Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations/Archive 27

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Reviewing articles by editors with a history of miscellaneous issues with sourcing

A day ago, an editor held Turkoman (ethnonym) to be a succesful GA notwithstanding my protestations. Today, among other things, I found a massive misrepresentation of a source. Though I urge all of you to evaluate the merits of my particular allegations as raised at the t/p, I have a larger concern which has nothing to do with either the nominator or the reviewer or even the review.

The nominator in question has (1) a history of misrepresenting sources, (2) using rare and old Soviet literature, perhaps to avoid scrutiny, and (3) machine-translating non-English sources until an admin threatened to block them. How shall an ideal GA reviewer proceed with any future nominations from such editors, balancing concern for content alongside AGF towards the editor? TrangaBellam (talk) 15:20, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations/Archive 26#Request to change a GA Reviewer for a bit more info. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 16:22, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, LV. TrangaBellam (talk) 16:25, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

It looks like you involved were in that thread, TrangaBellam. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 17:41, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes; I was inclined to fail the GAR but the nominator claimed that I was bullying him and got a new reviewer. Who, I believe, did not spot-check a single source. Anyway, since such allegations, I have decided to approach the community for all relevant dealings (example: User_talk:Visioncurve#Machine_translation:_Plagiarism_and_Copyright). More voices, quick resolution, and less friction :) TrangaBellam (talk) 17:48, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Frankly I'm of the opinion that nominators with such issues should be topic-banned from GA at speed. If we can't do that, their articles ought to be quickfailed aggressively. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 17:25, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

With respect, I did a copyvio check and a spot check on this nomination and didn't find any issues. If there are continued copyvio issues that's a block-worthy thing, not really tied to a single review. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:47, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I apologize, this wasn't meant to be a dig at you or your review. I didn't realize it was yours - haven't, er, reviewed the review. I was commenting on the topic of problematic nominators in general. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:46, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

No, I agree, it wasn't aimed at you. From what it's worth, the nominator was nothing but cordial with me and the items TrangaBellam brought up about the article weren't substantial to me (more of a content dispute, and potential genre specific issues). I can't say I'm likely to look into user specific issues during a GAN, that's better saved for another venue. I was asked to pick up the review after the previous one was derailed. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 22:49, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't think GAN can handle such issues. If the article passes the scrutiny of the individual nominator, then it is at some sort of standard. Normal content editing can of course continue on GAs, as seems to have happened here. Long-term issues need to be handled elsewhere. CMD (talk) 01:14, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree with CMD. The reviewer assesses for plagiarism as part of the criteria, but if they miss it, it's on the community to reassess and delist. We have existing forums and sanctions if it's a recurring, uncorrected, behavioral issue.

More to the subtext, the issue of verifying rare sources and their capacity for hoaxes I think is a larger unaddressed problem that deserves to be raised in a wider forum. czar 07:04, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks @everybody for your opinion. TrangaBellam (talk) 13:35, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

New reviewer needed

At Talk:Southern Railway 1401/GA1, a "review" was started, consisting entirely of Currency conversion needed... and technical copyedit. Once done, renominate. This is obviously not anything approaching a real review, and as the reviewer appears uninterested in completing one, a second reviewer is needed. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:09, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

I've left a note on the original reviewer's talk page. I think this is a case of WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU, or they just are paying no mind to the GA1. There may be a WP:CIR issue as well but that would require going through edit-by-edit, not going to accuse until anything more definitive. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 21:45, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

Primary sources

I am reviewing Brian Bolland for GA. The nominator will be working on the excessive quotations and other issues. The article has a massive amount of information sourced to The Art of Brian Bolland which was written by the subject. I think that is way too much use of a primary source for an article and that it should be failed due to that if it can't be taken care of by the nominator. I'm looking for thoughts from more experienced GA contributors. SL93 (talk) 13:31, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

I haven't reviewed the sources in detail, but at a glance, I wonder if there is actually significant secondary coverage of him? From a glance, it looks underwhelming. Artists on Art is actually a lengthy interview, with only a short summary biography. Much of the rest looks like it mentions him only trivially in discussions of other topics.

As to the citations to his own book, on the one hand, skimming it, none of the primary-source info looks especially controversial. I don't, for example, think it's unreasonable to cite the artist when talking about the artist's inspiration. But it isn't a good look for the majority of the article to be cited to it. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 14:05, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

I was thinking that he might squeeze by for notability because of the awards that he won. SL93 (talk) 14:08, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Maybe, but usually awards are only considered to convey notability if there's independent coverage of the win. If the only citations for the awards are to databases or his own book, it's not a strong indication of notability. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 14:16, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Now I think maybe AfD might be an option. Part of me might have been just giving it the benefit of the doubt since the article has been around so long and the first (albeit failed) GA review in 2012 didn't mention it. SL93 (talk) 14:22, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

In fairness, I am a bit of a hardliner on the GNG; others in the community might disagree. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 14:37, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

WP:ANYBIO says that people who have won a well-known and significant award or honour are likely to be notable, but there does not appear to be any real guidance as to what constitutes "well known and signficant" in this case. His Eisner award wins are probably the best case there, but I don't know that even they are really well known outside of the comics industry and fandom. It doesn't look as though anybody has challenged Bolland's notability before now, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he is notable! Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 14:57, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Remove option of GAR for failed GAN

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Currently, it's possible to list an article for a community WP:GAR after a failed GAN. The preferred process if you disagree is to simply renominate the article, or bring it to the talk page here. The GAN instructions say (Step 5: After the review): "If your nomination has failed, you can take the reviewer's suggestions into account and renominate the article. If you believe that you did not receive an adequate review, you may ask for additional input on the discussion page." The GAN instructions do not mention the process described at WP:GAR: "Use the community reassessment process if: (...) You disagree with a fail at Wikipedia:Good article nominations (however, it is rarely helpful to request a community reassessment for this; it is usually simpler to renominate it)".

This process is rarely used (I can't find an example). I don't think the slow community GAR process is the best location for a controversial discussion. Drawn-out controversy is never good for the community. This talk page is better watched and can resolve these matters more quickly. I don't see why we need to complicate matters and have three different options for a failed GAN. To reduce WP:instruction creep and make the GAR process instructions easier, I propose we scrap this option. A smal 2021 discussion at WT:GAR did not reach a consensus. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 16:05, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Agreed: I can't remember any time this option has ever been used, and I can't think of any situation where it would be preferable to simply renominating the article. Getting rid of this rule seems like an easy way to make the system simpler with no real cost. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 16:09, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

A very non-intuitive option. Agree with scrapping it. CMD (talk) 16:14, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Also agree. I've never seen this used. No need to keep it in the GAR instructions. Ajpolino (talk) 16:36, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Support removal. I've seen it used once - Talk:Charles Ellet Jr./GA2, and it just sat there for months before Wizardman finally reverted the GAR and suggested (rightly) that the nominator would have better result just taking it to GAN. Hog Farm _Talk 17:56, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

This appears to be obsolete, and should be scrapped, or at least marked historical. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 18:49, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

I have seen it used, but it is very rare and usually results in the closer suggesting that it should be renomninated. There are better options for nearly every situation where a review is failed at GAN and this is disagreed upon by the nominator. Aircorn (talk) 21:26, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Also support removal. Let's streamline the process. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:35, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Support removal. Renomination is standard and works much better than a GAR would. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:43, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Support removal. Gusfriend (talk) 23:30, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

I've removed the option from the guidelines. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 08:33, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

Support removal. I was surprised to learn this was even a thing. Things should be as simple as possible, and having multiple venues for relisting a GAN is confusing. Steelkamp (talk) 05:54, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

We need a MUCH quicker way of delisting GAs.

For a long time I've had a problem with the GAR system.

1. GARs lasts way too long. My Example for this is Railway surgery, which has been at GAR for more than 6 months. That's longer that the longest waiting unreviewed GAN. Not only that but this GAR has basically gone nowhere since its initial nomination. It's essentially one comment a month. This isn't a good problem to have and should be fixed as it sours the GAR process but cluttering the nominations with obscenely long nominations. Because of this length, it normally takes a GA months to be delisted when it should be going much quicker.
2. More so a 1a. but there is a tendency for nominations to sit for MONTHS without getting a single comment (see Flag of China and Black Hebrew Israelites). This is honestly annoying problem though I don't have much to say that isn't said in reason 1.
3. There are likely so many articles that deserve to be quickly delisted it's insane. Here's just one article that infuriates me beyond belief. the 1899 New Richmond tornado is one of the most poorly written GAs i've ever seen. There is so much problems with this """"GA""""" that it's actually insane. Yet SOMEHOW, this article has been a GA since 2009! 2009!?!? Not only that but it was passed by a SOCKPUPPET!!! And it has been a GA for OVER A DECADE NOW WHEN IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DELISTED LONG AGO!!! THIS IS EMBARRASSING! Yet I know that there is likely MUCH more of these """"""GAs""""""" out there just sitting for years being poorly made. But the GA removal system is pretty much inherently designed for these articles to sit there for years and years without and knowledge of any of their problems because the GAR system is way too slow.

Sorry for being incredibly angry with the third reason but I have had this feeling for an incredibly long time. GARs need to be done faster or more efficiently. Especially since there are over 35000 GAs which makes it impossible to reassess all of them without a widespread community effort.

Proposals:

Now I'm not good with proposals so these ideas are just ideas but here are some of my main ideas.

1. If a GAR is created but then does not get a single comment for a 1-2 months (like Black Hebrew Israelites) then it should be quickly delisted as it's clear that no one cares whether that articles remains a GA or not.
2. A GAR should take no longer than 3-4 months. If it takes longer than the article should either be delisted or kept.
3. There should be a category out there that lists GAs that have been orange tagged. It would make things SO much easier when trying to know which GAs have already had problems recognized without having to scower the over 35000 GA list.
4. Just like how there are GA Backlog drives, there should a GAR backlog drive. It would help create a widespread community effort to get rid of the many poorly made GAs that don't deserve to be GAs.

There's likely more solutions (and problems) to GAR that I haven't identified yet. In order for GAs to be done well this NEEDS to change or else that stupid New Richmond tornado article will still be allowed as a GA for as long as it has. Onegreatjoke (talk) 22:01, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree. I feel like the current process, with the split between single reviewer and community delisting, is overly complicated, which can be a barrier to participation. GA is supposed to be lightweight; delisting a GA should be similarly lightweight. The system should be simplified so there's a single review process. One person begins the review, others are welcome to weigh in if they feel the need, and the original reviewer can make the decision to de-list after an appropriate period of time. An article can easily be renominated if someone later disagrees with the delisting, so we shouldn't be leaving GARs to sit for 6 months. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:17, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

The instructions for the individual GAR say that an article can be delisted after seven days if there is no activity, but there doesn't seem to be any similar provision for a community GAR. If the individual/community distinction is worth keeping (and I agree with PMC that it is probably not) then we should at least introduce a similar provision explicitly into the community process. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 22:25, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Whilst I agree things need to be smoother, the issue I have with GANR is that there is always a chance a user who disagrees with a specific part of an article could open a review and delist the article if we aren't careful. Whilst there are times this would be logical, there's plenty of times I've seen bad faith edits at GAN, let alone GAR. We'd need to be careful to avoid. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 22:29, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

At minimum, suggestion three (category for orange-tagged GAs) seems like a no-brainer. I also think it's pretty clear that suggestion one (default to delist if no replies within 1–2 months) is a good idea. TompaDompa (talk) 22:31, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes. A Bot could then go through removing the tags. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:50, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, to be clear, you're saying a bot should remove any orange-level maintenance tags on GAs? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:02, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Indeed. The tags are notifications of ongoing discussion. When the discussion ends, the tags must be removed. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:29, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

That is not at all how maintenance tags work. Where on earth did you get that impression? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:35, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Help:Maintenance template removal. It is true that different tags have different requirements. If you are not seeking a discussion, there is usually no reason to place a tag; you can resolve the issue yourself. My perspective may be skewed; I am usually dealing with quality articles. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:11, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Maintenance tags are not notifications of an ongoing discussion, they are notices indicating issues with the article. Some of them suggest starting a discussion on the talk page, such as {{COI}}. Others like {{POV}} only say there may be discussion on the talk page, and many, like {{Notability}} or {{Original research}} don't mention talk page discussions at all. Orange-level tags should not be bot-removed from any article, let alone all Good Articles. Human review is necessary to ensure that the issue has been resolved and the tag no longer applies. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 20:32, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Lee. GA is a lightweight process, and the bar is low. And it can take months for an article to get through GA - just look at the queue. It is in the nature of improvement to articles that they sometimes subsequently become unstable for a time. As Lee points out, a lightweight delisting process would be a vehicle for malicious delisting of any subject or article containing something an editor disagrees with, or to harass an editor they don't like. I've seen this already at GAR. When editors disagree, a community consensus process is called for. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:50, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

An article becoming "unstable" for a period is different than it deteriorating to the point where it no longer meets the GA criteria. There are plenty of older GAs (especially ones promoted during the era where there were no actual reviews) that likely would not pass if the article was nominated today. There are many more poorly-written articles that should not be tagged as GAs than there are bad actors with curly mustaches waiting in the wings to aggressively delist good GAs for personal reasons just as soon as we loosen our grip. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:04, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Whilst I do understand that, the current GAR system is still somewhat bad imo. I'm not suggesting that we should have an individual delist a GA like how one person makes a GA. I'm just suggesting that it should either be quicker or more efficient. GARs shouldn't be sitting for months with no activity, especially if the GA in reassessment does indeed prove to not be of GA status. Besides, as much as malicious delisting could be a problem, I do feel as if you are exaggerating the threat of that. By that logic of "Bad faith edits will just ruin this whole improvement of GAR" that would make GAN unusable. In fact, that logic would GAN worse than any proposed improvements of GAR. GAN quite literally is as simple to ruin as "Open review, go to article talk page, make it GA" and that's it and it has happened plenty of times before. In fact the article I linked for argument 3 was made a GA by a sockpuppet. Yet everyone is fine with the current GA reviewing system. But for some reason, GAR improvements are suddenly this bad thing because of possible vandalism. In fact i have never seen a GAR be vandalised while GAN gets sockpuppeted multiple times a year.

I understand the worry of targeted GARs. I mean, two GARs seem to have been made specifically because they're doug couldwell articles. But something needs to change. The GAR system is way too slow to be sustainable and bad GAs will continue to exist for years unless something is done. Onegreatjoke (talk) 23:07, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Plus about vandalism. If it does happen then there should be people ready to revert it. We've reverted bad GA reviews before. What's stopping us from reverting bad GA Reassesments? Onegreatjoke (talk) 23:09, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

I would support a simple, reverse GAN process, where an individual can delist a GA after attaching a proper review and a week long period for any interested editors to make improvements/address their feedback. If there's (expected) contention, then WP:BRD should apply, over the talk page just like any other content dispute. We do list histories of GAN and GAR which could get messy if there's 50 wheel wars back and forth (hypothetical at the moment), but that doesn't matter in the big scheme of things, if the article is continuously improved/discussed. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 23:08, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

There already is an individual GAR option which our hypothetical bad actor could use to maliciously delist GAs, yet I can't remember ever hearing of this being a problem. If someone does start abusing GAR to carry out their pre-existing grudge I assume wikipedia's processes are up to the challenge of dealing with it. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 23:11, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Just wanted to add but a quick skim through of each major subsection's 50 edit history seems to show that the individual GAR system was only used....... twice. Specifically in the geography and places section to get rid of sockpuppet reviews. That should pretty much show the lack of care really with finding and delisting articles and why it takes so long to get any articles delisted. Onegreatjoke (talk) 00:22, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

I've seen far more than two individual GARs done; indeed, I've done one myself, and it wasn't to get rid of a sockpuppet review. The fact is that the option exists and can be relatively quick. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:15, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

As much as the option does exist, it doesn't truly solve the problem. Even though you've seen people do it, rarely anyone does it. It seems to be 1 or 2 Individual GARs a month. Which at the average, will never come close to the amount of GAs that need reassessment. It is useful, but we would need it to be more widespread in order for it to make a genuine impact. Onegreatjoke (talk) 02:27, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

I have a few comments/questions/suggestions:

Nominating a page for GAR can feel nominating a page for AfD with the sense of "everyone else is here to build an encyclopedia, why are you trying to tear it down?" and "this article was good enough to pass the GAN and for everyone else why do you have a problem with it?". Even if that is not said, it is easy to second guess yourself and so decide not open a GAR and avoid the hassle.

I have opened one individual GAR and do not plan to open any more individual ones as I am not entirely happy with the way it played out. Apart from anything else the discussion became hidden away on the individual article page rather than the community one where more people see it. Am I missing something, do my expectations match the community consensus, will someone else notice a different issue, is this something that someone else can easily fix? This is even more of an issue if the original author is no longer editing.

Can we transclude the individual GARs to the WP:GAR page so that more people see them?

Can we get a script to automatically add any community GARs to WP:Closure requests after they have not been touched for 2 months?

Would it be worthwhile to make opening a GAR with detailed reasoning equivalent to reviewing an article for the stats?

Gusfriend (talk) 05:33, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Continuing with your WP:AFD comparison, at least AFDs are a community thing that people other than you vote on. For individual GARs, you are the judge, jury, and executioner. That fact could put more pressure on people than they'd like and might prevent those people from doing individual GARs. Onegreatjoke (talk) 05:38, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

I would propose that an editor should be able to WP:BOLDly delist an article from GA, if it is clear that the article no longer qualifies for GA. BD2412 T 02:27, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

• On the 1899 New Richmond tornado article: I believe Onegreatjoke is misrepresenting what happened there. The nominator is an editor still in good standing and the editor who passed it wasn't his sockpuppet. The editor who performed the review, User:Mattisse, was a sock-master, yes (unknown at the time), but Mattisse was also very active in GAN/FAC of the era. Their reviews weren't necessarily any worse than anyone else, and they were banned not for incompetence but rather for holding bizarre grudges. Perhaps the article should be demoted, sure, but not because of an invalid review - remember that standards for GAC in 2009 were very, very lenient. SnowFire (talk) 02:33, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  Ok, for the sockpuppet part I will admit my mistake there. I wasn't truly telling everything with the sockpuppet part of the article so that is my fault. However, I do think you are misinterpreting why I want the GA delisted. I'm not just saying to delist it because it was reviewed by a sockpuppet. I'm saying to delist because of the fact that the article isn't of good quality. There is an entire paragraph and numerous chunks of prose that don't have citations which alone fails criterion 2b massively and would honestly be a good enough argument for a delist on its own. Also, just because standards for GAs were more lenient back in 2009 doesn't make it so that this article can't be delisted. Wikipedia has changed its rules for GAs and GA reviews work. If a GA promoted in 2009 no longer supports the requirements of GAs today then it shouldn't be a GA, no matter if the requirements back then were much more lenient. Onegreatjoke (talk) 04:07, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  This is fair, but can you consider striking your original comment on "it was passed by a SOCKPUPPET!!!" then? You're creating a problem that doesn't exist in the GAR process. If someone passes a GA with their own sockpuppet, that's already grounds to quickly and instantly remove the GA status. Additionally, let me stress again that the original nominator is still active, and you were accusing them of passing their GA with a sockpuppet, rather than the more boring truth that the editor who passed it was merely later banned, which is not uncommon and not something the GA process can easily control. Stick to the complaints you have here SnowFire (talk) 04:08, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

• Also, on the railway surgery GAR, the problem is that a major claim was made that requires both familiarity with the sources used, as well as the potential existence of other sources. It's more important to be accurate than it is to be quick. If a GAR needs to stay open until some neutral third party can assess the claims being made, so be it. I do agree that for exceptionally long reviews, there should be a standard created for what "no consensus" means - does no consensus mean "preserve the status quo" and GA status stays, or does it mean "no consensus to remain a GA" and that the neutral status is not to be a GA? It's not clear, because we really, really don't want GARs to close as no consensus. A proposal to clarify this wouldn't be a bad idea IMO, but the general principle of not having too strict a timelimit for niche topics with hard-to-verify claims should be kept. SnowFire (talk) 03:37, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  Being delisted isn't permanent, it can always be renominated. It is a suggestion that an article should be delisted as soon as it gets nominated for review (since the review is basically another nomination review, it passes or fails as with a first-time review), though there is the chance for abuse there. Kingsif (talk) 03:40, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  I should clarify what I mean. When I mention railway surgery as a problem I mean that while still ongoing, is mostly inactive for quite a lot of it's history. Reason being, there was one comment in August, then only one comment in October, then it starts heating up again in December (though after 2 months of inactivity). The article itself hasn't been edited since June. I'm fine with nominations taking a while as long as the discussion is active. When we get to a point where we only get comments every 2 months is when I feel that the discussion is becoming inactive and could close as a no consensus. There could definitely be some changes to that idea if other people propose that change but for now that is what I mean. Onegreatjoke (talk) 03:47, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  Even as someone focused heavily on trains (duh), I do not have the expertise or sources to evaluate that article; I'd have to go looking for them and they're likely in offline books. Honestly I'd just support delisting it, and it can be renominated later.Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:54, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  The result of a no-consensus close is the same as always: a preservation of the status quo. It doesn't need to be clarified. Just as with AfD discussions, a no-consensus close makes it more acceptable to renominate within a few months, rather than wait longer, with new arguments. I don't think we want to close in a different way in clear no-consensus cases. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 09:46, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

• I am somewhat confused how this discussion was opened and reached this point without anyone linking to an actual GAR. To the question however, GARs can be quick. The lower limit given is seven days, so after that it can be closed. If an individual GAR isn't closed, ask the opener why. As for community GARs, they linger mostly due to a lack of volunteers to run through and close them, rather than any particular feature of the process. CMD (talk) 04:23, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  Though for community GARs, the problem they have isn't just with inactivity but rather the fact that they're kept open for too long. See for instance, Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Flag of China/1 which, while having not a single comment for over two months, has been still at GAR with nothing done about it. Or what about Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Railway surgery/1 which has mostly been spending its time being inactive for months before even the slightest amount of activity appears, before going back to inactivity again. Community GARs have a problem with being open for too long and there should be a set in stone rule to mitigate that problem. Even Featured Article reassessments will close as a delist if inactivity goes too far.

  The second problem I have is mainly an efficiency problem. It is way too difficult, in my opinion, to identify and spot GAs that need to be identified for reassessment. There is over 37000 GAs. That's more than 6 times as many FAs. Not only that, they're all cluttered in a list that only lists them by topic. That's fine to display what GAs cover what topics but not what GAs need reassessments. With the gigantic amount of GAs in that list, what articles need reassessment are surrounded by actual GAs that cause the article that needs reassessment to be ignored. I do have some proposals though.

  1. Find a way to list GAs by year of promotion. I think it's well known that GAs made in the 2000s and early 2010s are of much lower quality than GAs of the 2020s. Yet, there isn't an easy way to access and find them by year. You essentially have to go on a wide search of a 37000 long list just to find a group of GAs that fit that year. It would be easier to just go by year and determine if multiple GAs from 2008 have aged poorly. It'd be an efficient way to identify bad GAs and to reassess them with more ease.
  2. Categorize GAs with orange tags. A GA with an orange tag would be an immediate red flag to determine whether or not the GA needs to be reassessed. A category that lists GAs with orange tags would make things really easy to find and reassess bad GAs.

  Onegreatjoke (talk) 05:34, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  If you feel those two GARs could be closed, why not close them? CMD (talk) 11:12, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  @Onegreatjoke:

  1. This is done for FAs by @SD0001 by their bot at WP:URFA/2020. It may be nice to do this for GAs too, if it's not too much effort.
  2. The information can be found in the cleanup listing. This listing contains other maintenance categories too, but should be easy enough just to focus on the ones relevant for the GA criteria.

  —Femke 🐦 (talk) 12:11, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

  Data for GA nomination dates are maintained by SDZeroBot on a toolforge database. To listify it on-wiki, anyone with toolforge access can query it, for example: SELECT * FROM s54328__goodarticles_p.nominators WHERE date BETWEEN DATE('2010-01-01') AND DATE('2011-01-01'). – SD0001 (talk) 05:59, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

• Perhaps the solution is GAR co-ords. If we had a few people who could be independent, see if a GAR is likely to be picked up by someone likely to make the necessary changes, and that the gripes are legitimate they can close the items. In my opinion, this removes the bad faith nominations, and could potentially speed up the procedure. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:19, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  And given the ongoing backdrives there would also be work for coordinators beyond just GAR. I know some people who are serving or have served as either FAR or FAC coord are active here and so I am curious about what feedback they'd have about this idea. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:21, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  I agree. If we had four or five people who would check in periodically on open GARs and close them on their own judgement if they felt it was appropriate, that seems helpful. I suspect we could think of a couple of other items that they could help with too. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:12, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  @Lee Vilenski Would you like me to add coordinators to the Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023? If yes, what form would that be in? Etrius ( Us) 19:21, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  I could add it, but the way I see it, GANs don't require a co-ordinator. GAR does. If an article is suitably poorly promoted we generally just remove the review and revert to pre-review. I do see the issue being more suitable at GAR. I'd be happy to help out with such an idea. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 20:09, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  One can simply AGF, but I think explicitly stating which 3-5 sources were checked (if we add this requirement, keeping the number on lower end makes sense) would be reasonable too. This would give others confidence, that the sources chosen are reasonably higher quality sourcing, and not merely WP:SELFCITE tweet links, while also making it transparent that source spot checking is taken seriously. If others did a spot check and found that verification failed, they could ask the original reviewer why they missed it and open a larger discussion. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 20:31, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  I would agree given the situation (where it's basically infeasible to do another GA Sweeps akin to the previous level given the number of GAs) coords and/or some other mechanism for quickening the pace of GARs is advisable. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 20:43, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

  There are people who do this work already. Formalising it into a position would presumably mean other volunteer then couldn't do this, which feels counter-productive. CMD (talk) 01:29, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

  That's a good point, and you're right that there are already people who take the lead on trying to resolve these sorts of things. Perhaps the role (of stepping in to help wind up GARs) could be defined, but the definition could make it clear that any sufficiently experienced editor can do it? And then those who do help wind up GARs could be seen as examples of how to do it, rather than coordinators? Or is this already well enough defined that we already have a page we can point to as encouragement to help with lagging GARs? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 03:36, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

  I try to comment on as many GARs as I can to provide assistance to the people who proposed them but this means that I am wary about closing them as I am then involved. I would say that of the two, commenting on GARs is the one more needing specialised input which is why I wonder if adding things to WP:Closure requests might be a good way of getting more people closing things. Gusfriend (talk) 05:49, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

  This is a common issue. Perhaps before closure requests, there might be an option to increase visibility among those here. Perhaps a box listing the oldest open GARs, similar to how there is a listing of the oldest unreviewed GANs? CMD (talk) 06:40, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

  I have added many GARs to closure request when I didn't feel like I could close them (mainly because I have started them or commented on them). Aircorn (talk) 08:33, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

• Comment The problem is not with the GAR process, but with a lack of volunteers willing to close them. This is understandable as it is one of the least fulfilling roles on Wikipedia. It is not actually that hard and if everyone who is commenting here closed two GARs a year things would be solved. We need to have a community process as there are many occasions when someone unfamiliar with the GA process decides that an article is no longer a GA due to notability, dead links or some other non-GA reason. We do also get a few that do it maliciously because they disagree with the topic or because their edit was not accepted. Boldy delisting a GA is a bad idea and will only lead to chaos. It is very easy to delist an article that is nowhere near GA quality by opening an individual reassessment, all you need to do is list a few of the disqualifying features and wait a week after making the notifications. If someone has put the work in to getting an article up to GA standard they deserve a chance to keep it there. Co-ords will just make it harder to get people to close these as it will appear to be a specialist role. If you are have done a GAN and are interested just get into it. Ping me if you want and I will help. Aircorn (talk) 08:33, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
  • One way to make it easier to close community GARs is to allow involved editors to close them. If you have a GAR open and no one has commented then it is essentially a individual one anyway. Other cases will have to be done using common sense. The number of active editors there is so low that if you get a couple making comments there are not many left to close it. While there is a risk of it being gamed, it doesn't have any major repercussions. The green dot is not that big a deal in the scheme of things and renomination is always possible. There are ways to deal with obvious bad faith delistings. Aircorn (talk) 08:19, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

    Yes, I agree that involved editors should be allowed to close community GARs. If involved editors can close individual GARs (in fact, they are meant to), then they should be able to close community GARs. I bet this would speed up the process quite a bit as involved editors are generally the most familiar with how the review is going and can best know when to close it. Steelkamp (talk) 05:51, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

    I very much agree in noncontroversial cases. I've refrained from closing quite a few GARs where the outcome was obvious, which only led to delay.

    The way I see it, is that we can merge the two processes (individual and community) by defining when it's okay for an involved editor to close. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:37, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Related question

On a related note, I, Onegreatjoke, and others have been working our way through the GAR backlog. What is the general protocol for articles for which an individual reassessment was started, but which the nominator presumably forgot about, such as this? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:23, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Or this article where the nominator has left the project? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:28, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

When somebody forgot about it: ping them (as you've done). When somebody has left the project, and the outcome is clear, anybody can close it in my view. If the outcome is not quite clear, the best way is to post at WT:GAR. Is it just me, or does the GANReviewTool not pick up individual reassessments? —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:41, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Femke, it doesn't, not even if you're the nominator. Thanks for the advice. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:01, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

I'll wait to see how Wikipedia:Good_Article_proposal_drive_2023#Proposal_14:_Merge_individual_and_community_good_article_reassessment ends before asking for a potential fix. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 20:05, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Hopefully that is approved. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:17, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Roswell High School

So the article Roswell High School (Georgia) was a GA but was delisted yesterday. However, the good article icon still shows up on the article. I don't know how to get rid of it so if someone can do it that would be nice. Onegreatjoke (talk) 14:17, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

 Done. I also removed it from WP:GA/SS. For future reference, the way to get rid of the good article icon is to remove {{good article}} from the source text. TompaDompa (talk) 14:25, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

How to withdraw or put on hold an article?

Humanism has some issues, that I do not have time to address- I will do it in a couple or months. How to proceed? Should I withdraw the nomination? I couldnt spot any instractions. Cinadon36 10:41, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

It does not appear a review has started, so you can simply remove the template from the talkpage and add a new one when you think the article meets the WP:GACR. CMD (talk) 10:51, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Cinadon36, I've removed the nomination in question for you. For future reference, the instructions are on the GAN instructions page under Step 3: Waiting; there's a lot of useful information on the GAN process to be found on that page. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:58, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

@BlueMoonset @Chipmunkdavis Thanks for your help mates, really appreciate it. Cinadon36 08:02, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023 Feedback

Since a few proposals have passed, I've gone ahead and created a separate feedback page. I'll monitor it and add proposals as they come, once discussion is fully closed, I'll replace the Proposal Drive's tab with the Feedback tab. A tentative timeline is to stop accepting new proposals by the end of January. Discussion will hopefully be finished by about early-mid February, and feedback will be open to late February/Early March. This, obviously, is contingent on how long it takes to obtain consensus.

A special thanks to Mike Christie is in order for very quickly implementing proposal 7a into Christiebot. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 04:26, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Inactive Better Call Saul reviews

Per here, Nathan Obral has yet to start any of three reviews on Better Call Saul articles that were opened a month ago (Talk:Fun and Games (Better Call Saul)/GA1, Talk:Point and Shoot (Better Call Saul)/GA1, Talk:Breaking Bad (Better Call Saul)/GA1). They have been editing but haven't indicated a timescale for doing the reviews. Might it be best to delete the review pages and put them back in the queue? — Bilorv (talk) 15:14, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Given there has been no review done so far, deleting makes sense so they are available to others. Nathan Obral is of course welcome to pick them up again if they find time. CMD (talk) 15:24, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

I made the mistake of claiming these, thinking I’d be able to nominate three articles of my own. Unfortunately the review process is something I’m not qualified to do. I’m not an English professor or an expert on Wikipedia policies or standards. Plus my struggles in some GANs regarding image licensing makes me feel like I’d mess that up. It’s resulted in a mental block that cripples me and makes me feel unable to do them. I can’t.

As soon as my last GAN is reviewed, I will no longer pursue any GA nominations, as the need to review is something I cannot do. Sammi Brie has told me about a reform process to reviewing, and I hope it helps others. I’m just not able to do it in any way and I am at peace with it. Doesn’t make me feel any better, and I feel like a failure as an editor, but it is what it is.

I apologize for this. Even what should have been a series of simple enough articles feels like learning nuclear physics in less than 24 hours and being expected to remember it all perfectly. I can’t do them and I’ve let everyone down. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 18:03, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

@Nathan Obral, very sorry to hear that this causes you so much stress; it isn't supposed to be such a daunting task! There is not currently a requirement to do reviews, and current discussions are unlikely to change that. You also seem to have a higher standard for your reviews than the community. —Kusma (talk) 19:02, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

@Kusma, I had been hoping to mentor Nathan on GA reviewing with these and had encouraged him to pick a few relatively smaller pages to try (I'd reviewed several of the BCS episodes, thus the suggestion), but it's more of a stressor than I had anticipated. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 19:31, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

I hadn’t seen the show, so I felt walking in with a neutral viewpoint would help. But the times I tried to sit back and read the articles and start the process, it felt like a wall that got steeper and increasingly inaccessible, moreso knowing how much time had passed. The feeling is kinda almost like if one failed a literacy test or competency exam. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 22:35, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

If you decide you want to try reviewing in the future, and would like a mentor to work with you, consider asking here. I'd be willing, depending on my workload at the time. I wonder if you (or others who find the prospect of reviewing nerve-wracking) would find the templates a useful way to get started? Some of the steps can be done quite mechanically -- checking sources, and evaluating image licenses, and checking some of the MoS requirements. Filling in the blank spaces on the template might provide a sense that progress is being made, and a co-reviewer or mentor could step in to take on any parts you're not confident about. Just an idea for the future. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:44, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

That's the thing, I tried some of the templates, but it felt like it had the opposite effect and made it look more daunting. I'm not confident in knowledge of the MoS to be remotely comfortable with evaluating copy. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 05:48, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

I just didn’t want to screw up and accidentally pass something prematurely that didn’t meet the criteria yet. The mental obstacles are too overwhelming.

