Wikipedia talk:Version 0.5 Nominations/Archive 2

Maybe important question

What we want at last?:

• to put just nearly perfect articles into V0.5?
• or to put every important articles?

To be more understandable: for example, Saturn article is not as good as Mercury. But how could we publish any planet without the others? Or is there any template saying: it's in V0.5 but you should improve it's quality? NCurse _work 10:37, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

This is an important question, as we have to balance comprehensiveness against quality, and each case will have to be judged on its own merit. You should try to use as a guideline the WP:V0.5 criteria. You'll see that you made the right call on the planets - to quote from the criteria page, "If a certain lower-quality article is needed to complete a "set" (e.g. of the Solar system planets), then it may be included." Walkerma 04:28, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Part of using the bot is that it provides us with a diff we can use to check the degree of improvement (or degradation) of an article after it was passed. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 04:31, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

I meant to say before - regarding a way to request improvement of the article, if you assess it as B-Class and include "class=B" in the template, that will tend to encourage folks to work on it. If there are specific flaws, you should probably mention those on the article talk page. Walkerma 04:33, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Proportion of FAs that'll qualify

What proportion of FAs are anticipated to qualify as far as importance are concerned? If it's more than 75% or so, would it be good to consider every FA as nominated, and accept or reject every one of them for the sake of completeness? Andjam 15:09, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

I would guess less than a third, actually. A lot of our FAs are on topics of fairly narrow interest. Kirill Lokshin 15:24, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

But we will need about 10,000 articles. In my opinion we should build on FA articles. Then improve topics on them. NCurse _work 18:49, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

10,000? I was under the impression that those were the 1.0 numbers, and that the 0.5 release was to be much smaller (on the order of 2000 articles). Kirill Lokshin 18:50, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I see now. :) Ok, we have about 1000 featured. Then you are rigth. Now concetrate on major topics. NCurse _work 19:03, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Merging articles

Can we be able to merge articles such as the excellent Saffron series which are all FAs and History of Miami, Florida a FA to Miami, Florida. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 02:07, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Wait, do you actually mean merging FAs in the live Wikipedia? Somehow I don't think that's going to go over very well with the people writing them. Kirill Lokshin 02:14, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't see us being able to merge articles at all. There may be exceptional circumstances, where a WikiProject does a merge for us to bring lots of articles (typically stubs) together, in order to get the material included. Walkerma 02:40, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Maybe for the 1.0, note I'm mostly the writer of the History of Miami article and I don't mind Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 02:46, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Keep in mind the whole "appropriate length" thing from WP:WIAFA, though; merging two FAs may produce something that's no longer of sufficient quality simply by virtue of being too long (and hence unreadable). Kirill Lokshin 02:50, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Pretty odd selection process

I find it strange that an obscure topic such as Stanford prison experiment is selected as an event of major importance yet the article I just nominated about one of the bigger political scandals in U.S. history (1996 U.S. campaign finance scandal) was delisted within 12 minutes of me nominating it. It's a featured article that appeared on the main page back in late April. How was it determined to be not important? The article couldn't have even been read in such a short time period.--Jayzel 17:17, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

It was probably delisted so quickly because it had "1996" and "U.S." in its title. The presumption is that any topic which dates itself is less likely to be of high importance, and anything that is restricted to a specific country is also less likely to be of high importance. Anyway, it's true that the selection process, being based on WP:GA, is not entirely rigorous or consistent. Its mixture of evaluating quality with evaluating importance makes it even more likely to get one or the other wrong, and renders such evaluations even more subjective and person-to-person-variable; it also isn't very useful for establishing articles that aren't yet at a good enough quality, but are so important that they should be brought up to such a quality, which is arguably the most important task for Wikipedia to focus on if it's going to become a reliable encyclopedic resource. But I guess this project has its hands full just with the CD-selection process. At least it's interesting, even if, as you pointed out above, it's not especially consistent. -Silence 17:24, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

I glanced though the article and read parts of it, I'm reading fully now but 0.5 is a test release so only a limited number of articles will pass though. There are few bigger world and U.S scandals than that event. It's very well-written though so I moved it to held noms and it probaly will pass a 1.0 nom. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 17:30, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, for future reference, I really think you should actually read through an article thoroughly before trashing the noms. Six minutes from nom to delisting was a bit extreme. Wikipedia may as well just skip on past any kind of nominating procedure and just select a single person to pick and choose which articles go on the CD themselves. --Jayzel 17:35, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Who would be that person? :) I think it won't work. That's why there is a team (review team). We move the best nominated articles to Version 0.5. Before August we will look after all the articles (that will be the second screen), and then we will move the articles to Version 1.0. So when they will be published, they would have had 3 or 4 reviews. That's why I'm not worried about moving a nominated article to V0.5 in 6 minutes. Anyway you are right. NCurse _work 17:40, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

That's basically what's starting to happen here; and we're unfortunately beginning to see some of the negative effects (both with important articles being held and less notable ones being approved). Still, this is only a test release. Kirill Lokshin 17:37, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Yea I saw some articles that clearly met the failed by quality part moved to held noms, and also articles like Electron and a couple of the Planets articles which I would of failed by quality being passed. And articles like Sandy Koufax being moved to held even though that one of the most notable baseball players, and the most well-written of them. As for the 1996 scandal I think it may go to the 0.5 later on if no other scandal articles get promoted like Watergate for example. Same with Koufax Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 17:49, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, we hope to set up a "disputed" page where these things can be raised. Note that we considered the planets to be the type of thing that we consider highly important for an encyclopedia to have, and also it would seem odd only to include some of them rather than all. A lot of thought and discussion went into developing the criteria, and although every reviewer's perspective is different, we are all trying to do a fair job. For example the Koufax reviewer contacted me directly to get a second opinion, we both felt it was just on the edge, and will probably go into the 1.0 release (along with hopefully some soccer players from the World Cup?). The held nominations are exactly that- they will be automatically renominated for the next release.

Meanwhile a handful of the articles that passed seem odd to me, but then again my perspective may be wrong. I have agreed with nearly all the choices made so far. If you take a look at vital articles, you'll see how hard this job is (the people there have done a marvellous job, IMHO). I think we'll be lucky to get 3 articles on the US government in the 2000 or so articles we expect to get for 0.5, and those would probably mainly be more general topics than a specific scandal. But please, help us review articles if you can, and make the process work better! Thanks for your input, Walkerma 06:08, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm pretty confused why Albert Einstein got put as a held nomination when it's an FA and VA. Is there any process for re-evaluation? — Laura Scudder ☎ 15:54, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

I think he might have meant to fail it, as it's currently protected from a edit war, thus failing stablity. I would move it there Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 16:20, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

The confusing part for me was that the guidelines seem to indicate that held articles should have failed on importance only, not on quality or stability. Anyways, irrelevant now that it's not considered held anymore. — Laura Scudder ☎ 21:50, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

The Einstein article had a cleanup template, so it failed. But now it is ready to go. Anyway all of the held nominations will be reviewed again. NCurse _work 16:55, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

I think article that are failed will be reviewed again for the 0.5 but articles in held, I doubt it. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 20:26, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Proton, neutron, and electron

I passed electron a while back, although it was B-class, because I viewed it as a very important subject. Now there's a very reasonable request to include the articles on proton and neutron to complete the set. The proton and neutron articles also look B-class to me, and are of roughly equal importance as the other two particles of which the entire universe is made. So I think that all three articlese should either be in or out, but I'm not sure which. Any opinions? -- SCZenz 13:57, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Pass them all; it's not like we're running out of space ;-) Kirill Lokshin 14:28, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

These are good examples of articles that are of very high importance but low quality. We will probably have to allow in quite a few B-Class in such high importance cases. I think a lot more could be added to an article like proton, but at the same time it's a basic building block of matter. I'd say "pass", but hopefully the B-Class tag on it will spur the physics folks to work on the basics! But if we find "Start" class articles that are really important but not being used to complete a set (Saturn was needed for the set of planets), I would fail the article on quality and post a request for improving the article (with suggestions if poss.). Thanks, Walkerma 15:39, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia list discussion

There's a discussion about this on wikipedia-l ... take a look. +sj + 22:46, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Our delightfully high standards

I was highly amused by the recent promotion of Victor Hugo to V0.5. I happened upon the page a few minutes ago, and, while skimming through it, noticed something strange: the complete absence of any information whatsoever about the first 25 years of his life. This struck me as doubly strange because when I'd previously edited the article, it had plenty of info on Hugo's early life. So I checked the history, and discovered that a series of consecutive vandalisms and counter-vandalisms way back in early April (April 5–6, specifically) had eliminated the first two sections of the article! Amazed that no one had caught the dramatic alteration, I finished my copyedit of the lead section and restored the two deleted sections of the article—and then noticed that the article had just been promoted to VA 0.5. I restored the missing two sections of the article at 03:39; Jaranda passed the Hugo article at 03:41, while simultaneously nominating another article. No way did Jaranda have time to run up and pass the Hugo article after the changes I made: clearly this article, complete with a dramatic and obvious vandalism-by-omission (similar to ones I've also recently fixed on articles like Lucifer; it's really remarkably how sometimes the most dramatic vandalisms are the ones that survive longest), met all the standards for a typical Version 0.5 entry. Neato. :F I wonder if it ever would have been caught before print? :) -Silence 03:55, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for catching that! Please join us reviewing articles, we really need folks like yourself. I noticed a similar problem with crime (how ironic) only last night, we have to try and remain vigilant. It can be hard when you're tired and on your tenth review, though! Thanks, Walkerma 04:23, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Hm, alright. I'm usually more into improving articles than reviewing them, though: I actually find it easier in most cases to copyedit an article thoroughly than to read it all the way through without making any changes. But if you need help, and especially if there's anything specific you'd like my opinion on (like a certain article or group of articles), I'd be glad to do what I can. -Silence 04:49, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

