This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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)

Previously, the requirement was to "understand the sources". You then had to ensure that "reliable sources are cited inline". Hawkeye7 (discuss) 09:00, 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)

Possibly true, but I only had to conduct the source review. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:55, 18 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)

Indeed. What what it's worth, I'm not even a fan of the mathematical sciences being so obtuse that a layman can't understand the meat and potatoes. Lee Vilenski ^{( talk • contribs)} 09:37, 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 Huge agree re: reviewers should just do the tiny changes themselves. If it takes longer to type out the fix than to fix it... -- asilvering ( talk) 05:59, 19 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)

I won't have the time to manage any kind of RfC on a change, but if there is a discussion that decides to change the sort order, that's a quick change to make. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 03:25, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

@ Mike Christie do you mean the list here: User:SDZeroBot/GAN sorting? Unhelpfully, I can't explain why, but I've never found this useful. Too much information? I honestly don't know. It looks perfectly useful, but I haven't picked a single review from it. -- asilvering ( talk) 17:31, 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 was thinking also of User:ChristieBot/SortableGANoms, which I hope is less confusing. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 18:14, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

I wasn't previously aware of this one, no. I'll see if I find it inspiring over the next little bit and report back. -- asilvering ( talk) 20:35, 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)

I've done a lot of quick fails too. Sometimes it encourages the user to work on the issues and renominate, such at Talk:English interjections and Talk:Greece-Turkey relations. It was easier for me to find nominations that are a long way from passing the verification criteria, for example, than review the entire article. MrLinkinPark333 ( talk) 05:44, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

@ Premeditated Chaos speaking as a teacher... some of us never manage to drop this "being the bad guy" feeling. -- asilvering ( talk) 17:21, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Could someone please clean up the bookkeeping properly for I Choose You (Keyshia Cole song)? The article was promoted from a redirect to a GA by a sockpuppet, and then restored to a redirect when that was discovered. Thanks. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 20:46, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

 Done ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 20:52, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Also Tropical Storm Debby (2006) was merged per a discussion at Talk:2006 Atlantic hurricane season#Proposed merge of Tropical Storm Debby (2006) into 2006 Atlantic hurricane season. The article history template currently lists it as a former good article, but it's still on Wikipedia:Good articles/Natural sciences and no GAR page was created. Could someone clean that up please? * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:41, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Also  Done ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 23:09, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Ariana Grande is one of the oldest pending nominations, but it doesn't look like the nominator has had much involvement with the article. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 20:31, 22 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)

A couple other issues I happened across:

• Pocinho railway station has a maintenance tag
• Jews in the civil rights movement has some content that brushes against a topic ban the nominator has since received.

Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 20:57, 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)

File:"Randy Travis" Mural.jpg: A mural of Randy Travis in his hometown of Marshville, North Carolina.

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)

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 Regine Velasquez's article to TFA as an April Fools joke [1]
• 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)

Deleted the review page. — David Eppstein ( talk) 17:54, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you and much appreciated. Pseud 14 ( talk) 18:04, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Noting here that it is a week until the start of the March backlog drive. This is highly needed, as WP:GAN contains over 700 nominations, which has happened only a couple of times before. A third coordinator, to join Vaticidalprophet and Ganesha811, would be much appreciated. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 01:49, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

Happy to help. What needs to be done besides checking that reviews aren't rubber-stamped? Or is that the main job? -- asilvering ( talk) 01:11, 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)

Could we maybe close out and relist Talk:Perfect graph/GA1 before the review drive starts? It is not a substantive review and the reviewer bowed out a month ago. — David Eppstein ( talk) 21:58, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Done per WP:GAN/I#N4a. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 04:03, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! — David Eppstein ( talk) 06:28, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Well, this might take the record for the quickest quickpass. Talk:Microsoft Gaming/GA1

@ Cocobb8: Please review the Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations/Instructions and various GA reviews similar to the one you're reviewing.

