Wikipedia talk:Good articles/Archive 8

This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia:Good articles. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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As suggested by Gnangarra about a month ago, I have started putting GAs into subcategories, by using templates.

I also divided "Places" in the Geography section between Eastern hemisphere and Western hemisphere. Maurreen 01:06, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi Maurreen,

I don't support this move. It breaks the automatic listing of good articles. This could be fixed, but before we make the change it would be helpful to know the answers to the following questions:

1. What is the purpose of this (given that the articles are already categorized in the list)?
2. Won't this complicate the promotion process?
3. Why aren't the new subcategories part of Category:Wikipedia good articles?

Editing the new templates is also very difficult because one must edit each and every new template.

Cedars 08:43, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

OK, never mind. Maurreen 09:16, 9 July 2006 (UTC) It's not important to me. If you want to change it back, go for it. Maurreen 09:17, 9 July 2006 (UTC) But I wouldn't have done it if anyone had objected when the idea was raised. Maurreen 09:23, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I, in fact, like the modification that has been added to the categorization since it shows that we counter, for some part, the systemic bias by having both of them. I think Maurreen's change is a good one. Lincher 14:02, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I also like the use categories it promotes the good quality articles. Gnangarra 16:51, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. About the subcategories and templates, I don't understand what Cedars means by "It breaks the automatic listing of good articles." In answer to the questions:

1. Putting the articles in subcateogries via templates allows flexibility that the list does not; the list puts each item in only one category. For example, all the biographies can be collected together. Articles on the geography and history of a given region could be collected together. The added flexibility could especially be helpful in work toward a release version.
2. It need not complicate the promotion process. The wiki is always a work in progress. People can still use the general template. If we keep the new templates and subcategories, the people who choose to use them can do so, and the people who don't want to don't need to. I or someone else could come along later and put them on, or not.
3. The new subcategories are part of Category:Wikipedia good articles. But because they are named "Wikipedia good articles on foobar," you need to go do the "W" section to see them. Maurreen 17:11, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I still don't support this move it complicates making a minor change to the GA template and adds more templates to a project that has already been criticised for having too many. However provided all articles are still added to the Category:Wikipedia good articles it should be less of a problem. Cedars 10:47, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Do you mean that you think the articles should be listed individually in Category:Wikipedia good articles even if they are in a subcategory? Maurreen 11:18, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it ensures there is an alphabetical list of good articles. Cedars 00:25, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

FYI - I created a discussion on the FA Talk about making their page look similar to the GA page. I think this page looks great and would like to duplicate it over there for uniformity and such. Your thought might be helpful in that discussion as many seem to dislike the collapsible menus and sub-categories. Since you've been working with both for a while, I thought your insight would be valuable. Thanks Morphh 20:11, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand what GA page their talking about since they seem to be referring to one that is "utterly un=navigable", but it's really up to them :/. Homestarmy 20:17, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

If anything I wish we'd get rid of the GA system, everytime I load the page I have to wait about 5 seconds for all of the things to open and collapse. It's really annoying. --SeizureDog 02:29, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree the current format was a nice touch when the GA was started but as it get bigger its getting harder to navigate, I wouldnt like to push this on to FA they dislike GA enough now Gnangarra 02:42, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

In response to dicussions on the FA talk page here and on the GA talk page here. As well as the discussion on this page together with other discussion taking place on the FA and GA talk pages and talk pages of associated articles. I propose that this page Standardised formats for FA and GA become the only forum where consensus be developed for standard page and template formats for both WP:FA and WP:GA.

Featured articles and featured lists make available information on when the items were promoted so people can compare with the approved version and see whether it has deteriorated. This is done both with logs and through Template:Featured and Template:FL. I think it would be good to also be able to easily find out when GAs were approved. Maurreen 06:59, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

• I agree; a link to the version which was promoted would answer a lot of concerns about the reliability of this process. -- nae'blis _(talk) 22:45, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure how to do it to the template. Maurreen 04:07, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Rick Block set it up. Maurreen 22:25, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

I also think this is a good idea. Cedars 08:46, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you. Maurreen 14:09, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

To indicate the reviewed version of a Good Article, use {{GA|oldid=nnnnnn}} on the talk page (replacing nnnnn with the id number of the reviewed version) rather than just {{GA}}. Maurreen 22:25, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Just to let you know, the GA template (which adds a star to the corner of articles like the FA system), which was deleted a few months ago before the project was established, has come up for Deletion Review, should you want to support or oppose it's re-creation. --GW_Simulations_{|User Page | Talk | Contribs | E-mail} 11:04, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I can't seem to see the listing.... Homestarmy 17:30, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

The discussion is now closed; see the final decision by Xoloz or the last version of the review (do not edit!). The template stayed deleted. -- nae'blis _(talk) 18:52, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Aww, I wanted to vote :(. Homestarmy 18:55, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

For the record, what this means is that there actually is a consensus against adding a star or another mark to the corner of good articles. — mark ✎ 10:41, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Featured Articles and Good Articles are both Wikipedia processes to recognize quality articles. I created a proposal for greater co-ordination and integration between the two processes, so that both processes will be more successful in their aim of recognizing quality articles. Please read and participate in the discussion on the village pump. Thanks. --J.L.W.S. The Special One 13:48, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Would it be possible to rewrite this page so that it patched subpages of content into it for each of the subjects? eg. Wikipedia:Good articles/Art, architecture and archaeology/Architecture. This would specifically enable Portal:Architecture (or anyone else) to provide a box on it's page that would be automatically updated whenever Good articles are added to the list here (I think by using {{Wikipedia:Good articles/Art, architecture and archaeology/Architecture}})? Currently we are duplicating the information on this page and have to maintain the portal to make sure it is current and correct - seems like an easier and error free way of doing it.--Mcginnly | Natter 00:23, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

You could use a template, like Template:GA-bio people. Maurreen 09:49, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Actually, we have tried a method using subpages in the past. I continue to manually synch Wikipedia:Good articles/Trains for transclusion on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Trains page. Slambo (Speak) 13:03, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Why was the subpage idea abandoned?--Mcginnly | Natter 01:43, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps those who were involved in the redesign could chime in here? I think subpages could still work through transclusion even with the collapsing headers as we've got them. Slambo (Speak) 15:58, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

It is easier for the script that updates the list to have all content on one page. I still submit the updates manually using "Edit this page" so having two dozen subpages would be a heavier burden for me to update. Cedars 07:00, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Are there any immediate plans to change the way this is done?--Mcginnly | Natter 15:43, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't really think this will help ... it will slow down the categorizing, the bot operation, the count updates meaning that multiple pages will have to be updated. Too much hassle for this to happen, KISS for this project. Lincher 17:14, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Dang, as it does put burden on the project coordinators to keep manually updating. I do wish there was a way to transclude, oh well. plange 00:07, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you, if bots would be easy to create and would do a the cruft associated with reviewing then it would be easy to implement these changes (which I normally see in good light) but it is a PITA (pain in the butt) to try to do everything manually (it also comes with MediaWiki which doesn't update too fast ... thanks to BRION for the work put in). Lincher 03:04, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I guess I'm not understanding what you have to do manually to this page? I'm not being facetious, I really don't know. Hence my puzzlement. Are you referring to when us as reviewers come here to add GAs we passed? plange 03:07, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes it's what I'm refering to. As of now, it isn't too much of a job to do to add articles in the right unwinding menu but if subpages are created as this idea refers to, then the amount of work will be increasing. Lincher 14:52, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Don't see how as you could include the little edit link right above the transcluded page and the user would be one click away just like they are now...plange 15:05, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

The difference is that the page is already loaded altough if we do what is intended, then if you make a mistake choosing the right section/subpage you have to load multiple pages which loads the server and may render doing stuff longer. Ever tried to open a page and there is an error on the server, if the page is already loaded as it is now, it is much faster for the editing. Lincher 16:32, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

So from what I can gather the situation is this:- 1. For the people who update the GA page it is much easier to have it on one page. 2. For the people who run portals & wikiprojects etc. it's much harder to have the GA page as one page.

As there are more people updating wikiprojects and portals it seems logical that there would be less total work for the community as a whole to do, if the GA page had subsections that could be transcluded. I appreciate there would be more work for the editors of the GA page, but appeal to your community spirit to make such changes.--Mcginnly | Natter 12:01, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

In any event, I'm still not getting, why:-

Would someone explain? --Mcginnly | Natter 11:47, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

It might be a good idea to create a version of this page which doesn't rely so heavily on JavaScript, since 5% of people have it disabled! EVOCATIVEINTRIGUE TALKTOME | EMAILME | IMPROVEME 14:01, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Maybe including a non-JS link to the transcluded subpage, alongside the JS link? -- nae'blis 15:12, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Actually, scratch that: I tried again in Opera and they expand if the user hasn't got JS on, so there's no problem. EVOCATIVEINTRIGUE TALKTOME | EMAILME | IMPROVEME 16:46, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Hooray for graceful failure! -- nae'blis 19:57, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I don'T get the great failure here ... if people try it, then it can be implemented. I have started to add the page version to the articles.

In addition, it would be nice to have all the GA tags (FailedGA, GA, DelistGA) show the date and the reviewed version in question to make it easier to go back to the original reviewed version. Lincher 03:07, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

The phrase "animals and organisms" is odd. All animals are organisms. Perhaps it could be renamed just "organisms"? Even better would be "taxa", but that might be a bit technical. (And on a technical note, viruses are taxa, but might not be organisms.) --Stemonitis 08:25, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

The usage of "organisms" is much more appropriate. I agree with you that this should be renamed. --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 17:55, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Recently, Lou Graham (Seattle madame) was reviewed and rejected to be a Good Article. I don't necessarily object to the conclusion, but the reviewer's remarks leave me wondering: did the reviewer actually read the article? It's not terribly long. If anything, I would say its main problem is that it is too short, and there should be a lot more archival research.

