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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4Archive 5Archive 6→Archive 10

Proposal to find quality articles via Wikiprojects

As I recently mentioned here, we do now have a successful model for peer review of a large number of articles (384) by a Wikiproject team leading to a set of approved articles (still growing). I propose we do the following-
  1. MONTH 1 Contact each active WikiProject (a few hundred of these?), asking them to assess the key articles in their subject area for quality, NPOV and completeness. We could suggest (but not require) they consider using the chemistry assessment method.
  2. MONTHS 1-4 This committee should meanwhile identify significant areas not covered by Wikiprojects, and try to find at least a few appropriate articles from these subject areas. We could use the same assessment criteria as the Wikiprojects.
  3. MONTHS 1-8 Collect lists of quality from Wikiprojects, with some polite prodding or assistance. If most projects cooperate, then by the end of this process we should have 5000-10000 quality articles (my estimate).
  4. MONTHS 8-12 Collate all of the articles into an appropriate order for publication, dividing these up according to editors general area of expertise. Look for any important missing topics that may have been overlooked.
  5. MONTHS 13-15 Write/get written/improve a handful (hopefully!) of missing articles.
  6. MONTHS 13-18 Look into getting this published.
  7. MONTH 24 Go to press?
Comments please? Walkerma 18:55, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Note: I put this timeline up to try to show what might be done, I am not saying it will happen! I wanted to stimulate discussion, but apparently I failed! As I am a newbie here, I apologise for placing this in the middle instead of at the end, hence the move. Walkerma 20:47, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Hi. Sorry I missed your earlier note here. I haven't looked at the links, but your plan has a lot of potential. I'm willing to help, but probably only a limited amount. Maurreen (talk) 17:07, 19 September 2005 (UTC)


Strategies table

I have posted a table on the project page that summarises (as best I can) the ideas presented over the last 10 months or so. My idea is that we should start to move from talking about strategies over to implementing them. After spending many hours studying all of the ideas, I am struck by the fact that we would be best served if all four ideas went ahead in tandem, not just one. For example if we just focus on FAs, we end up with a small, random list, but if we blend in some core topics it becomes more balanced. If we add in Wikiproject ideas, we get a bigger, balanced list. And in the long term, we must fix the Wiki to make all our lives easier. I apologise if my table is clumsy, I'm not an HTML expert, also feel free to edit this if I've got anything wrong.

So please think about which of the four sub-projects you want to work on (I plan on contributing to at least two). I don't see the need to sign up to these, we can all contribute to all four as we feel we want to. I plan on setting up four separate sub-project pages in the next few days to organise the work and monitor progress (or lack of?), so watch this space! Walkerma 22:13, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

New Core topics page

In order to get things moving on the Core topics sub-project, I have started a new page which can be a home for the project to get 100-200 qulaity articles The page contains a table that can show assessment, comments, as well as useful links to portals etc. Please take a look, and if you want to contribute please help out with some article assessments, especially if any of these fall in your area of expertise. I have given my own assessment of about a dozen articles so far (just to get the ball rolling), and I will continue to assess as time allows. If you are unsure of how the assessment criteria apply in practice, take a look at my assessments and comments to get an idea. This assessment scheme is currently being used very successfully by about 5 people at WP:Chem to keep track of 380 articles. Walkerma 09:17, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

More sub-project pages

I have started off a Featured Articles First sub-project page - currently this just lists the pages by category. How should we organise the work on this page? I also began a Work_via_Wikiprojects sub-project page, and put up an associated page for tracking articles submitted by Arts Wikiprojects. Please give feedback if you like/dislike the new pages, and please feel free to get involved. Thanks, Walkerma 06:43, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Speaking about this, what kind of things you wish to see done to FA's before they get sent to the Wikireader? I have a couple FA's that I would easily love to send to yall for this project. Zach (Sound Off) 05:01, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Modified Wikipedia 1.0 Rating Proposal

This is just to notify everyone that there is a new proposal at Wikipedia_talk:Pushing_to_1.0#Modified_Rating_Proposal. If there is support, I may follow User:Walkerma's suggestion and lead the WikiSort project.the1physicist 20:38, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Project WikiSort has begun!the1physicist 01:37, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Yet another plan...

I know everyones sick of hearing more and different plans for v1.0 but here's a very simple suggestion that we could impliment quickly as a step towards a plan. Call it plan v0.5 for wikipedia 1.0.

(0.5) Call any article that has passed Peer review version 0.5 and protect these article from IP user edits.

I'm sick of reverting nonsense edits from good articles. IP users are great for adding to young or short articles, but its rare that one makes a worthy addition to a good peer reviewed article.
How does an article pass peer review? Currently the peer review system is a free format feedback system intended to give guidance to an editor, but there is no formal evaluation system that provides a clear pass/fail. Peer review is intended to provide useful information on how an article may be improved, but there is no requirement for recommendations to be implemented and a submitter may unlist a review request at any time. --Allen3 talk 10:39, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
Peer review brings the article to a wider audience, and suggested changes are usually implimented. But perhaps 'pass' is the wrong word - 'been through' might be better.Seabhcán 10:47, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

(1.0) Call any article that has passed FA version 1.0 and protect these from non-admin user edits.

All FA articles are very good or excellent. When an article passes FAC it should be protected. A "version 1.0+" page can be created and edits can be encouraged there. Anything useful (such as a new event relating to the article) can be copied back into the original by admins.

