Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations/Archive 2

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Organization

I know it's been shut down before, but couldn't we try filing the nominations under headers? Not each individual category, the major broad ones, or we could even group the smaller ones. If we did that then people could find nominations on certain topics easier, and we might get quicker/more reviews. For example, I can't bear an article on Atom splicing in astro physics, but I'd enjoy reviewing a music article instead. It's just an idea, flame away Highway Rainbow Sneakers 16:16, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I wouldn't mind that at all I don't think. Maybe we could try splitting into science, arts and humanities at first and see what we think? I'd review the atom splicing article but probably not the music :) Worldtraveller 19:58, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Can we do that.. like now (or verrry fast) because we're getting close to about 50 articles.. which is a LOT. Could some be bold? Highway Rainbow Sneakers 20:14, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Done! The sections are: Sciences, History (merging with Arts), Arts, Humanities and Geography. Hopefully this will cut down on build up. Highway Rainbow Sneakers 21:08, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Everything is fixed, dates organized, Art and Histoire merged, I've changed the instructions and I've managed to make the web link jump to each sub header. Let's hope it works, Highway Rainbow Sneakers 21:18, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
These four categories are workable. But, a note explaining where some subtopics fit could be helpful. Or, perhaps an edit to the cateogories. I see social science articles under both science and humanities. Hence, I lengthened the title of "Humanities" to "Humanties and Social Sciences". I also think that it is a good idea to add Technology to Science and so will do that. What do you think? -- Vir 00:34, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
I included maths with the science and technology - though we don't seem to be getting many maths articles full stop! TheGrappler 00:40, 8 April 2006 (UTC) And some other stuff didn't seem to fit easily - I turned arts into media, arts and sport to reflect what was getting put there. I also included education with humanities. Does this all make sense? Personally I was happy enough with the great big list, but there you go! :) TheGrappler 00:44, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
I think this list needs subcategories because it is easier to find information in smaller chunks. More that 20 items becomes a bit difficult to scan quickly -- especially for those with tired or worn out (by age) eyes (and brain). Eventually, as the nomination list grows, we may need at least 2 identical top levels of category structure on the nomination and good article pages. I tweaked your edits. Media, arts and sport --> Arts and media. Sports go best with society under Humanities, society & social science, I think. -- Vir 00:54, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Makes sense... if I was nominating a university now, though, I wouldn't know where to put it, and if I was nominating a sports player, it's not obvious to put them under society. I might just make that slightly clearer without changing the way things are split up. I liked the way the single list made it dead easy to nominate stuff, now it's kinda hard for several topics. I don't think the noms list will grow. Historically it's generally oscillated between about 20 and about 60. I think it tends to go down rapidly at weekends, for instance. Basically, the number of reviewers has tended to grow with the number of nominators, and (especially since they are often the same people) nominations often dry up once people are busy reviewing their way through a queue. I've certainly seen no evidence that the list will ever spiral out of control! TheGrappler 01:05, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
It is early on in the life of the GA list and Wikipedia too. It seems possible that the number of good article candidates will increase 10x and even a 100x over the coming years. Consider: In what pace will Wikipedia move from quality in almost 2000 articles to quality in 20,000 and then 100,000 and more articles. It will could do so by involving ever more editors increasing the depth of the stream of good quality articles. As for specifying society -- I was thinking of a footnote. Putting some key topics in parens is good idea. I'll build on that. --Vir 01:55, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
By specifying society (as economy, education, family, history, language, law, politics, religion, sports, war) it becomes clear that society includes most everything (including the institutions of the sciences and arts), as society is a universal term for human institutions. So, the question comes up then: should Humanities (along with language, law, and religion) ---> Arts & Humanities (instead of Arts and Media)? I could live with that. We would then have the categories below (back to first level): -- Vir 02:09, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Proposed top level categories

  • Arts and humanities (history, language, law, media, philosophy, religion)
  • Earth sciences and geography
  • Natural sciences and technology (applied sciences, engineering, mathematics, medicine, transportation)
  • Social sciences and society (economy, education, family, politics, sports, war)

I think these are more balanced and inclusive. These could actually serve as top level categories on the GA page as well. What do you all think? -- Vir 02:09, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