Please see Talk:Lou Graham (Seattle_madame)#GA_failed for the details, but just to give a taste, the reviewer asks, as if the article doesn't say anything about it, "Did her business flourish? Did she have success?" The article says (among other things) that she "[became] a wealthy landowner, one of the largest landholders in the Pacific Northwest. She owned one of the Seattle's great mansions…and 'contributed liberally' to projects sponsored by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce"; how much clearer can it be that she was a success in business? - Jmabel | Talk 06:16, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not appealing this; again, I think the article needs more material. But, still, I worry about a review process that can miss something like that (and several other similar items) in an article of only ten paragraphs. - Jmabel | Talk 06:18, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

For your information ... I don't read the lead section as it should be a summary of the article so it only left 1 paragraph to read. After reading it I was puzzled by the lack of information I could find in that paragraph. My concern as of now is that the article isn't structured like it should have been. The lead section is too long and there are missing paragraph. Sorry if this seemed to be a weird way of assessing the article but this is my way and if you disagree then find another reviewer for this as I try to give constructive comments maybe they were just misdirected have I had read the lead section. Lincher 14:48, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I have now reorganized the article according to your suggestions. Frankly, I think that as a piece of prose it suffers from this. In any case, I'm not really convinced that it reaches GA status myself (it was my article, but someone else's suggestion to nominate it for GA); I'm not sure that I agree at all that an article this short really gains by sectioning. - Jmabel | Talk 02:11, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you with the idea of sectionning but when creating a fast entry list on artists or subjects, it is nice to have the lead section as a wrap up of the article rather than the long prose given in the article. It can also serve in Lupin's popups as it only shows the lead section. Lincher 03:52, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Featured articles have their little star in the upper right hand corner of the screen ({{featured article}}). Would it be possible to do the same thing for good articles? I see no reason why not and people would easily be able to tell that the article is a good article without going to the talk page of the article Thoughts?--NMajdan•talk 13:11, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunently, some administrators are on a sort of crusade against something called "Meta-data", which those little star things represent. If truth be told, Meta-data corrupts the database, increases load times by 50 bazillion percent, makes articles look like cartoons, creates computer viruses, creates real life viruses, and makes your hair fall out. However, these symptoms are highly speculative :D.

Ok, in all seriousness, there are some people who don't like "Meta-data", it's just I find their reasons ridiculous. The point is, we can't have the GA stamp at the top of articles. Homestarmy 13:38, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

So you're saying its more than just a template on the article itself?--NMajdan•talk 13:41, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

physically its no more than that, this topic frequently appears but attepmts to introduce it draw a sufficient response to prevent its use. Gnangarra 14:23, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I see that. I went poking around and found some of the discussion.--NMajdan•talk 14:29, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Another answer to this question... my sense is that the real reason that "they" won't allow such an icon is that they believe only "featured articles" should be noted; "they" don't have enough respect for the "good articles" program. Outriggr 00:31, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that we know. And for that matter, the GA project has to find a solid ground to work off of, which means having like 3k articles to compare newly nominated GA candidates. The project also needs to have clearly defined criteria for article candidates and in that sense, help, as the FA process is doing, in peer reviewing the article in a way to improving and not only give a pat in the back GA status award like some nominations get (e. g. Keane, Ottawa or Edinburgh). Lincher 02:10, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Do we need the show/hide template here? I want to be able to skim the categories for articles I might be interested in reading, like at WP:FA, without clicking two dozen "show" links. I don't mind on pages with just a few such templates, but to me it degrades how easy it should be to browse this page. Alternatively, is there a way I can set "by default, always show" in my preferences? TransUtopian 15:14, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

It occurred to me after I submitted the above, that this page might have archived discussions too. Found the relevant one in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Good_articles/Archive_3. I guess there's consensus if it's been here with little discussion since March, and my question is then more about how I can set every such template to always show by default. If no one here knows, I'll ask in Village Pump: Technical. TransUtopian 15:19, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I, for one, like this current style because it is easier for the addition of articles to the GA page and it prevents from going through lots of page screen before viewing something I want. I only open the tab that interests me and then I do what I have to do. It is something that saves from scrolling the whole page and loosing time in that. Lincher 16:29, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Myself and TheGrappler put the current look together when the GA page was merely a baby. I'd always hoped to come back to the show hide thing but didn't have the technical know how but worse no time to read up on it.

The code that adds the show hide functionality lives in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monobook.js and as you can see it is marked as experimental (I think it was borrowed from the German wiki). If you want your own personal preference to override the page behaviour, add this to your personal monobook.js:

NavigationBarShowDefault = 28;

(the number is the amount of sections on a page before they all get shown by default)

This will have the side effect of showing all show/hide sections across the site. It would seem to me that a bit of Javascript could limit this to just the GA page to get rid of this side effect - but I never got round to getting this working. I did ask the god of popups Lupin for advise but shame on me - never got round to taking it further.

It seems to me that if GA becomes more accepted code could be introduced specifically for it in the way that it currently exists for FA. An idea might be to have a show/hide ALL button for the GA page - maybe if FA had the same look there would be more chance of that being done by someone, but I know from reading opinions that many FA people don't like change and certainly don't like this look. I do not like the FA look and my hope with the work on GA was at least to highlight to the FA editors that there can be other ways of doing things even if it isn't the way we have chosen. Regards. SeanMack 22:55, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Thank you very much SeanMack! Both for posting here and for giving me a heads up on my talk page. I added it to my monobook.js and it works! I prefer to see everything in all show/hide templates so that's perfect. Is there the possibility of altenate skins/pages/templates for FA like there are for the main page, so people can have the show/hide option for it if they want? TransUtopian 23:43, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm sure a skin would be doable to provide a button to show hide all, from the skins I have already seen, but it's outside what I have the time for at the minute. It would be cool if you could get a skin writer interested in GA though. As for FA I'm not so sure - I don't have the technical wiki knowledge unfortunately. All the best. SeanMack 23:49, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

There's been some discussion on Talk:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Primary and Secondary Phases as to whether or not I should have asked for GA status for a list of episodes. My argument is essentially "Why not?" There's not a GA equivalent to "Good List" (i.e. a list that may or may not be on its way to Wikipedia:Featured lists status). If there are no objections, I'd like to relist the article as a GA nominee, and ask that instead of using strictly "Good Article/Featured Article" criteria, that a modification of the Featured List criteria be used instead. There are currently six lists of TELEVISION episodes as Featured Lists, but not ONE Radio Series episode list.... --JohnDBuell 16:33, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

You know, reading over the GL requirements again, carefully, I might be barking up the wrong tree with my pair of articles, since they are NOT lists of links. But it may still be a good idea eventually to have a "Good Lists" program to parallel "Good Articles." Just a thought. --JohnDBuell 23:05, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

In several of the different categories on the GA page, names of people are listed in different manners. Under Music, people are: First name Last name and alphabatised by first name. Under Media, people are listed as: Last name, First name and alphabatised by last name. I suggest that these be made uniform by choosing one style. There is a third option of course: First name Last name, alphabatised by last name. I suggest the Third. What do you think? --The Talking Sock talk contribs 20:07, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

The third can't be automated. The benefits to the project of automation are very significant so I would strongly oppose the third. I don't mind the current system where the decision is made on a section-by-section basis. In mathematics, the surname is generally remembered better than the first name where as in music, people generally remember both names in order. However I wouldn't mind a first name first system either. Cedars 11:26, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Who came up with the idea of splitting this into "Eastern" and "Western" hemispheres? More importantly, why is Norfolk, in the UK and east of the Grenwich Meridian, considered "Western", while Bristol, in the UK and west of the Grenwich Meridian, considered "Eastern"? I suggest instead having "Europe", "North America" and "Rest of World" sections. Joe D (t) 15:29, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Maybe "Europe", "Americas", "Asia and Oceania" and "Africa" would be more appropriate. Still I like the idea of moving away from the Eastern/Western hemispheres. Cedars 00:49, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

As per subject; I love this format of the subsections, so artilcles can easily be accessed through a kind of indexing system. From it I created Template:Christ, I suppose that this format will become the standard for new templates everywhere. Full credit to you, whoever you are. A J Hay 01:32, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

I've noticed that there a bunch of video game characters that are in both the Media and the Sport and Games sections. Does this mess up the count? I'm thinking that they should only be in one or the other, and it's not completely consistant at the moment besides. If they should only be in one section, what do you guys think? Media or Sport/Games? Note: it's even more complicated for some- Final Fantasy VII characters are in the game as well as the movie. --PresN 02:01, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I just went through and deleted the duplicates from the media section, as all of the ones there were in the Games section, but not all of the characters in the games section were in the media section. It was 15 articles, and the count has been adjusted accordingly. --PresN 18:53, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Please support bug 4288 which is an enhancement that allows general tagging of revisions. This will allow user and group defined tags which can then be used for things like this project and possibly other stuff in the future. Thanks. --Gbleem 23:22, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

I propose we automatically allow for delisting any article which shows no signs of having gone through the process, i've delisted and/or commented on a good amount of articles already which apparently were never reviewed or commented on even once for Good Article status, and it's slowing me down, because I give comments to articles even though they've never even been through the system. If we could just delist them immedietly without so much as a how-do-you-do, we could sweep the list faster and stop template-stampers far more effectively, because alot of articles i've come across just got stamped and left, exactly what the GA system should not be about. However, delisting shouldn't be mandatory, many old articles were here before the review system, it should be up to the sweeper to decide if an article ultimately meets the standards, but the sweeper shouldn't be obligated to do a thorough review for articles which have snuck their way through the system is what i'm after here. Homestarmy 18:54, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

• I oppose that, as you know. Nobody should be "sweeping". In my book, that's akin to disrupting Wikipedia to prove a point (your point being that the reviews are too lax). But my own opinions aside, it's obvious that nobody should be removing GA status without comment. One of the main requirements of delisting a GA is stating why it failed. Kafziel 19:00, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

• Uh, if we don't sweep the list, the tons of articles which have not even been reviewed at all will just sit there, and then this really will just be a pat-on-the-back stamp project, which would have little to no purpose. Homestarmy 19:04, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
• Perhaps I should be more clear on what I mean. I propose we not have to explain delisting articles which have not even been reviewed, period. Even articles which have had just one person saying "This is a Good Article" still count as being reviewed in my book, but every other article i've been seeing today wasn't even reviewed at all, or if it had, there's no way an editor would be able to figure that out easily. So as far as I can tell the GA stamp was just put up there, they were never sent through nominations mostly, and most of the articles were not even close to the lowest of standards, much less a Good Article. Homestarmy 19:06, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

• So far as you can tell? What does that mean? There's absolutely no way to tell how much work a reviewer put into his decision. If you don't agree with the quality of others' reviews, you can delist the articles. But stating your reasons for doing so is absolutely required, no matter how crappy you think the article is. And if the reasons aren't valid (like nonspecific claims of "too few refs") then your removal can be overturned. The same way a simple "oppose" is not acceptable at FAC, your input is required for every failure and delisting so other editors have the chance to fix any valid objections. Kafziel 19:13, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

