applying them in a clockwork fashion doesn't actually help get it right. Moreover, energy spent on doing that is energy not spent on doing anything else, and the GAR system forces it to the top priority, rather than one of several coequal and interlocking desiderata. (For example, there's no point in sticking a footnote on a paragraph when that paragraph should be deleted because it doesn't belong in a broad overview.) A system in which only a fraction of the hard work is seen to count towards success is a thankless system, and not optimal for the benefit of the encyclopedia. I have very limited time for Wikipedia these days, and I had hoped that my comment here would be a constructive use of that time, but I see that engaging with the GA process in any way continues to be a mistake. XOR'easter (talk) 15:50, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Incidentally, though, if you're casting around for supposedly-mathematics GAs to scrutinize, The Math Myth would be high on my list. It contains an entirely unsourced "synopsis" section (which as a work of fiction does not fall under the usual allowance of plot summaries without sources), with a lot of evaluation of what the book claims (rather than merely description of a sequence of events), already tagged as confusing. If we're picking and choosing which articles to put effort into cleaning up versus which to leave and let fail, that's one that I don't think meets the criterion now despite its recent pass, and that I don't care to put effort into improving. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:09, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
I think you mean as a work of non-fiction. Would you care to nominate it yourself? I am reliably informed that nominating articles at GAR is good for your ego. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 03:39, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Non-fiction, correct, sorry for the typo. Not me, but I won't object at all if someone else does. Instead I'm putting some effort into eliminating cleanup tags from mathematics GAs before they get nominated (but not that one). —David Eppstein (talk) 03:47, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
I think it's fair to say both sides have good cause for their particular points of concern and frustration regarding the criteria or GAR process. Perhaps there is room to consider some revision of the criteria to emphasize or elucidate criterion 1, as difficult as that may sound—while perhaps allowing for certain classes of exception regarding criterion 2a. Remsense诉04:01, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Some suggestions from above, not all mine:
Make talk page discussion of issues a mandatory first step, with some amount of time without action required before the process continues.
Make notification of the GA nominators and top editors mandatory.
Limit the number of concurrent reassessments that any one reviewer can have open.
Limit the number of concurrent reassessments in any one topic area.
Lengthen the one week prod-like delisting period.
Give out Good Article Save Awards to editors that shepherd articles toward a keep.
Numbers two, four, and six are already done. I have agreed above to #1, and I am willing to do #5 (a month? two? I don't think we should hold the backlogged process of GAN as a guide). As I know that the process, like everything on WP, will grind to a halt if a couple of dedicated people don't keep it going, I am opposed to #3, but obviously if consensus is in favour I will acquiesce. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 04:16, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Could you tell me more about 2, 4, and 6? I'm seeing some soft language in the reassessment procedure related to 2 and 4 that could be much firmer. For 6, are these awards commonly given out? Vector space, one of the examples above, led to a keep. Was anyone given an award? Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 04:26, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
For #2, the nomination bot notifies previous GAN/GAR reviewers, but you are expected to notify WikiProjects (see Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Great Salt Lake/1 for one where this was not done, and the nomination was held open for a week after the notifications were given). I have tried to emphasise this; if you feel the language should be "harder", feel free to edit the guidelines.
The closest step I can find to #2 is "Consider raising issues at the talk page of the article or requesting assistance from major contributors." Could we change that to "Raise issues at the talk page of the article and request assistance from major contributors and the original GA nominators"?
The closest version of #4 is "If there are many similar articles already nominated at GAR, consider delaying the reassessment request." I'm not sure how to beef that up, but the wording could definitely be more declarative.
#2: "The user script does not notify major contributors or relevant WikiProjects. Notify these manually."
#4: what do you suggest? People who ignore a request to "consider" will nominate them anyway. I didn't want to say "Nominating multiple articles on related topics is considered disruptive" or similar, because that hasn't actually been formally confirmed yet.
"If there are many similar articles already nominated at GAR, consider delaying the reassessment request. If an editor notices that many similar GARs are open and requests a hold, such requests should generally be granted."
Which of these are already done at WP:FAR? And do they have similar issues with bad blood or arguments? I ask because if that process already has a good solution figured out, perhaps we can just steal it. Also, thanks for bringing the discussion back to focus on the process, Rjjiii (talk) 04:17, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Analogs of 1, 2, 3, and 6 exist at FAR. I mentioned above that FAR also struggles with 4. Reviewers and coordinators seem pretty willing to put reviews on hold when topic area editors mention they are overwhelmed. 5 isn't something directly comparable to FAR. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 04:30, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
I don't think I would support a month for GA reassessments with no commentary, especially if we're going to cap nominations by a single nominator. FAR is about a one-month process if there are no improvements, and since GAN is a much more lightweight process than FAC, GAR should be more lightweight than FAR. Yes, we do have GANs sitting around far longer than they should, but I don't see how having stagnant GARs rotting on the vine would be a positive addition to the process. And there definitely needs to be a process to close quicker than that for the utterly deficient ones - Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Great Raid of 1840/1 comes to mind. Hog FarmTalk05:09, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
While we're proposing things, I think we might consider a speedy delisting procedure for GAs that have long-stale and still-valid cleanup tags. Maybe a year old? We currently have some that are much older than that, as long ago as 2008 (to pick a somewhat arbitrary example, Hull House). After all, this is actually in the GA quickfail criteria. The articles AJ is complaining about often have no cleanup tags at all; I think that tagging things with [citation needed] tags first, and only escalating if the tags are disputed or left unresolved for a long time, could be a much more lightweight and unbureaucratic process than initiating a GAR or instituting an ongoing we-must-GAR-everything process. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:29, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
Moving forward
This discussion is important but has been getting to the rambling stage that almost any policy discussion around here reaches. Should we start moving forward with a formal process to codify some of the proposed reforms to the GAR process? #6 seems like a practice that doesn't require codification. Since we've been doing #4 already, I think the language to that effect in the GAR instructions can be strengthened in some way now. #3 and #5 need more workshopping and/or to develop a consensus. #2 feels more like a "presumptively mandatory" (a term used in my line of work IRL) than strictly mandatory (I don't see why we would need or want to notify a vanished user or a blocked sockmaster or a banned user). So #1 is a good place to start - there seems to be a general consensus that requiring the notifications is a good thing, but what is an agreed upon time? FAR requies 2-3 weeks; making the waiting periods for GAR and FAR the same seems reasonable to me. As well as a tracking system of WP:GARGIVEN, similar to that which exists at WP:FARGIVEN. Language could then be added to the instructions that premature GAR nominations are subject to closure or placing on hold per the discretion of the coordinators.
I understand that concern - I'd say what I ran into at Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Great Raid of 1840/1 falls under that level of problems as well. For the Frozen example, the FAC discussion would surely suffice in lieu of a formal discussion there. At least from what I've seen though, the lowest hanging fruit of deficient articles have been delisted, so this level of mess is more of the exception than the rule, and for most articles the talk page waiting period is going to have value. Hog FarmTalk22:41, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
That's part of why I suggested it, but only part. The other part is that I think the sweeps script is largely focusing on the wrong thing, unproblematic passages that passed GA from a time when we were not as strict about requiring that well-known material have sources stating what is well known. The cleanup tags focus on actual problems. Revising how we handle sweeps is avoiding the issue that the sweeps focus on the wrong thing. What I don't want to see is a surprise GAR sprung on me suddenly giving me a week's notice to fix all the never-previously-identified problems in my favorite article, at a time I might not have the spare time to do that. Or worse, the same thing for three articles at once. Instead, if the people pushing so hard to make all paragraphs sourced would simply tag unsourced paragraphs with citation needed, with a much longer deadline like a year until the tags get stale, this would have the same effect of getting the articles sourced or unlisted, in a way that feels more like routine maintenance and less like demanding that other people drop everything now to attend to trivial but time-consuming details. Additionally, it would provide an opportunity for the people doing the tagging to be thoughtful about whether the unsourced material is WP:BLUE or WP:CALC, rather than just mindlessly counting blue clicky numbers. More strongly, I would prefer to add a rule that GAR not be initiated unless specific problems have been identified and unaddressed. "There are unsourced paragraphs" is not a specific problem. "This claim needs a citation" is. For any issues that rise to the level of making GAR necessary, it should also be possible to point out those issues with a cleanup tag. GAR should be a system of appeal to resolve disputes over whether cleanup tags are necessary. It is too heavyweight a process to make routine for GA, which is supposed to be lightweight compared to FA. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:42, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
I find the assertion that cleanup tags solve anything, or attract any attention whatsoever, pretty naive. WP:FEB24, a backlog drive dedicated to resolving articles tagged with one of the worst cleanup tags: {{unreferenced}}. If cleanup tags worked, you'd expect the backlog to be a couple of years old, maybe going back to the later 2010s at most. But no. The drive's first goal was to clear out Category:Articles lacking sources from December 2007. December 2007.
I find your assumption that I think cleanup tags to be a panacea an insulting oversimplification of what I wrote. I am well aware of cleanup tags lasting for years without any cleanup. But a problem that lasts for years without any cleanup tag, only to be sprung on its article maintainers as a last-minute excuse to delist an article, is worse. Give them a chance. Tag the articles. It might work. It might be the case that you are placing fatuous tags and get told off for it. It might not work, and the tags might get stale, as they usually do. But at least you're giving people a chance instead of ordering people to prioritize your interests over their own.
And again, what is your obsession with bashing mathematics articles? It has all the appearance of a WP:BATTLEGROUND mentality. None of the articles you list is a Good Article. They are irrelevant. I am well aware of stale citation tags in all subjects. Your only excuse for picking these ones was that you dislike mathematics. One might hope that, after being caught attacking and insulting an entire project based on false pretenses (a long-standing bug in your script that you already knew about) you might apologize and back down, but no, here you go again, attacking the same project for no valid reason. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:56, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
Please strike the personal attacks in your last paragraph before I or someone else takes that matter to WP:AN—I am quite exasperated with the constant insults of my intelligence and willingness to collaborate. I chose mathematics articles because they are the ones under discussion in this section (see the first two words of the section title?)—if you want, you can find and select any/all of the 1762 other articles from 2008 in CAT:ALS, but that doesn't affect my point. As noted below, I am perfectly aware of the script's weaknesses—if you want proof, see my revising of WP:SWEEPS2023 to reduce the inaccuracies for the mathematics-related articles you claim I irrationally hate (e.g. [4][5]). The only false pretences here is your retention of the administrator toolkit while actively eschewing a central part of its requirements. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 02:26, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
You know, when people criticize your behavior respectfully, as I have tried to do here, you could try taking it as criticism of your behavior, and think about whether there might be some basis to it, instead of holding grudges, attacking entire projects, and making bad faith assumptions. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:08, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
You call accusations of WP:BATTLEGROUND, "bashing mathematics articles", and "attacking and insulting an entire project" respectful criticism? Please either provide diffs backing up your personal attacks or strike the relevant sentences; I don't particularly want to go to AN. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 09:35, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
I'm not going to strike anything. I have provided a diff on my talk for something specific and off-topic. This entire thread, starting with its title, is an exercise in bad faith assumptions aimed at a single project, made by you, as should be evident to anyone reading it. It is not a personal attack to express my disagreement with those assumptions. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:58, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
Much better than a cleanup tag would be a concrete and specific review flagging particular claims, sentences, or sections. If instead of GAR you started with a detailed talk-page review calling out the particular text in an article which you think have poor prose style, are poorly organized, are poorly illustrated, are important but missing, are excessively detailed, are confusing, are written at too high a level, are too imprecise, are written with too informal a tone, read like marketing material, seem controversial, are attributed to questionable sources, are claims you can't find any source for at all, etc. etc., then other editors would be more than happy to productively engage and fix the specific issues flagged, going back and forth if necessary to reach consensus. Not a single one of the GAR "reviews" looks anything like that. Instead they are aggressive threats with short deadlines built on vague and often non-actionable criticism.
You spoke of spending an entire year rewriting an article and shepherding it through the GA process. But you only spend a few minutes on these GAR reviews, and don't seem to be interested in requiring them to be more concrete and specific because it would apparently be too burdensome. Can't you see the extreme asymmetry here? –jacobolus(t)02:11, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
In fact, I took the effort today to scan through my entire list of passed GAs. No cleanup tags. I have cleaned up and removed all cleanup tags from multiple other mathematics GAs that I was not involved with, just this week. (There are a few others farther from my expertise left.) For multiple weeks I have been cleaning up tagged mathematics articles and resolving their cleanup tags at a rate of about ten newly-untagged articles per day. And yet you continue to make the bad-faith assumption without evidence that mathematics editors, as an entire collective, are unwilling to clean up articles. No. I am happy to clean up articles that need cleanup, GA or not. But I personally am unwilling to put effort into reading your mind about what vague qualms you might have about untagged GA articles, when you have been asked to make those qualms specific by tagging specific points you think need cleanup but you have refused to take the effort. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:17, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
David Eppstein, I don't believe I have ever made that assertion: please point me to where you think I did. As far as I am concerned, the fact that mathematics editors actually reply and clearly give a crap about articles, places it higher than nearly every other WikiProject; maybe not MILHIST or weather, but those are the only two I can think of. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 09:35, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
Re "please point me to where you think I did" [make the bad-faith assertion that mathematics editors are unwilling to clean up articles]: perhaps we can start with your wording from the initial post in this thread: "when I nominate mathematics-related articles, I often find myself having to defend the GAR process as a whole against editors who see it as a waste of time ... As I understand, these editors often feel that WP:BLUE and WP:CALC covers nearly everything mathematics-related, and so adding inline citations is an optional extra". I think the contradiction between these words and your protestations here of not having said any such thing speaks for itself. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:26, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
Hm. I suppose you could read that as me saying that mathematics editors don't want to clean up articles, so apologies for my poor choice of wording. I was trying to get across the fact that there was a fundamental division in what the GACR meant/what GAR was for (that's why I asked "Do they have a point?" and not "Can we get a consensus that they're wrong). I do think an argument of "the only project with a 100% success rate at GAR is unwilling to clean up articles" is fairly obviously not what I was going for. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 01:52, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
@AirshipJungleman29 Sorry for my excessively sharp response at the top of this discussion. "Power trip" was not a fair accusation. I was feeling annoyed because I felt that your initial question here was loaded and made an unfair emotional appeal for rhetorical effect, mischaracterizing previous conversations. In the past I feel you have not really been responsive to earnest critical feedback about this topic or tried to understand where other editors were coming from. Instead of trying to figure out how to meet people halfway and accomplish your goals in a way that doesn't antagonize people, I would paraphrase the your responses in the past as «I have the authority to do what I'm doing, no matter what anyone says. Deal with it.» Maybe that was not your intention, but that's how it felt, which can be frustrating from the other side. It now seemed like you were summarizing those conversations in a way that sort of read like «look how mean these entitled math people are, can the community please step in to stop them from demanding special treatment».
In particular, I don't think this is an accurate description of any editors' "feelings":
As I understand, these editors often feel that WP:BLUE and WP:CALC covers nearly everything mathematics-related, and so adding inline citations is an optional extra,
People haven't claimed this that I have seen; or at least, I don't think that was what anyone directly meant if they did say something that could be read that way (based on my impression of discussions/behavior inre sources on math articles). What people have said, that I have seen, is that for claims that are uncontroversial and easily verifiable (e.g. found in literally every introductory textbook on some subject) and that have been in roughly the same (fundamentally fine) state for years to decades, forcing people to rush to provide many citations within a very short time frame, under threat, seems disproportionate and unnecessarily antagonistic. It is emphatically not the case that authors of mathematical articles believe that Wikipedia mathematics articles can make whatever claim they want, without sources.
I also object to:
they seem woefully undercited, but I know that if I were to nominate any of them at GAR I'd get accused of wasting other people's time
Nobody thinks that any articles on Wikipedia should be "woefully undercited", or that it is a waste of time to improve article sourcing. Some people's dispute is that (a) some of these articles seem more or less fine with many provided sources that clearly cover the content of the article (by my standard, many of these are "good articles"), and (b) the process doesn't really seem respectful of available editor attention, goals, or needs, and doesn't really seem tightly focused on what is best for readers or the Wikipedia project. –jacobolus(t)02:52, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
Yes, I think since the von Neumann GAR, all involved have been predisposed to bad faith (and I include myself in that). I understand your arguments, though I do not agree with some of them, and will do my best to alleviate the perception of high-handedness and arrogance going forwards. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 03:05, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
Precisely. There have been less than a dozen experts on Mongol history within the past decade and half on Wikipedia. Sure, I could have slapped a cleanup tag on Mongolian language and hoped that in fifty years someone with the knowledge would be around to fix it, but I prefer to live in the present reality, so I delisted it today. Burkhan Khaldun is an article I do have the knowledge to work on, but I didn't have the time or resources, so I delisted it too. Hopefully, I can get it back to GA status in the future. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 02:35, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
(I have taken a step back from this conversation, as I have comparatively scant GA(R) experience, and feel out of my league.)Remsense诉06:20, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
I would support a talk page requirement and a two week waiting period before GAR nominations. I would support thinking through some quick-nom criteria, but I don't see that as something that should stop progress on this proposal. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 03:34, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
Question: what is the rationale for having a talkpage discussion in addition to having a GAR discussion? As I understand it, the GAR discussion is already present on the talkpage via an excerpt. Would the talkpage discussion have a different topic or would both discussions essentially be about the same topic? Phlsph7 (talk) 09:14, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
@Phlsph7: - as used at FAR, the idea is the talk page discussion beforehand will sometimes either 1) result in discussion indicating that the perceived problems are minor or not problems, avoiding an unnecessary GAR or 2) result in editors working on the article outside of GAR with the GAR not becoming necessary or 3) smoothing some of the ruffled feathers that would be caused by the sudden appearance at GAR. 3) still doesn't work in all cases of course, and sometimes the work in 2) doesn't get completed so the article has to go to FAR/GAR anyway, but at least at FAR the talk page discussion beforehand does have benefit. I've given a FAR-style pre-GAR notice at Talk:Kansas City Chiefs#GA status. Hog FarmTalk14:25, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation. I think you make a good point that there are certain cases in which having an article talkpage discussion beforehand could be helpful. But my impression is that making it mandatory unnecessarily complicates the process by having the same discussion twice without a significant payoff in many cases. What do you think about including this as a suggestion rather than a strict requirement that all GARs need to follow? Phlsph7 (talk) 19:06, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
My thought is that talk page discussion would start a good amount of time before the GAR. Better to start with an informal process than start the clock on a formal process right away. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 16:09, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
The current GAR nomination/closing procedure (carried out near-entirely by me) is as follows:
Nominate article, with nomination statement referring to GA criteria.
Notify all relevant WikiProjects and primary editors.
See if anyone responds.
If they do and start improving the article:
If they resolve all issues with substantial work, close as keep; award GA save barnstar.
If issues are not resolved, give them two weeks from last edit to article/GAR, and ping them for updates. They are given three months to improve the article. If they do not respond or respond that they can't continue, return to step 2.
If there is discussion, see which way the discussion resolves, and assess consensus; if the result is "no consensus" the article is kept as a GA.
If there is no (further) discussion and the nomination rationale is valid, delist after a week.
The suggestions which I am totally willing to implement are: add a first step of talk page nominations, and extend the "week" timeframe to longer (a month). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 04:30, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Nominators yes; closers no. Take a look at the recent GAR archives: the vast majority since the reformation of GAR last year (archives 71-present) by myself. You also have experienced editors like HogFarm, buidhe and the GAR coords, who follow the above, or, more recently, WikiProject Weather (which is, unlike WikiProject Mathematics, full-steam-ahead committed to excising GAs which do not meet current criteria, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Weather/2024–25 Good Article Reassessment). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 04:47, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Your extended one-month time frame is still a tiny fraction of the amount of time some first-time nominated articles wait for a reviewer. Why should GARs be fast-tracked relative to these? —David Eppstein (talk) 07:38, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
I don't see why the backlog at GAN should ever be a benchmark comparison. Yes, some nominations wait six-eight months; that doesn't mean that FACs should last two years. In fact, FAC is almost certainly the best-functioning quality process on the project for one reason: nominations are not allowed to hang on indefinitely. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:03, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
It is in some way a benchmark of how realistic it is to expect quick action from a limited pool of editors. If your goal is not to improve things to GA standard but rather to remove as many GA badges as possible as quickly as possible, then I suppose the availability of editors to do the improvements is less relevant. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:50, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
I suppose in all this I don't quite understand why improvement and renomination isn't an option. Perhaps there should be a page that lists recently delisted GAs per topic. Maybe GAR nominees should be strongly encouraged to take up the redux GAN. Remsense诉15:52, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Just delist them all! If you have to wait for them to be re-nominated and re-reviewed, what's the problem? After all, if they're getting reviewed and passed at a rate of maybe one a month, it will only take decades to get back to the status they already had. By which time we'll go through another spate of delisting everything and we'll be back to the start, just like Sisyphus. Won't that make the process more encouraging of article improvement? —David Eppstein (talk) 16:01, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
GA is not some badge of encouragement for editors to feel proud about, no matter how much most of us treat it as one; it's an assessment of the quality of an article. If an article is not at GA quality, it shouldn't be a GA by definition. It would be nice if lots of people watched GAR and rushed in to improve articles when they saw something nominated, but that isn't what happens. It wouldn't be what happens even if you made every GAR last a whole year, because most people will not put in a lot of effort for articles they aren't interested in. Making GAR slower won't make more people improve these articles, it'll just make more shitty articles stay at GA and make the assessment meaningless. AryKun (talk) 03:40, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
I think we can all agree that the wait times at GAN are broken - why should we be wanting to emulate a broken process? I also expect that a GAR with work occurring at a slow pace would be kept open for more than a month if needed. Hog FarmTalk14:06, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
There isn't a problem with GAR. There's a problem with how people conduct themselves at GAR. If an article is going to be a GA, then it has to meet all of the GA criteria without fail. We're not going to mark it as "meets the standards" if it doesn't meet the standards. We're not going to make exceptions if someone makes a scene out of it. If we want to solve the GAR problem, the answer is to hand out tbans to those who repeatedly disrupt the process. Going forward, if I see someone hassling a good faith GAR nominator and it's a pattern, I will open an ANI discussion, or an ARBCOM case if the person in question is an administrator, and I encourage others to do the same. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:38, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
Mathematics article and unfixed bug in sweeps nomination script
A large part of the antagonism here might be sparked from the fact that the sweeps are based on superficial mechanical counts of unsourced paragraphs. Many mathematics articles format displayed equations in a way that causes the breaks between the equation and the text to look like a paragraph break, when semantically it is all a single paragraph. This could cause mathematics articles to look less than properly sourced to people who prefer to count clicky blue footnotes than to read and think, and focus undue attention on those articles. This appears to be what has happened here: for instance, the original post complained that [[Matrix (mathematics)] is "on top of the sweeps pile". Skipping the lead, I see one WP:BLUE unsourced paragraph in the "Definition" section, at the start of "Size", but I suspect the script thinks the long single paragraph at the start of "Definition" is really three paragraphs. I seem to remember going over this issue the last time it came around. Has this bug really remained unfixed? Is this whole thread based on a false premise sparked by a script bug?
