Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations

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Good article nominations

This is the discussion page for good article nominations (GAN) and the good articles process in general. To ask a question or start a discussion about the good article nomination process, click the Add topic link above. Please check and see if your question may already be answered; click the link to the Frequently asked questions below or search the Archives below. If you are here to discuss concerns with a specific review, please consider discussing things with the reviewer first before posting here.

Mathematics subcategories

Mathematics → Mathematical concepts and topics is getting quite lengthy (130 articles) and encompasses everything between Addition, Free abelian group, Pell's equation, Book embedding and International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). If there is no clear partition of these articles then could we at least make a couple of subcategories and leave the rest to "Other"? It seems like "Graph theory" would consume a big chunk of these and "Geometry" another. Additional possibilities are "Cellular automata" and "Algebra".

I don't want to set off chains of arguments about where individual articles belong but these suggestions seem like low-hanging fruit. I'm happy to put some of the work into recategorising these if there's agreement. — Bilorv (talk) 10:21, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bilorv You may see my page where I categorized many types of mathematics articles. One possibility to create one category is "Mathematical object", listing objects in any dimensions, such as polygons, polyhedrons, or even polytopes. Points and lines may also be listed, but I think I would prefer to split them differently (if someone has an alternative in this special case, let me know). Dedhert.Jr (talk) 12:30, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

130 isn't a particularly large group, nor long enough to impede navigation. That said, Mathematics has always been a very small list, so it wouldn't be out of character to split what it has up. Regarding potentially requiring an "Other", it is possible to use headers of levels 4-6, so a subgroup could be split off into a lv6 header while leaving the rest under the main lv5 header without causing issue. CMD (talk) 15:04, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis Umm... how many numbers are particularly large groups, so that they could be split into more subcategories? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 01:26, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

To clarify, there is no issue splitting a group of 130. If Graph theory and Geometry would make useful grouping (ie. not conversely too small) a split sounds useful. To the direct question, have a look at Wikipedia:Good articles/Music. When you hit around 200 articles (in VECTOR2022), the categories begin to exceed standard laptop screen size, although it varies slightly based on the average length of individual entry names. CMD (talk) 02:28, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis That being said, my laptop is somewhat lagging after going to WP:GA/MU. Reply about Graph theory and Geometry: Still, I would probably split the category. Assuming that we break the category based on mathematical fields, I'm aware that an article may have two fields combined, which confuses the reviewer by putting the after-passing-GA in two different related fields. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 11:12, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

I think a big chunk could be split off as "geometry". The rest are pretty haphazard, though. The boundaries between algebra, number theory, and combinatorics are not always clear-cut, but some of these topics are definitely on one or the other sides of those boundaries. Pell's equation, for instance, is number theory (not algebra); book embedding is graph theory (a subtopic of combinatorics); free abelian group is algebra; the IMO is not a mathematical concept at all. I don't think there are enough cellular automata Good Articles to make a good subdivision. And I don't think there's any conceptual reason to lump graph theory with geometry (we have several articles that blur that boundary because my own interests are in that boundary area and I'm a frequent GA participant, not because it's a very blurry boundary). So my preference would be to split off geometry, leave the rest unsplit, and see how that goes. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:04, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

I think that should work, and also I think it makes sense to follow David in this, as he is responsible for the vast majority of recent mathematics GAs. The question is a bit how widely construed we want to interpret "geometry"; do we want more topological things like Möbius strip included? "Geometry and topology" could include Mayer–Vietoris sequence, but "geometry" would probably not. —Kusma (talk) 21:38, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

I think Möbius strip has enough geometry to be classified that way regardless, but geometry and topology would be ok as a subdivision. That might also include articles like book embedding (topological graph theory). —David Eppstein (talk) 22:20, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

As I mentioned before, I would prefer to split into by their types rather than give a subsection by the fields because most of those articles may have one or two (or possibly more) related branches of mathematics. As an example, "Mathematical objects" may include points, lines, curves, polygons, polyhedrons, and many other mathematical objects, especially topological objects. However, this may be too focused on the objects, rather than the geometrical and topological concepts (which could possibly add more such as "Mathematical theorem, conjectures, and lemmas"? But I think it's fine to keep including the theories and concepts back to its original pool) And for the non-concept mathematical articles, maybe we could put another subcategory "Miscellaneous", such as International Mathematical Olympiad?

But if we are in favor of breaking them into subcategories by fields, take an example, aside from breaking into "Geometry and topology", does this also mean that we would have to break them into more subcategories, which is haphazardly bizarre, as @David Eppstein mentioned? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 05:51, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

I gather most people prefer larger subsections than I do but I'm hoping we can take some action on this. Is there any objection to me attempting to break off a "Geometry and topology" subsection only, and then others moving edge case articles that they think I've categorised incorrectly? — Bilorv (talk) 08:33, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

None from me. CMD (talk) 09:46, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bilorv See my reply, but let's see what about others? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 11:49, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

It's normal to have "Other" sections. Since discussion has stalled I'd rather take some action that has consensus. Do you object entirely to a "Geometry and topology" subsection? — Bilorv (talk) 13:05, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bilorv That's what I said previously, seeing my reply, where I mentioned the possibility of the article may only have more than one field. What I meant was that two fields in a mathematical article could possibly include one of the two topics in the subsection, and another one is not (I should have explained this more specifically). For example, suppose that we have an article that contains algebra and geometry topics, algebraic geometry or geometry algebra, or whatever it is. Would not make sense to put "Geometry and topology"? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 13:16, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

It seems that the phrase "Mathematical object" has ambiguous meanings based on the fields after I have read the article. I would possibly add the alternative one: "Geometry objects", but Mobius strip and Borromean rings have a relation with topology. I have asked a user about whether they are included in geometry or topology. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 13:50, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bilorv I have retracted my previous ideas after having discussion between me and David Eppstein. You may added "Geometry and topology" subcategory. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 10:23, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis, David Eppstein, and Dedhert.Jr: I've made a first attempt here, with "Geometry and topology" articles separated, and sections re-ordered so that "Other" comes last. Please take a look—I'm happy for you to directly move any articles that you think I've categorised wrongly. — Bilorv (talk) 11:02, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

@Bilorv Ummm... why are most of the topics and concepts being put behind after texts and biographies? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 11:09, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

It makes sense for an "Other" topic to come last and for geometric and topological subjects (texts/mathematicians) that are not classified in "Geometry and topology" to precede the section. — Bilorv (talk) 11:11, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I move a few across. There are a couple of unclear cases (is vector space or Hilbert space better classified as geometry? and shouldn't three-gap theorem and lonely runner conjecture be on the same side of the classification, whichever side that is?) but in general this gives a fairly nice even split. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:08, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I think Vector space and Hilbert space might be included in algebra, while Lonely runner conjecture may be included in number theory. Three-gap theorem is fine in geometry. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 04:03, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Abandoned reviews

User:GhostRiver has abandoned a handful of reviews including one of mine. She has not visited Talk:Joanne_McCarthy_(basketball)/GA1 since February. Others too.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 14:07, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

They opened several reviews in January; a couple weeks ago I deleted the four where they did not even start the review at the request of the nominators, but there are a handful that were started a few weeks after opening but not returned to. --PresN 15:43, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

She indicated recently that she was unable to continue reviewing. I have failed one review where the nominator is also absent. The rest can be handled individually. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:02, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposals to address the backlog

We are now three weeks into the backlog drive and, to me at least, it feels like a Sisyphean task. We're doing a lot of work to push the backlog down, only for it to grow out of control again before we've even gotten the chance to breathe. The last backlog drive we did was in August 2023 and during it we managed to bring the backlog down by 69%, from 638 unreviewed nominations to 198. This was a huge effort, but even then, what we were left over with was still quite a long list, a big undertaking. By the time of the current backlog drive, we had 655 unreviewed nominations. This time, we were able to cut it down by 25% to 493 unreviewed noms, before dozens of nominations were dumped onto the list en masse, setting back our efforts by two weeks.

I'm glad that these backlog drives have been happening, but it should be clear that they are not a sustainable way forward for cutting down on the backlog of unreviewed nominations. Even if this nom-dump hadn't occurred, at the rate we were going, we would still have needed to keep the drive going for another month in order to cut down the same amount we had in the last backlog drive. And the moment they are no longer going, the backlog just starts ballooning all over again. The drives become our only way of actually addressing it.

As such, I wanted to make some proposals for addressing the backlog in a more sustainable manner. I'm going to sort them from the least drastic to the most drastic options. If you have other ideas for helping bring down the backlog, feel free to propose them here. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 1: Regular backlog drives

After the subject of another backlog drive was raised, it took us a month to figure out the details and another few weeks of milling around before it actually began. I don't recall many notifications being sent out for this one and the results show. I think rather than this ad hoc and reaction-based approach to backlog drives, we need to accept that these need to become a regular thing: one or ideally two times a year, at the same months, leaving us time to get the word out. I propose that we have a backlog drive set for every March and September of each year. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. As proposer. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. Codifying biannual drives, and the procedures surrounding them, is I think a good step forward. It also opens the door if anyone wants to organise shorter "blitzes", as I believe they do at WP:GOCE.
3. Support in addition to any other proposal. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 17:04, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Backlog drives are fun and help entice people to review. I like the reward structures with extra points for old and long articles. —Kusma (talk) 17:21, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
5. Agreed. Maybe even have it 3 times a year (January, May, September) or 4 times a year (January, April, July, October). MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 17:39, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
6. I think four times a year would lead to very few reviews being picked up in the off months. That might not be such a bad thing if we get the backlog drives really moving, but it's something to keep in mind. -- asilvering (talk) 17:51, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
7. I recommend January and August, where (going off of memory) we've had successful GA drives in the past. I vaguely recall another project (GOCE?) routinizing their drives and finding steep drop-off when it was put on a calendar, but I equally do not recall the timing of those drives being isolated as a factor in that drop-off. I suggest picking times when most editors are enjoying a staycation. But the dates can be decided later. czar 18:15, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
8. seems fair enough sawyer * he/they * talk 18:22, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
9. I think 3 backlog drives per year would be reasonable, too. Skyshiftertalk 19:02, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
10. This might slow reviews off-cycle, but I still think it's good practice to have the drives be more predictable. It seems the WikiCup has a large impact on both noms and reviews, so let's try to align the drives with that and perhaps whatever else might be going on outside of the GA bubble. Grk1011 (talk) 15:50, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
11. I'm in support of this idea, but there will need to be willing coordinators prepped in advance. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 18:15, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
12. These seem to have been working. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:39, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
13. WP:GOCE would be a good model to use, or something similar. Z1720 (talk) 21:20, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
14. Sounds good to me. Epicgenius (talk) 22:16, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
15. Three or four times a year would be best, biannual isn't enough at the rate the current backlog seems to grow.
16. Agreed. GoCE run a drive of some sort every month and it works, so maybe, as suggested above, more frequent drives, and/or some variety in them. Eg every non-major drive month have a seven day "snap" mini-drive focused on just whichever section has the biggest backlog; just a suggestion. Gog the Mild (talk) 13:50, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
17. Unsure on the frequency (once a year is not enough), but something regular would be good. (Personally, I'd probbably not be contributing if it's the same month as an NPP backlog drive, which aren't regular.) -Kj cheetham (talk) 19:52, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
18. I think two to three drives a year, with considerations for timing (as discussed), would be effictive. Averageuntitleduser (talk) 00:54, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

Discuss

1. Regarding timing, I highly agree with czar. March-April is rough for a lot of students and teachers, and I expect that covers many people involved in GANs. -- asilvering (talk) 19:05, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

While I think the concept is good, you need people to run the drives, and right now coordinators are fairly thin on the ground and subject to burnout. It's one thing to make a schedule; it's another thing to be able to staff the drives per said schedule. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:04, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

I'd be for designated GAN coords the way FAC, FLC, and FTC/GTC have coords. Obviously they wouldn't be checking every nom like those coords do and would only have to be active during a backlog drive. Additionally, I'd be for having a lot of them, maybe somewhere around the neighborhood of 10 if it helps with alleviating burnout. AryKun (talk) 13:09, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

• I have no strong opinion on this either in favour or against, but I try to think about what the unintended consequences (for all proposed changes) might be, and I share Grk1011's concerns about this leading to reviews being postponed to when there is a backlog drive, in other words redistributing the reviews to the drives at the expense of the rest of the year. TompaDompa (talk) 16:27, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 2: Cap open nominations

Currently when somebody goes over 20 open nominations, the new ones they open get put into a green expandable box at the bottom of the list. (Right now we have these boxes at the bottom of 10 of our lists) This puts mass nominations out of immediate sight, but it does nothing to address the de facto monopolisation of the process that mass nominations encourage. Instead of putting them into a box, I propose we cap open nominations at 20 per user. Honestly, I think the cap should be a lot lower (no more than 5). I frankly do not think it is fair to reviewers to submit so many nominations at once, but I also think it's bad for the nominator, as the individual qualities of each article get lost in the sea of nominations; you just can't keep track of what you are doing with each one if you have dozens in the pool. But as 20 is the limit we currently have before overflow, I'm happy to propose we cap at 20 for now and maybe discuss lowering the cap at a later date. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. As proposer. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. This is done at WP:FAC and seems to work just fine there. I'm sympathetic to the idea that we don't want to discourage anyone from improving content, but we have to find ways to manage the GA process. Our current system, where we have a long queue and submitters wait months for review, could also discourage folks from improving content. Ajpolino (talk) 18:18, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
3. This works fine at FAC. I'd propose 10-15 as a cap for nominations, rather than 5. As slow as reviewing throughput as been, I can see 5 becoming a problematic cap so a higher number would work better. As of 22 March, 77 out of 695 nominations are by a single editor (11.1%). I see no reason why one nominator should be allowed to contribute that sort of amount to the backlog at once, and I can also remember the days when Coldwell would have loads and loads up at once. I would give an analogy to when a lawn mower engine will "flood" if you try to start it too much, but don't know how to phrase it well. Hog Farm _Talk 21:10, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Support. It works well at FAC with minimum grumbling, hiccups or unintended consequences. Having run 107 articles through GAN and reviewed 160 I see no reason why it should not work equally well and without unintended consequences. As an alternative, set a limit on nominations not currently being reviewed? Personally I would think a limit of five nominations about right, but I can see that that is never going to fly; unless the "not currently being reviewed" suggestion is taken up. Gog the Mild (talk) 14:05, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. The current soft cap does the trick. —Kusma (talk) 17:19, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. Most of the people with large numbers of GANs write high-quality articles in a niche subject area. This would punish them for no particular reason. People mass-nominating low quality articles would be handled via quickfails, presumably. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 17:21, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
3. I largely stand by what I said when the (soft) cap was suggested back in 2023: I don't think this is a good idea. For one thing, I'm not convinced that the existence of editors who nominate a lot more than they review is in itself a problem. Writing high-quality articles and reviewing nominations are to some (not insignificant) extent separate skillsets. For another, limiting the number of open nominations would not in itself reduce the effective backlog, only hide it. If an editor has 20 articles that are ready for nomination but they can only nominate 5 of them, the other 15 may be hidden from the publicly visible backlog but they are in practice only put on a waiting list to be nominated. Without an increase in throughput, limiting the number of open nominations does not in any meaningful way ameliorate the backlog issue. The idea that editors might spend more time reviewing is, I think, a bit optimistic. As I said, reviewing requires a different set of skills and I think it's more likely that they would either keep on doing what they're doing or disengage from WP:GAN entirely. That last point is the most important one to me: this might discourage the nomination (and for that matter creation/curation) of high-quality articles. That's not, to me, an acceptable price to pay for reducing the backlog. TompaDompa (talk) 17:28, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
4. We want the encyclopedia to be full of good articles. Mass-noms are a symptom of the backlog getting out of hand, not the cause of it. -- asilvering (talk) 18:04, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
5. Per asilvering and my last oppose—and remove the soft cap. There is an issue with mass nominations of poor-quality articles. There is no issue with mass nominations of good-quality or nearly-good-quality articles. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
6. per asilvering & Bilorv! sawyer * he/they * talk 01:48, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
7. I don't think there is a need to reopen this. The soft cap achieves the goal and automates what would otherwise be mildly annoying paperwork fpr nominators. CMD (talk) 12:07, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
8. While well-intentioned, I think this will have the adverse effect of pushing the backlog somewhere where this isn't visible. Prolific nominators with actual high-quality content would be disadvantaged, especially if there was a lower hard cap (e.g. a cap of 5 is completely infeasible for nominators who work in obscure subject areas and have to wait months for a review). This will also have no effect on the actual issue, which is that there aren't enough reviewers; as mentioned above, it is a symptom of a larger problem, not the problem in itself. Epicgenius (talk) 22:16, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
9. Most of our prolific nominators are also people who review a lot and whose articles are almost invariably high-quality. I don't think artificially removing articles that are good enough for GA from GAN actually furthers the purpose of improving articles.