I have FireFox so I can be in a couple of articles in once, I read the other article like 30 min before. I quickly read though the Hugo article and I thought there was something missing about the life section and wasn't going to promote it. I clicked the history section before I was going to deal with it saw your edit to the life section, and promoted it has I had the Hugo article in another tab. The vandalism is worriesome though, we should add the article to our watchlist. One last thing, starting on the 21st I would be away for arm surgery and won't have anymore time in wikipedia soon so we really need more people. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 04:33, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Alright, I'm just glad to know you saw the change before making the promotion. Yay for FireFox! -Silence 04:49, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the offer, Silence! We could use your help in handling some of the philosophy noms, I'm not qualified to judge whether or not Omnipotence paradox is a significant enough topic, likewise Transhumanism (until my brain gets enhanced). I am sure that many things will slip through the reviewers net, but our system is (I think) more rigorous than previous CD releases, and it is only a test release (partly to "test" the reviewing system). I like to think I have fair general knowledge, but I can't really tell if the article on John von Neumann I reviewed tonight is missing some major fact of his life - I'm an organic chemist by training! I'm sure we're all getting better as reviewers, though. You can see that the proposal for review at WP:V1N (closed for now) is still more rigorous, and I'm hoping we will get the WikiProjects doing more and more of their own assessments (to bring in subject-specific expertise).

On a related note, Silence (and others), if you're attending Wikimania in August, you may be interested in a discussion I'm organising on the subject of formalising validation (not just assessment) on Wikipedia (i.e., How do I know an article is factually accurate?). I'd love to meet you if you're attending.

Jaranda, I'll really miss your work here, you've really helped us a great deal through the formative stage of this project. Thank you so much, and I hope the surgery goes well. Walkerma 07:09, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Borderline importance

Here are a few articles I think of as having borderline importance:

• Gulf Oil
• Transhumanism
• Barbara McClintock
• Tooth development

All of these have been nominated for at least a week. None have an entry in my one-volume encyclopedia, which has 17,000 entries. I haven't looked in my larger set.

Does anyone want to discuss or defend their possible inclusion? Maurreen 14:35, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I would move Gulf Oil to held, and not sure about the other three, maybe talk to experts about them. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 15:21, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I think all of them are candidates for later versions, and should go in "Held." Transhumanism is a popular thing among certain groups of young people, it is definitely noteworthy but perhaps not enough for 0.5. McClintock is a Nobel Laureate and is definitely noteworthy. Tooth development may not be in the one-vol encyclopedia under that heading, but the way Wikipedia works, it is in effect a subsection of our coverage of dentistry. Not appropriate for 0.5, but I could see us having perhaps 5 dentistry articles in a later release, and as a Featured Article, this would be a strong candidate at that time. So let's put them all on hold. Walkerma 02:18, 22 June 2006 (UTC). I meant to say, transhumanism has only taken off in the last 5 years or so, I think, so it's understandable that a print encyclopedia wouldn't have it in. Walkerma 02:22, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Eligible for nomination template

I've made *{{V0.5 nom possible}}. If there are no objections, this could be used to encourage nominations. It could be placed on articles of high importance en mass, encouraging an editor active with the topic to make the nomination. Maurreen 16:40, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Err, if you're going to be editing all of those talk pages anyways, why not just nominate the articles and cut out the extra step? It's not like it makes any difference who does the nominating at this point. Kirill Lokshin 16:44, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. The template allows efficient publicity. I could put it on many articles that I'm confident of the importance but haven't read for quality. Someone following the article could be spurred to either nominate it or improve it. I'm trying it out of a few continent articles. Also, I added a category. Maurreen 17:02, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

It maybe be useful, especially for later noms as there are few people reviewing, I got arm surgery tommorrow morning so I'm going to be out of wikipedia for a bit. We don't want to see a backlog with the nominations so it's a good idea. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 16:48, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Good luck with your surgery. Maurreen 17:02, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

So at last, should we use this new template or not? :) NCurse _work 17:06, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Is there any reason not to? Maurreen 17:52, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Ok, ok. :) Then now I flood science-related articles with this template... :) NCurse _work 18:27, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I just first saw this template used on chromosome and I find it very annoying. Talk pages are not meant for publicity of other not directly related projects. One step further and we will have flash banners competing for the readers attention on every talk page. If you think an article is important but don't lnow if it is good enough, either nominate it or make a list of them, but please don't go spamming talk pages. --WS 23:48, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Wouterstomp. This is too invasive and time-consuming, and using talk-page templates to advertise a project (rather than to directly benefit the encyclopedia) is inappropriate. A simple list would be much less invasive, and much easier to keep updated. In fact, that's exactly the method the WP:VA project uses. -Silence 00:53, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I just created this User:Jaranda/Articles eligible for Wikipedia:Version 0.5 basiclly a copy-paste of WP:VA, maybe we can fix it up and place in to wikipedia namespace. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 01:10, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, if we're going to make it exactly like WP:VA (at least to start with), you could always use WP:VA itself. :P Nobody's really using that project for anything major anyway, other than for the CD Version endeavors. Or, depending on how long you want the list to be, you could start with Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded and then simply start trimming off all the articles that don't meet the 0.5 cut (and adding ones that do). The Expanded list is probably closer to what you're really looking for, if articles like chromosome (which probably wouldn't fit on the shortened WP:VA list, though genetics itself might) are a good example of what would make the cut. If somebody clarified what types of articles would (and wouldn't) be appropriate for a list of "eligible for CD nomination" articles, I'd gladly help to work on such a list. -Silence 01:20, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

The VA exapanded is too long, we need a list that can remove articles that was already in 0.5, I could move my version to wikipedia space, merge articles from VA expanded and use that. I already removed most of the articles that was in the 0.5 in my version. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 01:33, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Since we don't really need to know which articles have cleanup tags on them for the purposes of V0.5, why not use bold to indicate articles that are already in 0.5, rather than removing them from the list altogether? That way someone won't see an obvious omission in the list (like biology) and add it, not realizing that it's just an entry that's already been accepted into 0.5. (Or, if bolding isn't a good idea, we could always use a CD icon, similar to the small image we're using for GA and FA. But I think bolding would be a lot easier and quicker, while still making the distinction between accepted and non-accepted "eligible (i.e. important) articles" very clear.) -Silence 01:37, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I agree with that, we need to format the Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded though. Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 01:43, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Ok I deleted my version, we can move Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded to Wikipedia:Articles eligible for Wikipedia/Version 0.5 if we want. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 02:06, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Oi. You deleted your version while I was in the middle of a major edit to it. I'll paste the text to Wikipedia:Articles eligible for Version 0.5. -Silence 02:14, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Publicity

Has this been put on the Village Pump, etc.? Maurreen 12:20, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Are you sure that being so aggressive on the publicity front is a good idea? Recall what happened to WP:GA when they went overboard in that regard. Kirill Lokshin 12:54, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

What happened to GA? Maurreen 13:05, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

A lot of people have started opposing their every attempt to legitimize the process on principle, believing them to be spammers and such. Kirill Lokshin 14:45, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Publicity is important but we should wait until we have about a few hundred articles and a well organised system. In the start, it would be tough to work with hundreds of contributers. :) NCurse _work 18:40, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I did put a "press release" out when the nominations opened, that seemed the appropriate time. It went on the community notice board, and also made it into that week's Signpost. I think it helped getting the word out. At the same time, Kirill has a good point, if you try to get too much publicity! I'd like to do a major splash when we're getting to the last couple of weeks or so of nominations. Walkerma 02:09, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Feeling

Why does Jareena's nomination of the article feeling falsely claim that (1) the article is on the WP:VA listing (it isn't, and never has been, though emotion is), and (2) the article is B-Class (when it's really Stub-Class, or at best somewhere between a really crummy Start-Class and a dab page)? Moreover, there is ongoing discussion to merge feeling into the emotion article. Was the wrong page nominated here? -Silence 21:14, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Yea conflusion of article, got confused, meant to nominate emotion. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 21:19, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Nomination categories

The nomination categories don't match up with the categories in Wikipedia:Version 0.5. Is there a grand reason for this? Andjam 12:07, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Also, how about we move the links to the categories higher, so we don't need to scroll down? Maurreen 14:13, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Good idea. NCurse _work 16:12, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