• Sure there's a way to figure out how much work a reviewer has put into their decision, if nobody has obeyed the very explicitly layed out instructions on how to review articles, and it has never even apparently been on the candidate page in the first place, then it is most likely it wasn't even reviewed at all, and the page was just stamped as a GA. I don't care how lousy a person's review is, if they've reviewed it, people should comment on delisting, but if nobody has even given a sign that they've reviewed it, I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially for some of the articles i've delisted today. Take a good look at Grid computing if you want, and please point out to me where exactly this article was reviewed, because I sure don't know how it got onto the list in the first place. Quality of reviews is no issue here, the issue is that no review seems to of happened at all, period, as in no consideration for any sort of standard was even contemplated when someone stamped these types of articles. Homestarmy 19:20, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

• Since you issued the challenge, grid computing was listed 11 March 2006, then reviewed and passed 19 March. The GAC page at the time said nothing about leaving reasons for passing an article; this was promoted within process. Gimmetrow 12:49, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

• There wasn't always a process. "Good Articles" was created months before "Good Article Candidates". People could simply list articles they felt met the criteria. And the early concept of GAC was that articles you think meet the standards could be listed and if nobody objected within 24 hours, they became Good Articles. The process has changed as the number of nominees has grown, but that doesn't imply bad faith on the part of editors who either passed articles at the beginning of the project or who chose to go by the original rules after GAC became what it is today. Kafziel 19:35, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

• I was choosing articles compleatly at random today, and I saw maybe 3 of out of 12 or so were reviewed, and one review was from December of 2005, which didn't have any comment, but was by the editor who founded the whole project. We haven't had the review process for that short of a time that such an increadibly small amount of articles actually get reviewed. Homestarmy 21:14, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

I did a mini-sweep about a month ago and I delisted nearly 50(!) articles. I compared with the current standard and left a message on all talk pages. All the delisted articles were promoted during the slap-on-the-template days. Recently I took a look at the reaction of those delistings. Most have ignored the delisting (either no active editors or just quietly continued to work on the article), one nominated without any changes (and failed), and one really worked on the article and got GA after nomination. RelHistBuff 10:46, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

It's really very easy to see if it was reviewed- did the person who stuck on the tag say anything about it at all, or did it just appear? There's nothing wrong with delisting articles that never went through GAC, there isn't a "grandfather clause" for articles that came in before GAC existed. --PresN 16:44, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Kafziel's point has not been addressed. The folks who started "Good Articles" did not have a formal process for review initially. Review was informal, and rarely logged. You cannot arbitrarily remove articles automatically because you don't like the review process; when they were admitted they most likely did pass the review process then in place. You can, however, propose articles for removal because they don't meet the current standards. Briangotts (Talk) (Contrib) 16:51, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

My argument wasn't to have permission to remove the articles arbitrarily, we already have that, my proposel was to allow us to just basically speey delist articles which don't even appear like anybody gave any effort. I don't see how there can be so many old-school articles listed that about 12 out of 15 articles I delisted yesterday had no sign of being reviwed at all. Homestarmy 17:03, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

If you want to remove an article because it does not meet the criteria, that's fine. You can't remove them simply because you don't approve of the reviewer's methods. In that case, you just need to assume good faith. And no, there's no basis for "speedy" delisting articles. We all need to provide specific reasons for failing or delisting articles, no matter how bad they are. Kafziel 17:08, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

I haven't checked every article that Homestarmy has delisted, but the couple I looked at he did give reasons for why it was, i.e. the criteria that they were failing. If he's doing that on all of them, then he's technicaly removing them for not qualifying as GA's, rather than the reviewing method (or lack thereof). --PresN 18:55, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, he is currently. He was asking not to have to do that. Kafziel 19:03, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

You just had to be there, some of these articles were just abysmal, even by the low standards of the project when it began, I don't know who'd pass some of them. I mean one of them was just a block of text and a picture, no sections, no lead. Homestarmy 19:05, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

How can the number of GAs actually go down? 81.107.36.208 03:32, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

a number of ways one is delisting, another is when an article is promoted to FA it taken off the GA list Gnangarra 04:32, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Sure, I was just amazed to see it happen to about a dozen articles over night... 81.107.36.208 02:43, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

One editor also found an instance where the GAAuto bot was double adding a few articles. Homestarmy 03:16, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

That explains it. 81.107.36.208 03:42, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

After a few lengthy discussions the other day on GAC I had thought that about how to make this more worthwhile wiki-wide. What if Good Articles become "A and B class articles" and was officially married to the assessment scale, an idea which has merit but doesn't appear particularly active. Presently it lists:

• FA
• A
• GA (B+?)
• B
• Start
• Stub

This is heavy at the top. What especially doesn't make sense is that GA's criteria are so close to FA (I've said enough about that already) but technically it's third rank after FA and A (FA, very very close to FA, and very close to FA?). And, to take that further, we're devoting a lot of work in the FA process to the gold (which makes sense) and the next largest workload to the bronze (which doesn't). So:

• FA
• A (included in present GA system)
• B (ditto)
• C (the refuse would wind up here)
• Start
• Stub

Nothing much would have to change here, except nominators would have two choices: nominate as A or B. A reviewer could: Pass an A, "half-pass" an A as B, pass a B as a B, or fail a B as a C. Everything transcluded at {{A-Class}} could be grandfathered into the list. Marskell 13:05, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

I think A-Class should be interpreted as the designation Danny aspires to in WP:100K; FA-quality but not actually featured. The problem with FA (and to a lesser extent GA) is that they require a centralised process - which is slow. On the other hand the 1.0 assessment scale is distributed so it can scale a lot more effectively.--Nilfanion (talk) 13:29, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

My concern is diversion/duplication. I agree with you that speed = scaleability, but if you have people working from same page, a slight decrease in speed can be overcome be greater manpower. And note the above is only suggestive; if, to be passed an "A", the criteria is "FA-quality but not actually featured", fair enough (although there's something of contradiction—part of the point of FAC is that one person alone cannot judge what is FA quality). Marskell 13:42, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Not sure exactly what you are suggesting, but AFAIC GA is "A and upper B class articles which have been given a pretty badge". FA articles are A+ articles (i.e. brilliant, professional quality) which have been given a pretty badge (and a rather more thorough peer review). --kingboyk 13:53, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm suggesting making the assessment across ranges, avoiding top level duplication, and admitting and allowing for the things getting listed that are merely "B." When you say "A and upper B class articles which have been given a pretty badge" you're speaking about an ideal not a practice—or do you honestly think near all the GAs conform to that standard as explained on the assessment scale? Is Amanda Dowler "A or upper B"? It was made a GA three days ago with an insufficient lead, an insufficient TOC, and a grand total of 9k.

What I'm afraid of, however, is that people like the pretty badge so much this process is resistant to critique or calculated redirection. Marskell 14:07, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

In principle, I agree with Marskell's proposition. The "GA" status seems shoehorned into the WP 1.0 assessment scale, creating a redundant level. Either an article is really good on all accounts (which makes it fit for both A-class and GA), or not. And if an article is really as excellent as an FA should be, it should go straight to FAC - if it is really excellent enough to be an FA, it will pass, and if it fails, it is clearly NOT excellent enough.

GA process is rather quick, but the GA criteria are rather strict, and I believe at that point of the quality scale even a one-person external review is very beneficial to ensure everything is up to snuff. So, I believe that GA should be equivalent to A-Class on the quality scale (not to say that the GA tag is a requirement for the A-Class status or the other way around), to make things clearer. Bravada, talk - 15:59, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Seems to me that there are too many classes there. When someone is making brake linings or bottles of Pepsi, or cans of paint, or radar systems for F-18 fighters, the quality control people have two choices: either the product ships, or it doesn't. When a salesman tries to put you in a new 2007 Gadabout Roadster, he doesn't get paid half-commission for almost making a sale. If you haven't read at least one of Phil Crosby's books, you oughta take a break and do it right now because that's what we're talking about - quality control - and the reason he sold so many books is because he made the point that either a product measures up, or else it doesn't. A product with more features doesn't have better quality; quality is just a matter of meeting specifications. If a widget needs to be between 0.9 and 1.1 inches, you're wasting money trying to ensure that it's between 0.99 and 1.01 inches. And if you're shipping widgets that are 0.88 inches, you're wasting your fleet, because they're just going to come right back.

We don't need forty-leven categories. Either an article is satisfactory or it's not. If an article violates the NPOV/NOR/V content policies, if the writing is not clear and understandable, if the article is incomplete, or it contains illegal content, it's NUTS - Not Up To Snuff. If it meets Wikipedia standards, then it's a Good Article.

There will be articles that stand out, pieces of art, with writing that sparkles, and illustrations that really hit the mark. Those get the FA stamp of approval.

But there's a tendency to impose a minimum length on GAs. "It's a stub", people say - but that's not what a stub is. A stub is a too-short version of an article that ought to be longer. If a subject can be covered well in one paragraph, then it ought to be covered well in one paragraph, and labeled as a journeyman-grade, meets-the-specifications, Good Article.

But all this A-grade, B-grade, C-grade, D-minus, stuff is counterproductive. If an article doesn't meet Wikipedia standards, why should the creators be rewarded for a half-fast effort? If an article is satisfactory, why should it be denied recognition, simply because it's a small bite? Web pages stretch. ClairSamoht - Help make Wikipedia the most authoritative source of information in the world 16:54, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Coming from the assessment side of things, rather than the GA side: utterly unacceptable idea. The reason the GA level seems shoehorned into the scale is because it was shoehorned after people started using a mindless GA tag → A-Class assessment approach. The entire point of the assessment system is that it is run by the WikiProjects themselves, rather than hanging off a central process (especially one with a less-than-stellar track record). A number of projects (notably WP:TROP and WP:MILHIST, but I suspect there are others) already have a more rigorous system of reviewing potential A-Class articles than the GA setup provides; to collapse the two levels would eliminate that distinction, and prevent the projects from actually assessing articles properly on their own. Better to remove the GA "level" from the scale and have it be an entirely unrelated system. Kirill Lokshin 17:06, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

While your points on the Wikiprojects are well taken the conclusion is odd: "Better to remove the GA "level"...and have it be an entirely unrelated system." Why?! Wikipedia is one unitary process. Parallel means of assessment for the same subjects are never a good thing (do you show up if the HR manager gives you the job but the Office Manager says no?). And I've been told repeatedly that this is an assessment process, not an improvement drive.