Discuss

1. Mass nominating low-quality articles (at present, one editor has submitted around a tenth of the nominations currently at GAN) is not very respectful of other editors at the process as a whole. That said, I have nothing against mass nominations of good quality articles either, if the nominator does their work in reviewing. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:39, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

• For context, this cap was originally proposed and discussed in Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023 § Proposal 6A: Cap concurrent GA nominations per editor at 20. czar 16:50, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
• What about lowering the cap? For people who are genuinely doing high quality work this shouldn't hit them too hard (because at least when I was super involved in GA, those people's reviews rarely tended to sit for huge amounts of time). Barkeep49 (talk) 18:43, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
  • As someone whose main editing interests are in an area where there are limited numbers of nominators and reviewers (mathematics), I have been nominating roughly 1-2 articles per month and despite this the long waiting period for reviews routinely causes my number of nominations to exceed five. If the cap were lowered to five open, I could easily imagine situations where the wait for reviewers caused me to be locked out of the process altogether for months or longer. I can live with a cap of 20 (it is not a number I have come close to) but 5 is too low. Better would be a limit on rate (number of nominations per unit time) rather than on total number of open nominations. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:13, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 3: Introduce a QPQ system

I understand that this has been proposed before and it wasn't a popular proposal, but I think it deserves restating. QPQ is necessary for the functioning of the DYK project and it is already an unwritten part of the FAC process (even if they don't like admitting it). The backlog is never going to be sustainable so long as the barriers to nomination are so low and the requirements for reviewing are so intense. We used to sort lists by reviews/noms ratio, but this proved confusing, so it was reverted to the queue system. But now we have nothing to incentivise nominators to review other nominations, so we have just ended up with people that review little and nominate a lot effectively dominating the process. It's very common to see users with dozens, even hundreds more nominations than reviews. These represent the largest contributors to the backlog being so unsustainable. Users that review more than they nominate just can't keep up. So let's just get it over with and start requiring QPQ reviews. We could even use the ratio to scale how many QPQs are required, the higher your nomination/review ratio, the more reviews you should be required to do for each nomination. (i.e. More reviews than nominations = no QPQ required; more nominations as reviews = 1 QPQ required; more than twice as many nominations as reviews = 2 QPQs required; etc.) --Grnrchst (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. As proposer. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. I would support the scheme outlined in the last sentence of the proposal. That said, there's no chance it'll ever be implemented. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:39, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
3. Per Airship. GAN suffers badly from the tragedy of the commons: more people want to write than want to review. The current system of crossing our fingers and hoping that people will chip in puts the burden on those of us who are actually willing to help others out. Nominators who can't be bothered to do reviews benefit from our hard work while doing nothing to help others in return, and thus the backlog grows. The system doesn't work unless we all share the burden. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 04:30, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Support, at least for a trial period. I do think the concern about low quality reviews is worth taking seriously. But I think we should try this for a month or two, then see how much of an issue that is in practice. Ghosts of Europa (talk) 04:38, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
5. Actually, you know what? I think we ought to try this out and at least see if it really does lead to poor quality reviews. I know it is a perennial proposal, but if it has never actually been implemented at GAN, can we really say for certain that it wouldn't work? And besides, as PMC says: if people give bad reviews, we can just topic- ban them, or at least temporarily stop them from reviewing for a period. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 03:51, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
6. The current system doesn't seem to provide any assurance of quality. Getting nominators to review more will help in two ways. It will help them understand what's required and so nominated articles should have less issues. And, by adding a cost to the nominations, there will be less free-riders and this should reduce the number of nominations to a more manageable level. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:01, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. I stand by what I said the last time this was proposed: The potential benefits do not outweigh the drawbacks of potentially (1) discouraging high-quality nominations and (2) encouraging low-quality reviews. TompaDompa (talk) 16:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. Having a backlog is preferable to having poor quality reviews. If we do not have a method to ensure high quality reviews, we should not force people to review. —Kusma (talk) 17:18, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
3. As performing an indepth check of all of the article (grammar, neutrality, verification, copyvio etc.), it would not be fair to have reviewers needing to do a QPQ in order to nominate. Another issue is that the nominations at GAN are much larger than at DYK. Therefore, the reviews themselves take much longer to complete. While reviewing articles at GAN are important, having QPQs delays new nominations. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 17:44, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Per MrLinkinPark333, but with the added note that, frankly, QPQ isn't fit for purpose at DYK either, so it's the last thing we should be emulating. ——Serial Number 54129 17:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
5. Very no, per TompaDompa, but I do support mild badgering of the prolific writers who aren't doing their share of reviews. -- asilvering (talk) 18:01, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
6. per everyone else, and also totally agree with Asilvering that we ought to be a bit harder on those who have 50+ GAs and zero reviews. if one has dozens of GAs, then they should be familiar enough with the criteria to do their part. sawyer * he/they * talk 18:40, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

   If not by requiring QPQ, how else might we "be a bit harder on those who have 50+ GAs and zero reviews"? Mokadoshi (talk) 03:27, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

   see Proposal 16: Cap open nominations for editors with a negative review-to-GA ratio sawyer * he/they * talk 03:29, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

7. I am willing to do QPQs myself, but I think making them required would worsen the quality of reviews too much. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
8. We are building a long-term system to robustly measure quality (as well as reward editors). Rubberstamping and shoddy reviews will cause us problems later down the line. Many more people are interested in GAN than GAR. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
9. Too many people are never going to be good reviewers, and the GA quality will suffer if you try to make them in order to submit their own GANs. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:06, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
10. The incentive structure would exacerbate existing issues. CMD (talk) 12:08, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
11. This would be a disincentive for me. Someone folks like writing, others like reviewing. Grk1011 (talk) 15:51, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
12. While I understand the intention, it would just encourage poor-quality reviews. This is especially true if we tied the number of required reviews to the review-GA ratio - there is nothing stopping prolific nominators with few reviews from doing improper quick fails or quick passes. Epicgenius (talk) 22:16, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
13. In my opinion, this takes away the right from editors to either prefer writing or prefer reviewing. A decent amount of good standing, active editors already review when they nominate anyways. In areas like DYK, this type of system works, since there's promoters and QPQ is fair when there's a chance to make it onto the front page, but here? All I could see coming out of this would be less people interested in the GAN process long term, or rushed GAN reviews that have to be taken to GAR at a later date. I can't see this proposal being beneficial to the project at all. λ NegativeMP1 03:59, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
14. The potential downsides outweigh the benefit. Both nominators and reviewers are doing a service to the encyclopedia, either by creating good content or by ensuring that truly Good content is recognized as Good. Some people will naturally gravitate to one or the other. Personally, I find reviewing more satisfying than being reviewed, which is stressful. As Kusma put it, a backlog is preferable to having poor quality reviews. —Ganesha811 (talk) 12:35, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

• For context, this idea was last proposed and discussed in Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023 § Proposal 3: Adopt "quid pro quo". czar 16:50, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
• I've tried that Asilvering; never works. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:03, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

  What's your definition of "works"? It's an end in itself. What I'm saying is that I think people who submit far more articles than they review should face some social disapproval. That's all. If someone wants to submit dozens of articles and review none of them, that's annoying, but that's all it is. -- asilvering (talk) 18:08, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

• Has this ever been attempted at GA? And if so, was there proof that the quality of reviews decreased? If not, could we look into a trial period of a month or two to see whether QPQ would work, as suggested by Ghosts of Europa? Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 18:18, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
• It blows my mind that every time this comes up, those who oppose continually assert that if we do this, everyone will for sure start doing bad reviews. Why do we make this bad faith assumption? Do we really have such a poor opinion of our fellow contributors? Or are we admitting to our own laziness here? And keep in mind that bad actors can always be TBANned, just as they can be now. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:44, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  Personally, I can say I'm not making the assumption that that would happen, but I think the incentives are misplaced, and incentivizing behaviour you don't actually want to see doesn't tend to be a recipe for success. I simply don't think getting a GA stamp on an article should require anything other than writing the article. People who like writing and hate reviewing should also get to participate. Should those people get to suck all the energy out of the room? No, that's why I strongly support Proposal 16. -- asilvering (talk) 03:57, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  Also, I don't like participating in qpq-type transactional systems. They gross me out. I don't volunteer to do things because I expect someone to do the same back to me. I'd be horrified to learn anyone had done so on my behalf. -- asilvering (talk) 04:00, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  Collaboration is a fundamental aspect of the project. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 04:44, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  I am not at all sure what that has to do with my statement. -- asilvering (talk) 04:47, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

  It means that doing stuff for other people is necessary in order to keep this part of the project rolling. The very act of nominating an article for GA is a request for someone else's time. Editor time is the most valuable commodity on the project. Therefore, in my opinion, anyone who is willing to request that someone else spend time on their work should, in the spirit of collaboration, be willing to offer their time back by doing a review themselves. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:04, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 4: Formalize "horse trading"

I love the idea of a QPQ, I think it's the radical sort of thing we need for the project. But looking at how they actually work: DYK QPQs just aren't good quality. For most people (and there are luckily exceptions) they're something people crank out in a few minutes because it's a chore you have to do before nominating the article you really want to DYK. Do we want GAN reviews to fall into that level of quality? Grnrchst has pointed out that FAC reviews are something of an informal QPQ. That exists for good articles too—I've seen it called "horse trading." Ultimately, the problem with a backlog is that GANs take a while. This might not ultimately be a bad thing for everyone; I had some pretty old outstanding GA reviews until recently and I didn't really mind it. If someone does mind it though, they could request a horse trade with someone in a similar subject area and each would review each other's articles. To prevent abuse, it'd be important to make sure that fails count for the trade, and for some cursory overview by a coordinator of some sort to make sure that none of the GAN review process has been ignored (most commonly, source-checks). Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 16:51, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. As proposer. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 16:51, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Horse trading = log rolling = cliques of friends get easy passes for each others' articles while everyone else gets locked out of the system. It is a recipe for corruption and dubious GAs. It is something we should discourage, not encourage. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:49, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. Formalisation isn't needed. Informal agreements to review each other's work is okay so long as the people involved aren't afraid to fail the nomination or bring up substantial issues if needed. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
3. Not sure there is much in actuality that needs formalising, and I can't see what a formal option would be that isn't QPQ (already being discussed above). CMD (talk) 12:10, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
4. I've seen editors start a review with "please also consider reviewing one of my open nominations" and I think that's fine. Not sure what "formalizing" might mean or accomplish. Grk1011 (talk) 15:52, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

I'm not really sure what you mean by "formalize", since you don't have any formal language in this post. What specific language are you proposing to formalize? -- asilvering (talk) 17:55, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

I interpreted it as something like adding "Agreeing with another nominator to review each others' articles is allowed, so long as the reviews are of good quality" to WP:GANI. That said, that is acceptable now, so I guess I don't understand why it needs to be formalized. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:00, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that's precisely my question: what are we formalizing, since this appears to be no change whatsoever? -- asilvering (talk) 18:02, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't actually specify. Apologies; I meant having a separate page and review system for this. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 18:20, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

I still don't follow, sorry. -- asilvering (talk) 18:58, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

What I don't get is why? I can say to you, "if you review Michael Block I'll review Centennial half-crown", and as long as they're thorough reviews, that's acceptable? Why is a separate page needed? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:02, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

If someone is currently reviewing one of your GA nominations, it's a conflict of interest to review or promise to review one of their nominations, because then if they discover any problem and fail your nomination they might reasonably expect you to be more hostile to their nomination. Therefore, they would be incentivized to look the other way and pass your article rather than pointing out the problem. This is not something we should be encouraging or formalizing. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:38, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I wouldn't do it personally for that reason, even though I would hope that I/fellow editors wouldn't take a fail in that way. As far as I know, though, it's not forbidden by the GA instructions. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:48, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 5: Incentivise reviewing

For a while, the sort order of GAN was not by date of nomination, but only by the nominator's review to nominations quotient. This was great for wait times for frequent reviewers (I rarely had to wait long) but was discouraging especially to nominators with many legacy nominations. We could try to find a compromise position where reviewing in general helps to reduce wait times. For example, we could sort reviews by (wait time)*(reviewer bonus), where "reviewer bonus" is a number between 1 and 3 depending on how frequently the nominator performs reviews. So every new nomination would start out at the bottom of the list, just some of them would climb to the top at a faster rate.

Support

1. As proposer. Happy to hear other suggestions for incentives. —Kusma (talk) 17:33, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. I am in favor of the concept of incentivising reviews in a thoughtful manner. Barkeep49 (talk) 18:41, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
3. i think this is worth a shot! sawyer * he/they * talk 18:44, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
4. The soft reviewer bonus system with appropriate leeway for new nominators seems a nice subtle nudge system less problematic than requiring QPQs. CMD (talk) 12:13, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. I think it's best to keep the main list by wait time alone, at least for long enough to work through the backlog that's been here since the articles were ordered in the reviw-to-noms way. But I do think it's helpful that we have the "highest priority" list of reviews at the top of the page. Having a couple different top-five lists could be really helpful. "Oldest articles by GA newbies", "oldest articles by people with a better than 1:1 review ratio", etc. -- asilvering (talk) 17:59, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. Wait time is what has worked. I would like to see incentives remain outside sort order, such as through barnstars. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
3. We just got away from sorting by an opaque algorithm that did nothing to incentivize reviewing, especially of older nominations. Let's not go back to it. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 12:20, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Yes, it didn't work. If barnstars or other pats on the back work for people, that'd be fine. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:38, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
5. This proposal is not marked as an RfC, so probably doesn't have the WP:CONLEVEL to overrule the RfC done only a few weeks ago. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:07, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

• I am in principle decidedly in favour of incentivizing reviewing, though less sure about this particular suggestion. I had no strong opinions on either changing the sort order to be by review ratio or changing it back, but both[1][2] had fairly strong consensus in favour at the time. The sort order by review ratio did incentivize me to review more than I otherwise would have, although this mainly took the form of encouraging me to pick up clearly-premature/unprepared/deficient nominations to close as unsuccessful rather than ignoring them as I otherwise might have—which may or may not be the kind of behaviour we want to encourage. TompaDompa (talk) 16:45, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

  @TompaDompa At least personally, I do think that's the kind of behaviour we should encourage. The sooner obviously unprepared articles exit the queue the better. -- asilvering (talk) 20:57, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

• To address PMC's point, the proposal incentivises keeping one's review-to-nom ratio high, which gives an indirect incentive to review (and that did work for me). It does not remove the current incentive to review older nominations (if you just review everything above your own nom, your nom will become the top one), but it makes it slightly less work for frequent reviewers. —Kusma (talk) 19:22, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

  That was exactly the justification for the switch to the algorithm sort last time. There was strong recent consensus to change it back because it wasn't providing that incentive to most reviewers. I recognize that you're the admirable exception but it just doesn't seem to work for most people the way it did for you. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:58, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 6: Swap Unreviewed nominations with Old nominations at Backlog Drives Progress

Currently, there are 186 GAN nominations that are 3 months or older. Of these 186, 32 of them are older than 6 months. This means that over 70% of them (502 out of 688) are under 3 months old. While 688 nominations are a concern, the majority of them are not that old. I think that the Progress bars at the Backlog drives should track Old nominations (3 months and older) and the Total number of nominations like at Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Backlog elimination drives/March 2024. While nominations of older nominations have been started, 28 of them have open reviews started more than a month ago per Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations/Report. An open review does not guarantee that it will be completed. Therefore, I think tracking the number of old nominations in the progress table would be more encouraging. Cutting back the backlog from 8 months to 2 months would be a massive accomplishment. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 18:10, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. Per my proposal. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 18:10, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. There's only a backlog if old nominations are in the queue. If many nominations are in the queue then this could (in theory) be a well-functioning, active process with quick turnover. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
3. i think this makes more logical sense than what we have right now sawyer * he/they * talk 01:50, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Per Bilorv. The backlog becomes an issue when people have to wait for months for somebody to come along and review their article. I think it's still important to keep track of overall unreviewed nominations in backlog drives, but refocusing drives on old nominations would produce a massive benefit for the whole project. --Grnrchst (talk) 13:07, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
5. I like this. It seems more in the spirit of eliminating the backlog. Our backlog isn't really noms in general, but the ones that linger. This would help address the concern about folks who dump a bunch of new noms periodically. They shouldn't be chastised for being active and productive. It's only a problem if no one reviews the noms for months. Grk1011 (talk) 15:38, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

Discuss

This would be more like the GOCE, which has the total articles needing copyediting, and a specified set of the oldest articles needing copyediting: the drive specifically lists the months being targeted—for example, the current drive is targeting the December 2022, January 2023, and February 2023 articles that need to be copyedited, and the initial 263 listed has been reduced to 164; however, the total articles needing copyediting has only been reduced from 2509 to 2461 because new articles are being tagged with a {{copyedit}} template. However, the count includes those that are already under review (there are 123 unreviewed that are 90 days or older, 11 of which are over 180 days). While old open reviews don't guarantee that they will be completed, the vast majority are completed, and the rest eventually find new reviewers, and more frequently during backlog drives due to the extra points offered. (That's less true this drive than in past ones, admittedly.)

However, in past reviews, a quickly dropping number of unreviewed nominations has proved a major encouragement. That hasn't been true this time, but it might in future. On the other hand, past GOCE drives have sometimes had to add in a new month when the original targets are used up (they also give a bonus for old articles), which seems to invite new energy to reduce the number again. Note that the total changes for GOCE are to the total outstanding copyedit requests, not the targeted ones, which is different from how we work (we show the reduction in those articles waiting for review). BlueMoonset (talk) 04:26, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 7: Organize nominations into sections based on months at GAN

Inspired by Mike Christie's comment below, how about we organize all of the nominations based on User:SDZeroBot/GAN sorting? We could have four sections:

• Nominations that are 6 months or older
• Nominations that are older than 3 months old
• Nominations that from 1 month to 3 months old
• Nominations that are under 1 month old.