As far as I know, it's still a known bug. The disclaimer at the top of the Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Sweeps 2023 should be expanded to mention the paragraph break issues caused by the templates used in mathematics and language articles. If I was familiar enough with higher math to determine what requires or does not require a citation in those articles I would go through and update the paragraph counts, but my grasp of mathematics is not good enough for that. Hog FarmTalk03:56, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
Well, the script isn't using any actual understanding of any of the other subjects, either. So maybe if it could recognize the three or so different ways of making displayed equations and just not count the paragraph breaks on either side of them as paragraph breaks, we could get a more accurate count of unsourced paragraphs. We still won't get a count of paragraphs that actually need sourcing, and which ones are entirely source-not-needed material (start-of-section summaries of later material, blue sky, routine calculations etc) but we're not getting that in other subjects either. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:06, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
After trying to read it more carefully, in my opinion Matrix (mathematics) needs more help than any of the other math articles recently put up for review or proposed for future review. Nothing in there is particularly controversial so I'm not too worried about content being unverifiable (though it wouldn't hurt to link at least one nice introductory textbook or survey paper for each section), but I think it would take a significant makeover to make it truly excellent. There are sections that aren't appropriately contextualized, the narrative is sometimes disjointed, and some sections don't seem to do full justice to the topic, especially the sections about "computational aspects", decompositions, applications, and history (the latter two should ideally have their own full articles). The article could probably be somewhat more accessible at the low end while also going into more detail at the high end.... On the other hand this is an absolutely enormous topic which is very difficult to concisely summarize, so I'm grateful to the past authors for bringing the article to its currently decent state, from which many readers surely benefit. Bringing this up to the highest standards would take probably at least hundreds of hours of serious work, and authors competent to undertake a job like that might reasonably prefer to work on other articles which are in much worse shape. –jacobolus(t)05:59, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
The script implements a few workarounds to minimize this problem. For example, if you use its highlight-feature on the article Matrix (mathematics), you will see that none of the paragraphs in the section #Matrix multiplication are counted as unreferenced even though they include formulas and matrices that split the text. These workarounds are far from perfect, and the script is only intended to assist reviewers, not to replace their judgment. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:13, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
Hello Firefangledfeathers and thanks for the ping. I partially responded to this issue in the comment right above yours: the script implements various workarounds to address this problem but they are far from perfect since they rely on rather crude mechanisms without any understanding of the meaning of the text.
If you can pinpoint me to specific articles where it does particularly bad then I can try to tweak it to get more accurate results for those articles. As a test, I checked the article Matrix (mathematics). From what I can tell, there are close to no false positives for that article. One false positive is the paragraph starting with An algorithm is, roughly speaking. Another possible candidate would be the paragraph starting with "Linear maps Rn → Rm are equivalent to m-by-n matrices," but this is debatable. Given the length of the article, some inaccuracies are to be expected, even with additional tweaking. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:57, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
One possible example is Newton's theorem of revolving orbits, especially §Derivations. Some blocks of connected thought that might be considered a paragraph if they were just prose are counted as separate paragraphs due to (I assume) the line breaks and math coding. There's also the issue that the citation style seems to be presenting the citation before all the content, but I wouldn't count that against the script! Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 02:21, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing this out. I didn't spot any false positives in that section and most of the material in that section seems unsourced. But you are right that the count of unsourced paragraphs is higher than one would expect because the different "structural paragraphs" could be considered parts of a single "semantic paragraph". The script usually checks whether the structural paragraph after a math formula starts with a new sentence. If not, it is considered part of the same semantic paragraph. This is the case, for example, for the two structural paragraphs starting with "Applying the general formula" and "which can be re-arranged".
I'm not sure if there is a good other way to check this. A different approach would be to just automatically assume that if there is a formula between two structural paragraphs then they belong always to the same semantic paragraph. That would reduce the count of unreferenced paragraphs but would also create false negatives in which a series of long, independent, and mostly unsourced structural paragraphs is not recognized as unsourced if formulas are inbetween and one structural paragraph contains a source. I think it should be possible to implement that. I could give it a try if there is consensus that this would be an improvement. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:38, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I said this would take me a week or two but I had more time than I expected today so have implemented this. However, no reviews have been started in the last couple of hours so I can't tell if it's working. I'll watch it for another hour or so but if anyone spots issues (e.g. ChristieBot not running or some GANs not correctly processed) please post a note here. By morning (US EDT) I expect a review will have been started so I should be able to tell if it's working. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:49, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
@Mike Christie: thank you for your work! According to the proposal, the nominator's name would be listed more similarly to the reviewer's name, in a "User (talk • contribs) date of nomination" format. Would it be possible to do a change where the nominator's information are similar to the reviewer's, from a technical perspective? Skyshiftertalk12:06, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
Sure; I didn't do that because I was concerned it would ping the nominator but I now realize that it wouldn't because you have to sign for a ping to work. I'll make that change later today. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:43, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
Would there be any issue with adding the date (in this case, the date the nomination was made) after the nominator's name? Among other things, it shows how long between nomination and review right there on the page. BlueMoonset (talk) 00:50, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
Should be doable. Perhaps "Nominated by BlueMoonset (talk·contribs) at 00:50, 19 March 2024 (UTC)"? I would want to make this change when I have some time to monitor it, and between work and travel today was my last free day for a while, so it'll probably be ten days before I can get to this. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:48, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
Great. Thank you. Is there any reason why "at" is included? We don't use "at" on the Reviewer line; I see these as echoing each other in terms of format. BlueMoonset (talk) 00:50, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
Oh for fuck's sake. GAN3 for that article was also taken on, badly, by someone with minimal edits. I've left this person a note on their talk page asking them to identify if they have any previous accounts. ♠PMC♠ (talk)05:44, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
I waited ages, then why I was away on holiday I had my GA nomination shut down. I really don't understand why this has happened twice. All I want is the key points pointed out in a straight forward manner, not some cryptic script that I don't understand at all. Can someone else please help? I found this type of manner clear, Talk:Edward Colston/GA1, it doesn't help when they don't talk directly about anything in the article. Regards, Govvy (talk) 09:06, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
Looking at Talk:Walter Tull/GA2, the reviewer states that the article was not close to GA level, with a specific example being the presence of very old maintenance tags at the time of nomination. The GA process is primarily an evaluation of the article against the criteria, not a full peer review, so if the article is not close to meeting the criteria the reviewer is not expected to evaluate the whole article. CMD (talk) 10:14, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
Govvy, you can help yourself better by reading the comments in the review. I can assure you that they are neither "cryptic" nor lacking in analysis of the article. If you want them to be repeated, here they are:
There are unaddressed maintenance tags, including for unsourced material.
The article contains large amounts of trivia.
Some sources are unreliable.
Why is a certain source not cited more, if it is a book-length biography?
Reviewer here. (I think it would have been polite to ping me, by the way.) I've offered to answer any specific questions you have, but you haven't asked any. The Edward Colston review is asking for only minor changes. I could not give you a review like that because the article needs major changes, not just rearranging some commas. You also are not a significant contributor to the article. Until you are the main contributor to an article you believe is ready for GA, I think you should probably hold off on nominating any more. -- asilvering (talk) 16:24, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
I wonder if perhaps the GA review process would work better if all potential new reviewers are mentored or shadowed through their first handful of reviews by a more experienced reviewer. Yes it'll slow down the review process, but I think the trade-off is improved quality for both the editor writing the article, and the eventual reader of the article. Sideswipe9th (talk) 05:52, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
I just completed my first review and when I got to the instructions section that says If this is your first review, it is beneficial to ask one of the good article mentors to look at your review I just ignored it as it was daunting (and seemingly time consuming) to pick a random editor from the list and hope they had time to help. If the instructions said to post on a specific noticeboard I would have done that instead. In my case I think a shadow was unnecessary. Is there a list of first time reviews that I can peruse to help check for shoddy reviews?--Commander Keane (talk) 06:22, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
Yes, it might be better if those instructions directed first-timers to post here, so anyone who's around can pop in rather than forcing a new person to pick a particular person to ask. ♠PMC♠ (talk)06:38, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
Commander Keane, there's no specific list of first-time reviews, but this page lists all recent activity and can be used to find new reviewers. It is missing a day or two of activity because of a technical issue that came up this weekend, but should start updating again this evening. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:37, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
rather than forcing a new person to pick a particular person to ask I think there's a third way that no-one has considered yet. Instead of new reviewers seeking out experienced reviewers to check a review, or making it so that first-time reviewers post here when they think a review is ready, why don't we create an sub-talk-page where perspective new reviewers can express interest and experienced reviewers can come along and say something like "I'm free to mentor you through your first couple of reviews"?
Yes that puts a burden on experienced reviewers to pick a newbie, but it also means that experienced reviewers can offer their services as and when they have the availability. Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:39, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
I really don't think a secondary talk page is necessary, it adds more complexity. We want the "please help me" process to be as simple as possible. ♠PMC♠ (talk)22:49, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
Ok, same idea then but do it here. I'm concerned that making first-timers post here before promoting a review will still allow a bad review to occur up to the point where it's approved. The experienced reviewer would then have to clean up and/or take over the bad review. If instead you move the process of requesting mentorship to the start of the process, so that it happens before a perspective new reviewer's first review, the newbie can then be guided through the whole process start to finish. That way the opportunity for bad reviews to happen from first-timers is significantly reduced. Sideswipe9th (talk) 22:56, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
People who feel they need the additional hand-holding can just post here before they get started though? There's no reason they have to be finished the review before they post here. A second board is going to get far less eyes than the existing talk page. ♠PMC♠ (talk)23:53, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
I think I suggested recently that the bot picked up first time reviewers and posted that info somewhere.
I think the big issue here is piling on people who are trying to help, rather than being soft and trying to actually help them complete thorough reviews. Lee Vilenski(talk • contribs)12:39, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
I support both EC restriction and a simple report of new reviewers (we have User:ChristieBot/Recent GAN activity like Mike said above, but that's not very convenient for this specific purpose). I'm assuming the report is something that would depend on how Mike Christie wants to approach it. Would the process for EC restriction be more complicated? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:59, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
(full disclosure that i came here because it was linked in the discord) i'd support restricting GAN reviewing to editors who are either extended-confirmed or have at least one successful GA; i think that could minimize the amount of poor reviews (such as we've seen with Ariana Grande) while also allowing some leeway for those with GAN experience but who haven't reached 500 edits yet. i'm now undecided. see comment thread with asilvering below sawyer * he/they * talk00:46, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
As someone who is EC but has zero GAs, I don't think I know any more about the criteria before 500 edits than after. Nothing has taught me more about the criteria than actually participating in reviews. Ideally we allow anyone to participate but find some way to filter out people who aren't familiar with the amount of work required for a review. For example, we could require first timers to complete a tutorial or some other demonstration of knowledge of the criteria. If we can't do that, I'm fine with trying an EC restriction as a "least bad" solution. Mokadoshi (talk) 01:15, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
I would personally support an EC restriction for GA reviews. It's just hard to truly get a feel for the criteria when you haven't been around Wikipedia for very long or have made enough edits. Relativity 01:15, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
I strongly oppose the idea of EC restriction, since I don't think edit count has anything to do with whether someone will be a good reviewer or not. (Actually, I think reviewers who are sensible, clever people with no Wikipedia experience are probably better at sticking to the GA guidelines rather than imposing ideas of personal taste!) I do think that having someone shadow your first review or first couple of reviews would be a very good thing, though. I really hesitated to do my first one because I was worried about doing it wrong somehow; that's why I started during a backlog drive. Encouraging first-time reviewers to post here would be a good idea. I agree with Sideswipe9th that requiring new reviewers to pick an experienced reviewer from a list is daunting. -- asilvering (talk) 16:14, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
i see your point about edit count not necessarily correlating with the ability to do a good review; if EC/1 GA restriction doesn't pass, then i like your idea of having one's first review or two be shadowed, although that would be somewhat trickier to implement in practice than a fairly simple user-rights-restriction. sawyer * he/they * talk05:00, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I'd like to add a bit more to my "strongly opposed" in that regard: I think it's actively discouraging to people who would be very good at this kind of thing to gate it behind EC/1GA/etc. The people it doesn't discourage are the ones who don't really read the rules and guidelines - and those are the people we need to discourage. As a specific example, I recall at least one GA done for a WP:@ article where the review was done by a historian who is active in the specific topic area, and who had joined wikipedia specifically because of those articles. I really, really think gating it behind EC is a bad idea that will cause at least some harm and no good whatsoever. -- asilvering (talk) 17:49, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
you make a good point, and have actually convinced me - which makes me ask, how do you think something like shadowing reviews could work in practice? sawyer * he/they * talk18:09, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I've been trying to convince an editor friend of mine (as in publishing professional, not wikipedia) to join wp and suggested GA reviews as a thing she could get into to Do Good Work without jumping straight in to editing mainspace articles, and I figured that if she ended up doing this, what I'd do is jump in as soon as the review page went up to reassure the nom that this noob was a noob with oversight, namely me, and watch the review unfold from there. In this case, since the noob in question is a personal friend, I was expecting that if she had any questions she'd ask me off-wiki. If I were doing this with someone I didn't know personally, the questions would have to happen on-wiki, or maybe in Discord, but I expect it would be the same kind of thing. The difference would be, I suppose, that I don't think I'd have to intervene in the case of my friend, but probably would have to intervene at least with some editors who are new and who I don't know personally.
I don't think this is likely to become particularly difficult or onerous, especially if we can get a particular report from ChristieBot that points out new reviews by new reviewers. Then we'd just need a handful of people actively checking on that list, introducing themselves at the review, and jumping in if there are minor issues. If there are major issues, I'd hope we can agree that it's reasonable to call for a G6 of the review page and tell the reviewer to rethink things and not try again for a month or so. If the review mentors are obligated to do full reviews in the event that the newbie reviewer has serious competence/experience issues, I think that's sliding into an unfair use of their time. -- asilvering (talk) 18:51, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
See here; apparently adding the new subtopic of football to the Sports topic has caused an issue with a tracking category. Does anyone know how to fix this? If not I'll post at VPT. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:45, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
They opened several reviews in January; a couple weeks ago I deleted the four where they did not even start the review at the request of the nominators, but there are a handful that were started a few weeks after opening but not returned to. --PresN15:43, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
She indicated recently that she was unable to continue reviewing. I have failed one review where the nominator is also absent. The rest can be handled individually. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:02, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
GAR question
There was recently a sprawling discussion on this page regarding GAR processes, which has resulted in some support for the idea of placing talk page "notices" on the article's talk page before sending to GAR in some cases. A similar process exists for featured article review, except that it is required in that process and purely optional here. For a tracking list of pre-GAR notices given - it's unclear to me whether it would be better to track these at a separate page like is done at WP:FARGIVEN, or to create a section onto the GAR page. I've left four pre-GAR notices where I do not believe the articles to still meet the GA criteria, and have listed that at a draft page at WP:GARGIVEN. However, it has been suggested to me that adding these directly to the main WP:GAR page in some fashion would be a better approach. I'm loathe to make major changes to the GAR page without prior discussion, so I'd like to hear others' thoughts on this matter. Hog FarmTalk18:12, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
I am fine with @Chiswick Chap having withdrawn my GA nomination for Sherlock Holmes as I myself feel that I had not significantly contributed to the article except for running a bot.
However, my GA nomination for Prince George of Wales should not be considered a drive-by as I am one of the top five authors of the article as well as a frequent editor (one of the top 10).
Also I never claimed that the "rules did not apply to me". I hope you all understand. I am a good faith editor who always tries to abide by the guidelines and have never picked up any sort of dispute with another editor. I always try to resolve all issues with peace in accordance with Wikipedia's policies. Regards and hope that we can come to a peaceful conclusion. MSincccc (talk) 18:14, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Noting that User:MSincccc has attempted to canvas support for his position, here and here. Please do help out upon seeing this message does not comply with the guideline, which underlines how canvassing can influence "the normal consensus decision-making process, and therefore is generally considered disruptive behavior." ——Serial Number 5412919:57, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Well I did not intend to canvas support for the Sherlock Holmes article. Rather I was trying to just clarify with other users whether my GA nomination for Prince George of Wales is drive-by or not. @Chiswick Chap leaving a message on Prince George's GA discussion page that it can be considered a drive-by is not factually backed up as I am both a significant author as well as one of the all-time highest editors to the article. Further, I had made it clear that I was fine with Chiswick having withdrawn my GA nomination for Sherlock Holmes.
Can I renominate please? I have the authorship and I will do my best to make as many constructive edits as possible in the coming days so as to make it a GA-table article. How can this response to Chiswick Chap's message that he has withdrawn GA nomination for Sherlock Holmes be taken as a message from me asserting "that rules don't apply to me". Further, @Serial Number 54129 has recently pointed out that my claims of "authorship" are excessive. That might be with regard to the Holmes' article which I would not nominate in future but he made the remark with regard to other articles where I was the a significant author as well as a frequent editor. Neither has my behaviour been disruptive nor did I intend to disrupt the platform.
[This] will further clarify the fact that my GA nomination for Prince George of Wales is valid. I never tried to game the system not was this nomination made in bad faith given I have taken part in discussions regarding it with fellow editors. Chiswick's message on George's GA review page goes as such -...a bit of discussion on the talk page does not constitute "significant" editing per the GAN criteria, i.e. this is a drive-by nomination. It can either be quick-failed or you can simply CSD this page so that it is deleted, and remove the nomination from the talk page, it doesn't matter much. Well I hope this matter is looked into and that my GA nomination for Prince George not be considered a "drive-by". I accept the fact that I had not "significantly contributed" to the Sherlock Holmes article. Regards MSincccc (talk) 02:19, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
As for Catherine's GA I had consulted Keivan, the article's prime author and all-time top editor and he was fine with it. Now I fulfil the GA criteria in each of these cases (these are my only GAs) which states-If the nominator is either the author of less than 10% of the article or ranked sixth or lower in authorship, and there is no post on the article talk page, it can be uncontroversially considered a drive-by nomination. You can notify the nominator on their talk page. I am a peaceful editor by the way and have done nothing wrong until now nor will I. Regards and yours faithfully, MSincccc (talk) 12:43, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
I just want to clarify that the instruction you quoted does not say that if you are ranked 5th or higher in authorship then you are guaranteed to be allowed to nominate the article. All it says is that someone ranked 6th or lower can have their nomination closed without discussion.
I do think there is merit to discussing whether you understand how authorship plays into the GA review. The fact that you've nominated more than one article with less than 5% authorship is unusual from my experience. Just as a random comparison, I have 76% (17k characters) and 49% (17k characters) authorship in the last two articles I've nominated. Mokadoshi (talk) 04:24, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
In my mind, the point of this restriction is to ensure that the nominator can adequately work with the reviewer in making changes to the article. There are many articles that are pretty high-quality and should go through GAN someday, but their primary authors for one reason or another are not interested in the process. That shouldn't necessarily have to entail fudging the numbers to ensure they clear a certain threshold, but I do think that involved familiarity with the article and its sources is necessary for a nominator. Remsense诉04:39, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
Well my work on Catherine, Princess of Wales has made me quite familiar with the entire article's prose as well as sources. Further, the prime author of the article,i.e., Keivan made it clear that he was fine with my nomination. If I have only 4.9% authorship in that article, it's because I am relatively new to Wikipedia given I joined only in January 2022. As for the other two nominations, I have made a significant number of mainspace edits to the article apart from being the highest author as is the case with my two pending nominations at the time of writing. I hope the others understand. Regards and yours faithfully, MSincccc (talk) 14:23, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
If I have only 4.9% authorship in that article, it's because I am relatively new to Wikipedia given I joined only in January 2022.
This is a non-sequitur. I started contributing late last year, and have cannibalized the authorship share on too many big articles. I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say here: the point is demonstrating familiarity with the ins and outs of individual articles, right? So being new to the site has little to do with that. Remsense诉18:20, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
The end is that I am very much familiar with Catherine's article and that I am presently working with Keivan to bring it to Featured Article status. I hope you understand. Regards MSincccc (talk) 19:04, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
"On hold" workflow
Once the reviewer put the article "on hold", and the nominee considers to have resolved all the observation of the reviewer, who can change the status from "on hold" to back "in review"? I didn't find any information on that in the Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations/Instructions. Can the nominee, after what the nominee considers as resolved all the issues indicated by the reviewer, change the status from "on hold" to back "in review"? Maxim Masiutin (talk) 18:52, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
It's a matter for the reviewer. The status is not especially important; what matters is that the reviewer knows the items have been addressed. This is normally obvious if each item has been responded to individually in the review thread. Failing that, nom can ping the reviewer. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:14, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
I usually put it "on hold" to indicate that I've completed the full review, and I keep it there to indicate "the review portion is done, now we're working through the review and fine tuning it". And then keep it at "on hold" until it's ready for promotion or failure. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:57, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
I think it's pretty standard for the nominator to {{ping}} the reviewer on the review page once they think all issues have been addressed. The nominator should not change the status on their own. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:27, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
Re: Dune (2021 film)
I'm trying to review Dune (2021 film), but I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the stability criterion. When I started the review, it wasn't as much as a problem, but as I'm about half-way through, there's been at least one editathon and now traffic from IPs. Is it unrealistic for me to continue this review? I think it's doable, but I wonder if I'm kidding myself. Viriditas (talk) 21:04, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
The GA review is not supposed to halt normal editing activities, so random IP edits, reverts, adding categories, etc are going to be expected while you're reviewing the article. However, I see that entire sections have been added since you started your review. The rule of thumb is whether the edits are so significant that you can't tell what you're supposed to be reviewing. Since most significant edits recently seem to be contained to the new "Analysis" section, I think putting the article on hold is fine I see you've done. Mokadoshi (talk) 15:31, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
Thanks. The section was added by an acknowledged subject matter expert. I have asked them to provide page numbers; is this required for GA? They also added their own book to the section, which I don't necessarily see as a problem, but I think they should have added it to the talk page instead, but were likely unaware of COI best practices. I don't see anything wrong with the material as of yet (another editor has recently made some edits) but the section has recently deteriorated in quality and now has multiple tags. While I could probably rewrite and fix the material given some time, I also wonder about whether this crosses the line from nominator to reviewer and back again. Lots of issues with this article at the moment. I will take it one day at a time, but my concern is that for every two steps forward, the article could conceivably take three steps back due to the high traffic. For me, this is a conundrum. Viriditas (talk) 00:56, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Page numbers are not required for GA, but there is no harm in noting their absence so long as it does not hold up the GAN. COI is a topic that the GAN process isn't equipped to handle. If the material is being changed in such a way that quality is deteriorating, and if you have to dig in and fix things yourself, then the article is not a GA. Overall I agree with Mokadoshi, normal editing is expected, but if entire sections are being added then that is a major change suggesting the article is not stable. (And perhaps shows it was incomplete and failing broadness when nominated.) CMD (talk) 01:15, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Yes, I'm leaning in that direction, obviously. But I have worked with the nominator in a previous capacity on DYK and was impressed by their work. I was hoping we could both clear the minefield and move this thing forward, but I'm starting to feel like Sisyphus. Viriditas (talk) 01:26, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
If you're at the point where you're saying things like I'm starting to feel like Sisyphus, I think it's time to stop the review. You don't want to burn yourself out, and you don't want to be in the kind of space where you might rush through things simply because you want to get it out of the way. Maybe that means failing it on stability grounds or broad-in-coverage grounds, or maybe it means putting it up for a second opinion, but I think you should listen to your own words here. -- asilvering (talk) 19:36, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Update. I have failed the review due to additional breaches of stability well after this discussion took place. I now have two or more editors angry at me, so you may see additional discussion about my review on this page. Viriditas (talk) 23:58, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
Notability is not part of a GA review
Currently, Wikipedia:Notability is not in the criteria, but the instructions tell reviewers to "Ensure all articles meet Wikipedia policies and guidelines as expected of any article, including neutral point of view, verifiability, no original research, and notability." (bolded for emphasis). The other policies listed are in the criteria, and so possibly redundant, but not confusing. It's not clear what "ensure" means for a reviewer. Recently the idea of GA reviews checking for notability came up in a complaint at WP:ANI. In discussions about adding notability to the criteria, editors have expressed conflicting viewpoints with AfD being the most common solution and no consensus to add notability to the criteria: [6][7][8]
The discussion that resulted in adding the above language[9] came to a consensus to add it as instructions for nominators, and it was. It was also added to the reviewer instructions, against the consensus of the discussion: ("Notability is handled at AFD or in other venues."; "if you get a GAN that you think is non-notable, but find it has survived AFD in the last few months (and stable since), you should respect that decision and review the GAN without that concern"; "nominate it for deletion, and add a note to the GAN template")[10]
Notability should either be removed from the reviewing instructions, or it should be clarified what action a reviewer is expected to take. Rjjiii (talk) 02:58, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
Notability is in the criteria under WP:QF#C3: it needs a valid notability cleanup banner. The instructions should be: add the banner to the article if it is not already there. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:09, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
Comment: If an article nominated for GA doesn't meet the notability guidelines, isn't it true that there will also be other GA criteria it fails, like C2b reliable sources are cited inline or C3 broad in its coverage? If this isn't true, does anyone have a counterexample? Mokadoshi (talk) 00:51, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
Hello to all! The March drive is now closed; reviewers and coordinators will be wrapping up over the next few days. Thank you to everyone for your hard work reviewing. We successfully reduced the # of unreviewed nominations by over 250, clearing out many older nominations and reducing the overall backlog by over 37%! We had 64 separate reviewers complete at least 1 review during the drive. A full retrospective with more statistics will be posted after all reviews have closed, points have been awarded and rewards handed out. @Mike Christie, would you mind calculating the average age of a nomination on February 29th as compared to March 31st when you get a chance? Thank you! —Ganesha811 (talk) 23:20, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
I didn't save the query I used to determine these numbers for the last backlog, so I wrote a new query. When I ran it for the old backlog it gave slightly different results -- not sure why. I'll give the old and new values for comparison, and I'll put the query I used this time below so I can be sure to run it the same way next time. Last time I found 631 unreviewed articles at the start of the backlog drive, with an average age of 91.7 days at that time; this time the query finds 639 articles with an average age of 88.0 days. Not a huge difference, but I've no idea why there's any difference at all.