And this is what I find so difficult here—a total resistance to marrying this to other projects. This won't be married to FA (say as a featured article drive), nor even have its criteria properly distinguished from that process; should not become a means of identifying good short articles; should not be actually thrown open further as a mass-tag drive; should not be linked to other assessment systems.

So what the hell is it for? Marskell 17:19, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Identifying the many, many articles in Wikipedia which are good, but are not exceptional like an FA should be. Homestarmy 17:52, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Right. Or a less stressful way of getting some recognition than going through an FAC. And, AFAIC, a decent bridge between B class and FA, not that GA was designed with WP1 in mind nor are the two projects important to each other. --kingboyk 17:57, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

To repeat, rephrased: if it is identifying anything contrary to, or out of sync with, other identification processes it needs repair/marrying. "A decent bridge between B class and FA"—that was, actually, what I was thinking with the initial thread. Formalizing that should be a goal (not by making it lengthier, but simply re-targetting its instructions). Kirill raises a dilemma with the projects, but this is not insurmountable; if MilHist has the best means of identifying "A", copy it here. "But that will take up time"—having Homestarmy removing dozens at once because the process is leaky, takes up time too (I noticed today in the history).

I don't know. I just have this sneaking suspicion the congratulation/recognition bit is the real (misplaced) driver here, and that people are happy to keep the process in a vacuum if they can hand out green targets. Marskell 18:15, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Meh. The GA system was developed because some people felt that FAC was too difficult; the obvious result is that it's significantly more forgiving of faults in articles. This means it won't be taken seriously as an intermediate level between FA and B, however, because passing a GA review reveals very little about how well an article would fare at FAC (due to the laxity of the standards and the rapid pace of the reviews). If the system were to be recrafted to follow the A-Class reviews used by some WikiProjects, it would essentially become FAC "lite"—particularly as the entire one-reviewer-pass system would need to be removed—and thus suffer from the same issues of scale that would make it more efficient to decentralize it through the WikiProjects anyways (not to mention becoming thoroughly unsatisfying to the people who wanted a laxer system in the first place). Kirill Lokshin 18:31, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. As Kirill says, this would be unacceptable for some projects; WP:TROP has an extensive checklist to determine which articles should be A-Class and which ones stay at GA. We have an assessment subpage, similar to the "FAC lite" Kirill refers to. For us, A-Class means ready for FAC, so GA cannot provide that analysis; however, articles which wouldn't pass GA are left as Bs. Titoxd^(?!?) 18:35, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

OK, I take the point about project standards likely not being replicable here, but the rest of it's more befuddling logic to me. We want to keep this process lax because we need a lax process. In fact, it's forgiving to the point that marrying it to FA is impossible and it won't be taken seriously as an assessment scale. So, square one. What purpose does it serve? Somebody now tells me "to identify things that are good but not FA" and then I re-post my second last, question unanswered, and so on. Marskell 18:54, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Quite honestly, I have no idea; I didn't agree with the creation of this process—and the rampant shoehorning of it everywhere else—to begin with. Some people, however, seem to feel that we need a lax process; I've never understood their arguments either. Kirill Lokshin 18:58, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

The problem, I think, lies with the fact that A-class is determined by the projects, and to my knowledge is only routinely formally assessed by a total of two projects (WP:TROP and WP:MILHIST), while the other 104 projects have no real idea what to do with it. Stub, Start, and B-class is easy, GA and FA are easy (you ship it off to the black box, and either you get it or you don't), but A-class? Even a large project like WP:CVG hasn't really discussed it, and just uses GA for anything above B. Nifboy 19:41, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

The entire assessment system isn't that old, though; I suspect that, now that we have several working examples, the larger WikiProject may start adopting more formal review systems. Kirill Lokshin 19:51, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

(To Nifboy after conflict)

Only a 104? I actually thought more—the rash of idle projects is a topic in itself.

Again, the A-class thing was only suggestive. In fact, that only two projects use it might be a boon: see what they do, and try to make something scaleable project-wide. That's much easier to do if there isn't fifty different systems. Per recent "top-level" comments of 100k "feature quality" articles as a goal, some quicker process may be needed—but GA as it is isn't it, as the input procedure is too diffuse. Re ease, I'm not quite sure I understand how "A" on a project is easier than FA. You don't ship it off and get it or not; you ship it off and then pick at the fu**er for a week-and-a-half.

Anyhow, I just suggested elsewhere coming up with a quick list of "refocussing possibilities" and thinking of them outside GA talk itself. Suggesting reform ideas in medias res just seems to lead to a lot of talk circularity. Marskell 20:09, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

I stopped following sometime ago, but here's what I think - GA should not be a "lax" and "forgiving" process to allow instant recognition, it should be a process that allows for quick and fuss-less identification and recognition of articles that comply really well with all Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and are generally really good encyclopedic articles. The differences between the GAs and FAs on given subjects might be quite small in substance, but large when the effort is considered. So, GA should be the status all articles should be striving for, as it means they are "complete" and can be left like that, while FA is for articles that really excel, and not all articles HAVE to reach that status.

In other words, we need a process that would be able to handle large amounts of articles that are "there", as ideally all Wikipedia articles should be developed to the stage when they are really good encyclopedic articles, even if they are not outstanding. That said, there are calls and attempts to make the GA standards tighter and more consistently applied, so I guess GA will be shaking off its questionable image in near future.

Concerning A-Class and WikiProjects, I believe you are thinking the wrong way - if there is a process that has even higher standards than GA - i.e. all GA formal requirements, including reviewing by a person not involved with editing the article, but also something extra, like checking for some topic-specific characteristics - it would be great to make it equivalent to GA in the way that all articles that pass it are automatically GA! It would be great if we could gradually "outsource" reviewing of articles on some topics to WikiProjects, as this would make it easier to find reviewers ready to process lenghty articles on specialist subjects, and also some useful standards might be developed for similar articles, which would make reaching the GA level easier. Bravada, talk - 02:13, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

After thinking about participating in good Good Articles reviewing, I also ended up not "getting" it. In fact, I don't really "get" the entire article assessment system. It's so bottom-heavy that I don't see what, of interest, it reveals. Articles are weighed on multiple dimensions to achieve one ranking, yet these dimensions often vary drastically within one article (comprehensiveness, referencing, prose quality...). There are excellent articles out there that are still just "B"s because they aren't referenced enough to be "Good". I don't call that identifying good articles. I've said it on some talk page once before: generalizable, user-interface-oriented, multiple-dimension assessment seems a more interesting idea to me. They told me a similar idea had been considered but abandoned earlier in 2006. –Outriggr § 00:32, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Good Article promotes balanced articles - they might not be absolutely outstanding on any account, and there might be articles that had much more blood, sweat and tears put into them, but what is important is that we create articles that are all around good. A very nice writeup that is not referenced is not a good encyclopedic article. A great work of literary art that is POV isn't good either. And neither is one that covers every small facet of the topic but is not understandable to non-specialists. We promote making encyclopedic articles good on all accounts here, not making them excel in one field and leaving them there.

To relate it more to what you said - well, if an article is weighed down on the scale by just one dimension it, well, is. Also, GA is a separate process from the general 1.0 Assessment Scheme, the Scheme adopted GA as one level (quite disputably, as the above indicates), but the GA was meant as a standalone project, perhaps only somehow related to FA in the way that it was intended to work so as not to interfere with FA but rather complement it. Bravada, talk - 00:43, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

PS. Also, even if you fail an article, you give the editors a good review and feedback on all accounts, so you can indicate both the strong and the weak points of the article. See the talk pages of Louvre, Spice trade or Sunol Water Temple for examples of recent reviews (I know, they are mine, but that's why I can give them of the top of my head) to see how it works.

I'm concerned with this at the moment there isn't even consensus on what is a good article. Every time there are continual disputes with personal attacks. before GA should consider its position it needs to decide what its doing. Gnangarra 00:52, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

I am afraid this is not very true, as there was a recent consensus (achieved in a fiery discussion, but that's another thing, and seems to be the unavoidable when it comes to important policy changes) about the change in WIAGA, which constitue per se what is a Good Article, and there is a fair amount of agreement on a more serious approach to executing those. Current GAs are now being reviewed for compliance with standards and non-complying articles delisted. Current nominations are also being monitored. It will take time to clean everything up, but I believe the above statement is not too well-founded. Bravada, talk - 01:05, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

On a different note, I'd like to ask who updates this section? Is it updated automatically, or during some periodic maintenance process, or are we simply supposed to update it manually when listing an article? If the latter is the case, it would be good to provide some clear instructions on that, like "put the article you list at the beginning of the queue and remove the last item" (not that I find this wording too clear, actually). Same question goes for the general article count. Bravada, talk - 01:11, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

I believe that they are updated with a script called the GAAuto. Its programmed to do the tasks you mentioned. Tarret 20:46, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Currently, there are a few members of this project who are going around to articles that are listed as "good" letting them know that they fail criterion 2b. Only problem is, some of these articles actually do have inline references (albeit a small number). Since there is no minimum number listed at criterion 2b, I say it is inappropriate for people to warn that articles will be delisted unless there are precisely zero inline references. If there are one or more inline references, then discussion must be had as to whether more should be provided for the article to be "good" or not. This is a matter of editorial good practice. Some articles lend themselves to inline referencing more easily than others. Science and math articles in particular may not have as many (and may even have what looks superficially to the uninitiated reviewer as "too few") references as other articles. So please, do not delist or insinuate that delisting is immanent unless there are precisely zero inline references. Thank you, --ScienceApologist 20:57, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

If they've worded their messages to the effect of "it does fail", I have to say, that isn't necessarily correct, because in the end the criteria here was sort of meant to be subjective to a point, and I gotta admit, several of the articles (including Mathematics) which have been warned do seem to be, in my opinion anyway, Good Articles :/. However, you've got to understand, we haven't sweeped the list in a very long time anyway, so there's bound to be disputes, and that's what WP:GA/R is for. Homestarmy 21:09, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

This subjective sweep is being marketed as an objective sweep. The messages do read "This article has a very small number of in-line citations for an article of its size and currently would not pass criteria 2b." when in fact criteria 2b doesn't say anything about the number of in-line references per size of an article. In-line reference density is not a standard criterion. By the way, anyone know what the inline reference density is for Brittanica? --ScienceApologist 22:38, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

The inline reference density standard for Brittanica is identical to the inline reference density quoted by Wikipedia:Verifiability: for every "fact" submitted by an editor who is not on the payroll and whose credentials have not been thoroughly vetted, a source must be cited. ClairSamoht - Help make Wikipedia the most authoritative source of information in the world 23:30, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