On inspection, the above seem much preferable to both a single word structure and to the current front page category structure, with humanities, social science & society being ungainly, that I'm going to include the above in one more iteration of polishing these categories. -- Vir 02:15, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
War is in social sciences and society, but history is in arts and humanities... seems a little odd! But at least now I think it is more obvious where stuff goes. What about language and linguistics? Society I guess... my big problem with this is that previously it was dead easy to nominate something. I appreciate that stuff is going to grow tremendously in the long term (by and large I've been responsible for adapting and breaking down the featured article subsections at WP:GA-it is really hard to break stuff down logically) but I think that we need to make this system as easy as possible for the casual user. If it's going to be tough on anybody, it ought to be the reviewers not the nominators (especially true since at the moment we could do with finding more GAs and the review queue is still well under control... in future, more concentration will have to be on purging the list for quality control rather than just adding to it). Looking through a list to spot if there's anything interesting to you doesn't add a lot to a reviewer's workload, especially if you start combing at the top of the list (there's no need to look through all 50 or so nominations). On the other hand, I can see this nominations system becoming seriously offputting to people coming across WP:GA for the first time. TheGrappler 03:05, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, perhaps people could enter new suggestions under a category titled "new nomination" (instead of "miscellaneous"). I made that edit and moved it to the top. With this structure, someone can come along and easily drop in a nomination. Then, someone else can categorize new nominations later. (I bet there would be volunteers.) This gives a three step process: nominate; sort; review. That way it is more easy on nominators and reviewers (with "tired" eyes and slow brains). It will be easier to categorize articles later. This will especially be the case as article voluem goes up and when the 2nd level of 20-someting categories go in. Regarding categories: Humanities are an eclectic category that seems somewhat arbitrary. But, this is not entirely so. History is both a humanity and social science -- sometimes history is narrative and sometimes it is more analytic in social science mode. Languages are organic cultural phenomena that really belong in the humanities. Linguistics is a social science. Law sometimes is put in humanities, but it probably belongs more in society. Philosophy should be over in society. The french do it better: They have the human sciences. The above are not entirely arbitrary distinctions. Social phenomena are both consciously subjectively lived and objectively analyzable. A category system needs to be sensitive to these distinctions (but not to the point of obsession, especially in a context like this one). But, it doesn't hurt to have a well designed category system and a helpful way to use it in place early on. Ps. I went ahead and moved history to society as well -- it really fits better there. I added literature to the arts category, computing to the natural science and tech subcategories (dropping applied sciences), and made earth sciences subcategories. I referred to the categories on the GA page while doing this. --Vir 04:20, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
I've no strong feelings either way for the new category system. However I'd just like to note that when making changes to this, editors need to remember to keep the section number up to date within the Your addition here link. Cheers. SeanMack 08:12, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
If the what was towards my point - I meant these: your addition here. The section number in the url needs to match the actual section number. If new categories are added or removed this is relevant... ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Good_articles/Nominations&action=edit&section=7 your addition here]'' SeanMack 10:10, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
What? Anyway, "History" should be in Arts because you can become a "Bachelor of the Arts in History" and I personally think that "War" is part of History because most wars are ancient. We could move History and War to Arts (but only as History) and add Military to Society. Thoughts? Highway Rainbow Sneakers 09:57, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Now where does psychology go? (Sorry, still utterly confused, but the last few edits have made it all a bit more intuitive) TheGrappler 13:32, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I would put it in Arts because I think there's a Bachelor of Psychology.. otherwise I think it would go in society. Highway Rainbow Sneakers 16:04, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Psychology is a social science and should stay in that category. History is part liberal art and part social science, so it can go wherever. I an thinking that geography and history should go together -- for three reasons. 1. They are "indexical" bodies of knowledge -- they locate society and people in the world, one in space and the other in time. 2. Historical and geographical "holistic" methods that are used in the natural sciences, social sciences and liberal arts. 3. I created a collection of basic category sets that groups history and geography together and I think combining the two works well in various categorization contexts see: Category sets. So, I'm going to make that revision. Wonder what people think? --Vir 14:39, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Difficult reviews

Recently, despite the length of the lists, articles at the top haven't had much of a lag, suggesting that the review system is working well even for "tough to review" articles (a situation some had feared when we were experimenting with auto-promotion after a time limit). However, there have still been some suggestions (see above) that at least in some cases, more than one person should get involved in making a review. What would make sense to me is for a reviewer who finds a case borderline (and therefore might not want to make a decision on that article) to take the article to the the disputes page and get some more feedback there - as it is, that page works a lot like a "review" page anyway. It might be a good place to send exceptionally borderline cases if you want more input while making a decision. Any thoughts? TheGrappler 22:44, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I think it's more n00bs and anons promoting difficult articles more than them being easy which is kinda worrrying.. If I have a difficult article, or want one reviewed again for any reason (they come up), I normally ask another reviewer to review it, which is normaly CorbinSimpson. An idea is that everyone could get a review partner to deal with stuff like that. We could also have a fortnightly/monthly FAC style thing and we could tackle all the hard GAs together. It's not what we want I know, but it is a good way to deal with the tough cases, Highway Rainbow Sneakers 23:11, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Personally I don't think one person reviews are effective for longer articles (say 15-20kb or more). I'd prefer it if we didn't handle them at all, rather than getting into a more complicated review system. If an article warrants being 20kb or more long, it really deserves the more rigorous reviewing of an FAC, I reckon. Worldtraveller 17:40, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Or you could send it to me. :P By the way, how can you find out the length of an article in KB? Highway Rainbow Sneakers 17:47, 8 April 2006 (UTC)