For this backlog drive:
On 29 February 2024 at midnight: 655 unreviewed articles with an average age of 73.6 days.
On 31 March 2024 at midnight: 401 unreviewed articles with an average age of 55.7 days.
Here's the query:
select sum(z.days_in_queue)/count(*) as average_age, count(*) as unreviewed_articles
from (
select n.title, n.page, n.snapshot_ts, n.status, n.nomination_ts, n.review_started_ts, datediff('2024-04-01', n.nomination_ts) as days_in_queue
from nominations n
inner join (select x.title, x.page, max(snapshot_ts) as max_prior_snapshot_ts
from (select title, page, snapshot_ts from nominations where snapshot_ts < '2024-04-01') x
group by x.title, x.page) y
on n.title = y.title
and n.page = y.page
and n.snapshot_ts = y.max_prior_snapshot_ts
where status = '') z;
Thank you Mike! Nearly 20 days reduction is pretty good! I appreciate you writing a whole new query to answer this one - thanks for taking the time. —Ganesha811 (talk) 12:15, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
Qwerfjkl (bot), which did the move of the article to its new name as the result of a recent RfC on season article titles (according to the edit summary), was apparently unable to handle the fact that a Talk:Doctor Who series 2 already existed as a redirect, so as a result we have the GA nomination still at Talk:Doctor Who (series 2), while the article and the GA review have been moved. This causes the wrong name and reviewer to appear at WP:GAN. Is there someone here who can fix this disconnect, presumably by deleting the redirect and moving Talk:Doctor Who (series 2) to Talk:Doctor Who series 2? And, if this is a common situation, letting the bot owner know that they have some further cleanup to do? Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:55, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
Indagate, I can see the problem. How my code works is it attempts to move the page to the target, and if that fails it performs a round-robin swap (which was needed in this case). Unfortunately it seems the move worked, but only for the main page, so the talk was left behind. I'll update the code to handle this (probably by just logging where it happens, I doubt they'll be many cases). — Qwerfjkltalk22:27, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
Qwerfjkl, please be sure to clean up after your bot: in this case, by doing the talk page round-robin swap that it failed to do in the first place. Thank you. BlueMoonset (talk) 23:44, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
I don't want to set off chains of arguments about where individual articles belong but these suggestions seem like low-hanging fruit. I'm happy to put some of the work into recategorising these if there's agreement. — Bilorv (talk) 10:21, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
@Bilorv You may see my page where I categorized many types of mathematics articles. One possibility to create one category is "Mathematical object", listing objects in any dimensions, such as polygons, polyhedrons, or even polytopes. Points and lines may also be listed, but I think I would prefer to split them differently (if someone has an alternative in this special case, let me know). Dedhert.Jr (talk) 12:30, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
130 isn't a particularly large group, nor long enough to impede navigation. That said, Mathematics has always been a very small list, so it wouldn't be out of character to split what it has up. Regarding potentially requiring an "Other", it is possible to use headers of levels 4-6, so a subgroup could be split off into a lv6 header while leaving the rest under the main lv5 header without causing issue. CMD (talk) 15:04, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
To clarify, there is no issue splitting a group of 130. If Graph theory and Geometry would make useful grouping (ie. not conversely too small) a split sounds useful. To the direct question, have a look at Wikipedia:Good articles/Music. When you hit around 200 articles (in VECTOR2022), the categories begin to exceed standard laptop screen size, although it varies slightly based on the average length of individual entry names. CMD (talk) 02:28, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
@Chipmunkdavis That being said, my laptop is somewhat lagging after going to WP:GA/MU. Reply about Graph theory and Geometry: Still, I would probably split the category. Assuming that we break the category based on mathematical fields, I'm aware that an article may have two fields combined, which confuses the reviewer by putting the after-passing-GA in two different related fields. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 11:12, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
I think a big chunk could be split off as "geometry". The rest are pretty haphazard, though. The boundaries between algebra, number theory, and combinatorics are not always clear-cut, but some of these topics are definitely on one or the other sides of those boundaries. Pell's equation, for instance, is number theory (not algebra); book embedding is graph theory (a subtopic of combinatorics); free abelian group is algebra; the IMO is not a mathematical concept at all. I don't think there are enough cellular automata Good Articles to make a good subdivision. And I don't think there's any conceptual reason to lump graph theory with geometry (we have several articles that blur that boundary because my own interests are in that boundary area and I'm a frequent GA participant, not because it's a very blurry boundary). So my preference would be to split off geometry, leave the rest unsplit, and see how that goes. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:04, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
I think that should work, and also I think it makes sense to follow David in this, as he is responsible for the vast majority of recent mathematics GAs. The question is a bit how widely construed we want to interpret "geometry"; do we want more topological things like Möbius strip included? "Geometry and topology" could include Mayer–Vietoris sequence, but "geometry" would probably not. —Kusma (talk) 21:38, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
As I mentioned before, I would prefer to split into by their types rather than give a subsection by the fields because most of those articles may have one or two (or possibly more) related branches of mathematics. As an example, "Mathematical objects" may include points, lines, curves, polygons, polyhedrons, and many other mathematical objects, especially topological objects. However, this may be too focused on the objects, rather than the geometrical and topological concepts (which could possibly add more such as "Mathematical theorem, conjectures, and lemmas"? But I think it's fine to keep including the theories and concepts back to its original pool) And for the non-concept mathematical articles, maybe we could put another subcategory "Miscellaneous", such as International Mathematical Olympiad?
But if we are in favor of breaking them into subcategories by fields, take an example, aside from breaking into "Geometry and topology", does this also mean that we would have to break them into more subcategories, which is haphazardly bizarre, as @David Eppstein mentioned? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 05:51, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
I gather most people prefer larger subsections than I do but I'm hoping we can take some action on this. Is there any objection to me attempting to break off a "Geometry and topology" subsection only, and then others moving edge case articles that they think I've categorised incorrectly? — Bilorv (talk) 08:33, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
It's normal to have "Other" sections. Since discussion has stalled I'd rather take some action that has consensus. Do you object entirely to a "Geometry and topology" subsection? — Bilorv (talk) 13:05, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
@Bilorv That's what I said previously, seeing my reply, where I mentioned the possibility of the article may only have more than one field. What I meant was that two fields in a mathematical article could possibly include one of the two topics in the subsection, and another one is not (I should have explained this more specifically). For example, suppose that we have an article that contains algebra and geometry topics, algebraic geometry or geometry algebra, or whatever it is. Would not make sense to put "Geometry and topology"? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 13:16, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
It seems that the phrase "Mathematical object" has ambiguous meanings based on the fields after I have read the article. I would possibly add the alternative one: "Geometry objects", but Mobius strip and Borromean rings have a relation with topology. I have asked a user about whether they are included in geometry or topology. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 13:50, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
@Bilorv I have retracted my previous ideas after having discussion between me and David Eppstein. You may added "Geometry and topology" subcategory. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 10:23, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
@Chipmunkdavis, David Eppstein, and Dedhert.Jr: I've made a first attempt here, with "Geometry and topology" articles separated, and sections re-ordered so that "Other" comes last. Please take a look—I'm happy for you to directly move any articles that you think I've categorised wrongly. — Bilorv (talk) 11:02, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
It makes sense for an "Other" topic to come last and for geometric and topological subjects (texts/mathematicians) that are not classified in "Geometry and topology" to precede the section. — Bilorv (talk) 11:11, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
Per discussion above, GA templates should include a line for spotchecking, and some of these templates (especially Template:GATable) are heavily intertwined with this page.
Although the GA criteria does not have a point 2e and spot-checking is its own separate requirement, Template:GAList2 and Template:GAList call their parameters for this 2e so IMO it makes sense to be consistent here. Though alternatively it could be called something like spotcheck if you think calling it 2e is misleading. ― novov(tc)04:08, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
It will require a formal RfC to make a change to the GACR per WP:CONLEVEL; a discussion can only adjust templates, no matter if they are "intertwined" with the criteria. For myself, I think that the current criteria is sufficient: you do the source spotcheck to ensure compliance with criteria 2c) and 2d).~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:38, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
The source spotcheck should not be a separate 2e. The spotcheck is part of 2c and 2d, it should be prompted in the review column not the criteria column. CMD (talk) 01:57, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
I was going off what other editors had already done for Template:GAList etc. The parameter there is called 2e even if it doesn't show up on the final template (as it shouldn't, because as I am well aware, it's not actually criterion 2e). I agree that that's probably not the best name for it and I have no strong preference on what to call it myself.
How to display it in the final template is a different question entirely, and probably something that should be hashed out by multiple people. ― novov(tc)04:02, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
I'd prefer it be displayed as part of 2c and 2d for clarity. "(OR, including source spot-check)" and "(copyvio and plagiarism, including source spot-check)" for example. That way it doesn't have a separate tick but is clearly part of the process needed to achieve those two ticks. CMD (talk) 07:28, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
Spotchecks in templates
It's my understanding that all GA reviewers are now expected to do verification spot-checks on at least some of the sources. This isn't in any of the GA criteria templates, though. Are there any objections to me adding that item to the reviewing templates? -- asilvering (talk) 23:07, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
no objections at all; spot-checking is an important part of reviews & that should be reflected in templates etc. not sure how you could even make sure an article meets criteria 2b without doing a spot-check... sawyer * he/they * talk05:21, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
That has always been my position, and WP:GACN has said to spotcheck "at least a substantial proportion" for at least as long as I've been reviewing, but apparently this wasn't universal. -- asilvering (talk) 17:09, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Could we also add a reminder to check the nominator's level of contribution to the nominated article? I always aim to do this as one of my first tasks, and it would be helpful to have it as part of the "checklist". Regards, BennyOnTheLoose (talk) 09:48, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
In my view, we shouldn't have this in the checklist, which should only be about the article, not about the nominator. A nominator who hasn't contributed to the article isn't entitled to get a review so the nomination can be removed, but a non-contributing nominator isn't a reason to fail a review once you have started it. —Kusma (talk) 09:52, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
Yep, templates and the review page should note the new expectations that spotchecks be explicitly commented on by the reviewer and that the nominator is a "major contributor" or has sought feedback from such contributors. I'm sure this would have been included had they been rules at their inception. — Bilorv (talk) 21:51, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
I've added the line about source-checks to the first four templates at Wikipedia:Good article nominations/templates. Then I opened the first table one and got a migraine. (Is the table to blame? Unknown.) I leave the remainder for someone else, as I am apparently constitutionally incapable of looking at wikitables. -- asilvering (talk) 03:25, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
As the spotcheck is to ensure compliance with criterion 2 and its sub-criteria, not for its own sake, I have removed it as a separate line and added it to the respective criterion 2 headings (also see the discussion below). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:30, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
Hard-to-understand terms in the lead
Can you please help me with the review I wrote on an article nominated for GA by @Sammi Brie?
My understanding that the article complied to GA criteria except 1a in the lead. It should be understandable by a broad audience, but there are terms such as PBS. According to the manual of style, the had to understand terms should be avoided, but if cannot be avoided, they can be linked and defined (explained) right in the text. Only linking is not enough. See MOS:INTRO. Quote: "Make the lead section accessible to as broad an audience as possible. Where possible, avoid difficult-to-understand terminology, symbols, mathematical equations and formulas. Where uncommon terms are essential, they should be placed in context, linked, and briefly defined." But the terms such as PBS are not briefly defined, and they are even used in the Short description. Overall, the following terms are not explained or not avoided: PBS, commonwealth (also linked contrary to MOS:PIPE best practices), American Public Television, Kentucky General Assembly, Corporation for Public Broadcasting?. Consider you are an adolescent outside the U.S. reading the lead - you will not understand due to these terms. Is my understanding of the GA criteria correct, and I can consider that the article Fail GA due to the use of these terms in the lead? I like how The Economist defines new terms or new company names. For example, The Economist does not simply mentions "Corporation for Public Broadcasting", but something like "Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a private nonprofit entity authorized by a law adopted by the U.S. Congress in 1967". The Economist even defines such known companies as Goldman Sachs, for example, they write "Goldman Sachs, an investment bank..." -- such brief definitions would also be helpful in the lead of a GA candidate article.
I asked the nominator to fix these terms, but the nominator declined.
Can I conclude the article as fail GA due to lack of compliance to 1a on the word incomprehensible by the audience in the lead?
Or should I insist that the nominator fix the terms, and if still the nominator not fix, then fail?
Well, to give you a different perspective, as someone who last interacted with biology almost 2 decades ago, the following terms in Histamine N-methyltransferase make almost no sense to me: "methyltransferases superfamily", "biogenic amine", "Nτ-methylhistamine", "Nτ-methylation", "diamine oxidase", "histaminergic neurotransmission", "knockout mice". And I'm certain that my parents (whom I would consider average readers) don't know what "cytoplasmic protein" is. Does that mean that it needs an explanation in the first sentence of the lead? No, I don't think so. That's what wiki-links are for. I also don't think that an article about a TV network needs an explanation on TV station programming in the US in its lead section. Or that it needs to explain different types of states in the US. AstonishingTunesAdmirer連絡12:11, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
That article actually does a very good job of explaining scientific terms though; of the ones you mentioned, only three are unexplained. A methyltransferase transfers methyl groups, as mentioned explicitly in para 2. It explains "Nτ-methylhistamine" and "Nτ-methylation" very well, any discomfort there is just from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. Diamine oxidase is an enzyme, again mentioned in the article. "cytoplasmic protein" is a protein in the cytoplasm, which hardly requires explanation. The only unexplained terms are "biogenic" (amine is self-evident) and "knockout mice". The article manages to explain most of its jargon in a way that requires pretty much just the first two chapters of high school o-chem and biology, no need to knock on it just because some of the nouns are long. AryKun (talk) 14:25, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
Thank you, I will try to address the issues you mentioned. I did my best to explain jargon in simple language in the HNMT article whenever possible. However, as in the Kentucky Educational Television article, some terms were not needed at all and could be easily removed with no disadvantage to the article (e.g. the word "commonwealth" could be replaced to "state" or removed at all, the abbreviation PBS could de-abbreviated and be briefly described the way The Economist does that, etc. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 15:04, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
Yeah, commonwealth is unnecessary; the fact that it's in the official title of the state doesn't have any actual implications for its political status any more than the DPRK's name has led to a blossoming of democracy there. AryKun (talk) 15:14, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
According to the MOS:INTRO, the intro itself should be easy to understand, as they refer to a conclusion (statistics?) that the intro alone is what most readers read, so that they don't read the rest. Therefore, there is no sense to explain in the terms later if they are not understandable in the lead. Wikilinks do not help much because clicking back and forth hampers readability. My point is that sometimes it is easier to fix the uncommon terms then to argue with the reviewer. I once encountered an article that also contained uncommon terms but the nominators agreed and quickly fixed that to comply with the rules, they also probably had the same opinion as me that fixing is the most efficient way than arguing, see Talk:Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome/GA1. I am sure they could have presented plausible arguments in favour of keeping these terms as is rather than replacing to the simple term. I am sure that the article on Kentucky_Educational_Television had uncommon terms that could not have a justification to keep, they could be replaced or explained without affecting, still, Wikipedia is not based on a sole opinion on one person, we have to seek consensus, and consensus was that the article was OK, so that's why I requested second opinion and concluded that it passed GA, but I don't want to be in a similar situation again. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 16:19, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
Let me ask second opinion, and anybody can jump in and I will decide according to how did the second opinion reviewer decided. Would that be an appropriate procedure? Maxim Masiutin (talk) 13:05, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
I thought that you meant that the article on HNMT also does not conform to the GA status. The fact that one article does not conform doesn’t mean that the second should also not conform. This phenomenon is known as quality creep. Quality creep refers to the gradual lowering of standards or expectations over time. It occurs when deviations from established quality criteria become more acceptable, leading to a decline in overall quality. In the context of articles or content, it highlights the danger of compromising quality simply because other similar content exhibits deficiencies.
Maintaining consistent quality standards is essential to uphold credibility and reliability. While leniency toward minor deviations can be reasonable, it’s crucial to strike a balance between flexibility and maintaining high-quality standards. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 13:07, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
You appear not to have read the third sentence of my initial reply. In any case, you have two second opinions here; the wait for a formal second opinion will likely be weeks, if not months. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:08, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
I would like to follow the formal procedure. Your arguments are plausible. Probably you could also probably step in and provide the second opinion via the established procedure. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 13:18, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
While maximising understandability and accessibility are good goals, they might not always be possible. Consider the spirit of WP:ONEDOWN, and target for understanding by say people already familiar with Kentucky and/or with educational television. CMD (talk) 01:29, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
As someone reasonably familiar with educational tv but not Kentucky, seeing the current lead "Kentucky Educational Television (KET) is a statewide television network serving the U.S. commonwealth of Kentucky, a member of PBS.", I would have preferred to replace linked commonwealth with unlinked state (to the rest of the US and the world, Kentucky is a state; we don't need to know about the principles by which its founders might have chosen to call it something else). Calling it "statewide" is redundant. The grammar makes it unclear whether KET or Kentucky is the member of PBS; I think this, rather than the initialism, is what makes PBS look technical. If the grammar were clearer it would be obvious what kind of thing PBS is. And I think it's often better to say what something does than trying to define what it is. So I think the reviewer's qualms are justified. Maybe something like "Kentucky Educational Television (KET) provides educational television to the US state of Kentucky as a network within PBS." would be an improvement? —David Eppstein (talk) 05:29, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
"methyltransferases superfamily of enzymes" -- superfamily means big family, i.e. big family of enzymes called methyltransferases, I thought it was already clear, if you have an idea on how to make it better - please let me know; I, for example, gave suggestions on how to improve the terms in the Kentucky Educational Television article, my suggestions were not evidently irrelevant, I don't know why did you outright rejected them;
"biogenic amine" -- thank you for pointing that out, I replaced this term to "biomolecule";
"Nτ-methylhistamine", "Nτ-methylation", "diamine oxidase" -- all these terms were explained in the lead; for example, "diamine oxidase" was explained as the second enzyme involved in histamine metabolism
"histaminergic neurotransmission" -- thank you for pointing that out, I explained this term;
"knockout mice" -- thank you for pointing that out, I also explained this term.
I have recently reviewed the article Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One, a nomination managed by ZooBlazer (main editor, 69.3% of the text of the article). I pointed some things that had to be fixed, they were fixed, and the article was promoted. Accordingly, the article was placed in further nominations for DYK and good topic. But then Favre1fan93 (third main editor, 5.1% of the text of the article) removes those fixes, two times already. Those fixes are things like using the years of the films in the section headings (something he claims is required by guidelines, but it isn't), a WP:EASTEREGG link, plots described in full in-universe style, etc.
What should be done here? Should I open an article reassesment? Remove the good article status, restore the nomination and ask for a second opinion? Tell Favre1fan93 to accept the results of a GAN of an article where he's not a significant editor nor took part in the discussion? (he didn't even comment anything in Talk:Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One#Potential future GA nomination). Just walk away and let the article be a good article with this minor but noticeable problems?
I wouldn't hang GA on the precise formulation of section headers, but I would agree mixing the in-universe writing with out-universe information is not clear and fully understandable prose (GACR1a): "In 1943, Steve Rogers is deemed physically unfit to enlist in the U.S. Army and fight the German Reich in World War II...In April 2006, Marvel hired David Self to write the script for a Captain America film". That said, before going to GAR (if that is the endgoal) there should be a discussion of the relevant issues, usually on the talkpage but this is a very recent GAN so if discussion happened on the GAN page that would also seem reasonable. CMD (talk) 02:11, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
After thinking about it, I think at least the years in the subsections should stay after all. That's pretty normal across the MCU and film franchises. -- ZooBlazer17:48, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
The headings should not have been an issue. That formatting is used across numerous other franchise pages in the film, television, and video game medium (to name a few), so this isn't an outlier. In terms of in-universe vs out of universe, the smaller film sections are all clearly segregated by paragraphs as if each were "mini" sections (without subheaders). Those are a premise (first paragraph), production info (second paragraph), and relevant larger MCU tie-ins (third paragraph). This is how this info has been formatted since these sections all originally lived at Marvel Cinematic Universe (and then List of Marvel Cinematic Universe films) before the separate phase articles were split out. I don't see how those premise stylings would be of issue to a reader, as it follows the convention of MOS:FILMPLOT and as if it was being used on a film article. Regarding the additional edits I made, the Silver Age of Comic Books is any comic book in the 1960s, and changing it from their comic books in the 1960s Silver Age of Comic Books to their comic books in the 1960s removes the awkwardness of the first instance and double instance of "comic books". And I would hope the copy edits to the Iron Man and Cap First Avenger sections were not also of issue. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 16:45, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
If they've vanished, their nomination and its review should vanish with them, especially as the review hasn't yet been posted. Note that reviewer Esculenta has two other GA reviews open (one just a few hours old), so they can work on the others instead. I have just removed the GA nominee template from the article talk page. BlueMoonset (talk) 20:46, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
I tried looking for the answer in the archives, but to no avail. Is there a minimum number of sources for a GA or is it based on article length? APKhi :-) (talk) 04:46, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
No minimum sources, no minimum length. The only requirement is that breadth is demonstrated. (There is no definition of breadth. 🙃) ♠PMC♠ (talk)04:59, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
The short answer is: "enough". Enough to reliably source all content, and (as PMC says) to provide broad coverage of all significant aspects of the topic. Now I'm curious about the fewest we have in a current GA. I have one with only eight sources but I suspect that's significantly more than the record. — Preceding unsigned comment added by David Eppstein (talk • contribs)
Per this discussion, I've implemented a way to change GA reviewing statistics. The corrections page is User:ChristieBot/Corrections to GA reviewing statistics, and the format should be obvious. The GA stats will be decreased by one for the "old reviewer", and increased by one for the "new reviewer". The bot does not currently check that the review (here Talk:Pitfall!/GA1 really exists or was opened by the old reviewer; I will probably add that check in the future and will have the bot add a list of discrepancies to the bottom of that page if any discrepancies exist. The comments field is optional.