I appreciate the kind words but reviewers are more important than nominations. The backlog is so severe (my one remaining GAN was put in back in July and my lack of reviewing more than likely hurt its cause) that I do no one any favors by just nominating and doing nothing else in return. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 22:46, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Ah, well this is quite charged territory where editors have been expressing quite different opinions. Mine is this: nominating an article for GA and taking it through the process is a big favour—to our readers—and nominators are an important part of our community. Reviewing is important within the community but I think some are losing sight of the fact that taking content to GA is not a burden that hurts Wikipedia but a valuable act of volunteering that improves it. — Bilorv (talk) 22:52, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree -- I wouldn't want to imply otherwise. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:59, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

@Bilorv and Mike Christie: I just wanted to push myself by trying to help resolve a bad situation with the review queue, which was something I was encouraged to participate in. My opinions and standards were not directly influenced by anyone in particular. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 03:22, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

@Nathan Obral: thanks for doing your best on reviewing, and if you've learned that it's not a task for you then hopefully that's useful information going forwards. If you like nominating articles for GA then please continue, and if you don't like reviewing then you do not have to. And if you like improving articles outside any formal processes like GA then that's fine too.

There's plenty of other Better Call Saul episodes that both nominators and reviewers could tackle in the meantime so I don't think anything has been lost if we just put these back in the queue. — Bilorv (talk) 19:38, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

I have marked the review pages for deletion, and will clean up the article talk pages once the deletions go through. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:47, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

It's my intention to review one or more of the pages that were left in limbo, as a note. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 01:57, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Clean up after review page deletion

FYI: ChristieBot reports an error if the review page doesn't exist and the status of the GA nominee template is set to "onreview". This is the error page. These errors aren't harmful and can *usually* be ignored; I decided to make this state of affairs report an error because in some cases it might indicate a real problem -- for example if the article and talk page are moved, but the review page isn't, this might be the result. So if any regulars happen to notice this error before I clean it up, it's worth taking a look at the pages it's complaining about. This is the necessary clean up edit. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 04:02, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Wait time statistics

@Mike Christie, are you/ChristieBot able to see the average wait time, per GAN from date of nomination to the date it's claimed by a reviewer, for a nominator with 0–5 GAs vs. a nominator with 20–100 GANs? My hunch would be that reviewers are more likely to choose and close the experienced nominators' faster (even though there are more) because they're easier to address. But interested if you have some empirical data or if someone has run this analysis before. czar 01:36, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Interesting idea. I have nomination timestamps for everything that was nominated at the time ChristieBot took over, and timestamps for when reviews were started and when they were passed or failed. I'm not at the right computer to look up how many reviews that comes to, but it's probably no more than a couple of hundred. I don't think that would be enough to get statistically valid data yet, but the dataset will keep growing. I think there are a lot of things that would make it hard to get reliable results, though. For example, I believe, just on a casual look, that most warfare GANs are reviewed by MilHist participants. That's a very active project and the behaviour in that group may not match the behaviour of the rest. For another example, the last time I did a big chunk of reviews I took the GANs almost entirely from the oldest, and I was very active for a month or two. You'd get a very different read from those two months than from the next two months. I think we'll need at least a year of data to draw any conclusions. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:16, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

I'd be interested, in particular over the next year, in how the new sort order (by review ratio) affects review uptake, if high-ranked articles are picked up at any increased rate, as is the theory czar 05:56, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Preventing copyright violations

I didn't follow this while it was occurring, but it seems like there's a pretty serious issue where referencing and verifiability issues are not being caught by the Good Article process. The highest priority, even more than cleaning up, should be to make sure that this isn't a regular occurrence. Some sort of change needs to take place to make it clear what exactly is expected of a reviewer when considering criterion 2 and what steps the reviewer should take when evaluating an article for these things. I know that I for one feel particularly lost when doing this part of a review. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:57, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023 would be the right place for these comments.Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:06, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Thebiguglyalien would you mind separating this to its own Level 2 heading? I'm going to be launching a formal proposal soon, so it would be good to keep this section confined to the Coldwell GAs. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:40, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Done, though so far it doesn't seem like anyone has anything to say on actually preventing the issue either way. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:39, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for that; there are several proposals under discussion on the page Lee Vilenski linked. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:06, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Taiwanese Mandarin

The article Taiwanese Mandarin has passed GA, but the bot did not add the GA icon, so I had to do it manually. Is there a bug on that bot? Is there any mistake I made? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 05:59, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

The bot doesn't work immediately. The manual addition works as well. CMD (talk) 08:55, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

See WP:GAN/I#PASS. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:55, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

List order for nominations

Is it just me, or is the bot seriously bugging out right now? I mostly work in music, and went to check how GANs were looking overall for albums - but I find my own nomination (The Ghost Inside (album)) which I placed in December, at number six, while I'm finding nominations from August at the bottom (Handcream for a Generation). It's seemingly random - fifth on the list that I saw was one from September, and fourth was just this past Wednesday morning (18 January). What is going on? Do I have some setting enabled that I don't notice? Is there a new sorting method? dannymusiceditor ^oops 23:38, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

It's been reordered per an RfC which is part of Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023, it's promoting newer nominators and those who review more. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 23:41, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

@Lee Vilenski: This is enormous, which section is this located in so I can read the relevant information? dannymusiceditor ^oops 23:44, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

It's proposal nine. Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023/Feedback also has some additional info. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 23:46, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you so much! dannymusiceditor ^oops 23:47, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Talk:The Olivia Tremor Control/GA1

Could someone have a look and take over this GAN? The nominator has been inactive for a few weeks now and was somewhat inactive prior to that, so I wound up making the changes myself in the interest of not holding up the passing of a well-written and well-researched article. I feel I'm a bit too involved at this point to pass it. It just needs another set of eyes, the actual review portion is done and (well, imo, lol) fully implemented. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 17:24, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

Approved, Accepted, and  Resolved  :) SN54129 17:51, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

Ahh many thanks :) ♠PMC♠ (talk) 17:58, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

ChristieBot problem -- running intermittently until fixed

See here; I evidently failed to take good notes about how I get the bot authentication working. I will be running the bot by hand until this is fixed, at least once an hour when I'm at the computer and as often as I can otherwise. I will post here again when the problem is fixed. If anyone reading this has the relevant technical knowledge please ping me. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:07, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

Legoktm was on IRC and was able to give me a workaround which I think is going to be more stable in the long term anyway, so panic over. I'll keep an eye on the bot for a few runs to be sure it's back to normal. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:05, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

Individual GAR to community GAR

Reference: Talk:1995 Quebec referendum/GA2

This reassessment has been open for a couple months, with disagreement about if the article currently meets the GA criteria. I want to list it at community reassessment to potentially get more opinions on this, but am unsure of the procedure. What is the best path to convert an individual reassessment into a community reassessment? Or would it be better to close the individual reassessment and create a new assessment page? Thanks for your help. Z1720 (talk) 23:59, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

I wouldn't move the page, not sure what that would mess up. However, asking for more opinions here works fine. CMD (talk) 01:44, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Close the individual reassessment and create a community page. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:17, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

A question about WP:Close paraphrasing

While reviewing a nomination, I came across the passage

He finds it fitting that Tuor, "Tolkien's early quest-hero", escapes from the wreck of an old kingdom and creates new ones, just as Aeneas does, while his late quest-heroes in The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits of the Shire, are made to return to their home, ravaged while they were away, and are obliged to scour it clean, just as Odysseus does in Homer's Odyssey.

This has since been rephrased as

He finds it fitting that Tuor escapes from the wreck of an old kingdom and creates new ones, just as Aeneas does in Virgil's Aeneid, while his late heroes, the four Hobbits, are made to return to their home, ravaged while they were away, and are obliged to scour it clean, just as Odysseus does in Homer's Odyssey.

The source says

There is a certain chronological fittingness, I think, in the fact that Tolkien's early quest-hero, Tuor, escapes, like Aeneas, from the ruins of an old kingdom and goes on to establish new lands, while his late quest-heroes, four hobbits from the Shire, return, like Odysseus, to their original homeland which has been desecrated in their absence and which must be made free of enemy invaders before a reign of peace can be established.

I'm unsure which side of WP:Close paraphrasing this falls on, so I figured I'd ask here to get some input from others and hopefully learn something in the process. TompaDompa (talk) 09:36, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

TompaDompa, I think this falls on the wrong side of CLOP. It reads as if a thesaurus had been used with every word, and then the phrases were shuffled slightly. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:55, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, that was my intuition as well. This has since been resolved by presenting the information in a different way that sidesteps the entire issue altogether. TompaDompa (talk) 17:19, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Two malformed nominations and a note about short descriptions

The bot is reporting two malformed nominations; see User talk:ChristieBot/GAN errors. I have to go to work shortly or I'd talk to the nominator, who evidently hasn't seen or understood the instructions. Is the error page sufficiently prominent/well enough watched for others to notice and follow up on situations like this? There's also an error section on the GAN page and a note in the edit summary that errors were found; again I don't know how noticeable that is. If there's a better way or page to write errors, please let me know. I'll deal with the malformed nominations tonight if nobody else gets around to it.

FYI on the new GANentry format: the short description will now show up as part of the entry on GAN if anything changes regarding the nomination so that it has to be updated. E.g. if it's put on hold, or the subtopic changed, or a review is started, it will start showing the subtopic short description. All new nominations will also start showing the subtopic short description. Eventually this means every nomination will show the subtopic short descriptionif there is one. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:18, 25 January 2023 (UTC) Edited to fix my error. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:51, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Hi Mike, I am following the error page but was unsure if we were meant to action the errors or if they are for bugtesting. I wonder if it's possible to combine/transclude with Wikipedia:Good articles/mismatches‎ somehow? CMD (talk) 12:49, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Well, yes, it's definitely getting used for bugtesting too, so perhaps I ought to break out a separate page for that. I'll look at putting a report section into the mismatches page; hadn't thought of that and it looks like a good idea. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:52, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

I have removed the nominations from the talk pages, and asked the user to nominate again. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:16, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

I had already notified the user, so perhaps it may look less intimidating if you attach your note as a follow up to mine?

Mike, to be clear we should action that page and you will have a separate bug page? CMD (talk) 14:35, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

I'll have to create a separate bug page, probably tonight, and will let you know when it's done. It's likely there will be issues that I can't easily tell what needs to be done; I'll probably put those on both pages if I can identify them. I'm trying to keep the background database clean, so there may be cases where both pages get a notification, so I can clean up the database mess as well. For the moment, I can definitely say that if it says "Malformed nomination" I am pretty sure it's something an editor is going to have to deal with. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:41, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

You got there a minute before me. Explains why I didn't see it. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:44, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

I've created User talk:ChristieBot/Bug messages to record bugs, and will watch that. User talk:ChristieBot/GAN errors should now contain only reports of issues that the bot finds as it traverses the category. Anything that says "malformed nomination" should be something obvious. The other possible errors on that page are (with comments for the non-self-explanatory ones):

• No review page exists for Example/<page> but status is set to <status>
• Status of Example is <status> indicating review has started but there is no review page [same as previous but found in a different way; I'll probably make the messages match at some point]
• Could not find nominee template in Talk:Example when trying to update status

  This happens when a review page has been created and the bot looks on the talk page to add the "onreview" status. If it can't find the nominee template it checks for article history showing a review and for Failed GA; if it can't find either it posts this error.

• Could not find status parameter in template in Talk:Example when trying to update status

  Same as above but this time it found the nominee template, but can't find the status parameter to add the "onreview" status.

• More than one active nomination found for Example.

  Two different nominations in the database for the same article. I think this error is now impossible but if it happens it means something very strange has happened on the article's talk page, probably involving multiple errors. This one might also require me to do some clean up in the database.

• Could not parse timestamp for Example

Anything that's an error that doesn't trigger one of these (or a "malformed" message) is probably going to trigger a complaint to the bugs page.

As for transcluding it onto Wikipedia:Good articles/mismatches‎, that should be easy to do; GreenC operates the bot that writes that page; GreenC, can a section be created to transclude User talk:ChristieBot/GAN errors? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:46, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Pre-2012 GA bot stats

I've been looking into scraping old contributions to get a list of historical GA reviews, partly to get the stats more accurate and partly to allow analysis of the data. Pinging Ovinus, who I know also has this on their to-do list, as an FYI. I would like to check numbers against User:GA bot/Stats, but the first revision of that page is here, dated August 2012, with many thousands of reviews already recorded. Does anyone know where those stats were before that date? Also pinging Chris G, who was the one who created that page, in case they remember. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:06, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Honestly that's so long ago, I can't really remember. At a guess, I think I wrote a script that used some combination of querying the database, and scraping the API to figure out the inital list. --Chris 13:36, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

OK, well that's useful to know too. I'll do another scrape and see if I can match those original numbers. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:59, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Are these supposed to be all the reviews where there are subpages? (In the very old days, a GA review could look like this). —Kusma (talk) 14:17, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't know how Chris G did it (if they did) but I'm going to start with the subpages and then look for exceptions by finding articles that are now or were at one time GAs for which I haven't been able to find a subpage. I don't think there's any chance I can get it to be completely accurate, but if I can get to about 99% accuracy I think that's probably OK. I know, for example, that the current stats page has major inaccuracies because of an old bug in Legobot, so I think 99% is probably better than what we have now. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:37, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Dilemma on potential conflict of interest

Hi, going through the list of GA nominations, I found an article page and opted to review it. During this course, I researched on the verifiable sources for the topic to find if there's anything more that can be used to improve and expand the article. It turns out that there's quite a good amount of content that can be added.

The criteria of reviewer to not have contributed significantly to the article has put me in dilemma. Now my question is, since I have taken up the task of reviewing the GA nomination, what will be the best course of action - ask & wait for other editors to improve the article or go ahead with my contributions to article? Anand2202 (talk) 06:57, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

(as nominator): Anand2202, since we agree that you should not be contributing significantly to the article, especially per your statement on the review page that you have strong views on the subject, introducing a clear conflict of interest, you should undo your edits and recuse from reviewing the article. Another editor can then conduct the review neutrally. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:29, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Um, the "strong views" mentioned on my talk page refer to the person whose words are in italics. It's not mine.

My conflict of interest was in reviewing the article - since I have added some additional content to existing information. Anand2202 (talk) 10:54, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

I think the confusion arises from beginning the quote with "As one of the proponent[s] with strong views on this cultural appropriation says..." usually (as far as I have seen) "As [x] says" is done to indicate agreement unless done sarcastically. I think this may have been what mislead Chiswick as well. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 10:59, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes, indeed. That could have been avoided.

Learning. Learning. Learning! 🙂 Anand2202 (talk) 11:11, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Generally speaking, a reviewer should only perform edits that are unobjectionable; how often reviewers actually perform those vs. requiring them depends on the reviewer themselves. For anything minor (spelling, grammar, reference fixes, language/convert template insertion) I usually go ahead and do it myself, because it's tedious to suggest and tedious to perform, so doubling the work seems like a waste of time for me. There are some things that fall on the right side, outside of this, for instance, if you notice an uncited section can be covered by an existing ref, but generally, there is not a lot of room for large edits while retaining the objectivity required for reviews; I've been on both sides of the equation where a second opinion was requested because the reviewer became involved, but this is and should be a rarity. Given your lack of experience (it happens, I messed up my first few GAN reviews very badly), and stated COI, I would recommend stepping aside as reviewer, and suggesting changes through the talk page, rather than directly inserting them. As a reviewer, I avoid taking any articles that I have particularly strong feelings about, as "reasoned neutrality of something you care about" is the falsest of gods. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 10:42, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Just to clarify, my usage of word "strong" and not referring to the quoted person directly seems to have created some confusion. I took the article for review not because of any "strong feelings" but out of interest in the topic. Yes, I agree, this is my first attempt on reviewing any article. At the beginning I thought it was fairly straight task of ticking the check-boxes required for qualifying as a GA. In due process, I noticed that there's a scope for improvement and invested a good amount of time and effort in looking for content which can be cited to verifiable source. Now I realize that I can do more as a contributor than a reviewer. Hence the dilemma! Anand2202 (talk) 11:09, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Already, what you have done would be grounds for recusal; as I see it you can revert your edits and review without addition, or recuse yourself as reviewer. I would recommend a greater familiarity with certain rules (such as lede construction) if you do plan to go about improving the article. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 11:11, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Correct word

Not sure if this is the right place to point this out, but in the last sentence of the Nominations section, shouldn't the last "nomination" be "nominator"? Findingmoney100 (talk) 16:00, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

@Findingmoney100: Decidedly so, fixed now. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 16:05, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Short description

{{GANentry}} has a parameter for short description, but for most of the nominations, it hasn't been filled out. Is it possible/worth while to have this default to the short description of the article unless overwritten? (I am not watching this page, so please ping me if you want my attention.) SSSB (talk) 10:41, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

GANentry gets the short description from the {{GA nominee}} template on the article talk pages. That template is written by {{GAN}} which was changed a few days ago to pick up the short description automatically. Every nomination from now on will pick up the short description (if it exists), so eventually all articles that have a short description will show it on the nomination here. If anyone wants to add it to a nomination started before the change, they can add "|shortdesc=...." to the GA nominee template, and it will be picked up the next time the GAN page refreshes. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:01, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

Ah, ok, thanks. SSSB (talk) 11:32, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

Correcting errors in reviewing statistics

Back in 2013, QatarStarsLeague reviewed Hu Zhengyan, and when they passed it they accidentally left the nominee template on the talk page. This confused GA bot (the precursor to Legobot) and over the next 36 hours it incremented QatarStarsLeague's review count from 65 to 268. Nobody noticed and the stats page has had the increased number ever since.

There are also some stranger bugs in GA bot -- for example (again for QatarStarsLeague, since I happened to be tracking down their discrepancy) see the GA for Yeovil Town F.C.. This diff shows GA bot deciding that QatarStarsLeague was the reviewer for the newly nominated Yeovil Town F.C., but their contributions for that day show they never touched the article.

I also suspect that whatever method was used for counting the original stats in the first version of the stats page, it did not include any reviews from before the time subpages started to be used in late March 2008. Some early GAs consisted only of a user stopping by and decided that an article was a GA, saying so on the talk page, and adding the star. I don't think it's worth counting these early reviews in the statistics. Aside from anything else, those reviews are over fifteen years old, and I would rather use an accurate count from the last fifteen years than continue with inaccurate numbers for which I can't explain the provenance.

When I've finished extracting the data from various sources, I'll put together a temporary statistics page and will calculate the differences for everyone on the list -- i.e. how much their reviewing count will change. Unless there are objections I propose to switch to the revised statistics. It will be a few days till I have the data ready -- the extraction will be done some time tomorrow, but there are some special cases I need to clean up (e.g. for some reason I'm not yet getting data for blocked users) FYI, here's what the revised top of the table would look like, excluding Eric Corbett whose data I don't have yet. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:11, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Reviewer	Now	Revised
Sturmvogel 66	918	878
The Rambling Man	813	773
Jezhotwells	762	752
Wizardman	741	745
Jaguar	743	742
Pyrotec	552	537
Kyle Peake	517	516
J Milburn	462	474
Dana boomer	456	464
Hog Farm	375	386
Khazar2	373	377
Mike Christie	385	367
ThinkBlue	368	367
Casliber	363	358
12george1	421	203
QatarStarsLeague	385	154

Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:11, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Stop the count! Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 22:55, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

User:Feetfeet 341 reviews

I am going to request that a new reviewer takes on the review at Talk:John Green/GA1, and suggest that the same be done for Benji man's review at Talk:Nabataean Aramaic/GA1. Feetfeet 341 picked them both up, but seems to be a relatively inexperienced editor who has made several edits and nominations recently that show they aren't quite ready to be reviewing GA's: [1][2][3]. It seems that the instructions at WP:GAN/I#N4a will be helpful for this, but wanted to start a discussion before I take any actions since this seems a bit unusual. Cerebral726 (talk) 20:30, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Having looked at this user's history, not only should they not be doing GA reviews, they should be indeffed as a strange combination of CIR and NOTHERE. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 21:25, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Since they do have some good faith edits, I have given them a strong final warning and won't hesitate to indef as CIR/NOTHERE if they persist. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 04:40, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Referencing and Non-English Sources

Hello, I may have time to review the Garry Kasparov article. I note it relies heavily on web sources. If neither a link nor archived version exist, then may I regard that as equating to a "citation needed"? Also, what does one do about the significant number of foreign-language sources cited? Thanks Billsmith60 (talk) 12:18, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Also, where do I find the previous GA assessment from June 2021? Billsmith60 (talk) 12:46, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

The previous assessment is at Talk:Garry Kasparov/GA1. I'm not sure if a web source without a link is a cn exactly, but it is unusual, and you could ask the nominator about it. There is no need to check every source, just a few. I would suggest sampling a few of the English sources and seeing if they support the cited text. If they do, then you can note this on the review, and take the rest on good faith if you wish. CMD (talk) 14:04, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

I did the Kasparov review (a fail but getting there from the last time). However, I've messed up the presentation of results a bit – sincere apologies. Still, my findings are clear enough to be acted on, I trust Billsmith60 (talk) 16:38, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

@Billsmith60: I have found Template:GAList2 to be pretty intuitive and user-friendly. You can try using that one if you want to tidy up the presentation (or you can try using it for your next review). TompaDompa (talk) 16:54, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

BillSmith60, not sure if you realize you have not actually failed the nomination yet -- the instructions are at WP:GAN/I. I see the nominator has asked if you would keep it open while they fix the issues you've identified; that's up to you. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:07, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello Mike, fortunately my making a b***s-up of the assessment templates has allowed the review to stay open, and I've let the nominator know accordingly. I see they've made a start already. All the best Billsmith60 (talk) 20:40, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Alain Prost Nomination

Can someone with the relevant permissions delete the above? The nominator 'Dallavid' has made some edits to the article (mainly small web links) but has not contributed significantly to it. Thanks Billsmith60 (talk) 20:03, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

What are you asking for exactly? If you're asking about the thread above, we don't delete threads; they will be archived by a bot eventually. If you're trying to delete the GA review page, that is generally only done when a review is opened in error or someone starts a review page and never writes anything. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 20:54, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

@Trainsandotherthings: He is talking about the nomination for the page; Dallavid nominated despite not having a lot of edits. That said, Dallavid has fixed a number of the reference works, so it's marginal enough for me not to personally remove the nom. @Billsmith60: If you feel strongly you can remove the nomination with an explanation that only significant contributors (or those with permission) may nom the articles. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 21:52, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Oh, I'm dumb. I thought Bill was talking about the review page, not the article. Clearly I shouldn't have stayed up to midnight last night. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 22:31, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

That is correct. I do feel this is still a drive-by nomination, with minimal contribution by the nominator, but I won't remove it (not that I can see that I'm able to, anyhow). Thanks Billsmith60 (talk) 22:21, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

@Billsmith60: For going forward: Removal is a simple manual process (just open the area in editing and remove the nom template). Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 03:10, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Accuracy in citing

In Talk:Pro-EU leaflet/GA1 I criticize not the reliability of the sources, not the bibliographical or other description of what/where the sources are, but instead the relationship between what the article attributes to a source and what that source actually says. I've done this for two (multiply cited) sources so far. This took me some time, and the result is prolix. Three questions (from a relative noob in GA matters): (1) Do my comments seem to be mere hair-splitting? (2) Should I continue and also examine the use of a third, fourth, fifth source? (3) When I come to writing up my ratings (via template), where does (in)accuracy of citation fit among 2. It is factually accurate and verifiable. / a (reference section): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR): d (copyvio and plagiarism):? -- Hoary (talk) 01:49, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Text-source integrity is important, its relevance may fall under 2b or 2c. Some of the issues you raise feel quite relevant (eg. difference between "UK" and "England" and using a 2018 source after a mention of 2019), others like hair-splitting (eg. "Looks to me" and "described" seem similar enough). Re hair-splits, from the examples given I'm more concerned about close paraphrasing than text-source integrity in some of those examples, they are too close to the source. CMD (talk) 02:01, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, CMD. I'd thought that there was a significant difference between "It looks to me like quite an [adjective] [noun]" and "It's an [adjective] [noun]", but maybe that's too pernickety of me. I've added analyses of the use of two other sources, and am disinclined to look at a fifth, let alone any more. -- Hoary (talk) 05:13, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm more likely to just fail an article if there are significant text-source integrity or close paraphrasing issues. (t · c) buidhe 06:32, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, buidhe, but I've already posted this appeal. I'm not optimistic, though. -- Hoary (talk) 07:11, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Script to find unreferenced passages

Unreferenced passages are marked in red.

I wanted to let you know that I wrote a script to mark unreferenced passages. This script may be useful to GA reviewers to get a first quick impression of whether a nomination lacks references and where the problems may be. Nominators may use it to make ensure that their nomination is well-sourced. More information can be found at User:Phlsph7/MarkUnreferencedPassages User:Phlsph7/HighlightUnreferencedPassages, including instructions on how to install and use it as well as information on its limitations. Questions and feedback about problems or new ideas are welcome. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:20, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

@Phlsph7: Thanks! I've added it to my collection of tools; one thing I will note is that it is tagging ledes as uncited (which is obviously correct, but not exactly helpful). Perhaps a bit of code to not tag the first section if multiple exist? I admit to knowing very little about how coding works. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 10:06, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello Iazyges and thanks for the feedback! I've thought about whether to exclude lead sections or not but I'm still not fully sure either way. Specifically, I was thinking about new and stub articles. The information they provide in the lead is often not fully backed by the body of the article and some only contain a lead section. If the script was only for GA reviews then it would make sense to exclude the lead. This issue is also discussed at User:Phlsph7/MarkUnreferencedPassages#Explanation_and_limitations. It wouldn't be too difficult to modify the script to exclude them (unless unforeseen coding difficulties arise). Phlsph7 (talk) 10:17, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

That shortcoming is mentioned in the write up (with that shortcoming, how useful is the script?). More importantly, it appears to assume that consecutive sentences are not covered by the next citation (that is, it assumes every sentence must be cited), which makes me hesitant to even install it, and worry for the fallout any editor using it is likely to get. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:19, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Judging by the screenshots, it seems to assume that consecutive sentences within a paragraph are covered by the next citation: it seems to only mark sentences where there are no further citations in the paragraph, or where there is a {{citation needed}} tag before the next citation. I haven't tested it yet, but assuming reviewers don't take its results as gospel and do their due diligence, I can see it being helpful in spotting when an article is clearly deficienct in its sourcing. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:25, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

An interesting tool, used with care. Might be helpful as mentioned for first impressions, as long as it is clear that this cannot prove sourcing, only lack of sourcing. CMD (talk) 10:32, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: The script works paragraph by paragraph. It assumes that a reference supports everything in a paragraph that comes before it (unless there are "citation needed" tags), as Caeciliusinhorto-public has pointed out. So if a paragraph has a reference at the end, it marks nothing. If it only has one reference in the middle, it marks everything after that reference.

You are right to worry about the threats of using the script mindlessly. I've tried to counter this by making it very clear in the description that it has limitations and only signals that attention may be needed. I'm not sure if that's enough and I'm open to more suggestions on how to minimize the downsides of mindless usage. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:34, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

That's not what I'm seeing at File:Mark unreferenced passages - middle paragraph.png; how do you know citation 134 does not verify the highlighted content? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:18, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Re suggestions, if it's tagging the lead, and unless the example I gave above is addressed, you are going to end up with lots of angry editors screaming at you or users of this script :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:27, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

The script assumes that the passage in the picture lacks a citation because there is a "citation needed" tag after it. Do you think that some or all of the marked text should not be marked? The paragraph is taken from Dog#Food.

Concerning the lead, I think you and Iazyges convinced me that a different approach is necessary. I was thinking about something like the following: if the lead makes up less than a third (or half or a quarter?) of the article then it is excluded, otherwise it is included. This way, only the lead of very basic articles is marked. A different approach, suggested by Iazyges, would be to mark the lead only for articles that have no other sections. Or it could be excluded for any article. Are there any other ideas?

Phlsph7 (talk) 11:40, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Ah ha ... you mean the cn tag was already there before the script ran? I (mis) interpreted the image to mean that the script had added that cn tag. So sorry; my misunderstanding. So, if you fix the lead issue, could be useful. But I would move up and make more prominent in your write up all disclaimers, as I can still envision some angry editors if other editors misapply this script. Thanks for the hard work! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:59, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

The script does not add any tags, it just changes the background color. I'll make sure to do something about excluding the lead and I'll try to make the limitations more prominent in the introduction of the script documentation. Thanks for all the feedback! Phlsph7 (talk) 12:06, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

I went ahead and made the corresponding changes. The script now ignores missing references in the lead unless the article is a stub. I also expanded the discussion of the limitations in the introduction of the script documentation. Phlsph7 (talk) 17:45, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

I think where I got hung up in my first post is in this wording: Mark unreferenced passages is a user script to mark passages that lack references with a red background. Its main purpose is to help users quickly identify unreferenced passages, paragraphs, and sections in mainspace articles and drafts. The mark implied to me it was actually adding the citation needed tag, different from, for example, User:Evad37/duplinks-alt which merely highlights them so the user can use that info in improvements or content review processes. Can you address that? Maybe change mark to highlight or some such ? I also urge you to post this at WT:FAC, where you will get a different audience and may get useful feedback. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:22, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

You are right that the term "highlight" is more descriptive and less likely to lead to misunderstandings. I decided to rename the script as a whole, see User:Phlsph7/HighlightUnreferencedPassages. The old script contains script-equivalent of a redirect so there should be no problem for people who installed it under the old name. I also followed your advice and started a topic at the featured article talk page, see Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_candidates#Script_to_highlight_unreferenced_passages. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:28, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Abandoning reviews

I will need to be off Wikipedia for a while. I have two open reviews (Talk:East Timor/GA1 and Talk:Education policy of the United States/GA1, I totally forgot about this one and it is empty) and am not sure of the best way to deal with them. Usually I see abandoned reviews being brought up here so I thought this would be best. Sorry about this; poor planning on my part. Ovinus (talk) 07:25, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

If it's empty, I would G7 it. Otherwise, you can close as failed and ask the nominator to renominate it, or ask for a second opinion—it's up to you and the nominator. (t · c) buidhe 07:26, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I've asked for speedy deletion on the second and marked the first for "second opinion". Ovinus (talk) 09:35, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Old GA page errors

I've figure out how to attach the nominator to the reviewer data, and will be looking at adding the outcome data next. However, the bot is turning up a lot of odd situations. The great majority seem to be the result of page moves that did not drag along the GA subpages with them. I don't know what the expectation is in those cases. Here's an example: Talk:24 Hours of Le Mans Virtual/GA1 has the name the article had at the time the review was done. If you go to Talk:24 Hours of Le Mans Virtual you are redirected to Talk:2020 24 Hours of Le Mans Virtual, which has an articlehistory template that points to the wrong place. What's the correct way to fix these? Judging from Talk:About Love (Marina song)/GA1, the right answer is to move these to the same name as the parent article. If so I think there are going to be more than I can move by hand, and ChristieBot doesn't have approval for moving pages; I can produce a list of these if there's a bot or AWB operation that could do the moves. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:03, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

The real solution is to stop transcluding GAs to article talk (note that FACs and FARs don't do that), and go a subpage system like FAC/FAR use, as those don't break when an article moves. Besides the breaking problem with the way GAs are handled, the duplicate transclusions on the talk page (when they are already in {{Article history}}) is a serious source of talk page clutter that could be eliminated by moving to a system like FAC uses, and which articlehistory handles even if pages are moved. Why do we need to see fully duplicated GA transclusions on talk pages after they have been rolled into article history? And why are they a subpage of a talk page that can be moved? Cleaning up the DC talk pages is going to be quite a chore because of the way GA templates are used.[4] Even DYKs don't break when the page moves; this problem is exclusively with GAs, AFAIK. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:24, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

PS, this was almost 15 years ago. I don't understand why GA has lagged. And yes, I think you are forced to manually adjust every instance where the page moved. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:32, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

And, another interesting feature of what GA transclusions do to article talk pages is that, when trying to edit a GA talk page, one might end up instead at the GA sub-page (happens to me all the time). Geometry guy (who was essentially a GA Coord) stopped serious GA process editing back in 2014; this process needs Coords. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:41, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: One would have to wonder who that would be; User:BlueMoonset is a shoo-in (so long as they are willing), but who else would we have? Do we aim for roughly 3 coords? Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 21:50, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

I am not in a position to say (have only been following here since the DC GAR mess), but three is a good number. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:54, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

My understanding was that the coordinator proposal was for GAR, not for the GA process as a whole. Did that change at some point? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:02, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Not that I'm aware of (unfortunately). Both are needed. FAC has four, FAR has three, and the volume here is higher (although the demands may be lower). (More than three results in no place where the buck stops, so three is about the right no.) For gosh sakes, even WP:FLC has a Director and delegates (as FAC had when I was delegate). Would Doug Coldwell have happened if GA had a Coord, and all of those reviewers who gave up had someone they could inquire of as to what was up? Over 200 meaningless GAs, and how many reviewers chased off by the bad experiences described at the AN thread? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:14, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I can't see why it wouldn't. The GAN talk page has always been active with questions from new (and old) reviewers. We really don't need the narrative of "DC was the only one at fault, and if the reviewers had had a [insert Macguffin] they would have immediately realised what was up." The fact of the matter is that hundreds of times, reviewers looked at his articles, went "eh, they're not great quality, but do they really deserve a massive fuss?", and passed them. I know, because Union (automobile) was the first GA review I ever did, and I had that exact thought process. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:19, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Whatevs. Here's what happened in the day when Geometry guy was quasi-director, I was FAC delegate to the director (who stood down after appointing me), and FAC was the guaranteed route to RFA. Frequent ill-prepared FACs appeared from nominators who were aiming for RFA. There were almost always GAs and were quite often deficient. G guy opened the door for me to let him know of any such case, and he had a word with the nominators and the GA reviewers. And kept an eye on their noms. Problem solved. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:24, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

And how many of Doug's articles made their way to FAC? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:26, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Once G guy and I nipped the GA-FAC-RFA grease pole in the bud, those nominators stopped appearing at FAC and stopped abusing of GAN for their RFA aspirations. (We still do see overstated claims of GA at RFA with G guy gone.) If DC had appeared at FAC, he would have been subjected to a first-time nominator spot check of sources (assuming that hasn't also fallen by the wayside (UPDATE: I just checked some recent FACs, and shockingly, it has fallen by the wayside SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:02, 3 February 2023 (UTC) ). I'm unsure why you are asking that, though ? I'm completely missing what you are trying to say or asking (as I'm worn out by the WP:DCGAR work. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:31, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I might add that as Doug has been contributing in pretty much the same way from 2007, G guy, quasi-coordinator or not, wasn't really the cure you imply he would have been if he was still around. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:30, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Mike's stats and DC's GA list indicate he was more involved at DYK in those days, and his GAs started later. If those stats are wrong, and DC has more than 223 GAs, we are missing those at WP:DCGAR ???? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:32, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I guess you're saying GAN doesn't need a Coord, otherwise I'm not following what your point is -- sorry, too tired. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:33, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Well, I thought you were saying that a system like you guys had back in the day would work; I pointed out why it wouldn't. At the end of the day, I can't see why a Coldwell reviewer (such as, well, me) would be any more likely to go to a coord over the GAN talk page. I thought he had been contributing GAs since 2007—my mistake, apologies. Perhaps sleep? You do so much good work for the project, I think we can survive without you for a bit. Actually, on second thoughts I take that back. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:35, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I admit to needing sleep :) I suspect everyone's mindsets would have been different today when confronted with the kinds of problems that surfaced at the DC AN (only after the fact), if reviewers had been able to have a quite word with or make an inquiry of a GA Coord. Someone might have caught on sooner. I was particularly gobsmacked by Xor'easter's feedback at the AN, and worried how many top-notch editors like XOR gave up. Anyway, that's enough from me :) (Except I hope our 223 DC GAs is an accurate number and he really didn't start going for GA until much later in his Wikicareer, as that's what Mike's reviewer data shows.) Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:48, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

There is someone we can ask :) Sorting Mike's data by date shows that David Eppstein was clued in early on. David, did you try to raise the problem anywhere, did you feel there was nowhere to go, what light can you shed on the discussion above about whether having a GA Coord would have made a difference ? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:53, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I don't recall trying to escalate the issue, no. If I did, it would most likely have been at this discussion page and I can't find anything in the archives. Although my earlier reviews did run into the now-familiar issues of failed verification and inappropriate copying or close paraphrasing from sources, I didn't really realize how wide-spread and pervasive those problems were. Instead, I thought the bigger problems were bad writing, bad article organization, bludgeoning reviewers in quick succession until finding one willing to give a pass, and clogging up the GA queues with a high rate of dubious nominations without any reviewing done in return. But low-quality writing is not exactly rare on Wikipedia. And because I didn't see anyone else complain about the GA process issues, and they weren't directly related to article content, I thought they were generally accepted as the cost for all the content creation DC was doing.