Lots of the regional notice boards now have FAC article drives. By declaring FA articles to be v1.0 it would encourage competition to get more and more articles to be v1.0 When we do finally figure out what is meant by Wikipedia 1.0 we will already have a large body of good articles, with out the current risk of them degrading because of lack of protection. Seabhcán 19:32, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sick of hearing ideas- as long as they're workable! Your idea seems very straightforward and in line with our current ideas. It is my impression that most formal peer reviews are intended to lead to FA status - is that true? If so your (0.5) grade ones are in effect failed WP attempts, I agree these are usually pretty good anyway. As for protecting articles, that is rather controversial, and the v1.0+ idea is good but would require a major change in the code. We can always go back to the definitive FA version if we wish. I believe that even FA articles (esp. 2004 ones) do improve with further over edits, though I agree that vandalism and loss of content balance are problems and that the law of "diminishing returns" applies. I agree that we can use v1.0 as an incentive to encourage quality articles - for a recent example see here and the succeeding posts. You could use the 1.0/0.5 assessment, or you might like to take a look at our other assessment system where the corresponding grades would be FA and A-class (or poss B-class in a few cases).
Would you be willing to try implementing your idea? We currently need someone to take the lead on the Featured Articles First project – would you be willing to do this? This project is designed to organise the FA articles into some sort of order for publication. Since much of the assessment work has already been done in peer review, this shouldn't be too hard. Your system sounds to me like a great way to do that organisation! Please sign up if you're willing to take this on. Thanks, Walkerma 02:39, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I think the fact that anonymous users rarely improve articles that are already high quality is a VERY useful statistic. Whether that means we should restrict editing of those kind of articles to registered users is obviously up for grabs. Personally I'd say it's a good (maybe even great) idea, but there are of course wiki purists who would disagree. However, I am only in favor of protection once an article is very close to featured status (say 0.9 quality). Also, as the current leader of the Wiki Sort Project, I would encourage you to look it over and share some more of your good ideas. Thanks!the1physicist 02:57, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the encouraging replies. I just stumbled across this version 1.0 discussion yesterday and so I'm not up to speed on all aspects yet. I'm certainly interested in the "Featured Articles First" project, but I'm afraid real life will keep me from giving an answer for a few days (conference paper deadline on tuesday - eek!).
In reply to questions - Peer review is a recommended first step to FA status, and its being increasingly accepted that only articles which have first passed peer review should be submitted as FA candidates. So they're not 'failed', they have simply passed the first test. I think we can implement a version of this plan without any software changes. For example, the article on metrication has become a Featured Article and will be on the main page on Saturday. We could protect it, create a copy at metrication/suggested changes which is free to edit, and then put a bannar template at the top of the article saying:
This article is considered to have achieved Version 1.0 quality, and has been protected against vandalism. You may contribute to the next version or make suggestions on the talk page.
If this works and gains acceptance, we could then change the software to make it more fluid (put a V1.0 tab at the top of the page maybe).
About the contrabutions of IP users: I spend a lot my time on wikipedia deleting new pages made by IP users. I'd estimate that more than half are vandalism, vanity pages or spam, perhaps as many as 75%. When the wiki was small IP users did make useful new articles, but this is diminishing quickly. I don't think it would be a great hardship to require registration before users may create new pages. (I would apply this only to the English wikipedia, smaller wikis still need IP users) But this is an argument for a different forum. Seabhcán 08:52, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm extremely opposed to the idea that only non-admin users can edit FAs. If you want to alienate 95% (or whatever) of regular Wikipedia users this would be the way to go about it. Recently User:R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) and I collaborated on Richard O'Connor to get it through FAC. Under this proposal we would now be unable to edit and improve the article, which is 99% R.D.H.'s work! This strikes me as an attempt to install a clique which can control input to articles and is in opposition to everything I thought Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, stood for. Leithp 09:27, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Well I'd say 90%;> but most of the rest is YOUR work too, which makes it our work as far as I'm concerned. Or anyone's who has something positive to contribute. User:Fergananim, for instance, did some research, found another source and provided some interesting facts about General O'Connor's early life and ancestery. This was AFTER it had been awarded FA status. Leithp and I both have made edits to it since As well. During its FAC discussion User:Piotrus was kind enough to make some additional edits. Others have made minor but still helpful changes, such as adding catigories. It is now a better article, exactly because it was OPEN to editing. It may be our work, but it is not our article. Nor is it complete. Everything on the Wikipedias is a WORK IN PROGRESS. And this is as it should be. Knowledge is a work in progress...it is a Wiki world...or at least it should be. Oh and this proposal- Bad idea, as per Law of Unintended Consequences and Iron law of oligarchy--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 05:34, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
You make a good point. But we still have the problem of vandalism and that some users will make ridiculas edits or change things that have been agreed without good reason. What I'd like to see is when you open a FA you see the version that was vetted and agreed and then have the option to see the current version. Currently, you can't have confidence that the article your looking at is accurate, even if it is a FA, or used to be. Since I got metrication through FA I've had to daily fend off silly edits and unexplained removals.Seabhcán 09:36, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
I appreciate that it's frustrating, but I don't think having two versions of the article is a viable or desirable solution. I think that putting up with edits you don't like is simply the price you pay for working on such a collaborative project. You can always get the article locked if it's subject to too much vandalism or edit wars. For my part, the day Wikipedia starts locking articles that aren't subject to conflict or vandalism is, very probably, the day I will stop working on it. This idea is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water. Leithp 09:48, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
And another thing, there are a large amount of long-term users who have chosen not to go for sysop status. By doing this you would effectively be forcing them to do this, and accept the responsibilities involved, in order to continue to collaborate on many articles. IMO you would have to dramatically lower the requirements for sysop status (removing the requirement to spend time fighting vandalism etc) in order to make this even remotely workable. Leithp 09:56, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
I propose that effectively no-one should edit a FA article after it has reached that status, admin or not. If additions can be made they should be made to a proposed future version of the article. Wikipedia isn't just about the editors, its about the readers too. They need to be given a guarentee that what they read can be relyed upon. I maintain the articles that I have time to do, but some day I'll stop. The articles that I have improved will then gradually drift back into chaos. Seabhcán 10:06, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
I defy you to find a FA that can't be improved, and some of them are very obviously in need of work. Many of these can be made very simply. For example, I found an awful lot of grammatical and spelling errors in IFK Göteborg last week. Should I have listed these all individually on the talk page? I wouldn't have bothered. FAs aren't the be-all and end-all of Wikipedia, they're simply a useful indication of a certain level of quality, and shouldn't in my opinion be treated any differently from any other article. If this really is a serious proposal then I'm very worried about the direction Wikipedia appears to be taking. Leithp 10:15, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those spelling errors crept in after it got FA status, and they'll return after you've fixed them. Seabhcán 10:53, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
Nope, try to keep it quiet but WP:FAC isn't infallible . Especially if you have a lightly trafficked nomination. Leithp 11:05, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
Protecting FA is not a good a good idea, and might lead to people stop putting up new FAC. Instead I suggest adding some kind of header at the top, like A pervious version of this article has become featured and a link to that version. Then admins could have the ability to choose which version the link would point to. Fornadan (t) 10:23, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
Thats not a bad solution. So it would look like:
Featured article star Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Archive 4 was voted as a featured article on 27 October 2005. It may have been altered since that date, but the agreed version is kept here.