I have tested a couple of invalid formats, and the code seems to cope quite well, but if there are errors that the bot can't cope with, it will ignore *all* corrections on the page and revert to the uncorrected version of the stats. I will look into adding a message at the bottom of that page that says "Error reading page -- corrections ignored".
It has just occurred to me that this same mechanism would also be able to give credit for co-reviews -- that is, if we wish to credit two editors, rather than one, with a review. Leaving the "old reviewer" column blank would probably have that effect, though I haven't tested it. I don't think we should do that without some discussion here, but if someone wants to argue that we should do such a thing it is now technically possible. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:30, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
Thank you! If the initial reviewer will return before another reviewer picks up the review, I guess the initial reviewer could re-start. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:39, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
I don't really get why the default path of action when discovering an inadequate review, often by a new reviewer, is to come to WT:GAN and broadcast it to over 1,200 page watchers, instead of quietly notifing the editor on their talk. Anyway, I've done the latter now; hopefully they won't feel so shamed that they never again return to a process desperately in need of reviewers. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:12, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
Indeed. I was very hesitant to join in as a GA reviewer, precisely because I saw this kind of thing happening on the Talk page here. -- asilvering (talk) 20:23, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
It's something I've been fighting against for the last while; I ever added direction to the top of the page to discuss it with reviewers first, but of course no one reads that. I'm tempted to start removing these posts unless I see conversation with reviewers first. ♠PMC♠ (talk)02:15, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
@AirshipJungleman29: First, concerned editors have been bringing this sort of thing to this talk page for years, so it happens at least because other editors see it as a norm. Second, many editors have too much compunction and are averse to confronting new editors and their faux pas. Third, the concerned editor might also be unsure if this review was sufficient and is asking for a compass-check from other editors. With everything being political here on Wikipedia, most non-admins want to proceed from an understanding of consensus. I know I wouldn't care about shaming a new editor, since the fault was theirs. Chris Troutman (talk)15:20, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
I know it is the norm, which is why I described it as "the default path of action"; personally, I wouldn't describe exposing their mistakes to hundreds of others as having "too much compunction". I think Your Power is quite experienced and shouldn't hesitate to open a section on a user talk page, and also think that you, also a very experienced editor, might need to reread WP:BITE, as "even the most experienced editors may need a gentle reminder from time to time." ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:30, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
You said "I don't really get why the default path of action..." and I explained why. Many people might assume that talking about someone behind their backs (on a WikiProject talk page) is easier than confronting them one-on-one. You might disagree. I, for one, encourage vigorous criticism of all by all and I regularly bite other editors. You've assumed good faith regarding the new editor; maybe assume some good faith for User:Your Power/ Elias, too. Editors who have put in the work to nominate a GA are feeling maximum buy-in and those of us who created content should remember that feeling. But thank you, AirshipJungleman29, for telling new editor that there's a problem.Chris Troutman (talk)15:40, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
Given that the nominator was blocked due to their personal attack, could the GAN coordinators somehow delete the current GAN page for this article so that another reviewer can take it up instead? I tried looking for a speedy deletion resolution (WP:G5) but it doesn't apply in this case. Ippantekina (talk) 04:27, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
Ippantekina has just asked me if I can take over this review. Are there any objections to me opening a new review from scratch as a GA2 (and potentially claiming WikiCup points), rather than a "second opinion", as this would be a full review of all the criteria? — Bilorv (talk) 17:02, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
We are now three weeks into the backlog drive and, to me at least, it feels like a Sisyphean task. We're doing a lot of work to push the backlog down, only for it to grow out of control again before we've even gotten the chance to breathe. The last backlog drive we did was in August 2023 and during it we managed to bring the backlog down by 69%, from 638 unreviewed nominations to 198. This was a huge effort, but even then, what we were left over with was still quite a long list, a big undertaking. By the time of the current backlog drive, we had 655 unreviewed nominations. This time, we were able to cut it down by 25% to 493 unreviewed noms, before dozens of nominations were dumped onto the list en masse, setting back our efforts by two weeks.
I'm glad that these backlog drives have been happening, but it should be clear that they are not a sustainable way forward for cutting down on the backlog of unreviewed nominations. Even if this nom-dump hadn't occurred, at the rate we were going, we would still have needed to keep the drive going for another month in order to cut down the same amount we had in the last backlog drive. And the moment they are no longer going, the backlog just starts ballooning all over again. The drives become our only way of actually addressing it.
As such, I wanted to make some proposals for addressing the backlog in a more sustainable manner. I'm going to sort them from the least drastic to the most drastic options. If you have other ideas for helping bring down the backlog, feel free to propose them here. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
After the subject of another backlog drive was raised, it took us a month to figure out the details and another few weeks of milling around before it actually began. I don't recall many notifications being sent out for this one and the results show. I think rather than this ad hoc and reaction-based approach to backlog drives, we need to accept that these need to become a regular thing: one or ideally two times a year, at the same months, leaving us time to get the word out. I propose that we have a backlog drive set for every March and September of each year. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Codifying biannual drives, and the procedures surrounding them, is I think a good step forward. It also opens the door if anyone wants to organise shorter "blitzes", as I believe they do at WP:GOCE.
Backlog drives are fun and help entice people to review. I like the reward structures with extra points for old and long articles. —Kusma (talk) 17:21, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I think four times a year would lead to very few reviews being picked up in the off months. That might not be such a bad thing if we get the backlog drives really moving, but it's something to keep in mind. -- asilvering (talk) 17:51, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I recommend January and August, where (going off of memory) we've had successful GA drives in the past. I vaguely recall another project (GOCE?) routinizing their drives and finding steep drop-off when it was put on a calendar, but I equally do not recall the timing of those drives being isolated as a factor in that drop-off. I suggest picking times when most editors are enjoying a staycation. But the dates can be decided later. czar18:15, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
This might slow reviews off-cycle, but I still think it's good practice to have the drives be more predictable. It seems the WikiCup has a large impact on both noms and reviews, so let's try to align the drives with that and perhaps whatever else might be going on outside of the GA bubble. Grk1011 (talk) 15:50, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Three or four times a year would be best, biannual isn't enough at the rate the current backlog seems to grow.
Agreed. GoCE run a drive of some sort every month and it works, so maybe, as suggested above, more frequent drives, and/or some variety in them. Eg every non-major drive month have a seven day "snap" mini-drive focused on just whichever section has the biggest backlog; just a suggestion. Gog the Mild (talk) 13:50, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Unsure on the frequency (once a year is not enough), but something regular would be good. (Personally, I'd probbably not be contributing if it's the same month as an NPP backlog drive, which aren't regular.) -Kj cheetham (talk) 19:52, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
I oppose and believe that the proposal for regular backlog drives might be a counterproductive solution to instead increase the backlog rather than the indention to decrease it, for the following reasons: reduced incentive outside drives (regular backlog drives could potentially reduce the incentive for contributors to review articles outside of these events; this could inadvertently increase the backlog rather than decrease it); routine fatigue of regular backlog drives (over time, regular drives could become routine and lose their novelty, so that it could lead to a decrease in participation as the drives might not evoke the same level of enthusiasm or urgency as they do now with occasional backlog drives); reviewer time-pressure (the time-pressure on reviewers could increase with regular drives, potentially leading to burnout or decreased quality of reviews; it is important to ensure that reviewers feel appreciated and supported in their roles and not time-bound). Maxim Masiutin (talk) 16:55, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Discuss
Regarding timing, I highly agree with czar. March-April is rough for a lot of students and teachers, and I expect that covers many people involved in GANs. -- asilvering (talk) 19:05, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
While I think the concept is good, you need people to run the drives, and right now coordinators are fairly thin on the ground and subject to burnout. It's one thing to make a schedule; it's another thing to be able to staff the drives per said schedule. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:04, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
I'd be for designated GAN coords the way FAC, FLC, and FTC/GTC have coords. Obviously they wouldn't be checking every nom like those coords do and would only have to be active during a backlog drive. Additionally, I'd be for having a lot of them, maybe somewhere around the neighborhood of 10 if it helps with alleviating burnout. AryKun (talk) 13:09, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
I have no strong opinion on this either in favour or against, but I try to think about what the unintended consequences (for all proposed changes) might be, and I share Grk1011's concerns about this leading to reviews being postponed to when there is a backlog drive, in other words redistributing the reviews to the drives at the expense of the rest of the year. TompaDompa (talk) 16:27, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
There is need for fundamental changes. Instead of focusing on simple solutions such as regular drives, it might be more beneficial to address fundamental issues within the reviewing process so that it could include providing better protection and support for reviewers, promoting a friendlier environment for newcomers and old editors, and acknowledging the efforts of reviewers more effectively. The atmosphere of wikipedia is explained by my friends as hostile and highly toxic. The admins do not follow the rule of minimality of punishment, punishments are often maximal (permanent block) for trival offences that could be addressed by other means than blocks, one admin on asking to unblock a user who wrote Good Articles replied that Wikipedia does not have lack of editors. It might be beneficial to experiment with different approaches to managing the backlog and adapt based on the results. We can try this approach, and see whether it increase or decrease the backlog, however, I opposed this proposal because I think it will increase the backlog. Measures that could actually help could include mentoring programs, reviewer protection measures from pressure and threats for their opinion expressed in the review, such as treats to ban for incompetence; and there should efforts to enforce a principle of friendliness towards newcomers and also towards older editors. The current environment on Wikipedia might be perceived as hostile to newcomers. This could discourage potential new editors and reviewers from participating, contributing to the decline in editor and reviewer numbers. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 16:55, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Currently when somebody goes over 20 open nominations, the new ones they open get put into a green expandable box at the bottom of the list. (Right now we have these boxes at the bottom of 10 of our lists) This puts mass nominations out of immediate sight, but it does nothing to address the de facto monopolisation of the process that mass nominations encourage. Instead of putting them into a box, I propose we cap open nominations at 20 per user. Honestly, I think the cap should be a lot lower (no more than 5). I frankly do not think it is fair to reviewers to submit so many nominations at once, but I also think it's bad for the nominator, as the individual qualities of each article get lost in the sea of nominations; you just can't keep track of what you are doing with each one if you have dozens in the pool. But as 20 is the limit we currently have before overflow, I'm happy to propose we cap at 20 for now and maybe discuss lowering the cap at a later date. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
This is done at WP:FAC and seems to work just fine there. I'm sympathetic to the idea that we don't want to discourage anyone from improving content, but we have to find ways to manage the GA process. Our current system, where we have a long queue and submitters wait months for review, could also discourage folks from improving content. Ajpolino (talk) 18:18, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
This works fine at FAC. I'd propose 10-15 as a cap for nominations, rather than 5. As slow as reviewing throughput as been, I can see 5 becoming a problematic cap so a higher number would work better. As of 22 March, 77 out of 695 nominations are by a single editor (11.1%). I see no reason why one nominator should be allowed to contribute that sort of amount to the backlog at once, and I can also remember the days when Coldwell would have loads and loads up at once. I would give an analogy to when a lawn mower engine will "flood" if you try to start it too much, but don't know how to phrase it well. Hog FarmTalk21:10, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Support. It works well at FAC with minimum grumbling, hiccups or unintended consequences. Having run 107 articles through GAN and reviewed 160 I see no reason why it should not work equally well and without unintended consequences. As an alternative, set a limit on nominations not currently being reviewed? Personally I would think a limit of five nominations about right, but I can see that that is never going to fly; unless the "not currently being reviewed" suggestion is taken up. Gog the Mild (talk) 14:05, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Most of the people with large numbers of GANs write high-quality articles in a niche subject area. This would punish them for no particular reason. People mass-nominating low quality articles would be handled via quickfails, presumably. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 17:21, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I largely stand by what I said when the (soft) cap was suggested back in 2023: I don't think this is a good idea. For one thing, I'm not convinced that the existence of editors who nominate a lot more than they review is in itself a problem. Writing high-quality articles and reviewing nominations are to some (not insignificant) extent separate skillsets. For another, limiting the number of open nominations would not in itself reduce the effective backlog, only hide it. If an editor has 20 articles that are ready for nomination but they can only nominate 5 of them, the other 15 may be hidden from the publicly visible backlog but they are in practice only put on a waiting list to be nominated. Without an increase in throughput, limiting the number of open nominations does not in any meaningful way ameliorate the backlog issue. The idea that editors might spend more time reviewing is, I think, a bit optimistic. As I said, reviewing requires a different set of skills and I think it's more likely that they would either keep on doing what they're doing or disengage from WP:GAN entirely. That last point is the most important one to me: this might discourage the nomination (and for that matter creation/curation) of high-quality articles. That's not, to me, an acceptable price to pay for reducing the backlog. TompaDompa (talk) 17:28, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
We want the encyclopedia to be full of good articles. Mass-noms are a symptom of the backlog getting out of hand, not the cause of it. -- asilvering (talk) 18:04, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Per asilvering and my last oppose—and remove the soft cap. There is an issue with mass nominations of poor-quality articles. There is no issue with mass nominations of good-quality or nearly-good-quality articles. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
I don't think there is a need to reopen this. The soft cap achieves the goal and automates what would otherwise be mildly annoying paperwork fpr nominators. CMD (talk) 12:07, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
While well-intentioned, I think this will have the adverse effect of pushing the backlog somewhere where this isn't visible. Prolific nominators with actual high-quality content would be disadvantaged, especially if there was a lower hard cap (e.g. a cap of 5 is completely infeasible for nominators who work in obscure subject areas and have to wait months for a review). This will also have no effect on the actual issue, which is that there aren't enough reviewers; as mentioned above, it is a symptom of a larger problem, not the problem in itself. Epicgenius (talk) 22:16, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Most of our prolific nominators are also people who review a lot and whose articles are almost invariably high-quality. I don't think artificially removing articles that are good enough for GA from GAN actually furthers the purpose of improving articles.
We should not simply cap nominations using the formula max_allowed_monimations=20 as proposed, but use a formula as prescribed to have twice amount of reviews than nominations, plus some theshold, say, 5, i.e. there should be a formula max_allowed_monimations=5+(reviewed/2)Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:00, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Discuss
Mass nominating low-quality articles (at present, one editor has submitted around a tenth of the nominations currently at GAN) is not very respectful of other editors at the process as a whole. That said, I have nothing against mass nominations of good quality articles either, if the nominator does their work in reviewing. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:39, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
What about lowering the cap? For people who are genuinely doing high quality work this shouldn't hit them too hard (because at least when I was super involved in GA, those people's reviews rarely tended to sit for huge amounts of time). Barkeep49 (talk) 18:43, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
As someone whose main editing interests are in an area where there are limited numbers of nominators and reviewers (mathematics), I have been nominating roughly 1-2 articles per month and despite this the long waiting period for reviews routinely causes my number of nominations to exceed five. If the cap were lowered to five open, I could easily imagine situations where the wait for reviewers caused me to be locked out of the process altogether for months or longer. I can live with a cap of 20 (it is not a number I have come close to) but 5 is too low. Better would be a limit on rate (number of nominations per unit time) rather than on total number of open nominations. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:13, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
We should not simply cap nominations using the formula max_allowed_monimations=20 as proposed, but use a formula as prescribed to have twice amount of reviews than nominations, plus some theshold, say, 5, i.e. there should be a formula max_allowed_monimations=5+(reviewed/2) Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:00, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I understand that this has been proposed before and it wasn't a popular proposal, but I think it deserves restating. QPQ is necessary for the functioning of the DYK project and it is already an unwritten part of the FAC process (even if they don't like admitting it). The backlog is never going to be sustainable so long as the barriers to nomination are so low and the requirements for reviewing are so intense. We used to sort lists by reviews/noms ratio, but this proved confusing, so it was reverted to the queue system. But now we have nothing to incentivise nominators to review other nominations, so we have just ended up with people that review little and nominate a lot effectively dominating the process. It's very common to see users with dozens, even hundreds more nominations than reviews. These represent the largest contributors to the backlog being so unsustainable. Users that review more than they nominate just can't keep up. So let's just get it over with and start requiring QPQ reviews. We could even use the ratio to scale how many QPQs are required, the higher your nomination/review ratio, the more reviews you should be required to do for each nomination. (i.e. More reviews than nominations = no QPQ required; more nominations as reviews = 1 QPQ required; more than twice as many nominations as reviews = 2 QPQs required; etc.) --Grnrchst (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Per Airship. GAN suffers badly from the tragedy of the commons: more people want to write than want to review. The current system of crossing our fingers and hoping that people will chip in puts the burden on those of us who are actually willing to help others out. Nominators who can't be bothered to do reviews benefit from our hard work while doing nothing to help others in return, and thus the backlog grows. The system doesn't work unless we all share the burden. ♠PMC♠ (talk)04:30, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Support, at least for a trial period. I do think the concern about low quality reviews is worth taking seriously. But I think we should try this for a month or two, then see how much of an issue that is in practice. Ghosts of Europa (talk) 04:38, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Actually, you know what? I think we ought to try this out and at least see if it really does lead to poor quality reviews. I know it is a perennial proposal, but if it has never actually been implemented at GAN, can we really say for certain that it wouldn't work? And besides, as PMC says: if people give bad reviews, we can just topic- ban them, or at least temporarily stop them from reviewing for a period. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 03:51, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
The current system doesn't seem to provide any assurance of quality. Getting nominators to review more will help in two ways. It will help them understand what's required and so nominated articles should have less issues. And, by adding a cost to the nominations, there will be less free-riders and this should reduce the number of nominations to a more manageable level. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:01, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Support. We have already a recommendation to do twice reviews than nomination. This recommendation should become rule and enforced. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:03, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Having a backlog is preferable to having poor quality reviews. If we do not have a method to ensure high quality reviews, we should not force people to review. —Kusma (talk) 17:18, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
As performing an indepth check of all of the article (grammar, neutrality, verification, copyvio etc.), it would not be fair to have reviewers needing to do a QPQ in order to nominate. Another issue is that the nominations at GAN are much larger than at DYK. Therefore, the reviews themselves take much longer to complete. While reviewing articles at GAN are important, having QPQs delays new nominations. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 17:44, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Per MrLinkinPark333, but with the added note that, frankly, QPQ isn't fit for purpose at DYK either, so it's the last thing we should be emulating. ——Serial Number 5412917:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Very no, per TompaDompa, but I do support mild badgering of the prolific writers who aren't doing their share of reviews. -- asilvering (talk) 18:01, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
per everyone else, and also totally agree with Asilvering that we ought to be a bit harder on those who have 50+ GAs and zero reviews. if one has dozens of GAs, then they should be familiar enough with the criteria to do their part. sawyer * he/they * talk18:40, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
We are building a long-term system to robustly measure quality (as well as reward editors). Rubberstamping and shoddy reviews will cause us problems later down the line. Many more people are interested in GAN than GAR. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Too many people are never going to be good reviewers, and the GA quality will suffer if you try to make them in order to submit their own GANs. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:06, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
While I understand the intention, it would just encourage poor-quality reviews. This is especially true if we tied the number of required reviews to the review-GA ratio - there is nothing stopping prolific nominators with few reviews from doing improper quick fails or quick passes. Epicgenius (talk) 22:16, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
In my opinion, this takes away the right from editors to either prefer writing or prefer reviewing. A decent amount of good standing, active editors already review when they nominate anyways. In areas like DYK, this type of system works, since there's promoters and QPQ is fair when there's a chance to make it onto the front page, but here? All I could see coming out of this would be less people interested in the GAN process long term, or rushed GAN reviews that have to be taken to GAR at a later date. I can't see this proposal being beneficial to the project at all. λNegativeMP103:59, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
The potential downsides outweigh the benefit. Both nominators and reviewers are doing a service to the encyclopedia, either by creating good content or by ensuring that truly Good content is recognized as Good. Some people will naturally gravitate to one or the other. Personally, I find reviewing more satisfying than being reviewed, which is stressful. As Kusma put it, a backlog is preferable to having poor quality reviews. —Ganesha811 (talk) 12:35, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
In principle, it sounds like something that could have benefits, but, I accept a number of those expressing concern that forcing a review to be done before being able to nominate will inevitably lower the quality of reviews. It also should be considered that some editors much prefer writing and developing articles, rather than reviewing the work of others, and the two should not necessarily go hand-in-hand. If QPQ ever becomes part of the process, it should be on a reward-based approach, rather than something of absolute necessity (by that I mean, if we limited the number of open noms an editor could have at any given time, QPQ could allow for additional active nominations beyond a community-agreed cap). Bungle(talk • contribs)09:35, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
What's your definition of "works"? It's an end in itself. What I'm saying is that I think people who submit far more articles than they review should face some social disapproval. That's all. If someone wants to submit dozens of articles and review none of them, that's annoying, but that's all it is. -- asilvering (talk) 18:08, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Has this ever been attempted at GA? And if so, was there proof that the quality of reviews decreased? If not, could we look into a trial period of a month or two to see whether QPQ would work, as suggested by Ghosts of Europa? Unexpectedlydian♯4talk‽18:18, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
It blows my mind that every time this comes up, those who oppose continually assert that if we do this, everyone will for sure start doing bad reviews. Why do we make this bad faith assumption? Do we really have such a poor opinion of our fellow contributors? Or are we admitting to our own laziness here? And keep in mind that bad actors can always be TBANned, just as they can be now. ♠PMC♠ (talk)03:44, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Personally, I can say I'm not making the assumption that that would happen, but I think the incentives are misplaced, and incentivizing behaviour you don't actually want to see doesn't tend to be a recipe for success. I simply don't think getting a GA stamp on an article should require anything other than writing the article. People who like writing and hate reviewing should also get to participate. Should those people get to suck all the energy out of the room? No, that's why I strongly support Proposal 16. -- asilvering (talk) 03:57, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Also, I don't like participating in qpq-type transactional systems. They gross me out. I don't volunteer to do things because I expect someone to do the same back to me. I'd be horrified to learn anyone had done so on my behalf. -- asilvering (talk) 04:00, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
It means that doing stuff for other people is necessary in order to keep this part of the project rolling. The very act of nominating an article for GA is a request for someone else's time. Editor time is the most valuable commodity on the project. Therefore, in my opinion, anyone who is willing to request that someone else spend time on their work should, in the spirit of collaboration, be willing to offer their time back by doing a review themselves. ♠PMC♠ (talk)00:04, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
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I love the idea of a QPQ, I think it's the radical sort of thing we need for the project. But looking at how they actually work: DYK QPQs just aren't good quality. For most people (and there are luckily exceptions) they're something people crank out in a few minutes because it's a chore you have to do before nominating the article you really want to DYK. Do we want GAN reviews to fall into that level of quality? Grnrchst has pointed out that FAC reviews are something of an informal QPQ. That exists for good articles too—I've seen it called "horse trading." Ultimately, the problem with a backlog is that GANs take a while. This might not ultimately be a bad thing for everyone; I had some pretty old outstanding GA reviews until recently and I didn't really mind it. If someone does mind it though, they could request a horse trade with someone in a similar subject area and each would review each other's articles. To prevent abuse, it'd be important to make sure that fails count for the trade, and for some cursory overview by a coordinator of some sort to make sure that none of the GAN review process has been ignored (most commonly, source-checks). Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 16:51, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Horse trading = log rolling = cliques of friends get easy passes for each others' articles while everyone else gets locked out of the system. It is a recipe for corruption and dubious GAs. It is something we should discourage, not encourage. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:49, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Formalisation isn't needed. Informal agreements to review each other's work is okay so long as the people involved aren't afraid to fail the nomination or bring up substantial issues if needed. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Not sure there is much in actuality that needs formalising, and I can't see what a formal option would be that isn't QPQ (already being discussed above). CMD (talk) 12:10, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
I've seen editors start a review with "please also consider reviewing one of my open nominations" and I think that's fine. Not sure what "formalizing" might mean or accomplish. Grk1011 (talk) 15:52, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
I'm not really sure what you mean by "formalize", since you don't have any formal language in this post. What specific language are you proposing to formalize? -- asilvering (talk) 17:55, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I interpreted it as something like adding "Agreeing with another nominator to review each others' articles is allowed, so long as the reviews are of good quality" to WP:GANI. That said, that is acceptable now, so I guess I don't understand why it needs to be formalized. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:00, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
If someone is currently reviewing one of your GA nominations, it's a conflict of interest to review or promise to review one of their nominations, because then if they discover any problem and fail your nomination they might reasonably expect you to be more hostile to their nomination. Therefore, they would be incentivized to look the other way and pass your article rather than pointing out the problem. This is not something we should be encouraging or formalizing. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:38, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
Yeah, I wouldn't do it personally for that reason, even though I would hope that I/fellow editors wouldn't take a fail in that way. As far as I know, though, it's not forbidden by the GA instructions. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:48, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
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For a while, the sort order of GAN was not by date of nomination, but only by the nominator's review to nominations quotient. This was great for wait times for frequent reviewers (I rarely had to wait long) but was discouraging especially to nominators with many legacy nominations. We could try to find a compromise position where reviewing in general helps to reduce wait times. For example, we could sort reviews by (wait time)*(reviewer bonus), where "reviewer bonus" is a number between 1 and 3 depending on how frequently the nominator performs reviews. So every new nomination would start out at the bottom of the list, just some of them would climb to the top at a faster rate.