Limits

Do you think we should have a limit to the amount of articles a user can nominate in one day? While I have no problem against more nominations, I know have failed 90% of SeanMack's article nominations and he tends to add in bulk..

Now the new person Kingboy.. something nominated 8 articles in one minute... very promising Highway Rainbow Sneakers 11:06, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm hardly new - I'm actually an admin and have over 10,000 edits. I nominated a bunch of articles relating to The KLF that we have been working diligently on (see Category talk:The KLF for how this has evolved from a few shoddy articles into a comprehensive, encyclopedic mini-WikiProject). They're all imho a serious cut above the average popular music article (and as the founder of WP:Beatles I can tell you they're better than the average Beatles article too). Your comments would suggest you haven't even looked at them??
As for numbers, it shouldn't be a problem if the system works as advertised, that anyone can pop by and rate an article. If it's going to be restricted to a team of reviewers (either through policy or because other people aren't reviewing) and a backlog develops, then a limit of nominations per day would certainly be something to consider.
(Sorry for putting my response in at the top but since I'm mentioned by name...) --kingboyk 12:12, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
You have failed many articles that many others would have passed. We all know there is no consistency as only one person does the pass or fail. I certainly don't have the patience to do a tally of pass versus fail for myself or anyone else. When Worldtraveller set up the project the instructions and the remit were simple. Now the project has instruction creep and higher and higher standards. I felt in the past that you were reviewing GAs with something approaching FA standards. You moaned when someone quite rightly stated this to you. I do appreciate the efforts you have made as you put a lot of effort into the reviews. Don't get me wrong - you do very thorough reviews, which is to be commended. That is mainly why previously I said nothing about the harshness of your reviews, I feel I have to mention it now though since you are personally criticising me for an alleged 90% fail mark of nominations. I was trying to nominate mainly things that I believed should have been in an encyclopedia as opposed to fancruft. My opinion is that if something is borderline then nominate it. At least it gets a review and some decent criticism, hopefully to improve and get back on the list. It's not as if I nominate every article I see, there are many articles that I have added references to - in order to make them acceptable for review. Others I have added a no references tag to then ignoring, and others still I have bookmarked to work on later. By all means make some limits, but think carefully why you are making these limits... Are they per person? What is the time for the limit? Why does the project need a limit on nominations? If people think I nominate crap then it should be easy to dismiss the rest of my nominations. On consideration, given how your remarks have made me feel, perhaps I have become too attached to the project and should move on before comments like yours get to me. It's only the internet after all....SeanMack 11:59, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
I'm sorry Sean, it's just from where it stands in my eyes, you don't seem to put a great deal of thought into what you nominate. Although we give detailed analysis, we aren't a substitute for peer review, Highway Rainbow Sneakers 12:50, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
And if you ask me, the reviewing group and the rest of the project are very far apart, Highway Rainbow Sneakers 12:52, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I too am sorry, if you had just asked about a limit we could be discussing it, instead you chose to single me out for criticism to an extent I feel obliged to defend myself.

Basically what we have here is a fundamental difference of opinion. Since GA is new and finding it's feet, that is to be expected, what I object to, is your implied suggestion that I am clogging up the works by nominating only crap articles. And stating I am not thinking about what I ask others to review.

I can tell you that I have thought about the process a lot and the types of articles we really should be encouraging. Do you want to see GA being mostly made up of favorite albums and pokemon characters or would you rather it has encyclopedic content? I saw other nominations and thought that fancruft would prevail unless there was something to counter it. Bearing in mind we have a great system that is FA for approving and validating articles to a high standard I don't see the point in replicating that. However on the other hand we also have a project in WP 1.0 that is attempting to trawl around to identify articles that would be part of a baseline encyclopedia. That may be well in the future and it may be burned to DVD - that is not my concern. My concern was to address the lack of standardised encyclopedic content that is a bit of a problem in wikipedia given it's patchy nature of excellence here and dross there. I don't think you could possibly say that any of the articles I nominated was dire. Or do you. Many articles I have submitted have been accepted. I am not sure what your point it to be honest. Is it because I have nominated articles that you think are not good or is it because you believe I am clogging up the list with crap?