No, that's the verifiability density. It's not the inline reference density. --ScienceApologist 18:54, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

It's not? Show me a fact in Brittanica Online that comes from someone who is NOT a paid editor, and whose credentials have NOT been thoroughly vetted, that does not have an inline reference. Just one, please. ClairSamoht - Help make Wikipedia the most authoritative source of information in the world 01:07, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Get this through your head: Brittanica Online does not have an inline citation to every sentence in its encyclopedia. Period. It verifies every sentence, but it doesn't cite every sentence. --ScienceApologist 04:42, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Just a reminder: No one has ever advocated that every sentence must be cited. That's a straw man argument. --plange 14:49, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

I think we agree not every sentence needs to have an inline citation. But every sentence in a reasonable article will convey some fact. Thus not every fact needs an inline citation. What is your opinion on exactly which facts need inline citations, and which do not? CMummert 15:33, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

I know you and I do agree, but SA keeps bringing that up. I don't believe I would ask cites for basic things like when Henry VIII was born (unless this was disputed), etc. I think the discussion at WP:CITE is a good one and should help dispel some misinformation about what we're asking for or not asking for. --plange 15:52, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

SA is entirely correct in that the number of inline citations means very little as a measure of what we are really trying to ascertain, which is how well referenced the article is. Note that the FAC criteria don't blindly require inline citations for exactly this reason; inline citations should be used where appropriate, that is for facts that are controversial, in question, or otherwise require specific attribution. Christopher Parham (talk) 05:07, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

I would like to add one point which I have made elsewhere but bears repeating. In the case of articles that are technical in nature, in particular, it may seem that assertions are being made that require referencing, even though these are considered fundamental to those knowledgeable in the field and to "cite" the source would be risible, or even ridiculous. Frequently I find that inline citations come across as depressingly amateurish; far from the encyclopedic standard that is being sought. Inline citations need to be supplied in context and as a result it would be outrageous to demote an article on the grounds of insufficient citations unless the reviewer had a demonstrable technical or professional familiarity with the topic, allowing him or her to make such an assessment. Worse, in the ongoing effort to raise the quality standard at WP, the inappropriate use of references will serve to detract from the overall quality of the enterprise. I find this seemingly blind tarring of articles based on citation count both disturbing and dilettantish. I fear the policy will result in strong articles being demoted based on a context-blind litmus test applied by random editors who have no in-depth familiarity of the topic being considered. That is an excellent way to lose good editors, demean the project, and create turmoil. It is not, however, a very good way to produce quality encyclopedic content. Eusebeus 10:53, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

You'd think, however, that most people turning to Wikipedia to read technical articles would be doing it because they probably aren't an expert in the field, so they wouldn't have much idea of whether something is fundamentally obvious or not. As editors, we have the knowladge of what goes on in discussions behind the scenes concerning articles, and we'll know justifications for the insertion of this and that, but readers are supposed to just be able to learn what they need through only reading the article, not reading it, deciding they need to go to collage, and coming back four years later to trawl through talk page archives to make sure editors understood something. Homestarmy 12:55, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

You're setting up the same straw man over and over. Whether an article is too technical, and whether the sources are too technical, are two different issues. -- SCZenz 14:51, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

The sources are a very different argument, which doesn't really apply much here, because the problem is that there aren't enough in the first place, not whether the sources are too technical or not. Most readers probably don't check every single reference, but its useful for them to be there if somebody is, say, trying to write some paper or something. Homestarmy 14:56, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

If technical articles can only be assessed by fellow technical editors, then GA might not be a process for them. Perhaps their own A-class review in their respective projects? --plange 13:59, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Or we could skip the review bureaucracy entirely, and just rate the physics articles and argue about it at our own WikiProject. I am very tired of arguing with you guys here; you have very few rebuttals other than outrage that we seem to think we're "special." It is an unfortunate fact that many physics subjects are very technical, and that lay people in fact don't have a clue how to evaluate the sources; we still aspire to make the articles readable, but sourcing things to the satisfaction of the good article folks is a much higher standard apparently. At the end of the day, you're going to win because we don't have the time and inclination to argue this. If we leave you alone, will you leave us alone, and stop writing insulting messages about how they "fail" some new standards that you just added? -- SCZenz 14:51, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Hey, nobody has to participate in the GA system, if you don't want to bother with it, you don't have to nominate articles or respond when other editors want to discuss whether or not articles which have been labelled as good actually are good or not. Homestarmy 14:56, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, but I am also asking you to stop sending us uninformed evaluations of physics articles based only on a quick count of the number of inlined citations. -- SCZenz 15:00, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

You'll have to take that up with User:Agne27, she's doing (I really hope I got the gender right) most of the notifications right now, because its not increadibly bureaucratic, each user has a pretty fair degree of autonomy in doing things concerning maintenance. Homestarmy 15:03, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

The original intent that cause all this brew-ha was a simple notice encouraging editors to review the GA criteria, with specific concerns of citation, and see how their article stacks up. I was not conducting a full re-review at that time and the notice was intentionally made general because I was leaving the matter into the hands of the article's editors and the subsequent GA reviewer who would later go along. I appreciate the subject nature of the view "well referenced" and I would concede with Homestarmy that I could have worded my notice to incorporate that more. However (and I brought this up on ScienceApologist's RfA), I do feel that the articles I tagged were under-referenced. I went back to the two articles that particular stirred SA's ire, Hubble's law and Special Relativity and tagged 24 items in Hubble's and 43 in Special Relativity that I would like to have seen at least a majority of them tagged. Coupled with things like the OR-ish concerns of "textbook style" first person tone of the Special Relativity article among other things, I believe that through referencing is vital to our scientific articles in establishing Wikipedia's credibility and overall quality levels. You can not assume that you reader will have a textbook in hand and can just assume it's so when you simply state in the article that it is so. Important claims regarding the overthrows and conflicts of theories, the later inspirations of theories, the outcomes of experiences and results of experiments, the impact on science, historical scientific assumptions, vague weasel wordish “Some have said” (who?) and “this was thought to” (by whom?) type phrases SHOULD be cited. I also found areas where it says that an Author has said something, listing several or worse no books of the author in reference below, how are we to know WHERE he said this? Then there were areas where the article seemingly connected two thoughts and then declare they are related. (They may very well be, but how can I verify that?). I don't think it's fair to ask the editors to "dumb down" the article but these articles are absolutely inaccessible to lay readers when there is not solid citations and referencing throughout the article. Agne 15:02, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Well I agree with pretty much everything you write here; it looks, however, like you were trawling GAs and then throwing down the rulebook wrt citations arbitrarily. In the case of Metric expansion of space, for instance, the article is perfectly well sourced in my opinion, insofar as the article presents a very basic overview (including an excellent summary of the ant on a balloon metaphor for comprehending the extra-dimensional aspect of the expansion of matter). In the event that specific debates and controversies are not receiving adequate citation, I entirely agree that this should be remedied. But the impression being given is not that at all. Rather it is more like: this article needs x number of citations in order to be considered a GA. Allow me to quote User:Hoary who answered homestarmy's original objection to the lack of references in a way that I think is perfect: I think this means: "There are only five references, only one of which is linked to a specific assertion." Yes, there's only one note. What's the objection here? If it's that an article such as this should have a longer, more impressive-looking list of references (of unexplained relevance), I utterly disagree. (That smells of the bibliography-stuffing practiced by feeble undergraduates desperately trying to impress.) If by contrast it's that specific assertions should be linked to specific references, then for other articles I'd strongly agree; however, in my very limited understanding of cosmology this article is an attempt to summarize what's pretty much agreed among interested physicists and it's therefore unnecessary to say that A comes from X and B comes from Y. If I'm right here, then I suggest that the article should get either (i) some discursive footnotes, describing roughly what in the article comes from where (in addition of course to any needed footnotes saying which more controversial assertion comes from precisely where), or (ii) descriptions in the list of references, wherein the contribution of the source to the article is briefly explained. -- Hoary 07:06, 18 August 2006 (UTC) Indeed. Eusebeus 16:21, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

What Agne27 doesn't realize is that the style that introductory science articles are written in is done for editorial reasons and not because there are issues of knowing "who says what". For example, when we write that "In very distant objects, v can be larger than c. This is not a violation of the special relativity however because a metric expansion is not associated with any physical object's velocity." and you place a fact tag on it, you are being very confrontational. Who says? you seem to be barking. "Nature" would be the proper response, but the issue is that this is an elementary fact disputed by no one (except for uneducated loonballs and wackjob nuts) and referenced in hundreds if not thousands of reference books. A proper citation of this fact is to the "scientific community" because it is generally accepted. To use a specific citation would amount to spamming for a particular textbook. --ScienceApologist 18:30, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

If you use a hyperlink from somewhere instead you wouldn't be advertising a textbook :/. Homestarmy 19:08, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Is that supposed to be a joke? I hope so. --ScienceApologist 21:23, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Homestarmy, I already warned you on this. You are entirely ignorant of the reliability of sources in the sciences. Stop lecturing subject experts on which sources we should use and which we shouldn't. -- SCZenz 21:30, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

I withdraw my overly harsh wording above, and I apologize for it. But I did take the time to explain why this suggestion is not a good one already—can you please stop repeating it? -- SCZenz 21:47, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

I know there's scientific websites out there, while I agree textbooks certainly are of a higher standard, that's not an excuse to just throw out everything except for textbooks, i've seen plenty of heavy looking articles have all sorts of external links discussing the topic :/. Homestarmy 22:01, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

I would trust those links far less than a textbook; I would never use a random webpage on special relativity as a source, but I might make it an external link. The reliability of internet pages depends heavily on the subject; that's one reason we can be glad we have subject experts. Of course, if people who aren't experts insist on telling those subject experts what sources to use, in general and without the knowledge required to judge on a case-by-case basis, then those experts will (as we've seen) get increasingly frustrated. -- SCZenz 22:22, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

I would hope when most people look for webpages to cite things, they don't look for "random webpages", there are criteria for good and bad webpages after all. No blogs, no personal websites, etc. etc., and many of the websites im talking about hold archives of technical discussions, i've seen them on some of the technical articles, so I know that their out there. It's not that we all want you to use nothing but webpages, but inline citations are generally easier to find on the internet, since very few readers will have the specific books at the bottom, and even if they do, if there's no page, they may have to read the whole book again to figure out where it backs up the article. But this is all besides the point, whether you use hyperlinks or books, its better and more convienent for readers if their rendered as inline citations. Homestarmy 22:33, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm not gonna back down until I pound this point in: I know what reliable sources exist in the area of research that I am paid to do, and you only think you do. Yes, for detailed scientific papers the are reliable sources for everything that can be found online: the original journal articles. However, basic facts in established theories (which is what we're discussing) are found in textbooks, and reliable online equivalents to textbooks do not always exist, because people want to make money by selling them. Yes, this is a side point to the main discussion (which is in other places at this point)—but I think you badly misunderstand the difference between your general knowledge from surfing Wikipedia, and my very specific knowledge that's relavant to the evaluating sources in specific cases (like special relativity) that brought up this issue in the first place. I find your persistence somewhat disrespectful, to be honest, although I don't believe you intend disrespect. -- SCZenz 23:54, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Textbooks are considered Wikipedia:Reliable Sources. There's absolutely no reason you can't use them to meet criterion 2a. But even though Bird, Stewart, Lightfoot invented the concept of Transport Phenomena, listing them as a reference at the bottom of the Transport phenomena article doesn't cut it. You can't say "Here's a haystack; go look for your needle there."