To prevent the sections from getting too large, we could keep the topics/subtopics under each section that applies. Therefore, the oldest nominations are first and are not buried in the GAN page. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 18:33, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. As the proposer of the propsoal. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 18:33, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Seems to serve no purpose except for making the topics I want to review harder to find. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:33, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. Honestly I don't mind what happens on that sort page because I don't ever look at it. I find the main nomination page fine the way it is and it allows me to find articles in subjects I'm interested in. Grk1011 (talk) 15:41, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
3. It's a decent idea to highlight the problem of the backlog, but I imagine it would put people off reviewing by not being able to determine which articles they would be interested in or have expertise in. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 18:21, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Would break up the straightforward list-by-time structure. It's already evident which items are oldest, they're at the top of each list. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:42, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
5. I am only interested in reviewing certain categories of nominations, often small ones, and lumping them together with dozens or hundreds of video games, recent shows and music, and sporting events (big categories that I am not interested in) to organize by date instead would make these much harder to find. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:27, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

1. I don't understand this. User:SDZeroBot/GAN sorting sorts nominations based on topic, not age. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:57, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

   I referenced the GAN sorting as an example. For example, Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations/Report, there are:

   • 32 nominations that are 180 days or older
   • 152 nominations that are between 91 to 179 days old (older than 3 months but less than 6 months)
   • 209 nominations that are between 31 to 90 days (older than 1 months but not over 3 months).

   I thought having each of these age sections and breaking them up by topic would be easier. Instead of merging them all together, especially the 209 between 31 days-3 months and 152 being between 3-6 months, it would be more feasible. If it's easier to group them by age instead and not worry about the subtopics, then that works too. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 19:30, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

2. Many reviewers seem to check in specific topics, this would not help them and may hide even obscure the older nominations in that topic area. CMD (talk) 12:15, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
3. And who says that there has to be a single nominations page, that it has to be either the current layout or another? We can keep the current one as the "primary" nominations page, and have others that organize the same items with other layouts that we may find useful (such as order by nomination date, by article prose length, by users with the most present and past nominations to the least, by users with the most reviews to the last, by nominations/reviews proportion, etc). The WP:GAN page itself is 100% run by bots anyway and the same can happen with those, once set up those extra pages would require no active work from us to keep ordered. Cambalachero (talk) 20:13, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 8: Time out "stale" nominations

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

---

The major way WP:FAC trims their queue is by having un(der)reviewed nominations time out and fall out of the queue. The downside of this is obvious: it's unfair. A nominator waits in line only to be told to get back in line, starting at the back. I think there are some legitimate upsides though. Nominations that are in poor shape, or from editors that don't review much or are difficult to work with are probably most likely to fall down the queue, where under this proposal they could non-confrontationally be removed from the queue. We would add an automated message to the nominator that sadly their nomination wasn't reviewed due to an insufficient pool of reviewers, and that they can help by reviewing more GANs, or seek further feedback on the article at WP:Peer Review. The result of enacting this would be that reviewers' limited resources are spent reviewing relatively recently nominated articles, where the nominator is more likely to be around and have their sources handy. At FAC, the timeout is handled by coordinators based on momentum. I'd suggest here we instead set a time limit, perhaps 45 days. Ajpolino (talk) 18:35, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. As proposer. There's been a substantial backlog at GAN for as long as I can recall. I realize this would be a dramatic change, but perhaps it's time to consider trialing some dramatic options. Mike Christie's efforts to rebuild the GA bot and reorder the nomination list were a fantastic boon for the project, but revealed that tinkering with the list order probably isn't going to be sufficient to make a dent in our backlog. Similarly, backlog drives are great, and build community, but I very much doubt they can keep the backlog in check. I'm not saying this is the answer, but I think it's worth considering. Ajpolino (talk) 18:39, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. I agree that the result of this is that reviewers' limited resources are spent reviewing relatively recently nominated articles. I also think the result of it is that people with social capital in GA are at a huge leg up over people who don't and that's not the thing I wish GA would learn from FA. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:40, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. I don't think it would be fair to have someone who has been waiting for a long time have their nomination removed at GAN. The nomination could not be reviewed for a various of reasons: potential reviewers don't have access to sources, length of article, topic of article etc. Nominators do not have control in how fast or how soon their article is reviewed. Removing older nominations and telling users to review other articles might discourage them for resubmitting their article. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 18:44, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
3. Per Barkeep. This seems to me like a problem with FAC, not a solution. -- asilvering (talk) 18:53, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Per Barkeep. Also, why would we punish people who wait for a long time because they do not find reviewers by waiting even longer? —Kusma (talk) 20:32, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
5. What is an editor of a specialized topic that takes months to find an interested editor supposed to do? Keep re-nominating and re-nominating in the hope that eventually one of the nominations won't time out? Get their topic permanently banned from nominations because it has timed out too much? I don't see how this helps the backlog nor the GA process. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:52, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
6. As well as specialised topics, this would discourage people from working on articles with large scope (e.g. vital articles). Long and large scope articles often linger for many months. — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
7. per Barkeep & David Eppstein - also, selfishly, i worry that as someone who works on obscure topics, my future nominations would get stale in this system. sawyer * he/they * talk 01:54, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
8. It's simply unfair to those who nominate in good faith, especially (as noted above) the less popular categories. One reason we have backlog drives is to add an incentive to review the nominations that have been sitting around the longest. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:31, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
9. We don't have the institutional or organisational structure for this. CMD (talk) 12:16, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
10. Per everyone above. This is something I already found absurd about the FAC process, it'd be even more punishing here. --Grnrchst (talk) 13:04, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
11. This is exactly what we don't want to happen. Old and 'hard' articles need to rise in priority, not fall off a cliff. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:44, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
12. Not to pile on more opposes but reviewers' limited resources are spent reviewing relatively recently nominated articles it's tautological that if we forbid older nominations that most nominations will be newer. But it doesn't address the backlog, unless we're hoping for a significant number of these people to get fatigued and give up. Thank you for bringing it up, this is worth discussing, but not a proposal I support. Mokadoshi (talk) 03:50, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

Now, if the proposal had been to time out stale reviews, particularly where the nominator has not been responsive, that could help clear some deadwood away. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:31, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Don't we basically do this already? I've checked in on a handful once the backlog drive started, and when I've let one run too long before I had someone pop in to remind us to close it. -- asilvering (talk) 04:34, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

I do that, and I know others periodically patrol that page. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 08:52, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Without naming names, I've noticed at least 2 editors who have many noms but are not currently active. I'm sort of torn what the response might be. I feel like someone should start the review anyway with "I know you're inactive right now, but it's time for this review. You have 7 days to let me know if you will be able to respond, if not, this will be a quick fail and you can renominate when you're ready to return." Even when I don't have time to actively edit, it's never hard to check-in and respond to someone's quick question. If you don't have time to edit, you don't have time to have pending noms. Grk1011 (talk) 15:48, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Some nominated articles are GA quality without any further improvement, so nominator inactivity shouldn't be a quickfail reason. If someone is a significant contributor to an article that wouldn't normally be quickfailed then I believe they deserve a full review and feedback, even if that feedback is only something that can be actioned outside of the GA process or by another volunteer. — Bilorv (talk) 21:13, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Indeed. As a reviewer you can always write out the reasons for a fail (assuming none of the changes are addressed), then fail after a week or so if you don't hear anything back. -- asilvering (talk) 21:18, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

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

Proposal 9: Group nominations based on months at GAN in each topic section

• I propose an adjusted version of my proposal #7. In each section and subsection (Agriculture, food and drink, Art and architecture etc.), we could group nominations based on the amount of months that each nomination has been at GAN while keeping the information that's already there in each nomination (description, review/ga ratio, nominator, date). For example:

Computing and engineering

• 3 months or older:
  • DOM clobbering - 10 November 2023
• 1 month or older:
  • Open-source license - 22 February 2024
• Under 1 month old:
  • Texas City refinery explosion - 29 February 2024
  • Reinforcement learning from human feedback - 15 March 2024

Therefore, we can keep the existing topics and see which areas have more backlogged articles than others. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 19:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

Support as proposer. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 19:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. I don't think anyone needs section headers to tell how many months ago November was, or whether a nomination from 29 February was under a month ago. You can just count, or look at a calendar. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:36, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. All noms have the nomination date there already for those interested. CMD (talk) 12:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
3. Not necessary, and indeed adding clutter, per the comments above. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:45, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

Proposal 10: Finish doing some or all of the things we agreed on last time we did this

WP:GA2023 resulted in consensus to do several things that were never implemented:

• Proposal 2023.4: Proposed model reviews
• Proposal 2023.4A: Recognize exceptional reviews
• Proposal 2023.5: Make the mentorship program more visible
• Proposal 2023.15: Invitation
• Proposal 2023.21: Make GA status more prominent in mainspace
• Proposal 2023.30: Add a category separating GAs by month and/or year
• Proposal 2023.34: Create a page, Wikipedia:Former good articles, for delisted GAs, similar to WP:FFA

Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer and per consensus found at WP:GA2023. I had intended to revisit "Proposal 2023.15: Invitation" once the backlog drive ended and I believe it should be given priority. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. no reason why we shouldn't implement these ideas that already have consensus sawyer * he/they * talk 22:02, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
3. Support and see below for details on the "Invitation" and "Proposed model reviews", Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 18:18, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
4. I think the invitation to review would be most effective. I'm not quite sure what the criteria are for GA backlog drive invitations, but it would be good if we try to target a slightly different demographic. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 14:52, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
5. Support. Or why are we even spending time on the proposals above? Gog the Mild (talk) 14:10, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
6. These proposals look good; this goes without saying. Averageuntitleduser (talk) 03:18, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

Discuss

1. I mean, sure, but all of them require people to do the things. If you want to showcase model reviews, reward good reviews, be a mentor, or anything else, get on with it. I stepped forward with GAR and have been basically running the process for a year. It's no use vaguely handwaving at work and expecting that others (well, a certain someone else, let's be honest) will wave their magic wand and implement it, and complaining when they don't. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:33, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. After the initial somewhat complex plan to review the reviews stalled, I created a model review banner template and discussed it but never moved it to Template namespace or attempted to put it into practice. My thought was to have a template that someone could post to a review, the template would automatically add any marked review to a model review category, and optionally a bot could then auto-post a message to the reviewer's talk page. Rather than voting, the process could just be that if anybody removes the model review template, it stays off. Additionally, I drafted an invitation User:Rjjiii/Invitation that could be substed onto users' talk pages. I'm fine if any other editors want to modify that, push it to template space, or steal any ideas that seem usable. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 18:18, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

   that sounds like a great idea! sawyer * he/they * talk 18:19, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

   Love the Model Review idea. GAN reviewers are unsung heroes, and any effort towards recognizing them more effectively is good in my book. Fritzmann (message me) 13:55, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

   This looks great and I think such a system for marking and categorising model reviews would be fantastic. --Grnrchst (talk) 13:08, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

   This looks great! Some head-on solutions to the problem. The model review system would be a good reference for new reviewers, while the invitation would help us get those new reviewers in the first place. Averageuntitleduser (talk) 03:15, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

For proposal 34 there's a category, Category:Delisted good articles, which I think serves the same purpose, though I don't know how accurate it is. For 30, I think I looked into it and ran into technical difficulties, which I can dig up if anyone is interested. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:22, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 11: Collaborate with WikiProjects to make GAN reviewing part of their process

Members of WP:MILHIST and WP:VG watch their respective GAN categories, and nominations in these categories are handled more efficiently than others. Editors familiar with the GA process should work with other major WikiProjects to increase the overall focus on GAN nominating and reviewing, incorporating the same strategies used by MILHIST and VG. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. seems like a solid idea sawyer * he/they * talk 22:03, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
3. Sounds good. WikiProjects can help keep the backlog down in their specific sections of interest and hopefully bring new editors from those WikiProjects as well. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 22:16, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. There's nothing really to do here. Any Wikiproject interested in GANs can see them in Article Alerts already. At most Wikiproject sizes this would end up being small cliques reviewing each other even if this does work. (I personally sometimes avoid reviews that touch on areas I am one of the few regular editors in, fresh perspectives can be better.) CMD (talk) 12:19, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
2. Per below, I fail to see what this proposal actually means. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:23, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
3. Unclear what action this would actually involve. The two big WPs already have enough interested people to handle their GANs well. The proposal won't help the rest. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:47, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

Most WikiProjects are somewhere between dead and extremely understaffed, so this proposal only works for a few limited content areas. —Kusma (talk) 22:43, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Yeah. There is a reason that the two most active WikiProjects have the two most active GA sections. I'm not really sure what "strategies" Thebiguglyalien is thinking of, other than "have a WikiProject that isn't a graveyard". ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:28, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

I had initially listed a few different things when writing this, but I decided to leave it open-ended. One thing I had in mind was to design a more streamlined template banner that lists current GA (and FA/PR) nominations in a given topic—many WikiProjects use this, but it can be improved upon, standardized, and made more prominent. Another was to make use of WikiProject talk pages to notify them of recent nominations (also something that could be automated). Medicine, film, biography, women, politics, television, anime, albums, and sports all have active WikiProjects with untapped GA potential, among others. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:38, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

WP:AALERTS seems to be active for most of those projects, which handles notifications; I'm not entirely sure how you can streamline something like Wikipedia:WikiProject Film/Article alerts, so I'd like to see a mockup of that. In any case, unless I've missed something, I haven't seen any reference to specific "strategies used by MILHIST and VG", so I'd like to know what that refers to. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:58, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Women already has a whole wikiproject dedicated to GAs. It's WP:WIG. -- asilvering (talk) 04:42, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Some wikiprojects may have standards for prose, structure, and sourcing that aren't exactly aligned with the larger community's (like basing most of an article around non-independent local newspaper quotes and primary stats). See e.g. the former roads project's historical overuse of primary map/government/non-independent sources and exhaustive route outlines, and the general tendency of enthusiasts to include every minor detail on a topic. I would worry about some projects developing OWNership over their GANs and green-lighting articles that a neutral reviewer would have problems with. We already get QPQ-like partnerships where editors nominate and pass dozens of each others' articles, what's to prevent even bigger walled gardens developing when overseen by a wikiproject? JoelleJay (talk) 02:32, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

The real reason you don't like a QPQ-like partnership because it means you wouldn't be able to participate since you don't do any actual writing on Wikipedia, especially with regards to Good Articles. –Fredddie™ 22:45, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Lol do you have some kind of alert set up for wikispace mentions of "roads project" or are you just following me? JoelleJay (talk) 01:08, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Let's behave here and not start any drama. They are allowed to respond anywhere. It's not like GAN is a hidden page for admins only. Mitch32^{(it's you I like.)} 03:15, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

@Mitchazenia Maybe I'd assume more good faith if he didn't have a history of suddenly popping up at policy discussions slinging variations of this same personal attack at me and another editor.

You two had better take it easy. If your actions push more groups into forks, you might have to start editing in the article space because there won't be anyone else left.[3]

But you see, the nominator has a pattern of butting into topics that simply don't affect him because he doesn't contribute content to the encyclopedia.[4]

What really gets me going are the policy wonks who don't write articles trying to set and enforce policies on those who do. If we're creating ridiculous policies, maybe AfD should be limited to those who have written a Featured Article.[5]

Why do you care so deeply about this? NOR only affects editors who research topics and create articles based on that research. Judging by your contributions, that does not apply to you. So why do you care?[6]

As I suggested here, the people who don't write articles sure do want to impose their strict interpretation of said policies on those who do write articles.[7]

And they definitely have never sniffed FAC. Yet, they're perfectly comfortable dictating their narrow vision of policy to those of us who do produce content.[8] JoelleJay (talk) 00:04, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Neither. Self-admittedly, I'm kinda lame, but I'm not that lame. –Fredddie™ 03:20, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

You've got it quite backwards. A qpq system would not shut out reviewers with no GAs, but rather the reverse. -- asilvering (talk) 18:53, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 12: Allow Partial GA Reviews

At FAC, reviewers can focus on specific criteria and let others handle the rest (e.g. one person checks sources, another reviews the prose, another looks at image licenses). At GAN, we expect one reviewer to do everything. This means that if I love editing prose but hate checking sources, or vice versa, I can't meaningfully contribute to the backlog. This also makes it more intimidating to start reviewing.

