Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations

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Good article nominations

This is the discussion page of the good article nominations (GAN). To ask a question or start a discussion about the good article nomination process, click the New section link above. Please check and see if your question may already be answered; click to show the frequently asked questions below or search the archives below.

List ordering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 discussions left at Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023

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

Proposals still being discussed with links to those sections:

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

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

More statistics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example statistics

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

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

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

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

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

How many different reviewers does each subtopic attract?

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

Discussion

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

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

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

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

Link target for new backlog section

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

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

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

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

Backlog length

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

QPQ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tracking where in the queue gets the most attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Implementation of GAR Coordinators

After Proposal 13 of the GA Proposal Drive was passed, some discussion has taken place on the GAR talk page (here), in regards to the actual utility of the GAR Coordinators, and a call for self-nomination went out. After something of a slowdown has taken place at the GAR talk page, a suggestion was made to open a discussion here regarding the confirmation of coordinators, and their roles; in part due to the larger number of people active here, and because much of the activity taken place has involved a relatively small number of parties, most of whom have been active together in the recent WP:DCGAR, GA proposal drive, and GAR talk page discussions, forming something of a majority of "those who show up", rather than a necessarily representative consensus. Based on the discussion involved in the recent overhaul of GAN, including unanimous support for the merging of individual and community reassessment (Proposal 14) users @Premeditated Chaos, Femke, and AirshipJungleman29: have worked to craft and implement new guidelines for GAN which would seem to open the closing of GARs to uninvolved experienced editors in most cases, the GAR nominator themselves if there is a silent consensus, or, in the case of contentious discussion, the GAR coordinators. From this, we have a rough outline of the coordinators' roles, insofar as they help to manage the administrative work, and assist in the case of contentious discussions. But again, the role is not strictly defined, although what has been implemented thus far after active discussion seems to align with the spirit of the proposal quite well. A call went out to numerous editors to self-nominate, and recommendations were made, which resulted in a slew of @Trainsandotherthings and Etriusus: and myself, with @Chipmunkdavis: putting himself forward as a possibility, and @Aircorn: suggested (but he has been inactive recently and therefore was not available for comment). The thinking of some, including @SandyGeorgia:, who has spearheaded much of the movement, appears to be to open this to a wider discussion, where the nominees can be confirmed by the community here as reliable, and, during or after this process, the exact role of the coordinators in nailed down. I personally favor what appears to be our working model, of administrative work and decisive closers of contentious reviews; as well as the general slew of guidance and help that might be expected of coordinators. If people agree with this, I think the next step would be to open a poll for each of the various nominees, probably on a support/oppose basis, and a poll for the expectations and responsibilities of the coordinators. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 17:28, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

@Iazyges, Let's get the discussions wrapped up and feedback taken care of first for the Proposal Drive. I can open up a dedicated tab for 'Coordinator Elections' once its done. The same thing will have to happen for the RFC per Proposal 21. We can also do it here on the talk page, but it may get cluttered. I am in no rush either way. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 21:16, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Meanwhile: Wikipedia talk:Good article reassessment#DC GAR launched (GAR Coord role). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:18, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

I see no reason why the poll can't open now. In any case, SandyGeorgia, as I and Femke seem to be closing most GARs at the moment, I think we're probably able to handle the couple of DCGARs that have already been opened. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:57, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

My preference would be for polling to take place sooner rather than later. But whenever, could they please be widely advertised? Gog the Mild (talk) 12:16, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Poll proposal

I propose we open a poll here (higher viewers than WT:GAR) with the following procedure:

1. People have up to Monday 27 to say they volunteer (@Trainsandotherthings, Etriusus, Iazyges, and Chipmunkdavis: already indicated interest)
2. Then people have a week to support. Let's do a poll without opposes, as those are friendlier.
3. Top 3 people with most votes would be appointed as coords. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 21:06, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

• Endorse proposal, with a reminder to cross post a notice of the poll to all GA pages. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:18, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
• Seems like a good way to do things to me. I see no reason we couldn't have 4 slots, though. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 00:43, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
• Mostly agree with the timeline; I also don't see why four slots are too many. I would prefer a yes-no vote honestly, with whatever margin is considered necessary (80% perhaps?) for these candidates (including myself) and in the future. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 00:59, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
• Sure; I might as well officially put my name down as well. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 01:59, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
• No concerns on my end, I support it (saves me the trouble of setting up something else). I'd prefer 4 slots but whatever is most manageable. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 02:53, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Happy with four coords as well.. Nominees, feel free to add names below. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 17:17, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Poll

Candidates, feel free to nominate yourselves. Polling will open on February 27.

AirshipJungleman29

Help finalizing a pass?

Resolved

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

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

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

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

Historical stats

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

Promotion stats January 2021 to January 2023

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

Subtopic wait times January 2021 through January 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drive-by nominations?

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

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

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

Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023 Officially Closed

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

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

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

Concerns after review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion at WT:GA § Should everything be cited?

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

Requesting Second Opinions for a couple of drive-by GAs

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

Talk:Bayfront MRT station/GA1

Talk:Gardens by the Bay MRT station/GA1

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

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

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

Extended content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help? I think I need another review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Usage of the template, and marking off passes, is this reviewer's method of telling future viewers why the article passed. Although it has become the de-facto norm, peer review/line-by-line commentary is not actually required anywhere in the GA instructions, and there is no basis for disqualifying a review for not including it. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:51, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

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

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