Coords: I am not sure how to undo an improper review, but can we put this one back on the list? Generalissima ( talk) 15:25, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

@ Generalissima. Sure. May I ask which criteria you think is not met? I have spent much time thoroughly reading and reviewing the article and reading sources to check verifiability. Cocobb8 (💬 talk • ✏️ contribs) 15:29, 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

• no parts that are unclear or difficult to understand, that it fully complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation (criterion 1a and 1b);
• check at least some of the sources to make sure they agree with the sections cited by them in the article;
• make sure it doesn't have any neutrality issues such as unattributed praise or criticism;
• check the history to make sure that it is not currently affected by an edit war (this one is the easiest);
• and review the images to make sure none of them are improperly licensed. Generalissima ( talk) 15:36, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

For reference, here's another review of a Microsoft-related GA: Talk:Microsoft_Office_XP/GA1 this is the level of depth you have to do, even for an article that primarily meets the criteria! Generalissima ( talk) 15:38, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

@ 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)

If all criteria are met, you should at least present a source spot-check. Skyshifter talk 15:51, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

All right. Would you like to re-assess the article as B-class for now? I will need a couple days to complete that. Thanks! Cocobb8 (💬 talk • ✏️ contribs) 15:53, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I would also take notes about my progress and be in contact with the authors for areas of improvements if encountered. Cocobb8 (💬 talk • ✏️ contribs) 15:55, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

You are meant to follow the instructions at WP:GAN/I#R3. Wikipedia's processes are an open book test. Chris Troutman ( talk) 16:01, 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)

Ok. I will be completing this over the next few days. Cocobb8 (💬 talk • ✏️ contribs) 16:13, 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)

With the spotcheck presented, I think it's perfectly acceptable. Skyshifter talk 20:18, 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)

The templates are at Wikipedia:Good article nominations/templates. Reminder to keep Wikipedia:Good article nominations/Instructions#Reviewing open while you work, until you've got the hang of it. You may also be interested in User:Novem Linguae/Scripts/GANReviewTool. -- asilvering ( talk) 20:52, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! Cocobb8 (💬 talk • ✏️ contribs) 21:33, 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)

I have finished my review. How does that look in terms of notes taken? Cocobb8 (💬 talk • ✏️ contribs) 16:04, 28 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)

There's already a bot that states they are inactive after a certain period. I usually ping them and then close if they don't respond. Lee Vilenski ^{( talk • contribs)} 20:22, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

I've occasionally run into nominators who simply lurk and make no other edits till the nomination is picked up, so I think Lee's approach is a good one. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 20:26, 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)

I treat them as I would any other review: make comments, leave for seven days if necessary, and pass/fail as appropriate. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 00:26, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

An editor left a message on the talk page of Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One saying that they unintentionally started the GA review. Can someone please delete the review page? -- Zoo Blazer 23:39, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

G6’ed. Courcelles ( talk) 23:41, 3 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)

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 * talk 01:44, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Have you asked the reviewer, Sawyer-mcdonell? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 01:57, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

done (messaged privately) sawyer * he/they * talk 01:59, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Give me about an hour and I should be good. Geardona ( talk to me?) 11:45, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! I think this should be resolved now. sawyer * he/they * talk 18:37, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Adding a note to say I've seen this and will probably be able to make the change this evening (US east coast time). Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 13:10, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Done, I think; let me know if there are any issues. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 23:03, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

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)

Personally, I think leaving it up is a good compromise between the old sort order and the by-age sort order. -- asilvering ( talk) 00:01, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Can you please check whether I logged my reviews correctly on the Wikipedia:Good articles/GAN Backlog Drives/March 2024? Thank you! Maxim Masiutin ( talk) 20:01, 8 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)

I wonder if someone can weigh in we have a dispute about applying GA criteria. FuzzyMagma ( talk) 10:02, 9 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)

Thanks to the help of SD0001, the bot is running again on its usual schedule. Please let me know if you see any issues. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 17:33, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

This article is categorized as "2000 to 2004 albums" even though it's not an album, but a song. Рогволод ( talk) 17:08, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out - I have moved it to the appropriate section Caeciliusinhorto ( talk) 18:51, 12 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)

Makes sense, thank you. Mokadoshi ( talk) 01:18, 15 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)

Thank you for looking into this. If you or anyone else would be able, here is my next review that I would appreciate advice on. Mokadoshi ( talk) 20:38, 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 Rider 17:46, 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)

Hi! The reviewer hasn't made any comments yet. I'm talking about autocracy. The Blue Rider 20:42, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Nominator here: I actually have two nominations where the reviewer went MIA: Talk:Autocracy/GA2 and Talk:Politics of Botswana/GA1. Both reviewers have edited since I pinged them. On the latter, it's the reviewer's only review and I don't think they know how the process works. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 21:47, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

We just hit 50,000 good articles. I'm not sure what the 50,000th listed GA is, but congrats! TWOrantula^TM ( enter the web) 19:34, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

It's actually 50,000 good articles and featured articles and lists. We are close to 40,000 GAs, though. Skyshifter talk 22:55, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

What Skyshifter said! The 50,000th GA, FA, or FL appears to be Wharves in Wellington Harbour. Averageuntitleduser ( talk) 04:02, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

LMAO that was the same article I listed to solve a GA mismatch TWOrantula^TM ( enter the web) 04:23, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Maxim Masiutin nominated Drug-eluting stent and I'm reviewing it. Being a first-time reviewer, I'd greatly appreciate anyone's input. NikosGouliaros ( talk) 10:04, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

I've taken a look at the review.