Seabhcán 10:32, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm still not sure I see the need for any of this. The problem exists in some cases, but you can protect those individual articles until it dies down. How would you get the updated version "approved" as the FA, another review? How many people could be bothered doing that regularly? Would you do it once a year, or more often? I can't see many who got a page up for FA status being motivated to go through the whole palaver again for the same page and I certainly can't see them doing it regularly. This is using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. Leithp 12:15, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
If 1.0 is intended (quite explicitly, I might add) to be a print/CD/DVD/etc. version of Wikipedia, what is the point of tagging (or even worse, locking) articles? Surely, if a fresh-through-FAC article is considered ready for 1.0 release, it would be trivial to find, in the revision history, the version of each FA that passed FAC when compiling 1.0. This seems, quite honestly, more of a variation on the perennial "don't let anons edit" proposal than a necessary component of the 1.0 process. Kirill Lokshin 13:06, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
I suppose this is a disagrement about aims. Are we trying to get somewhere and achieve something? or is wikipedia a place to practice your writing skills? I believe wikipedia can be more than a large sandbox. But to get there, we need to create a mechanism to decide when an article is 'finished' and of acceptable quality to present to the public. Not of perfect quality, because perfection is impossible to agree, but of acceptable quality. We need a stamp of approval for each good article. Thats what I want. Seabhcán 14:15, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
No, it's a disagreement about philosophy. You appear to want to produce a finished article and then wash your hands of it and I'm not interested in that. I'd rather see an article continually evolve, possibly taking a step backwards before taking two forwards. As far as I'm concerned there are no "finished" pages on Wikipedia, everything can and probably will be improved. How many of the 2003 FAs would you call finished? Wikipedia has improved vastly since then, I'd like to think that in a couple of years time we will look back on the 2005 FAs in the same way. Leithp 14:24, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
I would hate to see a good idea lost because it came with some controversial things attached. The main WP1.0 idea here is to organise the FA articles and other peer reviewed articles so they can be published. That can be done, and should be done. The people coordinating this can decide whether to go with the original FA (easy to find in the history) and the current page, I don't think that's controversial either. None of this is contingent on blocking people or tagging versions, so we should be able to move ahead with the basic idea. Walkerma 15:00, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
As for the blocking of anon users, that is a much wider debate that goes way beyond this project and which will never be resolved here. It is one we will face more & more as Wikipedia matures. The idea of tagging FA versions is pertinent to this project, but it is not a requirement. I like Seabhcán's Featured article star shown above, based on Fornadan's comment, and I think it is probably workable. We could (and should, IMHO) work to get that adopted, but let's not lose sight of the main goal of getting a set of quality articles together. I think we really have a great opportunity to make an impact with this project, but only if we keep ourselves focussed on the main project. Can we move ahead with the key WP1.0 aspects of this idea, namely getting the FA and peer reviewed articles sorted out? Walkerma 15:00, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Absolutely not. I don't know who cooked up this idea, but it's horrible. It is utterly anti-wiki, and violates our page protection policy. I will not support any measure to protect the featured article or the peer reviewed articles. →Raul654 15:05, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