They used to match, but someone tried out a new format at V0.5 as an experiment. The category system used here at Nominations is the Wikipedia 1.0 standard, one we voted on after lengthy discussion. I recently proposed we switch back so they match again, are people here OK with that? See Wikipedia_talk:Version_0.5#Unbalanced_sections for more details. Walkerma 16:32, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Sure. Maurreen 16:40, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

systematic bias

please explain why pop singer mariah carey deemed significant, yet hong kong action cinema isn't. strange that a single generic pop tart is somehow more important to the world than a century of cinema from the world's third biggest film industry. cheers. Zzzzz 10:08, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Dear Zzzzz! I agree with you now. Maybe the reviewer thought that Hong Kong action cinema is a too narrow topic to get into the first 200-300 articles. As Walkerma wrote on held nomination page: "We may be able to include Hollywood and Bollywood if we're lucky, but this one will have to wait till a later release". Jaranda passed Mariah Carey for Version 0.5. It is hard to always see and realize the difference between the importance of the topics. Anyway these articles will be reviewed again soon. NCurse _work 10:30, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I think that we're suffering from the same problem that has plagued WP:GA: having things done by a single reviewer is always going to result in subtly different outcomes depending on which reviewer happens to check the article. I don't think it's too much of an issue for a test release, though; given the timeframe we're working with, it's likely to have a fairly random selection of articles no matter what we do. Kirill Lokshin 16:17, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

That's why I can't understand why we didn't started to use User:Chcknwnm/Sandbox... I loved that system. NCurse _work 16:28, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Probably because assigning articles to reviewers that they really couldn't know—or care—less about tends not to be the best way of maintaining their interest in being reviewers. What we need is a system that both (a) allows reviewers to self-select which articles/topics/categories they'll work with, but also (b) ensures multiple reviewers for each article. I don't think anyone has come up with anything other than a WP:FAC-like model, which might not really work given the small number of people we have at the moment. Kirill Lokshin 16:37, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

"the small number of people we have at the moment" - I can't see why it is a problem. Our number is growing, and I think FAC system could work. But not in V0.5. NCurse _work 16:44, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I think it would be absolutely wonderful to have a system where different users can comment and, informally (to help determine consensus), "vote" on each entry's quality and/or significance while it's nominated. The GA system for approval is a weak, inefficient one; I have no real interest in going through the list in its current state and making removals or additions based on my personal opinion and evaluation alone, but I'd have a great deal of interest in a system where I could simply voice what I think about each article's qualifications, and listen to others' evaluations and responses, before an agreement is reached. The more users can voice their opinion, the more successful and popular the project, and the more accurate and consistent the inclusion standards, will become; when only a single one decides for each nominee, without input from users with varied perspectives, there will be a much higher error rate than if we had even 3 or 4 users going over the list to find a common ground. This would also help isolate and make explicit some of the implicit disagreements over notability and quality standards in the background of this project, allowing us to directly address them. -Silence 16:41, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I was rather borderline with Carey, but being one of the most popular singers in the world, I let her though. We will probaly going to re-review the ones that was placed in held later on like Hong Kong cinema and Sandy Koufax in August. Still this is only a test release. Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 18:56, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I personally think Carey is a definite to include, based on the intro on her page:

• "best-selling female artist of all time"
• "the most U.S. number-one singles for a female artist"

Otherwise I can agree with all of the above points. The system isn't perfect, and our list will be a long way from comprehensive. Right now our bias (as I see it) is in the natural bias within Wikipedia - we have no articles (as far as I know) on any major transnational corporation, for example. Remember this is not a simple one-dimensional judgement - it's a balance of quality, importance and breadth of article. Should we have one article on Popular Music of the UK and ditch narrower articles like The Beatles? How about East Asian Cinema, or Cinema of Hong Kong, instead of Hong Kong action cinema? Or just include Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan? The reality is (thankfully) - for V0.5, it doesn't matter too much, as long as we don't have anything too silly or bad. The main issue is to get a total of 1000+ article reviewed & approved in the next 8-9 weeks or so.

Going forward to version 1.0 (for which both Koufax and HK action cinema will likely qualify), the issues become more significant, and Silence has explained the advantages of more thorough reviews very nicely. If you look at Version 1.0 nominations (still closed) you'll see that Maurreen has already set it up along those lines, rather like FAC.

I'd like to see several things set up, particularly #2:

1. A disputes page, to handle things like this
2. A page where reviewers can leave comments on articles, either directly or via transclusion. The bot can now read reviewers comments from any page of the type [[Talk:Article/Comments]], if the template is set up to read them. These comments could also be transcluded into a review page, a held nominations page, etc.
3. I agree that Chuck's idea was nice except for the arbitrary assignment aspect. I think that system could work well if restructured, maybe in conjunction with #2.

However, I simply don't have time to set up such pages and moderate them. If someone is really interested in doing any of them, please go ahead! Meanwhile, we still have another 800 articles or so to review....! Walkerma 03:47, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm ambivalent about Mariah Carey. But I agree with Walkerma that we should keep the process streamlined for now. Some disagreements are likely inevitable. Maurreen 06:25, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Page format

I added links to the nomination categories at the top of the page and put the categories in alphabetical order. Maurreen 15:34, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

FLAWED PROCESS

This process is very flawed; project articles that are KEY FAs are failed when minor pop stars, prison experiments, etc of low quality are included. It's all up to the reviewer, who is given vague guidelines and there is apparently no appeal process other than to resubmit and hope to get a different reviewer. I will not submit nor review any more articles for V0.5. What a joke. Rlevse 15:56, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

We knew that even at the beginning, the Version 0.5 procedure wouldn't be perfect. That's why we are here now and work to see our faults and create a better system for the main Version 1.0. Version 0.5 is just a "playground" where we can build a better system. That's why I can't understand your anger or what. It is like evolution; some species had to vanish. Like now, some articles shouldn't be in even Version 0.5, some should be there. But at the end, when the final part of the processs will start, we will be able to solve these problems. That's why you should stay and work on. NCurse _work 16:31, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I think there are two subtly different approaches we could be taking towards this:

• Try and develop a workable system for 1.0 while at the same time avoiding upsetting too many of the all-too-few people involved here.
• Try and develop a workable system for 1.0 while at the same time doing everything we can to upset people.

Why we seem to be increasingly favoring the second option, I can't fathom. Telling contributors that their article isn't "important enough" hurts, even if we don't intend it to. Why, then, are we rejecting FAs? There's no question of their quality, and even if we were to accept them all, we'd only have a thousand articles—far less than what we'd really want for a test release. Kirill Lokshin 16:37, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

• NCurse: You can't understand why I'm upset when you've selected Sharon Tate, a minor actress notable only for being murdered, and a prison experiment when you reject Eagle Scout, which is an FA KEY article on a highly esteemed achievement? You have got to be kidding. No, I will not stay. Kirill makes excellent points and you should pay heed. Rlevse 16:40, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, we should have started with all FAs, then core topics, then fulfill the empty parts among these articles. We tried an other way which, as it seems, won't work. A process is needed where at least 2-3 reviewer have to express their opinions. Rlevse is right now with that example, but to be equal, plenty of articles are in their proper place in V0.5. Or continue this way, but in the end, before starting V1.0, nominate articles (already in V0.5) - which shouldn't be there - to remove. NCurse _work 16:45, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Oh, wonderful. I'm sure removing more articles will make us even more respected.

I think some people are taking the putative 0.5 product itself too seriously here. The project is only in its infancy. More so than actually assembling a "finished" release, our objectives should be:

• Demonstrating that a (more-or-less!) reasonable hard-copy release is feasible.
• Convincing the rest of Wikipedia to support the effort.

Despite our progress (or lack thereof, in many cases) on the first issue, we're simultaneously having major problems with the second. We need to convince the editorial community that we're reasonable people with a worthy goal, not lunatics trying to impose bizarre standards of article selection; if doing so requires including some articles that we normally wouldn't, I think that's an acceptable price to pay. Kirill Lokshin 16:51, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

OK, it seems like a number of people want changes to the system. Here are a couple of ideas, food for thought.

1. FAs would only be failed if their quality had deteriorated significantly.
2. Have two people agree on failures of importance, OR
3. Items would only be failed on importance if they had been nominated for X amount of time without being approved.

Maurreen 17:18, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I think Kirill makes some excellent points, and NCurse has stated the situation well too. If we were reaching the point of having 5000 articles cramming a CD, "importance" would be more of a problem - but at present the main problem is a shortage of articles. Given that context, I think I would support the idea of opening up the held nominations page, and consider adding in anything that is not clearly obscure (assuming the quality is OK). Keeping people on board with the project is far more important than arguing over whether this baseball player is more important than that psychology experiment. I completely see why the article was held, I would have preferred to have seen articles like Scouting or Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell representing the scouting movement, but this article would certainly not look out of place on the CD, either. So let's consider revising our system such that only the most bizarre/obscure nominations are rejected on importance, and an appeal process is in place. Based on Maurreen's recent post, I'd agree, as long as we have liberal rules on what is important. In other words, two of us in fact agreed to reject Sandy Koufax on importance (not top 5 baseball player) under the current system, but under the new (more liberal) system we would allow the article (he is in the top 100 baseball players). This is what "test releases" are all about, ironing out these problems! Walkerma 17:24, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, but that seems a little too liberal for my taste. Can we compromise somewhere in the middle without setting the bar just a couple of inches from the floor? Maurreen 17:31, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

In my view, the problem is not the small number of articles. If there is a problem, it might be that the decisions either way are just made by one or two people, which can make inconsistency.