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)

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)

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?

I ask this here because sitting rather on top of the sweeps pile are articles such as Matrix (mathematics), Hilbert space, Newton's theorem of revolving orbits, and Fast inverse square root. Compared to the articles currently lying in WP:GAN#Mathematics, 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 by nominating articles that shouldn't have to meet the criteria. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 22:21, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

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?

It means the articles that say they are good are good. Remsense 诉 02:29, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

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)

Forgive me if I don't believe you; you've said this before. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 02:47, 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)

That's not why...did you actually read...never mind. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 03:12, 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)

Quite frankly, that's far more than most do Dedhert.Jr, so thank you nonetheless. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 04:38, 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.

After a quick skim all of Matrix (mathematics), Hilbert space, Newton's theorem of revolving orbits, and Fast inverse square root seem like quite well written articles to me, with many provided sources. Do you have a specific claim or section you are concerned about? – jacobolus  (t) 04:06, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

@ 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.

By the way, this is some kind of positive assumption, in my opinion. Dedhert.Jr ( talk) 04:17, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

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)

@ Jacobolus I see. Speaking of the article Pythagorean theorem, this article is already indiscretion in which some random proofs of the theorem, and some generalizations of the theorem. I would prefer to create the article about the proofs of Pythagorean theorem in many ways, especially the fact that it is an amazement that one of U.S. presidents have proved the Pythagorean theorem in different approach. Dedhert.Jr ( talk) 04:49, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

@ Dedhert.Jr I don't think an article about a specific theorem needs a separate second article about its proofs, but feel free to start a new discussion at talk:Pythagorean theorem. – jacobolus  (t) 05:06, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Don't forget to invite other members in WP:WPM. Dedhert.Jr ( talk) 05:12, 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 Farm _Talk 14:10, 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)

A notification system for GAN would be helpful. Z1720 ( talk) 16:04, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Sure, I can do that. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 03:42, 9 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)

This is such a basic distinction between reviewer and nominator/saver that I'm surprised it's up for discussion. Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 16:17, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

@ Firefangledfeathers: And yet there have been many times when people responded to GAN nominations with WP:SOFIXIT, demanding that I improve their article so they can keep the GA status for "their" article. Z1720 ( talk) 16:27, 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.

Speaking of saves, it might also help to have a GA Save Award. Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 16:31, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

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)

The hostility and WP:AGF violations evident in your comment serve no purpose, unless your purpose is to drive editors away from the GA process. — David Eppstein ( talk) 02:51, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I guess that's the anti-intellectual in me. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 03:39, 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)

Thanks David, I'll nominate it soon (if I'm not pulled up for nominating more than one article every seven months). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 03:57, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposals

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:

1. Make talk page discussion of issues a mandatory first step, with some amount of time without action required before the process continues.
2. Make notification of the GA nominators and top editors mandatory.
3. Limit the number of concurrent reassessments that any one reviewer can have open.
4. Limit the number of concurrent reassessments in any one topic area.
5. Lengthen the one week prod-like delisting period.
6. Give out Good Article Save Awards to editors that shepherd articles toward a keep.

I don't necessarily support all of these, and there's much detail to be worked out. Hope this helps as a starting point. Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 04:09, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

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)

Firefangledfeathers #2 and #4 are required.

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.

For #4, see this discussion linked below, which I subsequently added to the guidelines and have done my best to enforce.

For #6, I first configured the barnstar on 28 December 2023, and have tried to give it out since (it has occasionally been declined). For Vector space, the "saver" was also the original nominator. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 04:37, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

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.

For #6, I would still give save awards to original nominators. They might decline. Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 04:45, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

#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.

#6: fair enough. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 04:49, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks on 2. Still thinking about 4. Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 05:02, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

AirshipJungleman29, for #4, how about we add some to the status quo:

"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."

Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 03:37, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

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 would support #4 over #3. Remsense 诉 04:18, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Good thing it's already being done (see Wikipedia talk:Good article reassessment/archive6#Please keep topical limits in mind for the relevant discussion). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 04:21, 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 Farm _Talk 05:09, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I have, in the past, speedily delisted ones unarguably affected by copyright problems, like those affected by the LassieTime LTA. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 05:12, 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.

