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Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

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Harej ( talk) 16:58, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

This URL: [1] is broken, I don't know how to fix it. — andrybak ( talk) 19:09, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Dear wikipedians, after reading all the tabs in this WP still can't understand what is the goal ans scope. Is there a formal definition of what a "vital article" is, an which is the process to nominate and agree a given article as "vital"? If so, where is this documented? Thanks, DPdH ( talk) 00:38, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

For people who enjoy adding things to lists; I've launched 4 expanded lists on my user space: Books, Cities, Periodicals (TV shows, newspapers, magazines, websites), and Structures (buildings, rail systems, museums, etc.).

No voting procedure. Power~enwiki ( talk) 00:47, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded to be moved to Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 14:02, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

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There are a number of unresolved reference problems on Winston Churchill. Please see the thread at Talk:Winston Churchill#Sources. Your attention would be appreciated. DuncanHill ( talk) 15:39, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Hello WikiProject Vital Articles, a BRFA for tagging some vital articles is open here: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/SSTbot_4. If you are interested in the trial results or have general feedback on this task please discuss at the BRFA page. Thank you, — xaosflux ^Talk 14:14, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Quick check, you have Madonna (entertainer), but you don't have Björk, Sasha Grey, or Suzy Quatro. Which is presumably as it should be if you cover only 2000 persons in the history of humanity, and you are already at 2002 for this section. Checking random persons: Rosa Luxemburg, Ada Lovelace, and Emmy Noether pass, Grace Jones fail, too young, maybe? No obvious gender bias detected, kudos from the male IPs. – 84.46.53.128 ( talk) 08:51, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

I noticed that Talk:Identity (social science) doesn't have a vital articles tag, even though it's listed at level 4. Isn't there a bot doing this? Is it malfunctioning somehow in this case, or more widely? - Sdkb ( talk) 17:57, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Hello? Who should I tag to bring attention to this? - Sdkb ( talk) 14:59, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

This task was done by User:PowerBOT until around June 2018 when the bot stopped working. I asked for permission to tag the articles using AWB, but it isn't automatic . Unfortunately I don't really know how to code so I can't take over PowerBOT or run a more sophisticated solution. feminist ( talk) 09:37, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

I stopped running the bot because someone else started doing the tagging for level-5. I don't have time right now to get it running again, but can look into it at some point later in August if nobody does it before then. power~enwiki ( π, ν) 16:22, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

Change of plans -- I'll probably get through this this week. The time-consuming part is fixing redirects; I have a plan to make that easier. power~enwiki ( π, ν) 15:06, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

I have listed the following categories for deletion: Category:Previous WikiProject Vital Articles collaborations , Category:Current vital article collaborations, Category:Previous vital article collaborations. As per my rationale, Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/Collaboration was set up in 2009 but doesn't seem to have ever been used so the categories are therefore not needed. Discussion is at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2019 September 24#WikiProject Vital Articles collaborations. PC78 ( talk) 16:25, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

I've nominated Category:Wikipedia vital articles by quality and subcategories for renaming; since these are used exclusively by the {{ WP1.0}} banner I believe they should be renamed accordingly for the sake of clarity. See discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2019 September 24#Wikipedia vital articles by quality. PC78 ( talk) 19:08, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Hello and greetings from the maintainers of the WP 1.0 Bot! As you may or may not know, we are currently involved in an overhaul of the bot, in order to make it more modern and maintainable. As part of this process, we will be rewriting the web tool that is part of the project. You might have noticed this tool if you click through the links on the project assessment summary tables.

We'd like to collect information on how the current tool is used by....you! How do you yourself and the other maintainers of your project use the web tool? Which of its features do you need? How frequently do you use these features? And what features is the tool missing that would be useful to you? We have collected all of these questions at this Google form where you can leave your response. Walkerma ( talk) 04:25, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

I don't have the programming expertise to do this myself, but I'd be really curious to see someone create some lists of articles potentially missing from VA4 or VA5. For instance, a list the non-biographical articles not currently listed with the most page views could be very illuminating, as could articles not listed but ranked as top importance by a major project. Sdkb ( talk) 04:25, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm curious, how do the rest of you here track what's happening at this project? Now that cewbot is working a little more, having WP:VA3 or the like on my watchlist becomes even more untenable because of all the updates, but I'm not sure how else to be notified when a new discussion is added. Is there any solution? Sdkb ( talk) 11:48, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

I noticed that there was an invitation to come to the VA discussion of whether to list the coronavirus pandemic on its page. A note I added to Talk:Naval Architecture and Talk:Shipbuilding recently also seems to unintentionally have drawn in a !voter. In general, I think we probably ought to avoid putting out invitations to active VA discussions, as they tend to draw in contributors with a strong interest in the topic area and limited knowledge of how significant a topic needs to be to warrant inclusion at a given level. Is that the consensus here? Should we formalize it with some sort of policy, or just go with it as a general norm? Sdkb ( talk) 06:09, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

My thoughts are that we should if VA becomes a consensus discussion. It would be very helpful for areas not in most of our expertises. —  J947 ^{( user | cont | ess)}, at 18:34, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

There are definitely pros and cons. The contributor who came in for Naval Architecture did provide some useful technical knowledge we probably would have missed otherwise, even if they didn't convince me the nom was in error. But they also thought VA was about merging articles and needed some friendly education afterwards, so they clearly didn't have much knowledge of what it means to be at level 4 when they initially !voted. I don't mean to fault that editor — it's okay to have a learning curve, and I imagine many of the new Coronavirus !voters are in the same spot. But I do think VA is in a somewhat unique position in that we have a much lower bar for COI than the rest of Wikipedia. For instance, if an editor is a professional moth expert and really loves moths and badly wants the world to pay more attention to moths, that'll be fine for normal Wikipedia editing, but when the question is "how many moth articles should we have at level 5" or "should we add Moth to level 3", that editor isn't going to be able to come at it objectively. Sdkb ( talk) 17:39, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

How, exactly, is this being done? It seems like it's being done by creating new sections here and then there is a quick poll. Is that an accurate assessment? Sorry for the question - I just learned of this project. Useight ( talk) 19:01, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

• @ Useight: It is done pretty much how you described it, but there are different talk pages for the different levels of VA – Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Level/1, Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Level/2, Wikipedia talk:Vital articles (level 3), Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Level/4, and Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Level/5. —  J947 ^[cont] 01:59, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Archive 16#Proposal: two-month moratorium on proposals/!voting for levels 1-4. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 20:10, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Pardon for asking this (possibly answered) question, but I am curious: What is the reason for not displaying status of article explicitly (next to summary)? Zblace ( talk) 11:30, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks to some help from AntiCompositeNumber, we have a query listing the most-viewed pages not listed as a vital article (down to level-5). Looking through it, I'm seeing a lot of recent/pop culture pages, and I'm not quite sure how we'd adjust the query to filter them out. But there may be a few pages we'd want to add. One thing that I notice is that we don't really have any provision for how to handle lists here; would we want to add e.g. List of most popular websites? Overall, it's a nice check to perhaps catch pages we might have missed, and a good illustration of how our standards differ from just recent popularity. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 02:13, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

I'm not that familiar with the details of Wikipedia's tools, but if you're trying to ignore current celebrities, recency-bias, etc., my first thought would be to see if you can filter on certain infobox / wikidata dates. It will probably still let a lot through, but for the sort of data-mining you're describing, something that cuts even a noticeable part (say 1/4) of your noise is a win if it's simple.

As for the list articles, are you wondering if there's any interest in marking them as (probably lower level) vital articles, or are you asking if they could be used along with your query for data-analysis? I figured it's the latter, but I don't want to misinterpret you accidentally. -- Zar2gar1 ( talk) 03:12, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Zar2gar1, I'm asking if we'd want to make some list articles lower-level vital articles. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 03:15, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Ah ok, so I was misunderstanding. In that case, my guess would be that comes down to what you see as the primary purpose of the vital articles. If you see it as mainly a taxonomy for routing people to as many important topics as possible, some list or outline articles could have immense value. If you see it as more about prioritizing actual topics & content though, I don't think they would be appropriate.

I imagine it might line up a lot with whether you prefer general topic articles that cover a lot of ground, or the most basic articles that... Encino Man could use as a crash-course on current human knowledge after being thawed out. I'm ambivalent on those stances & don't try to be consistent, so while I don't plan to participate in the lower-level lists myself, I could probably support some really focused lists if I did. -- Zar2gar1 ( talk) 03:40, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

As a general rule, list articles are not listed as vital articles (at least in Levels 1-4). Some lists have been thrown in at Level 5, but as far as I know there has never been a discussion on whether or not lists should be included as part of Level 5. I would lean against the inclusion of lists as Vital Articles. Rreagan007 ( talk) 04:29, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Wikipedia:Vital articles to be moved to Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/3. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 19:48, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

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The announcements section at WP:VIT looks like it's broken. China, a level-3 VA, as been put up for good article reassessment, but it hasn't been listed. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 05:20, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Hi all, I noticed that Bloch's theorem was missing from level-5 vital articles in condensed matter physics, I believe this to be a significant oversight, it is fundamental to the field (you will hear many terms surrounding this one that all redirect there and are all notable, "Bloch electron", "Bloch wavefunction", "Bloch function", "Bloch state", and even "Bloch wave" sometimes). While neglecting that article, Onium is included in particle physics and is not really notable at all (could easily be merged with positronium). Also, those articles, and many others on the list, regularly receive less pageviews than Bloch theorem as well. Undergraduate students electing to take a class in condensed matter will learn about the theorem almost immediately, so I believe it is definitely a "vital article" in the condensed matter section of level-5 physics articles. Thanks! Footlessmouse ( talk) 22:44, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Footlessmouse, level 5 in physics is currently only 900 out of 1200 pages, so it's still very much under construction. Feel free to go ahead and add that page, as well as any other significant ones you notice are missing. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 18:55, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

