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Taking stock of the Good Article backlog
Before an English Wikipedia article can achieve good article status, the first of the high-quality article rankings, it must first undergo review by another editor. The growing number of nominations and stagnating number of reviewers has contributed to a backlog of articles needing such reviews, a perennial concern for Wikipedians going back almost as far as the good article nominations process itself. Nevertheless, the backlog at Good Article Nominations (GAN) reached its lowest point in two years on 2 July 2016. The culprit was the third annual Good Article Cup, which ended on 30 June 2016; the 2016-2017 GA Cup began on 1 November, and editors can sign-up until 14 November. The GA Cup is the GA WikiProject's most successful backlog reduction initiative to date, but there is a problem that plagues this and all other backlog elimination drives: editor fatigue.
The GA Cup is a multi-round competition modeled on the older and broader-purpose WikiCup (which has run annually since 2007 and concluded this year on 31 October). Members of the GA WikiProject created the GA Cup as a way to encourage editors to review nominations and reduce the backlog through good-natured competition. Participants are awarded points for reviewing good article nominations, with more points being awarded the longer a nomination has languished in the queue. Each GA Cup sees a significant reduction in the number of nominations awaiting review. On this metric alone the GA Cup is a success; but counting raw articles awaiting review only gives insight into what happens while the GA Cup is running, ignoring the origin of the backlog and masking ways in which the GA Cup can be further improved.
The GA Cup's predecessors, backlog elimination drives, only lasted a month, while the GA Cup lasts four. While the time commitment alone can be a source of fatigue, the mismatch between the time taken to review and the ease of nomination can lead to an unmanageable workload. A good article review nominally takes 7 days, so if the rate of closing reviews is less than the rate of nominations added, the backlog will not only increase, but the number of reviews being done by a given reviewer will balloon, causing them to burn out by the end of the competition. Well-known post-cup backlog spikes demonstrate the oft temporary nature of GA Cup efforts.
With proper information and planning, the GA Cup can begin to treat the cause of the backlog rather than the symptom and succeed in sustaining backlog reductions after its conclusion.
A history of the Good Article project
The Good Article project was created on 11 October 2005 "to identify good content that is not likely to become featured". The criteria were similar to those we have now:
| “ | [A Good Article] should be well written, factually accurate, neutral, and stable. It should definitely be referenced, and wherever possible it should contain images to illustrate it. Good articles may not be as comprehensive as our featured articles, but should not omit any major facets of the topic. | ” |
At first, the project was largely a list of articles individual editors believed to be good: any editor could add an article to the list, and any other editor could remove it. This received significant pushback, with core templates {{GA}} and {{DelistedGA}} receiving nominations for deletion on 2 December 2005 as "label creep" and a suggestion that the then-guideline should be deleted as well. They were kept, but, after discussions, the GA process received a slight tweak: while editors could still freely add articles they did not write as GAs, those wishing to self-nominate their work were referred to a newly created good article nomination page.
While the first version of the Good Article page told editors to nominate all potential Good Articles at Wikipedia:Good article candidates (now Good Article Nominations), that requirement was removed 10 hours later. The current process was not adopted until a few months later. In March 2006 another suggestion was made:
| “ | ...like many people are noting, many articles are being promoted to GA status, except it doesn't do much to lead to article improvement. So I'm thinking whenever articles get promoted to GA status, rather than just put the tag up, we make a section of the talk page on the article and copy all the criteria into it. Then we can go through each criteria one by one, listing how we thought the article met each category, naming any specifics, and noting any flaws we saw in the article under each category, whether or not it made it unable to have GA status. | ” |
| — Homestarmy | ||
The next day the GA page was updated to reflect this new assessment process, and the nominations procedure was extended to all nominations, not just self-nominations.
From there on the nomination page continued to grow. The first concerns over the backlog were raised in late 2006 and early 2007, when the nomination queue hovered around 140 unreviewed nominations. In May, the first backlog elimination drive was held, lasting three weeks. The drive saw a reduction in the backlog from 168 to just 77 articles. This did not last, however, with the backlog jumping back up to 124 a week later. The next backlog drive was held the next month, from 10 July to 14 August, with 406 reviews completed—but a net backlog reduction of just 50, leaving 73 articles still needing reviewed. Another drive planned for September was canceled due to perceived editor fatigue. Backlog elimination drives have been held at irregular intervals ever since then, with the most recent during August 2016. These drives were "moderately successful", to quote a 2015 Signpost op-ed by Figureskatingfan:
| “ | [T]he huge queue at GAN prevents articles from becoming the best examples of the best writing, research, and information on Wikipedia. To be honest, we haven't always been successful. Most of our attempts, like the now-defunct GA Recruitment Centre, which tried not only to train new GA reviewers but to retain editors (another chronic issue for Wikipedia), didn't succeed. Even our periodic backlog drives have been only moderately successful. | ” |
With a looming backlog of more than 450 unreviewed articles by August 2014, a new solution was sought: the GA cup. Figureskatingfan, who co-founded the cup with Dom497, writes of its creation:
I was in Washington, D.C., at the Wikipedia Workshop Facilitator Training in late August 2014. While I was there, I was communicating through Messenger with another editor, Dom497. We were discussing a long-standing challenge for WikiProject Good Articles—the traditionally long queue at GAN. Dom was a long-time member of the GA WikiProject. This impressive young man created several projects to encourage the reviewing of GAs, most of which I supported and participated in, but they all failed. I shared this dilemma with some of my fellow participants at the training, and in the course of the discussion, it occurred to me: Why not follow the example of the wildly successful and popular WikiCup, and create a tournament-based competition encouraging the review of GAs, but on a smaller scale, at least to start?
I was literally on the way to the airport on my way home, discussing the logistics of setting up such a competition with Dom. By the time I got home, we had set up a preliminary scoring system and Dom had created the pages necessary. We brought up our idea at the WikiProject, and most expressed their enthusiastic support. We recruited two more judges, and conducted our first competition beginning in October 2014.