The soft reviewer bonus system with appropriate leeway for new nominators seems a nice subtle nudge system less problematic than requiring QPQs. CMD (talk) 12:13, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Support. Maybe, we should add a fair weighting queue, similar to hat used in internet packet routing. The weight should be determined not only by the number of reviews done by the nominator, but on the article size, age of being in the queue, etc... the formula may evolve over time, but I agree that the number of reviews done by the nominator is a good factor. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:07, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Oppose
I think it's best to keep the main list by wait time alone, at least for long enough to work through the backlog that's been here since the articles were ordered in the reviw-to-noms way. But I do think it's helpful that we have the "highest priority" list of reviews at the top of the page. Having a couple different top-five lists could be really helpful. "Oldest articles by GA newbies", "oldest articles by people with a better than 1:1 review ratio", etc. -- asilvering (talk) 17:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Wait time is what has worked. I would like to see incentives remain outside sort order, such as through barnstars. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
We just got away from sorting by an opaque algorithm that did nothing to incentivize reviewing, especially of older nominations. Let's not go back to it. ♠PMC♠ (talk)12:20, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
I am in principle decidedly in favour of incentivizing reviewing, though less sure about this particular suggestion. I had no strong opinions on either changing the sort order to be by review ratio or changing it back, but both[11][12] had fairly strong consensus in favour at the time. The sort order by review ratio did incentivize me to review more than I otherwise would have, although this mainly took the form of encouraging me to pick up clearly-premature/unprepared/deficient nominations to close as unsuccessful rather than ignoring them as I otherwise might have—which may or may not be the kind of behaviour we want to encourage. TompaDompa (talk) 16:45, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
@TompaDompa At least personally, I do think that's the kind of behaviour we should encourage. The sooner obviously unprepared articles exit the queue the better. -- asilvering (talk) 20:57, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
To address PMC's point, the proposal incentivises keeping one's review-to-nom ratio high, which gives an indirect incentive to review (and that did work for me). It does not remove the current incentive to review older nominations (if you just review everything above your own nom, your nom will become the top one), but it makes it slightly less work for frequent reviewers. —Kusma (talk) 19:22, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
That was exactly the justification for the switch to the algorithm sort last time. There was strong recent consensus to change it back because it wasn't providing that incentive to most reviewers. I recognize that you're the admirable exception but it just doesn't seem to work for most people the way it did for you. ♠PMC♠ (talk)22:58, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
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Proposal 6: Swap Unreviewed nominations with Old nominations at Backlog Drives Progress
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Currently, there are 186 GAN nominations that are 3 months or older. Of these 186, 32 of them are older than 6 months. This means that over 70% of them (502 out of 688) are under 3 months old. While 688 nominations are a concern, the majority of them are not that old. I think that the Progress bars at the Backlog drives should track Old nominations (3 months and older) and the Total number of nominations like at Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Backlog elimination drives/March 2024. While nominations of older nominations have been started, 28 of them have open reviews started more than a month ago per Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations/Report. An open review does not guarantee that it will be completed. Therefore, I think tracking the number of old nominations in the progress table would be more encouraging. Cutting back the backlog from 8 months to 2 months would be a massive accomplishment. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 18:10, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
There's only a backlog if old nominations are in the queue. If many nominations are in the queue then this could (in theory) be a well-functioning, active process with quick turnover. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Per Bilorv. The backlog becomes an issue when people have to wait for months for somebody to come along and review their article. I think it's still important to keep track of overall unreviewed nominations in backlog drives, but refocusing drives on old nominations would produce a massive benefit for the whole project. --Grnrchst (talk) 13:07, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
I like this. It seems more in the spirit of eliminating the backlog. Our backlog isn't really noms in general, but the ones that linger. This would help address the concern about folks who dump a bunch of new noms periodically. They shouldn't be chastised for being active and productive. It's only a problem if no one reviews the noms for months. Grk1011 (talk) 15:38, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Support, since I don't see any potential problems that this change may cause, better visibility should at least not harm the situation, probably. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:08, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Oppose
Discuss
This would be more like the GOCE, which has the total articles needing copyediting, and a specified set of the oldest articles needing copyediting: the drive specifically lists the months being targeted—for example, the current drive is targeting the December 2022, January 2023, and February 2023 articles that need to be copyedited, and the initial 263 listed has been reduced to 164; however, the total articles needing copyediting has only been reduced from 2509 to 2461 because new articles are being tagged with a {{copyedit}} template. However, the count includes those that are already under review (there are 123 unreviewed that are 90 days or older, 11 of which are over 180 days). While old open reviews don't guarantee that they will be completed, the vast majority are completed, and the rest eventually find new reviewers, and more frequently during backlog drives due to the extra points offered. (That's less true this drive than in past ones, admittedly.)
However, in past reviews, a quickly dropping number of unreviewed nominations has proved a major encouragement. That hasn't been true this time, but it might in future. On the other hand, past GOCE drives have sometimes had to add in a new month when the original targets are used up (they also give a bonus for old articles), which seems to invite new energy to reduce the number again. Note that the total changes for GOCE are to the total outstanding copyedit requests, not the targeted ones, which is different from how we work (we show the reduction in those articles waiting for review). BlueMoonset (talk) 04:26, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
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Proposal 7: Organize nominations into sections based on months at GAN
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Inspired by Mike Christie's comment below, how about we organize all of the nominations based on User:SDZeroBot/GAN sorting? We could have four sections:
Nominations that are 6 months or older
Nominations that are older than 3 months old
Nominations that from 1 month to 3 months old
Nominations that are under 1 month old.
To prevent the sections from getting too large, we could keep the topics/subtopics under each section that applies. Therefore, the oldest nominations are first and are not buried in the GAN page. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 18:33, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Honestly I don't mind what happens on that sort page because I don't ever look at it. I find the main nomination page fine the way it is and it allows me to find articles in subjects I'm interested in. Grk1011 (talk) 15:41, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
It's a decent idea to highlight the problem of the backlog, but I imagine it would put people off reviewing by not being able to determine which articles they would be interested in or have expertise in. Unexpectedlydian♯4talk‽18:21, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Would break up the straightforward list-by-time structure. It's already evident which items are oldest, they're at the top of each list. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:42, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
I am only interested in reviewing certain categories of nominations, often small ones, and lumping them together with dozens or hundreds of video games, recent shows and music, and sporting events (big categories that I am not interested in) to organize by date instead would make these much harder to find. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:27, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
152 nominations that are between 91 to 179 days old (older than 3 months but less than 6 months)
209 nominations that are between 31 to 90 days (older than 1 months but not over 3 months).
I thought having each of these age sections and breaking them up by topic would be easier. Instead of merging them all together, especially the 209 between 31 days-3 months and 152 being between 3-6 months, it would be more feasible. If it's easier to group them by age instead and not worry about the subtopics, then that works too. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 19:30, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Many reviewers seem to check in specific topics, this would not help them and may hide even obscure the older nominations in that topic area. CMD (talk) 12:15, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
And who says that there has to be a single nominations page, that it has to be either the current layout or another? We can keep the current one as the "primary" nominations page, and have others that organize the same items with other layouts that we may find useful (such as order by nomination date, by article prose length, by users with the most present and past nominations to the least, by users with the most reviews to the last, by nominations/reviews proportion, etc). The WP:GAN page itself is 100% run by bots anyway and the same can happen with those, once set up those extra pages would require no active work from us to keep ordered. Cambalachero (talk) 20:13, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
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The major way WP:FAC trims their queue is by having un(der)reviewed nominations time out and fall out of the queue. The downside of this is obvious: it's unfair. A nominator waits in line only to be told to get back in line, starting at the back. I think there are some legitimate upsides though. Nominations that are in poor shape, or from editors that don't review much or are difficult to work with are probably most likely to fall down the queue, where under this proposal they could non-confrontationally be removed from the queue. We would add an automated message to the nominator that sadly their nomination wasn't reviewed due to an insufficient pool of reviewers, and that they can help by reviewing more GANs, or seek further feedback on the article at WP:Peer Review. The result of enacting this would be that reviewers' limited resources are spent reviewing relatively recently nominated articles, where the nominator is more likely to be around and have their sources handy. At FAC, the timeout is handled by coordinators based on momentum. I'd suggest here we instead set a time limit, perhaps 45 days. Ajpolino (talk) 18:35, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Support
As proposer. There's been a substantial backlog at GAN for as long as I can recall. I realize this would be a dramatic change, but perhaps it's time to consider trialing some dramatic options. Mike Christie's efforts to rebuild the GA bot and reorder the nomination list were a fantastic boon for the project, but revealed that tinkering with the list order probably isn't going to be sufficient to make a dent in our backlog. Similarly, backlog drives are great, and build community, but I very much doubt they can keep the backlog in check. I'm not saying this is the answer, but I think it's worth considering. Ajpolino (talk) 18:39, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Oppose
I agree that the result of this is that reviewers' limited resources are spent reviewing relatively recently nominated articles. I also think the result of it is that people with social capital in GA are at a huge leg up over people who don't and that's not the thing I wish GA would learn from FA. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:40, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I don't think it would be fair to have someone who has been waiting for a long time have their nomination removed at GAN. The nomination could not be reviewed for a various of reasons: potential reviewers don't have access to sources, length of article, topic of article etc. Nominators do not have control in how fast or how soon their article is reviewed. Removing older nominations and telling users to review other articles might discourage them for resubmitting their article. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 18:44, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Per Barkeep. Also, why would we punish people who wait for a long time because they do not find reviewers by waiting even longer? —Kusma (talk) 20:32, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
What is an editor of a specialized topic that takes months to find an interested editor supposed to do? Keep re-nominating and re-nominating in the hope that eventually one of the nominations won't time out? Get their topic permanently banned from nominations because it has timed out too much? I don't see how this helps the backlog nor the GA process. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:52, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
As well as specialised topics, this would discourage people from working on articles with large scope (e.g. vital articles). Long and large scope articles often linger for many months. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
per Barkeep & David Eppstein - also, selfishly, i worry that as someone who works on obscure topics, my future nominations would get stale in this system. sawyer * he/they * talk01:54, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
It's simply unfair to those who nominate in good faith, especially (as noted above) the less popular categories. One reason we have backlog drives is to add an incentive to review the nominations that have been sitting around the longest. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:31, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Per everyone above. This is something I already found absurd about the FAC process, it'd be even more punishing here. --Grnrchst (talk) 13:04, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Not to pile on more opposes but reviewers' limited resources are spent reviewing relatively recently nominated articles it's tautological that if we forbid older nominations that most nominations will be newer. But it doesn't address the backlog, unless we're hoping for a significant number of these people to get fatigued and give up. Thank you for bringing it up, this is worth discussing, but not a proposal I support. Mokadoshi (talk) 03:50, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Discuss
Now, if the proposal had been to time out stale reviews, particularly where the nominator has not been responsive, that could help clear some deadwood away. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:31, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Don't we basically do this already? I've checked in on a handful once the backlog drive started, and when I've let one run too long before I had someone pop in to remind us to close it. -- asilvering (talk) 04:34, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Without naming names, I've noticed at least 2 editors who have many noms but are not currently active. I'm sort of torn what the response might be. I feel like someone should start the review anyway with "I know you're inactive right now, but it's time for this review. You have 7 days to let me know if you will be able to respond, if not, this will be a quick fail and you can renominate when you're ready to return." Even when I don't have time to actively edit, it's never hard to check-in and respond to someone's quick question. If you don't have time to edit, you don't have time to have pending noms. Grk1011 (talk) 15:48, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Some nominated articles are GA quality without any further improvement, so nominator inactivity shouldn't be a quickfail reason. If someone is a significant contributor to an article that wouldn't normally be quickfailed then I believe they deserve a full review and feedback, even if that feedback is only something that can be actioned outside of the GA process or by another volunteer. — Bilorv (talk) 21:13, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Indeed. As a reviewer you can always write out the reasons for a fail (assuming none of the changes are addressed), then fail after a week or so if you don't hear anything back. -- asilvering (talk) 21:18, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
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Proposal 9: Group nominations based on months at GAN in each topic section
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I propose an adjusted version of my proposal #7. In each section and subsection (Agriculture, food and drink, Art and architecture etc.), we could group nominations based on the amount of months that each nomination has been at GAN while keeping the information that's already there in each nomination (description, review/ga ratio, nominator, date). For example:
Computing and engineering
3 months or older:
DOM clobbering - 10 November 2023
1 month or older:
Open-source license - 22 February 2024
Under 1 month old:
Texas City refinery explosion - 29 February 2024
Reinforcement learning from human feedback - 15 March 2024
I don't think anyone needs section headers to tell how many months ago November was, or whether a nomination from 29 February was under a month ago. You can just count, or look at a calendar. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:36, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Oppose, as I don't understand what is the difference between the sorting or categorizing proposed earlier? Isn't what was proposed in the other proposals the same? Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:11, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Discuss
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Proposal 10: Finish doing some or all of the things we agreed on last time we did this
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WP:GA2023 resulted in consensus to do several things that were never implemented:
Proposal 2023.4: Proposed model reviews
Proposal 2023.4A: Recognize exceptional reviews
Proposal 2023.5: Make the mentorship program more visible
Proposal 2023.15: Invitation
Proposal 2023.21: Make GA status more prominent in mainspace
Proposal 2023.30: Add a category separating GAs by month and/or year
Support as proposer and per consensus found at WP:GA2023. I had intended to revisit "Proposal 2023.15: Invitation" once the backlog drive ended and I believe it should be given priority. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I think the invitation to review would be most effective. I'm not quite sure what the criteria are for GA backlog drive invitations, but it would be good if we try to target a slightly different demographic. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 14:52, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
I mean, sure, but all of them require people to do the things. If you want to showcase model reviews, reward good reviews, be a mentor, or anything else, get on with it. I stepped forward with GAR and have been basically running the process for a year. It's no use vaguely handwaving at work and expecting that others (well, a certain someone else, let's be honest) will wave their magic wand and implement it, and complaining when they don't. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:33, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
After the initial somewhat complex plan to review the reviews stalled, I created a model review banner template and discussed it but never moved it to Template namespace or attempted to put it into practice. My thought was to have a template that someone could post to a review, the template would automatically add any marked review to a model review category, and optionally a bot could then auto-post a message to the reviewer's talk page. Rather than voting, the process could just be that if anybody removes the model review template, it stays off. Additionally, I drafted an invitation User:Rjjiii/Invitation that could be substed onto users' talk pages. I'm fine if any other editors want to modify that, push it to template space, or steal any ideas that seem usable. Rjjiii (talk) 18:18, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Love the Model Review idea. GAN reviewers are unsung heroes, and any effort towards recognizing them more effectively is good in my book. Fritzmann (message me) 13:55, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
This looks great! Some head-on solutions to the problem. The model review system would be a good reference for new reviewers, while the invitation would help us get those new reviewers in the first place. Averageuntitleduser (talk) 03:15, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
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Proposal 11: Collaborate with WikiProjects to make GAN reviewing part of their process
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Members of WP:MILHIST and WP:VG watch their respective GAN categories, and nominations in these categories are handled more efficiently than others. Editors familiar with the GA process should work with other major WikiProjects to increase the overall focus on GAN nominating and reviewing, incorporating the same strategies used by MILHIST and VG. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Sounds good. WikiProjects can help keep the backlog down in their specific sections of interest and hopefully bring new editors from those WikiProjects as well. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 22:16, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Oppose
There's nothing really to do here. Any Wikiproject interested in GANs can see them in Article Alerts already. At most Wikiproject sizes this would end up being small cliques reviewing each other even if this does work. (I personally sometimes avoid reviews that touch on areas I am one of the few regular editors in, fresh perspectives can be better.) CMD (talk) 12:19, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Unclear what action this would actually involve. The two big WPs already have enough interested people to handle their GANs well. The proposal won't help the rest. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:47, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Oppose, as there is currently no explanation on what does it mean and how can it be enforced, and what are the penalties of non-conformance, and what hampers from considering that already implemented, as the members of WP:MILHIST and WP:VG may already watch their respective GAN categories. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:13, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Discuss
Most WikiProjects are somewhere between dead and extremely understaffed, so this proposal only works for a few limited content areas. —Kusma (talk) 22:43, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Yeah. There is a reason that the two most active WikiProjects have the two most active GA sections. I'm not really sure what "strategies" Thebiguglyalien is thinking of, other than "have a WikiProject that isn't a graveyard". ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:28, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I had initially listed a few different things when writing this, but I decided to leave it open-ended. One thing I had in mind was to design a more streamlined template banner that lists current GA (and FA/PR) nominations in a given topic—many WikiProjects use this, but it can be improved upon, standardized, and made more prominent. Another was to make use of WikiProject talk pages to notify them of recent nominations (also something that could be automated). Medicine, film, biography, women, politics, television, anime, albums, and sports all have active WikiProjects with untapped GA potential, among others. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:38, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
WP:AALERTS seems to be active for most of those projects, which handles notifications; I'm not entirely sure how you can streamline something like Wikipedia:WikiProject Film/Article alerts, so I'd like to see a mockup of that. In any case, unless I've missed something, I haven't seen any reference to specific "strategies used by MILHIST and VG", so I'd like to know what that refers to. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:58, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Some wikiprojects may have standards for prose, structure, and sourcing that aren't exactly aligned with the larger community's (like basing most of an article around non-independent local newspaper quotes and primary stats). See e.g. the former roads project's historical overuse of primary map/government/non-independent sources and exhaustive route outlines, and the general tendency of enthusiasts to include every minor detail on a topic. I would worry about some projects developing OWNership over their GANs and green-lighting articles that a neutral reviewer would have problems with. We already get QPQ-like partnerships where editors nominate and pass dozens of each others' articles, what's to prevent even bigger walled gardens developing when overseen by a wikiproject? JoelleJay (talk) 02:32, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Lol do you have some kind of alert set up for wikispace mentions of "roads project" or are you just following me? JoelleJay (talk) 01:08, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Let's behave here and not start any drama. They are allowed to respond anywhere. It's not like GAN is a hidden page for admins only. Mitch32(it's youI like.)03:15, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
@Mitchazenia Maybe I'd assume more good faith if he didn't have a history of suddenly popping up at policy discussions slinging variations of this same personal attack at me and another editor.You two had better take it easy. If your actions push more groups into forks, you might have to start editing in the article space because there won't be anyone else left.[13]But you see, the nominator has a pattern of butting into topics that simply don't affect him because he doesn't contribute content to the encyclopedia.[14]What really gets me going are the policy wonks who don't write articles trying to set and enforce policies on those who do. If we're creating ridiculous policies, maybe AfD should be limited to those who have written a Featured Article.[15]Why do you care so deeply about this? NOR only affects editors who research topics and create articles based on that research. Judging by your contributions, that does not apply to you. So why do you care?[16]As I suggested here, the people who don't write articles sure do want to impose their strict interpretation of said policies on those who do write articles.[17]And they definitely have never sniffed FAC. Yet, they're perfectly comfortable dictating their narrow vision of policy to those of us who do produce content.[18]JoelleJay (talk) 00:04, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
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At FAC, reviewers can focus on specific criteria and let others handle the rest (e.g. one person checks sources, another reviews the prose, another looks at image licenses). At GAN, we expect one reviewer to do everything. This means that if I love editing prose but hate checking sources, or vice versa, I can't meaningfully contribute to the backlog. This also makes it more intimidating to start reviewing.