By 2020 (three years after my first reviews of Coldwell's articles in 2017) there was discussion here of the issue: see Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations/Archive 24. But it's evident from my comments there that I still didn't recognize the copyvio as the problem that it is; instead, I thought the process issues could be solved by quickfailing more of Coldwell's nominations. I did occasionally review Coldwell's nominations after my experiences with the three from 2017 that are on your list (e.g. Talk:English words first attested in Chaucer/GA1 and Talk:Equatorial sextant/GA1 from 2020) but only to quickfail them in cases where I thought that was obvious enough, as a way to reduce the GA nomination backlog. (To be clear: I thought they should all be failed, but in many cases it was not obvious how to fit it into the quickfail criteria, I didn't want to set up a full review that would drag out into weeks of "this is a problem"/"done!" back and forth, and I thought that if I went on a one-person crusade to fail significantly more of Coldwell's nominations it could be seen as a form of harassment.) —David Eppstein (talk) 01:20, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Thx, David ... reading through those archive discussions, it strikes me that there was enough of a problem in terms of just volume (even if the current problems weren't yet understood), that if GA had a Coord, they might have kept a watchful eye and picked up sooner on the issues. Even if a Coord had started a thread asking why DC's (many) noms were going unreviewed, we might have heard sooner from the people who later expressed (in the AN and on my talk page) why they would not touch his noms. Thx again for the info, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:24, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

The proposal at the proposal drive is indeed exclusively for GAR coordinators; their remit does not extend to GAN and that would have to be a separate proposal (and I'm not sure that's one that would pass). FAC does have coords, but that also introduces a lot of bureaucracy, and that's for a much smaller throughput of nominations. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 03:59, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

@Mike Christie: GA subpages not moving with their parent talk pages is a persistent problem I have previously raised in technical boards to no avail. If you have managed to develop a way to list all these errors, that would be a significant benefit to a long-standing problem. CMD (talk) 01:35, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I'll post the list here, but it might be a day or two -- the first pass through the list of all the GA subpages won't be done till late tonight, and then I need to do some detective work on the errors to see if there are variations. I think the rule is: if a review page was created at a time when the article's talk page did not exist, and it's because the talk page was moved after the review, then the target of the redirect gives me the basename for the GAn page to be moved to. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:56, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

We have a live case with Talk:List of wartime orders of battle for the British 1st Armoured Division (1939–1945)/GA1, which did not move with Talk:List of orders of battle for the British 1st Armoured Division. I have not moved it in case it helps. CMD (talk) 06:50, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Go ahead and move it -- the way the list is generated requires me to start with a list of GA subpages, and it takes a while to process. I grabbed the list a couple of days ago so it doesn't include that page. I would like to figure out how to monitor for this problem, but for now all I can produce is a historical list. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:05, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Noted, done. CMD (talk) 11:57, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

List of subpages that need to be moved

With a bit more work I can probably figure out the target and add a column for that, but here's what I have at the moment. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:19, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Article	Page	Review date
Somerset Towers	1	2008-06-10 16:41:10
Arise (album)	1	2008-06-25 00:45:58
GAR/link	1	2008-07-05 13:59:18
Halloween Horror Nights (Orlando)	1	2008-09-15 18:08:52
SS West Caruth	1	2008-09-16 16:51:56
Tropical Storm Norma (2005)	1	2008-12-27 19:09:54
Sultan Iskandar of Johor	1	2009-02-27 09:45:08
White Dog (book)	1	2009-04-13 11:59:33
Partington, Greater Manchester	1	2009-05-03 12:53:46
Call Center Industry in the Philippines	1	2009-05-11 16:24:28
Being There (album)	1	2009-08-14 19:35:53
Kõpu lighthouse	1	2009-08-17 12:54:22
White Dog (book)	2	2009-09-08 22:01:08
Send It On (song)	1	2009-09-09 09:05:12
Complete icosahedron	1	2009-12-20 21:41:29
Procar	1	2009-12-31 19:30:34
Battle of Old Trafford (2003)	1	2010-01-20 12:57:15
Outrageous	1	2010-04-17 06:36:15
Freshman fifteen	1	2010-04-29 02:56:05
Evergreen (album)	1	2010-12-04 16:08:06
Homework (album)	1	2010-12-07 02:43:18
True Blue (album)	1	2010-12-11 02:57:41
Somebody (song)	1	2010-12-30 14:28:43
Louis Clément Ngwat-Mahop	1	2011-03-12 16:57:37
Muhammad and slavery	1	2011-04-13 21:04:22
Blow (song)	1	2011-05-30 23:46:35
Breakout (album)	1	2011-07-03 13:14:44
Emotions (album)	1	2011-07-17 21:30:53
Make It Happen (song)	1	2011-07-17 22:16:42
I Want You (album)	2	2011-08-06 20:44:57
Music Box (album)	1	2011-08-27 23:28:41
Reckless (album)	1	2011-10-08 12:29:56
The Experiment (album)	1	2011-10-23 18:01:42
Labyrinth (film)	1	2012-01-24 18:45:31
Dan Leno discography	1	2012-02-10 23:37:05
Field Trip	1	2012-04-07 23:30:49
The Famous Five (series)	1	2012-06-16 22:03:16
Jai Ho	1	2012-07-15 17:49:24
Tea & Sympathy	1	2012-07-27 13:46:37
One nation conservatism	1	2012-08-11 08:32:51
Ki (album)	1	2012-08-26 19:43:44
Prometheus (film)	1	2012-09-12 08:06:24
Eugénie Fougère/GATalk:Eugénie Fougère	1	2012-10-07 15:28:18
Take It Off (song)	1	2012-11-07 22:50:56
Boletus badius	1	2013-04-04 21:08:45
Sesame Workshop funding sources	1	2013-04-17 18:32:18
Lost (2004 TV series)	1	2013-04-30 20:35:41
Lost (2004 TV series)	2	2013-04-30 20:35:41
Lost (2004 TV series)	3	2013-04-30 20:35:42
Can't Stop Won't Stop (song)	1	2013-06-18 17:51:53
Listen (song)	1	2013-07-10 00:24:19
Yellow (song)	1	2013-07-13 00:26:35
Shiloh (novel)	1	2013-07-27 18:01:09
Shiloh (novel)	2	2013-07-27 18:01:10
Pure (novel)	1	2013-07-28 00:44:02
The Fear (song)	1	2013-07-28 16:49:41
The Divine Comedy (album)	1	2013-08-10 11:59:10
One Day at Horrorland	1	2013-08-12 21:11:43
Jurchen campaigns against the Song Dynasty	1	2013-08-21 07:58:45
Homeless (song)	1	2013-10-16 17:32:44
Contact (film)	1	2013-11-04 18:44:08
New R. S. J. Public School Senior Secondary	1	2014-01-18 06:22:56
Conan (TV series)	1	2014-05-14 10:10:45
Do or Die (song)	1	2014-05-26 18:28:02
This Too Shall Pass (song)	1	2014-05-31 17:42:47
Typhoon Hal	1	2014-06-24 20:45:31
Bookends	1	2014-10-22 09:21:24
Jesus Piece	1	2014-11-08 21:29:58
Breaking Point (song)	1	2014-11-28 19:29:40
Devil May Care (novel)	1	2015-01-17 20:06:41
Jumper (film)	1	2015-02-22 18:43:44
Haumea (dwarf planet)	1	2015-02-28 04:55:03
Makemake (dwarf planet)	1	2015-02-28 05:08:25
Grey Wolves	1	2015-06-20 02:31:36
Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport	1	2015-09-21 03:27:20
Hud (film)	1	2015-09-24 12:06:36
Hud (film)	2	2015-09-24 12:06:36
HMS Natal (1905)	1	2015-10-09 12:22:47
Doomsday (film)	1	2015-11-14 01:53:40
George Bailey (cricketer)	1	2015-12-20 05:46:12
Yours (song)	1	2017-04-22 00:22:37
Synthpop	1	2017-04-27 20:49:46
Dreaming of You (album)	1	2017-05-29 00:18:57
Dreaming of You (album)	2	2017-05-29 00:18:57
Dreaming of You (album)	3	2017-05-29 00:18:57
Dreaming of You (album)	4	2017-05-29 00:18:57
French minelaying cruiser Pluton	1	2018-04-24 12:42:34
Basil II the Bulgar Slayer	1	2018-07-11 06:04:42
The J's With Jamie	1	2019-04-04 03:52:10
Beyond the Sea (film)	1	2019-04-27 19:04:25
Contagion (film)	1	2019-04-28 18:33:29
Ghost Rider (film)	1	2019-05-04 20:14:53
Greed (film)	1	2019-05-05 17:55:15
Relapse (album)	1	2019-05-14 19:05:16
Players (film)	1	2019-05-26 23:36:20
No Sleep (album)	1	2019-08-31 20:39:58
Statue of Lenin, Seattle	1	2019-09-16 02:40:07
Time Out of Mind (album)	1	2019-09-29 19:27:00
General Philip Sheridan	1	2020-02-24 21:22:13
Tom Hawkins (footballer)	1	2020-05-16 14:09:31
Polish Righteous among the Nations	1	2020-07-28 20:00:08
Voodoo (album)	2	2020-09-09 04:33:58
Geoff Smith (footballer)	1	2020-10-25 15:39:34
Ken Barnes (footballer)	1	2020-11-05 19:17:43
Nuno Mendes (footballer)	1	2020-11-10 19:14:22
Company (film)	1	2021-04-10 23:03:30
Booty (song)	1	2021-05-23 16:26:15
Endless Night (song)	1	2021-05-23 18:15:17
Headline News (song)	1	2021-05-23 19:25:15
Problem (song)	1	2021-05-27 15:53:50
David Lewis (politician)	1	2021-06-30 17:53:46
The Beyond (film)	1	2021-11-29 21:07:25
Golden Years (song)	1	2021-12-03 17:27:22
Joseph R. Fisher	1	2022-02-05 15:34:24
John Douglas (architect)	1	2022-03-12 18:25:07
Danny Williams (politician)	1	2022-04-09 00:05:31
Eskimo (film)	1	2022-10-14 00:03:16
Bad Idea (song)	1	2023-01-22 22:27:12
Crave (song)	1	2023-01-22 22:54:06

Discussion of list

Ack. Mike, maybe as this effort advances, you can follow what Gimmetrow did with {{Article history}} and set up a category that tracks errors, so everyone can pitch in. See how Category:Article history templates with errors works. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:20, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

• I did Crave (song) (that was caused by a move by Tassedethe), but each situation will be different depending on how the page was broken. (The GA talk page system does not work. I may be repeating myself.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:43, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
• Dreaming of You (album) resulted from another move by Tassedethe without correcting articlehistory. Note in the correcting diff that neither PR nor FAC pages need to be fixed, as those processes have individual page setups and AH was designed to handle those without changing the name. This problem is an artefact of GA. I have not independently edited all four GAs to fix the links, as I did at Crave (song) ... leaving the example of the problem with now four GA reviews that link to the incorrect article and all need to be fixed. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:49, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I am working on subdividing these into finer distinctions. I've just realized the ones listed above are the particularly difficult ones -- if the talk page doesn't exist at all it was probably something like a move to a dab page where the source talk page was deleted (as in Procar). There are many more that should be simpler -- GAs with a parent talk page that is a redirect are the easiest; those should go to a subpage of wherever the parent talk page redirects to. I should have that list in a bit but it's going to be long -- I think over 5,000, but I'm still digging. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:48, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Yep, but anyone working on these needs to carefully look at the differences in first two samples, as the problem with the way GA sets up these pages is that there can be different issues requiring different fixes, and knowledge of how article history works. I'll stop fixing for now, as those are examples only. It's a big problem. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:51, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Here's a revised sample of ones that I think need to be moved, with the source and target pages listed and linked. It's not as bad as I thought; most of what I had thought was going to end up in this category turned out to be just plain redirects, meaning those GA subpage have already been moved. (There will be a few dozen more where the target page already exists; those will need more analysis.) I can post the full list if necessary (looks like it will be about 2,000 pages). How should this be validated before we look for a bot operator to do these moves? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:44, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Doug Coldwell GAs

ANI

1. Where can I find discussion of a drive to review Doug Coldwell's hundreds of GAs? I've reviewed archives and come up empty.
2. Where can I find a list of all current GARs? This seems to indicate there are none.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:19, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

To point 1, the answer is you should start one. To the best of my knowledge it never actually happened. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:23, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

The listing can be seen at CAT:GAR (although I think there's likely to be some changes coming to GAR due to a GA proposals drive that I haven't followed much). A list of Coldwell GAs can be found at [5]. Hog Farm _Talk 14:25, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Thx, both; on it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:54, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Where can I find this "GA proposals drive"? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:32, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Never mind :) Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023 SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:33, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

FYI SandyGeorgia, per Proposal 14 which has passed, the individual and community GAR processes will soon be merged, and so I wouldn't recommend starting any individual assessments. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:37, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

It's one of those things that needs doing, but it's quite the undertaking. I also suggest not doing so until after the merger Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:44, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

When will this merger happen? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:56, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

There's no set date, Sandy. Someone will write the proposed new process, then the community will probably discuss it and tweak it, and then it'll get implemented. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:07, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Ideally by the end of February/early March we can have all the changes wrapped up. A more realistic timeline: eventually. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 23:42, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

AirshipJungleman29 at WT:FAR, when an abusive or deficient WP:FAC nominator is revealed, with consensus, we do what we call a "procedural FAR" to delist multiple at a time. (I see a proposal for GAR to have Coordinators, which would facilitate something like what FAR does.) Opening 200+ GARs would be a ridiculous burden. I will probably be suggesting something similar to FAR, that is, all Coldwell GAs are delisted by default via global consensus except those where a GAR is opened because a reviewer can vouch for the offline sources. We have rampant misrepresentation of sources along with copyvio, inaccuracies, and archaic sources, so WP:AGF on offline sources is out the window. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:56, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, that would probably work. To answer your question above, the merger is happening gradually, along with other implemented proposals: see Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023/Feedback ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:01, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I think procedural delisting would be good; unfortunately he generally chose such niche areas that it would be difficult to summon interest to fix them, even if we did run all of them through GAR. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 16:12, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I'm certainly willing to handle the ones related to trains, though I suspect most will conclude with the obvious answer being to delist them. Several already have been. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 16:20, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

What I am proposing would work without a GAR Coordinator, but would certainly be a smoother process with a leader in place, akin to the role of the FAR Coordinators. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:25, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

PS, the point of the procedural FAR is that gives us what we need to enter into {{Article history}} for a record. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:27, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Thx both, so I think I'm on the right track then ... will keep an eye on timing re merger. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:21, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I would say to the point of a drive that if we go through a large enough sampling and a significant enough portion have serious issues, that's cause enough to speedily delist them without formal GARs. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 16:26, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes, but we need a page that can be entered into AH, hence, the procedure like at FAR. Also, I am planning to bring forward further proposals on how to handle all of Coldwell's content, which goes beyond GA. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:29, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Of the ones I've seen at GAR, every single one has had major problems, but of his 200+ articles the total taken to GAR thus far can't be more than about 5 percent. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 16:33, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I've seen enough of his work to know that a large enough sampling has already been done. My proposal is going to go beyond his GAs; this is rampant garbage content, also breaching COPYVIO. A purge is needed. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:36, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't know if people realize that he seriously fed an entire Sybil Ludington "female Paul Revere" industry on a meme akin to Betsy Ross. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:37, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

He also presented as settled fact the very much disputed claim that New York Central and Hudson River Railroad No. 999 was the first locomotive to travel at 100 miles per hour. Doug only goes foot-deep in his research and the results are he just copies (figuratively and literally, since there's the copyvio) the top results he gets from Google and newspapers.com. And then there's his prose... the era of "brilliant prose" is well before my time here, but Coldwell's writing is the exact opposite. It is written in a juvenile, primitive manner that reads more like someone's blog than an encyclopedia article. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 17:33, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree that it would be best to delist all of his GAs. Even 20+ GARs would be a ridiculous burden, and something of a dead letter without someone new coming forward to champion that particular article. Mackensen (talk) 17:20, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

• Perhaps somewhere we should put together a list of his GA's (copied from link provided) to allow people to claim those that they wish to work on, and those that attract no interest can be procedurally delisted? Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 17:57, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

  I think that's a way forward, with the proviso that the claim window is limited (say a month), and "claimed" articles go through the formal GAR process instead of being summarily delisted. Mackensen (talk) 17:59, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

OK, so I may be almost ready to bring a global proposal to the ANI thread, which would point the GA proposal back to this forum. But I think we have a broad plan on the way forward here now, with a recommendation to wait for the merge etc. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:25, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

• @SandyGeorgia: It may prove better to list it at the village pump; in past I have seen ANI regulars consider the statute of limitations on an "incident" to be quite short. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 19:26, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

• In the meantime, I have made an user subpage where people can lay claim to an article they'd like to rewrite (to be excluded from summary delisting). -- Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 21:59, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

• I must confess to being a little confused by the proposals to review GA nominations when questions of reference integrity are raised. Are we really passing stuff without checking the sources? Huh??? If we're doing that, what is the point of the GA process existing at all? I feel like the best reviews I've gotten have all been from people who checked my sources (and consequently noticed stuff like if I got a date wrong, or misspelled a name). As a side note, my reviews of Doug's nominations (Eber Brock Ward, John William Lambert, Clam Lake Canal, Thomas Jefferson Ramsdell, George A. Mitchell, The Three Musketeers (Studebaker engineers), Buckeye gasoline buggy, and Paul Rapsey Hodge) all involved extensive source review (i.e. every statement in the article was checked against the sources that referenced it, and modified/copyedited if it was not consistent). jp×g 22:06, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

  In the case of Coldwell, it's about WP:AGF, as he frequently used sources not available online. My point is that AGF no longer applies to his content, considering his record. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:15, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Do you all think a subpage should be set up for the Coldwell GAs? Asking before I launch formal proposal ... something like Wikipedia:Good Article Doug Coldwell GA reassessment ?? If so, might this discussion be copied to wherever you put it ? And the list at User:Iazyges/Doug GA Rewrite Claims could go there as well ... ?? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:44, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I spent five hours today on only three articles, finding mostly failed verification, along with a bit of cut-and-paste and too close paraphrasing. What is time-consuming is the need to first locate the sources, some of which are actually available although not linked (eg archive.org). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:07, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

• Maybe, the community — including certain reviewers — need to retrospect on how some of DC's article became GAs at the first place, to necessitate this "drive". But, obviously, I am expecting a lot. TrangaBellam (talk) 16:38, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

  Well, one thing that can be seen by reading the AN thread is that many did try and were beaten back or discouraged; let's give them credit. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:41, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Coldwell GAs: Implementation

See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#User:Doug Coldwell. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:44, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

See some explanations and queries answered on my talk page. I'll start a sub-page today where all of this can be summarized, questions can be answered, and we can proceed at the sub-page to get everything in one place. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:06, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Premeditated Chaos I am thinking that the appropriate page name for centralized FAQ/coordination would be Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Doug Coldwell GAs; hoping for your comments before I continue. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:03, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Honestly, could just be Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Doug Coldwell. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:37, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

I think this suggestion is probably easier. Kingsif (talk) 13:58, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

For now, working at User:SandyGeorgia/sandbox9. I was worried that setting it up as "just" Doug Coldwell might leave the idea that Doug Coldwell is an actual GA aricle ? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:28, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

If we're talking about future people who have no idea of the situation, that idea shouldn't last longer than clicking on the link and reading the first line. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:17, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

OK, will wait to see what everyone says, for now, work can move to the talk page of my sandbox, and I'll let it rest for a bit as I've at least got the main points chunked in there ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:21, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Is there a list anywhere of which reviewers did which articles? I think when I looked it up before, I had done two of them, but I can't for the life of me remember which ones. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:38, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

I think I asked that earlier of Mike Christie but can't remember if it is available. If not, maybe Mike will produce that ? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:37, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't have it yet but am working on it. Possibly today, if not within a week or so. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:43, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Back to the name. To belabor the point, I am quite worried about how to name what is at User:SandyGeorgia/sandbox9, as we may be using mass sender to send a message to the talk page of each of the 223 GAs. It will endure. And whatever we think of him, Doug Caldwell/Coldwell is a living person. I wish we could name it something that actually does not involve his name at all. Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Multiple or something generic. Ideas, feedback? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:30, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: CCI uses an anonymizing date system for established editors, mayhaps we could use a similar one, such as Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/20230130, or whatever date we end up launching. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 18:32, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Because our launch date is vague, and it's January 30 already, maybe Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/February 2023_1. The _1 allows for this to happen more than once in February <groan> ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:52, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: If that should happen, I think our best, if not even most neccesary, course of action will be an immediate collapse into an anarcho-tribalistic society governed by your favorite Wikipedia Pillar, subdivided into factions of usage of ' over 's. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 22:06, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Aren't we already there ? (Heck, I run a script on every article I touch to fix the dumb quotes !) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:25, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

If I recall correctly, I think CCI stops anonymizing once the user is banned. –Novem Linguae (talk) 11:15, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Interesting ... sorting Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations#Open investigations by date reveals new CCIs on named users that are not banned (only indeff'd), so this appears to be correct. Back to the drawing board. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:22, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Doug Coldwell may be a living person, but the name is also a username he's openly used in two different combinations for 15+ years. If it was my username, I doubt we would think twice about the name. At the end of the day, Doug made his bed, and we have to lie in it for him, so to speak. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:20, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Good point. And by obscuring the name, we obscure the problem. So, rather than move my sandbox to a GA subpage this morning, as I had intended, I'll wait for more feedback. Want to get this right. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:23, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/2023 winter of our DisContent XOR'easter (talk) 14:35, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

What next (for new readers to the page)

Sorry to come into this somewhat ignorantly, but I was tentatively following this matter a few weeks ago, yet things have progressed rather quickly during the last week since I last checked. If I wanted to try and save/reassess one (Joseph Dart), is there a deadline before the mass delist occurs? This may be the wrong place to ask, but it seems there are various discussions spread out. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 20:34, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Everything is now somewhat summarized at User:SandyGeorgia/sandbox9, which I will move once we settle on a name for the page. The deadline is TBD, as it depends on when the planned merge of individual and community assessments will happen. That is, you have time to think about it ... see my sandbox. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:36, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

PS, before attempting a "save" be sure you have read through all of the lengthy AN and ANI discussions, and my sandbox, and are aware that the problems go well beyond copyright. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:37, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: Thanks for the quick reply. I have read this matter somewhat sporadically so I have some understanding of what is happening and why (I have dipped in and out since Doug pinged me back in October). Looking objectively, I would consider trying to salvage one of the GAs I did, although given the sheer mass volume under the hammer, hopefully any involved reviewer would be pre-advised anyway as courtesy? I am mostly fully aware of the fundamental concerns raised by editors which are believed to affect his contributions. I'd also expect that the level of scrutiny to be demonstrated in an assessment would exceed typical standards accepted during a GA review (which is why I do understand a lack of appetite in an en-masse reassessment). Moving some discussions/proposals from user sub-pages would help formalise the process somewhat. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 20:56, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

A key thing that is needed for saving any of these is that they not depend on any offline sources added by Coldwell. (Not having text copied or lightly paraphrased from those sources is also a concern, but one that is for obvious reasons harder to check.) —David Eppstein (talk) 20:59, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Bungle I am not following. Did you read the implementation plan in my sandbox? All of DC GA talk pages will be noticed when the time comes. How to sign up to "save" them is outlined there ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:03, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: I observed the message that the "GA talk pages" would be notified, but this doesn't consider that some reviewers may have since removed the talk page or reviews from their watchlist and so, that alone cannot assure the reviewers will be notified.

@David Eppstein: As I say, while I have not followed matters extensively, I have read enough and I am mindful of the concerns editors have raised and the expectations from any reassessment. I'd imagine even reported rectification may not be sufficient in some cases, though the primary concern seems to be WP:V. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:15, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Ah, Bungle, I see. Mike Christie is developing a list, so we might be able to include those editors in the MMS. See above. (Concerns are V, OR, and POV in addition to COPYVIO and too-close paraphasing and failure to attribute public domain sources.) Sorry to be so brief: I've been working on this (implementation detail) now for over 9 hours ... since before my morning coffee. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:40, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

No worries (I know the discussed issues extend beyond WP:V, hence noting that it appeared to be the primary concern, not exclusive). Alas, I tend to avoid getting too involved in these kind of matters, as it would pull me away from actually writing stuff, but I am compelled to occasionally! Thanks for making things somewhat clearer. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 22:10, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Coldwell implementation update

User:SandyGeorgia/sandbox9

I am holding off on moving my sandbox to a GA subpage to resolve the following:

1. Ongoing discussion (above) about the appropriate page name (I've put out some queries, but am leaning towards using the editor name after all based on feedback so far)

   Both Premeditated Chaos and MER-C felt we should stick with the numbering system. There are other Doug Coldwells in the world, and we don't want to impugn all of them on 200+ pages.

2. The (well-intended) page at User:Iazyges/Doug GA Rewrite Claims wasn't being used as intended, so I've rejigged the instructions to describe a new process after discussing with Iazyges ... I now have mass message sender, and we will be able to notify all DC GA reviewers. I'm working on producing that list in an MMS format.

   Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/February 2023 1/reviewer list SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:29, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

   With big thanks to Mike Christie; his data generating wizardry is instrumental and enormously helpful. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:32, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

3. I'm concerned we may have two different bots gearing up; I may be misunderstanding, so have put out queries.

   Resolved, not a problem. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:22, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

4. I don't want to move this info to a GA subpage until I have review from some critical editors in the CCI process; I've put out queries.

   Now have feed back so can move forward later today. SandyGeorgia (Talk)

Meanwhile, my sandbox will have to suffice for anyone seeking info at this stage. Let's hope we never have to go through this again ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:50, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

DC GAR page launched

Pages for February 2023 GAR reassessment and Copyright contributor investigation
Main pages DC Good article reassessment Copyright contributor investigation Lists Master GA list Reviewer list Intent to open independent GAR Sdzerobot list Notices Article talk notice MMS targets User talk notice MMS targets GAR delisting page Scripts and bots GAN Review Tool Bot instruction Petscan 23790505

See Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/February 2023

Editors here should note that the subpage for indicating which editors intended to pursue an independent GAR (User:Iazyges/Doug GA Rewrite Claims) was not being used as intended, so was archived. All editors should re-read this page and see new instructions. I have gotten no response on some pings regarding the former page, so we will need to individually check with those editors as the time for the bot run approaches, and to remind them to review the project subpage.

If you were a GA reviewer of one of DC's GAs, you will be on the mailing list for notifications already; if you were not a DC GA reviewer, and want to be kept informed anyway, you can sign up at Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/February 2023/GA reviewer MMStargets.

I will probably shortly unwatch this (very busy) page, so please place all followup on the GAR Feb 2023 page, or ping me here as needed.

Thanks to all who have helped out; this was a complex endeavor, never before attempted, made even harder as it came during a GAR revamping, so I appreciate everyone's patience and diligence as we got all the pieces in the right place. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:48, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Great work on this - we are still lacking a way to inform users which items they may have reviewed (I know Mike was working on this), as it's a bit of an ask to give someone a list of 200+ articles and asking them to remember which ones they've reviewed. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 22:18, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Lee, it's in the sidebar ... Mike did a quick and dirty, so some of the dates are wonky, and the pages aren't wikilinked, but see the reviewer list in the sidebar. If someone wants to add wikilinks, fine by me, but I Am Exhausted. There was a lot to coordinate here, considering a GAR revamping on top of an unprecedented situation ... so I put up the table without wikifying it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:23, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

PS: Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/February 2023/user talk notice will be sent to the reviewer list via MMS as we get things more settled. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:25, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Forgot to @Lee Vilenski:. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:29, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict)My bad. It didn't show up on mobile (or at least, the section containing it was hidden by default). That's great work. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 22:30, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Lee Vilenski do you (or anyone) know what I need to change in the sidebar to fix that ? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:32, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

No, the sidebar is fine. The section containing the table was collapsed by default, which is a thing that's new to the mobile view for pages like this. I'm still getting used to it! Don't worry about it, I've had a look at the items I previously reviewed and committed to opening a GAR for one, and dismiss the other to be demoted. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 22:36, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Unwatching now; please post any questions to the DC GAR talk page. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:21, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

DYK discussion on expanding GA on the main page

Please feel free to join in the conversation at: [|Did you know# Making GAs stand out?]] Thank you for any input you might have. — Maile (talk) 20:37, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Talk:Lithuanian Civil War (1697–1702)/GA1

The above-noted GAN has been open for well over six months and appears to have completely stalled. CMD attempted to get some movement going in November, BlueMoonset reminded the participants in December, and still nothing has changed. I attempted to get some movement going and suggested that the reviewer close it as failed as he does not believe it meets GA standards at this time, but was rebuffed by the reviewer today with the suggestion "let's wait a bit" to see if the nom comes back (nom hasn't edited since Jan 25, and hasn't touched the actual article since Dec 27).

Now, I'm not sure what the relationship was like between the nominator and the reviewer when the GAN was opened, but at this point it appears to have deteriorated badly. The last edits Cukrakalnis made were to ANI, to a dispute about the reviewer, Marcelus, in the same topic area (Lithuania), during which he suggested that Marcelus be TBANned from the area. There's also continued arguing between the two of them on each others' talk pages during that ANI. There's also a newly-opened DR request for another dispute between the two of them, again in the Lithuania topic area. I cannot possibly see how this contentious relationship could lead to a fruitful GA review.