I saw this late, thanks! I will do that now. Footlessmouse ( talk) 06:22, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Could you all please remember to place the vital article template within the wikiproject banner shell? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 12:04, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

@ SandyGeorgia: placing the talk banners is a task that should be done by a bot, not editors, and should be fixed by a bit if done incorrectly by editors. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 18:02, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Trashing of talk pages by this Project continues

Could the editors who work on this project (whose purpose I have been unable to decipher) PLEASE do something to address the talk page clutter that this project is spreading ? See this discussion. After spending months trying to clean up the messes left on talk pages by vital articles templates, I still see messes like Talk:Transit of Venus created by edits like this. Please take some responsibility here for the clutter this project is creating more than a full decade after the last successful effort to tame talk clutter. Please get yourselves a bot to go through and add your template to the banner shell, just as every other WikiProject does. And please also get a bot to go through and repair all the clutter that has been left across talk pages by random placement of this project’s banner. Barring that, please fix them manually, as I have been doing. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 09:39, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

SandyGeorgia, as you know from my recent idea lab post, I certainly care about reducing talk page banner clutter. You'll likely have more luck contacting the operator of User:Cewbot or the BAG than coming here, as this project page isn't heavily watched and I don't think any bot operators are active at this project. Here's the relevant BFRA. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 09:43, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

I see you did not read my post. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 09:48, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, I did read your post, but I only just connected that Kanashimi is the one who wrote cewbot (it wasn't obvious from the name). I'd turn to BAG, then. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 10:05, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. But the other part of my post is that by whatever process whatever editors choose whatever a “vital” article is supposed to be (I don’t find that information anywhere on the page and cannot discern what purpose the Project serves), those are the editors who should take some responsibility for cleaning up the messes they are making. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 11:30, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

SandyGeorgia, to learn about VA, I'd suggest Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Frequently Asked Questions. We do need to keep WP:Volunteer in mind, but I very much agree the project needs some reorganization to make its resources more accessible and operations (including tagging) work better. I share your frustration that this hasn't happened (instead, the vast majority of participant energy seems to be spent on debates about which pages to add/remove)—a few months ago I proposed a moratorium on add/remove debates to focus energy on those tasks, and when that didn't go through, I mostly left the project. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 19:28, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Wow, thanks for all of that. It is worse than I suspected. Now at least I know why it feels like the blind leading a bot which is wrecking talk pages. Not sure I see a solution other than MFD for a lot of wasted editor time. ;( SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 22:58, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

I have recently gone through the entire Category:All Wikipedia Unassessed-Class vital articles (it must have been a couple of thousand), assessing them for Vital and tagging with relevant WikiProjects if missing. While it was a herculean effort (I hope in the future we can have a bot that inherits the class for Vital from existing WikiProject banners), it was not totally wasted. I was able to identify some anomalies that project members may wish to cleanup. Namely:

• The remaining Category:All Wikipedia Unassessed-Class vital articles are all redirects
• Category:All Wikipedia Redirect-Class vital articles are also redirects
• Category:All Wikipedia Disambig-Class vital articles are disambiguation pages
• Category:All Wikipedia Draft-Class vital articles is a draft

Vital templates need to be removed or moved to the intended pages. –  Finnusertop ( talk ⋅ contribs) 23:20, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

The article 20th century (and earlier centuries) have lists of "important" people. These lists seem similar to what this project maintains. Thoughts on what to do? User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 03:24, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

At level 5, there are some "discussions" without any replies, e.g. Hermann Balck (started by me in April 2020). This lack of interest seems to me a clear indication that the article is not vital. So, I'd suggest to remove an article from the list if nobody votes to keep it after four months. Any thoughts ? -- Rsk6400 ( talk) 07:53, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

Rsk6400, I would be careful, since some topics may be under-discussed due to systemic bias rather than lack of "actual" interest. Tyrone Madera ( talk) 19:51, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

I would not be careful. There's a lot of articles on level-5 that aren't really vital, but nobody has cared enough to assess. If nobody's commented on a proposal after 4 months, I would recommend removing it and seeing if anyone objects. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 19:56, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

My apologies if I've read the proposal wrong; I think I could use some clarification. Is this only referring to articles that are being proposed (e.g. due to the subject being at or over quota), or does it also include any article from the list, whether under discussion or not, that hasn't received discussion? Tyrone Madera ( talk) 21:14, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

I was referring only to articles where a discussion about removal from the level-5 list has begun, but cannot be closed due to lack of participants. Rule 2 at Wikipedia_talk:Vital_articles/Level/5#Introduction says Any discussion must have at least four total votes before being closed. I started Wikipedia_talk:Vital_articles/Level/5#Remove_Hermann_Balck more than one year ago, but nobody replied. I'll now use WP:Common sense and remove it from the list. -- Rsk6400 ( talk) 17:57, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, I would think that the solution would be to defer to the status quo (whatever was the case before the discussion) in those cases. If the discussion was a proposal for addition, then no addition. If the discussion was a proposal for deletion, then no deletion. If both, then neither. Applying this to proposals over 4 months old would make sense as a rule of thumb. Tyrone Madera ( talk) 18:23, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

People here are probably interested to know that this year will see another Core Contest, starting on June 1, drawing heavily from the list of vital articles :). Signups are open. FemkeMilene ( talk) 15:26, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Quite apart from being a C-class article that seems unsure of its scope (the term, the glacial landform, a bit of both?), cirque seems anomalous in being a "vital" article... which the three relevant Wikiprojects all consider to be of "low importance". Is this a case of defeat being an orphan, a sharp difference in rated priorities, or some sort of bookkeeping errors somewhere? 109.255.211.6 ( talk) 06:25, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

I have nominated Joan of Arc for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Z1720 ( talk) 18:17, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

I think this can be taken further to a full-blown "vitality estimator" which I've hypothesized about earlier [2] [3]. Raw pageview counts alone are not sufficient, as articles about current topics tend to get disproportionate readership which clashes with this project's principle of anti-recentism - a subject should be old enough to establish itself as not just a passing fad, otherwise the list would change too quickly. The estimator would not only look at other article stats that are assumed to correlate with vitality (e.g. interwikis, wikilinks, page watchers, numericized wikiproject importances) but also give less weight to newer subjects, and assign "estimated vitality" scores to articles. The details can be figured out while testing which formula best correlates with levels 1 to 4, but one way for a first draft (for a "lower is better" approach) is to take a weighted median of an article's rankings by chosen metrics (e.g. if an article is ranked 467th, 30th, 98th and 55th the median would be 76,5), and then divide the number by something like (1-120/age of subject in months+120)². Also, the score would be useful for identifying listed articles that potentially don't belong, not just missing ones.-- LaukkuTheGreit ( Talk• Contribs) 11:53, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

@ LaukkuTheGreit and Power~enwiki:. Power, at [4], you said I would prefer PageRank over page views as the first measure of vitality. It's not perfect, in my tests a few years ago United States and Aristotle were the top two articles, and Harvard University Press was in the top 200. But it seemed to work fairly well. . Could you elaborate what it was? Dawid2009 ( talk) 21:11, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

@ DaGizza and John M Wolfson: I am pinging you two as you two are regular administrators in that project. What do you think about my own/suggested Formula for "estimated vitalness for people who died earlier than in 21th century" (I assume that one should work), this one:

x = 1-{1/[(a/b)+(c/d)]} , where:

• x - article which is analysed. This is biography of person who died earlier than in 21th century
• a - number of language versions with more than 30 pagewatchers for article called x in that formula
• b - number of language versions with more than 30 pagewatchers for article called wikidata ( d:Q2013) on Wikipedia (I belive vital topic should have more language versions than article on wikidata)
• c - "Google trends results" for article called x in that formula.
• d - "Google trends results" for article called English Wikipedia ( d:Q328) on Wikipedia ( I belive vital topic should be more often checked in Google than English Wikipedia itself).

I personally foud google trends (which collaborate with wikidata) more measurable for popularity than pageviews, and I especially like "Google trends in category of encyclopedias/dictonuaries". According to pageveiws Einstein in every Wikipedia is above Jesus, meanwhile according to Google Trends Jesus always is ahead of. I also found google trends focussed on "encyclopedia" more measuabre than "universal google trends". If we mark category "encyclopedia" in google trends then Miguel de Cervantes is ahead of Frida Kahlo but in universal google trends Frida Kahlo is above: [5]/ [6]. What do you guys think? Dawid2009 ( talk) 21:11, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Level 5 seems unnecessary to me and it doesn't match the numbering scheme of levels 1-4 ( Level 1 = one zero, Level 2 = two zeros, etc..) If a list of 50,000 then why not a list of 100,000?

I didn't see any discussion related to the creation of Level 5. Anyone have a link to where it was discussed? I'm hoping to read some reasons why it is needed (and why it is not 100,000 articles).

Ggpur ( talk) 21:29, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

I can't find it anymore (I assume the discussion regarding to it has been removed to save space from the talk page, as it is often done), but the 50,000 limit was taken other the 100,000 because 100,000 is way too much. To keep it concise, and to focus on most important articles, the threshold has been reduced at half. This isn't a big deal since the full list will eventually include 38990 new articles that are important enough outside of their field or in today culture to require an attention. It is also useful as a way to keep in check the global quality of Wikipedia most important articles. You've got ancient divinities, dinosaurs, pounds and measures, video games, mathematic theorems, all the US founding fathers and presidents, conspiracy theories, religious currents, non western history, all of which can't be featured in a reduced list of 10,000 articles, but who generally need special attention and in several cases might be very important for a large number of people or be subject to griefing or disinformation. So, the 50,000 list is necessary - its expansion to 100.000 may be decided once the 50,000 number is reached, though it will lose in utility for my point of view. Larrayal ( talk) 04:59, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Hello, could a project member please close this nomination as it has met the project’s minimum time and support requirements? A cascading level 5 proposal is planned compliment these changes. Kind regards, Cavalryman ( talk) 19:21, 17 December 2021 (UTC).