This idea goes strongly against my idea of what Wikipedia should be, certainly. I have some relevant experience, having just gotten my first article to FA. I certainly would not want to see it protected. It wouldn't save me any work, because (a) I'd still have to watch and deal with the "past-1.0 version" and (b) I'd have to worry about what to do when the "past-1.0 version" got so much better than the "1.0 version" that it needed to be replaced. I would also note that the idea articles "pass" PR, or that some level of quality is reached when they are through with PR, is currently completely inaccurate. Even for the "good" articles, PR seems a bit overloaded, and unfortunately most of the real work of improvement is happening in FAC, from what I've seen. Many "bad" articles enter and leave PR without a lot of comments or improvements at all. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 15:25, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I've made my thoughts on this pretty clear above, but to my mind this is the most wrong-headed thing I have ever seen on Wikipedia. It has dramatically far-reaching consequences for the future development of the project and if any of this gets implemented I would be extremely disappointed. I for one would never attempt to help get another article to FA status and would actively discourage others from doing so. Leithp 15:38, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I think this is a rather horrid idea. Take Tank: it was made a featured article about a year ago. Since then, it's been edited extensively. The quality has gone down, but on the upside, the editing has resulted in good articles on History of the tank, Tank classification, Tank research and development, and Armored warfare, and much of the current content may be spun off into Main battle tank soon. --Carnildo 18:26, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I do not like the idea of preventing people from editing certain classes of articles. Identifying good articles is necessary and desirable, but I don't think that to then restrict access to them helps our cause. A project with broadly similar aims is currently gathering steam: Wikipedia:Good articles aims to identify articles which broadly meet FA criteria and encourage editors to write all articles in the style of FAs. Worldtraveller 02:59, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

  • Generally in favor. I support something like a "Version 1.0" tab or a "Peer Reviewed" tab. Whatever this tab is called, it would show the version of the article that passed the judgement. There are many ways the article could be judged. Articles that pass FAC would be one idea. Another idea would be to allow the 600+ administrators to unilaterally flag a version as "Admin checked". With this route, they would read the article to (1) ensure it contains no glaring problems (2) ensure that it generally complies with style guidelines (3) spot check the facts presented. They would not need to check every date or fact in the article. Ideally, readers would be able to set a flag in their profile to see either the "Checked Version" if it exists or the "Latest Version" of the article. Johntex\talk 09:30, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
Against. I can sympathise with people who spend a lot of time reverting anon vandalism, but I don't like (or really understand) the idea of distinguishing articles on the basis of whether they've been peer reviewed. What counts as 'success' in a PR? Implementing every suggestion, regardless of whether it was a good one or not? Whether the people who contributed to the PR approve? I regularly edit F.C. United of Manchester and will probably put it through PR sometime next year, but that article often attracts good edits from anons (possibly because of its high Google ranking) and I wouldn't want it to be 'protected' from them. You'd have a case for protecting articles from IP edits where they'd been repeatedly vandalised, but using PR as the criterion for this just seems wrong.
The idea of restricting FAs to admins is far worse, of course. According to WP guidelines, adminship should be 'no big deal', but a policy such as this would immediately make it a big deal. Also, according to many of the people who vote on RFA, the ideal admin is someone who's been here for exactly three months and made 2000 edits, of which 1000 are in the Wikipedia and User talk namespaces and all the others are spelling corrections. I'm exaggerating of course, but I don't think there's anything like enough of a correlation between adminship and editing ability to justify this proposal, even without considering that several articles have got to FA standard largely because of one person's work. File:Yemen flag large.png CTOAGN (talk) 20:07, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

An Alternative proposal

While I oppose the above idea, I appreciate what it is trying to accomplish. Perhaps there is a less bureaucratic and cabal-istic way of protecting FAs without closing them off entirely or creating unneeded duplication. So please consider the following:

How about having a "Custodian" appointed for each FA. Custodians would be selected the same way FAs and Admins are, through open nominations and voting. Any registered Wikipedian can apply for or be nominated as an article's custodian. If it is an article they have started or contributed to significantly, or if they simply know a lot about the topic then they should qualify. An article may also have more than one custodian. This will be particularlly useful for longer, more complex articles and/or contraversial ones which draw lots of vandals. Custodians would be able to protect their articles for up to 48 hours. They could also have the admin "roll-back" button for their articles. These would be their only powers...a sort of admin-lite, if you will :> To streamline and speedup the process, whenever someone nominates an article for FA, they may also apply for or nominate another to be its Custodian. --R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 06:05, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

I like that idea - but it might require a software change. Seabhcán 08:15, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
what about just a registered only button that can revert the last change done to an article. if its been more than one change thats been done then just go and manually change it. alot less complicating. Lucid 19:32, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
This is perposterous! (Hope that's how you spell it). You are all dragging me away from my mother's birthday to deal with this outrageous idea! Why not just put a charge on it? That would fix everyone!? I think this whole idea is a terribly stupid one. Just because someone is lazy & tired of reverting "meaningless" changes, doesn't mean this should happen.
Any type of article can be put on peer review, stub, FA or just a plain old article. If a stub was put on, some new user might want to change it, but they wouldn't be able to. Have you seen through the ripples of this action? Not only would there be a surge of Admin Nominations, but there would be hundreds of users putting their articles, especially contravesial ones, on peer review, so as to stop users from editing them.
This not only affects wikipedia's ideals, but deplete's wikipedia's openess to new users. On another note, most current admins started off contributing anonymously. Why were they elected as admins if their first edits were "nonsense"?
I definitely like the proposal that R.D.H. gave; a sort of FA security gaurd with the revert option & 48 hour block if there is a persistant vandal. This 48 hours would give him time to contact an admin for the user's blocking.
What I don't understand, is why is there even such a thing as an anonymous IP? It's exactly like a registered user, but without a name!? You don't even have to pay anything to join. But that's what will happen next, wikipedia will have joining fee, so that's why we can't accept this. If this new law passes, it will be a very sad wikiday indeed.... So I say Omigosh Batman Object. -- Spawn Man 22:33, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
Seems unnecessarily complicated to me - if we're going to give someone this level of trust then they ought to qualify for adminship anyway. The only situation I can really imagine where someone 'unsuitable' for adminship would qualify for this would be if someone did most of the work for an FA well before reaching 1000 edits. I'd suggest that we just nominate them for adminship and get them to list 'article custodian for (articlename)' in the list of admin tasks they'd be interested in. If someone's been the major contributor to an FA and hasn't violated meta:Don't be a dick too often then I'd be prepared to ignore a slightly low edit count and support their adminship for this. Anyone think this would be a problem? File:Yemen flag large.png CTOAGN (talk) 22:56, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