Another idea would be to have two people other than the nominator approve any given article. Maurreen 17:34, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

What's our target size, anyways? If we're trying to get a hundred articles, we're being too liberal. If it's closer to 5,000 or 10,000, we're being far too strict. There simply aren't enough articles of a caliber that would be suitable for a (widely publicised) hard-copy release for us to be rejecting the ones we do get. Kirill Lokshin 17:37, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

About the number: Walkerma had generally talked about shooting for 2,000. Maurreen 17:41, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Okay then, ~1,000 FAs and ~1,000 other stuff should be feasible. Remember, the 0.5 release should focus on being a suitable publicity tool in addition to (and perhaps in priority over) a first attempt at a hard-copy encyclopedia. Sure, the coverage will be unbalanced; but the average quality of the articles is likely to be much more in our favor than if we select two thousand "important" topics and have the release widely derided because the articles are riddled with subtle errors. Kirill Lokshin 17:46, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

The reason I nominated Eagle Scout (Boy Scouts of America) is because it was a KEY FA of the Scouting project and hence of better quality than the Scouting or Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell or any other project article, which I'd suspect V0.5 would want all FAs to showcase Wiki quality (except maybe old FAs that don't have refs and such, from when the standards were lower for FAs). Granted the two articles Walkerma mention are more broad in scope, but their quality is not as high. This is why I nominated the Eagle Scout article first. Rlevse 17:35, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

In the planning stages, I always stated (when asked) that the aim was to get 2000 articles. These would not simply include all FAs, because quality is not the only issue when we limit things to 2000 - the same way the SOS CD release (2000 articles) passed over many FAs in order to include more "important" GAs. If we could get 5000, I would be delighted, if we get only 500 I will be very disappointed. I's guess that with some effort we'll reach 1000, but 2000 looks unlikely now that reviewing has slowed to a trickle. Walkerma 17:46, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Even if we include all FAs, GAs, and project-rated A-Class articles, we're still only going to have 2,000 to 3,000 to work with. I really don't see why some people are so insistent on excluding the articles that serve as the best representatives of the quality of writing Wikipedia is capable of. Kirill Lokshin 17:50, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

• One way to solve this issue would be to institute a system of different degrees of importance. Rather than making the only two options "it's important enough" and "it's not important enough", why not a 5-point system, where articles like Spoo (an FA on a trivial topic) would be "1", and articles like Sun (an FA on a core topic) would be "5"? "Eagle Scout" would probably be about a 2 or 3 on the list, thus allowing us to include "Eagle Scout" as a possible CD candidate, while still distinguishing between it and significantly more important articles, like Scouting itself. This would also mean that our initial evaluations wouldn't necessarily be completely useless to later evaluators, since even if our standards for inclusion are constantly changing, our evaluations of importance needn't be.
• I think that dropping almost all importance standards altogether, as has been proposed above, has several major dangers that could sink this project. The first danger is that if we lower our standards to blatantly non-noteworthy articles, we'll piss off the editors of the articles we dismiss even more; missing the cut of a project with high standards isn't such a big deal, but missing the cut of a project with relatively low standards will seem like a slap in the face. This could also lead to a slippery slope of increasingly low standards.
• The second danger is that if we base our inclusion standards on which editors make the biggest fuss (e.g., an editor bitched louder about Eagle Scout (Boy Scouts of America), so we caved in to his demands, but editors complained less melodramatically about Albert Einstein, so we left it off the list despite it's dramatically higher quality and importance), rather than on neutral evaluations of quality and importance, the entire project becames meaningless. It sounds above like users are more interested in popularizing this project so more editors become involved, than in actually keeping the project useful or consistent; it has been asserted above that making a certain editor happy is more important than actually treating the articles fairly. Although in the short term this is certainly a reasonable and practical method of making the project more active, in the long term this will utterly destroy the project as preferential treatness compounds further preferential treatment (e.g., "you let Eagle Scout (Boy Scouts of America) into the list because an editor complained about it and threatened to leave; why didn't you let Spoo into the list when an equally valuable editor threatened to leave the project?").
• If we aren't willing to step on an occasional editor's toes in the interests of consistency and fairness—if this becomes an elaborate, politically-loaded popularity contest, not a fair collaborative article evaluation project—then we'll have lost sight of the entire purpose of the project in the process of trying to advance it. -Silence 17:52, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Other than the risk of having Britannica's editors point and laugh at the contents of our putative release (which will likely happen anyways), why do we need to enforce any substantial importance standards at all? The quality standards alone should keep the number of articles we can possibly include quite small relative to Wikipedia's total size. Kirill Lokshin 17:55, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Has it not occurred to you that we can improve articles that are extremely important but that don't yet have good enough articles? That's what Wikipedia's editors are here for, after all, isn't it? There are countless methods on Wikipedia for gathering editor support to improve certain articles that need it, and we can create even more if there's a need. Isn't this is a CD that will not be released until years from now? If it was coming out next month, then I'd agree, yes, let's focus only on articles that are already good enough. But for a long-term project of any sort, it seems utterly senseless to place all the weight on whether an article is already of high quality: for one thing, many articles will degrade in the time, and only a fraction of those will be caught by us, especially if our list has grown so large in the future (due to our lowered standards) that we can no longer keep track of all the pages; for another thing, many other important articles that have so far been neglected (like tool, food, health, and countless others) might have become GAs or even FAs by the time of the CD release if we'd put pressure on editors to improve them by noting their high importance and substandard quality. Is this purely a publicity release to demonstrate how few typos and grammar errors Wikipedia articles have, or is it also supposed to be a remotely decent demonstration of the quality of Wikipedia's articles on a variety of extremely important topics? If the only intent of this project is to make Wikipedia look good in the short term, not to improve Wikipedia's actual quality in the long term, then I've been misled by false advertisement, and will have to find somewhere else on Wikipedia to waste my time. :) Threatening to leave seems to be the only way to get anything done around here anyway. XD -Silence 18:07, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

This (0.5) CD was meant to go out this fall, I think. We can plan all kinds of clever things in the long run, but if we actually wait for them to happen before doing anything practical on the release side, we'll be sitting here for a long time. Kirill Lokshin 18:14, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

If we just wanted to do a showcase of FAs, we could have done that. That would be a collection of high-quality articles that could be an interesting way for a reader to pass time and learn.

But it would not be a reference work. It would not be an encyclopedia.

Can we compromise on not failing FAs based on importance?

That would plausibly allow us to have 500-1,000 articles of the highest quality and 500-1,000 articles that are most important, and still keep a simple, streamlined system. Maurreen 17:57, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

That's what I suggested above ;-) Kirill Lokshin 18:00, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Not failing FAs? So articles like Spoo, Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Holy Prepuce, and Dawson's Creek would be automatically included, while articles like Brain, Earth, Television, Mathematics, and Water would not be? Is this really being considered? -Silence 18:21, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

The "points" system that Silence brings up above would be a good idea. There have been many cases in which I've doubted whether to include an article myself or not (such as Sandy Koufax, for example) because the quality is good, but the importance is just on the edge. In the case we need more articles for the 2,000 to be released, we can always looka at which articles have a value just below the threshold and include them if necessary. It would necessitate a new quality review, to check they haven't deteriorated, but it could avoid this problem. I do see the point Kirill brings up above of not alienating editors; however, I also think that we should give out something with some semblance of a traditional encyclopedia. Titoxd^(?!?) 18:02, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Sure. To put it in simple terms, 5 could be "definitely important enough", 4 could be "probably important enough", 3 could be "in the middle", 2 could be "probably not important enough", and 1 could be "definitely not important enough". So we'd have the same system we have now, but with the possibility of gradation. This, combined with a system to let people discuss what rating to give each article that's been proposed, would resolve most of the current problems plaguing this project (like inconsistency, caused by only 1 editor reviewing each submission, and lack of long-term significance, caused by the disregard for the significance of current decisions; and both caused by the ever-changing, vaguely-defined inclusion standards) and make the inclusion process both more rigorous and thought-out (though without overcomplicating matters with an elaborate or bureaucratic system), and more fair and consistent. I expect there would also be fewer after-the-fact complaints if each entry was discussed and "voted" on upon submission, since users could make their cases and reply to criticisms before any "final" decision is reached. -Silence 18:13, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Ok, but we should change the system after Version 0.5 is ready or change it now? NCurse _work 18:17, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Why wait? When the system's broken, fix it. Everyone here seems to agree it's broken, so the only question is how to fix it, not whether or not to do anything at all. -Silence 18:22, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I think the same, that's why I asked it. But what to do with previous nominations? In the new system we just should put our "points" next to the nominated article? NCurse _work 18:26, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

We already have a system of a four point scale of importance, this is now being read by the bot so we shouldn't go switching to a different system mid stream. The problem is not whether or not it's a good idea, but how do we get a consensus at V0.5 to agree on these numbers? Our current output is about 4-6 articles reviewed per day, at that rate this project could ground to a halt if additional work is demanded of reviewers.

The reason for the importance criterion was to ensure some level of balance, both within a broad subject area and between subject areas. We didn't want to have 20 articles on a particular TV show, then find we didn't have anything on television itself, or engineering. I might mention, in contact with WikiProjects discussion on importance is being very fruitful, as projects start to focus their energies more on fixing their top-level articles and less on minor topics. This will (in time) give us a system whereby WikiProjects (ie subject experts) themselves will decide on importance, and that will be much more objective than a non-expert reviewers opinion.