I see that Claude Monet was removed from the Level 3 vital articles. I was wondering if it is possible to promote Joseph Lister, the physician and scientist who formalised antiseptics and apparently saved more than 3 billion people from an early death, to a Level 3. Lister was a contemporary of Louis Pasteur. How would I go about starting a discussion on here, and where would I hold it. Thanks. scope_creep ^Talk 21:56, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Scope creep, I am not a member of this project but it does not appear there are any active members here. As far as I can tell, you propose to add Lister at WT:Vital articles. You must garner a minimum of five users to support the proposal and, if a minimum of two-thirds of participants support the proposal, it passes. Please ping me if you make the proposal, I agree he is worthy. Kind regards, Cavalryman ( talk) 12:30, 20 December 2021 (UTC).

Hi @ Cavalryman: Thanks for getting back to me. Five users. That's not too bad. I think it's probably doable, but it will be long while yet, a couple of years, maybe three. I want to introduce another guy in, John Hunter, while Lister created the modern craft of surgery in medicine, John Hunter create the science of medicine. He seems to the other side of the coin, mentioned proverbially, in every breath of Lister, when he was a young man. He has museum's all over the world, while Lister has institutes. I barely known anything about both of them, at the moment. When the article is complete I'll be able to provide a whole bundle of arguments, hopefully. I will keep it it in mind. I will do. scope_creep ^Talk 12:45, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

A discussion is taking place as to whether Template:Vital construction is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2018 April 10#Template:Vital construction until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the deletion notice from the top of the article.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Daask ( talk • contribs) 21:45, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Per an offer at the reward board, I have decided to promote the level 1 vital article The arts to either GA or FA status (most likely GA). It may take a while but I will do it eventually. interstate five  18:20, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Actually I have decided to get Mathematics up to GA status, as it is a former GA and I will have specific things to improve. interstate five  21:12, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Oh to heck with the specifications, I'll improve what I improve. interstate five  23:41, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

@ Interstatefive: Please see here, I'm offering $1000 USD to the first editor to get a level 1 vital article to GA :) -- Cerebellum ( talk) 10:12, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

@ Cerebellum Cash? I appreciate the offer but I accepted these reward board offers for something to do, not for cash. So you can keep it/just give me a normal Wikipedia award if I finish first. interstate five  13:52, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Understood, maybe I can donate to a charity of your choice instead. -- Cerebellum ( talk) 15:14, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Abiogenesis, a Vital Article level 3, has been nominated for renaming. If you want to take part in the diuscussion, do so at Talk:Abiogenesis#Requested move 1 July 2022 Cambalachero ( talk) 12:56, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

@ CactiStaccingCrane I noticed you made a pretty dramatic overhaul to the project's landing page. There are certainly improvements that can be made to it, but I have concerns about your particular changes:

• Since this project's initial founding in 2009, it has been a long overdue. I think you're missing a word here.
• Most projects have a vanity goal of some sort, like Wikiproject Military History's five milestones. However, here, we set concrete, attainable goals that can be chew off by an editor. Contrasting ourselves to WPMH is unneeded, I think you mean "chewed", and it's debatable whether improving many major VAs is really best taken on solo.
• Depp v. Heard is a very transient example — the cultural focus will have moved on from that in a short time. Please find something at least a little more enduring so we don't have to constantly update it.
• You've replaced what I think was an automatically updating list of GANs/FACs with one that needs manual updating and is all but guaranteed to become outdated over time. Please use one of the automatically updating options instead (see Wikipedia:Article alerts).
• The old page mentioned things like the levels of VA, which you've removed. They're key to the project's functioning and essential information for anyone coming to it to know.
• The to-do list was recently updated and the research section contains highly relevant links. Again, I'm not sure why you removed these.

I don't mean to be overly picky, but overall, if you're going to rewrite something from scratch, you should take care to do it better than the previous version so that you don't override others' work, and you should look at each element of the old version and make a deliberate decision about what should be preserved or discarded. That does not seem to have been done here, so I'm going to revert for now. Best, {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 23:58, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

I think I've addressed all of your suggestions. As for the removal of the "Goals" section, they are vague, and much better replaced with the to-dos respectively. More reworks are coming in the next few days. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 07:06, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

@ CactiStaccingCrane, looks much better now; thanks for addressing the things! I made a few copy edits for grammar. The only section that still gives me pause is "Guide to improvement", which seems like a fork of WP:Article development, WP:Broad-concept article, WP:General overview article, etc. To remove redundancy, I'd prefer to just see links to those places rather than trying to replicate them. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 19:11, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

I think that section should be kept, because it gives practical and easy-to-understand advice that you can act on right now. Though, these links are pretty useful in its own right, so I added a hatnote there to link these articles. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 00:39, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

I made some additional small changes to both the landing page and the Britannica comparison thing, I'd appreciate if you looked over them LarstonMarston ( talk) 19:50, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

User:CactiStaccingCrane, I know you planned to bring Science to GA, and nominated it before withdrawing it. Curious, are you still planning on nominating it, and do you need help with it? Also, you should read this if you haven't already. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 22:12, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

Just read CollectiveSolidarity's comments here, and yeah. Science should be revisited at a later date. I definitely don't have the capability to improve that article enough, you might not either. Would you want to brainstorm VIT3s and 4s that this project could work on for GA? Could be fun to collaborate, or we could divide and conquer. Something not too broad but with a good amount of sources. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 22:20, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

PerfectSoundWhatever, I'm currently researching about satellite which is in my area of my expertise (and is evident by my userpage :). Either way is fine for me, we can either improve each other's articles or working on a single article. You decide, but I think that Coffee, Compass, and Refrigeration are the least broad and the closest to being GA-class. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 01:24, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

I think I'm gonna try to improve Tea, but those are other good points to start. Thanks — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 04:52, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

Hey @ CactiStaccingCrane:, what was the reason for removing the "Progress" section in this edit? I found it pretty useful. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 05:19, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

It will be outdated as time goes by, when the numbers are not updated. I'm trying to figure how to do it automatically – the excerpted table right now is a temporary solution. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 05:20, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

PerfectSoundWhatever, figured it out, adding to the project page in just a sec... CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 06:03, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Done. The colorful progress bars are now in all WP:Vital article levels, and I make a cleaner progress bar for internal use that tracks GA + FA progress. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:48, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Very cool— thank you! — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 14:24, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Alright, we have a few people interested at the Vital WikiProject. Should we start attacking at a single or multiple articles? CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 05:11, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

@ CactiStaccingCrane Don't forget to post the drive at WP:CBB. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 20:59, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

(I would do it myself, but not sure what you'd want to write in it.) — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 21:00, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

PerfectSoundWhatever Alright, done :) CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 01:40, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

PerfectSoundWhatever, in 10 days, 6 articles out of 56 articles is done, with 5 in the progress. With 25 days left, we kinda need to speed up expanding the articles. How could we recruit more editors to the drive? CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:16, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

This is a good amount of engagment for only a first drive. No reason to rush it. Some progress is good progress nonetheless. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 18:51, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

I think it doesn't hurt to recruit more editors. Since you are on Discord, why not recruit them to join our effort? We could also integrate the WP:BVITAL effort with this drive. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:01, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

1. The 30kb threshold is too high. Since broad articles are usually WP:SUMMARYSTYLEs, there's no need all of them to be long: short GAs are certainly a thing, and some topics simply don't require articles at the same length as others. I don't know if this is unanimous, but I would much prefer a short, tightly sourced article over a lengthy article with spotty sourcing.
2. The drive's structure is flawed in a few ways.
   1. It encourages pure additions over quality. For example, if you start work on a poorly sourced article and you see a bunch of stuff that should be removed, it's against your goal of the drive since you are aiming to expand the article. Will improving all these articles to 30kb even benefit the VIT3's that much as a whole? I don't think so; I believe the imperative is quality over quantity.
   2. Short articles are easier to ignore because they are harder to bring to 30kb. When, really, the shortest articles should be the ones with most incentive to improve.
3. My opinion is that, for the future, we should aim for quality above all. For example, we could do a drive of bringing all Start VIT3's to C and above. Or all C's to B's. Yes, their assessment criteria are not too concrete, but it isn't too difficult to get a rough sense of assessment. If all else fails, we can use the Rater bot's automated assessment. Or, we could attempt to remove a certain cleanup tag in a drive. –  User:PerfectSoundWhatever

Moved from the project page. Aza24 (talk) 07:01, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Agreed on all three. I should have thought them out beforehand. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 10:05, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Agreed upon the flawed initiative of addition only. I do, however, think the drive has been successful in identifying anaemic articles and allowing us to act accordingly. Truthfully, I have seldom paid attention to the KBs of my article, instead prioritising what matters to the readers. I don't think KBs are a good metric of success. DMT Biscuit ( talk) 16:26, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

The next drive that is similar to this should use a better metric, which I think should be a combination of ORES predictions and increase of citations and prose size. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:28, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

These are all things worth considering for future projects, but I think the results speak for themselves too. Just look at what we did with Nutrition (I'm the one who marked it as done, but a few of us were working on it). 30k seems like a reasonable floor that Vital Articles will have to reach at some point, given the breadth of their topics, and this drive is making a lot of that happen. There have also been a couple articles where I had to remove a bunch of poor quality content, but that wasn't an issue– it just meant adding a little more somewhere else. I'd like to see assessment-based drives in the future, but I'd consider this drive to be successful. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 05:25, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