I propose we allow reviewers to opt into a Partial Review system, where they can complete the parts they're comfortable with and then pass the baton to someone else. Individuals are still encouraged to complete the full review if they're comfortable doing so. Ghosts of Europa (talk) 21:54, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. Ghosts of Europa (talk) 21:54, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. worth a try! sawyer * he/they * talk 22:07, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
3. Definitely agree! My expertise is verification and copyvio checks, while grammar and neutrality take a long time for me. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 22:15, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Skyshiftertalk 23:37, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
5. As someone who enjoys digging through sources while, as an ESL, being somewhat limited in prose, I fully support this. AstonishingTunesAdmirer 連絡 00:52, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
6. I like this idea! I'm better at reviewing prose, anyways, and spot-checks take a long time for me. Spinixster (chat!) 02:00, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
7. I don't participate in GANs because I have a tendency to be thorough to the point of self-injury when writing/evaluating (non-technical) prose. On the other hand, I think I would enjoy tracking down sources. JoelleJay (talk) 02:49, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
8. Oooh, I never would have thought of that. I like this. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 04:34, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
9. This is a fantastic proposal, it directly addresses an issue a lot of people have been raising for a while. I do wonder how this could be implemented (maybe a dedicated noticeboard?) but opening the door for it will be worth it, I think. --Grnrchst (talk) 13:00, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
10. Support, but maybe weight partials based off of the amount of partials of that category in the queue, if it’s all as airship says, “plz do spot checks” (sounds like me) maybe disallow any more partial reviews that leave out the spot check until that queue is reduced. Geardona (talk to me?) 04:17, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Support, I hope the "partial review" section doesn't end up being a long list of "pls do source spotchecks for me". To expand, if a person to share the load with isn't found within a suitable timeframe (a week or two?) then it is still on the original reviewer to fulfil the full review. This cannot be an "indefinite hold" mechanism. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:23, 24 March 2024 (UTC) EDIT: moved to oppose

Oppose

1. This sounds chaotic; delay seems likely; and a key difference between GAN and FAC is GAN's single point of contact reviewer – it's already the case that others can add comments. I note that many of the "Discuss" comments below read much like "Oppose", too. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:51, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
2. This needs more thought. I would suggest to coordinate "reviewer teams" that can commit to a full review, but would not want people to start partial reviews without clarity on who will finish. —Kusma (talk) 17:03, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
3. At FAC, partial reviews often meant that editors avoided source reviews. I fear this would be the case if implemented at GAN. Z1720 (talk) 17:38, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Knowing how hard it is to get a reviewer to finish off a not-yet-complete review under the "Second opinion" rubric, I wouldn't want this to go forward as proposed. I would expect the number of incomplete reviews to balloon just like the number of unreviewed noms has. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:31, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
5. After thinking, while a fair idea, I just can't see it working in practice. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:43, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
6. Oppose - not a bad idea, but I ultimately think that the benefits of this proposal are already covered by the "second opinion" section, while the drawbacks would be both novel and considerable. —Ganesha811 (talk) 13:59, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
7. Per the various comments above. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:31, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
8. Unfortunately I don't think this will work. The GA criteria aren't really set up in the right way, and a GA reviewer really needs to have a broad-ish understand of the article. Someone doing prose check + someone else doing source checks + someone else doing formatting feels like it would get chaotic and lead to reviews taking ages. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 11:08, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
9. AryKun (talk) 14:05, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
10. Would be curious to see a more detailed proposal, but at the moment opposing. As I noted below handling it partially is already possible in an ad-hoc manner, if someone wishes to test, although we still need a single editor to certify passing/failing. FAC is mentioned as an example, that process has coordinators who handle it. CMD (talk) 15:04, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

Who decides the final fate of the review? Right now, it's the reviewer who opens the review page who has the final decision (unless they crap out). Is it whoever has the baton at the moment the one who gets to decide whether to approve, fail, or pass the baton? (We'd want to be sure that backlog drives encouraged the completion of partially complete reviews.) BlueMoonset (talk) 04:35, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

i think realistically it'd probably be fairly informal; once all the criteria has been met to the respective reviewers' liking, it'd be passed by one of them. sawyer * he/they * talk 04:40, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

If we implement this, we should make it clear that it's optional and up to the original reviewer to invite, rather than turning every review into a free-for-all. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 04:45, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

definitely agree; this shouldn't be the default, just an option. sawyer * he/they * talk 04:47, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Indeed. -- asilvering (talk) 04:57, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

• Those interested in partially reviewing should post to the user talkpage or the relevant article talkpage with their comments. I have done so in the past when I see a GAN I want to comment on that isn't open. If it is open, comments can be added to that page. You still need someone responsible for closing the GAN. CMD (talk) 12:22, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
• Apologies for misunderstanding. Are you saying that your proposal suggests that the partial review may involve different users reviewing depending on their skills (such as reviewing the writing and facts, or checking the verifiability of the sources)? If so, should the second opinion be the alternative one? I don't quite understand here. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 13:38, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
• In regards to partial reviews, would that be counted as a .5 review in the stats? If so, how would that be tracked? --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 17:41, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
• I wouldn't oppose this but I worry that it would become chaotic, and as AirshipJungleman29 says it might turn into "please would somebody else do the source review and spotchecks". Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:03, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

  Now opposing, having been convinced by the pessimistic comments in this section and the oppose section that this is too likely to cause more problems than it solves. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:31, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

  Maybe we could have a subpage of the project where editors can add themselves as interested in doing source review and spotchecks? Then other editors who want to do the rest of the review could recruit one of them before opening the review. JoelleJay (talk) 16:28, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

• I am not categorically opposed to this suggestion, but I think the risk of unintended consequences—as noted by several editors above—is very high and I am far from convinced that this would not just replace one type of problem with another (possibly even worse). TompaDompa (talk) 18:23, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
• I am agnostic, but like the idea of encouraging reviewer teams. Gog the Mild (talk) 14:12, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 13: Barnstars / Thank You Messages for Reviewers

When a GAN passes, ChristieBot posts an encouraging message on the nominator's talk page. For the reviewer, however, the end of the process is an anticlimax. I propose that ChristieBot also post an encouraging message / barnstar on the reviewer's talk page at particular milestones (e.g. "Thank you for your first GA review!", "Thank you for reviewing 5 GAs!"). People love positive reinforcement :) Ghosts of Europa (talk) 21:54, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. Ghosts of Europa (talk) 21:54, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
2. i think this would be fun :) sawyer * he/they * talk 22:10, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
3. Skyshiftertalk 23:37, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Positive feedback is cheap and I believe it would be effectively. Could we have some new award (like Triple Crown), automatic or given out manually, for reaching milestones like 5 reviews, 10 reviews, 20 reviews etc.? — Bilorv (talk) 01:17, 23 March 2024 (UTC
5. Seconding Bilorv. I think part of why people don't do many reviews is that we put so much emphasis on being a "content creator", listing number of GAs, etc, but not on the processes that actually make any of that work. I started listing the reviews I've done on my userpage two years ago. In all that time, I can count the number of user pages I've seen with someone doing similar on one hand. Honestly, maybe it's only two editors. But people list their GAs all the time. -- asilvering (talk) 02:41, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
6. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:10, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
7. Sure, but it might need an opt out mechanism. —Kusma (talk) 17:29, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
8. sounds good! Spinixster (chat!) 03:58, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
9. A fun, straightforward benifit! Averageuntitleduser (talk) 00:42, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
10. Support! Good idea. —Ganesha811 (talk) 14:45, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
11. Support. Gog the Mild (talk) 14:23, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
12. Of course! HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 02:22, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

Discuss

• Would you be willing to implement this (and Bilorv's addition) Mike Christie? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:06, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

  Yes, I think this should be doable. If this passes it would be good to get agreement on the wording and layout of the various messages and barnstars; adding the functionality to ChristieBot shouldn't be that hard. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:10, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

• If it's any consolation, Asilvering, I keep a list of my GA reviews but not my GAs. That being said, I don't really show it off to others but rather maintain the list for my own sake—largely because it helps with future reviews to easily be able to reuse phrasings for recurring pieces of (at times, necessarily lengthy) feedback, refer to relevant policies and guidelines that come up now and then, and so on. I similarly keep a list of my DYK nominations and reviews for this purpose as well as to keep track QPQ-wise. TompaDompa (talk) 17:45, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

  It's not that I need any kind of consolation, I just think it's a clear statement of what the community values, that people list their GAs but not reviews, etc. -- asilvering (talk) 20:18, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

• Currently, writers of good articles can display the {{User Good Articles}} userbox, that displays a simple "This user has helped promote X good articles on Wikipedia." We can implement a fancy badge like those of Wikipedia:Service awards, but with the rules of having a number of reviews as well as own good articles to climb in the categories. Cambalachero (talk) 20:23, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

  I've gone ahead and created File:Good article review icon.svg as a thing for GA reviews. I have also created {{GA review user topicon}}; if someone could create a userbox that would be great! Hopefully, a dedicated "award" you can only receive for reviewing will encourage people to do more reviewing? Or, potentially, advertise that reviews are needed? HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 01:39, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

  Also: if it's of any use. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 02:36, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

  @HouseBlaster I just went to create one, and found that there is already Template:User Good Articles reviewed. Did you have something else in mind? -- asilvering (talk) 01:07, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

  @Asilvering: My thought process was that we should create a unique "award" which can only be achieved by doing a GA review. Do you think there would be protests if we swapped the logo, either to the one I created or something else entirely? Or should we create an alternative version for people to use, that uses a unique logo? HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 02:22, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

  @HouseBlaster I think we should leave Template:User Good Articles reviewed as-is (it appears to be what @Cambalachero was hoping for in the first place) and save your icon for whatever specific award you have in mind. Or maybe for "model reviews"? That's been suggested somewhere in here. -- asilvering (talk) 02:28, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

  @Asilvering: fair enough :) I think I will let it evolve naturally. HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 21:40, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 14: Backlog drives should address only a subset of the backlog

I think we (by which I mean the regulars at GAN) are asking for contradictory things, all of which are good goals in themselves. We want

1. A small backlog and a short wait for reviews
2. No obligation to review in order to get one's own nominations reviewed
3. No incentive to do poor quality reviews
4. An environment that does not burn out editors who review a lot

I support all four of these -- I hesitate over 2, but I don't see why we should prevent an editor from reviewing one of Another Believer's nominations, though I would not review one myself. I don't think we can have all four at the same time. I think 1 is unresolvable because of these mutually contradictory goals. We currently have 2 and 3, and per the proposals above those look like they're going to continue to stand. So can we do anything about 4? I think backlog drives actually harm the motivation of some reviewers as they feel their good will is being taken advantage of.

So I propose that backlog drives are limited to some subset of what's at GAN: only R/G > 1, or something similar. That is, there would be a page showing which nominations are part of the backlog, and only reviews from that list would count towards the backlog barnstars.

Added, after MrLinkPark333's comment: perhaps make every other backlog drive like this, not every backlog drive. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:58, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. As proposer. I would be much more likely to participate in a backlog drive that was structured like this. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:01, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
2. I would support perhaps R/G > 1 within the past year, or something similar. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:05, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
3. I would prefer backlog drives that give bonuses to articles from a particular list while still allowing all reviews to count. For example, a list could be drawn up at the start of the drive of all submissions from editors with >1 review ratios, and taking one of those could get a bonus point. But while I'd prefer that, I wouldn't oppose the suggestion as written. -- asilvering (talk) 23:20, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. I disagree with this idea. If one of the oldest nominations happens to be from an user with R/G < 1, their nominations should not be ignored. Backlog drives should allow any nomination, not disqualify ones based on ratio. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 17:40, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

Proposal 15: Ban the specific guy who dumped all those extra nominations on you from making more nominations

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

---

I don't get why all the proposals above are so cagey. The opening statement tells us "dozens of nominations were dumped onto the list en masse". Why the passive here? "Were dumped"? No, there was a particular editor who dumped the nominations – TonyTheTiger. Why not ban him from nominating articles until he learns to respect volunteers' time and energy? It wouldn't fix the whole problem, but it would help a bit, right?

If the regulars here want say to something along the lines of "this section is for discussing GAN's higher-order systems, not individual editors' conduct, go to ANI or something" then sure, I'll respect that. But it seems to me a large part of the problem here does hinge on an individual editor's conduct.

Support

1. As proposer. – Teratix ₵ 15:44, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. No. It's annoying if you're one of the reviewers working on trying to bring down the backlog, but you can't penalize an editor for staying within the existing rules. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:28, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

   AirshipJungleman29 makes good points about Tony's nominations, below, but I agree with Kusma that this is not the right venue even if a ban were warranted. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:56, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

2. I think this is the wrong venue for a ban from GAN; I am uncomfortable preventing an editor from nominating without a consensus at WP:ANI. Excluding TTT from the WikiCup (a totally optional game) is a lesser sanction that can just be done by consensus of WikiCup coords; it might actually be more suitable here. —Kusma (talk) 17:28, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
3. not the right venue; take this to WP:ANI sawyer * he/they * talk 18:07, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

(Incidentally, could someone reading this consider quickfailing Heath Irwin under QUICKFAIL #5? Tony has immediately renominated the article without substantially addressing the issues raised in my review). – Teratix ₵ 16:00, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

• The problem is the rules haven't been followed, Mike Christie. WP:GAN/I#N1 instructs nominators to ensure compliance with the GA criteria before nominating. TonyTheTiger has not done this—he has nominated dozens of articles he hasn't edited in years, in some cases for almost a decade, and unsurprisingly many of them are clearly sub-par. Take for example Malcolm (Macbeth), which Tony last edited in 2016 and which doesn't meet several criteria. For related discussions, see Wikipedia talk:WikiCup#Open season on qfing me, where Tony takes exception to the fact that he has failed to do the literal step 1 of GA nominating, and this discussion on his talk page. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:11, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
  • Malcolm (Macbeth) really is a conspicuous example. I saw it nominated, looked at the article, and thought to myself "What am I missing? This is clearly nowhere near WP:Good article quality, yet it was nominated by an editor with hundreds of successful nominations". I pondered for a few days whether I should review it as an obvious WP:QUICKFAIL before being beaten to the punch by AirshipJungleman29. If this is in any way part of a pattern, something needs to be done—even if just a stern talking-to. TompaDompa (talk) 17:27, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
  • i concur with airship here. not even the slightest amount of due diligence was done with these nominations. sawyer * he/they * talk 18:14, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
• Given that we all feel uncomfortable about TTT's input to the queue here, could a coordinator have a quiet chat with him sometime? Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:57, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

  there's already been a discussion happening at his talk page, as well as at WT:CUP sawyer * he/they * talk 20:07, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

  • • Many thanks, good work. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:15, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
• Looking at the user's talk page, I see that within the last 24-hour time period (20:25 UTC on 22 March to 20:25 UTC on 23 March), no fewer than 25 "Failed GA" messages were left by (ChristieBot on behalf of) ten different reviewers. I suggest that it would at this point be more kind to simply remove all their outstanding nominations than to keep this up—and it would also be a better use of the community's time. TompaDompa (talk) 20:25, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
  • I have just removed two clear drive-by nominations from TTT (1995–96 Michigan Wolverines men's ice hockey season and Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:29, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

This behavior of immediately renominating failed articles until the reviewers get too tired or lazy and just pass it anyway was a big part of the reason Doug Coldwell's nominations became such a big problem. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:41, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

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

Proposal 16: Cap open nominations for editors with a negative review-to-GA ratio

One reason backlogs happen is that some editors nominate more articles than they review. This proposal would only cap the number of open nominations to editors who have more successful good articles nominations than they have reviews. This would hopefully encourage them to review articles instead of adding to the backlog. After all, the limit will be lifted if they review articles. The ratio is already tracked on WP:GAN, and I hope this won't be too hard to implement. If an editor doesn't want to review articles, they can still nominate a set number of articles (maybe 5?) and wait until a review is finished on one of them before their next nomination. This proposal would also "reward" editors who review as they would not be limited in how many open nominations they have.

If successful, I think we should open another discussion on what the exact limits should be. Z1720 (talk) 21:35, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. As proposer. Z1720 (talk) 21:35, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
2. I think this is more than fair, even with a set number as low as 5. I'd also support doing this only with a "soft" cap like we have on 20+ submissions currently. -- asilvering (talk) 23:16, 23 March 2024 (UTC) (response edited in bold and strikethrough -- asilvering (talk) 18:55, 27 March 2024 (UTC))
3. If we don't do straight QPQ, let's do something at least. I'm very sorry that this will inconvenience people who don't want to review, but the thing is, GAN is a commons. If people don't take out equal to what we're putting in, the thing collapses under its own weight. The oppose argues that slowing certain prolific nominators down doesn't improve Wikipedia, but you know what else doesn't improve Wikipedia? Articles sitting waiting for feedback for nine months. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 02:10, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
4. PMC has convinced me, i think sawyer * he/they * talk 02:13, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
5. Yeah, this is a good idea. (Sorry, Epic.) Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 03:53, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
6. Per PMC. Ajpolino (talk) 20:26, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Making it more tedious for Epicgenius and Chiswick Chap to nominate articles for GAN does not improve Wikipedia. —Kusma (talk) 23:20, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
2. I'm sympathetic to this proposal, but this would disproportionately affect our best reviewers as well as our best content creators. I'm not going to speak for Chiswick Chap, but if I were him, I'd feel insulted by a measure like this. He's done as many reviews as the current five supporters of this proposal combined, and there's a level of absurdity in penalizing him for not doing enough. This proposal would quell many contributors who both write and review just because even if they're good at reviewing, they're better at writing (the main thing we're actually supposed to be doing here). This is before considering the fact that just mathematically, it's an immense effort to move a ratio at all once both numbers are high enough. Suggesting a possible alternative in the discussion below. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 04:45, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
3. Our existing soft cap system feels better than a hard cap. Perhaps the soft cap could be tweaked, but that doesn't seem to be what is being proposed. CMD (talk) 06:52, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
4. Both GAs and reviews are valuable to the project, and must be treated as such. Rescues at GAR deserve the same status, by the way. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:07, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
5. Per SusunW’s comments. I don’t see any point in limiting what good writers can nominate. I would prefer something like prop 14, which I suggested, because it rewards prolific reviewers without penalizing other nominators. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:29, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
6. Nominators of GAs are contributing to the encyclopedia and the GA process, not taking away from it. I don't like these proposals about limiting number of active nominations because it tinkers with statistics rather than looking at the root cause (people do not feel sufficiently qualified or valued for reviewing): a nominator just starts playing a game where they hold 10 nominations back until their current nominations are reviewed, so the real GAN queue is 10 more than the official figures and the "backlog" has been "reduced" by 10. — Bilorv (talk) 21:51, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
7. Per § Proposal 16 and 16b in March 2024 backlog. Adding caps merely hides the problem of not enough reviewers without addressing it, and having a (badly and confusingly described) hard threshold for the cap permanently locks out certain prolific contributors without in any way incentivising them to perform the ridiculous number of new reviews that would be needed to get past the threshold. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:21, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Comments