I propose we allow reviewers to opt into a Partial Review system, where they can complete the parts they're comfortable with and then pass the baton to someone else. Individuals are still encouraged to complete the full review if they're comfortable doing so. Ghosts of Europa (talk) 21:54, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I don't participate in GANs because I have a tendency to be thorough to the point of self-injury when writing/evaluating (non-technical) prose. On the other hand, I think I would enjoy tracking down sources. JoelleJay (talk) 02:49, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
This is a fantastic proposal, it directly addresses an issue a lot of people have been raising for a while. I do wonder how this could be implemented (maybe a dedicated noticeboard?) but opening the door for it will be worth it, I think. --Grnrchst (talk) 13:00, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Support, but maybe weight partials based off of the amount of partials of that category in the queue, if it’s all as airship says, “plz do spot checks” (sounds like me) maybe disallow any more partial reviews that leave out the spot check until that queue is reduced. Geardona (talk to me?) 04:17, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Support, I hope the "partial review" section doesn't end up being a long list of "pls do source spotchecks for me". To expand, if a person to share the load with isn't found within a suitable timeframe (a week or two?) then it is still on the original reviewer to fulfil the full review. This cannot be an "indefinite hold" mechanism. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:23, 24 March 2024 (UTC) EDIT: moved to oppose
I support this, with the caveat that any reviewer pair ought to be decided before the review begins. I think this will reduce the likelihood of the stall-out problems that oppose/neutral editors have mentioned. Regarding "I think this will cause problems"-type responses, I don't think the stakes here are so very high that we should be discarding ideas simply because they might cause problems. We can always do a test run of these new changes, then decide afterwards whether it was worth the change or not. It looks like many of the opposers think the problem will be "everyone clamouring for source checks", but we have three editors just in the votes above saying that's precisely what they'd like to do! We should at least give it a shot. -- asilvering (talk) 20:19, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
Oppose
This sounds chaotic; delay seems likely; and a key difference between GAN and FAC is GAN's single point of contact reviewer – it's already the case that others can add comments. I note that many of the "Discuss" comments below read much like "Oppose", too. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:51, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
This needs more thought. I would suggest to coordinate "reviewer teams" that can commit to a full review, but would not want people to start partial reviews without clarity on who will finish. —Kusma (talk) 17:03, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
At FAC, partial reviews often meant that editors avoided source reviews. I fear this would be the case if implemented at GAN. Z1720 (talk) 17:38, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Knowing how hard it is to get a reviewer to finish off a not-yet-complete review under the "Second opinion" rubric, I wouldn't want this to go forward as proposed. I would expect the number of incomplete reviews to balloon just like the number of unreviewed noms has. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:31, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
Oppose - not a bad idea, but I ultimately think that the benefits of this proposal are already covered by the "second opinion" section, while the drawbacks would be both novel and considerable. —Ganesha811 (talk) 13:59, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Unfortunately I don't think this will work. The GA criteria aren't really set up in the right way, and a GA reviewer really needs to have a broad-ish understand of the article. Someone doing prose check + someone else doing source checks + someone else doing formatting feels like it would get chaotic and lead to reviews taking ages. Unexpectedlydian♯4talk‽11:08, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
Would be curious to see a more detailed proposal, but at the moment opposing. As I noted below handling it partially is already possible in an ad-hoc manner, if someone wishes to test, although we still need a single editor to certify passing/failing. FAC is mentioned as an example, that process has coordinators who handle it. CMD (talk) 15:04, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
I feel that this would slow down the review process (when is it done) and folks wouldn't be as invested in their review. If this is something that we really want to see happen, I think the proposal would have to be a bit more detailed/specific. Grk1011 (talk) 20:23, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. The GA process is intentionally a lightweight process that should be quickly completed rather than doing a multistage multistep partial review process. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:14, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Discuss
Who decides the final fate of the review? Right now, it's the reviewer who opens the review page who has the final decision (unless they crap out). Is it whoever has the baton at the moment the one who gets to decide whether to approve, fail, or pass the baton? (We'd want to be sure that backlog drives encouraged the completion of partially complete reviews.) BlueMoonset (talk) 04:35, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
i think realistically it'd probably be fairly informal; once all the criteria has been met to the respective reviewers' liking, it'd be passed by one of them. sawyer * he/they * talk04:40, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
If we implement this, we should make it clear that it's optional and up to the original reviewer to invite, rather than turning every review into a free-for-all. ♠PMC♠ (talk)04:45, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Those interested in partially reviewing should post to the user talkpage or the relevant article talkpage with their comments. I have done so in the past when I see a GAN I want to comment on that isn't open. If it is open, comments can be added to that page. You still need someone responsible for closing the GAN. CMD (talk) 12:22, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Apologies for misunderstanding. Are you saying that your proposal suggests that the partial review may involve different users reviewing depending on their skills (such as reviewing the writing and facts, or checking the verifiability of the sources)? If so, should the second opinion be the alternative one? I don't quite understand here. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 13:38, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
I wouldn't oppose this but I worry that it would become chaotic, and as AirshipJungleman29 says it might turn into "please would somebody else do the source review and spotchecks". Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:03, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Now opposing, having been convinced by the pessimistic comments in this section and the oppose section that this is too likely to cause more problems than it solves. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:31, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Maybe we could have a subpage of the project where editors can add themselves as interested in doing source review and spotchecks? Then other editors who want to do the rest of the review could recruit one of them before opening the review. JoelleJay (talk) 16:28, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
I am not categorically opposed to this suggestion, but I think the risk of unintended consequences—as noted by several editors above—is very high and I am far from convinced that this would not just replace one type of problem with another (possibly even worse). TompaDompa (talk) 18:23, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
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Proposal 13: Barnstars / Thank You Messages for Reviewers
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When a GAN passes, ChristieBot posts an encouraging message on the nominator's talk page. For the reviewer, however, the end of the process is an anticlimax. I propose that ChristieBot also post an encouraging message / barnstar on the reviewer's talk page at particular milestones (e.g. "Thank you for your first GA review!", "Thank you for reviewing 5 GAs!"). People love positive reinforcement :) Ghosts of Europa (talk) 21:54, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Positive feedback is cheap and I believe it would be effectively. Could we have some new award (like Triple Crown), automatic or given out manually, for reaching milestones like 5 reviews, 10 reviews, 20 reviews etc.? — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC
Seconding Bilorv. I think part of why people don't do many reviews is that we put so much emphasis on being a "content creator", listing number of GAs, etc, but not on the processes that actually make any of that work. I started listing the reviews I've done on my userpage two years ago. In all that time, I can count the number of user pages I've seen with someone doing similar on one hand. Honestly, maybe it's only two editors. But people list their GAs all the time. -- asilvering (talk) 02:41, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Yes, I think this should be doable. If this passes it would be good to get agreement on the wording and layout of the various messages and barnstars; adding the functionality to ChristieBot shouldn't be that hard. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:10, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
If it's any consolation, Asilvering, I keep a list of my GA reviews but not my GAs. That being said, I don't really show it off to others but rather maintain the list for my own sake—largely because it helps with future reviews to easily be able to reuse phrasings for recurring pieces of (at times, necessarily lengthy) feedback, refer to relevant policies and guidelines that come up now and then, and so on. I similarly keep a list of my DYK nominations and reviews for this purpose as well as to keep track QPQ-wise. TompaDompa (talk) 17:45, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
It's not that I need any kind of consolation, I just think it's a clear statement of what the community values, that people list their GAs but not reviews, etc. -- asilvering (talk) 20:18, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Currently, writers of good articles can display the {{User Good Articles}} userbox, that displays a simple "This user has helped promote X good articles on Wikipedia." We can implement a fancy badge like those of Wikipedia:Service awards, but with the rules of having a number of reviews as well as own good articles to climb in the categories. Cambalachero (talk) 20:23, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
I've gone ahead and created File:Good article review icon.svg as a thing for GA reviews. I have also created {{GA review user topicon}}; if someone could create a userbox that would be great! Hopefully, a dedicated "award" you can only receive for reviewing will encourage people to do more reviewing? Or, potentially, advertise that reviews are needed? HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 01:39, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
@Asilvering: My thought process was that we should create a unique "award" which can only be achieved by doing a GA review. Do you think there would be protests if we swapped the logo, either to the one I created or something else entirely? Or should we create an alternative version for people to use, that uses a unique logo? HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 02:22, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
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Proposal 14: Backlog drives should address only a subset of the backlog
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I think we (by which I mean the regulars at GAN) are asking for contradictory things, all of which are good goals in themselves. We want
A small backlog and a short wait for reviews
No obligation to review in order to get one's own nominations reviewed
No incentive to do poor quality reviews
An environment that does not burn out editors who review a lot
I support all four of these -- I hesitate over 2, but I don't see why we should prevent an editor from reviewing one of Another Believer's nominations, though I would not review one myself. I don't think we can have all four at the same time. I think 1 is unresolvable because of these mutually contradictory goals. We currently have 2 and 3, and per the proposals above those look like they're going to continue to stand. So can we do anything about 4? I think backlog drives actually harm the motivation of some reviewers as they feel their good will is being taken advantage of.
So I propose that backlog drives are limited to some subset of what's at GAN: only R/G > 1, or something similar. That is, there would be a page showing which nominations are part of the backlog, and only reviews from that list would count towards the backlog barnstars.
I would prefer backlog drives that give bonuses to articles from a particular list while still allowing all reviews to count. For example, a list could be drawn up at the start of the drive of all submissions from editors with >1 review ratios, and taking one of those could get a bonus point. But while I'd prefer that, I wouldn't oppose the suggestion as written. -- asilvering (talk) 23:20, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Oppose
I disagree with this idea. If one of the oldest nominations happens to be from an user with R/G < 1, their nominations should not be ignored. Backlog drives should allow any nomination, not disqualify ones based on ratio. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 17:40, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
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Proposal 15: Ban the specific guy who dumped all those extra nominations on you from making more nominations
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I don't get why all the proposals above are so cagey. The opening statement tells us "dozens of nominations were dumped onto the list en masse". Why the passive here? "Were dumped"? No, there was a particular editor who dumped the nominations – TonyTheTiger. Why not ban him from nominating articles until he learns to respect volunteers' time and energy? It wouldn't fix the whole problem, but it would help a bit, right?
If the regulars here want say to something along the lines of "this section is for discussing GAN's higher-order systems, not individual editors' conduct, go to ANI or something" then sure, I'll respect that. But it seems to me a large part of the problem here does hinge on an individual editor's conduct.
No. It's annoying if you're one of the reviewers working on trying to bring down the backlog, but you can't penalize an editor for staying within the existing rules. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:28, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
I think this is the wrong venue for a ban from GAN; I am uncomfortable preventing an editor from nominating without a consensus at WP:ANI. Excluding TTT from the WikiCup (a totally optional game) is a lesser sanction that can just be done by consensus of WikiCup coords; it might actually be more suitable here. —Kusma (talk) 17:28, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
(Incidentally, could someone reading this consider quickfailing Heath Irwin under QUICKFAIL #5? Tony has immediately renominated the article without substantially addressing the issues raised in my review). – Teratix₵16:00, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Malcolm (Macbeth) really is a conspicuous example. I saw it nominated, looked at the article, and thought to myself "What am I missing? This is clearly nowhere near WP:Good article quality, yet it was nominated by an editor with hundreds of successful nominations". I pondered for a few days whether I should review it as an obvious WP:QUICKFAIL before being beaten to the punch by AirshipJungleman29. If this is in any way part of a pattern, something needs to be done—even if just a stern talking-to. TompaDompa (talk) 17:27, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
i concur with airship here. not even the slightest amount of due diligence was done with these nominations. sawyer * he/they * talk18:14, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Given that we all feel uncomfortable about TTT's input to the queue here, could a coordinator have a quiet chat with him sometime? Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:57, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Looking at the user's talk page, I see that within the last 24-hour time period (20:25 UTC on 22 March to 20:25 UTC on 23 March), no fewer than 25 "Failed GA" messages were left by (ChristieBot on behalf of) ten different reviewers. I suggest that it would at this point be more kind to simply remove all their outstanding nominations than to keep this up—and it would also be a better use of the community's time. TompaDompa (talk) 20:25, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
This behavior of immediately renominating failed articles until the reviewers get too tired or lazy and just pass it anyway was a big part of the reason Doug Coldwell's nominations became such a big problem. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:41, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
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Proposal 16: Cap open nominations for editors with a negative review-to-GA ratio
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One reason backlogs happen is that some editors nominate more articles than they review. This proposal would only cap the number of open nominations to editors who have more successful good articles nominations than they have reviews. This would hopefully encourage them to review articles instead of adding to the backlog. After all, the limit will be lifted if they review articles. The ratio is already tracked on WP:GAN, and I hope this won't be too hard to implement. If an editor doesn't want to review articles, they can still nominate a set number of articles (maybe 5?) and wait until a review is finished on one of them before their next nomination. This proposal would also "reward" editors who review as they would not be limited in how many open nominations they have.
I think this is more than fair, even with a set number as low as 5. I'd also support doing this only with a "soft" cap like we have on 20+ submissions currently. -- asilvering (talk) 23:16, 23 March 2024 (UTC) (response edited in bold and strikethrough -- asilvering (talk) 18:55, 27 March 2024 (UTC))
If we don't do straight QPQ, let's do something at least. I'm very sorry that this will inconvenience people who don't want to review, but the thing is, GAN is a commons. If people don't take out equal to what we're putting in, the thing collapses under its own weight. The oppose argues that slowing certain prolific nominators down doesn't improve Wikipedia, but you know what else doesn't improve Wikipedia? Articles sitting waiting for feedback for nine months. ♠PMC♠ (talk)02:10, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Making it more tedious for Epicgenius and Chiswick Chap to nominate articles for GAN does not improve Wikipedia. —Kusma (talk) 23:20, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
I'm sympathetic to this proposal, but this would disproportionately affect our best reviewers as well as our best content creators. I'm not going to speak for Chiswick Chap, but if I were him, I'd feel insulted by a measure like this. He's done as many reviews as the current five supporters of this proposal combined, and there's a level of absurdity in penalizing him for not doing enough. This proposal would quell many contributors who both write and review just because even if they're good at reviewing, they're better at writing (the main thing we're actually supposed to be doing here). This is before considering the fact that just mathematically, it's an immense effort to move a ratio at all once both numbers are high enough. Suggesting a possible alternative in the discussion below. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 04:45, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Our existing soft cap system feels better than a hard cap. Perhaps the soft cap could be tweaked, but that doesn't seem to be what is being proposed. CMD (talk) 06:52, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Both GAs and reviews are valuable to the project, and must be treated as such. Rescues at GAR deserve the same status, by the way. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:07, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Per SusunW’s comments. I don’t see any point in limiting what good writers can nominate. I would prefer something like prop 14, which I suggested, because it rewards prolific reviewers without penalizing other nominators. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:29, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
Nominators of GAs are contributing to the encyclopedia and the GA process, not taking away from it. I don't like these proposals about limiting number of active nominations because it tinkers with statistics rather than looking at the root cause (people do not feel sufficiently qualified or valued for reviewing): a nominator just starts playing a game where they hold 10 nominations back until their current nominations are reviewed, so the real GAN queue is 10 more than the official figures and the "backlog" has been "reduced" by 10. — Bilorv (talk) 21:51, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
Per § Proposal 16 and 16b in March 2024 backlog. Adding caps merely hides the problem of not enough reviewers without addressing it, and having a (badly and confusingly described) hard threshold for the cap permanently locks out certain prolific contributors without in any way incentivising them to perform the ridiculous number of new reviews that would be needed to get past the threshold. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:21, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Oppose, as the GA is a lighweight process and some reviews may be unfair, so the nominator should not suffer from the reviewers' incompetence, unless there is a multistage appeals process, which, again, is a rate-limiting step. It should not be a negative review-to-GA ratio, but a ratio of nominations and reviews, and it cannot be negative, it can be say, more than 2 or less than 2, but not negative, since neither the numerator nor the denominator can be negative: you cannot have -1 reviews or -2 nominations. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:20, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
i'm very sympathetic to this idea, as there are a few editors with zero reviews and 60+ GAs, or even 160+ GAs, which makes me not want to review their nominations at all, and i know i'm not alone with that sentiment. however, Kusma is right that this would hinder some of our most prolific GA nominators (Epicgenius, CC, Sammi Brie, etc). i'm undecided on this as of now. sawyer * he/they * talk00:57, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
It doesn't hinder them from writing good articles (lowercase), if that's what they want to do. It does make it harder to get the little green award on the articles they do write, unless they want to support the process that generates those little green awards. -- asilvering (talk) 03:24, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
(if you didn't notice, i did end up putting my name in the support section lol) yeah i've come around to agreeing with this. all three of them are pretty good about reviewing anyways, so i'm sure it would work out. any other editors with huge numbers of GAs and very few or no reviews should certainly pick up the slack; i'm sure we can all agree on that. sawyer * he/they * talk03:27, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
I don't give a rats about getting a "little green award". My motivation for submitting articles for review is very simple. They are improved by collaboration. Other eyes give input and perspectives that you might not have thought of and peer review is basically broken. IMO, which counts for absolutely nothing, imposing reviews will result in people no longer submitting articles and in turn a reduction in article quality. Maybe that's unimportant to others, maybe the focus is better directed at newbies trying to learn how to present better articles and just considering experienced editors' work "good enough". I have said many times on this page that reviewing and writing are not the same and in the real world, writers write, proofreaders verify/correct, and editors review. WP requires all of these to be done by a single person. Reviews are agonizing to me. It takes me an entire day or more to review any article. Critiquing someone else's work means that I will write and rewrite and rewrite yet again, each and every observation for clarity and to ensure that I am not inserting my own biases into recommendations. I force myself to review, but it is genuinely taxing. If we arrive at agreement to impose QPQ or a specific number of reviews, in all honesty, I will just stop submitting anything, because that would be too much pressure and cause me stress. Since my engagement on WP at all is to learn and to de-stress by doing something I enjoy, it would defeat the purpose. SusunW (talk) 18:37, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
To be clear, SusunW, this is the "cap nominations by noms with low review ratio" proposal, not the "quid pro quo" proposal. Anyone who doesn't want to review for any reason could still nominate articles for GA, just not 20 or so at a time. -- asilvering (talk) 22:43, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
asilvering I monitor what I submit (For the record, one of my last GA reviews was done by you, because you specifically asked me to submit the article. I had not done so, because I still have what in my mind is too many outstanding articles awaiting review. I was a bit disappointed by your comment above about collecting awards, because it makes unfair assumptions about nominators' intent.) I know from experience that women's articles sit for a long time before being picked up for review. I've had more than one exceed the term of a pregnancy. I cannot control how soon someone reviews one of my articles so saying I can't nominate if I have X outstanding or if I haven't reviewed X articles submitted by someone else, basically equates to just don't nominate articles. This discussion in a way seems counter-productive, like the goal is to punish content creators, unless they are prolific reviewers and to assume the worst motives for why they submitted an article for review. The cap and QPQ issues are related and inseparable to my mind. I am not trying to be argumentative, at all, just pointing out that there are many more ways to look at any situation than in-line from totally bad to totally good. Whatever is decided will be and I will just have to adjust what I do accordingly. SusunW (talk) 23:18, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
Sorry, about that. I didn't mean to imply that all nominators are only after the awards and get nothing else out of it, and I do feel very strongly that no one should be required to do reviews to be eligible for them themselves. But from your reply I see that my comment was also more unkind than I intended, and I apologize for that. I have more to say in response, but I need to step away from wp for a minute and wanted to get this apology out first. -- asilvering (talk) 00:41, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
Alright, having given it some more thought, my earlier position on this was both wrongheaded and inconsistent with my stated views (both in this wider discussion and elsewhere), so thank you for calling me on it. I've outright said that even mass-nominations are a symptom of the backlog, not the cause of it, and I stand by that. (Except, obviously, here, where I wobbled.) Among other reasons, I'm sure that this comes from frustration with how we put prolific content creators on a pedestal, then wonder why other tasks on the encyclopedia don't get done. Why don't people do more GA reviews? Why don't more people help at AfC? Why don't people run for adminship? Come on, folks: we know exactly why. In general, I think we ought to do whatever we can do to emphasize that we need all kinds of different hands to keep this ship afloat, which is why I still support a soft cap. But, obviously, "all kinds of different hands" does include people who only ever write articles and never do anything else, so when I'm being honest with myself, I don't support changes that make that more difficult.
I do wish more editors approached GAN as you do, as a collaboration that improves the encyclopedia, rather than a stamp of approval or an award to set in a trophy cabinet. It's much more fun to review when both nominator and reviewer agree that that's the point. -- asilvering (talk) 19:30, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
asilvering I appreciate your thoughtful response. I honestly don't know why others don't do things. I know why I don't. In general, don't like telling other people what to do. I am also not competitive (except with myself) and recognize my limitations. I am just not good with certain things. I agree that I don't support changes in general that make it harder for people to participate, but I also know that balance has to be struck to prevent chaos from reigning. That's why I said below to PMC that I don't completely object to a QPQ being imposed. I don't fully support the idea either because it will impact participation and quality, and won't solve articles sitting for months without a review, but if the community decides to do that I'll deal with it. (Somewhere else you posted that you keep track of your reviews. I wish I had thought to do that. I only keep track of articles so that I have an easy way to go back to them. I am horrible with Wiki-technology and the search engine. If on the other hand I have the links on my page, I can immediately pop to the one that I know tells me how to code multiple harv refs in one format, the one that tells me how to format an e-book with no page numbers, or the one that gives me historical context that I think is relevant to another article.) SusunW (talk) 20:35, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
One reason I don't maintain a tracking page for my reviews is that a noticeable fraction of my reviews are negative and I don't want to show off other editors' subpar work. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:48, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Working on it -- it's been a while since I've done one and it looks like I'll need to tweak the code a bit. I'll leave a note on your talk page when it's done; this weekend I would expect. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:04, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
I'd be more open to a proposal that looks at total number of reviews over review ratio. Nominators who have never reviewed would be capped at X nominations. Once you've done Y reviews, you're allowed another open GAN, and every Y reviews thereafter you'd be allowed another GAN until you hit a hard cap of Z. A measure like this—or some further variation if anyone has another idea—would mean that the penalty on prolific reviewers would be minimal, and it would be an even greater incentive for other nominators than just keeping it one above their GA count. For many low-review high-nomination editors, the ratio is skewed enough they'll wonder why they should bother; this would give them a simple attainable goal to open up more GANs, encouraging them to do a few. It would also involve a hard cap, which is something I've opposed in the past but am willing to compromise on. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 04:45, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
i think i'd be alright with this alternative, and you do make a good point about the sheer difficulty of improving one's ratio once one's numbers are high enough. sawyer * he/they * talk04:53, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Done. I considered making it a proposal right away, but I wanted to see if there was any feedback first (or if I was just wildly off base). Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:26, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
An article doesn't have to have GA status. Editors with negative review ratios have contributed to the backlog, no matter how much they have reviewed: taking Chiswick Chap as an example, they have 604 GAs and 356 reviews. That means 204 reviewers were nice enough to take time away from their own projects and interests, both on-wiki and in real life, to reward CC without CC taking the time to assess a GAN. I would tell CC that, while I thank them for reviewing so much, it isn't enough and they need to either stop nominating articles until they have reviewed 204 articles or stop nominating GANs. I would tell the same thing to all editors with negative review ratios, especially the most prolific ones. Z1720 (talk) 14:44, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Z1720, the way you're describing the process, it sounds like you're saying that nominating to GA is a burden, and that reviewers are benevolent for donating their time. But that doesn't add up. If nominating an article isn't worthwhile, that implies we're not actually accomplishing anything by reviewing either. The whole purpose of reviewing is to facilitate the nominating and promoting. The logical conclusion to your concerns wouldn't be to waste more time reviewing, it would be to shut down GA. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:05, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
@Thebiguglyalien: Reviewers are benevolent for donating their time, as without reviewers, nominators do not get the green badge. That doesn't mean nominating an article isn't worthwhile: nominating GAs allows an article to improve and enforces standards across the encyclopedia. GA status also incentivizes editors to improve articles to get rewards. GAN's struggle isn't a lack of nominations, it's a lack of reviews. Editors on Wikipedia do not want to review so we need to put in processes that encourage editors who nominate GAs to spend less time writing articles and more time reviewing. Z1720 (talk) 18:09, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
I don't see why the people who review and the people who nominate necessarily have to be the same? Would we not get the desired effect if we managed to motivate people who are not interested in nominating to review other editors' nominations? TompaDompa (talk) 18:37, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
Exactly, TompaDompa Both you and Chiswick Chap in his comments below make excellent points. The project is about quality, this proposal to me seems to be shifting that focus to quantity and narrowly valuing only writers and reviewers. Many editors with many varied skills improve our quality. Encouraging those who may not think they can contribute to the project because they don't want to/prefer not to write is a good solution. Sometimes we focus so narrowly on an idea that we miss the obvious. SusunW (talk) 18:59, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
In a perfect world, there would be a prolific reviewer for every prolific nominator, but lengthy experience has shown us that there are simply not that many of those people. We have to work with what we have. ♠PMC♠ (talk)23:53, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
Premeditated Chaos, you made me chuckle. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need reviewers as every single article would be well-written, would be completely objective, would use reliable sources and be verifiable, be free of plagiarism and would have multiple images that did not violate copyright restrictions. But, working with what we have, i.e. volunteers and humans, means that we have imperfections and people who do what they are interested in doing and what they find rewarding. The suggestion above that WP should "encourage editors who nominate GAs to spend less time writing articles and more time reviewing" goes completely against human nature. I write what I write because there are gaps in our knowledge. Reviewing does nothing to fill those gaps, nor does it offer any guarantee that my own articles will be reviewed. Perhaps the only solution is to take away the award aspect and truly convert the process to an actual peer review, but I am pretty sure that will never happen. Bottom line, any rule we impose will de-incentify someone, and motivate someone else. Each of us must decide for ourselves how we react to that. SusunW (talk) 17:33, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
It's unfortunate that we disagree on this. As I've said above under proposal 3, my view on the matter is very simple. Editor time is precious; it's the only resource we have. If you're doing something that asks for someone else's time (ie, making a GAN), I think you should be willing to put your time in for someone else in return. I don't think that goes completely against human nature, and it makes me a bit disappointed to see that you view this kind of teamwork in that way. ♠PMC♠ (talk)21:40, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
I don't actually think we disagree. While I spend a lot of time writing, I also spend a lot of time helping other editors in various ways and working on articles I didn't create because we are all trying to build a quality encyclopedia. I divide the time I spend reviewing between people asking for help with new creations, GA and FA nominations, for the latter reviewing more than I have ever nominated. I don't oppose doing a QPQ, but I don't think it will be a silver bullet and solve the problems. I do think it will act to discourage nominations and it will do nothing to eliminate certain articles waiting for months to be reviewed. I think we need to continue to look for solutions, which encourage participation across the board. SusunW (talk) 05:21, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Okay, what would your proposed alternate solutions be? I would be happy to support anything that I thought would encourage new reviewers to jump in and keep reviewing, or encourage existing reviewers to review more without burnout. ♠PMC♠ (talk)05:37, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
I think if it were simple, we'd have found a solution before. IMO we have to look outside the box, so to speak. Most of the ideas here are focused on incentives to encourage people who are already involved with the project to review or to limit nominations. As Femke said above, I think we need to look for new demographics. Maybe the mentorship program is the answer, maybe reaching out to WikiProjects is the answer, maybe reaching out to WikiEd? I know a lot of Projects have guidelines and help to teach people how to write articles, find sources, etc. Maybe they could be encouraged to teach people how to review? I also know that quite a few schools have incorporated WP into their course outlines and have students work on articles (in my experience, sometimes merely updating existing articles and sometimes working on new ones). Perhaps those programs could be made aware that reviewing expertise is also needed. The problem with implementing any idea is that we each have limited time so if we implemented an outreach scheme, it would mean giving up time for writing or reviewing and would require people to be willing to do it. Would it work? No clue. SusunW (talk) 15:39, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
I also think that having nine-month-old nominations is bad for the project because newer editors, who don't understand why that article is sitting on the GAN page for so long, might get discouraged from nominating an article. This is a missed opportunity to welcome that editor to GAN and that new editor might leave Wikipedia. I would rather have less nominations because prolific GA nominators who contributed to the backlog left, as that would lower the number of nominations and would make GANs from newer editors more prominent. Z1720 (talk) 14:44, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
@Chiswick Chap: Courtesy ping to you, since I mentioned you above. While I stand by my comments, including what I would tell you, there are many editors I could have used as an example instead and I would tell them the same thing. Z1720 (talk) 14:50, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
No doubt. See 'Oppose' above for my view. This thing about ratios is very recent; GA has never had QPQ, and the reasons why are discussed in some of the other proposal threads. An attempt to enforce quasi-QPQ, when QPQ has never been the policy, and retrospectively to boot, is hardly good practice. An alternative point of view is that there are many ways of contributing to the project, from gnomishly fixing categories and parameters to writing articles, reviewing, rescuing articles at GAR, maintaining existing GAs, and so on and so forth. It could be said that all of these are additive, each contributing in a small but useful way to the project; and I believe I've done some of all those things at various times. The idea that some of them are somehow "negative" is frankly unconstructive. We wouldn't think of "punishing" Wiki-gnomes for upping their edit-count without contributing citations to articles, or of measuring their usefulness by dividing their citations by their edits, for instance. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:45, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
The difference between almost all other editing and a review process like GAN is that GAN by definition is a two-person project requiring someone else's time. Pointing that out doesn't mean I think submitting a GAN is a negative, and I'm certainly not trying to punish anyone for wanting their articles reviewed. But it's a fact of life that the process asks for the time and energy of another person. In my opinion, if you're asking someone to take the time to do something for you, you should be willing to pay back your time to the process for someone else. ♠PMC♠ (talk)05:45, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
I don't even understand what a "negative review-to-GA ratio" is supposed to mean. A ratio is something that you get by dividing. If you divide reviews by GAs, you will always get a positive number (or zero, if there are absolutely no reviews). For these numbers, a negative ratio is literally impossible. From the context of the discussion, I get the impression that people are actually discussing the difference, reviews minus GAs? That is not a ratio. Also it's not obvious to me why it's the right formula and why it should be a hard limit. It's not a zero-sum game. Reviewers and nominators both help improve the encyclopedia. That's a lot more important than getting reviewing and nominating badges. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:50, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
I understand that; I'm just trying to interpret the spirit of Z's proposal rather than focus on the mathematical accuracy of the phrasing. If this ends up being implemented in the guidelines, I'm sure it can be rewritten to reflect how a ratio works. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 14:22, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
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Proposal 16b: Set a cap on nominations and reward reviews by increasing it
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As Z1720 said in Proposal 16, the backlog develops when editors nominate more articles than they review. This proposal would set a cap (to be determined) on how many nominations one nominator can have. For every certain number of articles reviewed (also to be determined), the reviewer would have their nomination cap raised by one. This would continue until reaching a hard cap of open nominations (presumably the current soft cap of 20).