Where I think you are right is that a GA review is not a substitute for peer review. Peer review and article assessment and FAC are all parts of a process to get articles to a standard where we can all stand over them and say the are high quality and verifiable. GA is not part of that process yet so no point kidding ourselves that it is. It is new and is not accepted policy. However it is a line in the sand, and hopefully a marker of an article that is readable and informative. Others have criticized GA for not making it's threshold much higher. What is the point of having a second inferior FA process? Maybe then GA should be replaced by a "featured shorts" process and we forget all about what we are doing here?

Where you are wrong is in your assumption that I have not thought about my nominations. Every nomination I make is because I think the article is relevant to a body of work. I may nominate more than you prefer that are borderline but that is a different debate. I would actually accept that not every article I nominate is "the best it could be" to quote a U.S. phrase. However my opinion was that each article was either there or close. Those that were close, at least have had a review and contributors now know how to make improvements to the article. Including myself, where I to choose to adopt the article. Viewed in the context of WP 1.0, my opinion is that getting more articles to a base level is more important that offending your sensibilities by nominating too many lackluster articles.

I am not sure what you meant by the reviewer group and the rest of the project are very far apart. Rather than assume the worst as I had done I'd appreciate it if you clarified what you meant. Other wise it sounds like you see yourself as a reviewer to be a breed apart. On that note I have reviewed some articles as well as nominating many. To me one embodiment of a good article is Bali Nine. It was enjoyable and comprehensive, not to mention current. What more could I ask from an online encyclopedia? Yes an FA could be cited in a school project or essay – but I for one do not want wikipedia to be solely a dry academic entity.

In short, I can assure you I appreciate the time it takes to review the articles, that is not a reason to have fewer nominations. My main aim is to raise the profile of articles that I believe need to be at a certain standard for wikipedia to be taken seriously. There actually are a lot of good articles out there and I for one like the idea that we can group them together. Verifiability can be taken care of by FA in due course. However breadth of coverage needs to be tackled from many different angles. That is why I also added the Vital articles list to the GA template. Kind regards. SeanMack 15:04, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

The point I was trying to make was that you tend to wander through articles, nominating them, without even editting them. I can appreciate the point of improving the "Vital Articles" (thank you by the way for having a go at the fact I added my "fancruft" entry which is one behind the lead "fancruft" entry in about 500 articles?) but you don't edit them! I sometimes wonder if you even look at the article you're nominating... Highway Rainbow Sneakers 15:31, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I wasn't intending to reply much after I had made my points above, any more is just tit-for-tat which I really can't be arsed with - I mainly want to say I wasn't having a go at you - to me the danger of fancruft is having lots of well written articles that are of limited importance to the man/woman in the street. I have no idea what you are talking about in regard to your entry. I have no idea what you nominated. Please don't take my own defence against your criticism as an attack on you. Lets get back to doing the encyclopaedia. I've said my piece, think what you want from here. If you looked at my contributions you would have seen that I have edited lots of articles to include pictures and references where necessary. However in most cases I have been looking for the "low hanging fruit". Simple answer, don't review my noms. If I see that other people agree with you I don't nominate any more. Easy. Cheers SeanMack 15:54, 10 April 2006 (UTC)