@ Z1720, AirshipJungleman29, Hawkeye7, Remsense, Jacobolus, Premeditated Chaos, Dedhert.Jr, Firefangledfeathers, David Eppstein, XOR'easter, and Phlsph7: as participants in the various stages of the discussion. Hog Farm _Talk 22:06, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

• I'm opposed to making talk page discussion mandatory across the board, for much the same reason that David Eppstein suggested a speedy delisting procedure above: some WP:Good articles have deteriorated to the point where they would qualify for a WP:QUICKFAIL if they went through the WP:Good article nomination process anew. I have encountered this twice in recent memory: WP:Good article reassessment/Dyson sphere/1 and WP:Good article reassessment/Frozen (2013 film)/1. In the former case, I came across the article, tagged it with numerous maintenance tags, and nominated it for reassessment. In the latter, I reviewed the article at WP:Featured article candidates/Frozen (2013 film)/archive1 and discovered severe deficiencies, prompting the withdrawal of the WP:FAC nomination and immediate nomination for WP:Good article reassessment. In neither case would a mandatory discussion period on the article talk page have been a net positive in any way. TompaDompa ( talk) 22:35, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
  • 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 Farm _Talk 22:41, 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.

  Lets have a look at the relevant categories of 2008 unsourced mathematics articles. There are a few in there: Compact element, Representation theory of diffeomorphism groups, Continuous modelling, Length function, Cusp neighborhood, Degenerate bilinear form, Local analysis. These articles have been tagged for fifteen years. What are the chances that they will be cleaned up before 2050? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 00:54, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

  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)

  other editors would be more than happy to productively engage and fix the specific issues flagged most are more than happy already. See GARs for, inter alia, Rules of chess, Invasive species, Battle of Antietam, Lundy, History of the Ottawa Senators (since 1992), Jeff Hanneman, Military career of L. Ron Hubbard, 10 Hygiea, Queen Mary 2, Mercury (element), Danny Deever, from the past four months. Currently we have GARs trying to improve Han van Meegeren, Roads and freeways in metropolitan Phoenix, Australian rules football, and Northallerton, all by editors who, according to you, should have been absolutely outraged at "aggressive threats" based on "vague and often non-actionable criticism". Why don't you drop a line on those talk pages, telling all those editors how outraged they should have been, and how unwilling they should have been to jump to improve Wikipedia? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 02:35, 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)

  As for these unsourced mathematics articles: these are minor aspects of niche topics with vanishingly few readers and little editor interest. You can likewise find plenty of underdeveloped articles about any topic on Wikipedia, including many with decades-old eyesore banners on top. For example, among links in just the lead section of Genghis Khan, we find Jamukha, Battle of Khalakhaljid Sands, Behter, Battle of Zhongdu, Zhongdu, Transoxiana, ... – jacobolus  (t) 02:20, 11 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 Farm _Talk 14:25, 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)

In light of the discussion above, I've created Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/notices given as an organizational place for those who chose to leave GAR notices for articles. Hog Farm _Talk 15:08, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

For clarity

The current GAR nomination/closing procedure (carried out near-entirely by me) is as follows:

1. Nominate article, with nomination statement referring to GA criteria.
   1. Notify all relevant WikiProjects and primary editors.
2. See if anyone responds.
3. If they do and start improving the article:
   1. If they resolve all issues with substantial work, close as keep; award GA save barnstar.
   2. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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)

Some of your best practices should probably be codified. Glancing at WP:GAR#Articles listed for reassessment, many other GAR nominators are active. Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 04:35, 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)

Since many of these affect nominators, I'm hoping to tighten that part up. Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 05:03, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I trust your judgement, so don't be afraid to boldly edit the GAR guidelines subpage to what you feel is best. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 05:10, 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)

I apologize that I'm testing your patience. Remsense 诉 16:03, 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 Farm _Talk 14:06, 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 Farm _Talk 03:56, 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)

No, I am perfectly aware of the bug. Even accounting for it, and taking "what forms a paragraph" as liberally as possible, there are still breaches of GA criterion 2b) in the articles I nominate. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 06:37, 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)

By the way, I modified the introductory text at WP:SWEEPS2023 to explicitly mention this limitation. Phlsph7 ( talk) 10:26, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

User:Phlsph7, your script has been really useful in pulling together WP:SWEEPS2023. Above, you'll see there's a potential issue regarding the script's processing of math-heavy articles. Any chance a fix is doable? Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 03:12, 16 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 → R^m 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)

Sorry for the mixup. I had pinging you on my to-do list so long that it became moot. I'll try and dig up an example or two soon. Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 16:31, 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)