I think it's complicated too, but don't forget, none of this stuff would be here if that guy hadn't proposed the "Yet Another Plan" idea. Spawn Man 23:21, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

I do prefer this approach, but I would still oppose it. Both ideas strike me as effectively contravening the principals of a Wiki - openness, the ability for anyone to edit an article, etc. Wikipedia should be striving to prevent cliques from being forged, not encouraging them. Regarding the previous suggestion about preventing non-admins from editing FA articles, as everyone knows FA articles always change — for better or worse. It would (I can imagine) be too cumbersome to constantly go through the exhaustive process of replacing the preserved article with the newer and more improved version, especially if substantial additions are made frequently. Now all this has pretty much been said up ^, so sorry about the repetition. SoLando (Talk) 00:52, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree totally! Thank goodness gracious me. This whole matter should be quashed! Spawn Man 07:51, 29 October 2005 (UTC)


We do need better tactics for combatting vandalism, though. We also need a "middle class" between registered users and admins. This could accomplish both. By Giving a good contributor Custodianship of an article it would encourage them to care for it, without locking it up completely. Plus it would give them a chance to show they have the "stuff" to be a good admin later on. If they can handle the comparatively small responsibility of a single article without letting the petty power go to their heads (or as CTOAGN put it not violate meta:Don't be a dick too often :) then the chances are high they will do well as admins too. The Rfa process is becoming more contentious and bitter. Many fine contributors are being driven away due to it. There must be a better way to encourage them to stay, other than cute lil barnstars, and to make the transition from user to admin easier and less political. If anyone can come up with a better suggestion, by all means please do and I'll endorse, peddle, push and pimp it wholeheartedly:>--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 17:36, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
IMHO this is a perfectly reasonable proposal. I see "custodian" as a slightly more formal equivalent of the "maintainer" we have for the Wikiportals. Sure, it adds another tier of admin, but Wikipedia has grown enormously since admins were introduced. It is no more "anti-wiki" than a standard rv, and no custodian would be God. As for myself, I have no intention of ever running for administrator (though I am an active Wikipedian), but I would consider working as a custodian, a job I (and others) already do informally by keeping certain pages on my watchlist. Thanks for the idea, RDH. Walkerma 18:25, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
This would be great for users with specific knowledge areas. While being an admin could be overwhelming because of the sheer vastness of Wikipedia, a custodian could focus on specific articles in their area of knowledge, knowing what is nonsense, & what improving the article. It would be a step up from registered user, easing them into the work of admin, rather than leaping straight into admin work & going completely insane & start running around the encyclopedia with their pants on their head, (or worse; no pants).
We could have some custodians maintaining more than one article too. Or on another train of thought, exsisting custodians & admins could vote on articles which they think need a custodian, (EG: Contaversial article prone to vandals such as George.W.Bush.). It could be called, Wikipedia:At Risk Article Nomination or Wikipedia:Articles In Need Of A Custdian, (AINOAC)? Well there's my 50 dollars US worth... Spawn Man 01:32, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
In retrospect, my opposition to R.D.H.'s proposal was ill-advised and wrong (can I blame sleep deprivation?). Like I did say ;-), I prefer this approch. Reading it all again, it is less "cliqué" and doesn't "alienate" the entire Wikipedia community like the first suggestion (IMO). I also like Spawn Man's idea. As R.D.H., Spawn Man and Walkermar said, there is definitely a need for a middle lane on the great motorway that is Wikipedia (ok, that bizarre analogy is mine :-D), which would hopefully have a positive affect in providing impetus to stay with Wikipedia; there really has been too many good people leaving through RFA rejection, as has been said up ^. How easy would it be to implement this, though? SoLando (Talk) 03:27, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
No you can't blame sleep deprivation, you might hurt his feelings. He gets blamed for car crashes, computing errors, tv programming mistakes & to be honest he's quite sick of it really!!!!!
On a serious note, yes, I agree, too many editors are placing too much enphasis on Adminship & leaving when it all goes terribly wrong, eg: the user Tony1. Creating a "lane", as you call it Solnado, in between the two current highways will put less pressure on everyone; less is needed of custodians, like lower edit counts, generally just following the "don't be a dick" rules & being known as a trust worthy user. Now if the interstate highway can be bipassed with a couple of new lanes & maybe a pedestrian pathway, we could quite possibly follow route 1 to route 2 using the GPS system provided by the workers working on the bipass to allow the tunnel to route 3. Should be a walk in the park for us! Spawn Man 04:41, 31 October 2005 (UTC)