• i'm very sympathetic to this idea, as there are a few editors with zero reviews and 60+ GAs, or even 160+ GAs, which makes me not want to review their nominations at all, and i know i'm not alone with that sentiment. however, Kusma is right that this would hinder some of our most prolific GA nominators (Epicgenius, CC, Sammi Brie, etc). i'm undecided on this as of now. sawyer * he/they * talk 00:57, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  It doesn't hinder them from writing good articles (lowercase), if that's what they want to do. It does make it harder to get the little green award on the articles they do write, unless they want to support the process that generates those little green awards. -- asilvering (talk) 03:24, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  (if you didn't notice, i did end up putting my name in the support section lol) yeah i've come around to agreeing with this. all three of them are pretty good about reviewing anyways, so i'm sure it would work out. any other editors with huge numbers of GAs and very few or no reviews should certainly pick up the slack; i'm sure we can all agree on that. sawyer * he/they * talk 03:27, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  I don't give a rats about getting a "little green award". My motivation for submitting articles for review is very simple. They are improved by collaboration. Other eyes give input and perspectives that you might not have thought of and peer review is basically broken. IMO, which counts for absolutely nothing, imposing reviews will result in people no longer submitting articles and in turn a reduction in article quality. Maybe that's unimportant to others, maybe the focus is better directed at newbies trying to learn how to present better articles and just considering experienced editors' work "good enough". I have said many times on this page that reviewing and writing are not the same and in the real world, writers write, proofreaders verify/correct, and editors review. WP requires all of these to be done by a single person. Reviews are agonizing to me. It takes me an entire day or more to review any article. Critiquing someone else's work means that I will write and rewrite and rewrite yet again, each and every observation for clarity and to ensure that I am not inserting my own biases into recommendations. I force myself to review, but it is genuinely taxing. If we arrive at agreement to impose QPQ or a specific number of reviews, in all honesty, I will just stop submitting anything, because that would be too much pressure and cause me stress. Since my engagement on WP at all is to learn and to de-stress by doing something I enjoy, it would defeat the purpose. SusunW (talk) 18:37, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

  To be clear, SusunW, this is the "cap nominations by noms with low review ratio" proposal, not the "quid pro quo" proposal. Anyone who doesn't want to review for any reason could still nominate articles for GA, just not 20 or so at a time. -- asilvering (talk) 22:43, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

  asilvering I monitor what I submit (For the record, one of my last GA reviews was done by you, because you specifically asked me to submit the article. I had not done so, because I still have what in my mind is too many outstanding articles awaiting review. I was a bit disappointed by your comment above about collecting awards, because it makes unfair assumptions about nominators' intent.) I know from experience that women's articles sit for a long time before being picked up for review. I've had more than one exceed the term of a pregnancy. I cannot control how soon someone reviews one of my articles so saying I can't nominate if I have X outstanding or if I haven't reviewed X articles submitted by someone else, basically equates to just don't nominate articles. This discussion in a way seems counter-productive, like the goal is to punish content creators, unless they are prolific reviewers and to assume the worst motives for why they submitted an article for review. The cap and QPQ issues are related and inseparable to my mind. I am not trying to be argumentative, at all, just pointing out that there are many more ways to look at any situation than in-line from totally bad to totally good. Whatever is decided will be and I will just have to adjust what I do accordingly. SusunW (talk) 23:18, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

  Sorry, about that. I didn't mean to imply that all nominators are only after the awards and get nothing else out of it, and I do feel very strongly that no one should be required to do reviews to be eligible for them themselves. But from your reply I see that my comment was also more unkind than I intended, and I apologize for that. I have more to say in response, but I need to step away from wp for a minute and wanted to get this apology out first. -- asilvering (talk) 00:41, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks for that. SusunW (talk) 14:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

  Alright, having given it some more thought, my earlier position on this was both wrongheaded and inconsistent with my stated views (both in this wider discussion and elsewhere), so thank you for calling me on it. I've outright said that even mass-nominations are a symptom of the backlog, not the cause of it, and I stand by that. (Except, obviously, here, where I wobbled.) Among other reasons, I'm sure that this comes from frustration with how we put prolific content creators on a pedestal, then wonder why other tasks on the encyclopedia don't get done. Why don't people do more GA reviews? Why don't more people help at AfC? Why don't people run for adminship? Come on, folks: we know exactly why. In general, I think we ought to do whatever we can do to emphasize that we need all kinds of different hands to keep this ship afloat, which is why I still support a soft cap. But, obviously, "all kinds of different hands" does include people who only ever write articles and never do anything else, so when I'm being honest with myself, I don't support changes that make that more difficult.

  I do wish more editors approached GAN as you do, as a collaboration that improves the encyclopedia, rather than a stamp of approval or an award to set in a trophy cabinet. It's much more fun to review when both nominator and reviewer agree that that's the point. -- asilvering (talk) 19:30, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

  asilvering I appreciate your thoughtful response. I honestly don't know why others don't do things. I know why I don't. In general, don't like telling other people what to do. I am also not competitive (except with myself) and recognize my limitations. I am just not good with certain things. I agree that I don't support changes in general that make it harder for people to participate, but I also know that balance has to be struck to prevent chaos from reigning. That's why I said below to PMC that I don't completely object to a QPQ being imposed. I don't fully support the idea either because it will impact participation and quality, and won't solve articles sitting for months without a review, but if the community decides to do that I'll deal with it. (Somewhere else you posted that you keep track of your reviews. I wish I had thought to do that. I only keep track of articles so that I have an easy way to go back to them. I am horrible with Wiki-technology and the search engine. If on the other hand I have the links on my page, I can immediately pop to the one that I know tells me how to code multiple harv refs in one format, the one that tells me how to format an e-book with no page numbers, or the one that gives me historical context that I think is relevant to another article.) SusunW (talk) 20:35, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

  One reason I don't maintain a tracking page for my reviews is that a noticeable fraction of my reviews are negative and I don't want to show off other editors' subpar work. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:48, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

  SusunW (and others): ChristieBot can generate a review summary for you that looks like this, if you want to see what you've reviewed. That list is for Hawkeye7 but I can create one for any reviewer. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:53, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

  Could I request one of those Mike Christie? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 02:44, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

  Working on it -- it's been a while since I've done one and it looks like I'll need to tweak the code a bit. I'll leave a note on your talk page when it's done; this weekend I would expect. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:04, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

• I'd be more open to a proposal that looks at total number of reviews over review ratio. Nominators who have never reviewed would be capped at X nominations. Once you've done Y reviews, you're allowed another open GAN, and every Y reviews thereafter you'd be allowed another GAN until you hit a hard cap of Z. A measure like this—or some further variation if anyone has another idea—would mean that the penalty on prolific reviewers would be minimal, and it would be an even greater incentive for other nominators than just keeping it one above their GA count. For many low-review high-nomination editors, the ratio is skewed enough they'll wonder why they should bother; this would give them a simple attainable goal to open up more GANs, encouraging them to do a few. It would also involve a hard cap, which is something I've opposed in the past but am willing to compromise on. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 04:45, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  i think i'd be alright with this alternative, and you do make a good point about the sheer difficulty of improving one's ratio once one's numbers are high enough. sawyer * he/they * talk 04:53, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  For the record I'd also be in support of some kind of system like this. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 04:57, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  @Thebiguglyalien it might be worth it to create a new sub-proposal for this? 16a perhaps? sawyer * he/they * talk 04:59, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  Done. I considered making it a proposal right away, but I wanted to see if there was any feedback first (or if I was just wildly off base). Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:26, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  Agree with PMC and Sawyer, I'd also support a proposal like this. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 04:59, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

• An article doesn't have to have GA status. Editors with negative review ratios have contributed to the backlog, no matter how much they have reviewed: taking Chiswick Chap as an example, they have 604 GAs and 356 reviews. That means 204 reviewers were nice enough to take time away from their own projects and interests, both on-wiki and in real life, to reward CC without CC taking the time to assess a GAN. I would tell CC that, while I thank them for reviewing so much, it isn't enough and they need to either stop nominating articles until they have reviewed 204 articles or stop nominating GANs. I would tell the same thing to all editors with negative review ratios, especially the most prolific ones. Z1720 (talk) 14:44, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  Z1720, the way you're describing the process, it sounds like you're saying that nominating to GA is a burden, and that reviewers are benevolent for donating their time. But that doesn't add up. If nominating an article isn't worthwhile, that implies we're not actually accomplishing anything by reviewing either. The whole purpose of reviewing is to facilitate the nominating and promoting. The logical conclusion to your concerns wouldn't be to waste more time reviewing, it would be to shut down GA. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:05, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

  • @Thebiguglyalien: Reviewers are benevolent for donating their time, as without reviewers, nominators do not get the green badge. That doesn't mean nominating an article isn't worthwhile: nominating GAs allows an article to improve and enforces standards across the encyclopedia. GA status also incentivizes editors to improve articles to get rewards. GAN's struggle isn't a lack of nominations, it's a lack of reviews. Editors on Wikipedia do not want to review so we need to put in processes that encourage editors who nominate GAs to spend less time writing articles and more time reviewing. Z1720 (talk) 18:09, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

    I don't see why the people who review and the people who nominate necessarily have to be the same? Would we not get the desired effect if we managed to motivate people who are not interested in nominating to review other editors' nominations? TompaDompa (talk) 18:37, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

    Exactly, TompaDompa Both you and Chiswick Chap in his comments below make excellent points. The project is about quality, this proposal to me seems to be shifting that focus to quantity and narrowly valuing only writers and reviewers. Many editors with many varied skills improve our quality. Encouraging those who may not think they can contribute to the project because they don't want to/prefer not to write is a good solution. Sometimes we focus so narrowly on an idea that we miss the obvious. SusunW (talk) 18:59, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

    In a perfect world, there would be a prolific reviewer for every prolific nominator, but lengthy experience has shown us that there are simply not that many of those people. We have to work with what we have. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:53, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

    Premeditated Chaos, you made me chuckle. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need reviewers as every single article would be well-written, would be completely objective, would use reliable sources and be verifiable, be free of plagiarism and would have multiple images that did not violate copyright restrictions. But, working with what we have, i.e. volunteers and humans, means that we have imperfections and people who do what they are interested in doing and what they find rewarding. The suggestion above that WP should "encourage editors who nominate GAs to spend less time writing articles and more time reviewing" goes completely against human nature. I write what I write because there are gaps in our knowledge. Reviewing does nothing to fill those gaps, nor does it offer any guarantee that my own articles will be reviewed. Perhaps the only solution is to take away the award aspect and truly convert the process to an actual peer review, but I am pretty sure that will never happen. Bottom line, any rule we impose will de-incentify someone, and motivate someone else. Each of us must decide for ourselves how we react to that. SusunW (talk) 17:33, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

    It's unfortunate that we disagree on this. As I've said above under proposal 3, my view on the matter is very simple. Editor time is precious; it's the only resource we have. If you're doing something that asks for someone else's time (ie, making a GAN), I think you should be willing to put your time in for someone else in return. I don't think that goes completely against human nature, and it makes me a bit disappointed to see that you view this kind of teamwork in that way. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:40, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

    I don't actually think we disagree. While I spend a lot of time writing, I also spend a lot of time helping other editors in various ways and working on articles I didn't create because we are all trying to build a quality encyclopedia. I divide the time I spend reviewing between people asking for help with new creations, GA and FA nominations, for the latter reviewing more than I have ever nominated. I don't oppose doing a QPQ, but I don't think it will be a silver bullet and solve the problems. I do think it will act to discourage nominations and it will do nothing to eliminate certain articles waiting for months to be reviewed. I think we need to continue to look for solutions, which encourage participation across the board. SusunW (talk) 05:21, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

    Okay, what would your proposed alternate solutions be? I would be happy to support anything that I thought would encourage new reviewers to jump in and keep reviewing, or encourage existing reviewers to review more without burnout. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 05:37, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

    I think if it were simple, we'd have found a solution before. IMO we have to look outside the box, so to speak. Most of the ideas here are focused on incentives to encourage people who are already involved with the project to review or to limit nominations. As Femke said above, I think we need to look for new demographics. Maybe the mentorship program is the answer, maybe reaching out to WikiProjects is the answer, maybe reaching out to WikiEd? I know a lot of Projects have guidelines and help to teach people how to write articles, find sources, etc. Maybe they could be encouraged to teach people how to review? I also know that quite a few schools have incorporated WP into their course outlines and have students work on articles (in my experience, sometimes merely updating existing articles and sometimes working on new ones). Perhaps those programs could be made aware that reviewing expertise is also needed. The problem with implementing any idea is that we each have limited time so if we implemented an outreach scheme, it would mean giving up time for writing or reviewing and would require people to be willing to do it. Would it work? No clue. SusunW (talk) 15:39, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

• I also think that having nine-month-old nominations is bad for the project because newer editors, who don't understand why that article is sitting on the GAN page for so long, might get discouraged from nominating an article. This is a missed opportunity to welcome that editor to GAN and that new editor might leave Wikipedia. I would rather have less nominations because prolific GA nominators who contributed to the backlog left, as that would lower the number of nominations and would make GANs from newer editors more prominent. Z1720 (talk) 14:44, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

• @Chiswick Chap: Courtesy ping to you, since I mentioned you above. While I stand by my comments, including what I would tell you, there are many editors I could have used as an example instead and I would tell them the same thing. Z1720 (talk) 14:50, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

• No doubt. See 'Oppose' above for my view. This thing about ratios is very recent; GA has never had QPQ, and the reasons why are discussed in some of the other proposal threads. An attempt to enforce quasi-QPQ, when QPQ has never been the policy, and retrospectively to boot, is hardly good practice. An alternative point of view is that there are many ways of contributing to the project, from gnomishly fixing categories and parameters to writing articles, reviewing, rescuing articles at GAR, maintaining existing GAs, and so on and so forth. It could be said that all of these are additive, each contributing in a small but useful way to the project; and I believe I've done some of all those things at various times. The idea that some of them are somehow "negative" is frankly unconstructive. We wouldn't think of "punishing" Wiki-gnomes for upping their edit-count without contributing citations to articles, or of measuring their usefulness by dividing their citations by their edits, for instance. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:45, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  Couldn't have said it better myself (and I've tried to). Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:54, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

• The difference between almost all other editing and a review process like GAN is that GAN by definition is a two-person project requiring someone else's time. Pointing that out doesn't mean I think submitting a GAN is a negative, and I'm certainly not trying to punish anyone for wanting their articles reviewed. But it's a fact of life that the process asks for the time and energy of another person. In my opinion, if you're asking someone to take the time to do something for you, you should be willing to pay back your time to the process for someone else. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 05:45, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't even understand what a "negative review-to-GA ratio" is supposed to mean. A ratio is something that you get by dividing. If you divide reviews by GAs, you will always get a positive number (or zero, if there are absolutely no reviews). For these numbers, a negative ratio is literally impossible. From the context of the discussion, I get the impression that people are actually discussing the difference, reviews minus GAs? That is not a ratio. Also it's not obvious to me why it's the right formula and why it should be a hard limit. It's not a zero-sum game. Reviewers and nominators both help improve the encyclopedia. That's a lot more important than getting reviewing and nominating badges. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:50, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I assume Z meant "a <1 ratio" — more GANs than GAN reviews. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 06:04, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Less than one is not negative. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:38, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I understand that; I'm just trying to interpret the spirit of Z's proposal rather than focus on the mathematical accuracy of the phrasing. If this ends up being implemented in the guidelines, I'm sure it can be rewritten to reflect how a ratio works. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 14:22, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 16b: Set a cap on nominations and reward reviews by increasing it

As Z1720 said in Proposal 16, the backlog develops when editors nominate more articles than they review. This proposal would set a cap (to be determined) on how many nominations one nominator can have. For every certain number of articles reviewed (also to be determined), the reviewer would have their nomination cap raised by one. This would continue until reaching a hard cap of open nominations (presumably the current soft cap of 20).