That's fair— I definitely agree the drive is a net positive. My comments were just from a single perspective and definitely not representative of how everyone has been editing the drive. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 06:07, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

While I applaud the idea behind this - expanding vital articles to some minimum level of usefulness - the implementation here has a glaring flaw in my opinion. The threshold is 30 kB of wikitext total, not prose. You can hit that by just running IABot on things (e.g. as seems to have been done here - I note that various Google Books links are archived there, which doesn't work...). I'd recommend that future such events have prose thresholds instead, albeit with the caveat above that we're always looking for quality over quantity. firefly ( t · c ) 15:44, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

I agree, but I also want to incentivise adding citations as well. Like the above thread, I think that a combination of ORES + citation count + prose size increase would be a much better metric for the next drive. Though, I actually don't think the WikiProject will ever make such a drive like this since it is just a staging ground for the Vital GA drives (This drive can be compared to the Project Mercury, developing preliminary skills and experience for the lunar landing.) CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 03:49, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

I actually found the kB measure really useful as it meant that I could concentrate on adding good quality references without worrying about increasing the prose length. Gusfriend ( talk) 06:31, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

So I've been looking at garden for awhile now because I thought it'd be something I'd be able to do, but I've realized that there's some overlap and a lot more content over at gardening. Obviously the main difference is one is an activity and one is a place, but then again, there's overlap. I'm worried I'd just make the overlap worse? Anyone have any advice here? Does anyone think that maybe the articles should be merged? I've never started a merge discussion before iirc but I'm thinking it might be a good idea. But at the same time I'm thinking there's enough distinct differences between the two. I'm not really sure. Clovermoss (talk) 00:34, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

In cases like this, I think the consensus is to keep them separate. My opinion is that Garden would be the parent article and Gardening would be the child article, so Garden would cover all aspects of gardens and briefly summarize the information in Gardening. Overlap isn't a huge issue, the worst case scenario is just that some content needs to be moved around. Garden certainly has other areas to expand; any one of those list sections could be turned into detailed prose. And since this is a broad topic article (like most vital articles), there are other garden-related articles and topics that can be summarized in Garden that don't involve the actual gardening process. But again, that's just how I would approach it. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 01:16, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

@ Thebiguglyalien: Thanks for the advice. It's actually quite helpful. It seems like a really good way to approach this :) Clovermoss (talk) 01:33, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Hey so if anyone needs a hand with their articles or wants to team up on one then just ping me. I've done two articles so far and I don't think I have enough background to complete one of the remaining articles solo. Dr vulpes ^{( 💬 • 📝)} 08:32, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Hey! I'm thinking of picking up Tool but i am having a bit of trouble for the categorization of tools which i think would make the article clearer and more insightful. There is already a discussion about this on the talk page but it is from 2011 and has no real answers to my problem, being: since so many things can be called 'tools' , where do we draw the line? For example my keyboard is a tool i use but it would feel a bit wrong to add it to the page. Furthermore, how can i split tools into easy to comprehend categories? Here are some of my ideas:

Number of parts, number of operators, period of invention (more complex tools tend to be more recent), which problem does the tool fix.

I'm not really sure how to go about this but am very willing to try all kinds of stuff, and would be very very happy with some help :)) Fbrh47 ( talk) 17:28, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Well, then we could just do it and see what works. We can always revert to the previous version if we broke things. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 10:19, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

If anyone wants to work on Broadcasting and de-bias the article, take a look at EB's broadcasting article, it is surprisingly good. Don't just copy or paraphrase it to the article; do use it as a lead for further research and such. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 10:28, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Personally, I think that one of them should be tropical cyclone as there is an active editor base that is aiming to push it to GA. Which two articles should we collectively push to GA? CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 11:24, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

I would suggest Phosphorus. It is part of a near-complete set (so there are a lot of examples to draw from), and is not in too bad a state as it is (the unsourced text seems at first glance easy enough to find, and a layout cleanup may easily help presentation). CMD ( talk) 12:14, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

A great candidate as well in my opinion. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:17, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Notifying to all members of the project as this is important stuff: User:PerfectSoundWhatever, User:CollectiveSolidarity, User:DMT Biscuit, User:LarstonMarston, User:Aza24, User:Ganesha811, and our de facto members, User:Thebiguglyalien and User:Kazamzam. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:30, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

I disagree about Phosphorus, we should put our first attempt at a non-technical topic. Technical topics are harder to write / improve for the average editor, and the changes are more contentious (see Cacti's edits to Science ( this) or Particle Physics for cases). I would suggest one of the topics that Cacti mentioned above, which are not too broad but high vitalness while also not too technical, like Coffee, Compass, Stove, Tea and Refrigeration etc. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 16:19, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

I fucked Science, Particle physics, and United States hard (Science for being too damn broad, Particle physics for being way too technical, and United States for the LTA scums). My general bold altitude upon editing these articles doesn't serve me well either. I think I have to agree with you on this one. We should take it easy on ourselves for the first drive. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:53, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Given that spotchecks are sort of a common thing in GA reviews, pushing a vital to GA seems very difficult and should be carefully done. Most if not all statements should be attempted to be verified before nomination. I don't know if collectively pushing for GA will even happen, or if it's even worth it. We should be improving the low quality vitals to B from C or Start first before pushing for GA. There's a big difference between Start and B as compared to B and GA. I know this is kind of antithetical to this project's goal, but if we we're to get all Vital 3's to at least B, promoting them to GA would be easier in the long run anyways. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 15:58, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

PerfectSoundWhatever, I agree that achieving B-Class should be our short-term goal, but I intentionally choose GA and FA for the long term goal. First, achieving GA/FA sounds more epic than achieving B-Class; second, B-Class can be self-certified, thus fudgeable by dishonest editors; and third, B-Class is really subjective and its criteria is fairly vague, which leave a lot of variability to the dividing line between C-Class and B-Class. But improving articles to B-Class is certainly not something that can be scoff at. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:13, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Some fair points, I still think we should put in an effort through drives to increase the amount of Bs, alongside the goal of GAs. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 16:15, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Why don’t we try Human history? It is a Level 1 Vital article, all the information is basically already there, plenty of sources to choose from, and we can find history buffs literally everywhere that can help out. (I must disclose that it was already on my GA bucket list). CollectiveSolidarity ( talk) 00:14, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Go to Human history and CTRL+F and type ISBN. Roughly 100 books cited. Since spotchecks seem common nowadays, how on earth are we supposed to get access to that many books and verify all that information? Also, how are we supposed to ensure the given sources and books are reliable? How are we supposed to bring an article to GA when 90% of the sources cited are unavailable to us? Not to mention the giant task of curating what and what not to include in the entire scope of Human history. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 00:29, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

@ PerfectSoundWhatever We could break down work into sections. WP:Library has some useful sources, so if a book/author sounds questionable, we can replace it with one of those sources. But unfortunately, even recently promoted featured articles such as Herman the Archdeacon have sources that are locked behind paywalls, and I suspect that most reviewers check the author’s credibility instead of the content. I’ve already done a small survey of what might be undue weight in human history. (TLDR: 20th century is too large, 21st century and Renaissance are too small), but I know such a large article can’t be brought to GA alone. Perhaps you have an idea of what we can improve? CollectiveSolidarity ( talk) 01:13, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

A cursory look: overarchingly, the article has too much prose for a WP:SUMMARYSTYLE article. For example, given that Post-classical history is a separate article, it's section really should not be that long. See how small the History section is in the GA Human for an example of a concise broad section. I still don't think the project should attempt the article quite yet, but good luck if you do. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 01:19, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

I like the route that PerfectSoundWhatever is thinking, at least for now. I would suggest Land as an important but not too specialized article that has a decently broad scope, discipline wise. Aza24 (talk) 01:53, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Sourcing is decent, layout is good…yeah, let’s try Land. CollectiveSolidarity ( talk) 02:00, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

If all of us collectively work on that article, we may have a shot to achieve it. But I still think that improving an article that is closer to GA quality would be a wiser idea, due to our small userbase. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 10:24, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Well, what should be the name of the drive? Personally, I would choose "Project Tungsten", as a homage to the insane amount of effort required to make a Vital GA and kinetic bombardment concepts, which tungsten rods is released from space to strike targets on Earth. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 13:15, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

How about "Vital GA Drive". So people don't get confused and immediately know what it is from the name. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 17:53, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Agreed :) CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 10:06, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

I assume that we'll take a stab at this after the 30kb drive? Or were we thinking of starting sooner? Aza24 (talk) 02:22, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, we will do this after the drive. Doing it sooner won't solve much. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 05:41, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Right, so tl;dr, here are the proposals:

• Phosphorus or other close to GA-class chemical elements
• Coffee, Compass, Stove, Tea, Refrigeration, everyday objects
• Human history
• Land

– CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:26, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

I've also made a simple page at Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/Vital GA Drive for drafting purposes. Feel free to edit it out however you see fit. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:48, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Good to see some action is being taken towards this. I have an idea on how to achieve it but I'll discuss it with a few people offwiki before I propose something. Does anybody know how many Vital articles are currently listed in total of all 5 levels?♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:39, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

About 50 thousand, but keep in mind that the Level 4 articles are also Level 5 articles. We are focusing at the Level 3 vital articles, which contains 1000 articles. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 17:44, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Drive-by editor that happened to see this discussion: since y'all were talking about improving to B as well as GA, a reminder that WP:BVITAL has been running for a while doing 2-week collaborations to get level-5 vitals up to B. We've found that more general articles, such as "Human history", are much harder to improve as they require a lot more work just to get to the level of understanding to know what should be in the article or find sources about the concept as a whole. Articles on smaller subjects are easier to see a gap and then find some sources to fill the gap. That said, we've been doing short-term collaborations, so if y'all are planning a longer, more focused effort, then it may not matter as much. -- Pres N 13:45, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

I agree, there's no doubt that getting Human history to GA is much harder than getting Pancake to GA. I'm worried that if this GA drive failed, the whole WikiProject would be extremely demoralized and potentially become inactive again, therefore I think starting off two Level-3 article about common subjects would be much better idea. That's being said, since our goal is to improve all Vital articles to GA, there would be a time that we must come around and work on the article. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:28, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Right, so let's go easy on ourselves and improve Phosphorus and Compass to GA. Is this ok? CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:47, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Preparation

As the deadline for the 30 kB drive approaches, I'm starting to make preparation to the drive here with a graphical timeline and insignia. We should also take this time to choose the best article for improving to GA. Here are a few suggestions, copied from above:

• Phosphorus or other close to GA-class chemical elements
• Coffee, Compass, Stove, Tea, Refrigeration, everyday objects
• Human history
• Land

- CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:03, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

I think an everyday article would be best. These are plain enough that accessibility isn't really a problem and thus bearings can be collected, collaboratively, so to speak. The others are elaborate enough to where splitting heads and hair could certainly arise. There's also a degree of skill issue. How many of us are Chemists, Historians or Geographers? What we would include or exclude? Perhaps more specialised articles should be done with the additional help of experts, when applicable. I have faith that if we build it they will come, but an outreach initiative may not be a bad idea.