I'm proposing this as an alternative to Proposal 16b, as this would lessen the negative effect on high output editors who both write and review, and it would make it easier for editors who currently have skewed negative ratios to get back in, instead of asking them to do dozens of reviews to lift a cap (which is more likely to just make them leave). It also encourages editors to get a higher review count overall instead of keeping it just one higher than their GA count. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:25, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
I think this is quite a gentle way of getting more reviews and making the social conventions clear (i.e. please try to review at least a bit). I think I'd like the maximum cap to be a bit higher, because I would not want to stop people like Chiswick nominating core articles :). —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:05, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Support, but it should not be 20, it should be twice amount of reviews than nominations, as suggested long ago, this suggestion should become mandatory less a certain theshold value, e.g. max_nominations = 5+(reviews_done/2)Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:22, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Oppose
For the same reason as my opposition to 16, above. I no longer think it's a good idea to prevent good writers from nominating; I think we should be rewarding prolific reviewers in a way that does not directly restrict nominators. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:20, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
I know that I played with options to implement this in the discussion below, but on reflection, I think Mike and David are both right. Personally I enjoy reviewing and do not expect to ever hit any of these caps (I am slow at writing articles and usually my nominations get picked up fairly quickly). Any tinkering with these caps would not reward me, but punish a few excellent writers. —Kusma (talk) 21:56, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
The real issue is people with lots of GAs who do not review at all, not people who have a legacy pile of GAs from a decade of work. We could allow people to have as many open nominations as they have made reviews: that would make it clear that reviewing is expected. We could even go for "limit of open nominations = number of reviews made in the last 12 months" to ensure people can't just live off their old reviews forever. I generally oppose hard caps, though: all they do is make the backlog move to prolific nominators' userspaces. —Kusma (talk) 09:53, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Trying to understand the logistics of this proposal, so sorry if this question is dumb: Hypothetically, let's say the cap is five nominations. Then, if an editor reviews one article, so the cap is lifted to six. A second article lifts the cap to seven, and this continues until the cap is 20 nominations because the editor has reviewed 15 articles. Since that editor has completed 15 reviews, would that editor be forever able to nominate 20 articles at a time because they reviewed 15 articles? Z1720 (talk) 14:19, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
No, I believe the user will only be able to nominate 20 articles after reviewing 15. So, if we simplify this, there would be four nominations for every three reviews. That's how I would respond to your query. WolverineXI(talk to me)20:42, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
From my interpretation of Wolverine XI's response, this would be similar to a QPQ system, but instead of reviewing 1 article to nominate one article, an editor would review 3 articles to nominate 4 (per WXI's example). Z1720 (talk) 20:56, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Indeed with "forever" that is not a great system. Better to look only at recent (last 12 months) reviews. —Kusma (talk) 21:00, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
This is correct, though I don't think raising the cap after every review would accomplish much. Like I said in the comments of the previous proposal, "Nominators who have never reviewed would be capped at X nominations. Once you've done Y reviews, you're allowed another open GAN, and every Y reviews thereafter you'd be allowed another GAN until you hit a hard cap of Z." I'd expect Y to be something closer to maybe five reviews, so that you have to hit five reviews then your cap is six, ten reviews and your cap is seven, and so on. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:53, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
@Thebiguglyalien, am I reading you right, that this proposal would require everyone who wants to submit more than x nominations at once to first perform y reviews, both of which are hard numbers that don't have any relationship whatsoever to the nom's overall ratio? So if I hypothetically had 0 GAs, and someone else hypothetically had 400, and neither of us had any reviews, we'd both need to perform the same number of reviews to have the cap raised/removed? After which point no further reviews are obligatory? -- asilvering (talk) 20:20, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Correct. Writing GAs and reviewing GAs are both valuable, and I won't support any proposal that creates a negative incentive against writing GAs. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:22, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Hm, I thought this was overly complicated, but I was misreading it earlier as a kind of moving target. Something like "do 5 reviews to lift your hard cap of 5 concurrent noms, after which point you can have an unlimited number (with soft cap of 20)" does actually appeal to me. I don't like qpq and I don't like the idea of forcing people to do things they hate or aren't good at. But provided it's a small enough number (like 5), I can see it more like "you should have some experience of both ends of this process if you want to be doing a lot of nominations", which I like. Maybe someone who thought they'd hate it finds they actually like reviewing, maybe they fight their way through the 5 and gain only a deeper appreciation of reviewers' time, either would be a positive outcome. -- asilvering (talk) 20:33, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Question: if the cap set by this proposal were to be set to, e.g. 5, would that mean I'd have to do 77 reviews before I could ever nominate another article again? (I've admittedly 82 GAs, no reviews – would review things, its just that I am awful at reviewing!) BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:10, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
My reading of the proposal as written is that it is for open nominations, and thus if it was set for eg. 5 you could nominate five articles at a time, and after one of those five has its review completed, you could nominate a new article and so on ad infinitum. CMD (talk) 18:45, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
I am completely confused by this proposal and how it would work. As it stands, this proposal assumes that reviewing articles somehow means that one's own articles will also be reviewed, but there is no guarantee of that. It also assumes that imposing rules for reviewing will somehow impact the number of nominations. Let's pretend I have reached the cap of articles I can nominate. Say I review 5 GA in a month and none of my articles are reviewed. I review 5 more the next month and again none of my articles are reviewed. This continues for the next 6 months. In that amount of time, I will have reviewed 30 articles, had 0 reviewed, and would be unable to submit any other article. Each of the persons whose articles I reviewed, whether they reviewed an article or not, would be able to submit more articles, but I would not. Also say that during this time, 100 new articles were nominated by other people. The takeaway is that number of files I reviewed has nothing to do with how many articles are nominated. In the example, we would still have a backlog and I would still be barred from nominating, although I reviewed far more than I nominated. Thus the question I would be faced with is am I willing to review and never be able to submit another article? It seems completely illogical to me that anyone would repeatedly do something that offers no direct benefit to themselves. Perhaps the indirect benefit as part of building WP would be enough, but I kind of doubt that. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the proposal? SusunW (talk) 15:09, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
@SusunW: You are totally correct. Take me for example: I have four GAs and twelve reviews. I now have three articles in the biology and medicine section that need to be reviewed. And, for reference, I once reviewed three articles in a single day in an attempt to reduce the backlog, but to no success. I think I'll just keep reviewing, because it appears to help people a lot. My reviews are also quick, which many of the regulars struggle with. As a man of the GA people, I'm willing to give up some of my valuable time in order to review articles. I also believe you shouldn't benefit from everything; sometimes you have to make sacrifices for others, even if they don't thank you (which happens quite a lot unfortunately). WolverineXI(talk to me)17:26, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for your input Wolverine XI. I appreciate your insights. I fear your choice of topic, like mine, probably means we must be patient in expecting reviews. I personally think it is admirable that you are willing to spend so much time reviewing. I also don't think there is enough time left in my lifetime to fill all the gaps in our knowledge that I would wish to address. I am truly weighing whether it is best for me to just focus on writing and bypass asking for input. It seems weird that in a collaborative project, collaboration to improve article quality is being limited by rules which discourage writing, but it is probably just that I misunderstand the intent of the proposals. SusunW (talk) 17:56, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
If I could get three reviews done in a day I'd do a lot more reviews. Usually (except for quick-fails) a review takes two solid days of my editing time, one for content and one for source checking, and then maybe another day's worth of effort later, more spread out, for back-and-forth with the nominator. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:55, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
Exactly David Eppstein. I probably average 2-3 days just to do the review and then at least another day or two in the collaborating phase. I have maybe done only 1 review in a single day, but even that took me the entire day, like 8+ hours. SusunW (talk) 20:03, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
@SusunW, I don't think that's the case - have a look at the more recent comments higher up in the thread. It looks like, if we assumed 5 reviews was the interval, once you've reviewed 30 articles you'd be able to submit 11 concurrent articles. So if your initial nominations were still in the queue, six months later, having reviewed 30 articles, you'd have been able to submit 6 more articles than you were able to initially. I gather from your comments in general that this still wouldn't appeal to you, at least not at an interval of 5, but it's not quite as restrictive as you had in mind. -- asilvering (talk) 20:41, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Asilvering Thanks for trying to explain it, but I still don't get how this would work. If the cap is 20 and I submitted 20, but none of my articles have been reviewed, I am still at the cap, no matter how many articles I have reviewed. (I totally do not understand how anyone could nominate 20 "at the same time" as is stated above, but if someone said it happens, it must happen somehow.) Or are you saying that 20 is fuzzy and not a real limit, so for some people it could be 20, for others 25 and for still others 30? That seems incredibly confusing. How you would ever know you were at the limit if it's a moving target? My cap in my head is 10 and those will be submitted over a course of many months. Once I hit that cap, unless an article I nominated is reviewed, I don't submit anything, no matter how much I think an article would benefit from collaboration. I don't see how increasing the limit with X reviews solves the problem, as it seems to me that instead of 10 pending reviews I could have an endless number of nominations waiting for review, as long as I keep reviewing, without any guarantee my submissions would ever be looked at. Maybe I'll try to look at it again later, it's 104F/40C and too hot to think. Going to go try to find a/c somewhere. SusunW (talk) 21:21, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
@SusunW, this discussion as a whole was prompted by a single person submitting about 60 or so articles all at the same time! So indeed, it does happen. When you scroll through the list of nominations, you'll sometimes see some are hidden beneath a cut - this is because the nominator has more than 20 articles in the queue at once. As for the cap, the idea here is that everyone who has done 0 reviews start with a hard cap of some number (say, 10), and beyond this they can't nominate any more articles until one of those reviews finishes and they have a new slot open. But by doing reviews, you'd get your personal cap raised. Let's say the interval is 5 reviews, and you've already done 15 reviews. That means you've hit the interval 3 times, and can have 3 more nominations in the queue at the same time. So someone who hasn't done any reviews will have a cap at 10 open nominations, but you'd have a cap at 13 nominations, and someone who had done 50 reviews would have a cap of 20 open nominations. That's the general idea here as I understand it. -- asilvering (talk) 21:38, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
A basic challenge for the GA system is that it requires people to write reviews, a task which is both somewhat thankless (though there are reward proposals above) and somewhat difficult. Editors are almost by definition not fully informed about the subjects of articles they did not work on; they often find copyright and image licensing difficult; they may not have been good at English grammar at school; they likely do not have access to books and other offline sources. We already have Earwig which does quite a good job at identifying possible copyvios. Tools could be developed to find wobbly grammar; to suggest possibly-missing sections (e.g. a species article with no Taxobox, History of taxonomy, Description, Ecology, or Interaction with humans section might be incomplete); to check image licenses; and perhaps (with an AI engine?) to note that a source does not seem to cover a claim cited to it. No doubt with suitable research effort several other review tools might be developed. The effect would be to lower the barrier to writing a competent review, making it a less daunting prospect for many editors.
There's already a page on how to review good articles. It is also necessary to have some familiarity with the subject matter when reviewing articles. The grammar tool could be useful, but there are already a ton of online resources (like ChatGPT), so I don't think Wikipedia needs to make one. You may be barking up the wrong tree. WolverineXI(talk to me)20:21, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Not going to oppose more tools, but they should not be relied upon to this extent. Earwig does a niche job as an indicator, but it very often fails to identify copyvios and it's concerning when a review merely notes earwig was used without elaborating. CMD (talk) 04:53, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
Clearly the choice of tools in the kit is completely open (no specific technology is mandated); and tools can be developed one at a time over a period of years. Each tool will need to be chosen for development on its likely costs and benefits. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:24, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
More tools would be great, but it's dangerous when they are seen as a way to replace human labour. Earwig is a net positive IMO but as Chipmunkdavis notes it shouldn't be the only way a reviewer tries to identify copyvio (you need to check sources, which might not all be webpages). A review is a skilled process and the fundamental checklist is the criteria. I'd love to see a tool that suggests missing sections, but hate to see a reviewer writing "This tool says you need a 'History' section" if the article already contains everything a history section would but as part of a different structure that suits that topic. — Bilorv (talk) 21:51, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
Depends on what do we mean by "tools". If it is to automate the whole process, then no, if we follow that logic then just place bot reviews and the backlog is solved. But something that can be welcomed is to add tools that do not replace the human work but give it a framework. The "blank page syndrome" can overcome reviewers as well as writers, and that's what you have when you start a good article review, a blank page. Cambalachero (talk) 20:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
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Proposal 18: Talk page messages for prolific GA content creators
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
In Wikipedia:Good article nominations/Instructions, all we have about reviewing articles once you nominate one is (Optional): Consider reviewing two nominations for each one that you nominate. This does not imply quid pro quo. This simply means that helping to review articles will help the Wikipedia community by cutting down the backlog as a way to help pay it forward. It may not be something a lot of people consider. So what if we sent a message to the talk pages of people who have ten or more GAs that haven't reviewed any articles, like one that I made at User:Relativity/Reviewanarticle? This attempt will likely be futile, but who knows? It's possible that someone will want to help. In any case, it would draw more attention to GAN. And there's not much harm in sending talk page messages. Relativity 01:50, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
Good article nominations
Hello, Relativity! I noticed that you've contributed many Good articles to Wikipedia, and thank you for all you've done to help improve Wikipedia's content. I don't know if you know or not, but there are currently 496 articles in the Good article nominations queue that are waiting to be reviewed. That's a significant backlog, and nominators are in need of high-quality reviews. Have you considered reviewing some articles? Since you've made quite a few Good articles, we're confident that you have a good grasp on the GA criteria and would therefore give high-quality reviews, which we need. Of course, no one is obligated to make reviews. Thank you for your work on Wikipedia! We're very happy that you chose to help keep knowledge free for everyone.
Excellent, thank you for this. It may not have much impact on the backlog, but I think it's an important message to send out all the same. -- asilvering (talk) 02:27, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
But not with the current wording, which is slightly condescending. I still think the best way to go would be to send an invitation once someone has reached about 3 GAs and then maybe one more reminder when they hit 10. We might also consider doing it more informally per Mike Christie below. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:53, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
While I'm not against it, I doubt it will have any effect (positive one that is). The prolific authors already know how the system works and they are fully aware of the backlog. And if we send this out repeatedly it will only be a minor annoyance for them at best and may feel like pointing fingers at worst. AstonishingTunesAdmirer連絡13:44, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
I agree. What I've done a few times with fairly new nominators, if it's clear they have a good grasp of the criteria, is to leave a personal note on their talk page or in the review page asking if they'd consider reviewing. I think personal notes have more impact that bot messages. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:41, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
General discussion
If the backlog drive managed to review every nomination by nominators with a review/GA ratio > 1, I'd feel like that was a major achievement. It does feel like all a backlog drive does is remind nominators that don't review that if they wait long enough their nomination will get reviewed anyway. I don't have a proposal to add above yet, but two rough ideas occur to me: one is to make the backlog drives focus only on reviewers with a high R/G; the other would be to hide nominations by nominators whose R/G doesn't meet some minimum level.
And what about changing the GAN page to a list of different GAN sorts? Right now, whatever sort order is on the GAN page is what we as a group are endorsing. What if GAN simply listed three or four (or more) pages that listed nominations: filtered and sorted for different priorities? If I were reviewing I'd click on the one that said "All nominations by editors who review a lot of GANs", however we were to define that. E.g. it would probably include Chiswick Chap, even though his ratio is < 1, because he reviews a lot. But the point is we could have custom pages and not have a default any more, and everyone could go to the kind of nominations list they want. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:19, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
I'll just note one thing I think GA could learn from FA: not all nominators are treated equally. Could there be a way to allow for faster reviews of well established content creators? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:55, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
There's two elements to things. There's the literal "we don't do all the steps for people we've come to trust". I think that is a good idea. There's also the "people who have name recognize are more likely to get anyone to do any steps and if you can't that's your failure rather than a failure of the process" and that's the part I see this proposal promoting and which I think is a bad thing. Best Barkeep49 (talk) 19:37, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
"We don't do all the steps for people we've come to trust" was one of the primary causes of WP:DCGAR and the concurrent events. If people, especially newcomers, didn't trust the hundreds of GA icons on Doug's userpage as a sign of community trust (and I count myself as one of them), perhaps the problem would have been identified and watched sooner. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:40, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
This second paragraph is similar to what I suggested under Proposal 5, and I like it, though I think even people like Chiswick Chap shouldn't appear in the >1 list. For the first, I like that a lot - we could have a list of reviews that need doing generated at the beginning of the drive, and simply stop if we hit the end. I'd suggest also adding noms who have 0 GAs to the list (even if they have 0 reviews). -- asilvering (talk) 18:56, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
One possible way to incentivize reviewing nominations from prolific reviewers (whether that be defined by the ratio of reviews to WP:Good articles or some other way) might be to offer additional points for such reviews during the backlog drives, similar to how reviews of older nominations get additional points. TompaDompa (talk) 16:24, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Sure. During backlog drives, some reviews count for more points than others. For instance, reviews of old nominations receive bonus points. Bonus points could also be handed out for reviews of nominations by prolific reviewers. One way could be to give bonus points for reviewing nominations by nominators who themselves have a review/GA ratio > 1. TompaDompa (talk) 20:53, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
As a general point, I think we should be careful about not introducing Asshole John rules that target specific undesirable behaviour. If someone causes trouble by violating the spirit of our rules, better deal with them by individual restrictions than by making the rules more painful and restrictive for everyone. —Kusma (talk) 04:01, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
Can someone explain briefly what is exactly the problem of proposals 16 and 16b? I have seen so much discussion about the soft cap and the limit of GA nominations, but it does not seem very well at the discussion. After all, I'm planning for a similar proposal, but it does not involve the review—maybe discussing here is mostly safe for me. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 12:54, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
I personally don't think these caps address the actual issue (too few people willing to do reviews). They impose obstacles on people like Chiswick Chap who have been very productive both at reviewing and nominating (358 reviews, 608 GAs). By setting a hard threshold at reviews=GAs (with very confusing and mathematically-illiterate language describing that threshold) they either make that obstacle more or less permanent (not going away until CC reviews hundreds more articles) or they eliminate the obstacle altogether (anyone can permanently lift the cap by making only a small number of reviews, which CC has long since done). Either way they don't function as an incentive to do more reviewing. And in any case, putting a cap on current nominations merely means that instead of having a visible problem (too many stale nominations) we have the same problem but we pretend it doesn't exist by pushing prolific nominators to maintain separate user-space waiting lists. (Probably many have these anyway; I've had my own user-space list since 2015, primarily to track not-yet-ready articles but also with others I think are ready but haven't yet officially nominated for whatever reason.) Hiding the waiting lists doesn't change the fact that having too few reviewers is the limiting factor preventing us from having more GAs. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:23, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
GAs and AfDs
Regarding Good Articles, is there any requirement for reviewers to consider a recent AfD, particularly if the AfD was contentious and resulted in a no consensus close, or is the assessment purely based on the GA criteria? Thanks! Dfadden (talk) 08:55, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
Using all GA nominations for the GA statistic rather than current promoted ones
I have refurbished an invisible part of ChristieBot that keeps track of all GAs back to around 2006, including failures and GAs that have lost that status (either via GAR or promotion to FA). Currently the "GAs" number on the GAN page only counts successful nominations. I could change it to include all historical promotions, or all historical nominations. I think the former at least would be appropriate, and there's a reasonable case for the latter. Any opinions? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:57, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
That would be interesting information, but I am not sure we should display it on the GAN page. It might have the effect of shaming people for having a lot of old GAs and not many recent reviews. I'm wondering whether we should rather display something like rolling 5 year noms and reviews. —Kusma (talk) 07:06, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
@CMD: That was poorly phrased on my part; I meant to distinguish three numbers:
The number of times a user has nominated an article for GA regardless of outcome;
The number of articles a user has had promoted to GA;
The number of articles a user has had promoted that are still GAs.