The sad thing is, if the authors of that article had written it with the book open and at their side, so that they could provide page numbers for the citations, it'd be a significantly better article. As it is, it's very obvious that the article was thrown together from memory - and a fairly poor memory at that. ClairSamoht - Help make Wikipedia the most authoritative source of information in the world 01:07, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

It's sad that you are finding disrespect in others' words, but not your own. I was Time's Man of the Year in the 1960s. He won his Nobel prize in physics in the 1980s. What honors do you have to your credit? ClairSamoht - Help make Wikipedia the most authoritative source of information in the world 01:07, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Clair, your argument is both misguided and ignorant. Listing textbooks is a fine way to reference an article. Including an inline cite to a textbook is an effective endorsement of that treatment of the material over all others. Wikipedia is not in the business of advertising for particular textbooks as reference materials. --ScienceApologist 17:48, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

I would like to see this policy/guideline saying that inline cites of textbooks are advertisements, as obviously if this is a widespread consensus, then we should probably clarify this in the inline citations thing. Homestarmy 17:51, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Then let's see what happens when I take a stab at using online sources to reference several of the statements Agne27 tagged on the special relativity article, and we'll see how I do. First, Galileo's principle of relativity, we have one Robert B. Salgado of the Syracuse University department of physics: [1] (the fact in question is at the bottom). Next, we need something showing the combination of Einstein's theory building upon Galileo's, to which we find an entire site dedicated to the subject by one Michal Fowler of the UVA Physics department I presume: [2]. After that, Agne requested a reference for a weasel word sentence, ("seem to violate common sense" "seems" is weasly, either it violates common sense, it doesn't, or a number of people agree that it does and it should be more specific) so i'm going to ignore that. The next request concerns how Newtonian physics was overthrown so to speak, after sifting through a few hyperlinks, a site by Stanford comes up, ([3]) essentially agreeing that Einsteins theory "supercedes" Newtons, and if you like, the rest of the sentence is referenced by the first hyperlink. Moving on, Agne requested a cite concerning how Special Relativity re-defines "c", which I found on a page from Florida State university, right at the top of the Special Relativity section: [4]. The next citation request is another weasel-worded sentence, "he derived startling and seemingly implausible results" (According to whom?) and I suspect the point being made there is just a continuation of refs given above here anyway. After that, we find something on an old-school belief of physicists, something about "aether", which seems referenced by a wonderful looking article from 1908 given at the Royal Institution Library of Science, which goes to the trouble of quoting several people using the term from back then. [5] Next, we need something concerning Einstein "discarding" the notion of aether, (the absolute rest thing is covered above) which is actually more difficult to look up than you might think, as the first few google pages are filled with critics of Einstein, and some face-value authoritative looking sites claiming that aether wasn't really disproven or something. Looking at the problem a bit closer, the reference comes straight from a speech Einsten made on the subject dismissing the classical views of "Ether" as he puts it, and his speech is here: [6] (Though, if one must, you could go find the article at the collected papers of Albert Einstein site it lists if you need to.) After this, Agne wanted a cite concering Einstein and Lorentz transformations, specifically how Einstein said that his special relativity stuff could be derived from it. Interestingly enough, Kyoto University seems to have that mostly wrapped up, while they don't directly quote anything Einsten said, the link here: [7] says at the bottom after its demonstrations that some of the things Einsten derived came from it. Do I really need to go on here? Homestarmy 00:57, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

This is the webpage you cited a subpage of for discarding the Aether; it doesn't look like a reliable source to me. Likewise, personal webpages on university servers (much of what you cite above) are not necessary reliable; after all I can make those myself. This is why, as I've asserted from the start, it is better to rely on textbooks. I can find pages like the above as well as you can, but I don't think they meet Wikipedia's reliable source criteria. -- SCZenz 01:16, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

I chose those links because the people who claims to write them appeared to be "experts" much like the editors who edit our technical articles apparently. The pages may be written personally, but their by experts and are often hosted on what I presume are their respective collages servers, and I don't see how this make them unreliable. Furthermore, the keelynet article simply seemed to of copied a different article from somewhere else, since it seems to of been archived I assume, I could probably find a more reliable web page hosting it if you like. Homestarmy 01:19, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm not a reliable source, even if I make a webpage, and neither are other grad students. It's pretty hard to judge who the writers of university webpages are. -- SCZenz 02:13, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

(clarifying the above) Or rather, it takes a lot of time to judge—time I know to spend, because I know who has access such pages, being an academic myself. Papers and textbooks are the proper reliable sources. -- SCZenz 02:15, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

None of these sources appear to of been written by grad students but rather seem to come from people inside the actual departments, and besides, not all of them even come from universities. One of them was Einstein himself making a speech concerning the "aether" thing, i'd hardly call Einstein a mere grad student, and another one was by someone gratuituously quoting other physicists of the day to demonstrate the belief in "aether". Homestarmy 12:22, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Can we move discussion of this to the talk page of WP:CITE, since it is this guideline that we're trying to follow? --plange 21:38, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Can we just focus on, like, reviewing and improving articles rather than fuelling our egos and engaging in pointless bickering? If there is a problem with a particular article, discuss it in GA. Is there a danger of serious injury or loss of life if we just leave the 2b as it is and see how reviewers apply it? If you believe in your own common sense, do believe in the common sense of others. Bravada, talk - 00:48, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, unfortunately all the additional in-line citation requirements would eat up a lot of time that could be used to add substantial content to existing stubs; thus I think it's important to work this issue out. If I am wrong, then the content I could be adding would have to be re-cited from scratch later; if I am right, then it will save much unnecessary work. -- SCZenz 02:13, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Back in the 1980s, I took a look back at the three months prior. I thought I had been rather productive, as I was writing on subjects where I was fairly competent in the first place, and I've always been considered a fairly prolific writer. I found out that between researching, planning, writing, and rewriting, I averaged 27 words per hour. But that's writing. Adding a cite isn't writing; it's just typing. It might take 30 seconds, or 60 seconds if you're a really bad typist. But once you do it, you don't find yourself deciding to rewrite it later; it's done. Citations are like a 2% sales tax on writing. And I'm not sure it's even that. I have to take a breather every so often, to collect my thoughts. Typing in a citation doesn't interrupt that. If I'm working hard on something, and I get interrupted by a phone call, it takes me about 20 minutes to "get back in the flow", and I've read that's typical. But citations aren't an abrupt interruption; they're a planned break. It's just a matter of getting into the habit of "doing things right the first time." ClairSamoht - Help make Wikipedia the most authoritative source of information in the world 05:40, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Obviously you are not a science-writer. Trying to cite elementary facts brings up issues that you seem happy to ignore. --ScienceApologist 12:26, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

ScienceApologist, quite obviously, you're demonstrating the danger of writing off the top of your head. You don't know, you're speculating, and you're wrong. That's why the NOR policy exists. If a fact is SO elementary that you can't google a cite for it in seconds, then either it's not true, or else everybody knows it already, and there's no need to mention it in the article. Disagree? Then don't talk in meaningless generalities. Illustrate your point with concrete examples. Someone mentioned the fact that you can't find a cite saying water is wet - but the Wikipedia article on water doesn't say that it is. That doesn't seem to affect the article adversely.

A pound of feathers weighs 22% more than a pound of gold, but the gold is worth more. Similarly, it's a lot easier to write crap than it is to write articles that users can rely on. If you want to produce unreferenced articles, GeoCities welcomes you. If you want to produce unverifiable content, Wikipedia does not. ClairSamoht - Help make Wikipedia the most authoritative source of information in the world 16:48, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Whoa boy, that's pretty unhelpful and illustrative of the kind of spurious argumentation we're up against. Makes me think that a fork of science editors at Wikipedia might be a good idea so we don't have to deal with such insulting sugestions as above. First of all, this isn't an article, it's a talkpage and it is now even more clear from your ranting that you don't write science articles. You have missed the points that were made by science editors and your shrill response only reinforces my claim that you really don't know what you are talking about. I smiled with amusement that you think that Wikipedia doesn't report that water is wet because you can't find a cite to it. That kind of reasoning is bullocks. --ScienceApologist 17:45, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Water is a good case in point. The long Chemical and physical properties section has 1 inline cite, and that cite is more academic spam that anything else. Other cites in the article are for specific statistics such as total volume of water on the planet. The bulk of the cites come in Politics of water distribution a more contriversal section. To me this seems to be appropriate referencing, reading the article the cited statments are where I might pause to think, is that really true, or who said that. This fits WP:CITE particularly if it's contentious or likely to be challenged. Adding citations to a random text book for the 100 or so scientific facts in the article would not enhance the article. --Salix alba (talk) 18:05, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Your right, choosing references arbitrarily from a single random textbook is probably a bad idea. Why not use multiple books which you have chosen carefully, or just find reliable sources from the internet for such "elementary facts". Homestarmy 22:51, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