The counts in the table for the Newton's theorem of revolving orbits and Matrix (mathematics) are not what the script produced—they are what I counted because the script thought that they had 80+ and 110+ unsourced paragraphs. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 10:18, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

With the current version of the script, I get 37 for Newton's theorem of revolving orbits and 47 for Matrix (mathematics). This is more than your count of 35 for Newton's theorem of revolving orbits and 40 for Matrix (mathematics). It's possible that an older version of the script was used for the original numbers. Phlsph7 ( talk) 12:23, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

No wait, Matrix (mathematics) wasn't one of the ones I adjusted, that was Hilbert space. But yes, it does look like the current version of the script is producing more accurate numbers than the old version. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 12:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Do art historians go in the artists section?- TonyTheTiger ( T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 18:48, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

I am going to put Barbara Blackmun in the historians section I guess.- TonyTheTiger ( T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 18:51, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

If this is wrong, then please move it or ping my talk.- TonyTheTiger ( T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 19:12, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

• Why is this not getting listed at Wikipedia:Good articles/recent?- TonyTheTiger ( T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 19:21, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

No, you're right: art history is history rather than art itself. ——Serial Number 54129 19:22, 19 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)

And of course as soon as I say that a review pops up. It looks like the new feature is working. Please let me know of any issues. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 02:10, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks as always Mike, a nifty bit of work. CMD ( talk) 03:42, 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? Skyshifter talk 12:06, 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)

Done, using {{ User}}. I'll keep an eye on it until I see one come through to make sure it works properly. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 12:48, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! Seems to be working well. Skyshifter talk 15:51, 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)

OK, I'll do it that way. Probably late next week. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 01:55, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Just a heads up that one of the most difficult GANs has been taken on by an editor with four mainspace edits. This might be a bit more than they're able to handle on their own. Talk:Ariana Grande/GA4 Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 05:40, 16 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)

Yeah. This page has had about 1200 views since it was created a few years ago; that user managed to find it on their eleventh edit. *facepalm* ——Serial Number 54129 20:00, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

No response and they haven't edited since March 8. I'm just going to G6. ♠ PMC♠ (talk) 23:59, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Note: I have now started GA4 for this article and intend to see it through properly. — Ganesha811 ( talk) 23:19, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, I'm sure the editor who submitted it will appreciate finally getting a sensible review. ♠ PMC♠ (talk) 00:27, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

Good grief. If I forget to award you a bonus point for saving this review, @ Ganesha811, remind me. -- asilvering ( talk) 16:15, 21 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?

I'm not sure what was so incomprehensible about those comments, but heigh-ho. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 12:08, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

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)

There's been a few discussions of late about poor quality reviews being carried out by inexperienced editors and reviewers. For example #Talk:Ariana Grande/GA3, #Microsoft Gaming Another invalid GA review, Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations/Archive 30#Talk:Chevrolet Volt (first generation)/GA1, and Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations/Archive 30#System to detect invalid GA reviews.

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)

GA Mentors used to exist, but it was archived as, like @ Premeditated Chaos said, a secondary talk page was considered unnecessary. Mokadoshi ( talk) 23:43, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I think PMC's suggestion of restricting reviewing to extended-confirmed editors would be a good one. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 06:35, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Need more eyes on reviews Talk:Disney–Charter Communications dispute/GA1 Moxy🍁 07:53, 10 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 * talk 00:46, 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 * talk 05:00, 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)

It occurs to me to tag in @ Grnrchst, whose article was the one reviewed. -- asilvering ( talk) 17:52, 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 * talk 18:09, 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)

i could see that working. might be worth making an actual proposal to iron some details out! sawyer * he/they * talk 18:53, 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)

This has been fixed. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 12:39, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

User:GhostRiver has abandoned a handful of reviews including one of mine. She has not visited Talk:Joanne_McCarthy_(basketball)/GA1 since February. Others too.- TonyTheTiger ( T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 14:07, 21 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. -- Pres N 15:43, 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)

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 Farm _Talk 18:12, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I like putting it on the main GAR page such as here. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 18:15, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I have today undone User:MSincccc's drive-by nomination of Sherlock Holmes, explaining why on his talk page. In his reply, he has made clear that he does not believe the rules apply to him. I am not sure what action may be required but it seems that some attention to the matter might be helpful. Chiswick Chap ( talk) 15:25, 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 54129 19:57, 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)

  No. The Prince George GA is by now a strawman; CC already withdrew that suggestion yesterday. That review is not in question. It's others that are, and more broadly, whether you have an idiosyncratic interpretation of 'authorship'. ——Serial Number 54129 11:08, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