(Chortle!) Thanks SM buddy, for driving that traffic metaphor off the road!:> And thanks ALL for your encouraging responses!!! Your positive words together with the unfortunate results of Tony's Rfa, have led me to bring up our proposal HERE. I've added a few more details for your consideration too. We can test the idea of Custodians out with FAs/FACs and if they work well, extend them to all articles. The threshold for consensus to be appointed Article Custodian would be lower than for admin (60-70%) and an abusive Custodian can be removed by a bureaucrat if asked to by at least 3 different admins. Thanks again for your encouragement and support...Now let's go ROCK THE RFA;>--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 19:29, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Responding from said RFA link... There may be a case for some sort of "admin lite" status, and various versions have been proposed in the past. Several of them I'd support, or at least have a degree of sympathy for. But I think that to link adminstrative functions to particular articles, and in particular to articles that as I understand the proposed mechanism, that the "guardian" will have already been heavily involved in editing, is a mistake. It pretty much builds in conflicts of interest, and gives an undesirable impression of "article ownership", which is distinctly un-wiki. We currently have almost as many admins as FAs, why not simply make sure there's adequate "watchlist coverage" of the featured articles among them? If necessary, this could be made explicit on a per article basis: "in case of emergency, contact the following admins" (or check which of them is currently editing, or something to that effect). Alai 20:12, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

I have doubts. Though well intentioned, I have doubts about this. Why? I have found that FA articles sometimes are not that great. I mean, this sounds a sensible idea. But once that should be implemented once FA articles are really up to a certain standard that makes them deserving of being a FA article. I really do not know how the process work -I have been a formal contributor for a short time; before that I used to make edits from time to time, but tended to be shy; but before that I used to read a lot here. And I found a few FA articles to be not so well written. One such article (just as an example) was: War of the Spanish Succession. Though a very informative article (where I found what I was looking for), it lacked in the way some things were told. Another FA article that I think can be improved a lot is the Formula 1 article. Anyway, before I digress too much, I think that before doing this, the standard for FA articles should be improved. Then we can follow with this proposal. No point in protecting B grade articles. Cheers to all. --Anagnorisis 08:55, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

As I've said before, I'd rather none of this happened, but someone had to bring all this up & try & change all of wikipedia!! But since this is happening, I would rather we went with R.D.H.'s & mine suggestions... Spawn Man 21:39, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Why is everyone still discussing this? While it is certainly discussion worthy, there are a multitude of more productive things we could be talking about. (*cough*such as this*cough*)  : ) the1physicist 02:54, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

I would support the '0.5' proposal, but strongly object to '1.0'. Many FAs have been written by non-admins - do you want to prevent their major contributors from working on them? For every admin we have there are 3 active non-admin content contributors. Forbidding them from editing FAs would be very, very bad. On the other hand, I'd recommend implementing in MediaWiki software some kind of a user-rating karma-system. This should show us who the good editors are. Remember: being an admin does not make one a good content editor. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 04:52, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Well. I oppose to any locking of any FA or PR articles. This is really going to kill the project. The more readers, the more editors. The more editors, the best. The barrier for editing any paper must be the lowest possible so that the ratio editor/reader increase. Many simply do not want to log in. Just because they are not wikiholic and don't intend to be. Some vandals just want to try whether the wikipedia is robust and if they realize it is then they may be tempted in editing seriously. Vb 12:39, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
Don't worry, I think the semi-permanent "lock FAs" idea has largely been rejected in favour of "An alternative proposal" where a custodian just puts an FA on their watchlist and keeps an eye out for vandalism. Correction: I should have said, a lock for 48 hours is possible under this revised proposal, but only on rare occasions by elected custodians. Walkerma 19:20, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Summary of this very long discussion

Please can Seabhcán and R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) and perhaps Spawn Man check that I didn't misrepresent their ideas?

Original suggestion: Seabhcán suggested a two tier system of grading quality articles, 0.5 for peer-reviewed articles and 1.0 for FAs. This is a variation of idea of the Featured Articles First project which has been heavily discussed here before (see archives), but the idea of including the peer reviewed non-FA articles was new. The proposal also included the more controversial anti-vandalism suggestion that 0.5 articles be locked from anon IP edits, and 1.0 (FA) articles should have edits performed on a "1.0+" page separate from the (locked) original article.

Response to the original suggestion: A few people commented favourably on the idea of using peer reviewed (0.5) articles, and some supported the 1.0 articles too, but without the locking aspect. Most people just focussed on the idea of locking articles - there was an overwhelming rejection of this idea. The idea of using an open 0.5/1.0 might still be considered, but the idea of locking articles semi-permanently should be considered DEAD.

Revised suggestion: R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) proposed having an "admin lite" person appointed as a custodian to keep an eye on an FA within their field of expertise, perhaps one they had written themselves. This person would be elected like in RfA, but it would be easier to become a custodian. Normally this person would not be expected to block users, merely revert vandalism, but if necessary they would have the power to freeze the page for up to 48 hours only. They would lose their privileges if they abused this. With "hot" pages we might want to assign more than one custodian. Normal editing of FAs would continue as it is done now.

Response to the revised suggestion: This has been clouded by the fact that many people seemed to be raising their objections to the original idea under this heading. As far as I can tell the main criticism was of a conflict of interest – i.e., a custodian jealously reverting changes to "their" article if they had written the FA. Once the idea became clear, some of the initial opposition turned to support of a "middle lane" between the godlike admin (with a tough election process) and the powerless standard user.