First of all, web references should be eschewed from inline citations as much as possible because websites are not stable. If we want stable versions of Wikipedia, we need to have versions that cite stable sources. Therefore, it's best to avoid direct citations of website. Having an external links section or including webpages in reference sections are fine and in cases where the webpage is directly quoted we should inline cite it, but citing an elementary fact to a website is very problematic. Why should we privilege a random website so? This criticism applies also for small number (multiple books chosen carefully) of textbooks. How does one choose such books "carefully"? I am of the opinion that it is better to just list relevant textbooks in the reference section and let the elementary facts stand for themselves. Elementary facts are easy to look up anyway. For example, it's not too hard to check out any physical science/astronomy/optics textbook and learn for yourself why the sky is blue. Look in the index and in less than a minute you'll be at the relevant page. It doesn't matter which text you choose so it shouldn't be included in an inline reference. That's a reasonable standard. --ScienceApologist 04:41, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Web references seem to be a well utilized kind of internal citation for the majority of Wikipedia articles, and if you get them from the right sites, then they won't be very unstable. For instance, linking a geocities page could probably be improved on, but linking from, say, a page from Oxford would probably stay there for awhile. It is nonetheless true, however, that links from the internet can become old and dead, but then this is Wikipedia, where anybody can fix things :). We have a large enough community that, if somebody noticed a dead link, it would probably be fixed quickly on a well-traveled article, or even not so well travelled ones if there's a wikiproject related to it. Not all articles have nice books written about their subjects, and besides, the Wikipedia stable version CD's can always have new versions released. Also, I guess I should say that requesting inline citations doesn't require random anything, I don't mean random books, I don't mean random websites, and I don't mean citing random sentences. I cannot think of a single GA that uses 100 percent random websites to cite totally random sentences, you're supposed to actually cite websites which, you know, relate to the fact that you're citing, and do that for sentences which are supposed to be cited. There is no need for random anything to use inline citations in technical articles. Homestarmy 14:07, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

I believe those in favor of mandatory inline citations feel they are only following WP:CITE. I encourage everyone to look here for a discussion about clarifying WP:CITE so that we can come to agreement here. CMummert 12:44, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

I would like to encourage GA folks to comment on this discussion about technical articles. Thanks! --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 22:19, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

...and I disagree with such removal. Instead of removing articles, try to fix them. Be bold ... but don't be disruptive is a WP guideline and for that reason, instead of delisting articles, lets try to fix such articles in order to bring them to GA standard. Lincher 03:27, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

This is getting ridiculous. GA is not a rival program to FA. FA is the Gold Metal, GA is Silver. — Deckiller 03:48, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually, it has stayed at around this number more or less for about the last week, at least the way I remember it....I mean come on, just look at Sugar and tell me that's well-referenced, we need to be sweeping out these sorts of articles. Homestarmy 04:32, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for the clear up ... I have to agree, Sugar should probably have more citations but maybe for the time being we should concentrate on the 60+ articles that need to be reviewed and haven't.

I don't understand Deckkiller's point though ...? We know it is Silver and what about that? Lincher 04:58, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, GA standards are probably bit higher than they need to be. — Deckiller 05:51, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

There are only 6 nominations in GAC now that are older than 7 days now (not counting those on hold). This is much less then what it used to be, despite some reviewers not reviewing anymore, being put off by pointless debacles in the talk page ;) Bravada, talk - 14:01, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

CMummert already linked to the discussion but the more consenus from all sides we can get the better outcome we will have
Since the heart of the matter seems to be the application of WP:CITE in relation to WP:V, the discussion has moved there towards trying to find a consensus compromise that we can all live with and help produce a better encyclopedia with. Working together to get something worthwhile accomplished with this guideline will make all these headaches and frustrations not be in vain. I do think there is room for compromise between what the GA team would like to see for readibility and verification and what the Science editors would like for ease of consistency and professionalism. I invite the editors who have been taking part in these discussions across several pages to lay things to rest here and move over to WP:CITE's talk page so that we can garner consensus there. There is not much that can be accomplished here before things are settled with the guideline. Agne 16:57, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Currently articles about sports stadiums - Arsenal Stadium and Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium are categorised under "Culture and society" > "Recreation" when I think they would be better placed, either in "Art, architecture and archaeology" > "Architecture" or under a separate subcategory of "Sport and games". What do others think? Qwghlm 12:30, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Go ahead and create the section. The bot will be aware of the change I guess. Lincher 12:46, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Done. I also moved Snap-dragon (game) (which was in the same section) to Sport & Games as well, as it fit there much more aptly. Qwghlm 09:05, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

I noticed in the "Historical figures" subsection, some used the first name for ordering which conforms with the Wikipedia style, while others used the last name which would conform to most listing situations such as the phonebook. Has there been a consensus decision on which should be correct? RelHistBuff 08:26, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Yeah we should get more consistent with that. My personal vote would be to order them based on Last name (Jones, Miller, Smith, etc) but to list them as first-last (Will Jones, Adam Miller, Jackie Smith, etc). Though I would go with whatever consensus decides. Agne 08:27, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

At first I thought that would be better (order last-first, show as first-last), but then I thought the list would appear rather strangely out-of-order. I think it would be better to keep the order and the display consistent. So either Wikipedia order (first-last)

• Adam Miller — Jackie Smith — Will Jones

or to use last name first and display it as such

• Jones, Will — Miller, Adam — Smith, Jackie

But whatever is the consensus is fine with me also. RelHistBuff 09:15, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

I just took a look at the FA list and it appears they use order last-first, show first-last. Oh well, I still think it doesn't look natural, but I guess we should follow the previously established convention. RelHistBuff 11:36, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

As there hasn't been much comment on this, I took the initiative to change the ordering so that it follows the same method as the FA listings. The original Wikipedia titles are shown, but the ordering uses the last name. RelHistBuff 08:16, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

This has been reverted with the running of GAAuto. Without indicating who are the people that should be sorted by their surname it is impossible for GAAuto to tell. We need to have more discussion about this matter before we make a change of ordering. If we really must make a change some solutions include leaving some sub-categories unsorted or using a comment to indicate sorting order. Both of these choices have disadvantages and my preference would be to leave the articles sorted by their listed first letter. Cedars 00:47, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Ok so for the moment the script only uses the letters in the Wikipedia title. Using the example above, the order is now

• Adam Miller — Jackie Smith — Will Jones

That was my first choice anyway. We just have to make sure that the titles are entered consistently that way. RelHistBuff 13:06, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I noticed about half of the "Physics and astronomy" section is under the subheading "Atmospheric physics and meteorology". Should we split that half into it's own separate heading called something like "Meteorology" or the broader term "Atmospheric sciences"? I would hardly say Tropical Storm Harvey (2005) qualifies much as being either Physics or Astronomy. -Hyad 06:01, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I've been thinking about a Meteorology section for a while. We have enough GA of storms and hurricanes that I think would warrant it. Agne 07:26, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I support a separate section and I prefer the broader term Atmospheric sciences. I also suggest Apollo 11 be moved to the "Engineering and technology" section. RelHistBuff 07:55, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

How about we use a top-level, secondary-level format used for the V 0.5 list. This will incorperate a meteorolgy heading and other useful headings along with it. Tarret 22:07, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree with all the proposed changes, even the V0.5 look (I find it more user-friendly). Although and I mean this, don't add pictograms, it takes decades to load all these little icons beside each section, I hit stop on my browser (Opera 9.02) not to loose time. Lincher 01:21, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I did a draft version at Wikipedia:Good articles/redesign a while ago that we can try using as a starting point. Tarret 20:37, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Looks good. Is it possible to add edit tabs to be able to edit the whole sections? Lincher 20:59, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I think the meteorology should be moved to the geology and geophysics section as it is with the featured articles. Atomic1609 21:34, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Actually the meteorology section works well in the Natural Sciences section. Geography and more specifically Geology deals with the Earth's shape as well as rocks, while meteorology is about the atmosphere. Tarret 00:06, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Since three of them have been given GA status so far, I was wondering: Could we add a Television Episodes category to the Media section? -- transaspie 01:56, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Isn't the section entitled Television shows and series taking care of that? Lincher 12:35, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I had some arguments for why they aren't, but I just realized that if albums and songs are in the same category, so should TV shows and episodes of TV shows. So ignore my idea.  :) I merely seemed to have a problem with the fact that, the way Abysinnia, Henry is listed, it appears to be a TV show instead of merely an episode of a TV show...branching out into a new category was the only idea I could think of to make that clear. -- transaspie 06:04, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Now that I think about it...shouldn't TV episodes be placed in quotes? I don't know if that's the proper way to link to them (there's not a standardized way of doing so; South Park episodes are listed in quotes while Simpsons episodes are not, for example) but it seems to be only way to differentiate between full series and a single episode that doesn't require splitting. -- transaspie 06:27, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Where do dramatist, such as W. S. Gilbert go? Adam Cuerden ^talk 15:40, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Good articles#Writers and critics, that is where he is. Lincher 01:01, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

After looking at the articles on the list I have found many articles that fail WP:WIAGA criteria 2b. I know that the criteria was recently changed but many sections such as th e Transportation section still has alot of articles that fails this criteria. This makes me wonder if anyone ever goes through the list and is it possible to make list sweeping a part of WP:GA/R? Tarret 18:54, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

We did a small sweep a month ago or so I think, I avoided delisting for inline citations at the time because that was when we had the huge fight over it, but if the criteria won't be challenged again, we can go ahead with another sweep. Homestarmy 19:51, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

It worth having a look at Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines a rapidly developing guideline which has wide support from the members of wikiprojects Mathematics[8] and Physics[9]. --Salix alba (talk) 23:41, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Appears to be a conversation worth getting into.... Homestarmy 00:50, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Though actually, looking at the policy, it sounds like a pretty good idea in theory. Of course, how people insist it should be put into practice is quite another thing, but if this ever became a guideline, I don't see much problem with articles being graded with it in mind. Homestarmy 01:04, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

It has the tag to indicate that, anyway. So does User:PalermoD. Badbilltucker 21:38, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I've removed tags from both pages. --Salix alba (talk) 23:42, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Awhile ago, the page was moved from "Good Articles/disputes" to "Good Articles/review", and I think there's a bit of a problem cropping up because of it. I didn't think much of it before, but there's been a couple people coming to the page wanting their article to be looked at immedietly rather than put it on the candidates page, and i'm starting to think the name Good Articles/Review name is misleading people into thinking that is a page where you can get an article reviewed first, rather than a page to review decisions on articles. Could it be moved back to "Good Articles/Disputes"? Homestarmy 19:06, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Its not just the title of the page, its the lead. The lead is so simalar to that of WP:GAN that even I cant tell the pages apart without scrolling down. We should try changing it to mention that the page is used to see if an article still merits its GA status or if a nomination was unfairly reviewed. Tarret 01:24, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Hi,