As for what everyday object, I am leaning towards coffee, for its historical and contemporary significance. DMT Biscuit ( talk) 16:53, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm thinking the same with you. Coffee seems to be a great choice for another reason: pageviews. Everyday, 3000 people on average read this article, which means that about a million of people read it everyday. Add SEO benefits of good original content and we would also got ourselves a Million Award. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:58, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

One thing I am concerned about Coffee is the book sources. If you CTRL+F there, and type "ISBN", you get 45 results. Given that spotchecks are becoming common in GA reviews, how are we supposed to verify the statements in every book? I guess we AGF? Also, we'd have to be careful to make sure every cited source is reliable. Not saying Coffee is impossible, but books are definitely something worth thinking about. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 17:00, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

A lot of the time we can use Google Books to help out. If we couldn't get the snippet, we can also try the Wikipedia library if we are lucky to get a chapter or two of the book. And if we couldn't... well, usually there are better and more accessible sources anyways. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 17:02, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

We can do that, for sure, but it would be a pretty large undertaking to track down that amount of books. Since we are all spread geographically, I think physical libraries would be a good resource, since they all vary in selection. (Also, inter-library loans and university libraries expand the selection as well). — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 17:05, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Should we put this theory into practice? Take a stab and see how many we can find, access and/or verify. If we get off to a good start: success (reasonably speaking) and if not: back to the drawing board. Going to try myself and report back my findings. DMT Biscuit ( talk) 17:35, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Update:The vast majority of sources link to Google Books, sometimes with the page included. Others such as Brown (2004) link to other retrieval sites and the Wikipedia library can most likely pick up any stranglers. That being said, I don't think most of these are reliable sources and inspection in that element should be conducted foremost. The user script User:Headbomb/unreliable sped the process up considerably. It colours "unreliable" sources: yellow means repository (practically speaking, it means Google Books). I highly recommend you install it, if yet to. DMT Biscuit ( talk) 17:56, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

That's awesome, thanks for looking into it DMT — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 18:26, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

I have another idea. We could try to bring to GA one of the articles we expanded in the drive, since one of us would have prior experience finding sources and writing prose for the article. But I would lean towards everyday objects or otherwise simple concepts once again instead of technical articles. Perhaps Island, Home, Arabic numerals. In that vein — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 16:57, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

The idea CactiStaccingCrane was to propose that the WMF set $10,000 aside annually for a book fund. Not from WMF grants which tend to focus on diversity and third world but directly from the annual budget. We draw up a list of 10,000 most important articles from here we want improved and give out book prizes for editors who work the hardest on improving our Vital articles each month and overall at the end of each year. So the $10,000 would be invested in further improving the site by giving editors books they need to further improve Wikipedia articles etc. I think we need such a mechanism with decent funding going into it to try to attract more editors to work on these articles. There were some concerns that WMF would still consider it "paid editing" so I haven't proposed anything yet. I'd be interested to hear if anybody likes the idea though. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 18:49, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

So the fund would be to purchase books to aid in researching articles, or as a reward for high quality improvement to vitals? — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 18:54, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Potentially both. Editors would have to qualify to be eligible and demonstrate that they've put significant research into expanding some vital articles, it could be some 30k expansions on lack lustre articles. The larger book rewards would be for the hardest working editors each month. Some type of system which gives an editor a rating and tracks achievements too so the system isn't abused. A panel of judges who decides on book allowances for each individual and who the hardest working editors each month. After 1 year the hardest working editor is selected for the grand prize. Think of it as a project investment into the most important content rather than "paid editing". ♦ Dr. Blofeld 20:55, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Dr. Blofeld, first, we don't need $10k, $1k would do as we are only improving 1000 articles in the main vital list. Second, we can have a voting system similar to meta:Merchandise giveaways, where we will vote on books and the editor that will receive it. This will ensure that the money will be utilized the most efficiently as possible, as you will get snowballed oppose if you don't choose the best-value book. We don't need a judge panel for this. We know ourselves enough. And third, which is perhaps the most important, we need to use this initiative as a sort of leverage for the WMF to give further funds to the improvement of vital articles. Just getting 0.01% of the WMF's budget ($11250) is enough for the Vital articles project to do insane things. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:42, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

How many good books can you buy with $1000? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 19:02, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Dr. Blofeld, Well... not much, but it's a much easier ask than $10000. It's much easier to ask for more later on if we can prove that the funding mechanism is efficient and effective. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:05, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

$1000 as a trial to show that the mechanism works initially might be a good idea. "We need to use this initiative as a sort of leverage for the WMF to give further funds to the improvement of vital articles." Exactly. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:47, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

User:Dr. Blofeld, what should we do first to get the money going? Sorry for the late reply, I'm fairly busy with a lot of stuff right now. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:45, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

A lot of wikiprojects have places where users can request assessment for articles. I think this is something we should consider, especially given the importance of the assessment system in our mission. And expanding on that, I think it would be helpful to have some process to facilitate collaboration or feedback on articles. There are a few vital articles I've made considerable progress on but I'm not sure what that last step is to get them to B class or GA, and I'd bet I'm not alone in this. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 19:21, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

@ Thebiguglyalien, well, for articles that are B-class or under, just go ahead and reassess them base of the assessment criteria. It's pretty arbitrary to be honest. To make an article becoming GA however, you need to go through the nomination process and someone will review the article based on the good criteria (be sure to look at the see also links there, there're good essays about the nomination process). The criteria is pretty strict, so that's why I want to set up a drive to focus everybody's effort. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 05:56, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

I ask because there are a few vital articles ( Injury, Dictatorship, and Human behavior) that I've put a lot of work into and I think I can bring up to B or GA, but I'm not sure where exactly they land or what they still need, and I could use some direction to get them across the final stretch. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 03:15, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Ah I see. I think someone here will give some feedback in the coming days. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 09:55, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

User:Thebiguglyalien Wait, no one? Let me give some then :)

• Like what I've said in the GA review, I think that the Injury article is too human-centric, much like nutrition in the past. I think most of the content can be moved out into a separate article called Human injury, with the main article used to describe injuries to all kinds of organisms.
• For the Dictatorship article, other than a few minor style fixes, I actually don't know what's missing. Maybe you should ask User:Buidhe for that, I think she's an expert at these kinds of stuff.
• I think Human behavior is missing a lot about Bias (such as Confirmation bias and Dunning–Kruger effect) and its history, both about the field of study and the evolution of human behavior. Again, I'm not an expert about the topic, but I hope that my feedback would give leads for further research.

CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:53, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

I had considered the same thing regarding a human injury article. I've opened up a discussion on Talk:Injury. As for human behavior, bias is a really good suggestion that should definitely be included. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 20:09, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

I have been expanding the section Space station#Resupply and crew vehicles with information and references and I think that the information could be better presented in a table but I wanted to see what others think and leave it to someone else to make the change. Gusfriend ( talk) 11:34, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Gusfriend, I suggest that don't make a table for that. Use a simple list of spacecraft-space stations instead: if people want specs, they could just click on the wikilink instead. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:00, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Well, the drive is more successful than any of us might have imagined. However, the drive's influx of editors is due to my request for adding it to the watchlist and it will be removed in 27 August. The last 4 days of the drive will be gruesome, but if we can do this, we can prove to ourselves that we can do great things. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:15, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

There are only 8 articles left (not "working"). Given the current rate of people coming from the watchlist, I wouldn't be surprised if all spots are filled up by the 27th. Personally, I would be willing to take on another article in collaboration with another editor. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 20:32, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Well, that another editor would be me :) CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 23:37, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Sure! Feel free to pick an article to work on together. (Ideally not something overly-technical) — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 23:42, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Well, you should be the person who pick it :) Anyways, I'm just assisting other people and write up the finished articles for a bit more than 30 kB, so as to provide margins. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 10:34, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Well, it seems that we will be off the marks now. At least we have expanded 40 articles – that's nothing to scoff of. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 17:49, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

I am happy to work Tool with either of you two, PerfectSoundWhatever and CactiStaccingCrane. Aza24 (talk) 19:21, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! Let's do it then. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 01:11, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Vital Article page group. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 02:24, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Does anyone here has any other proposals? Be quick, as the Vital GA drive will launch two days later on 1 September. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:50, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

• Throwing out two suggestions: Nutrition and Space station. Nutrition was expanded as part of the 30kB drive, already looks very close to a B-class and had an active contributor, so it should be easy enough for a GA. Space station, while not fully fleshed out and B-class yet, also has active contributors. Cacti, the organiser behind this push, has an interest in space and rocketry, so that's another advantage the project might have in relation to this article. 117.197.85.126 ( talk) 18:05, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