I'm considering IAR closing it but would like to see some other opinions just in case I'm somehow being too hasty here. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:36, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Well, I think that if @Cukrakalnis declares his will to continue working on the article within next let's say a month, I'm open for keeping the review open. But if he declares he isn't going to improve it further or isn't comfortable with me as a reviewer than I can close the review or hand it over to the other user. So far we didn't have trouble working on this particular article together, at least @Cukrakalnis didn't voice any complain, and he usually isn't shy about it, so I don't think that our relationship is affecting this review. Marcelus (talk) 22:45, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I'd say a fail would be appropriate, if Marcelus feels the article still doesn't meet the criteria, or an outside close. We're well past the standard 7 days. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 10:40, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Close it. Six months without constructive improvement should end the review immediately. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:07, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Okay, I'm going to IAR close it down. It doesn't make sense to let it linger indefinitely, hoping that the nom will return. Thanks for your input, guys. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:14, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Just came back from a brief holiday, partly to WP:DEESCALATE, but it's no problem that the nom was closed, even though I was intending to improve it in the near future to not keep it hanging over the head. Cukrakalnis (talk) 13:53, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

GAR numbers

CAT:GAR lists 45, WP:GAR lists 37. Where's the difference, what are the eight that aren't on the page ? A Coord is needed. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:15, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

These will be individual reassessments. After the merge, these numbers should align, but not yet. I've been encouraging people to close their individual nominations in the transition period. Femke (alt) (talk) 17:02, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

The trouble is that because of the increased focus on GAR, and the continued existence of the introduction encouraging the creation of individual assessments, several of them have been created in the past month. That introduction needs to go up ASAP. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:46, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

@AirshipJungleman29: I've gone ahead and updated the instructions. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 22:53, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Two lists of GA subpage errors

I've done as much as I can towards extracting data from the GA subpages, and have come up with two lists of pages that need attention.

• User:Mike Christie/GA subpages that should be moved. There are 1939 of these. I would like someone to spotcheck a handful of these to be sure that the bot has correctly understood what is needed. The target page is constructed from the target of the parent talk page redirect target. When I get a vote of confidence here that these should be moved, I'll post at WP:BOTREQ to get the moves done.
• User:Mike Christie/Unparseable GA subpages. These are the pages that defeated the bot. There are 450 of them. For these the bot can't even figure out whether the page is a GAN or a GAR. There are several different ways in which the bot can fail; there's a comments column and an explanation at the top. These subpages have the reviewer name attached (the bot assumes the creator of the subpage is the reviewer) but are excluded from many reports since I don't know if they're GANs or GARs. There are two main things that could be done to help sort these out: add article_history, and move the subpages to where they should go.

About fifty pages are on both lists. I am still running code to extract the outcome, outcome date, nomination date, and subtopic where possible, but that will take a while longer. The nominator has been extracted in almost every case. In a few cases it will be reported as a blank, or "None"; this generally means there's something weird about the original nomination template.

If anyone is willing to go through the unparseable pages and add article_history, even for just a few of them, that would be very helpful. I suspect it's not a particularly quick job -- generally speaking eveyrthing left over has something weird about it so it might take a bit of poking around in the histories in each case. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:44, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

The top 10 from "GA subpages that should be moved" look good. I note in some cases that there have been manual fixes, but assuming the bot leaves a redirect I don't see anything breaking. CMD (talk) 16:02, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

OK, thanks. I'll leave a request at WP:BOTREQ tomorrow. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:46, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Request posted. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:46, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Mike Christie: - How do you want us to mark ones on the unparseable list as resolved? I've fixed Talk:15th Alabama Infantry Regiment/GA1 - when the article was moved, the GA subpage was moved, but not the talk page itself. I've rolled the failed GA into an article history template, although I didn't put the dyk into the article history because I was having trouble finding the DYK nomination page because I'm unfamiliar with how they did DYK nominations in 2010. Hog Farm _Talk 16:03, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

How about just changing the "Comments" field to "Fixed"? And probably should sign too, in case anyone has a question about the fix. Thanks! Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:29, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm finding most of the unparseable ones are page move issues, aside from the disambiguation I'm not seeing what the bot is seeing that differentiates them from the first list. Some appear to be GANs of now-deleted pages, I suppose they stay where they are. Others like Talk:Ayu Tsukimiya/GA1 I can't figure out what the bot is missing. Is that just because the article history template is pointing to a talkpage transclusion rather than the page? (Does this mean the bot is trying to work through the article history template?) CMD (talk) 16:15, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

For Ayu Tsukimiya/GA1 the problem is the GA nominee template. To figure out whether a subpage is a GAR or GAN the bot looks up the creation date of the subpage, then looks in the talk page for a revision prior to that date. That gets this version, which as you can see has no page parameter. So I can't tell if that GA nominee template applies to this subpage because I can't match the page number. The bot also tries to match articlehistory, but here the link in article history is not to the web page. The bot also will match in some other circumstances that don't apply here -- if articlehistory has only GANs and no GARs from after the subpage was created, it assumes it's a GAN, and vice versa. Here there's both. To your more general question, yes, I think most of these are probably page move issues of one kind or another. I may just have to keep an exceptions list for the deleted pages and any other insoluble ones. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:44, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

And I just realized I didn't answer part of your question; yes, if the article_history link pointed directly to the subpage the bot should be able to cope with that. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:53, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Can't see what's wrong with Talk:Burnitup!/GA1, the FGA template has a page number. CMD (talk) 03:00, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

The nomination template was for /GA2 at the time it was nominated; the subpage was moved to /GA1 after the nomination was completed. The bot doesn't want to assume that nomination template applies to that subpage if the page number disagrees. Article history would fix it because that would use the correct current name for the subpage. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:56, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Though I think the bot might just trust the FGA template's page number. I'll look at adding a check for that. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:41, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

I changed the code to only require the page number to match, and not worry about whether the fail timestamp was close to the last edit on the subpage, and that picked up another forty-odd pages. I've removed those from the unparseable subpages list; thanks for the suggestion! If you see other cases where there's a rule I could follow to identify what the subpage is that would be great. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:21, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

I went through the tropical storm, typhoon and hurricane articles on the unparssable list and moved the appropriate subpage to the appropriate title, though there were two that need another pair of eyes.Jason Rees (talk) 23:36, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks; I ran the bot against those and have marked them as fixed. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:47, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

GAR template format

I'd like to parse the GAR templates on talk pages to get the timestamp. Checking a couple of current GARs I see {{GAR/link|~~~~~|page=|GARpage=|status=}} as the format; is this going to continue to be the case after the merge of the individual and community GAR processes? Are there other GAR templates I might need to parse? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:34, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Hi Mike, at User_talk:Premeditated_Chaos/GAR_proposal there's some discussion of what format GAR pagenames should take. I wonder if it might be worth copying this there so as to centralize discussion of the revamp? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 17:21, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Self-GAR

Some time ago I helped to promote the article Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to good article. It is currently tagged as outdated. And, unfortunately, that is correct: I had left wikipedia for a time, and focused more on astronomy than on politics since I came back, and this article about an active politician got outdated. Both the "Legal charges" mentioned in the lead template, and the "Vice presidency" section (currently only reporting than she was elected, but not any of the things she did during that time). It should cease to be a GA, it should be worked on to be updated (that would be a big work, not just add a pair of lines) and then proposed and evaluated again.

But that would mean I should start a GAR that would have to be contested by... me. Which should be the procedure? Can I unilaterally remove the GA status at this point? Should I start and close a GAR explaining the reasons? Should I simply open it and let it be closed by someone else? Cambalachero (talk) 15:27, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

@Cambalachero, you can't unilaterally remove GA status. Right now GAR is kind of a hassle. However, we're in the middle of finishing up a streamlined GAR process, which specifically makes it easier to self-close GARs that no one objects to. If you wait a week or two, that process will go live and you can probably do that. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 15:39, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

OK Cambalachero (talk) 15:58, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

If you intend to do the editing, I'm not sure how a formal GAR might help you. Ideally a GAR results in the article being kept, so if you can pre-empt the GAR by updating the article, that goal is achieved. Removing GA status is not an urgent task. CMD (talk) 16:29, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

It sounded to me from their post that they don't intend to do the updates, which is fair. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 16:34, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Ah, I took the opposite from the "contested by... me" part. If they don't intend to, throwing up the GAR as you advise makes sense. CMD (talk) 01:50, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Mauricio Macri

Some weeks ago user SeeAlsoPolice started a GAR over Mauricio Macri at Talk:Mauricio Macri/GA3. It did not appear to be a reasonable GAR: he placed maintenance templates to the article, with no rationale, and then started a GAR right away, with the sole argument that there were "Numerous maintenance templates". He never shows up to continue the discussion he started, and when I was about to remind him of it I noticed that he has been indefinitely blocked.

What should happen now? Is it fine if I close this, or should someone else do it? Cambalachero (talk) 21:37, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

@Cambalachero: Does seem odd; that being said, there are four uncited bits of the article, which should be addressed, or a legitimate GAR could be launched (although it's unlikely for such a small segment). I would like to see those fixed before closing it. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 00:26, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

 Done Cambalachero (talk) 15:11, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

I didn't see this discussion, but just did a procedural keep as SeeAlsoPolice has been indeffed. Femke (alt) (talk) 09:08, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Call for GAR coords

Per Proposal 13 of the Drive, see Wikipedia talk:Good article reassessment#GAR coordinators. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:08, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

Josip Broz Tito

After trying to add their nomination for the above article directly to WP:GAN, The Emperor of Byzantium has once again completely ignored the instructions. They have apparently created a GAR page (again, without following the instructions there). Can someone fix this mess? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:43, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

@AirshipJungleman29: I've removed the nom. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 22:54, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

But will the Talk:Josip Broz Tito/GA2 GAR just go away when the article is nominated again? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:59, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

@AirshipJungleman29: *Sigh*, didn't realize he had done that... I have CSDed the page. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:02, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

Report available to show what your reviews were

I've been scraping all GA reviews that are on a subpage with "/GAn" at the end, starting with users at the top of User:GA bot/Stats and working down. I have written a tool which lets me take a user name and quickly create a subpage of ChristieBot that lists all the reviews performed by that person. See User:Mike Christie/GA review lists/Iazyges, User:Mike Christie/GA review lists/Lee Vilenski, and User:Mike Christie/GA review lists/Chiswick Chap for examples.

Caveats and notes:

• This only includes GAs that end with "/GAn". I will be doing more scraping to find other old GAs, but I don't know when.
• The GA is listed as belonging to the user who created the subpage. This should still be correct after page moves, but it won't know about cases where a user picked up and finished an abandoned review.
• There is a "superseded" column. This will almost always be blank; if it isn't it means that review was deleted and another reviewer performed that review under the same review number.

As of right now, the bot has data for anyone with 140 reviews or more. Over the next day or two it should get quite a long way further down the list, so even if you have fewer reviews than that, if you would like me to create a subpage with your reviews listed, let me know, and I'll create it as soon as there's data. I may eventually set this up so users can request the list for themselves. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:11, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Mike Christie have you anything that produces a list of editors that reviewed all of another editor's GAs? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:01, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Not yet, but some time in the next two weeks I might have the data to do that. There's a WBGAN database that I have access to that will give me a good start. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:04, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Mike, would you be able to easily produce a list for me? Hog Farm _Talk 00:16, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Done. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:29, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

@Mike Christie: - You may already know this, but just as a heads up to keep your data clean in case you didn't, but this is including some GARs, as well, such as Talk:Deep frying/GA2 or Talk:Project 86/GA2. Hog Farm _Talk 00:31, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

I did notice that, but forgot to mention it in the caveats above -- thanks for the reminder. For reviewing statistics I'm not sure it's that bad -- doing a GAR is a beneficial thing, and perhaps editors should get credit. (Though I'm a long way from being able to use these numbers to replace the GA reviewing stats.) I do want to be able to tell the difference. I'll take a look at it tomorrow. Tying it to articlehistory will work in some cases, but only some. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:38, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

When ready, this is going to be good news, as it was at FAC ... the connections we all knew about suddenly had data to back them ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:20, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

• @Mike Christie: Might want to note that my first three got overturned because I had no idea what I was doing back then ;). Haven't claimed them on my list for that reason. (is nice to see that they line up other than those three though). Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 02:12, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

  My inclination would be to leave them as is. I doubt you're alone in having an early review or three that wasn't up to snuff; I don't want to have to police that boundary, so I'd rather just let them stand. And it doesn't matter in any case unless/until I can use these numbers for the statistics page, which is far from certain. If I get that far we can decide if we want to mark some reviews as superseded. (Ones deleted from now on are automatically marked superseded by ChristieBot.) Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:20, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

• This looks nice. I think it would be interesting to have the GA category in the table. What can't Christiebot do? CMD (talk) 02:57, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

  Do you mean topic/subtopic? Or the categories mentioned in one of the proposals -- promoted 2018, demoted 2020, and so on? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 03:29, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

  Topic/subtopic. Having one date seems enough. CMD (talk) 03:39, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Leaving a request here for a list for myself, @Mike Christie. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 22:51, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

Sammi: Done. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:01, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

• Might be helpful to have an outcome column for each review, and a wikilink to the review itself. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:03, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

  Good ideas -- I've added the link, and have just redone Sammi's list with the links in place. I can't yet do the outcome -- I'm still pulling data from various sources (WBGAN, article_history GANs and GARs, user contributions history for everyone on User:GA bot/Stats, and every article with a {{DelistedGA}} or {{FailedGA}} template) -- and I plan to assemble it, as much as I can. When I have the data linked I'll add outcomes and should be able to add a nominations section as well as the list of reviews. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:17, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

• @Mike Christie: Great work, thank you! I'd created a manual list of my own reviews a few years back when I first started reviewing and have since updated myself. Be interested to compare ... apologies if I missed something, do I need to make a request for the bot-generated list? Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 03:35, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

  Goldsztajn: Done. FYI for anyone watching this conversation, I have now added the nominators to this report. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:48, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

  @Mike Christie Thank you! FWIW - my manual aggregrate count matches the bot, however there's a variation in the actual reviews because I didn't create the GA page in one case, but did the review, and did create the GA page in another, but did not complete the review. Is there something I could do to fix the bot result? Regards, Goldsztajn (talk) 22:26, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

  At the moment there's no way to change the attribution in those situations. I don't think it will make a material difference to most reviewers' review counts, so unless others think this is a priority I doubt I'll add a way to fix these. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:42, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

• @Mike Christie: Any chance you could create me a page? Would be good to check against my own list. Cheers. Harrias ^{(he/him) • talk} 15:23, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

  Harrias: Done. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:32, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

  Although I am one who may have been more active before the /GA# days, I'd like to see a list. Please create one for me.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 22:33, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

  Tony, done. The ones that have "None" or a blank for the nominator are ones where I haven't figured out how to look up the nominator yet; in many early cases the nominator isn't in the GA nominee template so I have to dig it out of the article edit history. I'm still working on that. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:53, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

  • Thank you for this service. I didn't recall that we had the /GA# as early as 2008. I didn't start editing until 2006 so may not have that many missing. I didn't believe I had even reviewed 66 let alone 266. It has been a long time since I have done a review. Shame on me.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 23:23, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
  • P.S. why does the bot credit me with only 260, when you have scraped 266?--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 23:26, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

    The stats page uses numbers that were scraped a long time ago; there are a lot of errors on that page. Once I've finished going through the old pages and scraping as much as I can, I'll update the stats page to match what I've found. Probably some time in the next two or three weeks. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:46, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

GA discrepancy questions

Strange old GA for Dragonmead/Ímar

I'm gradually working through some of the GAs that are resistant to being automatically categorized via article history and so on. I am baffled by this one and wonder if it should perhaps be deleted, or if not, if a FailedGA or articlehistory template should be added.

• Talk:Ímar/GA1 has a first line saying it was done at 14:43, 28 May 2015; it's a pass. The edit history for the page matches that date and it is transcluded on Talk:Ímar, and there's a GA template on that page. This one looks fine.
• Talk:Dragonmead/GA1 has the identical first line, including both the time and the link templates, which all point to Ímar, not Dragonmead. It looks like it was copied and pasted from the Ímar review, but the content is different (it's a fail). It was created in a single edit. The article history for Talk:Dragonmead has no record that it was ever nominated for GA. By 2015 were users still sometimes dropping by an article and creating a GA review nobody requested? Doing that for a fail and then leaving no trace of it on the talk page seems particularly pointless. The review is so sketchy that I can't even tell if this is really the article that was reviewed.

-- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:09, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

@Mike Christie: Very strange; there was discussion here from User:7&6=thirteen about nominating for GA somewhere; not sure if that ever went anywhere, but that was in February of 2015, a few months before the failed GAN. I can find no evidence that 7&6=thirteen ever nominated it or requested the review from User:TheMagikCow; perhaps 7&6=thirteen can shed some light on the situation if they are aware, TheMagikCow has been inactive for nearly a year. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:52, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

Nothing in TheMagikCow's contributions from that time that I can see which sheds any further light. It's clearly a different review, just with the wrong transclusion at the top for some reason. It could be for Dragonmead, the lead certainly isn't that large. CMD (talk) 02:41, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

I guess we should just assume it's for Dragonmead; it's clearly for something. If there are no objections I'll change the header links and add article history to the talk page. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 03:18, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

@Mike Christie: Sounds good; I'm not opposed to a CSD of the page either, given it seems unrequested, but it makes little difference so long as it is resolved one way or the other. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 03:24, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Articles for Deletion/Dragonmead which resulted in a Keep and Did you know nominations/Dragonmead which failed over a question of 5X expansion. There was a suggestion by someone at the time that it could be remedied by nominating it for a GA. I didn't follow up on that. GAs are a lot of work, and I did not want to make the effort. I don't think it was ever nominated for GA. User:Doug Caldwell never touched the article, so this should not be part of that dragnet. Until today, I was unaware of a putative GA review. If I had been, I would have tried to address the listed issue. I don't know what that's about. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 11:43, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

This isn't connected to the Doug Coldwell GAs; this just came up because I've been going back through old GAs to try to get a database with a clean list of all of them. I doubt we'll ever know why TheMagikCow decided to do the review. I'll add the article_history to the talk page in a moment. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:58, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

I've dropped a note to explain the situation and link back to here (using a diff). Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 14:31, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Batik GA1 self-nominated

How should Talk:Batik/GA1 be dealt with? It seems a good-faith error on the part of the nominator; they just didn't understand the instructions -- they added the nomination template after creating the GAN page. It was reviewed properly a short time after that (GA2) and passed. The talk page linked to GA1 for the passed review; I've fixed that. Do we delete GA1 (via G6, I guess, though it does have a sentence or two of (self)-assessment? And if so do we leave GA2 where it is or move it to GA1, where it technically should be? If we leave GA1 in place I will mark it as a "not listed" GA nomination in article history. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:52, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

I say mark as not listed and drop a topnote explaining the situation. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 14:15, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, no need to shuffle pages. CMD (talk) 14:17, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and dropped a note on it; won't get in the way if we do decide to delete it later. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 14:22, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Added to article history. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:30, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Hume-Bennett Lumber Company

I think Talk:Hume-Bennett Lumber Company/GA1 is a nominator error too. Guywelch2000, did you mean to nominate this for GA? What you actually did was open a review page, which is what the reviewer should do, not the nominator. The instructions are at WP:GAN/I. If that's your intention, we can delete the review page and you can nominate it if you still want to. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:03, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Given that it was never trancluded, it seems like an error. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 14:14, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

I've CSDed it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:29, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Closing Talk:Russia/GA4

An individual reassessment for Russia has been open for 4 months. Given the fact this should not have been opened as an individual reassessment and that User:Xx236 does not seem to want to close this, I propose it is closed by somebody else. I closed the previous GAR on the topic as 'no consensus', so I'd rather have somebody else close this one. However, I'm willing to close if there are no other volunteers/no objections. The concrete objections have been addressed, but the discussion about neutrality requires some uninvolved eyes. Femke (alt) (talk) 08:54, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I am recusing from closing this (but have no objection to Femke closing it). This is the sort of GAR that may be a useful sample for the role of a GAR coordinator. CMD (talk) 09:45, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm willing to close this as an uninvolved editor. The issue is, with the nominator abandoning the GAR, do I simply close it as no consensus to delist with no prejudice to another GAR, or do I in essence "supervote" and make a determination if the article should be delisted? Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:09, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Without having read that GAR, I think the principle should be to determine consensus and not supervote. Aside from anything else, if GAR coordinators are going to do this, as CMD suggests, we won't want to bring them in as supervoters; they should simply be administering the process, because they should not have to shoulder the additional burden of assessing the article. If they want to assess it and add their !vote then I'd suggest they would recuse as coordinator for that GAR. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:23, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

The issue here is this is an individual GAR, which we are phasing out. So it's kind of a unique situation. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:28, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm gonna go ahead and take a stab at it. Kingsif (talk) 14:31, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

How'd I do? Kingsif (talk) 14:38, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

My view is that it was a flawed GAR that should not have proceeded. A core of the initial complaint was stability, which we have a longstanding consensus is not a reason to GAR. The opening post did not mention the GACR at all, nor much in the way of specific issues. The one specific issue that was raised, "The text copies Russian constitutional propaganda rather than to describe the real political system", was obviously wrong. The later list of various wikilinks and sources were a grab-bag of random items, with no consideration of WP:DUE or WP:SUMMARYSTYLE. Nor, if they had, would this necessarily fail GACR3a, which calls for broadness rather than thoroughness (as opposed to FACR1c, which calls for "thorough and representative" text). In essence, this GAR felt clearly driven by considerations outside of the GACR.

Many later comments feel similar. The one point mentioning specific text at issue (the citation needed tag) was addressed, and there was little else actionable raised. While the close mentions recentism, my reading is that many of the comments were requesting increased recentism in the article. An interesting comparison is Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Russia/1, opened just under a year ago and closed as kept a couple of months later. That is quite recent in terms of Wikipedia time-scales, but also far enough back that the real-world dispute drivers were not as prominent. I !voted delist in that GAR, but did not gain consensus for that view, and the GAR closed as keep with the article overall quite similar to today's. My views relating to my delist !vote remain the same (especially given the article is roughly the same), so I have no personal issue with the outcome, but I do not think the recent GAR matched the previous consensus, or even stood up much on its own merits.

I would be interested in others opinions, I have had this GAR in mind ever since the GAR coordinator position was raised as an interesting example. I would also like to clarify that I am grateful for the close, and not looking to have it reversed. CMD (talk) 15:32, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I would have closed as no consensus again, as many of the objections had been addressed at the end of the discussion. What CMD said. I fear GAR was used as a weapon here.

There is one part of the close I hope you would reconsider. I very very strongly object to the notion that controversial articles are not fit for a GA. The criteria say that only a recent edit war precludes an article from GA status. That was not the case here. Controversial articles are the most important ones to get right, and the GA process is one of our best ways to improve article content. I believe it is very harmful for article quality if that route is closed to controversial articles. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 20:43, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Thank you both for your comments; attempting to summarise such a strange discussion was new to me, so your comments are helpful. Femke, the close does not say that the controversial nature was a reason considered for delisting, I just felt it worthy to mention that this was something the opener had suggested - perhaps I should have been clearer that I discounted it, if you think this would affect future closes. Kingsif (talk) 11:19, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

As this is a prominent article, there is a risk people may look at it for future closes, so an change would be appreciated :). —Femke 🐦 (talk) 21:11, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

3 discussions left at Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023

There are only 3 open discussions left at the Proposal Drive. I'd appreciate a bit of traffic to the last three discussions so we can get this all closed down and the focus can move to implementation and feedback. I'll swap out the Proposal Drive tab for the Feedback page once I've wrapped it all up. If nothing else, I'll give the discussions a week from their most recent comment should no one pick them up. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 02:50, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Proposals still being discussed with links to those sections:

• Proposal 34: Create a page, Wikipedia:Former good articles, for delisted GAs, similar to WP:FFA "This is more of a personal opinion of mine but I propose the idea of making a page listing delisted GAs in a similar way to other pages like WP:FFA and WP:FFL. This is because I feel that the way showing delisted GAs through Category:Delisted good articles is pretty cluttered to me. Sure it works somewhat but I feel like it could be done better in the ways that I've listed. Would like to hear some opinions." (edit: proposal passed)
• Proposal 35: Make a contest for empty out GA backlogs "A list of GA-related backlogs can be found at https://bambots.brucemyers.com/cwb/bycat/Good_articles.html. Cleaning up backlog as a contest helps editors to stay engaged and it is also a good way to draw attention to improving poor good articles as a whole." (edit: proposal not passed, no consensus)
• Proposal 36: Fix inaccurate GA review numbers for users whose account names have changed "Until the bot that updates the table at User:GA bot/Stats is fixed to accurately reflect statistics of GA reviews for users who have changed usernames, the sorting of the GA table should revert to being a reverse-chronological order (i.e. oldest-at-top)}}."

Rjjiii (talk) 15:21, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

More statistics?

I'd ask at the proposal drive, but it is now "closed". Would there be appetite for collecting more statistics on how long pages wait for review, how long these reviews take, and how many reviews are closed as successful or unsuccessful? Could be as simple as a monthly report "This month, 25 GA reviews were closed, 19 passed, 6 failed. The longest time to wait for review was 180 days and the average was 33." or similar. Or is this useless/would there be better things to report on? Of course, all would depend on whether @Mike Christie thinks it is worthwhile to code :) —Kusma (talk) 13:50, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

This would be very easy to do and I have been thinking along the same lines. I'm probably going to wait to do it until I can get the extracted historical data as clean as possible -- we're waiting for a couple of thousand page moves to be OKed at WP:BRFA, and I am still putting in tweaks to extract as much information as I can from old GA pages. The number of different ways in which they can be screwed up is truly astonishing. I plan to use that to update the reviewing stats count, but it would also be a good source of comparative statistics over time. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:57, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

If we can even find out about the past, that would be awesome. I think it would also be worth just collecting this kind of data starting now (should become useful/interesting when we have a year's worth of info). —Kusma (talk) 15:18, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

I'd really like to see the average wait time vs closeness to top of GAN page. A glimpse at how much this sort order lark matters. CMD (talk) 15:26, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

My impression is that short articles get reviewed way faster than longer ones, so you'd probably want to control for length (assuming it's possible to extract prose size) when looking at the effect of sort order. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 18:44, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

I'd find it interesting and would be interested to know (maybe not possible) which topics have the longest and shortest turn-arounds. (Actually, I'd love to see some work done on the subtopics in general, as in some areas we have hugely broad areas of interest and in pop culture pretty narrow ones. It's often extremely difficult for me to figure out where to put activists and social reformers, who had careers in something else.) I strongly suspect those without English sources, or limited English sources, have the longest wait times. (My record nominee waited 9 months.) It would also be interesting to see if there is a gender gap. SusunW (talk) 18:58, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

I would be interested in that, yes. TompaDompa (talk) 14:00, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Me too. I assume there will be outliers in terms of wait time, so median will likely be the better metric. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 17:07, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

I have detailed and complete information from the point ChristieBot took over (17 November) and a bit before. I can provide that as a wiki table (which will cut and paste neatly into Excel) if anyone wants that data now; you could get quite a bit of information from that already. Separately I have about 55,000 records in a table for every subpage of the form "Talk:.../GAn". 46,000 of those are GANs; another 3,000 are unclassified at the moment but most of those will be taken care of when the moves are done. For that table I have reviewer and review timestamp; in most cases I have the outcome (pass/fail), the timestamp of the outcome, the nominator and nomination timestamp, and the subtopic, but it's a bit patchy -- I have very good data for the more recent years but malformed nominations were commoner further back in the past. Again I'm happy to give the data in its current state to anyone interested. That's a bit too big for a Wikipedia page, but I could email a csv file. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:52, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Example statistics

I'm putting together some scripts to extract stats for the two completed months since ChristieBot took over maintaining the GAN page. I'll post results here as I come up with them.

Here's the total number of passes and fails, plus the average wait time in days (nomination date to review date, not to pass/fail date). Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:28, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

GAN pass/fail and wait time
YYYYMM	pass	fail	avg_wait	Total
2022-12	143	58	50.2	201
2023-01	265	61	56.2	326

This is the average wait time for December and January combined, by subtopic, again for articles passed/failed in those months.

Wait time by subtopic
Subtopic	avg wait	# GANs
Agriculture, food and drink	5.8	5
Albums	85.1	11
Art and architecture	47.0	34
Biology and medicine	63.2	25
Chemistry and materials science	7.0	1
Computing and engineering	34.7	7
Culture, sociology and psychology	30.0	14
Earth sciences	89.5	8
Economics and business	74.6	10
Education	89.1	8
Film	88.8	19
Geography	8.2	6
Language and literature	55.9	37
Law	68.5	10
Magazines and print journalism	64.7	3
Mathematics and mathematicians	12.3	3
Media and drama	69.3	13
Other music articles	120.3	10
Philosophy and religion	47.4	7
Physics and astronomy	73.0	6
Places	64.4	9
Politics and government	88.8	21
Royalty, nobility and heraldry	27.7	10
Songs	39.2	38
Sports and recreation	77.1	36
Television	83.8	21
Transport	58.2	54
Video games	11.4	17
Warfare	8.2	44
World history	34.8	40

How many different reviewers does each subtopic attract?

Subtopic	# reviewers	# reviews
Agriculture, food and drink	5	5
Albums	8	11
Art and architecture	21	34
Biology and medicine	15	25
Chemistry and materials science	1	1
Computing and engineering	6	7
Culture, sociology and psychology	13	14
Earth sciences	2	8
Economics and business	7	10
Education	6	8
Film	9	19
Geography	5	6
Language and literature	17	37
Law	10	10
Magazines and print journalism	3	3
Mathematics and mathematicians	3	3
Media and drama	10	13
Other music articles	9	10
Philosophy and religion	6	7
Physics and astronomy	4	6
Places	9	9
Politics and government	16	21
Royalty, nobility and heraldry	10	10
Songs	11	38
Sports and recreation	21	36
Television	16	21
Transport	20	54
Video games	11	17
Warfare	13	44
World history	29	40

Discussion

Thanks Mike! A quite weak correlation for height on page against longer review time (R² = 0.0469), although this is substantially pulled down by Video games and Warfare (without them, R² = 0.2156). It's even weaker looking at just lv 2 headers. No relation at all between #GANs and time to review. (Both observations may be different for in-topic order.) This does suggest particularly long wait times should result in targeted efforts to recruit editors from those areas (although some of the current reviewers:review ratios are 1:1!). CMD (talk) 02:40, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Hadn't thought about height on page; that's an interesting idea. Femke mentions medians as being likely more informative and I agree; I'll put something together eventually for that. It also occurred to me that a scatter graph showing the reviews/GA ratio of the nominator plotted against the wait time for their nominations might tell us whether the sort order matters -- the scatter graph should show a change at the time the sort order is changed. Not sure how to put a number on that; perhaps just a correlation? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:46, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

This is interesting but we'll need a longer sample. Mathematics shows three reviews at an average wait of 12.3 days, but there are a few nominations that have been waiting for more than four months. So in Dec/Jan, all that were reviewed were done quickly, but that doesn't mean articles usually get reviewed quickly. —Kusma (talk) 16:12, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

• I was surprised to see transport (the category mine fall under 95% of the time) is the busiest subtopic. I would have thought for sure it would be sports, warfare, or songs. There also appears to be little or no correlation between the number of reviews in a subtopic and the wait time in a subtopic. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:29, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Help finalizing a pass?

Resolved

I can't tell if help with WP:GAN/I#PASS is needed at Talk:Bit House Saloon/GA1 or not.

Anyone want to take a look? Thanks! ---Another Believer _(Talk) 00:39, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, User:Iazyges! ---Another Believer _(Talk) 01:09, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) There was a clear intention to close with a pass, and it's dragged on a bit, so I've gone ahead and hit the button after a quick check. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 01:09, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Link target for new backlog section

Per the closure of proposal 16, a new table has been added to the backlog; you can see it here. I've set the links to go to the articles themselves, but then realized that the other half of the backlog links to the GAN page. I recall complaints about this in the past. Should I change the links to go to the GAN page, or leave them as they are? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:03, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

The problem with linking to articles is the extra work needed to get to the Start Review button. Since the review has links to the article, the talk page, and the history, it is a useful place to start at. CMD (talk) 14:49, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

OK, switched to point to the GAN page. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:44, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Personally, I'd prefer if links went to articles instead of the GAN page. It's more intuitive that the link with the article name would go to the article, and it's especially less relevant to link to the GAN page now that it's not useful for looking through entries in chronological order. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:18, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Drive-by nominations?

Hey, I was looking through the list, and found that Saturn V, Falcon Heavy, Artemis 1 and Harrison Schmitt were all nominated by QuicksmartTortoise513. The editor is not a major contributor to these articles, so these nominations can be a drive-bys, which community decided to ban per Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023#Proposal 11: Ban drive-by nominations. Do anybody have any thoughts on this? QuicksmartTortoise513, I don't want to discourage you and I'm sorry if I'm wrong, but the articles look quite complex for GAN, and if you are not very familiar with sources it will just be failed nominations that can waste time of several reviewers. Artem.G (talk) 18:34, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I apologize, I didn't see the policies on drive-by nominations. If I caused any inconvenience, please forgive me. I simply meant for the articles to be given improved worthwhile ratings. — Preceding unsigned comment added by QuicksmartTortoise513 (talk • contribs) 18:43, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I have removed the nominations, noting the lack of contributions (although there were a few) and that two of these articles have failed GANs. The best course of action is the one taken at Talk:Artemis 1#Renomination for Good Article?, requesting more frequent contributors to start or join a GAN. CMD (talk) 23:49, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023 Officially Closed

I want to take a moment to thank everyone here for their work in making the 2023 Proposal Drive a success. I have swapped out the Proposal Drive for the Feedback page in the tab header. Once everything has been implemented, we can finally close it down as well (hopefully by the end of February).

I'll start preparing a 'Coordinator Elections' tab when I find the time for it. Are there any ideas on how to handle the RFC per Proposal 21? 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 20:24, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Re Coord Elections, I'm concerned that you have to decide how many, as there are more than three hats in the ring, and I don't think having more than three is effective (too easy to pass the buck). So one question might be, how many. And then it's that many top vote-getters? And then do they put their heads together to propose a job definition, or do you put one forward in the same RFC? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:26, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Discussion at WT:GA § Should everything be cited?

