Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Newsletter/November 2007
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Canadian Paul is the GAN Reviewer of the Month of October, based on the results of weekly judging of the number and thoroughness of reviews performed by Epbr123. Canadian Paul is a reviewer hailing originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is an alumnus of the University of California, San Diego, and is currently a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, studying Middle Eastern Studies. Other outstanding reviewers recognized during the month of October include:
There are now 152 members of WikiProject Good Articles! Welcome to the eleven new members that joined during the month of October:
This WikiProject, and the Good Article program as a whole, would not be where it is today without each and every one of its members! Thank you to all! |
Here's a couple of useful tips for new reviewers. First, it would be good to become familiar with the Good Article criteria. This is the core set of criteria that all Good Articles must adhere to. It is recommended to refer to it in your reviews, and you may link to its shortcut at WP:WIAGA. The criteria consist of six items by which GAs should be checked against: prose, verifiability, completeness, neutrality, stability, and images. Some of these will be easier to check than others. For example, checking the images requirement is relatively easy; do all images have their required image copyright tag, and if fair use is being claimed, is there a fair use rationale in the image description? Stability is also a fairly easy check, as it mainly just requires reviewing the article's edit history and talk pages to insure that there are no recent (with the last month or so) edit wars, not counting simple vandalism by anonymous editors and such. Criteria that will take more time to review include #1 (prose) & #3 (completeness). Criterion #1 will require the review to thoroughly read the article, checking for grammar, spelling, manual of style issues, and other things like sentence structure. It can also often be the easiest to fix, as it mainly just requires simple copyediting. If you're very comfortable with copyediting, and are familiar with the manual of style and have a good grasp on the use of english grammar, it is completely acceptable to copyedit the article yourself and promote it, if this is the only criteria that is lacking in your review (minor edits to articles are allowed by GA reviewers). Criterion #3 is a little bit different to review, and may take longer. When judging an article's completeness, we want to make sure that the article covers most of the major topics that it should cover. Check the talk page for some of the WikiProjects that are listed there, and look for some of the guidelines for articles. For example, if you're reviewing an article about a city or town, look at WP:CITIES and see what sort of guidelines they have? Are all the major subsections that are listed at WP:USCITY or WP:UKCITIES present in the article? Or does it lack key topics like government, culture, or economy (or all three)? The article should also be focused, and not go off into too many unnecessary tangents. Check the use of subsections in the article. If there are a very large number of 2nd, 3rd, or 4th-level subsection headings, perhaps the article is starting to go off into unnecessary details, and some of these subsection headings should be eliminated or combined to help the article be organized better? The most important thing to remember when reviewing an article, is to try and write a good review. The more advice that you can provide for improving the article, the better. Try to avoid only using templates like {{GAList}}, and offer suggestions on how to write a better article. It might help to memorize some of the shortcuts to some of wikipedia's help pages, so that you can easily incorporate these links in your review; some ones that you'll probably use often include WP:MOS (manual of style), WP:MSH (for header/subsection issues), WP:CITE (for citation and formatting of citations), WP:LEAD (for lead section issues), and WP:NPOV (for neutrality issues). Also, if you're not sure whether an article meets the criteria or not, don't hesitate to use the {{GA2ndopinion}} option. This option exists primarily for newer reviewers to seek the advice of an experienced reviewer fairly easily. It may also even be used by more experienced reviewers if an article might be fairly controversial, such as if there might be some neutrality issues that you're not sure of, for example. For more good advice on reviewing good articles, see Wikipedia:Reviewing good articles.
This is the very first issue of the WikiProject Good Articles newsletter, ever (Hey, you've gotta start somewhere!)! Apologies if we've left out any important topics that participants might have wanted to see, but maybe I just didn't know about it yet. If you'd like to make comments on this issue, or suggest a topic that you'd like to see in the next issue, you can do so here. We're also looking for any contributors that might want to help out by writing some of these sections as well. Are there any volunteers to write the next major topic article (like 'advice for new reviewers'), above?
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Improving Wikipedia one article at a time since 2005! | |||||||
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