  I agree, IP, that Nutrition is a good candidate. How about just Coffee and Nutrition? — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 18:07, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

  A point I would like to make is that we need not restrict ourselves to two articles. The goal of the project is two successful good articles nomination. Considering the manpower the project has (10+ active members apparently) and diversity of their interests, I think it can afford to focus on three, four, or even five articles, with the goal of nominating them and ensuring at least two are successful. 117.197.85.126 ( talk) 18:18, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

  In my opinion, we should limit to 2 or fewer. We need the highest quality we can possibly achieve, since Vital GAs are notoriously more difficult than normal GAs, more articles to promote will increase the likelihood of failure. This is our first attempt at a Vital GA so we should start small. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 19:18, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

  Agreed that two or fewer would be the best for now. I had noticed the great improvements to the Nutrition article—I'm impartial between Coffee+Land and Coffee+Nutrition, but would support Nutrition if it leads to a consensus. Aza24 (talk) 19:22, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

  As evident by my talk page and like IP has said, I would like to swap Land for Space station :) Just kidding, I don't really mind either way, but the article limit should be 2 because we are right now a small WikiProject. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 00:21, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

  Much as I would love to see Space Station reach GA and I think that there is a lot of information that could be added which would help make it easier to do I think that it would be too much effort. Apart from anything else there are lots of sections without information such as Maintenance. I suspect that the trajectory of the article is that it will grow to be well over 100k and then parts will be split off. Gusfriend ( talk) 07:29, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

@ CactiStaccingCrane: For the GA drive, you should 1) send out a mass message to all project members to inform them of the drive, 2) Add the drive to WP:CBB, 3) create a centralized place to discuss each article (I think we should un-redirect Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Vital Articles/Vital GA Drive). I believe we should each read through the article, and create a collective to-do list of things that need to be fixed.

Personally, I won't be of much help at the moment due to tooth surgery — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 22:11, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm going to add the drive to the community portal now and have prepared my MassMessage at User:CactiStaccingCrane/sandbox – it's just a matter of time before it is sent. Personally, I don't think that the discussion should happen in an internal page as it would be frustrating for other editors and potentially becoming a WP:CANVASSING issue when we nominate the article. I think it's best to discuss each article separately, and when centralized discussion is needed, just go to the WT:PVITAL talk page. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 02:36, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Sounds good. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 03:08, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

User:PerfectSoundWhatever I know this is a minor thing, but having to navigates to the subpages really annoys me when I need to type and click twice instead of once with no apparent benefit. Should we merge the Tools and Drives pages back to the main WikiProject page? CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:15, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Splitting into subpages allows room for the project to expand instead of stuffing everything into a single landing page. A list of all drives on the main page isn't sustainable, say, 1 year from now. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 19:36, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Community_portal, both in Events and project and in Notices. DFlhb ( talk) 12:07, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your help DFlhb! However, like I said at the Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#Incentivize WP:Vital article improvement, it would take far more than this in order for the drive to take-off. There's a lot that hinges on this drive (and it sucks that I'm lacking the time to nurture it). CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 11:16, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

I typed up a response here since I was hesitant to criticize Wikipedia at the Village Pump and preferred a more low-traffic page, but WTH. I just left a second response there. Your (and my) lack of time isn't an isolated problem, and I think while this WikiProject is a crucial initiative, there's just too much inertia among Wikipedia editors nowadays for it to work effectively. DFlhb ( talk) 12:39, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm gonna try to come around and gets my hand dirty on the 17th when I have a bit more free time. Gotta make the heavy wheel turning... CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 08:26, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

Well, working on these articles alone is extremely grueling. There's something about the 30 kB drive that this one don't have. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 09:31, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

It's probably a few things. First, the previous drive gave users significantly more flexibility in what articles they can work on, while in this one there are only two options. I've been working on different vital articles because I have little interest/knowledge in the two chosen topics. Second, it's asking significantly more of users, and GAN might either be too much of a commitment or too abstract of a task compared to just adding a small, specific amount of content. And third, there might still be some burnout from the previous drive. There's a reason why only really big WikiProjects do regular back-to-back drives. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 18:26, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

In my opinion, we also need greater organization than just: "bring this article to GA". For example, a detailed to-do list (specific >>> broad tasks) for each article would make contributing easier, since the tasks are broken up, and they know exactly what to do. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 18:37, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

I think that we should scrap the Vital GA drive and figuring out what to do next. The amount of people participating in the GA drive is just disappointing. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 09:46, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't think we should give up. Better something than nothing. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 20:36, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

Also don't believe scrapping it is the answer. 3 weeks left isn't such a long time; I'd let it play out and figure out how to move forward from there. As User:Thebiguglyalien said, it's probably better to just let people work on any vital article they want, like the 30kb drive. For example Petscan shows 25 articles linked from Wikipedia:Vital articles (that's just lv3, not lv5) that are in the category "Articles with multiple maintenance issues". A drive could focus on that. Or on all vital articles that have any maintenance tag; that should give people wide choice for what to work on. Or it could focus on Start-class Vital articles. You get the idea. DFlhb ( talk) 20:54, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

The 30 kB drive has about 24 hours remaining as of this post. Given the significant improvements to some of these articles, I'd say it's been a success. And while the end point and the sizes are mostly arbitrary, there are a few articles that could still use that boost to 30kB if you want to make one last push over the next 24 hours:

• Physical chemistry needs 15,384
• Strong interaction needs 12,143
• Masonry needs 11,113
• Variable (mathematics) needs 8,023
• Chemical compound needs 10,481
• Electric light needs 8,972
• Social equality needs 8,430
• Grammar needs 3,634
• Design was completed but needs 4,991 due to mass removals

Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 23:51, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Also, pinging editors @ Thebiguglyalien, Solobear89, and EpicPupper: who have articles marked as  Working at WP:30kb, while the deadline is a day away (September 1st). — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 01:16, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

@ SpaceEconomist192: (sorry this one too) — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 01:18, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

Good job with this 30kB drive. Finally en.wp has the highest growth in the meta table here --> meta:List of Wikipedias by sample of articles -- MarsRover ( talk) 23:26, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

MarsRover, we did it! CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:55, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Electric light is now 31,154. It still needs a lot of work including missing information and sections without references but it is a bit better and the first part of the uses section is nicely supported now. Gusfriend ( talk) 11:08, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Much apologies for my disappearance from this project – I was extremely busy the last month. Anyways, I propose that we should make a drive that encourages references, including citing unsourced statements and check the cited statements. In my opinion, that's a great way to bring the quality of the Vital list without doing much effort. Here's my draft of the plan:

1. Work on topic by topic (i.e. each section on the list) to prevent burnout
2. Have editors to cite all of the uncited claims and check the cited claims.
3. To ensure no collusion, when each of the article is marked done, a short review of random 5 citations should be made. It could be as simple has having a permalink to the article, with each entry having a number of the ref and notes. Anyone except those participated at step 2 can do the short review.
4. Once the check is done, well, get your swags. Else, these editors are banished to ANI promptly asked to redo the work.

What do you think about the plan? All ideas and opinions are welcome :) CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:17, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Here's an example of how the drive might work:

• People section's 112 vital articles is selected.
• Alice check and cite stuff at Hatshepsut.
• Bob, Carol, Dan join in Alice; Bob has WP:The Wikipedia Library access, Carol has access from her university, and Dan is just a great searcher for open access content.
• Erin wraps up with minor copyedits without looking at the sources.
• Now, the sourcing is complete, and someone is needed to check them. Alice, Bob, Carol and Dan cannot check the citations because they have been involved in sourcing the article; Erin can because she had not looked at the source – yet.
• Erin makes a report. She asks Carol to email the snippets to her for source checking.
• Erin found that 2 out of 5 sources are inconsistent with the text. The editors throughly check the article again.
• Frank, a new editor, makes a new report and found no citing errors. Mission complete.

CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:28, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Sounds neat! DFlhb ( talk) 16:48, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Citation work is always undervalued, but be careful not to make it too complex. Always build your plan around two assumptions: we might not get as many participants as we hoped for, and some of the ones we do get will probably leave their work half-finished. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 10:03, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

You are absolutely right, and that's one of the main reason why the Vital GA drive failed. We should WP:AGF and skip part 3, and to avoid gaming the system we shouldn't employ a leaderboard or something like that. When we reach a critical mass of editors (~5) then we should implement step 3. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 10:07, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

I had wanted to wait until the GA push died down to ask but I have been wondering about using the number of inline references per page as a useful metric. As a rough starting point it can be used to identify articles likely to need additional references. Gusfriend ( talk) 10:19, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

I disagree. We should be looking at how many statements have ilc's and how many don't. Ilc count is correlated to article prose size, so this would be a bad metric. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 11:56, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure giving people more choice would cause burnout. How about just letting people work on any vital article, level-1 through 5? We would cater to a wider range of editor experience, since new editors might be more intimidated by established (vital-3) articles. Giving choice would help all editors feel useful. And allowing people to switch around between topics throughout the month helps prevent burnout. I really think the more flexibility, the better.

Freeing up the topics could also help us do collabs with other WikiProjects, which would really help us catapult this. Project Military History is super active, let's do a collab, rally people there, we have plenty of vital military articles. Same with Project MMA, and all the other active projects; there's enough vital articles that we can be relevant to every WikiProject. We need to embrace our role as a meta-Wikiproject, we're not focused on a specific topic, we're trying to channel all Wikipedia editors' efforts into improving vital articles.