I'm proposing this as an alternative to Proposal 16b, as this would lessen the negative effect on high output editors who both write and review, and it would make it easier for editors who currently have skewed negative ratios to get back in, instead of asking them to do dozens of reviews to lift a cap (which is more likely to just make them leave). It also encourages editors to get a higher review count overall instead of keeping it just one higher than their GA count. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:25, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. As proposer. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:25, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
2. this addresses the lingering concerns i had about the main proposal 16. sawyer * he/they * talk 05:29, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
3. Still prefer QPQ but this is an acceptable alternative. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 05:31, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
4. A poor second to Prop 2, but better than the status quo. Gog the Mild (talk) 14:28, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
5. I think this is quite a gentle way of getting more reviews and making the social conventions clear (i.e. please try to review at least a bit). I think I'd like the maximum cap to be a bit higher, because I would not want to stop people like Chiswick nominating core articles :). —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:05, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. For the same reason as my opposition to 16, above. I no longer think it's a good idea to prevent good writers from nominating; I think we should be rewarding prolific reviewers in a way that does not directly restrict nominators. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:20, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
2. Per § Proposal 16 and 16b in March 2024 backlog. Adding caps merely hides the problem of not enough reviewers without addressing it, and this supposed "reward" both prevents the cap from doing much at all and fails to adequately incentivize reviewers. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:21, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
3. I know that I played with options to implement this in the discussion below, but on reflection, I think Mike and David are both right. Personally I enjoy reviewing and do not expect to ever hit any of these caps (I am slow at writing articles and usually my nominations get picked up fairly quickly). Any tinkering with these caps would not reward me, but punish a few excellent writers. —Kusma (talk) 21:56, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Comments

The real issue is people with lots of GAs who do not review at all, not people who have a legacy pile of GAs from a decade of work. We could allow people to have as many open nominations as they have made reviews: that would make it clear that reviewing is expected. We could even go for "limit of open nominations = number of reviews made in the last 12 months" to ensure people can't just live off their old reviews forever. I generally oppose hard caps, though: all they do is make the backlog move to prolific nominators' userspaces. —Kusma (talk) 09:53, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

• Trying to understand the logistics of this proposal, so sorry if this question is dumb: Hypothetically, let's say the cap is five nominations. Then, if an editor reviews one article, so the cap is lifted to six. A second article lifts the cap to seven, and this continues until the cap is 20 nominations because the editor has reviewed 15 articles. Since that editor has completed 15 reviews, would that editor be forever able to nominate 20 articles at a time because they reviewed 15 articles? Z1720 (talk) 14:19, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

  No, I believe the user will only be able to nominate 20 articles after reviewing 15. So, if we simplify this, there would be four nominations for every three reviews. That's how I would respond to your query. Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 20:42, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

• From my interpretation of Wolverine XI's response, this would be similar to a QPQ system, but instead of reviewing 1 article to nominate one article, an editor would review 3 articles to nominate 4 (per WXI's example). Z1720 (talk) 20:56, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Indeed with "forever" that is not a great system. Better to look only at recent (last 12 months) reviews. —Kusma (talk) 21:00, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

This is correct, though I don't think raising the cap after every review would accomplish much. Like I said in the comments of the previous proposal, "Nominators who have never reviewed would be capped at X nominations. Once you've done Y reviews, you're allowed another open GAN, and every Y reviews thereafter you'd be allowed another GAN until you hit a hard cap of Z." I'd expect Y to be something closer to maybe five reviews, so that you have to hit five reviews then your cap is six, ten reviews and your cap is seven, and so on. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:53, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

@Thebiguglyalien, am I reading you right, that this proposal would require everyone who wants to submit more than x nominations at once to first perform y reviews, both of which are hard numbers that don't have any relationship whatsoever to the nom's overall ratio? So if I hypothetically had 0 GAs, and someone else hypothetically had 400, and neither of us had any reviews, we'd both need to perform the same number of reviews to have the cap raised/removed? After which point no further reviews are obligatory? -- asilvering (talk) 20:20, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Correct. Writing GAs and reviewing GAs are both valuable, and I won't support any proposal that creates a negative incentive against writing GAs. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:22, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Hm, I thought this was overly complicated, but I was misreading it earlier as a kind of moving target. Something like "do 5 reviews to lift your hard cap of 5 concurrent noms, after which point you can have an unlimited number (with soft cap of 20)" does actually appeal to me. I don't like qpq and I don't like the idea of forcing people to do things they hate or aren't good at. But provided it's a small enough number (like 5), I can see it more like "you should have some experience of both ends of this process if you want to be doing a lot of nominations", which I like. Maybe someone who thought they'd hate it finds they actually like reviewing, maybe they fight their way through the 5 and gain only a deeper appreciation of reviewers' time, either would be a positive outcome. -- asilvering (talk) 20:33, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

• Question: if the cap set by this proposal were to be set to, e.g. 5, would that mean I'd have to do 77 reviews before I could ever nominate another article again? (I've admittedly 82 GAs, no reviews – would review things, its just that I am awful at reviewing!) BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:10, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

  My reading of the proposal as written is that it is for open nominations, and thus if it was set for eg. 5 you could nominate five articles at a time, and after one of those five has its review completed, you could nominate a new article and so on ad infinitum. CMD (talk) 18:45, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

  @BeanieFan11 I don't believe so. See the thread immediately above this one. -- asilvering (talk) 20:34, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

• I am completely confused by this proposal and how it would work. As it stands, this proposal assumes that reviewing articles somehow means that one's own articles will also be reviewed, but there is no guarantee of that. It also assumes that imposing rules for reviewing will somehow impact the number of nominations. Let's pretend I have reached the cap of articles I can nominate. Say I review 5 GA in a month and none of my articles are reviewed. I review 5 more the next month and again none of my articles are reviewed. This continues for the next 6 months. In that amount of time, I will have reviewed 30 articles, had 0 reviewed, and would be unable to submit any other article. Each of the persons whose articles I reviewed, whether they reviewed an article or not, would be able to submit more articles, but I would not. Also say that during this time, 100 new articles were nominated by other people. The takeaway is that number of files I reviewed has nothing to do with how many articles are nominated. In the example, we would still have a backlog and I would still be barred from nominating, although I reviewed far more than I nominated. Thus the question I would be faced with is am I willing to review and never be able to submit another article? It seems completely illogical to me that anyone would repeatedly do something that offers no direct benefit to themselves. Perhaps the indirect benefit as part of building WP would be enough, but I kind of doubt that. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the proposal? SusunW (talk) 15:09, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

  @SusunW: You are totally correct. Take me for example: I have four GAs and twelve reviews. I now have three articles in the biology and medicine section that need to be reviewed. And, for reference, I once reviewed three articles in a single day in an attempt to reduce the backlog, but to no success. I think I'll just keep reviewing, because it appears to help people a lot. My reviews are also quick, which many of the regulars struggle with. As a man of the GA people, I'm willing to give up some of my valuable time in order to review articles. I also believe you shouldn't benefit from everything; sometimes you have to make sacrifices for others, even if they don't thank you (which happens quite a lot unfortunately). Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 17:26, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your input Wolverine XI. I appreciate your insights. I fear your choice of topic, like mine, probably means we must be patient in expecting reviews. I personally think it is admirable that you are willing to spend so much time reviewing. I also don't think there is enough time left in my lifetime to fill all the gaps in our knowledge that I would wish to address. I am truly weighing whether it is best for me to just focus on writing and bypass asking for input. It seems weird that in a collaborative project, collaboration to improve article quality is being limited by rules which discourage writing, but it is probably just that I misunderstand the intent of the proposals. SusunW (talk) 17:56, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

If I could get three reviews done in a day I'd do a lot more reviews. Usually (except for quick-fails) a review takes two solid days of my editing time, one for content and one for source checking, and then maybe another day's worth of effort later, more spread out, for back-and-forth with the nominator. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:55, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Exactly David Eppstein. I probably average 2-3 days just to do the review and then at least another day or two in the collaborating phase. I have maybe done only 1 review in a single day, but even that took me the entire day, like 8+ hours. SusunW (talk) 20:03, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Same. -- asilvering (talk) 20:13, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

@SusunW, I don't think that's the case - have a look at the more recent comments higher up in the thread. It looks like, if we assumed 5 reviews was the interval, once you've reviewed 30 articles you'd be able to submit 11 concurrent articles. So if your initial nominations were still in the queue, six months later, having reviewed 30 articles, you'd have been able to submit 6 more articles than you were able to initially. I gather from your comments in general that this still wouldn't appeal to you, at least not at an interval of 5, but it's not quite as restrictive as you had in mind. -- asilvering (talk) 20:41, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Asilvering Thanks for trying to explain it, but I still don't get how this would work. If the cap is 20 and I submitted 20, but none of my articles have been reviewed, I am still at the cap, no matter how many articles I have reviewed. (I totally do not understand how anyone could nominate 20 "at the same time" as is stated above, but if someone said it happens, it must happen somehow.) Or are you saying that 20 is fuzzy and not a real limit, so for some people it could be 20, for others 25 and for still others 30? That seems incredibly confusing. How you would ever know you were at the limit if it's a moving target? My cap in my head is 10 and those will be submitted over a course of many months. Once I hit that cap, unless an article I nominated is reviewed, I don't submit anything, no matter how much I think an article would benefit from collaboration. I don't see how increasing the limit with X reviews solves the problem, as it seems to me that instead of 10 pending reviews I could have an endless number of nominations waiting for review, as long as I keep reviewing, without any guarantee my submissions would ever be looked at. Maybe I'll try to look at it again later, it's 104F/40C and too hot to think. Going to go try to find a/c somewhere. SusunW (talk) 21:21, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

@SusunW, this discussion as a whole was prompted by a single person submitting about 60 or so articles all at the same time! So indeed, it does happen. When you scroll through the list of nominations, you'll sometimes see some are hidden beneath a cut - this is because the nominator has more than 20 articles in the queue at once. As for the cap, the idea here is that everyone who has done 0 reviews start with a hard cap of some number (say, 10), and beyond this they can't nominate any more articles until one of those reviews finishes and they have a new slot open. But by doing reviews, you'd get your personal cap raised. Let's say the interval is 5 reviews, and you've already done 15 reviews. That means you've hit the interval 3 times, and can have 3 more nominations in the queue at the same time. So someone who hasn't done any reviews will have a cap at 10 open nominations, but you'd have a cap at 13 nominations, and someone who had done 50 reviews would have a cap of 20 open nominations. That's the general idea here as I understand it. -- asilvering (talk) 21:38, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 17: Develop tools to support reviewers

A basic challenge for the GA system is that it requires people to write reviews, a task which is both somewhat thankless (though there are reward proposals above) and somewhat difficult. Editors are almost by definition not fully informed about the subjects of articles they did not work on; they often find copyright and image licensing difficult; they may not have been good at English grammar at school; they likely do not have access to books and other offline sources. We already have Earwig which does quite a good job at identifying possible copyvios. Tools could be developed to find wobbly grammar; to suggest possibly-missing sections (e.g. a species article with no Taxobox, History of taxonomy, Description, Ecology, or Interaction with humans section might be incomplete); to check image licenses; and perhaps (with an AI engine?) to note that a source does not seem to cover a claim cited to it. No doubt with suitable research effort several other review tools might be developed. The effect would be to lower the barrier to writing a competent review, making it a less daunting prospect for many editors.

Support

1. As proposer. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:46, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

Comments

There's already a page on how to review good articles. It is also necessary to have some familiarity with the subject matter when reviewing articles. The grammar tool could be useful, but there are already a ton of online resources (like ChatGPT), so I don't think Wikipedia needs to make one. You may be barking up the wrong tree. Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 20:21, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Using AI in the GA process is absolutely the last thing we should be doing. Especially for source checks! -- asilvering (talk) 02:23, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

• • Struck that suggestion. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:24, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

• Not going to oppose more tools, but they should not be relied upon to this extent. Earwig does a niche job as an indicator, but it very often fails to identify copyvios and it's concerning when a review merely notes earwig was used without elaborating. CMD (talk) 04:53, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

• • Clearly the choice of tools in the kit is completely open (no specific technology is mandated); and tools can be developed one at a time over a period of years. Each tool will need to be chosen for development on its likely costs and benefits. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:24, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

• More tools would be great, but it's dangerous when they are seen as a way to replace human labour. Earwig is a net positive IMO but as Chipmunkdavis notes it shouldn't be the only way a reviewer tries to identify copyvio (you need to check sources, which might not all be webpages). A review is a skilled process and the fundamental checklist is the criteria. I'd love to see a tool that suggests missing sections, but hate to see a reviewer writing "This tool says you need a 'History' section" if the article already contains everything a history section would but as part of a different structure that suits that topic. — Bilorv (talk) 21:51, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

• Depends on what do we mean by "tools". If it is to automate the whole process, then no, if we follow that logic then just place bot reviews and the backlog is solved. But something that can be welcomed is to add tools that do not replace the human work but give it a framework. The "blank page syndrome" can overcome reviewers as well as writers, and that's what you have when you start a good article review, a blank page. Cambalachero (talk) 20:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Proposal 18: Talk page messages for prolific GA content creators

In Wikipedia:Good article nominations/Instructions, all we have about reviewing articles once you nominate one is (Optional): Consider reviewing two nominations for each one that you nominate. This does not imply quid pro quo. This simply means that helping to review articles will help the Wikipedia community by cutting down the backlog as a way to help pay it forward. It may not be something a lot of people consider. So what if we sent a message to the talk pages of people who have ten or more GAs that haven't reviewed any articles, like one that I made at User:Relativity/Reviewanarticle? This attempt will likely be futile, but who knows? It's possible that someone will want to help. In any case, it would draw more attention to GAN. And there's not much harm in sending talk page messages. ‍ Relativity 01:50, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Good article nominations

Hello, Relativity! I noticed that you've contributed many Good articles to Wikipedia, and thank you for all you've done to help improve Wikipedia's content. I don't know if you know or not, but there are currently 482 articles in the Good article nominations queue that are waiting to be reviewed. That's a significant backlog, and nominators are in need of high-quality reviews. Have you considered reviewing some articles? Since you've made quite a few Good articles, we're confident that you have a good grasp on the GA criteria and would therefore give high-quality reviews, which we need. Of course, no one is obligated to make reviews. Thank you for your work on Wikipedia! We're very happy that you chose to help keep knowledge free for everyone.

Support

1. As proposer. ‍ Relativity 01:50, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
2. Excellent, thank you for this. It may not have much impact on the backlog, but I think it's an important message to send out all the same. -- asilvering (talk) 02:27, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

Comments

• Compare Wikipedia talk:Good Article proposal drive 2023#Proposal 15: Invitation, which passed. TompaDompa (talk) 02:34, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
• While I'm not against it, I doubt it will have any effect (positive one that is). The prolific authors already know how the system works and they are fully aware of the backlog. And if we send this out repeatedly it will only be a minor annoyance for them at best and may feel like pointing fingers at worst. AstonishingTunesAdmirer 連絡 13:44, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

  I agree. What I've done a few times with fairly new nominators, if it's clear they have a good grasp of the criteria, is to leave a personal note on their talk page or in the review page asking if they'd consider reviewing. I think personal notes have more impact that bot messages. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:41, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

  +1 ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:53, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

  +1 Averageuntitleduser (talk) 20:21, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

General discussion

If the backlog drive managed to review every nomination by nominators with a review/GA ratio > 1, I'd feel like that was a major achievement. It does feel like all a backlog drive does is remind nominators that don't review that if they wait long enough their nomination will get reviewed anyway. I don't have a proposal to add above yet, but two rough ideas occur to me: one is to make the backlog drives focus only on reviewers with a high R/G; the other would be to hide nominations by nominators whose R/G doesn't meet some minimum level.

And what about changing the GAN page to a list of different GAN sorts? Right now, whatever sort order is on the GAN page is what we as a group are endorsing. What if GAN simply listed three or four (or more) pages that listed nominations: filtered and sorted for different priorities? If I were reviewing I'd click on the one that said "All nominations by editors who review a lot of GANs", however we were to define that. E.g. it would probably include Chiswick Chap, even though his ratio is < 1, because he reviews a lot. But the point is we could have custom pages and not have a default any more, and everyone could go to the kind of nominations list they want. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:19, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

• I'll just note one thing I think GA could learn from FA: not all nominators are treated equally. Could there be a way to allow for faster reviews of well established content creators? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:55, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

  I don't understand your intent here, since this seems at odds with your response to Proposal 8? -- asilvering (talk) 18:57, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

  There's two elements to things. There's the literal "we don't do all the steps for people we've come to trust". I think that is a good idea. There's also the "people who have name recognize are more likely to get anyone to do any steps and if you can't that's your failure rather than a failure of the process" and that's the part I see this proposal promoting and which I think is a bad thing. Best Barkeep49 (talk) 19:37, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

  "We don't do all the steps for people we've come to trust" was one of the primary causes of WP:DCGAR and the concurrent events. If people, especially newcomers, didn't trust the hundreds of GA icons on Doug's userpage as a sign of community trust (and I count myself as one of them), perhaps the problem would have been identified and watched sooner. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:40, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

  Agree. I'm not sure what trust has to do with it, when it comes to a GA review. What part would I even skip? -- asilvering (talk) 02:42, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

This second paragraph is similar to what I suggested under Proposal 5, and I like it, though I think even people like Chiswick Chap shouldn't appear in the >1 list. For the first, I like that a lot - we could have a list of reviews that need doing generated at the beginning of the drive, and simply stop if we hit the end. I'd suggest also adding noms who have 0 GAs to the list (even if they have 0 reviews). -- asilvering (talk) 18:56, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

One possible way to incentivize reviewing nominations from prolific reviewers (whether that be defined by the ratio of reviews to WP:Good articles or some other way) might be to offer additional points for such reviews during the backlog drives, similar to how reviews of older nominations get additional points. TompaDompa (talk) 16:24, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

@TompaDompa I don't follow. Can you explain again? -- asilvering (talk) 20:49, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Sure. During backlog drives, some reviews count for more points than others. For instance, reviews of old nominations receive bonus points. Bonus points could also be handed out for reviews of nominations by prolific reviewers. One way could be to give bonus points for reviewing nominations by nominators who themselves have a review/GA ratio > 1. TompaDompa (talk) 20:53, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

As a general point, I think we should be careful about not introducing Asshole John rules that target specific undesirable behaviour. If someone causes trouble by violating the spirit of our rules, better deal with them by individual restrictions than by making the rules more painful and restrictive for everyone. —Kusma (talk) 04:01, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Can someone explain briefly what is exactly the problem of proposals 16 and 16b? I have seen so much discussion about the soft cap and the limit of GA nominations, but it does not seem very well at the discussion. After all, I'm planning for a similar proposal, but it does not involve the review—maybe discussing here is mostly safe for me. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 12:54, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