 You are invited to join the discussion at WT:GA § Should everything be cited?. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:30, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Historical stats

There's still more clean up to do, but I think I now have the history clean enough that additional data gathering won't change the look of the data by more than a couple of percentage points. Here's two years worth of promotion stats -- looks like there must have been a couple of backlog drives? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:46, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Promotion stats January 2021 to January 2023

Month of review	Listed	Not found	Not listed	Under review
2021-01	238	4	36
2021-02	173	4	26
2021-03	506	14	101
2021-04	170	1	27
2021-05	203	4	21
2021-06	150	5	26
2021-07	488	18	76
2021-08	192	1	29
2021-09	315	2	20
2021-10	190	1	11
2021-11	143		17
2021-12	103	4	19
2022-01	549	6	101
2022-02	124	2	20
2022-03	151	3	33
2022-04	144	3	21
2022-05	130	1	16
2022-06	316	4	63
2022-07	112		34	1
2022-08	255	1	58	1
2022-09	205	1	45
2022-10	147	1	27
2022-11	141	4	43	2
2022-12	144	3	43	4
2023-01	244		42	15
Grand Total	5533	87	955	23

Subtopic wait times January 2021 through January 2023

I've made no effort here to clean up the odd subtopics -- these are usually taken from either article history, or the GA nominee template on the talk page, or the section of GAN they were in. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:55, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Subtopic	Wait (days)	# GANs
Agriculture, food and drink	11.8	60
Albums	38.6	197
Art	1.0	1
Art and architecture	49.7	430
Biology and medicine	31.0	350
Chemistry and materials science	50.8	24
Computing and engineering	48.1	106
Culture, sociology and psychology	42.1	120
Culture, sociology, and psychology	53.5	4
Earth sciences	37.0	97
Economics and business	85.3	88
Education	79.9	70
Engtech	1.0	1
Film	38.3	168
Films	0.0	1
Geography	35.5	106
Geography and places	0.0	1
History	4.5	2
Language and literature	50.6	390
Law	58.6	95
Magazines and print journalism	61.9	46
Mathematics and mathematicians	33.7	59
Media and drama	62.4	143
Miscellaneous	35.3	4
Music	67.4	253
Other music articles	26.0	1
Philosophy and religion	45.1	111
Physics and astronomy	51.4	64
Places	57.7	119
Politics and government	67.9	265
Royalty, nobility and heraldry	40.6	134
socsci	1.0	1
Songs	25.4	502
Sports and recreation	52.8	823
Television	31.9	242
Transport	47.4	417
Video games	22.3	281
Warfare	16.0	452
World history	40.6	369
y	13.0	1
Grand Total	1517.1	6598

It seems the theory that agriculture/food/drink has shorter wait times has been confirmed. It also gives evidence that high activity at WP:MILHIST and WP:VG directly affect their wait times (if you're involved in an active WikiProject, consider bringing focus to GA). I'm curious what these numbers would look like if we used the median or if we ignored items that were reviewed quickly. I get the impression that once a nomination has been waiting for a few weeks, it's likely to wait for a few months. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:31, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I think the right way to look at that is a histogram by subtopic showing how many nominations get reviewed after 1,2,3, etc. weeks. I am going to be away from my usual computer till Monday afternoon, but I've got a copy of the historical data and will see if I can put a graph like that together this weekend. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:41, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I wish more articles were nominated in subtopic y :( ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:31, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Here's a histogram of the five most heavily populated nomination subtopics since 1/1/21. The horizontal axis is weeks between nomination and review start; the vertical axis is the percentage of all nominations in that subtopic. For example, over 50% of Warfare nominations were picked up in under a week. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:14, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Here's the data in tabular form. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:14, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

% picked up in (weeks)	Topics
Weeks	Art and architecture	Songs	Sports and recreation	Transport	Warfare
0	22.7%	32.0%	21.8%	21.7%	52.7%
1	10.9%	16.6%	8.4%	7.5%	13.5%
2	9.5%	12.6%	6.1%	8.0%	10.0%
3	3.1%	7.1%	6.4%	4.4%	4.8%
4	2.8%	5.5%	4.6%	6.1%	2.7%
5	6.4%	3.8%	3.5%	6.3%	3.7%
6	4.0%	4.5%	4.0%	6.6%	3.2%
7	2.1%	5.3%	4.6%	4.6%	1.4%
8	2.4%	2.4%	3.1%	4.1%	0.9%
9	3.3%	2.4%	4.0%	2.9%	1.4%
10	3.3%	2.4%	3.5%	3.2%	1.4%
11	1.4%	1.4%	3.2%	3.2%	0.9%
12	3.1%	0.6%	3.3%	3.4%	0.5%
13	5.9%	0.8%	3.3%	3.2%	0.5%
14	2.1%	0.6%	1.9%	2.9%	0.2%
15	3.1%	0.4%	3.0%	3.6%	0.5%
16	1.9%	0.6%	2.4%	0.5%	0.2%
17	3.1%	0.2%	3.5%	2.4%	0.2%
18	3.6%		1.9%	0.7%	0.7%
19	1.4%		1.1%	1.0%	0.2%
20	1.4%	0.2%	1.2%	1.0%
>20	2.4%	0.6%	5.4%	2.7%	0.5%

Backlog length

Given the change in the sort order, I recommend changing the length of Wikipedia:Good article nominations/backlog from 5 to somewhere in the 10 to 20 range like Wikipedia:Good articles/recent in order to give some visibility to the older nominations. User:Mike Christie has encouraged me to open a discussion in this regard.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 15:16, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Twenty feels like too many to me – I might look at a list of five random articles to see if any look interesting, but I'm not going to look through 20; I'll just navigate to the sections where I'm most likely to find articles I'd like to review.

On a related note, "highest priority unreviewed good article nominations" does not strike me as a helpful description of what is being listed; my first thought on looking at the current list is that it's hard to see under what criterion Schramm's model of communication is highest priority in anything! Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:24, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Any better ideas for the name? It's technically "the five articles which sort to the top of the current sort order, which sorts by the ratio of reviews to GAs of the nominator, with ties broken by the number of reviews", but I'm not suggesting that. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 09:27, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

I agree. With the change in sort order, older nominations are liable to languish in the middle of a massive stack of nominations (see the Eurovision articles in the music section). I would put the number at 15-20, because otherwise people won't realise how many articles are old (and with the new sort order, it's not unlikely that quite a few articles will languish for a year plus). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:19, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

This is something that we probably should have thought of before we implemented the "ratio" idea. The GAN page is less organized than it was before, and it's at the expense of the more difficult nominations that were already going to languish before we decided to deprioritize the ones at the front of the line. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:19, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Another option would be to flag nominations that are older than 3 months as a means to encourage reviewers to pick them up first. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:24, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

QPQ

Another thing that you might do to give low priority articles some hope of review is instituting a QPQ like DYK has. I am frustrated seeing my (260 reviews, 336 GAs) ratio has my article at 42nd in the Sports queue. Even worse is to think that if I did 75 reviews immediately it would still be at 42nd and if I did 150 it would only move up to 41st. Suppose you made a policy that people can reprioritize a nomination by doing reviews. Suppose I do 2 reviews I could double the ratio for any nomination. If I do 3, I could triple the ratio. This would encourage low ratio people to do more review than they nominate and reduce the backlog.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 19:41, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

QPQ wasn't supported in the drive, but I think weighing recent reviews more than older ones is a good idea. We could consider only R/G in the last X years. (X = 2? 5?) Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 20:24, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

I think 5 is too many. 1 or 2 might be worth trying. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:43, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm fine with either; it'd create a more dynamic list than the current one which can be rather static for certain editors. I think it's due to R/G being mathematically too hard to budge once the denominator gets large. Compare editor A with (3 reviews, 3 GAs) to editor B with (100 reviews, 100 GAs) - under the current system, A gets rewarded way more for a new review than B (since 4/3 >> 101/100). If you instead use a fixed time limit, the numbers are naturally lower and this is less of a problem. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 02:40, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Restricting to a certain timeframe makes sense, it could display as "recent GAs" and "recent reviews". I can't articulate a strong difference between 2 and 5 years. CMD (talk) 03:28, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I am not a big fan of the newer reviews method. It is not going to reduce the backlog like the proposal I mentioned. Frustrated nominators are not going to be motivated to review by changing how you calculate the reviews in the manner you suggest. I think we should wait a year or so and have a look at the problems that we find from the change and then fix those problems. The formula change seems like just tinkering to say you tinkered.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 03:57, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

QPQ is a perennial proposal, but consensus has always been against it. The investment needed for a GAN is more than DYK, and we already see issues with quality control (so to speak). CMD (talk) 04:03, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

While I sympathize with the concern about backlog length, QPQ has been shot down many times. GA is intended to be a lightweight process without significant commitment, unless you want to. QPQ likely won't get the support any time soon and we just came off a proposal drive where QPQ was almost unanimously opposed. I'm ambivalent personally, but don't see it as realistic. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 02:57, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Tracking where in the queue gets the most attention

The idea behind the change in sort order was to reward frequent reviewers by placing their nominations nearer the top of the list where they would get reviewed more quickly. That works if being at the top of the list increases your chance of getting reviewed. A concern raised above is that some nominations will never make it to the top of the list under this sort order. We know from experience that reviewers pick from all over the lists, not just from the top, but we don't actually know how much more likely it is that a nomination at the top will get reviewed. Per Gog's comments it might well be that the newest articles are quickly scanned for interest and many are picked up right away, which is the reverse -- what's left over are nominations that aren't especially interesting to any active reviewer, so they have to wait. That would imply many get picked from the bottom of the list in the old sort order.

I could start recording at the time a review is begun where in the list for each subtopic that nomination stood. E.g. if World War II is picked up for review and it stands 10th of 20 in the Warfare subtopic, I would record that, along with the sort order used at the time. That would start to gather data that we could use to answer these questions.

Some comments on the various ideas to change the way the nominations are presented, plus an extra idea or two. I think it would be best if we had the data on position when reviewed, but we may not want to wait till we get a meaningful amount of data. (Theoretically I have the data already and can try to calculate it but it's not stored explicitly and would be tricky to calculate.) Update: I just checked and it can be done with existing data so I do have history for this.

• Reducing the time period for which reviews and GAs are counted. I think this is a good idea. The new sort order is demotivating if you have fifty more GAs than reviews; there's little you can realistically do. But if you start reviewing on a regular basis, you'd soon come up with a good ratio. I would suggest one year, in order to make the number responsive to changes in behaviour. In fact it might be worth doing a fresh start and starting it at 1 December 2022, but switching to a rolling year once we hit December 2023.
• Changing the layout to a sortable table inside each subsection, defaulting to R/G. This would address Gog's concern; I'm not sure it would address Tony's. It would at least allow everyone to sort in whatever way they wanted.
• Change to a combination of R/G and age -- we would have to determine the formula, but it wouldn't be hard to come up with a combined number that meant new reviews sorted strictly by R/G, and older reviews gradually acquired bonus points that worked them up the list.

-- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:32, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

And while I think of it, there's one more variation that's independent of the others. Currently R/G is calculated on started reviews, and promoted nominations. Either of those could be changed -- it could be completed reviews, and nominations that fail as well as those that pass could be counted; and we could also count in the G column any nomination currently under review, if we want. Right now Phlsph7 has the top five spots in the backlog because they have no GAs and 11 reviews. One of their nominations is under review, so counting nominations under review would give them an R/G of 11/1, instead of treating them as a new nominator, and would give the top spots in the backlog panel to someone else. (And it's a bug that the backlog panel includes "on review" nominations; I'll fix that next week.) Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:53, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I'll admit that the reason I started that review was because I thought it inappropriate for that editor to have all the top spots in the backlog. On the other hand, I did discover the article I was interested in reviewing by looking at the "highest priority unreviewed good article nominations" list, so it did serve its purpose. TompaDompa (talk) 15:01, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

February 2023 raised reviews

GAN	Action taken	Notes
Talk:108 Leonard/GA1	None
Talk:Canyon View High School (Arizona)/GA1	None
Talk:2022 South Lanarkshire Council election/GA1	None
Talk:Proposed new South Shore Line station in South Bend/GA1	None
Talk:2014 NCAA Division I women's basketball championship game/GA1	None
Talk:Ontario Highway 11/GA1	None
Talk:Capri-Sun/GA1	New GAN created
Talk:Eurovision Song Contest 1999/GA1	None	Review opened but not started
Talk:Bayfront MRT station/GA1	None	More evidence of individual commentary, but nominator has requested a second opinion
Talk:Gardens by the Bay MRT station/GA1	None	More evidence of individual commentary, but nominator has requested a second opinion
Talk:Total Drama Island/GA1	Deleted
Talk:Yella Hertzka/GA1	New GAN created
Talk:Cora Slocomb di Brazza/GA1	New GAN created
Talk:Competitive debate in the United States/GA1	None	Was put on hold for insufficient lead before passing
Talk:Educationally subnormal/GA1	None	Currently on hold for "lead could be bigger" and "Needs images"
Talk:Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford/GA1	None	Currently on hold for "lead could be bigger" and "Images need alt text"
Talk:Education in Wales/GA1	None	Currently on hold for "some references need page numbers" and "Images need alt text".
Talk:Winchester College/GA1	None	Currently on hold for "Images need alt text", and the nominator has added this
Talk:Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life/GA1	None	Was put on hold for "Images need alt text" before passing after alt text added
Talk:Magdalena Cajías/GA1	None	Currently on hold for "images (with alt text) would be very helpful"/"Needs images"

Given we have three separate discussions on similar topics, I created this table to help keep track. Please add if I have missed any. To be clear, appearance on this table means it is related to the discussions above, it does not mean action has to be taken. CMD (talk) 02:24, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Concerns after review

theleekycauldron and I recently put Capri-Sun (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) up for GAN. Not long thereafter, Shawn Teller conducted a review; they soon passed the article after a series of comments that were quite flattering but not very informative and, in at least a few places, factually incorrect ("fully adheres to MoS"; "doesn't cite any primary sources"). Now of course, leek and I would not have nominated Capri-Sun if we did not think it was GA material, so we don't dispute Shawn's conclusion, but we do worry that perhaps their review did not meet the expectations outlined at WP:GANI. Looking at their seven previous reviews and Mujinga's comments in a similar situation in October, I think it may be necessary for someone to have a word with Shawn about what is required for a GAN review. Since this isn't a user conduct board, I haven't pinged Shawn yet, in hopes I can find someone willing to explain the issue to them and give them some advice for the future, since I see in them someone who clearly wants to help a great bit. If not, I can try having that conversation, but I've only done one review myself, so it might be better to come from someone more experienced.

It also may be necessary to reässess their past reviews. In the case of Capri-Sun, leek and I are happy to resubmit it (essentially treating /GA1 as a no-fault quickfail), or, since we do intend to bring it to FAC in the near-ish future, to submit it for a peer review to buttress this GAN. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 04:33, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Hmm. They deleted Mujinga's comments from their talk page after you posted this. WP:GANI has clearly not been followed, so the review is basically invalid in my opinion (and will be considered as such at FAC). Comments such as "I checked out each and every citation" are, well, suspect (I know the newspaper clipping says it, but is "p. 5-4" really the best page number to provide for the Callahan source?)

The sentence "Thanks to this article, I have an in depth understanding of Capri-Sun and now I know that it is a type of juice I can buy at a grocery store" is at least the funniest thing I've read today, so there's that. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 10:15, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Looks like all eight reviews were passed with none having any issues worth commenting on, which feels statistically unlikely. That Capri-Sun comment is not alone, there are similar comments elsewhere like "I now understand that Ontario Highway 11 is a paved road that vehicles use to travel." Intended to be positive I think, but I'm not sure that is how it comes off. Presumably this conversation has been seen, so hopefuly Mujinga's comments will be taken to heart. Aside from Squatting in Albania, all the GANs were reviewed this month, so we could look at reopening them for a full review. CMD (talk) 11:00, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

In the ~20 or so reviews I've done, I have never had a situation where I passed something with zero comments. Even exceptionally well written articles, like Pledging My Time, had a few minor issues, such as repeated links in the body. These all need to be looked at again for sure. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 18:35, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, Capri-Sun is a fairly long article with a lot going on, and at a minimum I would have expected some questions as to why a few decisions were made, plus, no doubt, a copy-edit here and there. Like CMD, I'd like to AGF about this review; my best description would be that this is someone who thought a GAN review was supposed to be like a book report. As CMD says, hopefully ST takes this to heart—and, Shawn Teller, I will ping you at this point just to be sure you've seen this. I want to emphasize that I appreciate your passion, and that all newer users make mistakes (I've heard tell that sometimes even admins who've been here a decade make mistakes!). It sounds like there's several people in this thread who could give you advice if you have questions on how to conduct a more thorough GAN review.

Now, momentarily setting aside the question of the 7 previous reviews and, much like a Kindergartener in a shopping cart, focusing on Capri-Sun: At this time, would there be any objection to me re-closing GA1 as a procedural fail and relisting at GAN? I'm not super familiar with the procedure here but it seems the simplest way. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 19:45, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Alternatively, we could pass them all through GAR, and work on them there. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:25, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

To Tazmin's query at 19:45, I agree with Airship's suggestion to run them all through GAR instead, simply because there is now more oversight at GAR, with pending appointment of Coords. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:58, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

I suppose the good thing is that none of the articles look that bad, after a quick skim, so I don't think any will be delisted. If Tamzin would prefer to delete the nomination, bearing in mind the prospective FA candidacy that might be more helpful. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:10, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

GAR remains a very different process, more at seeking individual problems than getting a full review. If I submitted hoping for a thorough review, like Tamzin seems to want, then a GAR will almost certainly be a disappointment. CMD (talk) 01:12, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

I think Tamzin's probably closest to my thoughts on this one – this review isn't sufficient for GA status, we shouldn't be running the article through processes like it's a GA that's fallen out of step. It'd be way more time consuming than just reversing the outcome of GA1 and going through the GA process again. Plus, pointers for FA status would be great, and that's not something that usually happens at GAR. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 06:53, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Go ahead. Might take the review myself, if I have time.~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 09:34, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Are there other thoughts on the completed February reviews? The options seem to be relisting, as per Capri-Sun, listing on GAR, or letting this lie as "none of the articles look that bad". If this did go to GAR, that appears to me to be using GAR for a confirmation, which is not exactly what I think of GAR as, but it could work. I've looked through the relevant articles, and would agree that "none of the articles look that bad". The one exception that does need action is Talk:Eurovision Song Contest 1999/GA1, which was opened but never started. Deletion would put this back into the queue. CMD (talk) 04:09, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Limit the high-priority backlog box to one nomination per user

I propose to change the high-priority backlog box at the top of WP:GAN (added per the recent proposal drive) to only display one nomination per user. At the moment the highest priority nominator happens to have five nominations, so all five of the top priority spots are taken by the same nominator. I propose that it should display the oldest nomination by that user, followed by the oldest nomination by the second-highest priority user, and so on. If there are no objections I'll make the change in the next couple of days. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:38, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Sounds fair; imagine the current system is an oversight more than anything else. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 22:42, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I am in favour of this suggestion. Seems more fair. TompaDompa (talk) 22:46, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I also think this is a good idea. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:22, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Sounds good. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:28, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Great. Unlimitedlead (talk) 23:39, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Lots of quick agreement, so done. I made one additional tweak which I hope will be uncontroversial: if a nominator has any nomination under review, none of their nominations will appear in the high priority box, regardless of their age and priority. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:55, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Help? I think I need another review

Never had this happen before, but I had 2 articles approved after nominating them for GA within 18 minutes of each other. That seemed impossible to me and when I went to the editor's page, I saw that 9 articles had been reviewed in the space of about 4 hours. I queried that, but don't know exactly what to do to have Yella Hertzka and Cora Slocomb di Brazza reviewed by someone else. Can someone please ping me and tell me what to do here? SusunW (talk) 22:01, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Pinging the reviewer, SyntheticSystems, who has placed some of the reviews on hold, and thus has shown some reviewing discretion. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:26, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Oh, I think I know what's going on here, SusunW. They nominated Verrado High School at FAC a couple of months back, and were advised to take it through the GA process. Now they're presumably fed up with the backlog and are reviewing all the education nominees to increase the chances of getting a review. I must say, SyntheticSystems, that if you received the quality of review you're providing to others and took Verrado to FAC again, I don't think you'd get a very positive reception. But heigh-ho. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:31, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

AirshipJungleman29 I'm not speculating on the reviews they are doing for others or why. That said, getting zero feedback to me doesn't improve the article at all, so it is as if I didn't nominate it at all. I would rather have someone review it thoroughly and help with improving it. SusunW (talk) 22:39, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

SusunW well, I've had a quick skim of the articles, and I can fairly confidently say that they do meet the GA criteria. Now, we can't exactly disqualify reviews that pass articles that should pass GA, no matter how lightweight those reviews are. Unfortunately, the gap between what GA reviews are prescribed to be and what many (including you and I) think they should be, is quite large. You might just have to ask other editors to go over them, whether that be on talk pages, or at PR or FAC. Apologies, but I don't have any other suggestions. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:39, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, it was just affirmed at the GA proposal drive that it's up to the reviewer to determine what kind of review they want to do, and the nominator has no say. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:30, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

We can, and in fact should, disqualify both reviews. The reviewer has freedom to do a review in the manner they choose, however this does not mean that they can just run pro-forma passes. Reviews should tell future viewers how and why a particular article passed. Talk:Yella Hertzka/GA1 shows almost no evidence of analysis, with the only seemingly individual comment being "Some of the red links need to be removed", which is the opposite of what we might want. The only individual commentary in Talk:Cora Slocomb di Brazza/GA1 is "lead could be cut back a bit". CMD (talk) 01:41, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Usage of the template, and marking off passes, is this reviewer's method of telling future viewers why the article passed. Although it has become the de-facto norm, peer review/line-by-line commentary is not actually required anywhere in the GA instructions, and there is no basis for disqualifying a review for not including it. As long as a reviewer isn't passing articles that don't meet the GA, they're not really doing anything wrong. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:51, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

That's arguing against a strawman. Nobody has suggested line-by-line commentary is needed. CMD (talk) 01:55, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

You're ignoring the phrase "peer review" which precedes it, in favor of pointing out what you believe is a straw man argument. It would probably be more helpful to engage with the substance of what I said. But I'll strike that wording, if you prefer. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:58, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm not exactly sure how you're defining peer review if it wasn't the wording you used to describe it, but something along the lines of WP:Peer review is also not something anyone has suggested is needed. As to the substance, a review needs to show evidence of review. This has been the standard for awhile, and was reinforced through the recent passing of an explicit spot-check requirement. CMD (talk) 02:14, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the point of confusion here is, honestly. Call it whatever you want - "Peer review", FAC-style commentary, line by line commentary, writing down suggestions for the article - basically what I mean is anything in the review that goes above and beyond checking on whether or not the article passes the GACR. Again, there is zero requirement for this kind of thing. All the review must do is show that the article meets the GACR, and ticking off the template does in fact do that. Even the instructions for the spot-check are simply "Check that at least some of the cited sources verify the article text"; there is no direction anywhere that this must be done or recorded in any specific way. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 02:19, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

To the contrary, "don't just leave an all-positive checklist" is an explicit part of our Wikipedia:Reviewing good articles guideline, having evolved from "the criteria should not be used merely as a checklist" which was in place since that guideline's initial creation in 2007. CMD (talk) 02:29, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

An obscure page which contradicts what's in the far more visible GAI. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 02:33, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

It is directly referred to within WP:GAN/I#R1. The substance is at any rate, that there is a longstanding consensus and ongoing practice that a checklist is insufficient, and that this has been documented in official guidelines for a very long time. CMD (talk) 02:48, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Which says it is "suggested that you read" it. Suggested. That doesn't seem to me like the page is intended to override the actual GAI, which states nothing of the sort. Perhaps we should have taken the time at the recent proposal drive to codify an expected level of thoroughness in reviewing, but we didn't - in fact, we came away with a strong consensus that the reviewer decides how to conduct their review, not the nominator. In this case there's no indication that the articles don't actually pass the GACR, so the only issue is the nominator's desire for more peer review than was given. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:21, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Well, can't force someone to read a guideline, but it's a guidelines nonetheless. The guideline also doesn't as claimed "override the actual GAI", which explicitly requires the GAN page to justify the pass. The issue at hand is that the reviews are insufficient per our long-standing guidelines. The recent consensus was that the review format was at the reviewers discretion, not that existing guidelines could be ignored. The nominator has not once requested that more peer review be given. CMD (talk) 03:36, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

That said, getting zero feedback to me doesn't improve the article at all, so it is as if I didn't nominate it at all. I would rather have someone review it thoroughly and help with improving it. I am not misrepresenting her request for a more thorough review commentary, thank you. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:41, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough reading, I was interpreting as an issue with the 18 minute time being insufficient. Struck. CMD (talk) 03:53, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Sorry. Airship is right. I did read the articles though, I just didn't write the reviews until yesterday. I didn't mean to cause all of this. SyntheticSystems (talk) 19:13, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

SyntheticSystems No need to apologize, we are all being given an opportunity to learn from the process. Next time, you should just reply or explain, in answer to the queries on your talk page. But in reality, I would have still come here because a pass with no comments isn't helpful to me. SusunW (talk) 19:22, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

@SusunW: I've returned the two articles you nominated to the GAN queue (I hope) at their original position. As to we can't exactly disqualify reviews... no matter how lightweight those reviews are., of course we can. The purpose of a GA review is to check the article against the criteria – and secondarily to SusunW's point, to suggest ways to improve the article. If we have reason to believe a review hasn't done that, we can undo it and move on. I'm assuming this is just a case of someone new to GA reviewing misunderstanding the norms here, and trying with best intentions to help out. I've left a message at their talk page suggesting they build trust by explaining their thinking more thoroughly.

The same concerns apply to Talk:Competitive debate in the United States/GA1, Talk:Educationally subnormal/GA1, Talk:Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford/GA1, Talk:Education in Wales/GA1, Talk:Winchester College/GA1, Talk:Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life/GA1, and Talk:Magdalena Cajías/GA1. I don't have time to check all those at the moment, but I'll say that if we're going to allow the passed review(s) to stand, someone should finish the process and replace the GAN template with the GA one. Ajpolino (talk) 01:53, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I agree with PMC that checking boxes on a template is sufficient for a GA review. But a template with checked boxes could be from a thorough review or a summary glance. I think it's ok for us to use our best judgment to determine which is which. Also I'm a bit afraid to ask but, PMC, what is It was just affirmed... has no say referring to? Ajpolino (talk) 02:01, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Some people use GA as a peer-review-esque process and/or FAC staging area. Technically speaking, that goes above and beyond what is required by the GACR and GA instructions. On the other hand, some nominators just want to run the article through the GACR and aren't interested in detailed FAC-prep commentary. At the recent GA proposal drive, I suggested that this split could be made optional, and it should be the nominator's decision. This was soundly opposed, generally on the basis that it should be the reviewer's decision on how to review the article, not the nominator's.

Which does mean that if the reviewer does a lightweight review, the nominator has no basis for complaining, because per strong recent consensus, the style of review isn't up to them. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 02:14, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I really don't know what to make of some of the comments above. I can't understand why the nominator can't ask for a second review, or a process review. It also seems strange that the nominator is supposed to guess whether someone was checking boxes or doing a thorough evaluation. I guess we all have different reasons for nominating articles. Thank you Ajpolino for returning them to the review queue. SusunW (talk) 02:22, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Susun, the proposal I linked above would have actually enshrined your ability to request a particular style of review. It was soundly opposed on the basis that the style of review isn't up to the nominator. I suspect of course that the people who opposed it never expected that someone wishing for a thorough review might receive an unwanted lightweight one, but that was the consensus we came out with - nominators don't get to pick what kind of review they get. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 02:36, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining and providing that link above Premeditated Chaos. I rarely go to wiki policy discussions as they seem to be a time sink, those who speak loudest and have more friends will always prevail and the time spent there could be used to research and write. I brought this here because yes, I wanted my articles returned to the review queue, but to me it seemed a bigger issue than just the reviews I got. 2 articles were supposedly read and evaluated in 18 minutes, which calls into question the quality of the review. It seems to me that as a group we should be concerned if that is happening as it diminishes the value of even having a review. The criteria are established standards and implemented as a means to improve articles their quality, as stated in both the instructions and essay on what a GA is not. I am left with many questions regarding the above discussion that I need to ponder. The biggest one is how does just checking boxes, or a summary glance, do anything to improve an article? The longer I work on Wikipedia the more baffling it becomes to me. SusunW (talk) 15:53, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

SusunW the GA process was never designed to improve articles. It was intended, and is still intended, to certify articles which have been improved to a desired standard. That is the point of the criteria—articles are passed when they reach a standard, not when they have been improved a certain amount. Nominations of many experienced editors pass in one look, simply because they are capable of writing articles to the desired standard (see for example Talk:Battle of Cirta/GA1, recently passed). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:07, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

The problem is that GA is flawed at a fundamental level. The criteria are poorly defined and often ignored, the instructions are unhelpful, the actual guideline overseeing it is buried and unused, first-time reviewers are on their own, and there's very little accountability. All of these problems are fixable, but none of them are easily fixable. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:11, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

AirshipJungleman29 the way you state "to certify articles which have been improved to a desired standard" raises concern to me. I probably am misunderstanding you, but it seems to me that you are saying people are submitting to collect little green buttons, a "seal of approval" so to speak. As one already knows when one nominates (or should know) if it mostly meets the criteria, then what is the value of getting a review if not to improve it? Thebiguglyalien, I agree that the process is confusing (and I have written and reviewed a lot of GA), but I am not sure they can be fixed. SusunW (talk) 16:34, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

SusunW, that's precisely what I'm saying. You might know, after 66k edits and 90 GAs, that it mostly meets the criteria; the very fact that quickfails exist and do happen shows that not everyone does. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:54, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

But if the process is confusing to me, how can we not expect that it is confusing to newbies? SusunW (talk) 17:03, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

There's a split between GA as lightweight confirmation of basic okayness (what it was intended to be) and GA as FAC-prep/substitute peer review (what it has evolved into). It is not at all set up for this expanded function. It mostly handles it okay, because people tend to simply accept the review they are given even when it goes well beyond the GACR. However, the cracks become evident when there is a discrepancy between reviewer and the nominator as to which side of GA they are attempting to work from. (I try to split the difference in my reviews by noting that I review FAC-style but won't fail for anything not explicitly in the GACR, but that's a deliberate hack.)

If we want to fix this, we need to decide once and for all what we want GA to be. We need to make reviewing instructions that clearly reflect that purpose, and get reviewers to actually stick to them rather than haring off and doing whatever they feel like. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 16:35, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

PMC, I agree 100% with "we need to decide once and for all what we want GA to be". If standards are established to review quality, but are being implemented to produce quantity, IMO we are missing the boat. I also agree the instructions need to be clear. If I don't understand them, and I am fairly experienced, how can a newby be expected to navigate the processes or understand them? SusunW (talk) 16:48, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict)This should really have been clarified at the once-in-a-decade proposal drive, shouldn't it Premeditated Chaos? At least we're already holding an RfC on something else, so more eyes on the page anyway. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:54, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Boy howdy it sure should've been! But I suspect we would have come to no consensus, because nobody seems to be able to agree on what GA is supposed to be. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 16:56, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Almost certainly, but at least then we'd have something to point at when someone complains about the cracks in the system (hardly surprising when out of the three second-level improvement processes — GA, PR, and A-class — GA is the only one still mostly moving). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:58, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I agree with you both that it should have been clarified but also agree with PMC that it would have come to no consensus. In truth, I never saw a proposal drive page and had no idea it was happening, but would likely not have participated because generally policy discussions devolve into something incivil in my experience. SusunW (talk) 17:03, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

We have a pretty solid consensus that GA is intended to affirm an article meets the GA criteria, with further advice being allowed but optional. That is laid out at WP:GANI, supported by WP:RGA, expanded upon by WP:GACN, and has been consistent practice in general and more specifically in GAN drives. There is sometimes uncertainty around the edges, and with those less familiar with the process, but no discussion has greatly veered from the basic consensus that I can recall. CMD (talk) 17:06, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

This one was actually quite civil and productive, and in fairness we did achieve some things we really needed, like GAR reform. We just neglected the largest issue, unfortunately.

AJ29, my guess about PR is that it's moribund because it produces nothing that other processes don't already cover. GA and FA are both recognized as stages of article development - you have to slog through a formal process, but you get a thing that says "this article meets X standard". On the other hand, PR is basically a formalized version of talking about ways an article could be improved, which can already be done informally at a talk page, and which produces no recognition of the article meeting any standard.