Most WikiProjects seem to focus on new article creation, since it's more fun to start from scratch than fix someone else's mess. But there's also plenty of people that despair at the quality of many vital articles. All they need, is to feel that they're not alone in tackling them. Some WikiProjects already coordinate improvement drives around their topics, but such efforts would have far more visibility is they were all centralized in one place here. Maybe we could also provide a (non-bureaucratic, informal) way for people to team up on articles together ("squadrons"), since many editors have friends here and would enjoy working on vital articles they're interested in small groups.

By not focusing on level-3, we'd be neglecting the 100% good article by 2032 goal, but that's fine if it gives us momentum. We're trying to change Wikipedia culture here, by refocusing editors on the most important articles; once we have enough momentum going, it'll take care of itself. DFlhb ( talk) 16:54, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Also, several, smaller project goals might be more encouraging. I think we should just copy WP Military History's goals (except featured pictures; swap that one for a referencing-related one), just adapting the numbers to make sense for us.

It'd also be nice to flesh out the project page with backlogs, task lists, those types of things so people can dip in and out. DFlhb ( talk) 17:59, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Strongly agree with collaborations, and military history would also be my first choice for a starting point. It looks like there are a dozen or so level-3 vital articles in military history, most of which are C-class. I also think the "squadrons" idea is important: officially delegated tasks are doomed to fail on a volunteer project like Wikipedia, but a more informal setup can provide much-needed direction. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 18:04, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Your idea of making drives more informal and collaborating with other WikiProjects is really good! However, I don't really agree with working on lower-class Vital articles. Take a look at WP:BVITAL, an initiative by Wikimedia's Discord server, which is very much like WP:SPOTLIGHT by WP:IRC. At first, there's a burst of activities because people work on articles that interests them, but when the hype went away the BVITAL project really stuttered. Focusing our efforts at the level 3 list would avoid scope creep and help contributing to our 1000 Vital GA task. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 01:28, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

You make a good point on scope creep; besides, there's enough newbie-friendly issues with vital-3 articles (citations, copyediting) that my concerns about welcoming newbies would already be addressed by the rest of my proposals.

Having topic flexibility would still address burnout issues. It would also allow us to create a watchlist notice, which I suggest we do, just like the Guild of copy editors is currently doing. DFlhb ( talk) 20:57, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

The article is improving much better than what I and perhaps everyone have thought. Join us to make the article a good article and get some swags along the way. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:08, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

There are currently hundreds of level 5 vital articles that have not been assessed. I've taken care of assessments in most sections, but there are a few that have much larger backlogs that are too big for one person. As a result, there are four sections that still need assessments: Animals (94 unassessed), Astronomy (43 unassessed), Chemistry (219 unassessed), and Technology (140 unassessed). Generally, if a vital article is unassessed, it means one of three things:

• No one has previously assessed the article, and someone needs to add WikiProject templates to do a full assessment. ( example)
• The article has been assessed, but the VA template is still blank, so someone just has to fill it in with the pre-existing assessment. ( example)
• The article had been assessed, but some IP user blanked the header, which is surprisingly common. If the vital articles template is the only thing in the header, odds are this is what happened. Someone needs to go into the page's history and restore the header. ( example)

It's a pretty minor issue overall, but if you have a few minutes, it would be super helpful to go through and fix a few. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 06:09, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

I've added a backlog counter on the homepage to monitor this DFlhb ( talk) 08:50, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Also, to anyone: feel free to use User:Evad37/rater to make the process easier.

And why don't we just use a bot for this? I think User:EarwigBot does it. We should overall do a review to make sure we're using all the (useful) bots we can for all our articles, to save editors time on administrative crap. Category:All Wikipedia level-3 vital articles contains 992 pages instead of 998, and Category:All Wikipedia level-5 vital articles contains 49,290 articles instead of 49,255. We need a bot to make sure everything on Wikipedia:Vital_articles is properly up to date (if it's not) and an automated way to track Vital tags/untags so we can review additions/deletions and make sure there's consensus. We should likely create a dashboard tab. DFlhb ( talk) 09:09, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Rater doesn't work on the VA template. We already have a bot ( User:Cewbot) that keeps the VA list updated and the VA talk page templates maintained, but it has no way of knowing what the assessment should be if no one has assessed the article. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 09:42, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Rater works for me, and doesn't seem to mess up the templates. And I've seen quite a few pages that have no Vital quality rating, but have been rated by other projects, why doesn't Cewbot WP:AUTOASSESS them? I know WikiProject Apple used to have one (I believe the defunct Xenobot Mk V). There's no point in doing this manually when a bot could. DFlhb ( talk) 10:31, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Yes Thebiguglyalien, I can confirm that Rater finally works! CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 09:47, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

I suspect that my approach worked. I noticed that one of the updates to the script allowed for it to discover banners that weren't based on the standard template. Now that the vital article template is in Category:WikiProject banner templates not based on WPBannerMeta, it seems to be reading them. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 17:30, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Moved through the animal articles (it was mostly birds). Apparently Rater doesn't recognise Template:BirdTalk, although I have no idea if that's related. CMD ( talk) 02:17, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Handled the Astronomy ones. CMD ( talk) 04:05, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

Apart from Land, a very interesting topic, I'm also currently working on bringing 3 other articles to Good article class:

• Technology (level 1), quite good but two sections need expansion; I've listed useful works on the talk page
• Mac (computer) (level 5), which I've nominated
• iPhone (level 5), still needs major work

All are free to help if they wish, though please don't let it come to the detriment of our important efforts on Land. DFlhb ( talk) 23:31, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

Just added a few pictures to all of these articles. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:19, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

At your current drive, it states "These articles must achieve quality that is above and beyond GA standard. This will ensure that the article will not decay to below the standard for some time." In other words, might your goal be rephrased as a comprehensive A-class upgrade for all articles you collaboratively work on? AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 17:10, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

A-class isn't really used all that much. It's typically only used if an individual WikiProject sets up its own assessment system, and WP:MILHIST is the only prominent example of such a system. We certainly could set up our own assessment system with an A-class review process, but it would be a major undertaking. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 18:52, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

It seems that the target counts on Level 4 and Level 5 have been adjusted. LightProof1995, was there an agreement that these needed to be changed? Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 02:47, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello :) these have been changed as I was updating the counts. I accidentally had the incorrect totals for Vital-4 and just changed them back. LightProof1995 ( talk) 02:49, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Okay, but why are the target counts changed? Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 14:49, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

See WP:Village stocks, with my name on it. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:31, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

No, I was there for that. I'm talking about changes like this where LightProof seems to have changed the target counts manually. I'm wondering if there was a discussion about that, or if they did this unilaterally. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 16:00, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

A few months ago, it was suggested that the next organized event to improve Vital Articles could involve a collaboration with another WikiProject. I've been thinking about this, and I've come to a conclusion: it would be silly not to do this. Land is a fairly straightforward topic, and a lot of good work was done on it just by random people on WikiProject Vital Articles. But how well will that strategy work for Epistemology, Theory of relativity, or Internal combustion engine? A lot of vital articles require a certain level of expertise that most of us don't have, and these articles are also the ones that require the most sophisticated effort to motivate improvements. I think we should seriously consider previous suggestions to facilitate collaboration between WikiProjects. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 06:10, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. We are basically just mediator and nudging editors to improve broad-topic articles. But how could we motivate people to do so? CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 07:17, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

I would suggest organizing some sort of drive or competition based on a specific theme (improve all of the music articles, the Africa articles, the medical articles, etc) run in conjunction with one or more associated WikiProjects. Preferably one where the WikiProject is very active but doesn't already have its own regular events, so that way we can get effort focused on an area that needs it. There's also the question of what the objective would be, because people will need some sort of goal to work toward. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 14:53, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

That's a great idea. We should try to do so at WP:WikiProject Tropical Cyclones and tell them to work on weather-related articles, as there is a great number of active editors there, no active drive, and best of all they need some street creds after recent scandals. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:30, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Weather could work. It looks like WP:WikiProject Weather and WP:WikiProject Severe weather are related groups with reasonable activity as well. There would be a few things to consider though. First, would we want it to be broad like the 30kb drive or specific like the Land GA drive? Because there are only three weather articles at level 3 that still need to be brought up to GA. Second, would this be a vital articles event that other wikiprojects are invited to join? Or would we go to a specific wikiproject and suggest that they develop a drive of some sort? Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 16:15, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

I think that we should push these articles to GA to keep in theme with our goal. All WikiProjects can join obviously, the more the merrier. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:31, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Thebiguglyalien, here's my proposal for collaboration: Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/Vital Competition. Teams from WikiProjects and lone wolfs would pit with each other to see which team is the most effective at improving content. We would help the teams along the way and give them advice on how to make their work even better. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:31, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

CactiStaccingCrane: As always, I admire the enthusiasm. With that said, I do think some more planning should go into this; even things like the WikiCup and the GA Backlog Drive require several very experienced editors to constantly oversee them, and this looks an order of magnitude more complicated. Events and drives generally aren't something that work when set up unilaterally. One other thing I'd like to say right away is that I would strongly discourage mentioning any sort of cash prize unless you already have the money. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 16:56, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

I agree. I'll try to flesh out more details during the weekend. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 17:10, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

The page which had been Gautama Buddha was unsuccessfully proposed for a change to Siddhartha Gautama, then successfully changed to The Buddha, and is now being proposed for a change to Buddha. Your input and expertise would be most welcome at: Talk:The_Buddha#Requested_move_25_November_2022 Best, Fowler&fowler «Talk» 00:38, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

Looking at some of the tables of classes at pages like Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level/2 it looks like there are a lot of articles that need their class reassessed that would be a possible drive. Apart from anything else the more accurate the class is, the easier it is to target effort. Gusfriend ( talk) 09:42, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

I would support something like this LarstonMarston ( talk) 13:09, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

User:CactiStaccingCrane What do you think of this? LarstonMarston ( talk) 14:46, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