I think we do need perhaps to lower the bar for FAs for the reasons Kirill says, but it's still a case of where we set the bar. If we allow Heavy metal umlaut and Spoo, maybe we run the risk of being laughed at - unless we make it abundantly clear that these articles are included for "fun". Can we do that, or will we just look silly? This isn't just about one editor complaining - see the previous section in this talk page. My assumption is that we would revisit everything on the the held nominations list. As for Einstein, there was a temporary quality issue, that's why the article was "held" - for such situations (as with Bob Dylan recently) I now use the term "frozen" and place a comment in the nomination section.

Yes, we should fix things now, that's what tests are all about! Walkerma 18:27, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Another idea: why not dispense with the hand-selection process entirely (except as a sanity check immediately before release) and leverage the distributed rating system instead? For example, what happens if we allow all articles that are Top-Importance (in some WikiProject) and B-Class or higher to be included? How big of a set do we get?

(I'm aware that there will likely be a complaint that "trivial" WikiProjects may get articles in. I don't think this is a particular problem, since active WikiProject == interested editors == interested readers == will probably be of interest to some non-trivial number of people if it's included in the release.) Kirill Lokshin 18:25, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

(So much indenting and so many subthreads here I'm just gonna jump in below what I want to answer with a crazy indent number; please move if it you object) :) "Top importance" (to some Project)/at least B (I'd prefer "GA"/"A"/"FA" personally) articles plus articles on the core topics sounds like an excellent idea to me. Yes, there will still be some systemic (systematic? sp.?!?!) bias but at least this way they're self selecting and any systemic bias is reflective of the current state of Wikipedia. We can't right all of Wikipedia's wrongs in one go; all we have to do is get together a reasonable selection of showcase articles and this seems to me a quite reasonable way to do it. --kingboyk 19:09, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

That would be biased toward active wikiprojects. For example, I think it would leave out a lot of articles on countries. Maurreen 18:27, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Aren't all of those all on the "core topics" list or something? Kirill Lokshin 18:29, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, this is supposed to be the "sanity check", as many of the articles that are checked have already been reviewed by WikiProjects (see all the held tropical cyclone articles, for example), so I'm not sure whether distributing work that is already greatly distributed would be as effective as we hope for. Titoxd^(?!?) 18:30, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I meant a sanity check immediately before the release. Our problem here is that we're trying to do it without a clear picture of how many articles we have to work with. Kirill Lokshin 18:32, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I think it's a great idea, once we get a core of important (there's the I word again!) articles together at V0.5. I'd be interested in that for version 0.8 or something like that. You've summarized the goals of Work via WikiProjects in a nutshell. There are a lot of active country (and city) WikiProjects, though some work through notice boards or Portals instead. Our job at WP1.0 will then be to rank the projects in terms of importance - and you thought ranking articles was controversial! Walkerma 18:35, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

We do have the list of articles at WP:VA. All of them should easily pass on importance, so how many have we reviewed? (Not a rhetorical question, I'm wondering if there is a page where all of that is already listed...) Titoxd^(?!?) 18:39, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Oh, and WP:WVWP would grind to a halt if we tried to categorize projects in terms of importance, so most likely that won't go well... but that's a separate discussion for another time. Titoxd^(?!?) 18:41, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

It's going to be difficult, certainly. Many articles are contenders for more than one Project and will have different ratings within those Projects, just to make it even more difficult! --kingboyk 21:03, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I think we should do it by project size ;-)

More seriously, I doubt that any ranking will be necessary. I would be very surprised if we wound up with more than ~10,000 Top-Importance articles in total; once the stubs and so forth are eliminated, we'll have even less. This is probably a reasonable number to be included in an early hard-copy release. Kirill Lokshin 18:43, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

By Project size is a wonderful idea! Smallest should get "top importance" (WP:KLF perhaps?) ;) --kingboyk 21:03, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

OK, if it's OK with others, I'd like to synthesise all of these ideas into some coherent proposals, and we'll take votes next week. I have to head off to Boston on Saturday for five weeks, I will be active in July but I need a couple of quiet days this weekend for packing etc. I'll mull over things on the long drive. In the meantime, please KEEP REVIEWING AND NOMINATING! Let's reach 400 articles by July 20th! We have lots of high importance articles that should be easy to approve! Walkerma 20:25, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Boston? I recall you mentioning that you'd be giving a talk at Wikimania; is that still on? :-) Kirill Lokshin 20:34, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, a talk on WP1.0 and a discussion on article validation. Please come! Walkerma 20:57, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Very nice! Kirill Lokshin 21:00, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I was planning to pass Eagle Scout today, as it's the key badge, and very major indeed, maybe pass it near the end, as it personally looks like about 1,000 articles will be in the release. I agree this the process isn't perfect, but it's just a test release. I don't agree with adding all FAs like Samantha Smith, Dawson's Creek, KaDee Strickland and Spoo to the release nither, as it's rather silly. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 02:37, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Instead of going through formal proposals and voting, maybe we can figure something out through discussion and reach a wide consensus. If we are going to make a change, how's this for a simple idea: When we either reach X number of approved articles or we are X amount of time away from declaring the set finalized, we give all the "held nominations" a second chance somehow. Maurreen 04:34, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

That doesn't really solve the immediate problem of people reacting negatively to the results of our selection process, though. Kirill Lokshin 04:41, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Maurreen proposal, we should give each of the held articles a second chance like a few weeks before the deadline. Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 04:51, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I think it could solve the problem, I just need to explain better. We change the template and the "Held noms" page to say something along the lines of: "This article (or "These articles") did not pass our initial review, but we will reconsider it when we are closer to publications." Maurreen 04:55, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but I can't see what relevance this has to the issue at hand (which can be concisely expressed as finding a suitable answer to the complaint that X was held but Y was passed, for arbitrarily bizarre cases of X and Y). Telling someone that their article will be reconsidered "closer to publication" won't be substantially more pleasant than telling them it will be reconsidered "for a future release", in my opinion. Kirill Lokshin 05:07, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

My thinking was that right now, we're saying that the article won't go in the first release version, period. We would change it so the held noms are all still pending, suspended, undecided.

But maybe we just disagree, that's OK.

Another simple option would be that failures for importance would need a second opinion. This method would still be streamlined, but somewhat less subjective, arbitrary and inconsistent. 05:16, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I still contend that we should stop—or at least severely restrict—the possibility of failing articles which are of suitable quality purely for importance. We've only passed three hundred articles after a month and a half; if we keep going at this rate, it'll take us well into next year to gather even 2,000 articles for a release. Kirill Lokshin 05:37, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

If we just wanted high-quality articles, we could have 1,000 from FAs and another 1,000 from GAs. It could be handled very quickly. There would be little or no need for us to do any screening. But the general plan has been to consider both quality and importance. I am trying to find a method that considers a variety of views and values. Maurreen 05:47, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree Kirill Lokshin, this process is rather slow and in this rate, it will be a while to reach 2,000. I still support that we should just renom the articles like a few weeks the process ends, and when in doubt, get another editor to help. As for Eagle Scout, that was a very borderline case and I agree, but too much fighting is happening over it, and it's a very well written and key article for the scouting project, I'll let it slide for passing now. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 05:49, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Or allow one of the regular reviewers (you know who they are by looking at this page) to put it into the release if it really is a toin coss, like Koufax was, and Martin approves. I say Walkerma as he is the one listed as the 0.5 coordinator with WP:1.0, so he would be the one to make the hard call in the worst case, right? Titoxd^(?!?) 05:56, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Kirill is absolutely right, considering things right before release does not solve the problems. The fact that the current system has significant problems is shown by the extensive discussions on this issue in this talk thread. The current system is arbitrary, vague,inconsistent, and slow. The good point is that everyone recognizes there is a problem, otherwise this discussion would not be taking place. The issues all center around what is deemed important and worthy of inclusion; which is much harder to define and subject to individual interpretation. The GA process works much better as it only deals with quality. Rlevse 10:00, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Michigan State University

I'm still learning how this 0.5 process works, so please excuse my naïvété. Why was Michigan State University deemed "outside the scope" of WP 1.0, when the University of Michigan made the list? Both MSU ans UM are large Big Ten Conference universities in the State of Michigan. Both have around 40,000 students (more or less), and both are members of the Association of American Universities. In terms of quality, both universities areFA's that have been featured on the main page. But the thing I'd really like to know is why UM is the only university in the entire world nominated so far.