Warning STOP! Hammertime!
It would be cool if people chilled out a bit and didn't include anything that might be interpreted as a personal attack. Now, personally, I have found that SeanMack's nominations tend to be articles of substantial length, almost always excellently illustrated (and usually with image tags all present and in good order), and with references and footnotes. That means that they are at least prima facie good article candidates. "Well written" is a question of degree and a little subjective, but I've never seen SeanMack nominate an article that was genuinely poorly written. Sparkling "brilliant prose" is lacking from most articles, not just SeanMack's nominations! I don't see why it should be compulsory to edit an article to nominate it, although if a nominator (or for that matter, a reviewer - I think it can come across as rude to say "here's a list of typos/grammar mistakes I found, now go fix them yourself!") finds some copyediting that needs doing, or a categorization that could be improved (you'd be startled at how many U.S. educational institutions aren't categorized under their county, for instance) then it would be neat if they could be added. Neat, but not worth making compulsory! Similarly, I don't see why anybody should have a limit put on number of nominations. So long as the nominator believes the page being nominated is pretty well-written, appropriately illustrated, fairly comprehensive (it's often possible to judge this from length), doesn't have an obvious POV problem (worth checking talk pages for that) then lets assume good faith... if you're sick and tired of reviewing a particular nominator's nominations, then you have the right to slack off and not review them :-) If you're reviewing an article that is a no-hoper, then there's no need to write a massive review (if I find an article that is a no-hoper, I might only make a few comments, like "before this article can be listed, it needs its images to have appropriate copyright tags and it needs references to back up its assertions about X, Y and Z; also the lead could do with being lengthened to give a better summary of what the article's about"), give a bunch of handy help links (WP:CITE, WP:LEAD etc) and leave the page be. I've made a valid constructive criticism, given some help (some useful advice, and perhaps a brief copy-edit) - I've done everything that anyone can expect of me without going to too much effort to do it, which I would class as an all-round win really! So, my general advice is don't make work for yourself, try not to get upset about other people's good-faith nominations, and there's no obligation on you to review them if you don't want to. If all the nominations here were so good they all passed, then it would be impossible to judge where our actual standard was! TheGrappler 16:30, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Geography and history

History is part liberal art and part social science. So is Geography (which includes human geography). I think that geography and history should go together in a top category, for three reasons. 1. They are "indexical" bodies of knowledge -- they locate society and people in the world, one in space and the other in time. 2. Historical and geographical "holistic" methods are used in the natural sciences, social sciences and liberal arts. 3. I created a collection of basic category sets that groups history and geography together and I think combining the two works well in some well-balanced categorization contexts, see: Category sets. Please see link if you have criticisms. So, I made that revision. Two other benefits of this is it makes the society list shorter and, by including history as part of a top level category (which it deserves even at 4 basic categories), this avoids the unresolvable debate about whether history belongs with the arts or the social sciences (since it is both). --Vir 14:47, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Removal of GA nominations

I wonder on what grounds things can be removed as GA? I have worked pretty hard on the article Richard Francis Burton and it was given GA status a few days ago and then this was removed a few days later on grounds I consider pretty dubious (see the talk page) -- including the claim that some sentences I wrote myself "I'm afraid such pasages have been copied directly from some biographies without even editorializing." --Richard Clegg 00:32, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure, by the fact they never tagged it as a delisted.. I wouldn't trust it too much. If you put it back up for nominations and it passes again we'll leave a note saying it passed twice and not to delist it without proper reasoning. Highway Rainbow Sneakers 10:37, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Lists

What's the procedure for lists. Can the GA be given to them? savidan(talk) (e@) 11:56, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Did you try going to Featured Lists first? Right now the only list on GA is List of Mega Man weapons, which is entirely prose; not a list in the traditional Wiki sense. Nifboy 15:27, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
As far as I can see, any "true list" meeting WP:WIAGA actually is likely to meet the featured list criteria, so long as it is tidied up a little! TheGrappler 17:25, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Well-written and cited historical timelines (basically lists of events in paragraph form) would definitely qualify for good article (as well as Featured List). Davodd 00:54, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
How about something like List of Catholic American entertainers? It's fully sourced, at the very least. Mad Jack O'Lantern 01:01, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
For something like that, I would suggest a little more context in the prose as to what the quotes are from and to maybe tablize it - with the inclusion of relevant photos of each person. -Davodd 09:51, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Hmm... good ideas. I might just do that. Mad Jack O'Lantern 17:37, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Curse Words

DO NOT add articles with curse words to the good articles list!!!—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 879(CoDe) (talk • contribs) .

Right... spam. Highway Rainbow Sneakers 22:12, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

  • Please explain why we should ban certain words and how you propose to do this. Please make sure your proposal and justification are compliant with the WP:NPOV policy and the WP policy against censorship. You will also need to develop a reliable test to determine exactly what is and is not a "curse word" in a way that gets WP community consensus. You also will need to define the various flavors of "curse words" and their acceptability. (EXAMPLE: Are "curse words" that are part of a title of a work of art or literature more appropriate - and deserving of a loophole to the ban - than words that are included in prose of an article regardless of relevancy to the topic discussed?) This will require an easy-to-understand process that applies to all English-speaking cultures and subcultures and dialects of English. It seems daunting to me, but if you are willing to take on this task and are open to accepting the community consensus, whether you agree with the final outcome or not, then I applaud you. But, I do not support an action of discrimination from a WP editor in the form of a decree - as if from on high - that something is not acceptable (regardless of quality) just because she or he finds the subject matter or the proper words required to identify it to be personally distasteful. - Davodd 00:46, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
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