Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20130403/Feature

Feature: A-class: Is It Worth It?

Submitted by Torchiest

Around the new year, there was an RfC to determine whether or not an article should be a good article before being put up for an A-class assessment. The overwhelming consensus was that no, articles could be nominated for A-class independent of their Wikipedia-wide status. With that issue settled, we can now turn our attention to another matter: should we even bother with A-class assessments?

Our project currently has 43 A-class articles. Of those, eight were promoted in 2012. Before that, there was a two year drought with essentially no promotions. So the process was more or less dead for the project until last year. But just because we're doing assessments again doesn't mean we're doing them as well as we could or should. I participated in quite a few video game FACs in late 2012 and early 2013, and I discovered that video game articles don't get a lot of respect from the FAC regulars, who often say that we're too deeply embedded in our subculture's lingo to be able to write articles the average person can comprehend.

Compare the A-class reviews from 2012, for articles such as And Yet It Moves and Dr. Mario to this A-class review from 2010 for Dragon Quest, where it was not promoted. The latter is more like the type of A-class review we should be doing now. Directly below its assessment is a "rubber stamp" style promotion from 2012. Check the third FAC for that article. It has an oppose commenting that it needs a major rewrite to improve the prose. One of the specific items listed for improvement reads "Here the logic is wrong, 'The lack of save points and the general difficulty of the battles were included with the intention of adding a sense of tension.' Absent concepts such as "save points" (whatever these may be) cannot be included." That problematic sentence is still in the article, two years later. I don't mean to single anyone out, as the one A-class review I did for Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars was pretty brief as well, and clearly insufficient, as that poor article failed FAC five times before finally passing in mid-March.

My point is, we need to work on creating a more robust A-class review system, like the amazing work WP:MILHIST does for their A-class process. Articles that succeed there are viewed as basically FAs without the star yet. We need to put our articles through the wringer here at home, so to speak, so that we can develop a reputation for sending superb articles to FAC. There are a number of advantages. Primarily, we have fellow editors that are interested in video games, whereas FAC is filled with an unlimited swath of topics, with editors who may not want to slog through another "confusing" video game article. FAC is a page that is constantly in flux, with articles that languish for too long getting archived and kicked off the page. We had a little burst of three candidate articles booted in the same day in January, with all of them in various states of completeness. Also, if we start to make it clear that articles our project sends are already in great shape, people will be more willing to take the last step and review them.

To this end, I think we should duplicate the MILHIST A-class review process in our own project. This would create an A-class review page for each article, much like the GA and FA subpages, that would be transcluded to the WikiProject Video games/Assessment/A-class review subpage. Our goal with this new review system should be to get articles to a point that they're FAs in everything but name by the time they've run the gamut. With a strong in-house A-class review process, we would have no time limits, and could go over articles as long as we need to before giving them the promotion, which would hopefully mean they can breeze through FAC. Our biggest goal in A-class should be to work on article prose quality, and constantly call each other out on using unexplained gamer lingo. This is a common weakness in many of our articles.

Because of this, my second new idea for the project is to create another reference page, WikiProject Video games/Lingo. Here we can assemble a list of all the gamer terminology we all take for granted, and work on brief, standardized descriptions for each term. The result will be a go-to list we can check against to ensure we're making ourselves clear to non-gamers in our articles. This would be a bigger and longer-term project that just beefing up the A-class review, and so I'm open to discussion on how to put the idea together to make it the most effective resource possible.

I believe that with these two new endeavors, we can become a highly respected WikiProject, and boost our reputation for quality work. We already have a couple dozen or so active and strong content creators. I'm not going to name names, but you know who you are. I'm confident that a sizeable percentage of those can revitalize our A-class reviews. We should also work to boost our presence in the FAC process, with anyone who submits an article at FAC attempting to review at least one non-video game article as a way to generate good will from the regulars there. I think when we give each other lots of reviews, our opinions are marginalized. If we do all the internal expert work in our own project, we can leave the final step to those outside the project.