  @ Serial Number 54129 Here are some statistics by the way-

  Ivanka Trump- 14.7% authorship (1st) and 62 live edits (3rd)

  Princess Charlotte of Wales (born 2015)-23.3% authorship (1st) and 82 edits (4th)

  Catherine, Princess of Wales-4.6% authorship (5th) and 615 edits (2nd)

  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)

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)

OK, thank you very much for the explanation! Maxim Masiutin ( talk) 21:23, 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)

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)

Thanks. I came here for second opinions. Now, I have them. Viriditas ( talk) 20:47, 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)

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)

There are many GAs that have been deleted. The most recent example is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Avocado cake. CMD ( talk) 01:20, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

There have even been FAs which met all of the MOS and FA criteria, but which fell afoul of policies such as WP:NOTSTATS; this comes to mind. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 11:34, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

:Seems a relevant discussion, but not here. Those are proposals to reduce the backlog. Cambalachero ( talk) 05:15, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

@ Cambalachero: feel free to move it down into its own section. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ ( talk) 05:27, 31 March 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;

-- Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 11:24, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

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)

Pinging bot operator @ Qwerfjkl: Indagate ( talk) 22:04, 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). —  Qwerfjkl talk 22:27, 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)

BlueMoonset, done (hopefully). As I've said elsewhere I'm not going to be available for the next week. —  Qwerfjkl talk 14:47, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Unrelated to GAN, but it appears this happened at Doctor Who's series 1 and series 9 talk pages too. – Rhain ☔ ( he/him) 23:35, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

As Qwerfjkl is unavailable, this needs an admin. CMD ( talk) 01:55, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Mathematics → Mathematical concepts and topics is getting quite lengthy (130 articles) and encompasses everything between Addition, Free abelian group, Pell's equation, Book embedding and International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). If there is no clear partition of these articles then could we at least make a couple of subcategories and leave the rest to "Other"? It seems like "Graph theory" would consume a big chunk of these and "Geometry" another. Additional possibilities are "Cellular automata" and "Algebra".

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)

@ Chipmunkdavis Umm... how many numbers are particularly large groups, so that they could be split into more subcategories? Dedhert.Jr ( talk) 01:26, 18 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)

I think Möbius strip has enough geometry to be classified that way regardless, but geometry and topology would be ok as a subdivision. That might also include articles like book embedding (topological graph theory). — David Eppstein ( talk) 22:20, 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)

None from me. CMD ( talk) 09:46, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

@ Bilorv See my reply, but let's see what about others? Dedhert.Jr ( talk) 11:49, 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)

@ Bilorv Ummm... why are most of the topics and concepts being put behind after texts and biographies? Dedhert.Jr ( talk) 11:09, 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)

I move a few across. There are a couple of unclear cases (is vector space or Hilbert space better classified as geometry? and shouldn't three-gap theorem and lonely runner conjecture be on the same side of the classification, whichever side that is?) but in general this gives a fairly nice even split. — David Eppstein ( talk) 18:08, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I think Vector space and Hilbert space might be included in algebra, while Lonely runner conjecture may be included in number theory. Three-gap theorem is fine in geometry. Dedhert.Jr ( talk) 04:03, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

This edit request to Wikipedia:Good article criteria/GAC has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Add parameter 2e containing a source spot-check has been done.

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 (t c) 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)

Deactivating pending broader discussion. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:08, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I didn’t realise changing that subpage would actually change the formally-defined GA criteria; I’m aware that would require an RFC to change.

I’m not sure there needs to be a broader discussion regarding it simply to change a few templates, instead one could simply special-case the logic in Template:GATable/item etc. ― novov (t c) 19:27, 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 (t c) 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)

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)

Support. WP:GACN suggests substantial proportion of sources, maybe we can use similar wording in the templates. Mokadoshi ( talk) 05:14, 24 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 * talk 05:21, 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)

It is required, it should be added to the templates. CMD ( talk) 06:52, 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)

We could add it to the hidden comment that shows up when you first start the review page, maybe? -- asilvering ( talk) 14:06, 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)

I've done all the rest of them except for Template:GATable which requires changes to a template-protected page. ― novov (t c) 07:14, 1 April 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)

Can you please help me with the review I wrote on an article nominated for GA by @ Sammi Brie?

See Talk:Kentucky_Educational_Television/GA1

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?

Or should I conclude the article pass GA?