By the way, as one of the primary editors of the MSU article, I will freely admit my own POV. If the 0.5 nominators deem Michigan State unworthy, that is fine, but I would like to know exactly what universities are within the scope of Wikipedia 1.0. — Lovelac7 10:21, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

See the thread immediately above this one, ie FLAWED PROCESS. Join the club. BTW, you make an excellent point.Rlevse 10:24, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

As you can see from the previous thread, we are considering a major revision of our policy. It's one of the flaws of our "crude but fast" system we needed to get us started. This is exactly the wort of reason why we needed this test version! I have no doubt we will be revisiting this article (+ perhaps the UM one too) and many others soon. Thanks, and please keep nominating education articles, Walkerma 14:04, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

And I thought I'd get complaints for including Cambridge but not Oxford on the WPCD. PS are we still aiming for 5000 articles? :) --BozMo talk 15:11, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

We're aiming for 2,000, would like to see 10,000, and—if we keep going like this—are likely to wind up with 500. Kirill Lokshin 15:14, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

In the prior thread (FLAWED PROCESS) Walkerma says 2000 and there are only 400 right now. At that rate, the project will nowhere near meet its deadline. Rlevse 15:12, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Goal date and quantity

It looks like we aren't going to meet the original goal of having 2,000 articles by August. Any thoughts on adjusting that? We could set a later date, a lower number, or decide not to have a specific goal for either. Maurreen 15:43, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Or we could just stop failing so many articles... Kirill Lokshin 15:50, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. Include U. Mich. but not Mich State when both are FAs. Include an obscure writer's B-class article that virtually no one heard of and fail an FA on...whatever that millions of people have heard of. Sounds like a no-brainer to me...See my proposal on Walkerma's talk page. Rlevse 15:57, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Quick and dirty Britannica-style setup

Okay, I suppose I should actually propose something original rather than just complaining. My idea would be to follow (in some sense) Britannica's Micropaedia/Macropaedia scheme:

Core

• Everything B-Class and above from WP:VA. Assuming that anything from 1/4 to 1/3 of the list will be unusable for quality reasons, this leaves us with about 400–500 articles.
• Every B-Class and above article on a current country (~200 articles)

Extended

• Every article from WP:FA, WP:GA, and the A-Class project assessment lists (~2,000–3,000 articles).
• Every B-Class Top-Importance article from the project lists (~500 articles, maybe?)

Yes, this won't have a particularly commendable balance of coverage. But it will give us around 4,000 articles we can stick on a CD. Best of all, it will select most of them automatically, based on already existing assessment work.

We can add other articles as desired, of course; but this can form a rough backbone that we can actually do practical things with. Kirill Lokshin 16:04, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

For the quickest way, you might be interested in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Test Version. That has a lot of similarity with what you are talking about. Maurreen 16:11, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

That seems to have no structure to it at all. There's no particular relation between articles listed and any existing quality or importance ranking, so it's essentially a self-selected random set of articles. Not really the best option, in my opinion. Kirill Lokshin 16:59, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Your plan is biased toward active wikiprojects. A great many articles have never been assessed with that scale. For instance, the countries of Abkhazia, Afghanistan, Albania, and probably a large number more. Maurreen 17:05, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, we'd have to do a little assessment on our own. I don't think there's any way to prevent that and still maintain any sort of quality standard.

Overall, though, its primary benefit is that it will produce a selection (based on quality, importance, or both) of articles in a reasonable timeframe that is sufficiently large to use for a CD release. All of the other plans proposed may be nicer in theory, but have the obvious drawback of not being particularly practical given the lack of time and people. Kirill Lokshin 17:10, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Countries ought to get in as "core" topics I would have thought (Abkhazia is a poor example as it's not internationally recognised). --kingboyk 17:11, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I explicitly listed countries for automatic inclusion, above. My guess is that the question concerns checking the articles to verify that they're B-Class or higher in quality. Kirill Lokshin 17:17, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Oh I see. Well, I would have thought that assessing core topic articles was a job for the W0.5/1.0 team. The absence of a WikiProject managing such articles is irrelevant. --kingboyk 17:20, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually, you didn't make yourself clear. "Every B-Class and above article on a current country (~200 articles)" does not say anything about the vast majority of countries that have not been given a grade. Maurreen 17:29, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

And given that most articles have not been given a grade, I have some doubt that this will be as efficient as you expect. I expect that the selection would turn out to have a lot of trivia, but so be it. Maurreen 17:32, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

V0.5 proposal

Here's what I think would work for your V0.5 project and meet most concerns people brought up:

1. Articles already selected: water under the bridge, leave them there
2. Article must be nominated-even if they are "automatically included", it is not the job of reviewers to go looking for articles
3. Stub and Start articles are not eligible under any circumstances, if the editor wants them included, he/she must beef them up
4. B-class are only eligible if they are on a Core Topic and in such a case are automatically included
5. FA, A-class, GA articles are automatically included if they have been rated as TOP or HIGH by a WikiProject OR are on a Core Topic
6. remaining FA, A-class, GA articles must be voted on by at least 3 reviewers and at least 2 must vote for inclusion and rated 1-5 by each reviewer, 5 being very important (like George Washington) and 1 being very minor (like Spoo). A score of 2.1 must be attained for inclusion. Nominations in this cat should be left on the nom page for at least 10 days
7. nominators should note if they feel an article is in an "auto included" category

Rlevse 20:56, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Section for items of debatable importance

There are probably a number of things that we won't get complete agreement on: about both individual articles and the larger project. I am trying to work toward what is least objectionable to the most people.

Here is another simple option: Make a section of the nominations page for items of debatable importance. I don't expect nominators to put anything in there, but reviewers would. That could lead to discussion of the individual articles, without slowing the process for other articles.

Does anyone think that doing this would be worse than our current process?

If there is some other idea that would engender more agreement, this would not preclude that. But we could at least do this until we get more agreement on anything else. Maurreen 16:06, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I really like this idea. It echoes back somewhat to Chuck's two reviewers idea. For many nominations, importance is not an issue and it boils down merely to quality (something easier to handle) - for those the existing one-reviewer system is fine. For anything where importance is an issue, we need at least two people to discuss things. Walkerma 20:45, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Some background

Some of these issues have been talked about in general before. Any project like this is likely to engender some disagreement on various issues, and trade-offs are required one way or another.

Version 0.5 was intended as a middle ground between being quick and being better (both the quality of the individual entries and topic selection.

For a quicker way, see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Test Version. It's very streamlined. Nominators simply tag the articles. In late summer or early fall, User:BozMo and his team will do some cleanup.

The longer process is at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Nominations. I was coordinating that, but suspended my activity there because I have recently been more busy outside WP and so as not to dilute the overall effort here.

The process at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Nominations is still simple, but it is longer. Each nomination would be handled similarly as at WP:FAC. The community could address each item on grounds of both quality and importance. Maurreen 16:46, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

All smoke. This is merely dodging the issue at hand--unfairness and inconsistencies in the 0.5 process.Rlevse 16:52, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

It's not dodging the issues. Part of my point is that we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Are you saying that neither of the two options or no option other than yours would address your concerns? I have offered a number of choices, and so have others. Maurreen 16:56, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Might I point out that talking about the "need to reinvent the wheel" is somewhat silly, in this case. One of the listed options (1.0) hasn't gotten past the initial planning stages, and the other one (the Test Version) seems so unstructured as to make it useless for any longer-term work (which is not to say that it doesn't have its uses, but merely that if things could be kept so simple, we wouldn't need the entire 1.0 process to begin with). Kirill Lokshin 17:01, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Like I said, I am trying to find the widest agreement. But some of us disagree in a more agreeable manner than others. Maurreen 17:10, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

You, 'trying to find the widest agreement', surely you jest again. You're proposals have been the narrowest of standards of us all and you're the one who failed a TOP FA of a project. And as Kirill said, you actually propose a standard (1.0) that is on hold and meanwhile V0.5 has 6 weeks to get 1600 out of 2000 articles.Rlevse 17:50, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

List of eligible articles

We already have Wikipedia:Articles eligible for Version 0.5. Those items should not be rejected based on importance. Maurreen 17:27, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Has multiple highly obscure people and things.Rlevse 17:55, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I believe that list is also called Wikipedia:Vital articles in other circles, so it is by no means composed of obscure articles. Titoxd^(?!?) 00:23, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

It may have started from VA, but has gone off the road, I'd hardly call Vitruvius a household name even among college educated people. I could list more, but it'd be pointless. Rlevse 01:05, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

How about Archduke Franz Ferdinand? ;-) Kirill Lokshin 01:07, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

no WP:VA is not the same as this one, which seems to be maureen's personal preferences with no objective criteria - for random example see "actors and directors" section: Tom Hanks is a must have! yet Akira Kurosawa, Bruce Lee, Satyajit Ray, Amitabh Bachan and Fritz Lang arent mentioned - because maureen's never heard of them so they must pale in comparison to Tom Hanks, right? and i wont be nominating them as i have no confidence in the abilities of those who are doing the importance assessments to know anything about the subject matter, they would likely be rejected in favour of Brad Pit and Angelina Jolie. agree with rlevse, at the moment the project is far too focused around the individual opinions of maureen instead of utilizing subject experts to judge importance. Zzzzz 00:40, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