First post here. Does this project have GA reviewer coaching, similar to Wikipedia:Esperanza/Admin coaching? I sorta poked around a bit, but didn't see anything similar. Thanks --Ling.Nut 15:40, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Not that I know of, but its not supposed to be very complicated, the instructions aren't long and the only thing really important to keep in mind is everything at WP:WIAGA as you read through articles. Homestarmy 18:52, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer. Follow-up? Does the project sytematically go through the existing GAs once in a while, to check for incorrectly classed articles, or those which have suffered some sort of "text rot"? Thanks! --Ling.Nut 19:15, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Every once and awhile several of us often take the initiative to sweep the current list, but lately, i've been having trouble finding clear cut cases of articles to delist now, before our last sweep, like only every 5th article should of been on the list it seemed :/. But generally sweeps have started when somebody brings up issues with a fairly large block of articles that makes things look suspicious, and it is possible people are still sneaking articles onto the list without people noticing. Homestarmy 19:17, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Eh? Please clarify. When you say "sneaking things on," you're not talking about bad judgment calls by reviewers, you're talking about actual hanky-panky by people who want to promote an article -- right? If that's the case, shouldn't there be some sort of bot or something to monitor that...? Thanks! --Ling.Nut 19:26, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually don't even need a bot; just a list and good ol' WP:AWB..--Ling.Nut 19:30, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, the GA page itself isn't updated by anyone special, anybody can add anything to the page, its just you're supposed to only add articles which have gone through the system. But occasionally we'll find some articles that somebody just spontaneously listed or things like that, and they often just sort of went under the radar so to speak. User:Cedars GAAuto bot will look for alot of articles that haven't been listed on the page properly, but it can't check for bad faith reviews or reviews where somebody wasn't aware that you have to list articles on the candidate page for somebody else to review first. Homestarmy 19:30, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Of course only humans can check for bad-faith reviews, but the prob of "not listing on the page" seems like a job for AWB or some bot or other.

Are reviews of newbies (or better yet, of all reviewers) followed up by old hands? Tag-team, etc.? Please forgive if this is an RTFMquestion... --Ling.Nut 19:34, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

There might be a need for some mentoring of new reviewers, to help ensure consistancy of review and help stear them away from just a tick the box type of review. --Salix alba (talk) 19:40, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

• I'm kinda surprised you don't already have it...
• ditto for checking for "bogies." :-)
• "Every fifth article" .. twenty percent is a pretty high percentage, if that's the percent of incorrectly list articles. Perhaps I misunderstood? But if twenty percent of the US dollar bills were counterfeit, there'd be panic in the streets. :-) --Ling.Nut 20:49, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

MMM, I'm pretty sure a GA template could be designed in such a way that it would display a message and/or add a category if the template were placed on an unlisted page. The bad thing is, anyone with knowledge of templates could circumvent it without trouble... hmmm but maybe even that could be dealt with... hmm...

But the other things listed above may be good ideas too--Ling.Nut 20:59, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Over at WP:1.0, Mathbot generates a log of all changes to a category, and anything that is fairly likely to be dubious/vandalism gets highlighted in bold. I have found it to be fantastic for work on Version 0.5; I have found people sneaking articles into our list without nominating them, and I have found many cases of talk page vandalism. See this log. Could you have a daily log like this? With only a few articles a day changing status it should be quite manageable, as long as someone checks the log regularly. Walkerma 21:10, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Add a WP:1.0 asessment system to this project! It would only be different in that it would include all and only the GA articles. easy... --Ling.Nut 21:34, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Not necessarily Mathbot, but any bot to log Category:Wikipedia good articles will do; the 1.0 bot bolds major changes (e.g. stub -> GA, low -> high, etc), so the on/off nature of GA doesn't lend itself to vandalism detection much. Nifboy 21:59, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

• I think I disagree. There should never be any changes within this particular assessment log, except additions/subtractions. If you add a page as GA, is that a big change? Even if it isn't, the addition shows up. And you aren't adding fifty per day, are you? Anyone watching the page with an eye for detail and a knowledge of what should really have been added will catch all bogies. I think that is the case. --Ling.Nut 22:06, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
• But for this restricted purpose, perhaps a custom bot would be more on-target. Salix alba, wanna write one? :-)--Ling.Nut 22:21, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Could do, I don't have a bot acount yet, but I'm thinking of getting one. We can probably cross reference Category:Wikipedia good articles, WP:GA. This would highlight miss matches, it might be possible to check WP:GAC as well so articles listed without first being candidates. That should catch most bad submissions. --Salix alba (talk) 00:10, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

What is {{GA talkbox}} used for? 74.116.113.241 02:00, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

This is a stupid question. However, if someone placed an article in nomination as a feature article candidate, without having ever had it ranked as a good article earlier, would you think it would still be a good idea to nominate them as Good articles, or would that be merely a formality? I am finding several articles which are former FA candidates while never being considered for GA, and welcome your responses. Badbilltucker 23:27, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Please join the discussion, as it pertains to GA and the Assessment project and several issues raised or broached here. Thanks! Girolamo Savonarola 00:16, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I've just managed to get my bot User:WillowBot to generate a cross reference table between

• Pages linked from Wikipedia:Good articles
• Pages in category Category:Wikipedia good articles
• Pages which transclude the template Template:GA

You can see the results at User:Salix alba/GA table. For the most part everything seem OK. However there are a number of articles which don't have the the template on their talk pages, possible because the the template has been substituted. Other articles have some minor case differences Indian independence movement is listed on Wikipedia:Good articles, but its a redirect to Indian Independence movement.

This is just the first go at generating the table so I can modify the results if needed. --Salix alba (talk) 18:18, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

That would be very useful, but would you fix it to recognize the specialized GA templates. Tarret 03:27, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Good work. I made it so the GAAuto script is now aware of case differences like the ones you pointed out. It would be good to see the results once the specialized templates are accounted for. Cedars 23:36, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Phineas Gage was not a biologist/medical scientist yet is listed as such. Perhaps listing him under health/medicine would not be such a ad idea (it seems you guys are trying to keep bios and nonbios apart but he is known more for his medical state than anything else)

Thanks for the report. I expanded the heading to "Biologists, medical scientists and test subjects" though this is probably not ideal. Anyone out there with a better idea, feel free to change it. Cedars 23:50, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Isn't the % of FA more like 0.75%, as per here, than 0.1% as mentioned on the WP:GA page? Or am I reading the graph badly? RHB 21:22, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

The table uses the ‰ (permille) not % (percent) notation. It's slightly confusing. Cedars 23:42, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Did this ever pass GA, because it has a Ga rating on the talk page

I think there was a GA review on it and it was delisted, let me look in the archive. Homestarmy 18:17, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, its here: Wikipedia:Good articles/Disputes/Archive 3. I'm not sure if I delisted it myself though since there were only two people talking about it including me, it might of been someone else. Homestarmy 18:22, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but would it be possible to get meteorology as its own section in the list. Currently, unless you know where you are going you might have difficulty getting there (I looked in history, geology, and materials sciences before I remembered where it was). There are 72 articles, which is almost enough to be its own category. In addition, there are 13 meteorology articles on the candidates page. Hurricanehink (talk) 14:51, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

What, so we can have a section with your name plastered all over it? d;-) In all seriousness, a good way to cull some of this backlog might be to make more sections in both areas, because I know I'd review more if Arts was split better, for instance. --badlydrawnjeff talk 14:58, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Heh. That's a good point about the backlog. Would it be too big of a problem if it were split? Hurricanehink (talk) 18:55, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

We have have had a discussion about going for the WP:WPRV look which can be found at Wikipedia:Good articles/redesign its just that not much discussion went on about it. Tarret 23:35, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I really like that redesign. That is much clearer and should be used, IMO. Hurricanehink (talk) 00:43, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Well unless someone disagrees feel free to change it. Tarret 23:38, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I have a few ideas to keep separate the concept of reviews in the promotion process vs. reviews in the delisting process.

• Even though it adds to our jargon, I propose defining and using acronyms such as GAC and GAR to keep the processes clear. This could be justified in that parallel acronyms are used in the FA system.
• Change "So long as they meet certain quality standards and have passed through the Good Article review process" to "So long as they meet certain quality standards and have passed through the Good Article candidate (GAC) process"
• In the Good Articles tool box, define the acronyms
  • Good Article Candidates (GAC)
  • Good Article Collaboration (GACo)
  • Good Article Reviews (GAR)

Comments? Or maybe there are better ideas? --RelHistBuff 09:36, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps "Wikipedia:Good articles/Review" should be renamed "Wikipedia:Good articles/Reconsideration" for clarity.--agr 12:35, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Those seem like good ways to word it to me. But I still liked the first name of the Review page, just "Disputes" :/. Homestarmy 13:30, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I just realized GAR is not a good acronym as WP:GAR is redirected to "Guide to abuse reports". But what I will do is change the "So long as..." sentence. I guess "Good article nomination process" is better than what I suggested. Other than that, since there are no other comments, I guess it is the status quo. --RelHistBuff 15:09, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

I've just created a template Template:Link GA, it's works similar as the Template:Link FA. However it needs the MediaWiki:Monobook.css and MediaWiki:Common.js to be updated to reflect this change. Is that a good idea to introduce this template? --Shinjiman ⇔ ♨ 05:58, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi - I'm a little confused as to how criteria 4, "It follows the neutral point of view policy. In this respect: (a) viewpoints are represented fairly and without bias; (b) all significant points of view are fairly presented, but not asserted, particularly where there are or have been conflicting views on the topic." fits in to an article on a fictional subject. Thanks for any assistance. - Malkinann 11:03, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

It fits into a fictional article because it should manily express an out-of-universe point of view to meet criteria 4. The specific guideline can be found at WP:WAF. Tarret 16:44, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

So WP:WAF is how an article on a fictional subject achieves criteria 4? - Malkinann 21:13, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I believe so. Tarret 02:29, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

"Meteorology and atmospheric sciences" has gotten pretty dense, thanks to all the contributors working on hurricane/tropical cyclone articles. The "Tropical cyclones" subheading seems to me to be too big. Maybe we can split up articles about the science of storms and articles about actual storms?

Also, "Recreation" seems like it would split nicely into "Games" and "Sports". Is there a good icon available for a "Games" section? Twinxor t 23:25, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Is there somewhere within this project which lists the newest additions of good articles by name as they are added by month? There is a similar list for FA here. --Nehrams2020 04:58, 13 December 2006 (UTC)