User:Keith D/sandbox3

This is a few rambling thoughts on getting people involved in improving articles using some form of helping to enable knowledge to be shared as suggested on the WP:ENGLAND talk page.

There are currently a small number of editors on English projects that have experience of creating and improving articles to GA standard. There are even fewer with FA experience. There is a need to distribute this expertise to other editors if we are to generate articles to GA/FA standard quicker and to cover more of the topics involved in a diverse project.

Obviously this depends on those with experience been willing to spend the time on helping to impart that knowledge and the number of those that are available to call upon. It also depends on the other editors being willing to get involved in this.

Select articles

The first thing is to select the article(s) that can be used to perform the training on. This could be one per project involved or even just one depends on how many we think can be handled at any one time. I would think that the articles should not be a top priority articles but which are in a poor state, probably no higher than a start-class. My reason for this is that the inexperienced editors need to know what to do to start getting an article into shape. Also it may take time depending on how many are working on it and their experience.

Experienced editors

The articles would be allocated to an experienced editor or more than one if resources are available. They would then review the article and create a list of things that need to be done to progress the article. This could be done with a review page similar to the peer review page or by taking a copy of the article and adding tags/comments where appropriate. May be this could be structured so that the major faults are addressed first and the minor things later on rather then a top to bottom review of the article. Obviously as this is a teaching thing the comments may need more explanation/detail than on a normal peer review, giving examples of what is required.

The experienced editor would not make changes to the article but leave this to those who are picking up the skills. Though I would expect that they would revert out vandalism when it occurs.

Inexperienced editors

The inexperienced editors would collaborate together on the chosen article to improve it using the notes left by the experienced editor. This may be a slow process depending on how many are willing to chip in and work in this way to gain the experience. They could ask questions of the experienced editors who would be keeping an eye on the progress and provide a new review/next steps to improving article when appropriate.

Formal review

At some stage the article would be ready for a more formal review and the inexperienced editors could then take the article through the peer review, GA review, FAC process under the watchful eye of the more experienced user.

Tutorial

I think that we should probably create some sort of tutorial for this as we proceed, possibly with differences, to show the stages of correction/improvement. This could be used by newer people to see what is required and may prevent having to repeat ourselves as things go forward.

Publicise

Once we have something that is workable then we need to publicise it to members of this project and the regional projects. This could be by posting on the project talk page, by use of the project newsletter or by posting to individual members. The last may be most effective but may be overkill.