Further discussion

I don't like the locking idea,but one of the main reasons wikipedia is not taken serious is that when you open an article it may have been factually vandalised.I really don't understand why an easy link to a "fact checked version" can't be given.A article is never complete,but one with a grave factual error is much worse.Until it's possible for a reader to have easy acces to such a version (link from the page history maybe),wikipedia will remain more of an entertainment medium than something that can be used for research (Anon)

I don't agree with the custodian proposal. Unless you set up 24/7 rotating shifts of custodians, the plan will not achieve the goal of providing articles of guarenteed quality, free from vandalism. Only some form of protection can do that.Seabhcán 23:04, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
Agree as per Seabhcan above. My concern is also about the office of the Custodian creating a new hierarchy. On the RfA, people may be asked to prove their credentials as a custodian first. This would only increase the bureaucracy here. --Gurubrahma 07:00, 8 November 2005 (UTC)


Business & Economics

Hi, An initial list from WikiProject Business and Economics is available at Wikipedia:WikiProject Business and Economics/Version 1.0 assesment. Please add any other business & economics article you have collected there. Currently, I am trying to add only a-class or b-class articles. Hope that helps. --Pamri • Talk • Reply 05:06, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Thank you so much for that! Clicking on the buttons there I see you have a good set of articles available, including some key subjects such as capitalism. I have been in contact with Wikipedia:WikiProject Game theory, and the discussion there has produced a list of candidate articles, though some are not FA/A/B-class yet. Should I suggest that they put their articles on your lists? Would you like to review the assessments first? My own assessments are given here, but I'm a chemist, not an economist! Thanks again, Walkerma 15:33, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
Ok, I updated the list and populated the start-class articles. We can link to the game theory lists, so it is reviewed and discussed in one place. I am not that much of an expert on game theory, so I guess I will leave the reviewing to that project. --Pamri • Talk • Reply 18:00, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

India

Ok, Added a few articles about India at Wikipedia:Notice board for India-related topics/Version 1.0 assesment. I am setting the bar higher for these than the business-related articles. --Pamri • Talk • Reply 05:15, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks again, there are a lot of nice articles there. We are currently slowly working through all of the Wikiprojects, and with a lot of projects and only a few people to handle them, we have yet to contact Wikipedia:WikiProject Indian cities and the other Indian projects, but now we have a head start! It really helps a lot to have people who specialise in specific areas providing suggestions. Thank you so much! Walkerma 05:59, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

WP:FAR

I've been trying to start up the featured articles first project, so if you're interested in a system of review of featured articles, see Wikipedia:Featured article review. Let me know what you think. Tuf-Kat 00:46, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Great! This is the last of the four WP1.0 projects to get under way, yet arguably it should be the easiest to get to completion. I'm glad you're reviewing them one by one, though you have a lot of work ahead! I think you will need to set up a table (such as this?) or a list to keep track of which ones are OK and which ones need work. Good luck, and thanks for taking the lead! Walkerma 05:15, 8 November 2005 (UTC) Oops, I missed seeing that you've already got a good list started. Walkerma 07:06, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Changes

Just looking at some of the changes to the FAs on the project page and a lot of them seem to involve further linking to other articles. Cay you be sure that all the articles thus linked will actually make it into 1.0? Filiocht | The kettle's on 11:20, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for publication

Hello all, it has been great to see there has been a lot of work on rigorous standards for v1.0. I have started Wikipedia:Requests for publication which can be applied immediately about how to approach it. Individual articles are put up for publication, that is, they are checked against the standards and copied off into a separate namespace and be protected. Its quite similar to the featured articles process so pages are protected as soon they have reached the quality desired. Yes, there is always an editable version no matter what. Read for more info. -- Zondor 07:05, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I think it's a decent idea, but aren't you being a bit premature going around to talk pages of non-featured articles (like Talk:United States) and suggesting "publishing" a version of the article? I am not at all sure that we will get consensus to do this with anything short of featured articles. And imaginably not even that, because some people consider long-term protection inherently objectionable. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:28, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
they do not have to be featured articles to qualify for publication because standard / good / usable / v0.5 articles can. i emphasise people can republish as much and as often as they like. -- Zondor 22:38, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Just another idea

I briefly read the content of the project and had to contribute my idea (and I apologize if it's already been suggested). Why not sort all the articles alphabetically (and possibly according to genre first), then divide up the grand total among volunteers to sift through them all and find articles that:

  1. Must be included
  2. Should be included with more work
  3. Can be included with more work
  4. Should not be included
  5. ?

There are roughly 850,000 articles in wikipedia. With 850 volunteers, each person would only have to skim through a thousand articles which is definately doable. When we have everything taken care of. Do the process again to catch the few new things that came up during the process (similar to how Guiness dedicates a page to records that were broken after the previous record was already printed)--Will2k 20:59, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