As for A-Class, I don't think it ever caught on with enough WikiProjects to become standard, and frankly there aren't enough active WikiProjects to make it plausible as a standard. (And realistically how many higher-level review processes do we need? There's only so finely you can distinguish things. How significant is the difference between A-Class articles and FAs? I'd hazard not very.) ♠PMC♠ (talk) 17:10, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Just chipping in to say that I think GA should stay as lightweight a process as possible. A nominator can request, but not require, a more thorough review if they wish, via the notes parameter in the nomination template. I'm happy to review GAs with an eye to FAC, and have done so many times, but it's a lot of effort from a reviewer and I don't think it should be the default. If a nominator requests more details in the notes, it would be impolite of a reviewer to ignore that, though I don't think it would make that review invalid. Such a note would likely delay the review, as some reviewers would not then pick it up, but that's up to the nominator. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:13, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

That seems a common feeling. Assuming all FAs went through GA first, just under 15% of GAs end up as FAs. Perhaps more than that are nominated and fail, but I'd be surprised if it was a huge amount. CMD (talk) 17:21, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

What about the converse situation, where a nominator simply wants a lightweight check of the criteria but the reviewer insists on making a big project out of it? I've found that oversized reviews are at least as common as undersized ones, and while I personally don't mind getting additional feedback, it isn't great that a lot of reviewers ignore the "lightweight" aspect (and often set their own criteria that are stricter than or unrelated to the GA criteria). Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:07, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

And all this time, apparently, I have completely misunderstood the purpose of having fresh input and wasted both my own time and other people's time. I am genuinely shocked that people who want a review based on improving quality would be penalized because the system is designed to be lightweight. Having the confidence and skill to submit an article to FAC takes time to build. It is now obvious to me from all the above comments GA is not and wasn't intended to improve quality or be a stepping stone to do that and there is no functioning intermediary step. Literally, my mind is blown. SusunW (talk) 18:14, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

It seems like a lot of the issues with reviews that don't match with nominator expectations could be addressed with more communication. For example, leaving a talk page comment that the nominated article is intended for future FAC and that more feedback is appreciated. However, I hope I'm not the only one who believes that the ultimate purpose of GAN just like all other Wikipedia processes is to improve the quality of the encyclopedia and therefore any useful feedback that actually gets implemented is a positive. (t · c) buidhe 18:19, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

SusunW, I think you did not misunderstand and have not been wasting anybody's time. I think that people approach GA with differing goals, but they are all looking to improve the encyclopedia. I only take articles to GAN that I am sure will never make it to FAC (because they're too short). For those, I am glad of any input that improves the article, but if I get a simple pass with few or no comments, that's fine too -- I didn't expect the article to have much room to improve. Other frequent FAC nominators always go through GA first, and for those nominators, a detailed review is exactly what they are looking for. That both approaches to GAN exist doesn't make either approach invalid. GAN is a tool that different editors can use to improve or validate their work in different ways. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:30, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

@Thebiguglyalien, I have also seen people putting articles on hold for aspects that have nothing to do with the GACR, and which are simply reviewer preference. I have no problem with people making suggestions that aren't GACR as long as they are just that - suggestions (and in fact that's how I structure my own GA reviews). But often they aren't clearly labelled as such, and people (especially newer nominators) have no idea that these arbitrary standards are not part of the GA process. I wish we had a consensus to discourage these kinds of off-label standards, or at the least to make it clear to new nominators that they are optional. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:34, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

If we had GA (as opposed to GAR) coordinators, having them look in on reviews and add comments to that effect is one of the things I think they could do. The volume of GA reviews is probably too high for them to be able to do that for every review, but certainly for newer reviewers it seems possible. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:58, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

A coord-type role could be doable if it existed to referee disputes or weigh in when pinged, rather than being expected to look at every review. It might also help if we explicitly put in the instructions that reviews should focus on the GACR, and any commentary outside of that is to be considered optional. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:20, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your input Mike Christie. I am still pondering, but what I am reading in all of this is way different than the philosophy the seasoned editors who walked me through my first good articles had. I take almost all articles to GA (unless they are too short/not detailed enough to meet my standard), or did to this point and now think maybe I should stop doing that. Reading the above gives me no confidence that (most?) reviewers are approaching the process with the goal of improvement; thus, it does seem that I have been wasting other people's time. Realistically, most of what I write could pass FAC, but I find the process very intimidating (and time consuming, which takes away from my ability to write.) When I find a particularly spectacular subject, I venture there, but my standards are high, (possibly too high). I am not interested in validation or accolades, my goals are simply to write the best article that I can that fills gaps in our knowledge and that other people can easily understand. Clearly, I am an outlier. SusunW (talk) 18:50, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I couldn't say if you're an outlier, but you're definitely not alone in your approach. I wrote more about how productive I've found yours and my interactions in reviews, but I've deleted it all and will instead just say that I think you can use the GAN and FAC processes however best suits your goal of improving the articles. There will never be full consistency among reviewers and nominators, nor should there be. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:08, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I'll pick up on the productivity bit then: I've only had the pleasure of being the nominator to SusunW's reviewer once, but it's easily the best net improvement to an article that I've had in GA, as a nominator or a reviewer. Not only that, but that review has essentially set the standard and the format that I've been using for related articles since then. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:19, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

@Mike Christie and Thebiguglyalien: Thank you both. Sorry for taking so long to reply, I am crazy busy in real life with visitors arriving tomorrow for a week. I appreciate your input and will put it into my mulling-over hopper. I always try to learn something from writing an article, having an article reviewed, or reviewing one. Even if it isn't about that article, sometimes it is invaluable to see how others interpret things. I genuinely appreciate your feedback. SusunW (talk) 21:21, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Sometimes it's just a matter of what you think the article deserves. A recent review I did ended up being longer than some articles, because there had been previous fails and I felt any promotion required a thorough looking over. Other times, I have passed without further comment, because the article is of such high quality that it's not worth suggesting improvements at GAN. Good luck. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:20, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

This is what I am struggling with AirshipJungleman29, I think every article deserves a thorough review. I review them as I would want my own articles reviewed, but I always make sure to note that anything in my review is a suggestion, unless is it specifically required as part of the criteria, and open for discussion. I have always approached reviews as if they were collaborations to improve an article and now I am trying to figure out if it would be possible for me to review them without doing that. In truth, I am just not sure that I could. SusunW (talk) 14:02, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I always make sure to note that anything in my review is a suggestion, unless is it specifically required as part of the criteria, and open for discussion – I think this right here is the answer. A GA review can be both a certification of the criteria and a staging ground for improvement, and this is what lets them coexist in the same process. Doing a bare minimum review does the article and the nominator a disservice, but enforcing things beyond the explicitly written GA criteria is unfair to nominators; this strikes the happy medium that we need, and it's what I try to do when I review. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:41, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

My experience is that most people due approach the process with the goal of improvements, and only a minority sees it as a validation tool.. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:05, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I don't see any reason to worry. Whatever its faults, the GA process will keep spinning on until it breaks too badly and people start noticing. In the future, a note asking for suggestions is a perfectly sensible suggestion from buidhe. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:22, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Most reviews of my articles have offered improvements, sometimes even suggesting new directions to explore. I am always grateful for such reviews, but I don't think I can expect them. What I do expect is that the reviewer will read the entire article and thoroughly engage with its content, and show that by actually mentioning some of the content in the review. It can be as simple as mentioning what you like or don't like about the article and why. —Kusma (talk) 19:35, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

GAR on hold for the last twelve years

Just ran into Talk:The Clean Tech Revolution, which has had an open GAR for the last twelve years. Obviously this should be closed as keep, but I left it open for the moment because I wondered if there's some way to find these. Shouldn't these be in a category that makes them findable? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:34, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

All open GARs should be in CAT:GAR. Don't know how this one never made it there. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:52, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

It appears the Category was lost during this edit. The act of placing the review 'on hold' seems to have confused whatever script/bot was running. This raises the question of what is the purpose of the 'status=' parameter when we really don't use it at reassessment. I am unfamiliar with 2011 GA Reassessment policy so I can't speak on it very authoritatively. I assume its a holdover of the more widely used 'on review', 'on hold', etc. statuses we use of GA reviews. Perhaps it would be better to cut out the 'status=' parameter all together.

@Mike Christie I doubt this is the only one, would there be any way to track down other delinquent reassessments that have gone under the radar? (Besides doing a sweep of all current GAs). I understand that without the category it is a big ask. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 21:38, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Part of the issue might have been that the GAR is /GA1 instead of /GA2, because no subpage was ever made for the GAN; mayhaps the bot ignored it for this reason? Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 21:42, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I think I found it by doing a what-links-here from {{GAR/link}} and looking in the Talk namespace. I could probably dig out any others by writing a small program to compare that list with the category. I'll try that in the next day or so, unless someone expert with Quarry can figure out a query that could find them by the same logic. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:55, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

@Iazyges I was thinking something similar at first. The category was originally placed correctly and was later removed by what appears to be an automated error. The sub-page for the reassessment seems to be intact but the original GA review seems to be nonexistent. Seeing how this is going all the way to 2008, I wouldn't be surprised if it was never retained or is located in some far-gone subpage.

I assume that the 'on hold' status change made the template unreadable to the bot and led to the category being dropped. @Mike Christie how does Christiebot react with the 'status' parameter on the GAR template? 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 22:49, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

ChristieBot only reads GANs, not GARs, at the moment, so it hasn't come up. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:50, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

It turned out to be quick to do so here's the list. I'm not familiar with how the GAR templates work but the first couple I checked don't seem to be open still. Should the GAR/link template still be on the page though?

• Talk:166th Aviation Brigade (United States) Looks like this one just got lost. Procedurally closed as kept, 14 years old.) Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:10, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

• I have now nominated it at GAR again. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:11, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

• Talk:CobraNet Was delisted but subpage naming issues prevented full close; delisted with GAR-helper then wiped "new" article history; issues should be resolved. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:10, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Eastern mole Closed by User:Wizardman three months ago, but article history not updated, now fixed by User:AirshipJungleman29. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:10, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Florida mouse As above, closed by Wizardman without properly updating article history. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:13, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:GAR/link/GA1 ‎

• Don't understand this one, but don't think we have to delist it ;) ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:11, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

• Most (all?) pages link to themselves because they're technically a transclusion of themselves or some such reasoning. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:31, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

  Actually, its an entirely separate page? Don't see a reason for it to exist, especially not in talk space, so I've CSDed it. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 00:09, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

• Talk:Green marketing 2009 individual review came to conclusion it had major flaws, so delisted. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:17, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Imelda Marcos Consensus to delist came in 2018, but this was incorrectly closed. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:19, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Iron(III) chloride Currently at GAR. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:23, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Milo of Croton A Wizardman GAR such as above. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:23, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Naomi Clark Individual error came to delist decision a decade ago. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:23, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:RevoPower Consensus to delist in 2009. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:24, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Saprang Kalayanamitr Consensus to keep in 2011. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:27, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Secret Truths 12 year old nom with keep consensus, closed now. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:27, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Section 34 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms GAR was at /GA1 due to issues, never properly closed; now added to article history and GAR template removed. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:27, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:SR Lord Nelson class Properly kept and article history made, but template never removed before. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Stephen the Great GAR subpage never made, 6 years old; just removed the template. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:The Bends (album) Kept as GA 7 months ago but never closed, fixed now. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:The Snowman (fairy tale) Same issue as Eastern mole (delisted 3 months ago, but never done in article history), delisting now with GAR-helper. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:There's More Than One of Everything 12 year old GAR, issues appear to have been resolved but never closed. Closed as keep. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Thomas Johnston (engraver) Brand new active GAR, no issues. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:Virgin America Seems to have been GARed in error 5 years ago, procedurally closed as keep. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
• Talk:XCOM: Enemy Unknown Delisted in 2020 but GAR link never removed; fixed now. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

-- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:32, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

@Mike Christie: Airship and I seem to have tackled all of them; only one actually needs a GAR going forward, and one is a current GAR (no idea why it's having problems), mostly just old subpage issues or people forgot to close them. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:31, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Two are active GARs—Talk:Iron(III) chloride and Talk:Thomas Johnston (engraver). Thanks for doing half. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:38, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Whoops! And of course, it was actually kind of fun (which I presume says more about me than the activity...). Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:42, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

This is normally around the time that I think "you know, you're really quite odd" to myself, so it's good to see you're in the same neighborhood. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:47, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

• As an aside, all pages in Category:Good article reassessment nominees have been vetted, and are current reviews. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:49, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

AirshipJungleman29 running GARcloser at Talk:Imelda Marcos resulted in several errors; that should have been a manual close to avoid a duplicate entry in articlehistory, and stripping of the C-class the article already was. COuld you doublecheck that you haven't run GARcloser on any others that needed to be manually closed as they were already entered in articlehistory? Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:06, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Here's at least one more that needs fixing; running GARcloser years after the fact strips the article assessment erroneously (as it would if it were stripping GA class, but that had already been done manually). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:09, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Iazyges there's another one at Talk:There's More Than One of Everything that should have been a manual close to get the correct date and oldid on the GAR. I corrected that one, but all the rest should be checked. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:16, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: For most of them I'm not sure the difference is meaningful: it wasn't truly closed until now, so the date is now, if that makes sense. Perhaps not. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 07:26, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

On those that were actually delisted earlier, the oldid and date need to be the right one. Talk:CobraNet has similar; by running the GAR closer belatedly, the class was stripped, and also there was no current status. Y'all need to go back through the entire list; every one I've checked has articlehistory errors because of belatedly running the closer script. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:31, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Joy. Sounds like a tomorrow morning problem. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 07:33, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

:) The thing is, you want to have the oldid point at the oldid at the time the article was evaluated. It may not be worth worrying about in most cases, but long story short is that running the closer late in the game is going to leave problems ... they all have to be looked at manually. And we can't have those like Imelda Marcos, where she was delisted twice :)

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:36, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Talk:Saprang Kalayanamitr also needs fixing; the oldid is not the February 23 oldid ... the right oldid is needed. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:38, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Ditto at Talk:Naomi Clark ... I shall stop now, but they all need revision ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:39, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Mine have been fixed. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:48, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Mine are also fixed; Talk:166th Aviation Brigade (United States) has been kept as a yesterday procedural keep because it just go lost and never dealt with, unlike the others, and is currently at a new GAR. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 15:51, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Most of these errors could have been avoided by the way were it not for that old bugger of transcluding GAs to talk rather than on their own subpage. The errors are everywhere because of that practice, and are only now being uncovered because of Mike's work. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:32, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

By the way, I only happened upon this problem by way of Wikipedia talk:Talk page layout#Case study, which caused me to look at the faulty articlehistory at Imelda Marcos, which brought me back here to find the whole list. And since Mike is trying to get the data right, that means articlehistory has to be right. To find out when an article was actually listed or delisted, even in cases of faulty closes, you have to go back to WP:GA (and navigate the wild set of sub-pages there). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:48, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Potential GAR Coords

Y'all are going to need a pingie thingie like at FAC, FAR and TFA. Please have a look at Wikipedia talk:Good article reassessment/February 2023#Deletion of GARs; I am quite concerned that CCI work not be held up by GA bookkeeping issues, after having done everything in my power to make this run smoothly, and eliminate copyvio while respecting the GA process. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:29, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Speaking of GA Nom Reviews...

Are Reviewers supposed to give nominating editors time to respond to their criticisms of an article that is nominated for GA status before they Fail it? Sure, the article I worked on - Robert Todd Lincoln - could stand with improvements. I know it isn't perfect but I am flummoxed that the Reviewer failed it within 2 hours of starting their review. Didn't give me a chance to respond before they failed it either - doesn't seem very collegial/collaborative/fair to me. Oh well, I'll GA Nom it again at some point I guess... Shearonink (talk) 19:29, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

@Shearonink: Appears to have been a quick-fail, without using such terms. Can't speak to this specific instance, but if an editor feels like a large amount of work is still needed to reach the criteria, it is their prerogative to provide what work need be done and then fail it in the meantime; personally, I favor putting it on hold, but I am not representative. Frustrating certainly, but fixing the issues they raised and then asking if they've offered a right of first refusal on their talk page seems to be the way to go. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 19:54, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

How I've always understood that if the GAN reviewer believed that the article was nowhere near the GA criteria in at least material areas, that a quick-fail was reasonable. I haven't looked at the Lincoln article thoroughly to judge if that failure was reasonable or not, but I did quickfail Talk:George Meade/GA1 myself last night. As a nominator, I still remember the sting of one of my first GA nominations, Talk:Danny Duffy/GA1 being a quickfail. Hog Farm _Talk 20:00, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Hog Farm and Iazyges for your thoughtful replies, will take them into consideration. Yeah, Iazyges, when I do a GA Nom Review I almost always put it on hold unless there is something major like copyvios or maintenance templates. I might re-nom the Robert Todd Lincoln article again and I might not...haven't decided yet. Thanks again, Shearonink (talk) 20:15, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

For this reason I tend to only start reviews when I think that either the article has a good chance of passing or can be quick-failed. It is very frustrating to write a review pointing out that there are significant problems with the article in its current state, and then to have the nominator come back with only the most superficial changes in only the exact points you have pointed out as examples of those problems without addressing the deeper pattern and expect you to pass it now. It should not be the reviewer's job to explain sentence-by-sentence how to rewrite the article to become a GA. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:16, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

David Eppstein I guess I always expect some time to work on a nom'ed article, to improve it and not get a quick-fail right off the bat... I never expect to only make superficial changes on specific points. In my editorial practices I have regarded the GA Nom process as an opportunity to collaborate with another editor on improving an article, both from the Nominator pov and from the Reviewer pov. Shearonink (talk) 20:21, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

As a reviewer, I expect that a nominator has in effect done a review of their own and judged that the article already meets the Good Article criteria at the time of nomination, and that the purpose of a review is to validate their evaluation and maybe find a few more small things to polish along the way. If a read-through of the article makes clear that certain basic points have not already been handled by the nominator (like checking source reliability and integrity, in the case of the Lincoln nomination) I think it's fair to quick-fail it. A GA nomination is not an invitation for a reviewer to spend hours of their own time further improving the article. If you think an article deserves to be GA but is not yet in shape, and you need help getting it in shape, then the correct process is Wikipedia:Peer review, not a GA nomination. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:36, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

I prefer to collaborate when I am Reviewing if at all possible but thanks for your opinion. Shearonink (talk) 22:53, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Concerns about a review

So I asked a question regarding one of the points raised by User:LunaEatsTuna on my GA for Splatoon 3 (see Talk:Splatoon 3/GA1) and was told that these shouldn't be things I have to do for a GA and was told to bring it here. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 03:12, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

• @Blaze Wolf: Hi there. Which point(s) exactly? Morogris (✉ • ✎) 03:25, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

  I don't know. Some of them were alt text and citation specifics. Other than that I don't know. I was just told that some of these things weren't part of WP:GACR. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 03:27, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

(EC) For clarity, Blaze asked about this on the Discord, specifically noting the request for publisher details for citations. I pointed out that this review includes requests that are not on the GACR and suggested he bring it up on the review or at WT:GAN. I have no doubt the reviewer is acting in good faith, but since we're here, this review is a good example of the kind of scope creep at GA that I've mentioned in other discussions above. Things like alt text are not on the GACR. For GA purposes, a citation is sufficient if the reader can use it to find the item being cited; it doesn't need to be scrupulously exact. These kinds of requests should be either labelled optional or not made at a GA review. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:28, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I have noted and will exhibit this for all future reviews I conduct. ツ LunaEatsTuna (💬)— 04:12, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

While ALT text are not GACR, they are an accessibility issue. If an editor is willing to invest hours writing an article up to the standard of a GA, they can presumably at least be asked to invest 5-10 minutes making that article accessible to the visually impaired. You can't fail an article for excluding ALT text, but you can certainly request that ALT text be added. Mr rnddude (talk) 04:16, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

I have no problem with the request, but I do have a problem with the scope creep/reviewer roulette aspect of GA reviewing. It's not fair to nominators that they're being judged for things that are not even in the GACR (and in the case of citation nitpicks, explicitly excluded). We really need to set some kind of specific standard - at the least, reviewers should be specifying that off-GACR requests are explicitly optional. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 04:25, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

As a matter of course, I like to add a bit of instruction that only text I bold is that which I consider necessary to pass the review; very few things fall into this category usually, so the person can know that the other stuff is good practice, but I am willing to pass the review without it. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 04:21, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Items like dates and page numbers may be necessary, but meticulous publication formatting and alt text go beyond GA requirements. If they are all that is holding back a nomination (from what I see most of the rest is prose [1a] concerns), they should be left as helpful notes and the GAN passed. CMD (talk) 15:15, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

List ordering

I am seeing a GAN page that is not rendering nominations in chronological order. I just nominated an article and it is showing as the 42nd listing among 67 nominees for sports and recreation. The nominees are listed in no logical order (expecially not chronological order).--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 14:32, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

The order is logical, it is based on each nominator's ratio of reviews to GAs. This change was implemented last month, as described here. The sort order prioritizes first-time nominators and frequent reviewers. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:43, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

• Attn User:Trainsandotherthings and User:Mike Christie: Would it make sense to make the length of Wikipedia:Good article nominations/backlog more like Wikipedia:Good articles/recent as a partial offset for the change so that the resulting stale nominations can get more attention?--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 12:48, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

  There's an outstanding task from the proposal drive to update that backlog page to have two sections -- one with the five oldest, as now, and one with the five highest priority unreviewed nominations according to the new sort order. I am hoping to get that done today. At the moment I'm only planning to have five in the new section. If anyone thinks we should expand either or both lists to more than five I would suggest starting a thread below to that effect. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:52, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

• I admittedly haven't touched GAN in quite a long time but, yeah these changes don't seem to make any sense. Everything's now in random (to a lay reader, at least) order, and ironically it actually seems to punish the reviewers as they end up further down the list which I'm pretty sure was the opposite intent. When I did the occasional review I'd grab something from near the top if I had some knowledge of the subject, now I would have no clue where to look to review an article. I can see why there's almost no reviewers these days if stuff like this is what's being changed. Wizardman 03:27, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

  How is it any different to a lay reader, and why can't you still grab something from near the top if you have some knowledge of the subject? CMD (talk) 03:41, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

  I guess by top i meant something older, since I've always tried to do that. I guess the oldest stuff gets punished further now, if that's consensus then that's consensus. Wizardman 03:48, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

• Comment I completely disagree with this change. It should be like how it was before (by nomination date) as that highlights the oldest ones in need of review. Now there's literally no rhyme or reason, and I fail to see how the current ordering improves or helps anything. I agree with Wizardman here, it almost less inclined me to want to review things. – zmbro _{(talk) (cont)} 18:06, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

• The consensus was clearly in favour of rewarding those who put effort into the process by reviewing. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:31, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

• I wasn't here for the discussion, and this may have been addressed in a place that I don't now see. But the count of a user's good articles appears to include only current GAs. This omits GAs that have been demoted; failed GA reviews; and, perhaps most of all, GAs that subsequently became featured articles. For instance, my GA count is given as 15, but this omits some 17 other GAs that have since become FAs. The result, I believe, is to over-prioritize some users (such as me) in the queue, by skewing the reviewed/nominated ratio. Is there a way to correct the count? --Usernameunique (talk) 21:40, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

• Usernameunique, it's a work in progress. See the discussion at the end of WP:GAPD23#Feedback. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 21:45, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

So much unnecessary work to fix old GA issues

Femke why does Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations/Instructions#Failing not mention the oldid parameter, so that when I'm cleaning (multiple other) GA issues on talk pages, I also have to look up the oldid like this, before I can roll the fail in to articlehistory? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:17, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Most of these will require manual checking. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:20, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

And the passing instructions don't mention oldid= either. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:25, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Oversight, probably? No objection to anybody adding it, given that we're not expecting people to do this manually anymore with Novem's script. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 11:35, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Was this very recent fail by Mark83 manual? As long as some reviewers may follow the instructions given, the oldid parameter should be listed. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:37, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

To clarify. If we didn't have a script, I would be worried about bureaucratic creep. Given we do, I'm happy for it to be added.

It may be an idea to publisize the script better. I did promise at some point, I would make it more prominent in the instructions, but never found time to deal with this... —Femke 🐦 (talk) 11:50, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

At the moment ChristieBot adds the oldid if the user does not, for passes, but not for fails. I could probably make it add the oldid for passes too, for users who don't use the script (and we'll never get everyone using the script). Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:54, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

This thread isn’t clear. Why was I pinged? I believe I followed the instructions? Mark83 (talk) 13:42, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

You did follow the instructions; the instructions are incomplete :) THey should have told you to add the oldid. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:44, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

You did follow the instructions, but the instructions seem incomplete.

Mike, solving this with a bot would be absolutely great! —Femke 🐦 (talk) 13:45, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

I prefer not to bog down my browser with more scripts, if I can possibly avoid it. I've already got quite enough stuff loading after I bring up a new wikipedia page... Ealdgyth (talk) 13:52, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

FA closes are processed by bot. The whole GA (templating) system is crazy. Still. That's why it's rife with errors of all kinds. (And a GA Coord is still needed ... I'm planning to fix all of those 66 errors listed in the Petscan query myself.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:08, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Even aside from people who would prefer to edit manually rather than use random scripts (I'm with you on this, Ealdgyth) the current instructions at Wikipedia:Good article nominations/Instructions#Finishing a review say that The user script GANReviewTool can perform most of these steps automatically, with no indication of which steps it may not perform and no indication that its use is recommended (if it is, I certainly didn't know that!) I have added mention of the oldid parameter to the instructions. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 14:11, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

OK, I'll add oldid for FailedGA to the to-do list for ChristieBot. Sandy, if you try that PetScan with DelistedGA instead of FailedGA, two more come up. And there are more oddities that aren't visible there -- for example Talk:Bitcoin scalability problem is on the PetScan list, but that talk page doesn't make it apparent that there's an abandoned Talk:Bitcoin scalability problem/GA2 as well. That should probably be deleted. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:15, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Struggling to get some sanity in the mess of GA templates that have not been dealt with for years, as I only started out trying to clean up the DC templates.

In case, it's not clear, here is the root of my frustration. There are five perfectly fine and excellent candidates above for GAR Coord (If I were voting, I'd vote for all five), and then there's also Mike, and also Femke, makes at least seven that I know of, and yet the GA process still has no GA Coord. Why are all the most experienced people needed for GAR: their talents are needed at GAN, where the problems (eg WP:DCGAR) started. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:20, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

We all monitor this page anyway—I'm fairly certain that this is where anyone and everyone comes when they have problems with nominations—see the three (or maybe four) issues above. I think the community consensus is that a GAN coord wouldn't actually be that helpful, most of the time. In any case, I for one would be pretty near useless in any template discussion, so I'm perfectly happy leaving it up to Mike and those who know better. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:52, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Many GA problems have stuck around as until last year Legobot was in control and out of control. We are able to adjust the GA process now, thanks to the huge contribution by Mike, and I suspect the problems raised will be dealt with as we go along. CMD (talk) 16:17, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Not aware of Legobot problems (not asking to know :), but sure is a good thing to have Mike's skills on board! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:33, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Mike Christie working through the others you posted above. I don't know how to fix this mess. The article was merged and delisted with no page. I suspect (?) someone may need to create a page after the fact for GA3, add that diff to the page as an explanation, and then add that to the AH. That is, it needs a convoluted manual fix. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:10, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

A possibly slightly less convoluted fix would be to link to Talk:Cyclone Lin#Merger and add a note there if necessary? Unless there's some reason that the article history template has to link to a subpage? Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:49, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

• @SandyGeorgia and Femke: and anyone else who'd like to join the Tyranny of those Who Show Up: Currently GAR Instructions link to the GAR-helper script and hides the manual steps below a hidden section, such that you have to pop it open if you use it. With the high usage of the GANReviewTool, I propose we institute something similar with the GAN instructions, such that the tool becomes the default, but manual usage is allowed and explained for those that truly want to use it. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 17:32, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

  Up to y'all ... as we are nearing the end of the enmasse delistings, and my coordination of WP:DCGAR will wrap up (thankfully), and I will switch my efforts to the WP:CCI, I will try to stop interfering now (plan to unwatch once the mass delisting is complete, so please be sure to ping me if DCGAR or articlehistory help is needed. :) :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:35, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

  I would support such a change to the instructions. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:51, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

I've manually merged all the recent FailedGAs to AH, and will leave this list here for someone else to finish. I was watching this to make sure the NovemBot run didn't generate any issues, and we're good there. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:28, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Requesting Second Opinions for a couple of drive-by GAs

Hello. A user has just been passing my GAs without giving a comprehensive review. May I ask for second opinions for the following?

Talk:Bayfront MRT station/GA1

Talk:Gardens by the Bay MRT station/GA1

Thank you. ZKang123 (talk) 04:36, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

I also note the creation of Talk:Total Drama Island/GA1, which appears to be an early attempt at a nomination. AirshipJungleman29, I note you found it at the time, do you remember if it was prompted by anything in particular? CMD (talk) 05:05, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

I've deleted that page under CSD G6, but have copied the relevant content here for others' reference.

Extended content

Total Drama Island should be nominated as a good article because of its well-written to readers in most regions, especially its mention of the regional variations of the winners and the conversion of Canadian dollars into USA dollars. It is two-sided between different groups of regions, especially in who won in which region, as it explains how the endings are made, and where they are telecasted to prevent any drama between people from different regions watching the show from arguing who won Total Drama Island. It is generally stable as there are no recent history of strings of reverted edits or edit wars. The media of the article are relevant to the topic and have suitable captions to explain what they're talking about. The article is well-sourced, and archived just in case the information is deleted already.

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 05:33, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

I have no memories of that, sorry. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 09:32, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Since reviews which need to be redone tend to be by new reviewers, would it be useful if ChristieBot posted a note to this page whenever a review is begun by a first-time reviewer? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:53, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Maybe not this page, because that would get pretty cluttered. Perhaps we could have a Christie masterpage, which those of us who monitor parts of the GA process could watchlist? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:13, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

I just checked and it would be more than one a day, on average, so I agree it would be too cluttered. If others agree I can set up a page. The notifications could also filter by edit count -- e.g. only bother to add an alert if the user has less than N edits. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:25, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

At first pass, I'm concerned about it appearing (and perhaps subtly encouraging being) WP:BITEy. CMD (talk) 13:33, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

I disagree about it being WP:BITEy and think most of those doing a review for the first time, or with very few edits (and therefore likely inexperienced) would not object if they got some advice/feedback on their review. The added benefit is also to increase visibility of those which may need another pair of eyes. I think another page or some enhanced visibility is not a bad thing. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 17:29, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

I can confirm that both articles should be reassessed. I tried to nominate Gardens by the Bay MRT station and withdrew the nomination. (my nomination was also malformed but the reason for withdrawing is that the article was a stub and not ready). I just reviewed Bayfront MRT station and found that it is not yet a good article. Bruxton (talk) 18:08, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Bruxton, could you elaborate on why the article is not a GA? Is there something that would be important enough to raise at a GAR or can it be dealt with on the talkpage? ZKang123, could you clarify what sort of opinion you are requesting? While short and done in one go, the review does seem to have looked into the article. CMD (talk) 03:27, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Found comments by Bruxton at Template:Did you know nominations/Bayfront MRT station, noting potential issues with text-source integrity. CMD (talk) 04:57, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Chipmunkdavis Thanks for fixing their DYK nomination to add the major contributor. The Bayfront article is looking a bit better now as far as DYK is concerned. I took the initiative and made two changes: I added the correct inline citation for a claim, and I rewrote one more sentence to reflect the actual information in the following inline citation. I will continue to go through the inline citations to make sure the rest are correct. I was mostly working on the claims in the Public art section as it related to DYK hooks. Bruxton (talk) 15:37, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

@Bungle I have no comment on these particular articles, but I totally agree with you about providing some sort of mentorship for first-time reviewers. We want to encourage new reviewers, but at the same time, we want to make sure they get off on the right foot with their reviews. I can't imagine any new reviewer objecting to this. And if they do, well, then they're probably not the kind of person we want conducting reviews. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:51, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

@RoySmith: Too often I have read here concerns about new or inexperienced reviewers, usually with the right intentions, not fully appreciating that there is some minimal expectation of scrutiny to pass an article through the process. The GA model has evolved quite considerably since its early inception and article writers generally expect a degree of thoroughness to be demonstrated by the reviewer (not always, but often). To me, none of this is really clear or evident to those unfamiliar until they get caught up or pinged here from a review perceived to be sub-standard.

Having a page or list whereby these reviews are highlighted for others to voluntarily check until new reviewers become more accustomed to the protocols can only be helpful (to the new reviewer and the process). I'm not suggesting that anyone new to reviewing has to have them "signed off", but just better visibility for others, if they choose, to informally cast another pair of eyes over. Bungle ^{(talk • contribs)} 17:51, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Idea: Good article save award, akin to WP:FASA

See also: Discussion that led to the 2021 launch of FASA

GAR has seen an increase in articles nominated, but there's not much to incentivize editors who save articles from demotion. The idea would be for this to be overseen by the GAR coordinators in pretty much the same way it's done at WP:Featured Article Save Award. Copying the language from there:

Version 1

The Good Article Save Award (GASA) is an award given to users who have worked to bring good articles back to standard after the article was nominated at good article reassessment (GAR). Its purpose is to recognise the hard work that editors have put into saving good articles from demotion. After an article is closed at GAR as "keep", anyone may nominate editors for a GASA. Nominated editors must meet the following criteria: The article was nominated at GAR, and subsequently closed as "keep". The editor made substantial improvements to the article while it was at GAR; this award is not given to reviewers, but to editors who actually improved the article during its review. The editor was not the original GAN nominator, as GAN nominators are expected to continuously maintain articles they nominated. The editor has not declined consideration for the award. Discussion on who should receive the GASA will take place on the GAR's talk page. The GAR coordinators will determine consensus and bestow the award.

Since the FASA mimics the FA promotion message, the GASA could in turn mimic ChristieBot's GA promotion message and symbol .