I think that's a good idea too. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:15, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Gusfriend, such as? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 ( talk) 00:45, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

The continent based level 2 articles are a good example as they look more like B than C to me but most of the level C articles for that level are worth considering. At level 3 the start class articles also look like a bit more than that. Gusfriend ( talk) 21:34, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Yet another suggestion for a vital article initiative: what if we had our own version of articles for improvement? The idea would be that each month, one vital article would be prominently advertised as the current project. It would essentially be a more informal version of the GA Drive, which would hopefully attract more editors. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 23:45, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

That sounds like a really cool idea! What do you think would be a good way to decide which article to feature each month? OliveYouBean ( talk) 01:28, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

I think a discussion on this page or its own separate subpage would be sufficient. There are only so many options to choose from, assuming it's limited to the Level 3 list. I'd also suggest criteria similar to those used by articles for improvement if something like this were to be done, limiting it to C Class and lower articles that are of general interest. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 03:00, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

The Wikipedia:Discord already basically does this, at WP:BVITAL. Don't you think it would be better to combine efforts for better progress? The only thing, Team B only selects from vital lists 3-5. You may think this is counterproductive, but the higher the vital, the higher the vital level, the harder the articles to improve. This way, actual change gets done (7 Team B Vital articles are now GAs, including one I helped a decent bit with). — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 04:48, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Right now is Sagrada Familia, if you'd like to work on it. Not a lot of progress so far, my guess is people enjoying their holidays :) — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 04:53, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

I feel like this format is counterproductive. BVITAL is essentially sequestered behind an off-site platform. I'm proposing that we promote as much attention to a particular article as possible to attract additional editors. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 05:23, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

While this is true, editors not on discord could simply look at WP:BVITAL and work on that article. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 05:38, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

See this discussion on its talk page. The article is extremely poor. May benefit from being stubbed. DFlhb ( talk) 18:28, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

DFlhb I think it's time to improve it then. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 08:32, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

Project members here might be interested in the rewards for taking Level 2 Vital Articles to GA that I just posted at Wikipedia:Reward board. And also User:Cerebellum's offer for Level 1 articles. the wub "?!" 18:33, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

I'm going to publicize this prize then :) Hopefully we will get a lot of good vital article this year. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 08:33, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

Gaza City has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 17:56, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Delhi has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 17:25, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Onegreatjoke Oh no... CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:25, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

Antoni Gaudí has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 18:13, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Hopefully someone that's knowledgeable in the arts can help out. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:35, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

Madurai has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 03:09, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Fish has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Artem.G ( talk) 16:48, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Manila has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 20:47, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

See discussion Template talk:WikiProject Vital Articles#Confusion. I believe this and other template are both absolutely necessary, but see opportunities for synergy and also reducing confusion. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him •  talk) 17:07, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

@ Onegreatjoke, @ Artem.G, @ PerfectSoundWhatever, how should we deal with the flood of GARs? It's really overwhelming for the WikiProject to handle. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:20, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

The best course would probably be: 1) triage. Figure out which articles are closest to being GA and work on those first. 2) focus. only work on a small number of articles at a time for the best chance of success. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 17:26, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

@ PerfectSoundWhatever Could you give some clarifications to your suggestions? I don't really understand what you've meant. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:14, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't know how to be more clear than Figure out which articles are closest to being GA and work on those first. I think someone should go through the GAR's and see which ones are the closest to saving. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 01:40, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

Too bad the ChatGPT thread was archived; could we create a dedicated subpage for more long-term discussions, tips for proper prompt hacking, and the like? ChatGPT is a great help for copyediting and discovering missing subtopics in an article, but I get pretty inconsistent results (obviously due to bad prompts). DFlhb ( talk) 10:16, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

DFlhb feel free if you want to :) This is a wiki after all. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 10:41, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Shanghai has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 01:09, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Uttar Pradesh has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 01:14, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Vital articles for greater visibility — Preceding unsigned comment added by CactiStaccingCrane ( talk • contribs) 16:07, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Radish has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 00:33, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Should a drive about adding reliable sources and removing unreliable ones (blogs) should be organized? I found that this is a big problem with Vital articles which can only be addressed by a large number of people. Of course, people can remove/add info as they please, but the main focus here is to improve the articles' reliability. CactiStaccingCrane 15:18, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Here are a few pages which you can look into:

• Bad source detectors: User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen, User:Headbomb/unreliable, User:Novem Linguae/Scripts/CiteHighlighter (you can combine CiteUnseen + Headbomb's script, or CiteUnseen + CiteHighlighter)
• Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources as a rough indicator of quality
• Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library for free access to paywalled sources
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange for people to email you paywalled sources
• Help:Find sources for sourcing suggestions
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Reliability
• WP:V, WP:RS, WP:OR, the usual policy stuff

CactiStaccingCrane 15:25, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Pinging @ Thebiguglyalien and @ DFlhb as they may be interested in this CactiStaccingCrane 14:44, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

I'm in if you organize one. In the meantime, I'll take a look at the WikiProject Apple Inc. Vital articles (though none are level 3). DFlhb ( talk) 23:14, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

I may join, and try to get Netherlands up to B-level. —Femke 🐦 ( talk) 19:12, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Hot chocolate has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 00:48, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

@ Onegreatjoke I appreciate your GARs on Vital article, but I don't think that it's really effective to just pile on reviews after reviews. The WikiProject is really small and inactive and things like this can strain the project to the ground. Can you help the project a bit by inviting more members to the WikiProject in order to deal with low-quality GAs? CactiStaccingCrane 16:04, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

I understand your concern, but I can't just not open these GARs. Some GAs need reassessment and I can't just keep them as broken as they are for longer than they should be. I sadly don't know how to help this wikiproject much. I'm not really knowledgeable with wikiprojects so I don't really know how to promote it. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 16:09, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Could you just list all GAs that are needed for reassessment here with a small comment for each of them? I will try to address them myself to the best of my abilities. CactiStaccingCrane 16:11, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

We don't have a list of this yet. I hope to organise GA sweeps focussed on the top 10% most-read / most-vital / available in most languages when all the changes of WP:GAPD23 have had time to settle in. In GAPD23 we've put in place many changes to ensure that GARs don't take ages and are easy to start. We now need to create a climate of saving articles, for instance by giving warning to relevant editors/projects for top-top articles before GARs are started. —Femke 🐦 ( talk) 19:11, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

So we should just pretend that these bad articles are good and turn a blind eye? The onus is not on the wikiproject to fix GAR's. Anyone can and should take them up. The wikiproject didn't write them, so its not like nominating them is harming the wikiproject; we're hardly affiliated with these articles. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 23:16, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

It used to be that GAR takes forever to be closed, so I thought that what Onegreatjoke's is doing is straining the GAR's system, but as it turn out that's not the case now due to recent GA reforms. CactiStaccingCrane 23:37, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Atomic theory has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 21:15, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

@ CactiStaccingCrane: since our banner doesn't rely on WPBannerMeta, but does include quality assessments, you might want to check out this reply by User:Qwerfjkl and this overall discussion.

I think our best strategy is to remove the quality assessments from our template. Not sure if a switch to WPBannerMeta is needed, but Qwerfjkl knows more than me about that. DFlhb ( talk) 19:10, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Antibody has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 21:10, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Lipid has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 21:29, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Entertainment has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 14:39, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

I have finished clearing up the backlog of unassessed articles, thought it should be in place before changes to the article assessment system that might ratings. Unassessed articles can be tracked through Category:All Wikipedia Unassessed-Class vital articles. In many cases the fix was simply to add the rating to the vital article banner.

Other cases were due to recent delists from GA which had not let been reassessed, which will continue to appear going forward. However, a worrying number were due to vandalism, some of which was later hidden by Cewbot readding the vital articles banner with an unassessed rating. I'm quite concerned I missed many cases of this. Many articles under this Wikiproject are obscure and unwatched. If something appears unassessed, please check the talk page history to see if there was vandalism such as deleting all the existing banners, especially if the only banner is the Vital Articles Wikiproject banner. CMD ( talk) 12:59, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Currently, Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5/Everyday life/Sports, games and recreation is a subpage of Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5/Everyday life, and sports, games and recreation templates link to the Everyday life page. However, there is no indication on the Everyday life page of this subpage. Does anyone know how to put it in in a way that will not confuse Cewbot? CMD ( talk) 13:06, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Electricity has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 00:17, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Albert Einstein has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 18:02, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Talk page layout § Vital tags should be placed with WikiProjects. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 05:04, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Terry Pratchett has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 18:44, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello, I have opened comments for Renaissance on the talk page that identifies problems with the article. If these receives no comments by monday then I will open a GAR for it. Onegreatjoke ( talk) 19:10, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

I get the strong sense that this isn't the more active of Wikiprojects, and that the huge tranche of B-Grade articles are the least immediate pf your worries. And indeed, officially it's the "least vitai" (level 5) of even vaster number of vital articles at large. So, expectation set to "modest", but any port, etc.

This topic is inevitably going to see a huge number of pageview next month, likely getting some sort of front-page mention, as the subject does some medieval cosplay with some very fancy jewelry. Any sort of additional eyes-on with the view of at least slightly improving it prior to then would be greatly appreciated. 109.255.211.6 ( talk) 22:38, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

In Special:Diff/853061088 by Feminist's bot, classified Spork as a vital article. Is this for real? -- RoySmith (talk) 16:14, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

Appears we have quite a few cutlery utensils listed. CMD ( talk) 16:24, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

Are they really vital articles? -- RoySmith (talk) 19:13, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

I think they are, at least under Level 5, which currently has about 50,000 articles contained within. Nervelita ( talk) 16:03, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2023 May 4 § Template:Vital article. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 05:50, 4 May 2023 (UTC)