No, the list was based off WP:VA and then expanded.^[1] Consider that before making accusations that a particular editor is biased or not. That Maureen has been the only one editing it lately is a different thing, but does not compromise the integrity of the list, nor means that any of the other articles you mentioned up above would not be accepted. If you won't nominate them, no one will look for them, so they'll stay out. Titoxd^(?!?) 00:47, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

as you'll see in the "systematic bias" section above i tested the process first before concluding that the process is biased - how else to explain Hong Kong action cinema's exclusion in favour of Mariah Carey? after reading the discussion, i saw that nobody was able to give a straight answer about why she is more important than a century's worth of cinema output, and so finally came to the conclusion that the process is a mess without objective criteria for importance. Zzzzz 00:56, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I added them along with 2 others. I heard of Lee before and I read the lead of the other four, and they are must haves. Anyways Hanks is considered as one of the best male actor alive today, and is a must have. Hong Kong may get added later, see above. Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 01:08, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Nominate them so they'll be included? You're joking. The last two days are about how things have excluded even though they're FAs, such as Mich. State out and U.Mich is in even though both are FAs on Big Ten schools. You can't explain that because there is no logic there. Zzzzz is right, if one person thinks it's unimportant it's out, with no recourse. At least at GA noms, they put things on hold to give the editor a chance to fix things. I just looked at one page of 0.5 noms history, Maurreen passed one out of six articles, no wonder progress towards 2000 articles is so slow and people don't want to submit things. 01:14, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

The list looks like a guide to me, and there is nothing in the lead paragraph that suggests it's intended to be definitive - "This is a list of some of the articles that are eligible for nomination". That's a fairly innocuous statement. It looks like an attempt to isolate a group of diverse articles into one place to make it easier to look at them, and nothing more. Naturally the list is going to be biased if Maurreen is making most of the contributions, but why is Maurreen being blamed for that? Where is everyone else? There are numerous glaring omissions from the list so why can't other editors add to it, or discuss those particular articles that they believe may not qualify? Why is Wikipedia talk:Articles eligible for Version 0.5 virtually empty if there is so much disagreement with what is on the list? WP:VA is also missing some articles that should be there in my opinion - neither of the lists are perfect. The examples you've given are important figures who should be considered, but obviously hadn't been thought of until now, and as Tito said above, if they don't get nominated they probably won't get looked at. Who then will be responsible for their omission? If you think they should be on the list, put them on the list. Rossrs 01:15, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

If that's the way it works, then what's the diff in that page and 0.5 noms page? Why have both?Rlevse 01:19, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I left Michigan State university out on importance, there are more notable ones out there like Harvard, Yale, Cambridge. We already got one article on a Michigan University on there. Obviously we can't add every university, only a few will pass though, let them be more well-known ones. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 01:53, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Therein lies the problem: MSU and U of M are rivals, so that isn't actually particularily neutral. Also, then you have to count Ohio State, etc... Titoxd^(?!?) 02:02, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Jaranda, Arguing that you've already promoted one Big Ten university in Michigan is like saying that, since you've already promoted one Republican U.S. President named George Bush, you don't need to add another. Even if two articles are about two similar people, places, or things with similar names, you still have to treat them as independent articles. — Lovelac7 02:50, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

So the one from Mich that's nom first gets in and others don't? Then you have to determine where to draw the line. Who determines whether Harvard is more important than Stanford? There's inherent bias there. And considering you have 6 six weeks to find 1600 of 2000 articles, the reigns are too tight. The inherent unfairness and personal bias in the current system is killing the project. Rlevse 02:06, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Looks like a AOLer just nominated Spoo sigh, also Stanford is very notable and should get in, still this is only a test release Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 02:15, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorely tempted to pass it ;-) Kirill Lokshin 02:18, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Moratorium on "fail for importance"

I would like to request that all reviewers hold off for the time being on the "fail on importance" option. We can re-activate this system once we have new policies in place. Being on the road this weekend, I can't take the time to set this up. Next week I hope we can:

• Revisit the "held" list, with the expectation that most FAs can be included.
• Set up a new system that works well without upsetting people.

In the meantime, please keep reviewing things you consider important enough, and please try to be civil. We're all on the same side here, and we all care a lot about Wikipedia. Let's at least try to get 1000 for a test CD. Thanks! Walkerma 20:50, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to relist the one's that people are having agreements over in the meantime, like Eagle scout, if that's ok with you guys, we need more reviewers. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 21:38, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Knowing that this is going very slow and being a nicely written FA, I passed Eagle Scout. Thanks Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 04:35, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Proposed group-nomination page

Wikipedia:Version 0.5 Set Nominations has been created and I would like some feedback before making it an official complement to the 0.5 process. Nifboy 06:32, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I think the experiment has shown the value of the process. Can you perhaps tweak the process to make sure that all loose ends are tied before approval goes through, and then I think we can make it official. What do others think? Thanks for setting it up, Walkerma 05:00, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I thought it was official already? Titoxd^(?!?) 05:17, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I hope it will be very soon, but I don't think it is official until people here have a chance to agree that it is, especially the folks who participated. Can I take your comment to mean a Yes?Walkerma 05:27, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Sure. Titoxd^(?!?) 05:29, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Nomination & review of FAs

After the problems we have seen with featured articles (FAs), which caused upset on four occasions when they were held because of "importance", I would like to set up a new system. I would like to say that in every case I think the reviewer acted within the guidelines, and I agreed with their decisions. However, as Kirill has pointed out, a system that alienates people so much is simply not working, and we need something different. This includes allowing many FAs to pass on importance that would have failed under our original guidelines. We can say the following about FAs:

• They should nearly all pass on quality, only failing on quality in exceptional circumstances - where we find one that is well below our modern standards.
• The consensus of our lively debate last week seemed to be that almost all FAs should also be allowed to pass on importance, only going to "held" in obvious cases like Spoo.

Thus, we can expect that nearly all FAs will be included in Version 0.5, so we simply need an efficient system to process them. We can also assume that nearly all Core Topics and supplement currently assessed as B-Class and above will be included (Core topics automatically pass on importance). We can therefore regard ALL FAs and ALL core topics as already nominated, and work from there. I would like to propose the following system for FAs and core topics:

1. Set up a review page for FAs, organised by subject area. We'd also set up a similar one for Core Topics.
2. Individual reviewers would then sign up for a particular subject area, and agree to review all FAs and/or Core Topics in that subject area by August 31st. Life happens, so if a reviewer is going to be unable to meet their quota they can let folks know that help is needed. If a reviewer is reviewing an article on which they were a major contributor, they can ask for another reviewer to do that one.
3. As each FA passes, it would be added to the V0.5 page and tagged in the usual way. Some FAs may get nominated on the main page, and reviewers may keep an eye on that, it shouldn't prevent the system from working.
4. A few FAs may appear to be too obscure to be included (these would be rated "1" on Silence's scale, or "Low-Class" if we consider it as a ranking for this WikiProject). A section of the page would be set aside for discussing these. I propose that we should have at least three reviewers agreeing unanimously that the topic is obscure, then after ten days those articles would be considered rejected for Version 0.5.
5. We could have a similar system working for Core topics (and supplement articles if time), with the rejection being based on quality rather than on importance.

Does this sound reasonable and workable? Walkerma 04:50, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

• Yep that's find with me Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 04:53, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
• Well, I don't like the idea of another subpage (as it is more difficult to find), but overall agree on the reviewing concept. Can't we just do it here? Titoxd^(?!?) 04:54, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I think if it's part of a series of related subpages - sets, core topics, FAs, people will work with it OK. There are enough of these things to discuss I think the pages will get quite big and need archives. I also think that keeping the reviewing one step away from this page would reduce the problem Silence mentioned - what if the author of an "unimportant" FA gets upset at not reaching our (now even lower) standard for FAs? Walkerma 04:59, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not really opposed to the concept either, as long as the links are prominently featured and we don't get spread too thin on the main nominations page. Titoxd^(?!?) 05:23, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I think this is an equitable solution to issue and is certainly more concrete that the prior process.Rlevse 10:04, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

• No, I have to say that I find the quality of FAs distressingly variable, on a number of counts. If it weren't, why is it so easy to pick off FAs from the log and list them for review, for failing to meet explicit FA critieria (and thenceforth, if necessary, moving them to FARC)? This brings me to a more general query about this CD. If its function is to show off WP's finest achievements, to the press, decision-makers, and general public, why is the quality of prose in the criteria for nomination buried towards the bottom, and expressed in narrow terms (correct spelling and grammar, is it?). I don't know whether you're aware of the reviews that WP has received in the press, but the variable quality of its prose is typically regarded with disdain when it comes to the crunch.

Thus, my question is: will there be an opportunity to vet the nominations for 0.5 to ensure that the quality of their prose is excellent? Do you, indeed, want to insist that the examples to be well written? I'm concerned. Tony 03:23, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Short answer: yes, just before publication.