Any thoughts? Perhaps the above process, which was intended for FAR, could be streamlined further for GAR? Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 09:26, 27 February 2023 (UTC) (updated 02:37, 28 February 2023 (UTC))

I don't think the coordinators need a role in this. Awarding a GAN is an individual process, awarding a save barnstar should be no more onerous. CMD (talk) 10:26, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

If we want to mimic GAN: anyone uninvolved editor (likely the GAR closer) could determine who gets the award in accordance with the above criteria; the award would be then given by a bot. In case of disputes, the coordinators can step in to moderate (e.g. if there are 2 editors involved in the save, one with 10% authorship and the other with 30%, do both qualify as having made "substantial improvement"?) Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 10:58, 27 February 2023 (UTC) (updated 15:59, 27 February 2023 (UTC))

Featured articles need a lot more saving than good articles. I doubt anyone cares that much if it's self-awarded, whereas FARs are often months of work that should be recognised. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:01, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

It can't be self awarded, of course, since the award will say "You may display this GA symbol upon your userpage" just like FASA already does, i.e. the "saves" are officially equivalent to the regular and . Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 16:24, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

I self-awarded myself with an FA on my userpage for Basiliscus, for rewriting it from this to this to stave off an oncoming FAR for overreliance on primary sources and numerous other aging-related issues; I am not the person who ran it through FAC 17 years ago (who is incidentally indeffed as a sock), but it's still almost exclusively my work. I see no reason why it can't be self-awarded, even if its nominally equal. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 18:00, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

I dislike the bureaucracy of FASAs. I hope for GAR saves, we can have coord or uninvolved editors give an award on a personal title, but still 'allow' people to put the plus on their user pages. I also dislike the third bullet points, which goes against the spirit WP:VOLUNTEER. I don't want that expectation, and have unwatched half of my GAs/FAR saves. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 18:00, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

No one can disallow people from putting icons on their userpages (atleast not at this venue). On the other hand, I believe it's important for the process to formally recognize editors who are responsible for the GA save. If it doesn't, as Z1720 says in the thread linked above, the message being sent is that it's more important to nominate new GANs or FACs than it is to save old ones. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 18:52, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Is there any evidence to suggest that people are being dissuaded from GAR more than normal? GAR is currently a rather tight bunch of experienced editors, much like many other venues of the site. Just because GAN involves more people of variant experience levels does not mean that we have to incentivize people to join GAR to equalize it, for the sake of awards. I am in favor of awards in principle, but feel that there should be no excessive bureaucracy around them. GAR can be an enormous undertaking that sometimes requires far more effort than just writing an article; requiring people to sit around and wait for an award, perhaps only to be overlooked, does not seem a good model to me. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 19:15, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

The "normal" of GAR doesn't seem like a good comparison, as people basically accept that the process has been moribund for many years :) I'm surprised that anyone can see the two processes as equal – as a new editor, GAN gets you a nice motivating talk page message while GAR gives you nothing except personal satisfaction. It's easy to ensure that people aren't overlooked! You just need volunteers willing to check (here's one). Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 19:22, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

There's a separate discussion at Wikipedia talk:Exceptional reviews SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:36, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Version 2

This proposal tries to equalize the official recognition for a GAN pass and a GAR save, while also equalizing the bureaucracy.

	GAN pass (current)	GAR save (proposed)
Talk page message	== Your GA nomination of Example == The article Example you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Example for comments about the article. Well done! If the article is eligible to appear in the "Did you know" section of the Main Page, you can nominate it within the next seven days.	== Your GA save of Example == Your work on the article Example has allowed it to retain its good article status following a GAR, earning you this Good Article Save Award . If you wish, you may display this GA rescue upon your userpage. Well done!
Eligibility	Nominators must have contributed significantly to the article.	Editors must have made significant improvements to the article while it was at GAR. (This is not given to reviewers.)
Who can confer it	The nomination may be reviewed by any registered user who has not contributed significantly to the article.	Any uninvolved editor may assess eligibility for the GAR save.

Thoughts? Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 02:37, 28 February 2023 (UTC) (upd 14:35, 28 February 2023 (UTC))

• All of these seem like too much bureaucracy to me. Just give someone a barnstar if you notice them saving a good article! (t · c) buidhe 03:12, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

• +1, specifically {{The Rescue Barnstar 3}} ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:41, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

  If we're not willing to treat new nominations and rescues of old articles on an equal footing, the message we send to new editors is that one of the two is less – less important, maybe less worthy; their efforts are not worth the (scant) time it takes to reward them. These icons are not merely awards, but they establish a culture – new editors see the and on experienced editor's userpages, are curious to find out more and end up creating GANs and FACs. Recently I've seen users who entered the system through saves of old FAs, not new ones – as shown through the FA saves they display on their userpages. This again (slowly) creates a culture. Why wouldn't we want the same for rescues of old GAs? Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 21:06, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

  If I saved a GA or FA, I would list it on my userpage alongside the written GAs/FAs. Nothing stopping me from doing that. I don't think a barnstar is inherently lesser than a GAN promotion message. (t · c) buidhe 21:10, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

  If you award that barnstar consistently, to everyone who saves articles... make sure no one's left out like we do for GANs, sure. But at that point you'll just end up with what I proposed above :) Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 21:19, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Personally, I have a GA icon on my page for an article I didn't nominate at GA nor save at GAR, but instead, as my first real Wikipedia work, rescued from this. Because I can. There is absolutely nothing to stop others from doing the same. And yes, I'm fine with that message, because a new GA and and an old one that has to go through GAR is almost certainly better for the project than a stub and a GA restored at GAR. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 21:38, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

• Didn't this discussion essentially say no to this idea? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:43, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

• That was technically for GAN but I do think the general message applies. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:46, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

  It's unrelated? This is for editors, not reviewers. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 14:30, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

• There's no difference between the two at GAR. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:20, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

  Essentially, the person who opened the GAR cannot receive the award. It goes to respondents who contributed to the article. Conversely, Prop 1 in the drive was about reviewers, who are not allowed to be significant contributors per GAN rules. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 15:38, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

  If the person who opened the GAR ends up doing the bulk of the work to fix it they should get credit for the save. (t · c) buidhe 21:11, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

  I'd be fine with that in principle. I'm curious how often it happens. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 21:48, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

What to do with old GAs subpages that are children of deleted or merged pages

While cleaning up old GA subpages I found these three:

• Talk:(I've Just Begun) Having My Fun/GA1 -- article now merged to Greatest Hits: My Prerogative
• Talk:Sesame Workshop funding sources/GA1 -- article now merged to Sesame Workshop
• Talk:Tropical Storm Norma (2005)/GA1 -- article now merged to 2005 Pacific hurricane season.

These GAs can't easily be accessed from anywhere. Yesterday I dealt with Talk:Crucibulum laeve/GA1, for which the parent article was merged to Crucibulum, by moving the GA to Talk:Crucibulum/GA1 so it could be indexed from Talk:Crucibulum. I left a note at the top giving the reasoning. Is that the best way to handle this situation? That is, move Talk:(I've Just Begun) Having My Fun/GA1 to Talk:Greatest Hits: My Prerogative/GA1 and so on, with an explanatory note? Alternatively each of the parent page talk pages could be returned to talk page state, with an article history template; I think I've seen this approach taken a couple of times though I can't bring an example to mind. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:15, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Mike Christie: I think it should depend on if there's any realistic chance of the article being created again, whether by becoming notable, or if the page was deleted for copyvio (such as the Doug Coldwell situation). If it might, I think the latter should be done, and the page tagged with Template:G8-exempt, so the GA might serve as useful for whoever might recreate the page; if not, the former seems right to me, for merges. For simple redirects, I think a G8 CSD is more appropriate, as they don't really share the history to justify merging the GA history, if that makes sense. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 01:29, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

I asked at WP:RFU for Talk:Sesame Workshop funding sources to be undeleted and the undeleting admin agreed that the original talk page was a good place to attach the GA. I would say it's not impossible that that article will be recreated, but it doesn't seem particularly likely. I agree with you that that's clearly the right choice when the article is likely to be recreated one day. I'm less sure what the right thing to do is when that's not the case. Still, you can probably argue that there's always a chance more sources will be found, so that recreation is always theoretically possible. I'll put the Sesame Street on at the newly undeleted talk page, probably tomorrow. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 03:01, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

The recreation of Talk:Sesame Workshop funding sources/GA1 and its container talkpage created a mismatch among the GA lists. I created a GAR to resolve this, pending any other clever ideas. CMD (talk) 12:09, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Garry Kasparov

A quick note to say that the above has passed - my first GA review. Once the nominator had done the hard work, I mucked in to lend a hand. Regards Billsmith60 (talk) 15:27, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Updating the GA reviewing statistics per the extracted history

This evening, or possibly tomorrow morning if I run into any issues with the change, I'll be updating the reviewing statistics to match the history I've found by scanning the GA subpages. I've posted earlier about this, and nobody objected, so I'm going to go ahead with the change; I'm absolutely certain it's more accurate than the numbers we have now, but it won't be perfect. For reference here are the parameters:

• Only reviews done as GA subpages will count. The GA stats page I inherited was built using this assumption as well, so this is not a change.
• The page must have been created since 1 May 2008. This is to exclude a handful of early ones copied to archive pages.
• Any page where the reviewer and nominator are the same is excluded. This can happen if the nominator is the one that creates the review page (e.g. Talk:Kingdom of al-Abwab/GA1, almost always by mistake, or where the nominator has manually archived the review to the archive page. There are about 300 of the these; the great majority are more than ten years old.

The total number of reviews in the database, including reviews excluded for one of the reasons given above, is 49,406.

The historical database tracks the following fields:

• nominator & nomination timestamp
• review & timestamp of start of review
• outcome & outcome timestamp
• subtopic

I'll be enhancing the reports I've already made avaiable so that you can query this database for an individual or a date range, and will see if I can automate some statistics. However, some things are unavoidably missing. The most common omission (over 600) is the outcome: if the GAN has been superseded by a later GAN, I can't tell the outcome by looking to see if the article is currently a GA because that's ascribable to the most recent GAN. If the article history template is on the talk page I can use that, but it's not always present.

In a few cases the nomination information is also missing. I extract it from the history of the article's talk page and from the history of the GAN page where I can, but if that doesn't work the various templates don't record the nominator -- {{article history}}, {{failedGA}}, and {{GA}} all show outcome and date but not the nominator or reviewer. I would like to change article history to add parameters to show nominator and reviewer, but I haven't gotten agreement for that change (and I can see arguments against it, to be fair). So 95 records have no nominator information, and another 125 have no nomination timestamp information.

Another occasional error is that some editors had a habit of moving old pre-subpage GAs to subpages. Bungle did quite a few of these. They then show up as the reviewer, since they created the page. If I can detect that the nomination predates the May 2008 cutoff, I don't include it, but a few have probably slipped through.

I've fixed (with a great deal of help from others, in particular Qwerfjkl's bot) the most egregious errors I found in the various GA subpages -- you can trawl my contributions history if you want to see samples of the messes that I found -- merges, redirects, deletions, disambiguations, and multiple moves. Qwerfjkl's bot moved over 2,000 subpages to their correct locations. I will post links on ChristieBot's user page to lists of the various remaining problems -- in most cases the recommended fix will be "add article history", though there's a small risk that in some cases that will actually remove nomination information. I'm not expecting anyone to go through those and fix them, but they could be a reference for any bot that can automatically build article history. And if anyone is wondering why their personal lists of reviews or nominations doesn't match, those pages may give the answer.

CMD just mentioned on my talk page that page moves that fail to move the associated GA subpages are still going on now. I don't have a way to detect those, but will see if I can come up with something. Perhaps if we report those and notify the movers in each case as we fix them, the volume won't be too high to keep up with, and we might end up educating the people making the mistake. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:51, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Proper action for GAN started by non-significant contributor

I was preparing to start my first review of an article when I noticed that the article in question was nominated by someone who was not a significant contributor (1 edit and 0.5% authorship). Seeing as how this violates "If you are not a significant contributor to the article, you must secure the assent of the significant contributors before nominating." in Step 1 of the GAN instructions, does that meet the bar for a quick-fail? Or would this be considered a "drive-by nomination" and would I be permitted to just directly remove the nomination? If so, do I just delete the entry manually from the nominations list or is there some automated process that's supposed to be started by ChristieBot? Thanks, Horserice (talk) 01:01, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

That's a fairly textbook drive-by nomination. Usually you'd resolve that by removing the GAN template from the article's talk page, and then the bot will take care of the rest. If the nominator is an experienced editor, you might want to check in with them to see what's up before removing it. If they're not, you can usually just go ahead and remove it and then leave the editor a talk page message saying why. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:08, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. I'll go ahead and do that, Horserice (talk) 01:27, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

GA historical categories per proposal 30

Proposal 30 passed and I have been looking at what could be done to implement it. (This would require a BRFA, so this is just to clarify before I make any request.) The goal is to have categories such as "Good articles listed in February 2023" and "Good articles delisted in February 2023". Good articles can cease being good articles for other reasons than being delisted -- they can be merged or redirected or deleted or promoted to FA. I don't think there's much value in trying to track those exceptions, so I propose that these categories are interpreted to mean just what they say -- an article is in category "Good articles listed in February 2023" if it passed a GAN that month, regardless of what happened afterwards; and it's in category "Good articles delisted in February 2023" only if it was delisted that month. So an article that is now a former featured article, and was GA before it became FA, is not now a GA but would not be in any "delisted" category.

If that all sounds OK, then I can do the following:

• For all articles for which I have a GAN/GAR subpage showing promotion/delisting with a date for the outcome, add a listed/delisted month/year category.
• For all articles for which I know they were listed or delisted, but I don't know the date, add a "Good articles listed [or delisted] on an unknown date" category.
• For all remaining current GAs that are not put into a listed category by the above, add a "Good articles listed on an unknown date" category.
• For all subsequent promotions to GA, add the relevant category.
• I can't do the delisted categories going forward, as ChristieBot has nothing to do with GARs. Novem Linguae perhaps could, but only for users that use the GAR script. Perhaps the GAR coordinators soon to be announced could keep an eye on GARs that don't use the script and verify that the category is populated correctly?

This will omit completely the following:

• Any promotions of articles from prior to the use of subpages in April 2008, if those articles are no longer GANs.
• Any delistings that took place without subpages.

There are some possible ways around some of these -- for example by checking every single article that uses article history, I might find some more records. But some will definitely be missed.

The categories would not be complete and there's no easy way to complete them, and maintaining them would add manual labour, at least for the delisting categories. I'm not sure this is worth doing with these caveats. Any opinions? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:55, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Could we just build this into the {{GA}} and {{Article history}} templates? Those two templates have code to determine if currentstatus=GA and then place the talk page into Category:Wikipedia good articles. I don't think it'd be a stretch to add code to determine the date of promotion (the date of promotion is already a param in both of those templates), and then put it into the appropriate date sub-category. That would save bot runs, and also save a lot of errors as things get out of sync over time. –Novem Linguae (talk) 16:43, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Discussion at WT:GA § Should everything be cited?

 You are invited to join the discussion at WT:GA § Should everything be cited?. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 02:32, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Implementation of GAR Coordinators

After Proposal 13 of the GA Proposal Drive was passed, some discussion has taken place on the GAR talk page (here), in regards to the actual utility of the GAR Coordinators, and a call for self-nomination went out. After something of a slowdown has taken place at the GAR talk page, a suggestion was made to open a discussion here regarding the confirmation of coordinators, and their roles; in part due to the larger number of people active here, and because much of the activity taken place has involved a relatively small number of parties, most of whom have been active together in the recent WP:DCGAR, GA proposal drive, and GAR talk page discussions, forming something of a majority of "those who show up", rather than a necessarily representative consensus. Based on the discussion involved in the recent overhaul of GAN, including unanimous support for the merging of individual and community reassessment (Proposal 14) users @Premeditated Chaos, Femke, and AirshipJungleman29: have worked to craft and implement new guidelines for GAN which would seem to open the closing of GARs to uninvolved experienced editors in most cases, the GAR nominator themselves if there is a silent consensus, or, in the case of contentious discussion, the GAR coordinators. From this, we have a rough outline of the coordinators' roles, insofar as they help to manage the administrative work, and assist in the case of contentious discussions. But again, the role is not strictly defined, although what has been implemented thus far after active discussion seems to align with the spirit of the proposal quite well. A call went out to numerous editors to self-nominate, and recommendations were made, which resulted in a slew of @Trainsandotherthings and Etriusus: and myself, with @Chipmunkdavis: putting himself forward as a possibility, and @Aircorn: suggested (but he has been inactive recently and therefore was not available for comment). The thinking of some, including @SandyGeorgia:, who has spearheaded much of the movement, appears to be to open this to a wider discussion, where the nominees can be confirmed by the community here as reliable, and, during or after this process, the exact role of the coordinators in nailed down. I personally favor what appears to be our working model, of administrative work and decisive closers of contentious reviews; as well as the general slew of guidance and help that might be expected of coordinators. If people agree with this, I think the next step would be to open a poll for each of the various nominees, probably on a support/oppose basis, and a poll for the expectations and responsibilities of the coordinators. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 17:28, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

@Iazyges, Let's get the discussions wrapped up and feedback taken care of first for the Proposal Drive. I can open up a dedicated tab for 'Coordinator Elections' once its done. The same thing will have to happen for the RFC per Proposal 21. We can also do it here on the talk page, but it may get cluttered. I am in no rush either way. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 21:16, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Meanwhile: Wikipedia talk:Good article reassessment#DC GAR launched (GAR Coord role). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:18, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

I see no reason why the poll can't open now. In any case, SandyGeorgia, as I and Femke seem to be closing most GARs at the moment, I think we're probably able to handle the couple of DCGARs that have already been opened. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:57, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

My preference would be for polling to take place sooner rather than later. But whenever, could they please be widely advertised? Gog the Mild (talk) 12:16, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Poll proposal

I propose we open a poll here (higher viewers than WT:GAR) with the following procedure:

1. People have up to Monday 27 to say they volunteer (@Trainsandotherthings, Etriusus, Iazyges, and Chipmunkdavis: already indicated interest)
2. Then people have a week to support. Let's do a poll without opposes, as those are friendlier.
3. Top 3 people with most votes would be appointed as coords. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 21:06, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

• Endorse proposal, with a reminder to cross post a notice of the poll to all GA pages. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:18, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
• Seems like a good way to do things to me. I see no reason we couldn't have 4 slots, though. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 00:43, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
• Mostly agree with the timeline; I also don't see why four slots are too many. I would prefer a yes-no vote honestly, with whatever margin is considered necessary (80% perhaps?) for these candidates (including myself) and in the future. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 00:59, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
• Sure; I might as well officially put my name down as well. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 01:59, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
• No concerns on my end, I support it (saves me the trouble of setting up something else). I'd prefer 4 slots but whatever is most manageable. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 02:53, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Happy with four coords as well.. Nominees, feel free to add names below. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 17:17, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Trainsandotherthings, Etriusus, and Chipmunkdavis: Just making sure you've been pinged that the polling is being opened for self-noms. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:41, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, I forgot about this. I've been busier than normal irl. Will add my name now. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 23:56, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Added as well. Thanks for creating the process as it goes along. CMD (talk) 00:09, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Done, thanks for the ping. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 18:14, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Poll

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Candidates, feel free to nominate yourselves. Polling will open on February 27.

AirshipJungleman29

1. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 18:12, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
2. Noting here rather than in each slot that I am fine with ending up with five coords. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:18, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
3. Gog the Mild (talk) 18:43, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
4. As with Mike, I am fine with five coords - given that it is intended as a more informal dispute-resolution type mechanism, the more people available to assist, the better. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:59, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
5. Competent and involved in the GA process, including the recent proposal drive. Can't see a reason why not. — Bilorv (talk) 13:36, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
6. a!rado🦈 (C✙T) 13:10, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
7. I'll also say this here, rather than in every section, but I'm fine with having five coords, since this is supposed to be less formal than FAC. I believe all six candidates are well qualified for the task. Epicgenius (talk) 14:23, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Chipmunkdavis

1. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 18:12, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
2. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:18, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
3. Support (t · c) buidhe 19:20, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
4. Hog Farm _Talk 21:35, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
5. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:59, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
6. Long-term volunteer and established content creator who can be trusted to act responsibly. — Bilorv (talk) 13:36, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
7. --In actu (Guerillero) ^{Parlez Moi} 11:26, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
8. a!rado🦈 (C✙T) 13:10, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
9. Epicgenius (talk) 14:23, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
10. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 01:04, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Iazyges

1. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 18:12, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
2. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:18, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
3. Gog the Mild (talk) 18:43, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
4. Unlimitedlead (talk) 19:18, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
5. Support (t · c) buidhe 19:20, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
6. Hog Farm _Talk 21:35, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
7. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:59, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
8. An extremely impressive content creation record and has been trusted to work as a Milhist co-ordinator. — Bilorv (talk) 13:36, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
9. Curbon7 (talk) 00:49, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
10. --In actu (Guerillero) ^{Parlez Moi} 11:24, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
11. a!rado🦈 (C✙T) 13:10, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
12. Epicgenius (talk) 14:23, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
13. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 01:04, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Trainsandotherthings

1. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:18, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
2. Gog the Mild (talk) 18:43, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
3. Support, but only if you want the role (t · c) buidhe 19:20, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

   While I joked on my talk page about part of me not wanting the role, I am seriously putting myself forward for consideration. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 19:32, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

4. Hog Farm _Talk 21:35, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
5. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:59, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
6. EpicPupper (talk) 04:22, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
7. A slightly newer user who has made a huge impact in their time here, and it's important to give people chances to take on more responsibility. Also wrote a Challenge. — Bilorv (talk) 13:36, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
8. Curbon7 (talk) 00:49, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
9. FormalDude (talk) 05:23, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
10. a!rado🦈 (C✙T) 13:10, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
11. Epicgenius (talk) 14:23, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
12. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 01:04, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Etriusus

1. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 18:12, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
2. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:18, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
3. Hog Farm _Talk 21:35, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
4. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:59, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
5. Brilliant content creator, a trusted user, and wrote a Challenge. — Bilorv (talk) 13:36, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
6. a!rado🦈 (C✙T) 13:10, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
7. Epicgenius (talk) 14:23, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Lee Vilenski

1. Support (t · c) buidhe 19:20, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
2. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:23, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
3. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 19:33, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
4. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:51, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
5. Hog Farm _Talk 21:35, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
6. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:59, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
7. Rschen7754 01:00, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
8. EpicPupper (talk) 04:23, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
9. Outstanding and prolific content creator who always acts with decorum. — Bilorv (talk) 13:36, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
10. Curbon7 (talk) 00:49, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
11. FormalDude (talk) 05:23, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
12. 100% --In actu (Guerillero) ^{Parlez Moi} 11:24, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
13. a!rado🦈 (C✙T) 13:09, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
14. Epicgenius (talk) 14:23, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
15. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 01:04, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Discussion of GAR Coord poll

I am not a regular part of the GA process, so won't be voting when voting opens tomorrow, but I would be voting for all five based on my experience of each of them so far, even though GAR does not need this many Coords. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:24, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

I mean, three seems the industry standard, so the three with most votes would work perfectly well IMO. Follow up question, should/can candidates vote? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:04, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

There's actually 4 FAC coords (Ian Rose, Gog the Mild, buidhe, and me). Hog Farm _Talk 16:07, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

And I think that's too many :) :) I can see, though, an advantage to approving all five GAR Coords: eventually transition them to GAN Coords. Airship, of course candidates can vote, but it's usually not a good look. If you oppose, you end up having to work together. If you support, you end up with all five needing to do same ... so why ? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:11, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I thought so. Anyway, someone will need to fulfil Gog's request above and send out loads of notifications to places that might take an interest tomorrow. Don't think I should do that as a candidate, so am requesting it of the non-candidate regulars here. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:16, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Mike Christie, do you mind doing the pings? At perhaps WT:FAC and maybe at a centralised discussion board, in addition to WT:GAR and WT:GA? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:26, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Sure -- will do it now. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:29, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

• Seeing as it is the 27th, I have kicked off the voting process. Not sure if I can vote for myself, so I didn't do so. Are we just signing our name under each candidate we support? Trainsandotherthings (talk) 18:14, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
• Per the comments above it's probably a good idea if none of the candidates vote, but I doubt it really matters. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:17, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

  I'm supporting everyone anyhow, so I don't think it makes a difference. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 18:19, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

  Not sure if it really matters, but I'll abstain from voting on principle. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 19:11, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Not principles! If you do it, I have to do it too! (also it means I don't have to keep voting when more people add, as seems likely) ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:31, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

If the other candidates would like me to, I will remove my votes. But I will support any candidate with some GA experience and am supporting all current candidates. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 19:35, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

@Trainsandotherthings: Can't speak to the other candidates, but I won't push you to remove it; it's a matter of personal principle above any form of real rule, so I can't expect others to follow it. And of course, from an objective standpoint, you actually hurt your own odds by voting in favor of others. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 20:03, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

I doubt it'll matter much. The general tend seems to be that most of us running support the others' nominations. I'm of the mind it'll be moot either way. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 20:24, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Yeah my primary motivation was to spur others to start voting, and it worked, so I'm happy. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 21:30, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

• Sorry for being so late to the party on this. I've put my name forward, I hope no one minds. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 19:22, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

  I think it's fine :). —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:23, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

  @Lee Vilenski: no problem, of course. -- Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 19:29, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

• Any consensus on how long this will go for? 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 20:19, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

  A week seems fair to me. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 21:23, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

• Noting here that while I think six co-ords would probably be too many, I've !voted for them all because I can't see a reason not to, and can see many points in favour of each candidate. I suppose my main aim is to express support for the implementation of Proposal 13 (it seems like this proposal drive has borne lots of very good initiatives). — Bilorv (talk) 13:39, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
• Late to the game i know, but could someone highlight the "what the GAR coords will do", as the current intro includes quite a lot of bits, while knowing what they're to be doing is really the most key. Nosebagbear (talk) 23:29, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

  Basically, the idea is to function as a sort of dispute resolution/unsticking mechanism for GAR. Discussion bogs down? GAR coord gives it a poke. Discussion getting heated? GAR coord steps in to deescalate. Contentious GAR needs a scrupulously neutral close? GAR coord takes care of it. All of these are functions that any editor can and should do where possible, but by running, GAR coords have effectively pledged to make themselves available to do so, and have the added legitimacy of community backing they can point to if needed in a dispute. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:06, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

  Tah muchly! Nosebagbear (talk) 20:49, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

  Here's the list of everything I had to do myself on WP:DCGAR because there were no Coords. The Coord postulates should be following (now) the six remaining DC GARs, for example. As things stand right now, I'm pretty much the only editor weighing in on all seven or eight DC GARs, for whatever that's worth. (From my end, that's frustrating; I'd like to be out of the DC GA business now that the main delisting is over :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:55, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Results

Well, it's definitely been over a week now. I don't know whether people want four or six coords, but I do know that there's a controversial GAR over at Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Hannah Arendt/1 that seems to have mostly halted, and as I and Etriusus have been involved, could I ask one of @Lee Vilenski, Iazyges, Chipmunkdavis, and Trainsandotherthings: to close it as their first act in the role? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 02:10, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

I also consider myself involved there. I feel obliged to point out that 3 coords was also a number on the table. CMD (talk) 02:18, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

I've closed it as keep under the rationale that, while the article is definitely too long from a MOS standpoint, it seems that criteria 3b is being obeyed, as all content relates directly to her. I have suggested that participants work to move content onto subpages, and then link said subpages, allowing the detail for those sections to be reduced on the main page. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 05:34, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

FWIW, WP:TOOBIG suggests this isn't a necessary item to reduce, just advised. It's amount of images and sources does make it read longer than you'd want mind. If we have agreed on the Co-ords, I'll take a look through open GARs in a bit and see if there's anything that needs input. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 09:24, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

I have closed the poll as electing four coordinators, which was the rough consensus in the pre-voting discussion. Support for more coordinators did materialise during the election, but there was no strong consensus to override the previously agreed election rules. Thank you to everyone for standing, and especially to @AirshipJungleman29 and @Etriusus, who both also appear highly qualified for the role. I would suggest to check in about a year's time whether we need new/more/other coordinators and hope you will stand again. —Kusma (talk) 09:45, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

NOTOC on GAN

WP:GAN currently includes a NOTOC directive, meaning that the only way to navigate to specific sections is to manually scroll or jump up to the top of the page, scroll down a page to reach the listing of headings, and then jump from there to the section you are looking for. The new Vector2022 default skin for Wikipedia (at least) puts a persistent table of contents in the sidebar, allowing more convenient navigation, but only for pages that do not explicitly disable contents using NOTOC. Can we maybe remove the NOTOC from WP:GAN, so that more convenient navigation is possible? —David Eppstein (talk) 18:45, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

I'd be happy for that change only if V22 is confirmed to stay the default skin after the current RfC. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:12, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

This issue is making navigation difficult for me now, regardless of whether V22 is confirmed. Is there some reason NOTOC makes things significantly better for those using other skins? —David Eppstein (talk) 19:43, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

It duplicates the fake TOC already there.. We can switch to a completely normal TOC maybe? —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:47, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't see any great advantage to having a custom TOC for just this page. There are a couple of disadvantages I can imagine, though I expect they affect only a tiny number of people at best and may be completely theoretical. As it's a custom TOC and doesn't have the toc class, anyone who has custom css to format the table of contents loses out on that. Conceivably also losing the semantic information that it is a table of contents does some harm from an accessibility point of view? Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 15:07, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

GA topics

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Good articles

 – per discussion. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 21:37, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Discussion on GA categorisation sometimes pops up, most recently at Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023. During that discussion (@Joe Roe, AirshipJungleman29, Kusma, Mike Christie, WhatamIdoing, BlueMoonset, and Ganesha811: courtesy ping) I created Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Topic Values/Subtopics to show the current topic (coded as h2) and sub-topic (coded as h3) divisions.

I have now collected the number of articles for those, as well as for their further divisions (there are h4 h5 and even some h6 scattered around, very ad-hoc no real system to speak of) at User:Chipmunkdavis/GA category stats. This gives some insight into the sorts of articles GA handles, and might be useful for discussion if there is still a desire to adjust the system. (The number of current GAs may not be exactly the same as the proportion of articles entering GAN, which Mike has been able to collect separately, but I assume it is roughly similar.) Some very full categories, some perhaps slightly too forward-thinking splits (shout out to Natural sciences#Types of chemical transformations with 0 entries). Please let me know if you spot any issues with the numbers (the overall number for example is not the same as the one generated by counting category entries, for some reason). Best, CMD (talk) 04:29, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Well, the first thing that pops out at me is that we probably don't need separate sub-subcategories for all the different TV shows. There's a lot to dig into here, thanks for collating this! —Ganesha811 (talk) 04:39, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't think I understand enough about how these might be used to feel confident making a recommendation. For example, there are 30 "biology books" and one "medicine book", so it seems very reasonable to me that we should merge those to "biology and medicine publications". But would that merge screw up something somewhere else? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:26, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

The h4/h5/h6 can be manipulated without issue, they're more for reader/research purposes. They can be unilaterally shifted to give us better ideas of what we have, make things easier for us, and/or to align with other systems. (We can also move items around, for example GA has archaeology under History which could be moved to match FA which has archaeology under Art, if desired.) Changing the h2 and h3 levels however has technical implications, and so requires more work. CMD (talk) 05:34, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Been doing further digging, and I think the discrepancy in total numbers may be due to duplicate listings: I think there's just under 180 of these at the moment. I may make some bold changes to clean these up, and also to boldly tweak some of the h4-h6 groupings including the suggestions above. CMD (talk) 04:26, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Cleared a whole lot of duplicates, and the discrepancy in numbers is now just seven! I think we could make more use of see also redirects to related subsections, a few exist now but we could for example have a link from Architecture memorials to the Warfare military memorials section. CMD (talk) 15:41, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Nice work! Thanks for doing that. —Ganesha811 (talk) 16:24, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Talk pages redirected (proposal 17)

Just an FYI that WT:GA now redirects here as discussed. I added a separate archive box above to enable searching (if anyone can create a single button to search across all the archives, that would be more ideal but I couldn't figure out a way to do it). There are some old subpages at Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia talk:Good articles that I wasn't sure what to do with, like for example WT:Good articles/iconmockups, and so I left those untouched. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 22:17, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Detecting drive-by nominations

It's been several weeks since we've formalized the informal rule against drive-by nominations. I recall that there was talk about a way to detect or flag drive-by nominations, but has there been any progress on this? I skimmed through some of the current nominations from nominators with 0 GAs, and a bunch of them are drive-by noms or the nominators are otherwise minimal contributors to the article. Catching these automatically is probably the most efficient step we can take to keep the backlog manageable. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:42, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

At the proposal drive, I suggested making some kind of bot generated listing of probable drivebys at the Wikipedia:Good article nominations/Report, but didn't turn it into its own formal proposal, so it never got actioned. I wonder if we could get consensus to do that? They would then be manually reviewed by humans who would either check them off as fine for whatever reason (nom knows what they're doing, etc etc) or remove the nomination. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:05, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

I could probably do something like that with ChristieBot, but not to that page as that's managed by WugBot. As it happens CMD and I have been talking about an alert page to warn of page moves that don't move the associated GA subpages. I've created it here; I was going to wait for a bit more feedback from CMD before mentioning it here, but it seems a good opportunity to say something because in both cases the report can be provided but not cleared by the bot so some human would have to review and delete the alerts once they were dealt with.

For the drive-by alert, what would be the definition? Less than N edits to a given article? Less than N edits total to Wikipedia? I will check, but I think the latter is a lot easier to determine and is probably a pretty good proxy for drive-by nominations, particularly if allied with 0 (or at most 1) promoted GA. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:16, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Not sure - I would think it would be number of edits or percentage of authorship, but if those are very difficult to assess, overall edit count combined with minimal GA activity could serve as a reasonable proxy. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:32, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

WP:GANR is actually a tad modular; it loads Wikipedia:Good article nominations/Report/top which WugBot adds regardless of what it's doing to the rest of the page. If a bot wrote to, say, Wikipedia:Good article nominations/Report/Probably drive-by and transcluded that onto GANR/top, we should get the behavior we want where both reports appear on the same page without bots conflicting. — Wug·a·po·des 02:46, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

That would certainly work. PMC, would you prefer an inclusion at the top of GANR, or a separate page? One thing to consider is that if this is human-cleared, it could intermittently get quite long if there's a period where nobody is cleaning up the errors. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 03:24, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm fine with whatever location other people think is reasonable :) Actually, Wug, since you're here - I was noodling around on the report earlier and noticed that the GA report links all go to the GAN subsection rather than the article or the review. Is there a reason it does that? It seems counter-intuitive, but maybe I'm missing something. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:31, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

@Premeditated Chaos It was like that when WugBot took over. Presumably it's so that editors can see the nom in context of other nominations (is this part of a series, did someone leave a note, have people been skipping over it for some reason) but that's just my guess. The people who use it most often might have better insight into how it fits into their workflows. — Wug·a·po·des 01:12, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

I've started using the report a lot lately. It fits into my workflow by interrupting it. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:47, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

+1 ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 01:50, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

I just tried some timing tests. Getting the contributors for an article is very slow; a second or two for an article without much history, but more like a minute for an article like Donald Trump. Getting the edit count for a user is much quicker. I think the best way to do this would be to append a bullet list item to the report page when the nomination is first added to the GAN page, if the nominator has 1 or fewer GAs and an edit count under 1,000. Or is that too high? The report would stay there until someone deleted it.