@Kusma, currently the GAN page shows #3 for each user; I'm suggesting it should show #1 or #2 instead. Wouldn't the effect you're concerned about be an issue now, if it is an issue? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:12, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
Ah, for some reason I thought you were talking about adding more old GAs. Ignore that (it is an issue that might be worth addressing separately).
I think #2 would be more appropriate than #3 if we want to show "skill", while #1 shows "workload caused". Personally I prefer #2 as it is weird not to count GAs that have become FAs later. —Kusma (talk) 10:39, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
I agree that #2 would be better than #3, and I've had enough queries from various editors to make it clear that #2 is what they would have expected anyway, so I don't think there would be any objections to switching to #2. As you say, #1 represents work caused, so it does fit the original idea of the G/R ratio better than #2. It would have the effect (for those reviewers who look at the ratio when deciding what to review) of making the R/G ratio worse for nominators who have frequent fails. At the moment there are no negative consequences of a GA fail to point to, but if we use #1 people might start objecting to procedural fails (e.g. abandoned reviews) as it would harm their ratio. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:53, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
#2 is preferable to #1. More intuitive, and the G/R ratio was meant to be a nudge rather than a guiding principle. CMD (talk) 11:01, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
I likewise agree. #3 is somewhat nonsensical as a measure. #2 reflects experience with writing (or, admittedly more accurately, nominating) articles that are up to WP:Good article standards. I think using #1 is a bad idea as it creates incentives related to failing nominations—in both directions: some reviewers might be inclined to fail nominations more frequently to affect others' statistics, while others might be disinclined to fail nominations to not affect the statistics (either by not reviewing the nominations at all or by putting in an outsized effort to make sure the nomination can be passed). That failed nominations do not impact nominators' statistics is, I think, a feature rather than a bug. TompaDompa (talk) 20:45, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
Change in positioning of "good article" template in promoted articles
ChristieBot adds the {{good article}} template to promoted articles, if it's not already there. It's been adding it to the front of the article, but that's incorrect; per MOS:ORDER it should be after short descriptions, DISPLAYTITLEs, and hatnotes. I've updated the bot to put the template after short descriptions and DISPLAYTITLEs, but not after the hatnotes as those are much harder to identify safely. The change appears to be working. If you see any problems, please let me know; or if you can think of a reliable way to identify hatnotes in the article's wikitext then please tell me! Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:09, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
Hello! I would be happy to address any specific concerns you have with my ongoing review. I have been carefully following the instructions, but if there is something glaring I have missed, I would greatly appreciate your feedback. I have also contacted a good article mentor to make sure my final review is in line with expectations.
Regarding my experience, I understand that I am a fairly new user so if it is truly inappropriate for me to be conducting a good article review I would certainly be open to changing the reviewer. Furthermore, if newer users should not review good article nominees I would appreciate your help in improving the instructions to make that clear. It was not clear to me and I suspect it would not be clear to other new users.
@SyntaxZombie: You checked boxes, but how are we to see that you actually checked what the boilerplate points you to? The article uses four photos. Are they each properly licensed? How did you run the COPYVIO check? This article seems to rely entirely on online sources that are not paywalled. Do each of them actually support what the content asserts? All of these and more are required per WP:GACR. You can find more detailed directions at WP:RGA, which I suspect you didn't bother to read, let alone follow. If you actually checked these items you would probably find problems for the nominator to address, like MoS. If you don't understand MoS, then why are you reviewing a good article? This is QPQ for your GA nom? Please examine any of my GA reviews to see what right looks like. Chris Troutman (talk)16:22, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
I don't see how this tone is helpful in teaching a new user—whose contributions to this point reflect quite well on them—how to use Wikipedia. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:47, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Hey! Thank you for joining us in reviewing good articles. Don't worry too much about it, I'm sure you will become a great reviewer after a few small adjustments (and after gaining some experience, of course). The table you used in your review is supposed to be supplementary, used to summarize the review. It sounds like you did follow the instructions, but right now other editors have no way to actually check that and it may seem like you just randomly checked boxes. If you were to express your thought process on the review page it would help greatly to clear up the confusion. It doesn't have to be extremely detailed. Another thing people expect to see in a review is "spot check", a review of sources used in the article. But it looks like you already know that. As for the number of sources you should check, I don't believe there's a specific number or percentage required. In theory, an article doesn't need to reach a certain arbitrary number of sources used, as long as the provided sources support everything. Say, the article could be based on a couple of super detailed books. However, usually articles have numerous sources. As far as I know, you are supposed to check the ones that you would actually question. Sales numbers, chart peaks numbers for music albums, some specific facts, dates, maybe some of the quotes if there are any. And if I run out of these, I just pick a few more random refs to check, until I reach 10ish. Some editors do more, but for good articles you don't need to check everything. Anyway, good luck! I hope to see you again in the future. AstonishingTunesAdmirer連絡21:36, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
It's perfectly appropriate for a new user to review GANs. The skills required - careful reading, following instructions, decent writing skills, communication - are in no way exclusive to long-time wikipedians. If you are carefully following the instructions, you'll be fine. -- asilvering (talk) 22:17, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
I am confident that SyntaxZombie can review this appropriately as well as take The Prince (play) through the nomination process, given some support. SyntaxZombie contacting a mentor was the right action and the IP volunteer bringing it to this forum was not. The short of it is that while some articles already meet all of the GA criteria at the time of nomination, it is good practice to provide several sentences of feedback: (1) because many editors primarily go through this process in order to improve articles; (2) so that scrutinisers can distinguish a thorough review from an inadequate review. Everyone develops their own style: mine is always changing, even after 50 or so reviews, and my latest idea is to use a "Strengths" section like here to really spell out how I have checked every criterion.Also, you can always find some wording improvements, and almost always find some verifiability issues by reading the sources. (Take a look at RSP, too, which often lists some of the publications used as references. In the case of Maui (Moana) you find that all except BuzzFeed and The Times of India are generally reliable, and you might conclude that those two are appropriate in context for this particular article.) — Bilorv (talk) 00:32, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
I nominated Merchant's House Museum to GAN back in October. A few hours ago, V.B.Speranza reviewed the nomination and passed it with few comments. With gratitude to V.B.Speranza for taking the review up, unfortunately, the review seems very cursory. For example, I do not think the sources were adequately spot-checked.
A second opinion would be somewhat a misnomer here, the review is checklist so any second opinioner would be performing effectively an entire review. If there is no agreement by the reviewer to return to GA1 then opening a GA2 (with the same nomination date) would be better than a second opinion request. CMD (talk) 02:01, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
We had quite a few cases recently of this issue, including two checkbox reviews of the article Arithmetic. The solution in those case was usually to declare the reviews invalid (violation of WP:GAN/I#R3) and send the article back to the nomination pool. Phlsph7 (talk) 07:49, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
That will probably be the path here, although it has been just under a week and the reviewer has not edited much in that time. Currently the article promotion was not completed on a technical level, so it's a simple template reset. CMD (talk) 13:21, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
What is spot-check actually in the case of reviewing articles
I have seen that some article nominations require reviewers to do a so-called spot-check. My knowledge about this means that the reviewer may check the verifiability of the sources and whether they match the written facts. However, sometimes the spot-check may be referred to arrange the format sources properly.
"However, sometimes the spotcheck may be refer to distribute the format sources." I'm not sure what this means. Can you clarify, @Dedhert.Jr? ♠PMC♠ (talk)05:35, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
The spot check has nothing to do with source formatting and nitpicky stuff like that. (In fact, correct source formatting isn't required for GA; per the GACR, as long as the citation points you to the source, it's sufficient.)
The spot check refers to the first thing you said - whether or not the source says what our article says it does. ♠PMC♠ (talk)05:50, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
Slightly more relevant is that we require all reviews to have a spot check, where a reviewer takes a selection of sources and checks that what is in the article is adequately backed up by the sources given. Lee Vilenski(talk • contribs)11:43, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
Should ChristieBot remove old GA transclusions when it transcludes a new review?
This is an enhancement suggested by Prhartcom; I've been working on the code this week so it would be a good time for me to add this functionality if we want it. The idea is that if the bot transcludes review2, it should delete the transclusion of review1, if it's present. I am a bit concerned that the bot wouldn't be able to tell if there was any other trace of the prior review on the article talk page. Perhaps it would be better if one of the bots that creates/updates {{Article history}} removed the old GA reviews once they're linked in article history? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:46, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
Please don't. Transcluded GA nominations are sometimes the only on-topic content on article talk pages; it is fine to archive them when the talk page becomes full, but simply removing them just makes the talk page less useful. —Kusma (talk) 12:25, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
(ec) Prhartcom hasn't edited for a few days so they may not comment immediately, but the example they gave when they requested this was this rev of Talk:Chris Rock–Will Smith slapping incident. A visitor to that talk page would probably scroll to the first GA transclusion and think it was the current one. As I said I don't think it's a good idea to just remove all traces of the old GA, but the bot could change an old transclusion to just a link along with some text that made it clear this was a superseded review. (I don't think the bot can build the article history template, which would probably be the best approach; that's very complicated to do.) However, even changing the transclusion like that might have some negatives -- for example it would probably prevent bots like DeadBeefBot which does implement AH from picking up the old GA and adding it. (Post ec): I agree it should not be removed with no trace left behind, but I don't see a problem with avoiding the transclusion so long as it's easy to see that there was a prior GA. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:30, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Our talk page model is "newest information at the bottom", which is old-fashioned, but once a user understands that, they know where to look. I don't think a transcluded GA review is in any way different from other information on the talk page, and I don't think transclusions should be removed. If you want to make it clearer that one GA review is closed and the other is open, it is better to use closing templates than to hide relevant information. During a new GA review, previous GA reviews need to be as easily findable as possible so it is easy to check whether issues mentioned in old reviews have been addressed. —Kusma (talk) 13:04, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
I am of the opinion that in general, GA review transclusions should not be removed from talk pages without simultaneously being added to talk page archives. TompaDompa (talk) 15:16, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
If an {{Article history}} entry is made for the previous GA review, I don't see any problem with removing the transclusion of it, since a link to the review will still be accessible from the Article history box near the top of the page (though you'd want to also remove the {{GA}} or {{FailedGA}} from that prior review). As noted, this may not be a job for ChristieBot... BlueMoonset (talk) 21:51, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure a link in a template is a suitable alternative for a long and detailed discussion of an articles quality. I don't really know why we'd want to hide it. If it gets archived along with other discussions (due to time), that's fine, but removing it because it's in a template seems a bit OTT. Lee Vilenski(talk • contribs)09:31, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
Thanks to Mike for raising this and of course thanks to him for ChristieBot. I can see where the consensus is going, and it makes sense: Do not remove the old GA transclusions unless they are added to the talk page archives. If Mike were to add that enhancement, it sounds like we approve. If he doesn't want to add that enhancement and leave the old GA reviews on the talk page, it sounds like we are fine with that. Prhartcom (talk) 11:40, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure why we'd need ChristieBot to do this. The old transclusions should be archived the same as other threads. Are they not getting archived? Lee Vilenski(talk • contribs)11:42, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
Perhaps that's the part we need to come up with a technical solution to fix. Maybe we should actually subst the review when it's been promoted/failed so it can be archived. Lee Vilenski(talk • contribs)14:47, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
Add new category for books?
I think it would be helpful if we had a separate category for books under the general "language and literature" heading. Right now, books are diffused throughout the categories according to their topic, which (imo) is a sensible way to arrange them for readers, but not so much for editors, and GAN is not a really "reader-facing" part of the project. Right now you can sorta-kinda get around this by looking at the article alerts page for WP:BOOKS, but I think a separate subcat would be better. -- asilvering (talk) 17:13, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
For the benefit of editors, mathematics books should be listed under Mathematics and cookbooks under Food. Why should they be put together? —Kusma (talk) 17:51, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
Because both writing and reviewing articles on books is much more about what makes a good book article than what makes a good math/food/whatever article. -- asilvering (talk) 18:11, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
I like the current system. Right now, I count (may have missed some) three books in the "l&l" section, and two books (The Glorious Cause and Waste Siege) elsewhere; I think that a separate "books" subsection would normally be empty, and would additionally confuse people when it comes to allocating to WP:GA categories. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:09, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
Multiple project listing
This has probably been asked before, but is not in the FAQ (where it probably should be if asked and answered). I made a GAN which should be both "Chemistry and material science" and "Physics". Note that their was once a "Materials science" project, but it appears to have collapsed some time ago and the gap is now partially filled by Chemistry and (Solid State) Physics. Is there a simple way to do this, the instructions indicate to only choose one. Ldm1954 (talk) 08:38, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
@Ldm1954: On the GAN page, we list pages exactly once (and there are good reasons for that; we'd quickly get people listing an article about a historical novel involving a WWII submarine in three different places if cross-listings were allowed), so you just have to pick one topic area (at random is fine). However, the nomination will be listed in other places than on the main GAN page, for example the GAN section of Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics/Article alerts if the articles has a WikiProject Physics tag on the talk page. You can also use the "comment" field on the nomination template to mention potential other fields. —Kusma (talk) 09:30, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
The GA criteria say not to go into unnecessary detail, but how much is "unnecessary"? Do excessive images count towards this metric? I am looking specifically at Angels in Neon Genesis Evangelion (promoted 2022), which has many explanatory images for minor details related to each angel, like a diagram of apoptosis to accompany text suggesting one of the angels "undergoes apoptosis"; or a diagram of the Dirac Sea plus a picture of Dirac to help describe the physical and geometric patterns of one particular angel's "AT Field". AFAICT the textual relevance supporting these images is sourced only to offline explanatory booklets from DVD releases and other material produced by people involved in the show. In fact, I'd say a substantial majority of the article is sourced to such primary and/or non-independent sources, which I guess isn't specifically against the GA criteria, but...
"Unnecessary detail" refers to coatrack articles, where the article gets away from its nominal subject, and instead gives more attention to one or more connected but tangential subjects. As to the second point, there is nothing wrong with the majority of an article being sourced to such primary and/or non-independent sources. Such sources are often preferred, being authorative.New editors sometimes confuse the requirement for independent sources to establish notability with what is required for sourcing. The article in question is fine. Hawkeye7(discuss)22:27, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
the majority of an article being sourced to such primary and/or non-independent sources.Policy definitely does not agree with this...Do not base an entire article on primary sources, and be cautious about basing large passages on them. and Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. and Base articles on reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. I'm not talking about notability here. I'm talking about a 150kb article on particular characters in a manga franchise that goes into extreme detail based only on primary and/or non-independent in-universe sources. How do we achieve NPOV if the only sources talking about particular material are directly from the producers of that material? JoelleJay (talk) 23:53, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
@JoelleJay, can you point out a particular sentence or two that you find objectionable on the grounds that it shouldn't use primary sources? I had a quick look and nothing jumped out at me. What I notice more is some stuff that looks WP:SYNTHy at a glance, eg, the discussions of the meanings of various names. Again just at a glance, I do think there's a bit of a focus issue here. I don't know that it's "unnecessary detail" so much as it is a list article that has some non-list stuff grafted onto it. -- asilvering (talk) 00:50, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
It's not any particular sentences, it's the whole thing. I realize that the GA criteria do not say anything about primary or non-independent sources, but surely there's a common sense aspect to this where it's worse for 10.5 thousand words of detail to be sourced almost entirely to the manga itself or other companion materials by its creators rather than to secondary analysis by people with no conflict of interest. Policy is very clear that basing an article around primary or non-independent sources is not acceptable. Not to mention we're AGFing that all of that primary and non-independent sourcing, which mostly appears to be offline and in Japanese, actually makes the real-world connections we're presenting in wikivoice and that they are accurately summarized. Not to mention many of the passages that aren't cited to people directly involved in Eva are interpretations by random bloggers... I'm bringing this up now because I'm in the midst of revisiting an article I was involved in delisting last year for being excessively detailed and this seems much worse. Pinging @AirshipJungleman29 and @Trainsandotherthings who also weighed in on that discussion since I've been interpreting this as analogous to the "Keith Miller" series if those articles were instead based largely on his team's own reports and memoirs. JoelleJay (talk) 08:50, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
I think the article that prompted you to start this discussion is a good example of someone with a pet interest who decided it needed an extremely detailed article (or in this case, many someones because this particular show is quite popular). If it were up to me, articles like this would get ported off to some Fandom Wiki where they belong. There are certainly secondary sources present in the article, but so much of it is based on primary sourcing that it makes me wonder if the article should even exist.
Sure, most of this website is just people writing about their special interests (and I'm no exception), but that can't trump the requirements for secondary sourcing, summary style, and avoiding WP:NOT situations. There are sources to support everything in this article, but how many of those sources are about the angels in the show as a topic? I've said before, I could write an extremely detailed article on everything the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad did in a given year, but it would just be cobbling together things from a bunch of sources, none of which would show that the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in a given year is itself a notable topic. Perhaps the most infamous example of this is the Tolkien madness that has seen more GAs written on things like Tolkien and Trees than we have on wars or famous scientists or leaders.
Thanks, @Trainsandotherthings, @Thebiguglyalien, @Chipmunkdavis, @Asilvering, @TompaDompa. Do you think having so much(*) of the article sourced to primary and non-independent sources at least warrants "too detailed" and "third-party" tags? I also find it hard to believe we can assume that the literally hundreds of citations that are inaccessible and non-English are accurately being summarized. The extremely brief review didn't mention spot checking any sources, let alone any offline Japanese ones. I would expect a lot more analysis in general to go into a GA for a 150kb article with nearly 500 sources...(*) Out of 471 sources, I count 243 to completely non-independent entities: 87 to Kadokawa Shoten (publisher); 5 more directly to Gainax or Gainax-controlled media; 21 to the Platinum Booklet and other "Booklet" DVD extras (some weirdly using the "cite journal" template without filling the "journal" parameter); 7 to GroundWorks (NGE publisher); 4 to Fujimi Shobo (NGE publisher); 6 to Khara (NGE film studio); 18 to NGE "Laserdisc" and "Blue Ray" Encyclopedias (DVD extras); 17 to other "Collector's Edition" Encyclopedias from the creators; 25 to Evangelion crewperson Poggio; 28 to Evangelion editor Cannarsi; 1 to Evangelion crewperson Asari; 2 to NGE artist Sadamoto; 4 to NGE editor Horn; 2 to other Kadokawa employees; 5 to Evangelion, Dynit (NGE studio), and Famitsu App (owned by Kadokawa) websites; 12 directly to Evangelion media; 2 to pressreleases; 1234 (Studio Voice interview of Anno) 5678 to primary, non-independent Q&A interview transcripts. There are additionally 90 to Evangelion Chronicle from Sony Magazines (commercial products supervised/endorsed by Gainax); 1 (9 individual cites)23 to non-expert blogs; and 2 to a user-generated ranking site. Not to mention numerous dubiously-qualified contributors like 12 and many clickbaity listicles. The independent secondary RS coverage is almost entirely constrained to the sections after In other media; very little is used for the lengthy descriptions of the angels. JoelleJay (talk) 01:43, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
The non-expert blogs and clickbaity listicles are definitely a problem pretty much regardless of context. I also find that review very curt given the article at hand. For things like the descriptions of the angels, I'd expect a lot of primary sources in there (who is a better source for "what did the creators intend?" but the creator?), but I would worry if there are neutrality concerns (eg inappropriate wikivoice, under-attributed quotes, etc) or WP:OR involved. Having skimmed it, I think the latter is probably an issue. -- asilvering (talk) 02:57, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
I can't say I disagree with the concerns you've raised here. I'd probably vote in favor of delisting based on all of the issues you've identified. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 20:02, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
GA requires compliance with WP:OR, which includes WP:PRIMARY. WP:NPOV also encourages (though does not strictly require) independent sources per WP:BESTSOURCES. I haven't read the article, but if the excessive detail is WP:FANCRUFT or could reasonably be tagged with {{Overly detailed}}, then most reviewers would expect rewrites or removals. I don't think I've ever seen images or diagrams described as a criterion 3 issue. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 08:36, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Agree with this, although I note the lead image licence should be updated following the page move. CMD (talk) 11:17, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Yes, BALASP is exactly what I feel is most in danger of being violated here. If the only people writing about these extreme details are themselves contributors to the NGE universe (or at the very least supervised by its creators) and have a direct commercial interest in promoting NGE, then how can we have a neutral summary of real-world engagement with the material? JoelleJay (talk) 17:15, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
My read through is it's a very thorough, researched article that absolutely does not belong on Wikipedia. It's a very useful example of why you need secondary sources to lead the path on due weight for a topic or parts of a topic because if you just use secondary sources to argue notability, you enable breathless and well-nigh indecipherable fancruft to fill articles. If reliable secondary sources can't be used in place of most of the primary sources, it suggests that aspect isn't important enough to spend time on, certainly not thousands of words' worth. The article absolutely should be delisted, and then it needs to be gutted to establish if it actually meets notability or this is something that should be covered briefly in the parent article. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchstalk12:24, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
Speaking of fancruft, if anyone wants to start removing chunks of the article, it would probably be a good idea to copy some of the text to the eva wiki, since it does appear to be well-researched, just out of scope (and maybe even notability) for wikipedia. -- asilvering (talk) 15:26, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
What is a 'significant contributor' to an article?
There's a helpful and friendly editor who is keeping tabs on articles I write, and then making some minor edits and then nominating them for GAN. Whilst the intent is welcomed and the articles I create are certainly not 'my' articles to gatekeep through any editorial process, I would prefer to be involved in the GAN process as these often delve into scope, reliability etc. discussions that require an understanding of the sourcing used in the article. I just want to confirm that a 'significant contributor' is someone who has provided what could be called content additions and not edits, and that I'm not being unduly discouraging to this person in suggesting that their approach may not be the best approach. Any ideas on how to involve them on the journey, and whether co-nomination of GANs is a thing, would help too. Thanks. ＶＲＸＣＥＳ (talk) 05:06, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
Generally we look for something over 10% authorship so as not to be considered a drive-by nomination, which is grounds for immediate removal. That being said, in my opinion it's a bit...overbearing...to walk into an article that someone else has obviously and recently done the work on and nominate it as your own GAN without asking. (As opposed to a situation where there is no main author, or the main author is AWOL, or the article is not actively being developed.) As you say - you're the one with the understanding of and access to sourcing, you're the one who's familiar with why certain editorial decisions were made. You could certainly invite them to co-nominate if you're into that, but if you're not, I personally don't think it would be unreasonable of you to suggest they ask you before nominating. ♠PMC♠ (talk)05:38, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
I would also be a bit put off if another user regularly nominated articles I was the main contributor to on-wiki processes. Irrelevant to that however, if the additional edits aren't themselves contributing content, these sound like drive-by nominations and are discouraged by current guidelines. Per PMC they could be removed by another party. CMD (talk) 05:50, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
I agree with the others that this is very weird behaviour. I've tidied up an article and nominated it for GA before, but that was after I got the explicit go-ahead from its original main contributor, who declined to be involved but was happy to see the article shepherded through. It might be an awkward conversation to have, but I would say you're well within boundaries of acceptable conduct to tell the person nominating the articles you wrote to cut it out. -- asilvering (talk) 22:29, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
Done ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:52, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
17:46, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
20:42, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
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File:Good article review icon.svg as a thing for GA reviews. I have also created {{GA review user topicon}}; if someone could create a userbox that would be great! Hopefully, a dedicated "award" you can only receive for reviewing will encourage people to do more reviewing? Or, potentially, advertise that reviews are needed? HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 01:39, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
if it's of any use. Rjjiii (talk) 02:36, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
I have opened a GAR for the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:54, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