Long answer: Ideally, we would like for the articles to be perfect before they came here, at least on the prose level, but we are going to have about a month to review everything before actually making a release, so we will try to solve a few issues there. However, we need all the help we can get. Titoxd^(?!?) 04:50, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm wondering where this comes from. If we were going for "perfect" prose (especially to Tony's demanding standards), then our current approach is absurd; many FA's won't meet that criterion (and likely nothing not already an FA will). I was under the impression, however, that we were trying to strike a balance between publicity and utility here; hence, the inclusion of less-than-perfect articles on important topics. Is this no longer the case? Kirill Lokshin 14:58, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

So what process will be used to remove—or encourage rapid improvements to—the majority of articles that have been nominated for inclusion? Is the rationale for publishing the CD explained anywhere. Perhaps I've missed something vital, but since WP is freely available on the Internet, why put part of it on a CD? Tony 14:03, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Many people and places don't have ready access to the internet. Kirill Lokshin 14:58, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

While Tony makes good suggestions to improve prose, very few articles, even FAs, meet his standard. Given that V0.5 only has about 400 of the 2000 articles it's seeking, it's unrealistic to expect to meet that goal and also meet Tony's prose standard. Meeting Tony's standard will kill the project or reduce it to a small handful of articles. Meeting the 2000 article will require something lower than Tony's standard for prose. Rlevse 16:58, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

As I see it, all of the above comments are valid - the difference comes in where you draw the line for "well-written". As a professional editor (and indeed I think we have more than one on the team, thankfully!) Tony's standards are naturally high. I agree with his comments that many of our articles are poorly written, and I suspect this is the main weakness in our full-length articles. When I have reviewed articles for Version 0.5, I have often ended up either doing copyedits or leaving suggestions on the talk pages. The following Wikipedia 1.0 activities do assist or catalyse article improvement:

• The Core Topics collaboration of the fortnight seeks to improve articles on Core Topics.
• The WikiProject bot is indirectly encouraging WikiProjects to focus on article quality. Almost 20,000 articles have now been assessed for quality, providing an incentive for project members to improve existing articles ("I turned the B into an A").
• Our reviews here at V0.5 can give suggestions for article improvement on the article talk pages. If there are problems with English, we can fix them or nominate the article for FARC, and ultimately that raises the standards across Wikipedia. As Tito points out, we intend to review everything again quickly before release.

At the same time, we must work with the material we have. Some FAs are well-written - I have mostly enjoyed reading Military History FAs recently - but others are clearly flawed. As Rlevse points out, if we wait for every article to meet the standards we would like, it would be many years before we could release Version 0.5, never mind 1.0. I recently passed Bob Dylan, after threatening it with a WP:FARC for having zero references. Since Dylan is so important in 20th century music, I spent about over an hour reviewing the article, researching the article history, posting comments on writer's pages, and the article still (IMHO) could still be greatly improved - but I don't have the luxury of taking 10-20 hours or more to do that (assuming I had the knowledge)! There are only a handful of people actively working on Version 0.5 right now, we just can't spare the labour to fix 1000 articles. Remember too that this is a test release, and we are releasing the articles from Wikipedia as it is now.

We must remember that our mission here is to make a CD (later DVD) and/or paper version of Wikipedia. A secondary mission is to organise articles in meaningful ways, in order to help us meet the first goal. Improving article quality is not our core mission, though we benefit from it. If many FAs and GAs are poorly written, that is a problem with the FAC process, not a problem that Version 0.5 can focus on (though many of our editors do pitch in and help). We should not "take our eye off the ball" - we need to get our list together and release the CD. It won't be perfectly written or fully referenced, but it will be better than much of Wikipedia, and it will certainly be infinitely better than the previous official release - version 0.0. Walkerma 23:14, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Very well stated, Walkerma. Rlevse 23:37, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure that there's a problem with the FA process; it would be fine if there were enough copy-editors who were willing to put in an effort to keep the standards high. But the fact remains that most FAs do need serious work on their prose.

So, I gather that part of the rationale for the CD is to reach people who don't have online access, and parts of the world where such access is difficult. (These two classes of people are diminishing in size year by year, especially in the third world.) My problem here is that these people are not important for gaining status; the publicity aspect of the CD is presumably going to have greatest impact on journalists and the like, who do have online access. If publicity and status are the goals (very worthy ones, IMV), the CD should contain only the cream of the crop, and be significantly smaller in information content than is currently planned. BTW, I don't expect "perfect" prose in the FAC room—just "compelling, even brilliant", which are Wikipedia's words, ensconced in Criterion 2a. These epithets are spot-on if WP is to set standards for itself that will lead to its widespread authority and respect, given the intense competition for these commodities on the Internet. Tony 03:44, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Tony, you are an excellent prose writer, but the problem is most others, myself included, are not, even though I try (eventhough my last FA went through with no objections-;). Therefore it befalls to you and those who are as good as you to either fix the prose themselves or tell others exactly how to fix it, sentence by sentence. Rlevse 09:54, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Suggestion: work backwards

Rather than try to nominate and approve two thousand articles by hand, why don't we just auto-nominate all FA and GA and prune from that list? The total of FA and GA is just about two thousand; for every one we prune we can add a lower quality article of higher importance. --Ideogram 15:28, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Makes a lot of sense to me. Maurreen 15:38, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, eminently sensible. That's really the direction we agreed to move in - see some of the above discussion on FAs, and Kirill has argued the same on FAs for quite a while. We have traditionally wanted to have some level of editorial control - but a quick look over an FA should tell us if it's gone off the tracks. We already have the Sets Nominations started (which are a step in that direction), and I plan to put up this page tonight (still needs content!). GAs are perhaps more controversial, we'd need to debate whether or not we want to assume they meet the quality criteria, though I think I'd be OK with that myself. We should also do the same with A-Class articles, and I hope (after work I did last night) the bot will auto-generate a list of A-Class Arts articles for us tonight. If we can get rolling all with these, we could get large numbers approved quite quickly, IMHO. I'd like to keep this page active, though, because (a) it allows us to catch articles that might otherwise fall through the cracks, and (b) it allows anyone to nominate an article openly and easily. Thanks, and please help, we still need active reviewers even with your system! Walkerma 16:55, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Given the current standards and goals, the default position for FAs is to be included. The entire list of FAs (except maybe those already approved) could maybe be copied over. Nominations could be made only to exclude items.

A similar principle could apply to the core topics. Most have been rated as "B". It could be more efficient to copy all or most of the list and decide what to exclude. Maurreen 17:17, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Village Pump

I posted a message in the village pump (assistance section) asking for more nominations and reviewers. Do we have enough people and is the village pump a good place to ask for them?Eyu100 00:49, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

We definitely need more of both active reviewers and nominations. Now we have the set nominations page (and soon the FA Review page too) we can cover a lot of ground, but we need people to be active. Thanks for taking the initiative! Walkerma 03:46, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Version 0.5 FA Review Page

I have now set up an FA review page, as we discussed earlier. This should serve two purposes:

• It should speed up the approval of FAs. We can assume that nearly all are OK on importance, and virtually all are OK on quality, so we should be able to race through these!
• It should reduce the upset called when nominees see their favourite FA rejected - in effect, I have just nominated every FA we have.

The system is as follows. A reviewer should sign up for 1 or 2 sections within their area of interest/expertise. They undertake to review every article within that section by August 31, 2006. Sections range from around 10-50 articles, but review is fast/painless, many have already been passed anyway, and you can share a big section if you wish. As articles get reviewed you strikeout the article name on the list (DON'T REMOVE IT!), and add the article to the main V0.5 listing directly (no need to go through the nomination page). Articles require 3 reviewers to agree (and none disagree) for it to be deemed "unimportant" - this should be rare. PLEASE SIGN UP! Thanks, Walkerma 04:32, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Ok... just someone needs to keep an eye on Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Featured log/July 2006 and Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Featured log/August 2006 to make sure it stays up to date. Titoxd^(?!?) 04:58, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

• One question: what do we do with articles that have already been nominated, held, and included in the FA list? The example I'm thinking of is 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, an FA assessed as high-importance, yet held. Titoxd^(?!?) 05:03, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
  • My guess would be that they'd get another look. Andjam 08:59, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
    • Yes, please take another look at all held FAs. Based on the new criteria (agreed here, see above) we would almost certainly include that article. Walkerma 11:33, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Just food for thought: If the version of the article that was determined to be featured was used, that could avoid any need to check for quality deterioration. Maurreen

That could be quite problematic, particularly for older FAs. There's no need to throw out good changes just to save a little time. Kirill Lokshin 15:06, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

• Is it okay to go ahead and strikeout FAs that were already accepted? Rlevse 15:13, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
  • FAs already accepted to the 0.5 listing? Yeah, that's what I did already in the Geography section. Titoxd^(?!?) 17:32, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

What do you mean? Articles that have already been nominated, held would get another look? How? They will stay in held nominations' page? Or should we somehow show these articles in the review page? NCurse _work 20:11, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

All FAs were in effect renominated as of last night, including previously "held" ones. Since we changed the criteria, we have to revisit the few FAs we held and reconsider them. We should make sure the FAs are removed from the "Held" page. Walkerma 03:44, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

Core topics review

I started a page for Wikipedia:Version 0.5 Core topics review. Should we add all countries on the page? They were left off the original list for the sake of brevity. I would also suggest including all vital articles. Maurreen 07:36, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Since countries form a closed set of articles, I was thinking we would use the set nominations page page. Indeed, I have already nominated the whole of Europe]] - please add comments, as I've had very little general feedback! If people prefer to do them with Core Topics I'd be OK with that too. For VAs, I think the list is quite long and separate from Core Topics, and so it may be easier to use a separate page - but if someone is willing to combine them somehow I wouldn't oppose it. What we DO need to add to this review page IMHO is the supplementary core topics list. Thanks a lot for setting up the page, Maurreen, things have been pretty busy for me this week. Walkerma 19:21, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I made Wikipedia:Version 0.5 Country Review. Maurreen 07:23, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

GA review

I have created a page for GA reviews, the equivalent of FA reviews. The only change is that two reviewers instead of three are required to fail an article on importance. Is this a good idea? That page is still being set up.

Good idea. Let's start to work there. :) NCurse _work 20:45, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good! Walkerma 22:33, 26 July 2006 (UTC)