User talk:ChristieBot/Incompletely moved pages is the same -- whoever cleans it up will have to delete the report records manually. CMD commented on my talk page that we are accumulating quite a few reports now, of different types; in addition to these two and GANR, there is Wikipedia:Good articles/mismatches and User talk:ChristieBot/GAN errors (which is self-clearing). Is there a better page architecture that would make these easier to track and deal with? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 09:43, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Should everything be cited?

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Good articles

 – per discussion. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 21:37, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

GA criteria 2 only explicitly requires citations for:

direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counterintuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons

That's also echoed in WP:GACN, though the latter heavily implies that anything not cited inline should still come from listed WP:GENREF. While general references used to be acceptable (a while ago), that now mostly seen as a relic of the early-Wikipedia era.

However, the "state-of-the-art" practice seems to have shifted to requiring everything to be cited inline. That's reasonable to me. I've also seen quite a few GA articles delisted for lacking citations (and even seen B-class articles demoted to C-class for not being fully cited). Indeed, it's very hard for anyone to know whether something is original research unless it's cited. Given that there seems to have been a shift in accepted practice, shouldn't we update the GA criteria to reflect this? DFlhb (talk) 17:05, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Well, not EVERYTHING - we don't need citing infobox information directly as well as the lede, but it should be cited somewhere else in the body. We also don't require obvious information to be cited. In my eyes 2A only applies to direct citations, as a GA should have all of its information attributed to one source or another even if not directly stated. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 18:02, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Of course; I'm not suggesting any changes for inboxes or leads, for which the accepted practice has not shifted. DFlhb (talk) 18:31, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

I do not think the current criteria should be required as not requiring in-line citations exactly. In-line citations are not a "state-of the-art" situation, they are the expected standard across en.wiki, even at lower quality ratings (as mentioned, general references are a relic). GA2c already requires no original research, which is quite hard for a reviewer to verify absent citations. GAC2b doesn't say there is no need to have in-line citations elsewhere, it pulls out specific examples of potentially problematic aspects for which great sourcing care must be taken ("including those for"). The criteria is very useful for its first statement of requiring reliable sources (which is a step above no OR), and the specific situations seem worth noting. If needed, I would support a tweak that clarifies the mentioned examples are things for reviewers to pay special attention to, rather than the only places needing citations (WP:GACN can be tweaked too for emphasis). CMD (talk) 00:22, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

WP:V and WP:OR are clear about the accepted minimum of citations. The GA criteria have a slightly higher standard, but not by much. There's a problem where editors are enforcing their own opinions of what the standards should be in GA reviews rather than the actual GA criteria. WP:RGA is the current guideline on the appropriate way to conduct Good Article reviews. If editors have an issue with current standards at any level, then they should go through the WP:PROPOSAL process to argue in favor of a change. Personally, I like the idea of reworking WP:GACR, WP:GACN, and WP:RGA and merging them into a single guideline page, hopefully with clearer standards for citations and comprehensiveness. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:31, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

"Editors are entrusted with the responsibility of upholding the integrity of Wikipedia while adhering to intellectual property rights, such as avoiding plagiarism, respecting copyright laws, and presenting appropriate citations for article content. Moxy- 16:41, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Would support such a merge (to WP:GANI instead of WP:GACR), as long as it's accompanied by a simplification to fight accumulated WP:CREEP. DFlhb (talk) 16:45, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

WP:GAR is currently following the criteria explicitly as written. This has led to disputes at reassessments such as Electricity. I would support a change in the GA criteria to something requiring one inline citation per paragraph, as a minimum. However, this is likely to run into opposition from editors who insist that the GA process is supposed to be lightweight, and who ignore that A-class as a rating is dead, aside from a couple of WikiProjects. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:31, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

One inline per paragraph at minimum (with exceptions e.g. for the lead) is the standard at DYK. I tend to think GA should be stricter than DYK, but in this case it isn't. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:06, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

@David Eppstein: It's actually been heightened – basically anywhere you can stick a {{cn}} tag now needs to be cited for DYK purposes as of late. See SG?inline citations. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 06:56, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Aha, I see you've seen it. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 06:56, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

I'd also support this change; GA shouldn't be less strict than DYK. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 20:06, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

• As others above have said, WP:GACR references Wikipedia:Verifiability, which says "All material in Wikipedia mainspace, including everything in articles, lists, and captions, must be verifiable." So, yes, everything should be cited, as per the GA criteria. Harrias ^{(he/him) • talk} 19:35, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

  What Harrias said. Otherwise, what have we here? (Answer: indecipherable messes.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:51, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

  That policy doesn't say that everything must be cited, it says that everything must be verifiable. Those are two related but distinct concepts. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:53, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

  • (edit conflict) @Harrias and SandyGeorgia:, DFlhb is suggesting that the GACR be altered to require everything to be cited with inline citations. The current GACR explicitly allow for general references, which are still verifiable, but rather more difficult. (Doug did use inline citations, just extremely badly.)~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:55, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

  (edit conflict × 2) Well, that's "verifiable", not "verified". I SNOW-closed an RfC in October that attempted to change "verifiable" to "verified" (although I noted that there was still room for a more carefully-presented proposal). Something like [[Charles, Prince of Wales]] (later King Charles III) attended the event.<ref>Prince of Wales attends ship's christening</ref> would be an example of a sentence permissibly containing verifiable but unverified information. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 19:58, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

• I would support changing criteria to require one citation per paragraph, which should cover the material within, with exceptions for lede and infobox material which is properly cited in the body. GA should be a thorough review process. I think this should also apply to lists within the prose, but not necessarily captions (for many, this would be needlessly prohibitive). Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 20:53, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

  The precise wording from WP:DYKSG is "All content, excepting leads, plot summaries, and paragraphs which summarize other (cited) content, must be cited, with at minimum at least one cite at the end of every paragraph." My feeling with respect to image captions is that they would in many cases fall under "paragraphs which summarize other (cited) content", but in the cases when they don't they should be cited. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:14, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

  I think changing "paragraphs which summarize" to "content that summarizes" would solve that, and also would cover something like, "Multiple narratives exist: Doe says X and Smith says Y", where that first clause doesn't need a citation because it just summarizes the rest. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 00:14, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  One inline per paragraph is a poor shortcut towards establishing verification, we should not be encouraging it. CMD (talk) 01:18, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  @Tamzin and David Eppstein: I've rewritten that SG: standard practice would be that it doesn't need to be a full paragraph for a citation exemption. Image captions, infobox material, and topic statements can all be exempt as well, circumstantially. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 07:10, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  @Theleekycauldron: Yes, but for DYK purposes the part about every paragraph needing a citation really means that you're not allowed to just slap a single citation at the end of a multi-paragraph section (or the end of a whole article) and call it done. If you want to show that the same source verifies multiple paragraphs, you have to make that more explicit by repeating the same footnote at the end of each paragraph. Your "clarification" misses that point. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:23, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  @David Eppstein: I think it's pretty standard practice on Wikipedia these days that content isn't "cited inline" if the citation doesn't appear in that paragraph – spelling that out seems rather redundant, but I'm happy to humour you. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 07:25, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  Thanks. I think part the point of these rules is to spell out explicitly what is "standard practice" rather than hoping that nominators and reviewers will do it without being told. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:32, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  Your edit removes the exemption for plot summaries; I think that specific exemption should be restored. DFlhb (talk) 08:33, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  oy va voy, yeah, good call – done. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 08:52, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

• I think we should probably be emulating the rule at SG?inline citations – the idea behind it is that anything you could otherwise slap a {{cn}} tag on (general refs not withstanding) needs to be cited. Everything in a GA should either be cited, BLUESKY, or a summary of cited content elsewhere in the article. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 07:10, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  I would support something to this effect, if we could find a way to convey it effectively as part of the good article criteria. With that said, I'm still partial to the idea of reworking WP:GACR, WP:GACN, and WP:RGA into a single user-friendly guideline. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 07:26, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  That seems fine as wording, and reflects the existing standard practice (as it does at DYK). Exceptions like the ones mentioned, plot summaries, and image captions can perhaps be in a footnote. CMD (talk) 08:39, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  theleekycauldron, DFlhb, Chipmunkdavis, are we still considering some sort of change like this? As far as GA reforms go, it feels like this is an important one. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 22:51, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

  I mean, my thoughts are on the table; next step is probably a proposal that people can support or oppose. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 22:59, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

  I like leekycauldron's proposal; fully addresses my concerns, and DYKSG is well-phrased. DFlhb (talk) 23:56, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

  To be slightly more specific: I favour DYKSG#2's specific wording, whether or not WP:SCG is appended. Not sure leekycauldron's wording was intended as a wording proposal rather than a clarifying/summarising statement. DFlhb (talk) 00:53, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

  I'm assuming the proposal is to replace 2b with theleekycauldron's wording? It would be good to retain 2b's "science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines" somewhere, since that guideline seems to have a few more exceptions (in addition to plot summaries and the ones mentioned above). Update: Actually, I noticed there's a proposal on the talk page to mark that guideline as historical, and after reading it I don't think retaining it is important. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 00:56, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

  I continue to feel we can move away from the end of paragraph wording, I feel that misleads more than it helps. People know how inline citations work it's not the early 2000s anymore. The first part of SG?inline citations is fine though, no problem adopting a variation on it. CMD (talk) 00:57, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

  Gonna put a specific draft on the table, reflecting your and Olivaw's comments:

  All content, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, is cited inline. All inline citations are from reliable sources, including those for direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counterintuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons—science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines;

  This only prepends, but keeps the current wording intact. I'm not against trimming it. Only a first draft, not a "final" proposal by any stretch; alternatives welcome. DFlhb (talk) 01:06, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

  I'd trim to:

  The article should, in general, be cited inline to reliable sources;^[1]

  1. Inline citations are not required for plot summaries of works that are the subject of the article, and for text that summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article; leads should follow the corresponding guideline. Science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines.

  I like CMD's suggestion to move exceptions to a footnote, and the direct quotations bit seemed redundant with the new wording. Update: After looking at the most recent version of the proposal, I've tried to word the exceptions more precisely. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 01:15, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

  I like the footnote, but we need to say explicitly that it's not just "the article" but "all content in the article" (with exceptions then listed in the footnote). Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:37, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

  Fine by me. DFlhb, if you agree, maybe you could finalize/propose if no one else comments in a day or so. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 09:24, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

  Fine by me too, but would rather someone else propose it, since I have barely any free time. Would be grateful. DFlhb (talk) 15:34, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

  Nitpick: if we use "All content is cited inline to reliable sources^[1]", with exceptions only in the footnote, isn't there a contradiction? Maybe it's just me. Perhaps the way out is to mention something about exceptions in the main text (ala the first draft) and leave the detail to the footnote. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 02:24, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

  Given the exceptions are not GA specific but based on common practice, I wonder if there is a way to outsource it. For example, the exclusions at Wikipedia:When to cite, although we have a high bar for inclusions. CMD (talk) 03:25, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

  How about "All content is cited inline to reliable sources except where nonessential;^[1]"? I was trying to mimic what's in the FACR ("where appropriate"). The footnote might still be useful for clarity. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 04:28, 8 March 2023 (UTC) (No takers, so I'll just go with the version more people seem to agree on.)

Initial proposal, withdrawn 04:46, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Proposal: Change criterion 2b 2b currently states: all inline citations are from reliable sources, including those for direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counterintuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons—science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines; Proposal: Change to: A: All content, except for plot summaries and summaries of cited text, is cited inline to reliable sources;[1] 1. Inline citations are not required for plot summaries of works that are the subject of the article, and for text that summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article; leads should follow the lead citation guideline. Science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines. B: All content, except for plot summaries and summaries of cited text, is cited inline to reliable sources no later than the end of each paragraph;[1] C: No change. If adding an option, please do so below the existing ones. Survey A > B > C. It is difficult to check for OR or copyvio without inline citations, which the status quo requires only for 5 types of statements. So I think either A or B would be an improvement. Between the two, B is more explicit but it might encourage end-of-paragraph overciting, so I prefer A. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 08:30, 8 March 2023 (UTC) Update: Collapsed. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 04:46, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Implementation of proposal 12: include GARs on GAN page

Proposal 12 in the proposal drive was to include GARs on the GAN page. It passed, and I'm starting to look at implementing it. I have a couple of questions, and would like feedback on layout.

• I could scan CAT:GAR, go to the linked talk page, and find a {{GAR/link}} template there, and then use the GARpage parameter to construct e.g. "Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Nakamichi Dragon/1". Will all GARs will be of this form going forward? That is, will any more GAR pages be subpages of the talk page? And would it make more sense to just search for talk page transclusions of GAR/link? I could then add a note to any that are not in CAT:GAR.
• Where do we want to put them? The proposal specified putting them in the subsections by topic, which is easy enough. At the end of each subsection, I assume? Collapsed or not? Should I change the subsections to have two headings: "Computing and engineering nominations", followed by (if there are any) "Computing and engineering GA reassessments"?
• We don't have a {{GARentry}} template as a parallel to GANentry; perhaps it would make sense for someone to create one, to make it easier to change the format and links included whenever we want to without having to edit the bot. I would rather not re-use GANentry as I think those get parsed by other bots. Wugapodes, would adding GARs impact the GA report?
• Sort order will be by creation date of the subpage. No GAs or review counts are needed. Do we need the GAR nominator's name? I don't see why we would. I could probably add the name of the original nominator, or at least the most recent successful nominator, and an indication of whether they've been inactive for longer than N days (I use 21 days for the GAN "inactive editor" note).
• Any other thoughts about formatting?

-- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:04, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

I would put them uncollapsed, with a separate heading. Thank you for your work on implementing these proposals! 17:06, 24 February 2023 (UTC) —Ganesha811 (talk) 17:06, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

GARentry now exists. Here's an example:

Terry Pratchett (talk | history | improve article) – English fantasy author (1948–2015) –

What should the link text say? I went with "improve article" as that's the primary goal of GAR, but "discuss improvements" could work too. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 02:50, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

No point beating about the bush: "discuss reassessment" works fine. The primary goal of GAR is to assess whether previously-certified articles meet the GA criteria. The secondary goals are to see whether the article can be improved to retain the status, and if not, to delist it. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:12, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

While I supported the proposal, I happen to agree with part of CMD's oppose: GANs require a reviewer to pick them up, GARs require a content creator to pick them up. It would be nice if this GAN page listing leads to more "GA saves", which is the priority of the process per the bold text on WP:GAR. The text there is a mirror of the wording on FAR: "the ideal review would address the issues raised and close with no change in status", which is what we should be promoting. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 22:02, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

This needs more comments, as only 2 have opined and we seem to be at an impasse :). Another option I like is "participate in reassessment", albeit it's a bit wordy. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 17:45, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

I dislike "improve article", which suggests what we usually call "edit". Whatever the link is called, it should not be an Easter egg. —Kusma (talk) 19:27, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Sorry I missed this Mike Christie would adding GARs impact the GA report? Probably not. As long as you don't re-use GANentry the bot should ignore it. — Wug·a·po·des 02:42, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Olivaw-Daneel, can you make the same change to {{GAR}} that you did to {{GAN}}, to pick up the short description and write it into {{GAR/link}} when GAR is substed? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:48, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Done. Let me know if it causes a bot or script to crash and I'll revert it (from my quick check I don't think it should break anything). Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 17:32, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. I think that completes the implementation for this, then, unless someone has a suggested change to the formatting/layout. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:48, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Amino acid is listed under physics, but it should be in either biology or chemistry per WP:GA/NS (where it's in both). I tried to see if it was wrongly categorized on article talk, but things look ok there. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 18:28, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

It's in physics because the article history template has it in "natsci", which is a topic level, not a subtopic, so it gets put in the default subtopic for that topic, which is Physics. I've updated the topic to "Biology", and the next time the page updates it should move to the right subtopic section. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:39, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

That may be a common problem given they otherwise work interchangeably. Something we will just have to look out for? (The double listings are another, more minor, problem.) CMD (talk) 18:42, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I think they'll just have to be changed to the subtopic on the article talk page. I don't know of another way to reliably get the subtopic. Not sure what you mean by double listings? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:55, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

The article appearing multiple times in GA lists. I just realised that I thought natsci would default to biology, which means I put it in the wrong place on Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Topic Values/Subtopics. How do you see what the default is? CMD (talk) 02:08, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

I have defaults hard-coded in the bot, since if someone puts a topic in the GAN template the bot has to figure out which subtopic to use. I don't remember where I got them. You can see the list here; I need to update the source code pages, but that part hasn't changed. Search for subtopic_var_dict and you'll see on the right what subtopic gets picked for each keyword on the left. Easy to change if we want to. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:46, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Checking the bolded links, the others were Drama and Music. Sensible changes, we should keep them and update Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Topic Values to reflect at some point. (Might just do it one day as no-one has opposed in the past few months.) CMD (talk) 14:33, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

GAN that might need a look

Dost Mohammad Khan has recently been nominated as a good article, and I don't know where a reviewer is supposed to start with this. I think someone more experienced than myself needs to intervene. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 06:43, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Probably a quick fail- the sheer amount of MOS problems and grammatical errors mean we'd need it copyedited before nomination Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 07:05, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

An exemplary example of history section WP:TMI. Quick-fail feels harsh, but asking a reviewer to look through all of that is a big request. CMD (talk) 07:17, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

I haven't read the article thoroughly, but on a quick look through it does seem as though there are major issues with both criteria 1 and 3. Clearly a good faith nomination, but a even before thinking about the other four criteria I can see a lot of work is needed, so quickfailing does seem appropriate Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 08:27, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

I get that it might seem a bit harsh to quick fail, but prose size is 242 kB (41390 words) which is two and a half times larger than the recommended prose length to consider splitting (see WP:SIZERULE). This in and of itself makes the article far from being passible in this state. Whilst it's a good effort, it's not particularly well written, there's MOS issues throughout (even things as basic as having a space between the punctuation and reference). I'd recommend closing the GAR and opening a PR to discuss how to split the page down. It's far beyond the scope of GAN to split an article of this size. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 13:23, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

At a glance, things like the extremely lengthy accounts of the First Anglo-Afghan War and the Kabul Expedition (1842) could be cut right down to brief summaries of their "Main" articles. But you're right, this sort of verbose length is sufficient cause for a quick fail. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:39, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Easily quickfailable—per QF criteria 1, nominations can be quickfailed if they are a long way from meeting any of the GA criteria, and this is clearly a long way from meeting 3b. The article doesn't need splitting, as most of the information is trivial, it needs someone to take a chainsaw to it. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:36, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

I suspected extensive copyright problems...guess what...huge amounts of plagiarism. I've checked Lee 2019—it's basically a selective copy-paste. Administrator attention will be needed—presumably revision deletion etc. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:48, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Pinging @Premeditated Chaos and Lee Vilenski: who have the tools to do what needs to be done. Lee 2019 is available here if you want to have a look for yourselves. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:50, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

I can do the revdel bit, but you'd need to do something about the copyright before I can do that. I'd suggest a post at Wikipedia:Copyright problems. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 16:09, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, for something this big that's probably the best plan - it can be tackled by experienced copyright editors. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:42, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

I decided to check if there was more copyvios by this user as there was a lot of copying at Dost Mohammad Khan. I found several more and will be filing a case at WP:CCI. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 23:25, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Checking for copyright/plagiarism

Hello, I'm in the middle of my first GA review here and was just wondering what the best way to check for copyright/plagiarism is. I think the article is fine, but I want to make sure. -- Zoo (talk) 00:20, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

@ZooBlazer: Apologies if some of this is elementary, I want it to be useful for less-experienced users as well. I recommend first using Earwig Copyvio Detector for a crude check; this will only catch the most blatant copy-pastes and has the ability to make false positives from websites that mirror Wikipedia, but it's worthwhile to put the few seconds of effort forth in case there is a blatant copyvio. For your GA review, the article looks fine from Earwig perspective, as all hits seem to be incidental phrase similarities, like College Football Playoff National Championship and Florida in the SEC Championship Game. After Earwig, I would spot-check various bits: you can haphazardly select a few of the sources (I usually do 3-10 depending on article size) and check that the source says what the article text that cites it claims, and that it does not Closely Paraphrase the source (unless the source is public domain or another acceptable license, in which case close paraphrasing and outright copying are acceptable with correct attribution). For instance, the source for the text Attendance at Hard Rock Stadium was limited to approximately 20% of normal capacity, is cited to this, which states that Not wanting to let this moment pass them, Raby and Cyrus will be among the 16,000 fans allowed in Hard Rock Stadium, which will be at less than 25% capacity Monday night as the Buckeyes take on the Alabama Crimson Tide. Looks good from a copyvio perspective; you might question if less than 25% and approximately 20% are the same meaning, but it's not an enormous difference between text and source. Then if you check the source for with the official attendance listed as 14,926., found here, there is some difficulty in finding this information, as the website is a live-update, which has a tendency to lose information over time as things change; if such sources are used, an archive should be made. In this case, you might try a reverse search (I did [Alabama football "14,926"]), and find that ESPN and NYT both confirm this number is true. ESPN also reveals that attendance was about 23%, which would make the whole "less than 25% and approximately 20%" basically meaningless as it splits the difference; you might suggest that they change the figure to the more accurate 23% and cite ESPN for both things. Apologies if this was too in-depth, hope it helps, and welcome to GAN reviewing! Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 01:34, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Awesome, thank you for the help! -- Zoo (talk) 02:25, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

When trying to decide which sources to check for copyvio, I do a few random, but I also target a) those sources used the most number of times, and b) those sources used to cite big chunks of text. If you just look for a big chunk of text from one source, and look at that source, you can often get a sense of whether structure is copied, and whether paraphrasing is good. And on a spotcheck, you shouldn't "randomly" manage to overlook the sources most often used. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:24, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

Another thing to note is that if possible, it is good to spotcheck at least one source which Earwig isn't going to be as helpful on, such as a print book (which might be available on archive.org, for instance). In this particular case everything is digital, so that's not as much of a consideration, but it is worth knowing where the automatic tools are most likely to let you down so you can compensate! If you can't get access to a particular print source that you want to spotcheck, I would consider it perfectly okay to ask the nominator to provide you with scans of a reasonable number of pages. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 16:56, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

A GAR that needs a closer

Thomas Johnston (engraver) is one of the WP:DCGAR bunch. I've taken it completely apart and put it all back together again, see Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Thomas Johnston (engraver)/1, Talk:Thomas Johnston (engraver)#Working through this article's refs per the individual GAR, Article's state when I started in February and article's present state. Can someone else please take a look at it and close the GAR? I can't do it because it's a DCGAR and I worked on it too much - COI and all that. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 14:16, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

I left a comment there. I'm leaning towards a keep but would like to hear from those who previously expressed concerns. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:27, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

GA review questions

Hello, I got some beginner questions I would like to ask:

1. What is the next step if an article is placed on hold? I checked WP:GAN/I#HOLD and it only explains how to put an article on hold.
2. What would be the correct next step to a) review the fixes that were made while being on hold and b) fail the review as there was no response by the nominator over at least 7 days. Also, does it fail automatically after 7 days or do I have to do that manually?
3. One of the GA criterias requires to only use reliable sources. I am familiar with using WP:VG/S and WP:RSP to focus on reliable sources. But what would be needed to do if an article is using sources that are not listed on any category (reliable, unreliable, inconclusive discussions)? Is the nominator required to replace them in order to fulfill GA requirements? I am asking this question because I am aware that those lists are not covering every available source.

Thanks in advance! Vestigium Leonis (talk) 12:51, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

When an article is on hold, the nominator is to work with the review to address any concerns. The on hold time is generally 1 week, but may be extended at the reviewer's discretion. Failing has to be done manually, it won't happen automatically. There are many thousands of sources, most are not listed at RSP. That does not mean they are unreliable. If you're unsure about the reliability of the source, you can ask the nominator. You can also review WP:RS and look for indicators a source is reliable (such as an editorial team and editorial policy). For instance, some of my articles use sources like Trains (magazine) or Railway Age. These are reliable sources for train topics, but you won't see them at RSP because they just haven't come up. That doesn't mean they can't be used. Published books are generally reliable, assuming they are not self-published. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 13:27, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

In line with what Trainsandotherthings said, a lot of it is down to the reviewer's discretion. I looked at the two reviews you did, and there are just a few things to note:

• The person that nominated Maid of Sker hasn't edited in a while, so there's a good chance they won't see or respond to the review. You'll probably want to just fail it once the week is up. Then the review can be used as a reference by anyone who wants to improve the article in the future.
• In some cases it's helpful to note what you checked when you mark a criterion as passed. For example, you checked "major aspects" on both of your reviews, but I don't know what major aspects you were looking for. You might note that it had all of the sections you would look for on a video game article (plot, gameplay, development, and reception). This isn't really required or always necessary, but can be helpful to anyone reading the review so it's clear why it passed.
• It's perfectly normal to use sources that aren't listed at WP:RS/P or other source lists, and most articles will likely have sources you've never heard of. Just weigh them against WP:Reliable sources to make sure they qualify as "reliable". It's a lot at first, but you'll get a sense of what's probably a reliable source really quickly.
• Make sure you're looking to see whether the sources actually say what they're supposed to say. You don't have to go through every single one, but check at least a few to make sure they're generally correct. You can also check to make sure no one just copy-and-pasted the source into the article while you're doing this.

With that said, you've done pretty well for your first reviews, and it's also a good sign that you're reaching out for advice. You can always ask here if you have more questions. Another tip is just to read a bunch of completed reviews and see how different reviewers do it. It's great that you're working on reviewing, because we can definitely use more reviewers. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:17, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips. In regards to the criterions, I just followed the template and if something was sufficient, I marked it as passed. I will add some explanatory sentences in the future! I am also looking at doing my first GA nomination and to look at the process from the nominator perspective has been helpful as well. Vestigium Leonis (talk) 16:16, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

RFC on whether citing maps and graphs is original research

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RFC on using maps and charts in Wikipedia articles. Rschen7754 15:19, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Now at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Using maps as sources. —Kusma (talk) 09:41, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Contents vs pseudo-contents on GAN (again)

Briefly, the question is: can we remove the NOTOC from WP:GAN, so that its table of contents becomes usable for navigation, and if we do that, should we also remove the pseudo-table-of-contents near the start of GAN?

In more detail:

• The GAN page currently has a NOTOC directive, and a manually-formatted pseudo-table-of-contents that is neither at the top of the page nor fixed in place. So to go to any individual section you have to scroll to the top of the page, scroll down one page to find this table, and then click on the link, too many steps. For those of us using Vector 2022 (the current default skin), a real table of contents would stay fixed in place in the sidebar making it always accessible.
• Therefore, I suggest removing the NOTOC, allowing the real table of contents to be present. If we're going to do this, it probably also makes sense to remove the pseudo-table-of-contents, because what's the point in having two tables of contents?
• For earlier discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations/Archive 27#NOTOC on GAN. At that discussion, there was some support from User:Caeciliusinhorto-public, but User:Femke suggested waiting for the outcome of Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Rollback of Vector 2022, and then the discussion got buried and archived by a wave of other discussions merged here from other talk pages. The merge has passed, and Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Rollback of Vector 2022 has closed as no-consensus no-rollback, so maybe now we can discuss this again?

—David Eppstein (talk) 00:26, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

No objections from me this time. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 07:14, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

David, can you manually edit the page to be the way you would like it to be, and then self-revert? I think I have no objections but would like to see exactly what you're asking for. I tried removing the NOTOC directive in preview but did not get a table of contents. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:30, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

That was a little tricky because of the way the page is actually built using nested sub-pages as templates, with the NOTOC in more than one place and the pseudo-contents buried two levels deep. But I think I have it back to the same appearance that it had before, if not the same source code organization, in a way that lets you compare the two versions.

• version as it was previously, with pseudo-contents
• version as I would like it, with contents (also removing the top-level "Nominations" header so that the contents expands to its main headers)

—David Eppstein (talk) 16:40, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

That looks fine to me. I take it this is the only change I have to make to the bot version of the page? It looks like you haven't self-reverted your changes to the guideline page; does that mean nothing else is needed? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:43, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

I moved the inclusion of "/guidelines header" from "/guidelines" to the main nomination page, and removed another NOTOC from somewhere in there, but did not otherwise change the "/guideline header" page (because it said there was a bot that used it). The move was necessary in order to be able to see both the old and proposed appearance in the history. If you want the new appearance, that would be the only change to the bot version. If you want the old appearance, we'd have to put "/guidelines header" back into "/guidelines", I guess. In fact, I have done so, in order to make sure your bot updates don't leave us temporarily with a version with no contents at all. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:13, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

I've made the changes to the bot, so the 14:40 EST update should remove the level 1 header and the NOTOC. There are no standing objections to the change and this is the second time you've requested it so I see no reason to wait. If I follow your comment, you can now redo the change to /guidelines, and in a few minutes we'll see if I made the change correctly. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:36, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

I forgot that the bot won't update the page unless there's a change to an article, so I reran it manually and forced the update. Looks like it worked; let me know if there are issues. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:54, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! Looks ok to me, at least. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:00, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

New version with the standard table of contents looks okay to me too Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:40, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

It is functional in Monobook (perhaps less pretty than the old version), so no objections from me for keeping this as the new status quo. —Kusma (talk) 14:51, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Tested on a few browsers. Old browsers like IE don't show the ToC which is how the new theme is meant to work. The official Android app now let's you pull up the ToC full screen from any point on the page, which seems to be an improvement. And the mobile version works like the rest of the site with the Minerva collapsible headers. Looks good, Rjjiii (talk) 07:20, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

I accidentally started a review of my own nomination

Sorry, is there any way to delete my error? I nominated Pachysentis. Mattximus (talk) 17:09, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

@Mattximus: request a deletion of the review page with {{db-G7}}. That will reset things. Imzadi 1979 → 17:13, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

I went ahead and deleted it based on this discussion. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:26, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! Mattximus (talk) 18:58, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Links on the Wikipedia:Good article nominations/Report page

On the report page, the links for each "old nomination" go to the relevant section of the main WP:GAN page. This was fine when the nominations were sorted by date, as the old ones were near the top. After the re-sorting, it has become hard to find the noms without browser ctrl-F. Shouldn't the report page also use {{GANentry}}, just preceded by the symbol (if applicable) and followed by the age of the nom? —Kusma (talk) 08:59, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Pinging Wugapodes, whose bot manages those entries. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:55, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

The next run should use {{GANentry}}. Preview from testing. Let me know if there are any issues. — Wug·a·po·des 22:53, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for doing this so quickly! The "nominators with multiple nominations" bit is the only one where I am not sure if this is an improvement. —Kusma (talk) 19:38, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

It also got copied over to the "oldest unreviewed good article nominations" box on the nominations page, which might need to be cleaned up as well. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:01, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Nominators with multiple noms could be reformatted as a vertical list if the issue is the style rather than the template. I thought oldest unreviewed was an improvement for the same reasons as other entries, but we can format it to link wherever we want if not. — Wug·a·po·des 20:40, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

I support this change. I never found it terribly useful before, but now it just adds to the navigational difficulties caused by the reordered GAN page. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:02, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

indeed, I'm not sure why you'd want to go to the page detailing all of the noms when you have already picked one up. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:48, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Articles via Blogs

Hi, I started a review of the Rhina Aguirre article. Are the sources via the blogs there suitable for a GA? (See review page). Pinging Krisgabwoosh, as the nominator. Regards, BennyOnTheLoose (talk) 09:58, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't think those blogs are acceptable sources, unless the authors are experts in some way, but per footnote 3 at WP:GACR, dead links are not a problem at GA. I would go back to citing the newspaper itself and cut the link. I take it no archive pages of the newspapers themselves can be found? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:07, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, so the actual articles themselves come from reliable sources, but the links are dead. I've still included the dead links, but since there is no WaybackMachine archive, I've used the mirror site as the archive. Is that acceptable? Krisgabwoosh (talk) 18:50, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

There's also the issue that if the blogs are infringing the copyright of the original sources (which it certainly appears they are), that would violate WP:COPYLINK. That means they cannot be used. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 19:04, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Some sites are reliable for some things but not others, but a blog that is not by an expert is not reliable for anything at all, so even without the COPYLINK issue I think the link should be removed -- that's not a reliable source for an archive of newspaper pages. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:39, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

If dead links aren't a problem for GA, I'll go ahead and remove the blogspot link. I'd argue that the second link could reasonably stay, given that—though still a blog—it's a legal reproduction of a government source from a reputable government official (Adolfo Mendoza). Krisgabwoosh (talk) 21:44, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

The US government does not hold copyrights, but that is not true of many other governments. According to Commons:Commons:Copyright rules by territory/Bolivia, in Bolivia the author of a copyrighted work must be a person (Mendoza) but the copyright can be exercised by the government. So "reproduction of a government source" does not automatically make it non-copyright. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:50, 22 March 2023 (UTC)