Please advice. Maxim Masiutin ( talk) 07:06, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

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", "N^τ-methylhistamine", "N^τ-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 "N^τ-methylhistamine" and "N^τ-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)

I agree with that sentiment. And I agree with David Eppstein's suggestions below. What I didn't agree with is that all these terms need to be explained in the lead section. Later in the article or through explanatory footnotes would be fine, preferable even, as the essence of your complaint is valid. But it's not a featured article candidate, so IMO it's fine. The prose is clear enough, even if I would have phrased it differently. AstonishingTunesAdmirer 連絡 15:52, 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)

I tried to address the issues (the uncommon terms in the HNMT that you've spotted). Thank you for your observations, they were more than reasonable. I removed or explained the terms "biogenic amine", "cytoplasmic protein", "knockout mice", etc., can you please provide your feedback at /info/en/?search=Talk:Histamine_N-methyltransferase#Explanation_of_uncommon_terms Maxim Masiutin ( talk) 17:05, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Very well put. There is not one sentence in the first two lead paragraphs of Histamine N-methyltransferase that I understand. And that is fine, because I do not expect the article to explain what I presume are basic concepts of biology to me. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 12:17, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

You know how to challenge the GA status, do that please. Maxim Masiutin ( talk) 13:02, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Why would I want to do that? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 13:04, 2 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)

If the reviewer would have spotted these problems, I would have rewritten, it looks like finger pointing. Maxim Masiutin ( talk) 13:04, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

That's exactly my point. It's not a problem, that's why it wasn't pointed out. And what you point out above is also not a problem, in my opinion. AstonishingTunesAdmirer 連絡 13:06, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

OK, let me ask for a second opinion. Maxim Masiutin ( talk) 13:07, 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)

1. "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;
2. "biogenic amine" -- thank you for pointing that out, I replaced this term to "biomolecule";
3. "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
4. "histaminergic neurotransmission" -- thank you for pointing that out, I explained this term;
5. "knockout mice" -- thank you for pointing that out, I also explained this term.

It is always good when people from outside see and find these terms. Thank you very much! Maxim Masiutin ( talk) 19:53, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

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?

@ ZooBlazer:, @ Favre1fan93: Cambalachero ( talk) 17:20, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

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. -- Zoo Blazer 17:48, 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)

The first sentence of MOS:FILMPLOT clearly says "self-contained sections", which these are clearly not. CMD ( talk) 01:55, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

User:Toobigtokale appears to have WP:VANISHed. They have one open nomination, which is under review but has received no comments. What is the appropriate path to take here? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 16:32, 4 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)

Noted, thanks. Esculenta ( talk) 20:47, 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? APK hi :-) ( 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)

Ok, thank you. APK hi :-) ( talk) 05:00, 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)

Mine is Trinity Episcopal Church (Washington, D.C.) with 8 sources. APK hi :-) ( talk) 05:35, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

The GA of mine with the fewest sources is probably Miracle Science and Fantasy Stories, with four. There's also A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, which technically has four sources, but three of them are entries in the same encyclopedia, so only two books are cited. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 21:46, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

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".

I suggest that as many regulars as possible watch that page, just to make sure the corrections are done in good faith. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 15:49, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks so much for implementing this! SnowFire ( talk) 16:59, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

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)

The user User:NikosGouliaros started a GA review for Drug-eluting stent but then stopped replying; I tried to contact via the GA review page, usertalk page, email via Wikipedia interface, and WP:DISCORD, and didn't receive any reply. Can you help? What should I do? Maxim Masiutin ( talk) 15:45, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

I will carry out WP:GAN/I#N4a ("What to do during a review if it seems abandoned"); this will return the GA nomination to the queue while keeping its original position Maxim Masiutin. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 17:34, 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)

Please keep the transclusion of the former (incomplete) GA review at the article talk page. Maxim Masiutin ( talk) 17:40, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

It seems I have encountered a similar problem as Epicgenius above, albeit with a different review. @ ToNeverFindTheMets's review on Talk:Dress (Taylor Swift song)/GA1 (nominated by @ Gained) is brief and does not sufficiently justify itself as a perceptive review; for example, whether a spotcheck of the sources has been properly conducted is unclear. TNFTM is a first-time reviewer, and as such, might benefit from some guidance and/or second opinions. ‍  Elias 🪐  (dreaming of Saturn; talk here) 14:49, 2 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)

Thank you for quietly notifying me. This other guy can ( Personal attack removed). ToNeverFindTheMets ( talk) 01:46, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

@ ToNeverFindTheMets: You are welcome to voice your disapproval with the process you're taking part in, but please remember to maintain civility in doing so — comments like this are never appropriate. — TechnoSquirrel69 ( sigh) 01:50, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Noted. I'll instead create another fake wiki page that mirrors this faux vampire thing to use as a counter to this guy being prickish. The catch? it's Keanu Reeves] ToNeverFindTheMets ( talk) 02:06, 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)