I personally don't think these caps address the actual issue (too few people willing to do reviews). They impose obstacles on people like Chiswick Chap who have been very productive both at reviewing and nominating (358 reviews, 608 GAs). By setting a hard threshold at reviews=GAs (with very confusing and mathematically-illiterate language describing that threshold) they either make that obstacle more or less permanent (not going away until CC reviews hundreds more articles) or they eliminate the obstacle altogether (anyone can permanently lift the cap by making only a small number of reviews, which CC has long since done). Either way they don't function as an incentive to do more reviewing. And in any case, putting a cap on current nominations merely means that instead of having a visible problem (too many stale nominations) we have the same problem but we pretend it doesn't exist by pushing prolific nominators to maintain separate user-space waiting lists. (Probably many have these anyway; I've had my own user-space list since 2015, primarily to track not-yet-ready articles but also with others I think are ready but haven't yet officially nominated for whatever reason.) Hiding the waiting lists doesn't change the fact that having too few reviewers is the limiting factor preventing us from having more GAs. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:23, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Spotchecks in templates

It's my understanding that all GA reviewers are now expected to do verification spot-checks on at least some of the sources. This isn't in any of the GA criteria templates, though. Are there any objections to me adding that item to the reviewing templates? -- asilvering (talk) 23:07, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Support. WP:GACN suggests substantial proportion of sources, maybe we can use similar wording in the templates. Mokadoshi (talk) 05:14, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

no objections at all; spot-checking is an important part of reviews & that should be reflected in templates etc. not sure how you could even make sure an article meets criteria 2b without doing a spot-check... sawyer * he/they * talk 05:21, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

That has always been my position, and WP:GACN has said to spotcheck "at least a substantial proportion" for at least as long as I've been reviewing, but apparently this wasn't universal. -- asilvering (talk) 17:09, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

It is required, it should be added to the templates. CMD (talk) 06:52, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Could we also add a reminder to check the nominator's level of contribution to the nominated article? I always aim to do this as one of my first tasks, and it would be helpful to have it as part of the "checklist". Regards, BennyOnTheLoose (talk) 09:48, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

In my view, we shouldn't have this in the checklist, which should only be about the article, not about the nominator. A nominator who hasn't contributed to the article isn't entitled to get a review so the nomination can be removed, but a non-contributing nominator isn't a reason to fail a review once you have started it. —Kusma (talk) 09:52, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

We could add it to the hidden comment that shows up when you first start the review page, maybe? -- asilvering (talk) 14:06, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Yep, templates and the review page should note the new expectations that spotchecks be explicitly commented on by the reviewer and that the nominator is a "major contributor" or has sought feedback from such contributors. I'm sure this would have been included had they been rules at their inception. — Bilorv (talk) 21:51, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I've added the line about source-checks to the first four templates at Wikipedia:Good article nominations/templates. Then I opened the first table one and got a migraine. (Is the table to blame? Unknown.) I leave the remainder for someone else, as I am apparently constitutionally incapable of looking at wikitables. -- asilvering (talk) 03:25, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

I've done all the rest of them except for Template:GATable which requires changes to a template-protected page. ― novov (t c) 07:14, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

As the spotcheck is to ensure compliance with criterion 2 and its sub-criteria, not for its own sake, I have removed it as a separate line and added it to the respective criterion 2 headings (also see the discussion below). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:30, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Re: Dune (2021 film)

I'm trying to review Dune (2021 film), but I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the stability criterion. When I started the review, it wasn't as much as a problem, but as I'm about half-way through, there's been at least one editathon and now traffic from IPs. Is it unrealistic for me to continue this review? I think it's doable, but I wonder if I'm kidding myself. Viriditas (talk) 21:04, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

The GA review is not supposed to halt normal editing activities, so random IP edits, reverts, adding categories, etc are going to be expected while you're reviewing the article. However, I see that entire sections have been added since you started your review. The rule of thumb is whether the edits are so significant that you can't tell what you're supposed to be reviewing. Since most significant edits recently seem to be contained to the new "Analysis" section, I think putting the article on hold is fine I see you've done. Mokadoshi (talk) 15:31, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. The section was added by an acknowledged subject matter expert. I have asked them to provide page numbers; is this required for GA? They also added their own book to the section, which I don't necessarily see as a problem, but I think they should have added it to the talk page instead, but were likely unaware of COI best practices. I don't see anything wrong with the material as of yet (another editor has recently made some edits) but the section has recently deteriorated in quality and now has multiple tags. While I could probably rewrite and fix the material given some time, I also wonder about whether this crosses the line from nominator to reviewer and back again. Lots of issues with this article at the moment. I will take it one day at a time, but my concern is that for every two steps forward, the article could conceivably take three steps back due to the high traffic. For me, this is a conundrum. Viriditas (talk) 00:56, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Page numbers are not required for GA, but there is no harm in noting their absence so long as it does not hold up the GAN. COI is a topic that the GAN process isn't equipped to handle. If the material is being changed in such a way that quality is deteriorating, and if you have to dig in and fix things yourself, then the article is not a GA. Overall I agree with Mokadoshi, normal editing is expected, but if entire sections are being added then that is a major change suggesting the article is not stable. (And perhaps shows it was incomplete and failing broadness when nominated.) CMD (talk) 01:15, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I'm leaning in that direction, obviously. But I have worked with the nominator in a previous capacity on DYK and was impressed by their work. I was hoping we could both clear the minefield and move this thing forward, but I'm starting to feel like Sisyphus. Viriditas (talk) 01:26, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

If you're at the point where you're saying things like I'm starting to feel like Sisyphus, I think it's time to stop the review. You don't want to burn yourself out, and you don't want to be in the kind of space where you might rush through things simply because you want to get it out of the way. Maybe that means failing it on stability grounds or broad-in-coverage grounds, or maybe it means putting it up for a second opinion, but I think you should listen to your own words here. -- asilvering (talk) 19:36, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I came here for second opinions. Now, I have them. Viriditas (talk) 20:47, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Update. I have failed the review due to additional breaches of stability well after this discussion took place. I now have two or more editors angry at me, so you may see additional discussion about my review on this page. Viriditas (talk) 23:58, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

"On hold" workflow

Once the reviewer put the article "on hold", and the nominee considers to have resolved all the observation of the reviewer, who can change the status from "on hold" to back "in review"? I didn't find any information on that in the Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations/Instructions. Can the nominee, after what the nominee considers as resolved all the issues indicated by the reviewer, change the status from "on hold" to back "in review"? Maxim Masiutin (talk) 18:52, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

It's a matter for the reviewer. The status is not especially important; what matters is that the reviewer knows the items have been addressed. This is normally obvious if each item has been responded to individually in the review thread. Failing that, nom can ping the reviewer. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:14, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

OK, thank you very much for the explanation! Maxim Masiutin (talk) 21:23, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I usually put it "on hold" to indicate that I've completed the full review, and I keep it there to indicate "the review portion is done, now we're working through the review and fine tuning it". And then keep it at "on hold" until it's ready for promotion or failure. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:57, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I think it's pretty standard for the nominator to {{ping}} the reviewer on the review page once they think all issues have been addressed. The nominator should not change the status on their own. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:27, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Drive-by editor unwilling to accept the rules

I have today undone User:MSincccc's drive-by nomination of Sherlock Holmes, explaining why on his talk page. In his reply, he has made clear that he does not believe the rules apply to him. I am not sure what action may be required but it seems that some attention to the matter might be helpful. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:25, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I am fine with @Chiswick Chap having withdrawn my GA nomination for Sherlock Holmes as I myself feel that I had not significantly contributed to the article except for running a bot.

However, my GA nomination for Prince George of Wales should not be considered a drive-by as I am one of the top five authors of the article as well as a frequent editor (one of the top 10).

Also I never claimed that the "rules did not apply to me". I hope you all understand. I am a good faith editor who always tries to abide by the guidelines and have never picked up any sort of dispute with another editor. I always try to resolve all issues with peace in accordance with Wikipedia's policies. Regards and hope that we can come to a peaceful conclusion. MSincccc (talk) 18:14, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

• Noting that User:MSincccc has attempted to canvas support for his position, here and here. Please do help out upon seeing this message does not comply with the guideline, which underlines how canvassing can influence "the normal consensus decision-making process, and therefore is generally considered disruptive behavior." ——Serial Number 54129 19:57, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

  Well I did not intend to canvas support for the Sherlock Holmes article. Rather I was trying to just clarify with other users whether my GA nomination for Prince George of Wales is drive-by or not. @Chiswick Chap leaving a message on Prince George's GA discussion page that it can be considered a drive-by is not factually backed up as I am both a significant author as well as one of the all-time highest editors to the article. Further, I had made it clear that I was fine with Chiswick having withdrawn my GA nomination for Sherlock Holmes.

  Can I renominate please? I have the authorship and I will do my best to make as many constructive edits as possible in the coming days so as to make it a GA-table article. How can this response to Chiswick Chap's message that he has withdrawn GA nomination for Sherlock Holmes be taken as a message from me asserting "that rules don't apply to me". Further, @Serial Number 54129 has recently pointed out that my claims of "authorship" are excessive. That might be with regard to the Holmes' article which I would not nominate in future but he made the remark with regard to other articles where I was the a significant author as well as a frequent editor. Neither has my behaviour been disruptive nor did I intend to disrupt the platform.

  [This] will further clarify the fact that my GA nomination for Prince George of Wales is valid. I never tried to game the system not was this nomination made in bad faith given I have taken part in discussions regarding it with fellow editors. Chiswick's message on George's GA review page goes as such -...a bit of discussion on the talk page does not constitute "significant" editing per the GAN criteria, i.e. this is a drive-by nomination. It can either be quick-failed or you can simply CSD this page so that it is deleted, and remove the nomination from the talk page, it doesn't matter much. Well I hope this matter is looked into and that my GA nomination for Prince George not be considered a "drive-by". I accept the fact that I had not "significantly contributed" to the Sherlock Holmes article. Regards MSincccc (talk) 02:19, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

  No. The Prince George GA is by now a strawman; CC already withdrew that suggestion yesterday. That review is not in question. It's others that are, and more broadly, whether you have an idiosyncratic interpretation of 'authorship'. ——Serial Number 54129 11:08, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

  @Serial Number 54129 Here are some statistics by the way-

  Ivanka Trump- 14.7% authorship (1st) and 62 live edits (3rd)

  Princess Charlotte of Wales (born 2015)-23.3% authorship (1st) and 82 edits (4th)

  Catherine, Princess of Wales-4.6% authorship (5th) and 615 edits (2nd)

  As for Catherine's GA I had consulted Keivan, the article's prime author and all-time top editor and he was fine with it. Now I fulfil the GA criteria in each of these cases (these are my only GAs) which states-If the nominator is either the author of less than 10% of the article or ranked sixth or lower in authorship, and there is no post on the article talk page, it can be uncontroversially considered a drive-by nomination. You can notify the nominator on their talk page. I am a peaceful editor by the way and have done nothing wrong until now nor will I. Regards and yours faithfully, MSincccc (talk) 12:43, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

  I just want to clarify that the instruction you quoted does not say that if you are ranked 5th or higher in authorship then you are guaranteed to be allowed to nominate the article. All it says is that someone ranked 6th or lower can have their nomination closed without discussion.

  I do think there is merit to discussing whether you understand how authorship plays into the GA review. The fact that you've nominated more than one article with less than 5% authorship is unusual from my experience. Just as a random comparison, I have 76% (17k characters) and 49% (17k characters) authorship in the last two articles I've nominated. Mokadoshi (talk) 04:24, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

  In my mind, the point of this restriction is to ensure that the nominator can adequately work with the reviewer in making changes to the article. There are many articles that are pretty high-quality and should go through GAN someday, but their primary authors for one reason or another are not interested in the process. That shouldn't necessarily have to entail fudging the numbers to ensure they clear a certain threshold, but I do think that involved familiarity with the article and its sources is necessary for a nominator. Remsense诉 04:39, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

  Well my work on Catherine, Princess of Wales has made me quite familiar with the entire article's prose as well as sources. Further, the prime author of the article,i.e., Keivan made it clear that he was fine with my nomination. If I have only 4.9% authorship in that article, it's because I am relatively new to Wikipedia given I joined only in January 2022. As for the other two nominations, I have made a significant number of mainspace edits to the article apart from being the highest author as is the case with my two pending nominations at the time of writing. I hope the others understand. Regards and yours faithfully, MSincccc (talk) 14:23, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

  If I have only 4.9% authorship in that article, it's because I am relatively new to Wikipedia given I joined only in January 2022.

  This is a non-sequitur. I started contributing late last year, and have cannibalized the authorship share on too many big articles. I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say here: the point is demonstrating familiarity with the ins and outs of individual articles, right? So being new to the site has little to do with that. Remsense诉 18:20, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

  The end is that I am very much familiar with Catherine's article and that I am presently working with Keivan to bring it to Featured Article status. I hope you understand. Regards MSincccc (talk) 19:04, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

GAR question

There was recently a sprawling discussion on this page regarding GAR processes, which has resulted in some support for the idea of placing talk page "notices" on the article's talk page before sending to GAR in some cases. A similar process exists for featured article review, except that it is required in that process and purely optional here. For a tracking list of pre-GAR notices given - it's unclear to me whether it would be better to track these at a separate page like is done at WP:FARGIVEN, or to create a section onto the GAR page. I've left four pre-GAR notices where I do not believe the articles to still meet the GA criteria, and have listed that at a draft page at WP:GARGIVEN. However, it has been suggested to me that adding these directly to the main WP:GAR page in some fashion would be a better approach. I'm loathe to make major changes to the GAR page without prior discussion, so I'd like to hear others' thoughts on this matter. Hog Farm _Talk 18:12, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I like putting it on the main GAR page such as here. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:15, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Doctor Who (series 2) → Doctor Who series 2 problem

Qwerfjkl (bot), which did the move of the article to its new name as the result of a recent RfC on season article titles (according to the edit summary), was apparently unable to handle the fact that a Talk:Doctor Who series 2 already existed as a redirect, so as a result we have the GA nomination still at Talk:Doctor Who (series 2), while the article and the GA review have been moved. This causes the wrong name and reviewer to appear at WP:GAN. Is there someone here who can fix this disconnect, presumably by deleting the redirect and moving Talk:Doctor Who (series 2) to Talk:Doctor Who series 2? And, if this is a common situation, letting the bot owner know that they have some further cleanup to do? Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:55, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Pinging bot operator @Qwerfjkl: Indagate (talk) 22:04, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Indagate, I can see the problem. How my code works is it attempts to move the page to the target, and if that fails it performs a round-robin swap (which was needed in this case). Unfortunately it seems the move worked, but only for the main page, so the talk was left behind. I'll update the code to handle this (probably by just logging where it happens, I doubt they'll be many cases). — Qwerfjkltalk 22:27, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Qwerfjkl, please be sure to clean up after your bot: in this case, by doing the talk page round-robin swap that it failed to do in the first place. Thank you. BlueMoonset (talk) 23:44, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

BlueMoonset, done (hopefully). As I've said elsewhere I'm not going to be available for the next week. — Qwerfjkltalk 14:47, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Unrelated to GAN, but it appears this happened at Doctor Who's series 1 and series 9 talk pages too. – Rhain ☔ (he/him) 23:35, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

As Qwerfjkl is unavailable, this needs an admin. CMD (talk) 01:55, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

March backlog drive now closed

Hello to all! The March drive is now closed; reviewers and coordinators will be wrapping up over the next few days. Thank you to everyone for your hard work reviewing. We successfully reduced the # of unreviewed nominations by over 250, clearing out many older nominations and reducing the overall backlog by over 37%! We had 64 separate reviewers complete at least 1 review during the drive. A full retrospective with more statistics will be posted after all reviews have closed, points have been awarded and rewards handed out. @Mike Christie, would you mind calculating the average age of a nomination on February 29th as compared to March 31st when you get a chance? Thank you! —Ganesha811 (talk) 23:20, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

I didn't save the query I used to determine these numbers for the last backlog, so I wrote a new query. When I ran it for the old backlog it gave slightly different results -- not sure why. I'll give the old and new values for comparison, and I'll put the query I used this time below so I can be sure to run it the same way next time. Last time I found 631 unreviewed articles at the start of the backlog drive, with an average age of 91.7 days at that time; this time the query finds 639 articles with an average age of 88.0 days. Not a huge difference, but I've no idea why there's any difference at all.

For this backlog drive:

• On 29 February 2024 at midnight: 655 unreviewed articles with an average age of 73.6 days.
• On 31 March 2024 at midnight: 401 unreviewed articles with an average age of 55.7 days.