I think the problem here is to find 850 volunteers! We have 150 articles listed on this project as "core topics", and with 20 or so people involved with the project we only have about 70 of these assessed so far! A decent assessment on a non-stub takes 2 minutes per article, that works out at 2000 minute for 1000 articles, quite an onerous task!
I heartily disagree with this assertion. The statistics say there is close to 700 admins. You're telling me 80-90% would refuse such a task. I would expect nearly all admins and then some could be recruited for this task. It will not be so difficult to find volunteers as long as they are approached beforehand and asked to perform the task. This is a one time task that would take occupy very little time if we have enough people - they don't need to join the project. And a non-stub doesn't need 2 minutes either. 30 seconds at the very most. Stretch that out over the course of about a month and this isn't a monumental task at all (roughly 33 articles per day - an average of little over one per hour - most people visit more than 30 pages in a single visit). It simply needs someone to skim the content and say "yes, this article falls into {complete, should be included, can be included,...}". From there, the talk page is auto-notified of our desire to include it into an encyclopedia and it falls into category {...}. From there, let the peons go to work to make it valid for inclusion in an encyclopedia. What we need is some extra programming where we:
  1. Get together a group of ~1000 volunteers to do this
  2. Get a list of ~1000 articles to each user
  3. Get a drop-down box at the top of the article-visible only to this user-that allows them to select how this article relates to the proposed encyclopedia
  4. Get some extra programming that will tag the talk page as such --Will2k 05:44, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
I assure you, it is not as simple as that. You simply aren't going to get 1000 or whatever number of people to do that all at the same time. Whatever validation process we choose, it has to be virtully nonexistant in terms of it's effect on normal editing. However, do keep the ideas flowing.the1physicist 05:50, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
There are about 650,000 users on Wikipedia. We need about .1% of them are needed for this task.--Will2k 14:15, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
The closest thing to this idea is the Work via WikiProjects subproject. Here we try to tap into the fact that many people already know some good articles within their area of interest, so it's very little work for them to let us know that. There are a couple of hundred WikiProjects, we have so far contacted about 20% of them and I estimate we have perhaps 100 publishable articles so far. However a common response to our request has been for people to start working on improving articles up to publication standard, so I think that by next May we should have at least 1000 good articles that are not FAs. With a bit more work (I have some ideas on that) we could probably make that 2-3000, which would give us around 4000 articles for publication by next summer. Not huge, but a nice start. This assumes that the WikiSort project hasn't given us anything- however it is likely this will take off soon, and give us even more. Please consider joining us on the WikiProjects work if you have time! Thanks for your input, Walkerma 22:43, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
I'd be delighted if you could prove me wrong! Can you try giving this a "dry run," looking over 1000 articles and giving us your opinion on how it went? I have set up a page here for you to list your results. I picked "films" as I noticed from your contributions you have some interest in this area. Feel free to change the page completely to fit what you had in mind, but remember we will need to process the information- for that we need to organise the articles in some way, along with dates and assessments. If you prefer to work alphabetically, then by all means take a look at aardvark etc. instead, set up the list that way. If this is as easy as you say, it would certainly be valuable input, at least until WikiSort gets going. Walkerma 20:56, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to apologize for my disappearance. I rarely have time to spend more than a few minutes on wikipedia. Anyway, I anticipated a script to have automatically generated the list for me. I will try to get this done though. I'm currently compiling a list of films from 1927 onwards based on the films which have been identified by a category that identifies the year as in thisone. When I have the list completed, I'll begin the assessment stuff. --Will2k 08:46, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for making a start. I dare say someone could write a script to generate a list, but that is way beyond my knowledge! If you find my table cumbersome, feel free to tailor it to your needs. By the way, I found out that the German equivalent of V1.0 used exactly your approach – 80 or so volunteers in a room together reviewing all the de articles. I believe articles were principally assessed by length, though, not quality. Cheers, Walkerma 15:16, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
I found this page which might make the distribution easier. I envision one person (or several people if we can) to do one of those sections over the course of a few days. There seems to be around 800 articles per page there. --Will2k 11:20, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Are you still seeking medieval articles?

I noticed a request at the Medieval Project talk page dated from October. Since I doubt this project is still checking for responses I'd like to offer a nomination.

  • Joan of Arc is nearing completion of its second peer review. The editors expect to nominate it for featured article status soon.

Some related articles, though not at the same standard, could be worth considering as the best English language Internet summaries of their respective subjects:

Durova 07:53, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Excellent! I'll add these to the list, except for Joan of Arc. I just want to see if it reaches FA status or not. :)--Shanel 04:35, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

V1.0 available from each article

I understand the topic is distributing an authorized version of the best articles of V1.0, by DVD or paper. I was thinking that there could be a version "1.0 button" on the top right of each article that makes it to 1.0 status. That way people can see that the article reached the point of authoritative status, and people can read the authoratative 1.0 version online frozen at its 1.0 editing status. Of course the adding of new material will go on, but the authorized 1.0 version can be flagged in the history and made easy to display at the touch of a button. This way people will have access to an authoratative article frozen in time, much like our rivals at EB, but they will still have access to the chaotic ongoing adding of new information. I am sure this has been discussed before, I just haven't come across it in the archive. Let me know if this has been discussed before at my talk page, and here. Thank you. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 18:14, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

I think some of the WP1.0 is coalescing around such an idea. This idea is fairly similar to the RFP idea above, now known as Wikipedia:Stable_versions, as well as the Good articles project. If you look on the talk page of an article like ammonia, you will see it already carries a "Good Article" tag. When we go to publication, such GAs will almost certainly become 1.0 articles, so in effect the GA tag is similar to your suggestion. 2006 will see much development, I think; we will very soon have user-based assessments to guide us, and GAs & stable versions as accepted policies too. Along with the subprojects from this group, we should end up with a healthy collection of articles to use. Thanks for your suggestion, and please come & help us out if you wish! Walkerma 20:49, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
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