Is anyone else getting a slight feeling of the uncanny valley from this conversation, or is it just me? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 15:46, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

ToNeverFindTheMets ( talk) 01:49, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Glad to see it got even weirder. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 10:21, 4 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)

If so the first review should be failed, and I don't know how to close that GA1. Ippantekina ( talk) 17:27, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

@ Ippantekina and Bilorv: I have edited the talk page per WP:GAN/I#N4a; you can start the review in the normal manner now. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 17:32, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Perfect—I should have realised that was actually written in as protocol. — Bilorv ( talk) 19:47, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

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)

  I don't understand your intent here, since this seems at odds with your response to Proposal 8? -- asilvering ( talk) 18:57, 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)

  Agree. I'm not sure what trust has to do with it, when it comes to a GA review. What part would I even skip? -- asilvering ( talk) 02:42, 23 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)

@ TompaDompa I don't follow. Can you explain again? -- asilvering ( talk) 20:49, 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)

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)

There's nothing in WP:GA? suggesting an article's notability is relevant to its review. ——Serial Number 54129 12:31, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I did find clarification in the link! Dfadden ( talk) 10:28, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

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)

What is the difference between "successful nominations" and "historical promotions"? CMD ( talk) 02:52, 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:

1. The number of times a user has nominated an article for GA regardless of outcome;
2. The number of articles a user has had promoted to GA;
3. 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 agree. If nobody objects I'll make the change to #2 in the next few days. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 11:22, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Also agreed, that sounds like a good improvement. Thank you for the update! — Ganesha811 ( talk) 16:52, 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)

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)

A 1 month user opened a GA review and has no idea what to do. 2001:4455:3AA:B000:D0C5:47BA:7023:4E1A ( talk) 12:33, 11 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 ( talk) SyntaxZombie ( talk) 16:02, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

@ 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)

They've reached out to a mentor, [19] and I've left a message on their talk page offering to help if that mentor is unavailable. [20] Rjjⁱⁱⁱ ( talk) 04:08, 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.

As such, I would like to request a second opinion for this GAN. – Epicgenius ( talk) 22:54, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm familiar with this user's editing and find they have a poor grasp of the GAN process. I would second the request for a second opinion. Trainsandotherthings ( talk) 01:10, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

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)

Talk:Wii U/GA2 should be also delisted. That article is huge and a lot of the sources were still not used and only minor problems that were brought before being passed immediately. 2001:4455:3AA:B000:258A:2817:BA68:E8D ( talk) 01:33, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

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.

I wonder if some users may have a different opinion about "spot-check". Dedhert.Jr ( talk) 05:34, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

"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)

@ PMC I haven't copyedited the words. Done. Dedhert.Jr ( talk) 05:38, 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)

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)

Why would we want to remove old conversations about a subject? Lee Vilenski ^{( talk • contribs)} 11:25, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't really see the point. What if a GA gets reassessed and then nominated again? Does the first review still get deleted? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 12:20, 11 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)

I suspect they won't get archived because they don't have a visible timestamp. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 14:17, 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)

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)

Not to mention that books are often pretty hard to classify into the categories that we already have. -- 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)

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)

Thanks. Add to FAQ? Ldm1954 ( talk) 09:53, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Not sure why there are two (as of right now) red links. TWOrantula^TM ( enter the web) 14:32, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Vandalism, not noticed until the change was picked up by the bot who populates the recent good articles section. — Kusma ( talk) 14:43, 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...

Is this really what a Good Article is supposed to look like for manga? JoelleJay ( talk) 21:59, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

"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.

At the same time, at least they are well sourced and not filled with OR. Perhaps we need to pick and choose our battles. While I don't like articles such as the one that prompted this discussion, I'd take something well sourced over articles filled with unsourced cruft such as this. Trainsandotherthings ( talk) 01:51, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

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; 1 2 directly to Evangelion media; 2 to press releases; 1 2 3 4 (Studio Voice interview of Anno) 5 6 7 8 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) 2 3 to non-expert blogs; and 2 to a user-generated ranking site. Not to mention numerous dubiously-qualified contributors like
1 2 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)

Let's remember that while primary and/or non-independent sources can be used for WP:Verification, they do not establish WP:WEIGHT of viewpoints or WP:ASPECTS. TompaDompa ( talk) 15:21, 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 Fuchs ^talk 12:24, 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)

 I have opened a GAR for the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 15:54, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

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)