Here's the query:

select sum(z.days_in_queue)/count(*) as average_age, count(*) as unreviewed_articles
  from (
select n.title, n.page, n.snapshot_ts, n.status, n.nomination_ts, n.review_started_ts, datediff('2024-04-01', n.nomination_ts) as days_in_queue
  from nominations n 
inner join (select x.title, x.page, max(snapshot_ts) as max_prior_snapshot_ts 
              from (select title, page, snapshot_ts from nominations where snapshot_ts < '2024-04-01') x
             group by x.title, x.page) y
    on n.title = y.title
   and n.page = y.page
   and n.snapshot_ts = y.max_prior_snapshot_ts 
 where status = '') z;

-- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:24, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you Mike! Nearly 20 days reduction is pretty good! I appreciate you writing a whole new query to answer this one - thanks for taking the time. —Ganesha811 (talk) 12:15, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Notability is not part of a GA review

Currently, Wikipedia:Notability is not in the criteria, but the instructions tell reviewers to "Ensure all articles meet Wikipedia policies and guidelines as expected of any article, including neutral point of view, verifiability, no original research, and notability." (bolded for emphasis). The other policies listed are in the criteria, and so possibly redundant, but not confusing. It's not clear what "ensure" means for a reviewer. Recently the idea of GA reviews checking for notability came up in a complaint at WP:ANI. In discussions about adding notability to the criteria, editors have expressed conflicting viewpoints with AfD being the most common solution and no consensus to add notability to the criteria: [9][10][11]

The discussion that resulted in adding the above language[12] came to a consensus to add it as instructions for nominators, and it was. It was also added to the reviewer instructions, against the consensus of the discussion: ("Notability is handled at AFD or in other venues."; "if you get a GAN that you think is non-notable, but find it has survived AFD in the last few months (and stable since), you should respect that decision and review the GAN without that concern"; "nominate it for deletion, and add a note to the GAN template")[13]

Notability should either be removed from the reviewing instructions, or it should be clarified what action a reviewer is expected to take. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 02:58, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Notability is in the criteria under WP:QF#C3: it needs a valid notability cleanup banner. The instructions should be: add the banner to the article if it is not already there. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:09, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Comment: If an article nominated for GA doesn't meet the notability guidelines, isn't it true that there will also be other GA criteria it fails, like C2b reliable sources are cited inline or C3 broad in its coverage? If this isn't true, does anyone have a counterexample? Mokadoshi (talk) 00:51, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

There are many GAs that have been deleted. The most recent example is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Avocado cake. CMD (talk) 01:20, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

There have even been FAs which met all of the MOS and FA criteria, but which fell afoul of policies such as WP:NOTSTATS; this comes to mind. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:34, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

:Seems a relevant discussion, but not here. Those are proposals to reduce the backlog. Cambalachero (talk) 05:15, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

@Cambalachero: feel free to move it down into its own section. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 05:27, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 1 April 2024

Add parameter 2e containing a source spot-check has been done.

Per discussion above, GA templates should include a line for spotchecking, and some of these templates (especially Template:GATable) are heavily intertwined with this page.

Although the GA criteria does not have a point 2e and spot-checking is its own separate requirement, Template:GAList2 and Template:GAList call their parameters for this 2e so IMO it makes sense to be consistent here. Though alternatively it could be called something like spotcheck if you think calling it 2e is misleading. ― novov (t c) 04:08, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

It will require a formal RfC to make a change to the GACR per WP:CONLEVEL; a discussion can only adjust templates, no matter if they are "intertwined" with the criteria. For myself, I think that the current criteria is sufficient: you do the source spotcheck to ensure compliance with criteria 2c) and 2d).~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:38, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Deactivating pending broader discussion. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:08, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I didn’t realise changing that subpage would actually change the formally-defined GA criteria; I’m aware that would require an RFC to change.

I’m not sure there needs to be a broader discussion regarding it simply to change a few templates, instead one could simply special-case the logic in Template:GATable/item etc. ― novov (t c) 19:27, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

The source spotcheck should not be a separate 2e. The spotcheck is part of 2c and 2d, it should be prompted in the review column not the criteria column. CMD (talk) 01:57, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I was going off what other editors had already done for Template:GAList etc. The parameter there is called 2e even if it doesn't show up on the final template (as it shouldn't, because as I am well aware, it's not actually criterion 2e). I agree that that's probably not the best name for it and I have no strong preference on what to call it myself.

How to display it in the final template is a different question entirely, and probably something that should be hashed out by multiple people. ― novov (t c) 04:02, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I'd prefer it be displayed as part of 2c and 2d for clarity. "(OR, including source spot-check)" and "(copyvio and plagiarism, including source spot-check)" for example. That way it doesn't have a separate tick but is clearly part of the process needed to achieve those two ticks. CMD (talk) 07:28, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One

I have recently reviewed the article Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One, a nomination managed by ZooBlazer (main editor, 69.3% of the text of the article). I pointed some things that had to be fixed, they were fixed, and the article was promoted. Accordingly, the article was placed in further nominations for DYK and good topic. But then Favre1fan93 (third main editor, 5.1% of the text of the article) removes those fixes, two times already. Those fixes are things like using the years of the films in the section headings (something he claims is required by guidelines, but it isn't), a WP:EASTEREGG link, plots described in full in-universe style, etc.

What should be done here? Should I open an article reassesment? Remove the good article status, restore the nomination and ask for a second opinion? Tell Favre1fan93 to accept the results of a GAN of an article where he's not a significant editor nor took part in the discussion? (he didn't even comment anything in Talk:Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One#Potential future GA nomination). Just walk away and let the article be a good article with this minor but noticeable problems?

@ZooBlazer:, @Favre1fan93: Cambalachero (talk) 17:20, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't hang GA on the precise formulation of section headers, but I would agree mixing the in-universe writing with out-universe information is not clear and fully understandable prose (GACR1a): "In 1943, Steve Rogers is deemed physically unfit to enlist in the U.S. Army and fight the German Reich in World War II...In April 2006, Marvel hired David Self to write the script for a Captain America film". That said, before going to GAR (if that is the endgoal) there should be a discussion of the relevant issues, usually on the talkpage but this is a very recent GAN so if discussion happened on the GAN page that would also seem reasonable. CMD (talk) 02:11, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

After thinking about it, I think at least the years in the subsections should stay after all. That's pretty normal across the MCU and film franchises. -- ZooBlazer 17:48, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

The headings should not have been an issue. That formatting is used across numerous other franchise pages in the film, television, and video game medium (to name a few), so this isn't an outlier. In terms of in-universe vs out of universe, the smaller film sections are all clearly segregated by paragraphs as if each were "mini" sections (without subheaders). Those are a premise (first paragraph), production info (second paragraph), and relevant larger MCU tie-ins (third paragraph). This is how this info has been formatted since these sections all originally lived at Marvel Cinematic Universe (and then List of Marvel Cinematic Universe films) before the separate phase articles were split out. I don't see how those premise stylings would be of issue to a reader, as it follows the convention of MOS:FILMPLOT and as if it was being used on a film article. Regarding the additional edits I made, the Silver Age of Comic Books is any comic book in the 1960s, and changing it from their comic books in the 1960s Silver Age of Comic Books to their comic books in the 1960s removes the awkwardness of the first instance and double instance of "comic books". And I would hope the copy edits to the Iron Man and Cap First Avenger sections were not also of issue. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 16:45, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Short GA review

I nominated Merchant's House Museum to GAN back in October. A few hours ago, V.B.Speranza reviewed the nomination and passed it with few comments. With gratitude to V.B.Speranza for taking the review up, unfortunately, the review seems very cursory. For example, I do not think the sources were adequately spot-checked.

As such, I would like to request a second opinion for this GAN. – Epicgenius (talk) 22:54, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm familiar with this user's editing and find they have a poor grasp of the GAN process. I would second the request for a second opinion. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 01:10, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

A second opinion would be somewhat a misnomer here, the review is checklist so any second opinioner would be performing effectively an entire review. If there is no agreement by the reviewer to return to GA1 then opening a GA2 (with the same nomination date) would be better than a second opinion request. CMD (talk) 02:01, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Hard-to-understand terms in the lead

Can you please help me with the review I wrote on an article nominated for GA by @Sammi Brie?

See Talk:Kentucky_Educational_Television/GA1

My understanding that the article complied to GA criteria except 1a in the lead. It should be understandable by a broad audience, but there are terms such as PBS. According to the manual of style, the had to understand terms should be avoided, but if cannot be avoided, they can be linked and defined (explained) right in the text. Only linking is not enough. See MOS:INTRO. Quote: "Make the lead section accessible to as broad an audience as possible. Where possible, avoid difficult-to-understand terminology, symbols, mathematical equations and formulas. Where uncommon terms are essential, they should be placed in context, linked, and briefly defined." But the terms such as PBS are not briefly defined, and they are even used in the Short description. Overall, the following terms are not explained or not avoided: PBS, commonwealth (also linked contrary to MOS:PIPE best practices), American Public Television, Kentucky General Assembly, Corporation for Public Broadcasting?. Consider you are an adolescent outside the U.S. reading the lead - you will not understand due to these terms. Is my understanding of the GA criteria correct, and I can consider that the article Fail GA due to the use of these terms in the lead? I like how The Economist defines new terms or new company names. For example, The Economist does not simply mentions "Corporation for Public Broadcasting", but something like "Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a private nonprofit entity authorized by a law adopted by the U.S. Congress in 1967". The Economist even defines such known companies as Goldman Sachs, for example, they write "Goldman Sachs, an investment bank..." -- such brief definitions would also be helpful in the lead of a GA candidate article.

I asked the nominator to fix these terms, but the nominator declined.

Can I conclude the article as fail GA due to lack of compliance to 1a on the word incomprehensible by the audience in the lead?

Or should I insist that the nominator fix the terms, and if still the nominator not fix, then fail?

Or should I conclude the article pass GA?

Please advice. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 07:06, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Well, to give you a different perspective, as someone who last interacted with biology almost 2 decades ago, the following terms in Histamine N-methyltransferase make almost no sense to me: "methyltransferases superfamily", "biogenic amine", "N^τ-methylhistamine", "N^τ-methylation", "diamine oxidase", "histaminergic neurotransmission", "knockout mice". And I'm certain that my parents (whom I would consider average readers) don't know what "cytoplasmic protein" is. Does that mean that it needs an explanation in the first sentence of the lead? No, I don't think so. That's what wiki-links are for. I also don't think that an article about a TV network needs an explanation on TV station programming in the US in its lead section. Or that it needs to explain different types of states in the US. AstonishingTunesAdmirer 連絡 12:11, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

That article actually does a very good job of explaining scientific terms though; of the ones you mentioned, only three are unexplained. A methyltransferase transfers methyl groups, as mentioned explicitly in para 2. It explains "N^τ-methylhistamine" and "N^τ-methylation" very well, any discomfort there is just from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. Diamine oxidase is an enzyme, again mentioned in the article. "cytoplasmic protein" is a protein in the cytoplasm, which hardly requires explanation. The only unexplained terms are "biogenic" (amine is self-evident) and "knockout mice". The article manages to explain most of its jargon in a way that requires pretty much just the first two chapters of high school o-chem and biology, no need to knock on it just because some of the nouns are long. AryKun (talk) 14:25, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, I will try to address the issues you mentioned. I did my best to explain jargon in simple language in the HNMT article whenever possible. However, as in the Kentucky Educational Television article, some terms were not needed at all and could be easily removed with no disadvantage to the article (e.g. the word "commonwealth" could be replaced to "state" or removed at all, the abbreviation PBS could de-abbreviated and be briefly described the way The Economist does that, etc. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 15:04, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, commonwealth is unnecessary; the fact that it's in the official title of the state doesn't have any actual implications for its political status any more than the DPRK's name has led to a blossoming of democracy there. AryKun (talk) 15:14, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree with that sentiment. And I agree with David Eppstein's suggestions below. What I didn't agree with is that all these terms need to be explained in the lead section. Later in the article or through explanatory footnotes would be fine, preferable even, as the essence of your complaint is valid. But it's not a featured article candidate, so IMO it's fine. The prose is clear enough, even if I would have phrased it differently. AstonishingTunesAdmirer 連絡 15:52, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

According to the MOS:INTRO, the intro itself should be easy to understand, as they refer to a conclusion (statistics?) that the intro alone is what most readers read, so that they don't read the rest. Therefore, there is no sense to explain in the terms later if they are not understandable in the lead. Wikilinks do not help much because clicking back and forth hampers readability. My point is that sometimes it is easier to fix the uncommon terms then to argue with the reviewer. I once encountered an article that also contained uncommon terms but the nominators agreed and quickly fixed that to comply with the rules, they also probably had the same opinion as me that fixing is the most efficient way than arguing, see Talk:Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome/GA1. I am sure they could have presented plausible arguments in favour of keeping these terms as is rather than replacing to the simple term. I am sure that the article on Kentucky_Educational_Television had uncommon terms that could not have a justification to keep, they could be replaced or explained without affecting, still, Wikipedia is not based on a sole opinion on one person, we have to seek consensus, and consensus was that the article was OK, so that's why I requested second opinion and concluded that it passed GA, but I don't want to be in a similar situation again. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 16:19, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

I tried to address the issues (the uncommon terms in the HNMT that you've spotted). Thank you for your observations, they were more than reasonable. I removed or explained the terms "biogenic amine", "cytoplasmic protein", "knockout mice", etc., can you please provide your feedback at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Histamine_N-methyltransferase#Explanation_of_uncommon_terms Maxim Masiutin (talk) 17:05, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Very well put. There is not one sentence in the first two lead paragraphs of Histamine N-methyltransferase that I understand. And that is fine, because I do not expect the article to explain what I presume are basic concepts of biology to me. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:17, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

You know how to challenge the GA status, do that please. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 13:02, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Why would I want to do that? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:04, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Let me ask second opinion, and anybody can jump in and I will decide according to how did the second opinion reviewer decided. Would that be an appropriate procedure? Maxim Masiutin (talk) 13:05, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I thought that you meant that the article on HNMT also does not conform to the GA status. The fact that one article does not conform doesn’t mean that the second should also not conform. This phenomenon is known as quality creep. Quality creep refers to the gradual lowering of standards or expectations over time. It occurs when deviations from established quality criteria become more acceptable, leading to a decline in overall quality. In the context of articles or content, it highlights the danger of compromising quality simply because other similar content exhibits deficiencies.

Maintaining consistent quality standards is essential to uphold credibility and reliability. While leniency toward minor deviations can be reasonable, it’s crucial to strike a balance between flexibility and maintaining high-quality standards. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 13:07, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

You appear not to have read the third sentence of my initial reply. In any case, you have two second opinions here; the wait for a formal second opinion will likely be weeks, if not months. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:08, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I would like to follow the formal procedure. Your arguments are plausible. Probably you could also probably step in and provide the second opinion via the established procedure. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 13:18, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

If the reviewer would have spotted these problems, I would have rewritten, it looks like finger pointing. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 13:04, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

That's exactly my point. It's not a problem, that's why it wasn't pointed out. And what you point out above is also not a problem, in my opinion. AstonishingTunesAdmirer 連絡 13:06, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

OK, let me ask for a second opinion. Maxim Masiutin (talk) 13:07, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

While maximising understandability and accessibility are good goals, they might not always be possible. Consider the spirit of WP:ONEDOWN, and target for understanding by say people already familiar with Kentucky and/or with educational television. CMD (talk) 01:29, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

As someone reasonably familiar with educational tv but not Kentucky, seeing the current lead "Kentucky Educational Television (KET) is a statewide television network serving the U.S. commonwealth of Kentucky, a member of PBS.", I would have preferred to replace linked commonwealth with unlinked state (to the rest of the US and the world, Kentucky is a state; we don't need to know about the principles by which its founders might have chosen to call it something else). Calling it "statewide" is redundant. The grammar makes it unclear whether KET or Kentucky is the member of PBS; I think this, rather than the initialism, is what makes PBS look technical. If the grammar were clearer it would be obvious what kind of thing PBS is. And I think it's often better to say what something does than trying to define what it is. So I think the reviewer's qualms are justified. Maybe something like "Kentucky Educational Television (KET) provides educational television to the US state of Kentucky as a network within PBS." would be an improvement? —David Eppstein (talk) 05:29, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Dress (Taylor Swift song)/GA1

It seems I have encountered a similar problem as Epicgenius above, albeit with a different review. @ToNeverFindTheMets's review on Talk:Dress (Taylor Swift song)/GA1 (nominated by @Gained) is brief and does not sufficiently justify itself as a perceptive review; for example, whether a spotcheck of the sources has been properly conducted is unclear. TNFTM is a first-time reviewer, and as such, might benefit from some guidance and/or second opinions. ‍  Elias 🪐  (dreaming of Saturn; talk here) 14:49, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I don't really get why the default path of action when discovering an inadequate review, often by a new reviewer, is to come to WT:GAN and broadcast it to over 1,200 page watchers, instead of quietly notifing the editor on their talk. Anyway, I've done the latter now; hopefully they won't feel so shamed that they never again return to a process desperately in need of reviewers. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:12, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Biting newbies and vandals is a norm, too.

@AirshipJungleman29: First, concerned editors have been bringing this sort of thing to this talk page for years, so it happens at least because other editors see it as a norm. Second, many editors have too much compunction and are averse to confronting new editors and their faux pas. Third, the concerned editor might also be unsure if this review was sufficient and is asking for a compass-check from other editors. With everything being political here on Wikipedia, most non-admins want to proceed from an understanding of consensus. I know I wouldn't care about shaming a new editor, since the fault was theirs. Chris Troutman (talk) 15:20, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I know it is the norm, which is why I described it as "the default path of action"; personally, I wouldn't describe exposing their mistakes to hundreds of others as having "too much compunction". I think Your Power is quite experienced and shouldn't hesitate to open a section on a user talk page, and also think that you, also a very experienced editor, might need to reread WP:BITE, as "even the most experienced editors may need a gentle reminder from time to time." ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:30, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

You said "I don't really get why the default path of action..." and I explained why. Many people might assume that talking about someone behind their backs (on a WikiProject talk page) is easier than confronting them one-on-one. You might disagree. I, for one, encourage vigorous criticism of all by all and I regularly bite other editors. You've assumed good faith regarding the new editor; maybe assume some good faith for User:Your Power/ Elias, too. Editors who have put in the work to nominate a GA are feeling maximum buy-in and those of us who created content should remember that feeling. But thank you, AirshipJungleman29, for telling new editor that there's a problem. Chris Troutman (talk) 15:40, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Is anyone else getting a slight feeling of the uncanny valley from this conversation, or is it just me? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:46, 2 April 2024 (UTC)