The history of GA, to the best of my ability to backfill, is that of an originally embarrassing Brilliant Prose-style 'process' that got whipped into shape c. 2008-2009. A major part of this shape-whipping was a systematic sweep of all extant GAs to assess their compliance with the standards. This was a vitally important process that permitted massive strides and maintained the quality of a broad swathe of articles.
It also took nearly three years, and we have over ten times as many GAs now as we did then.
The current situation is unsustainable. Many GAs have not been looked at in well over a decade, and the varying standards in the Reviewer Roulette process make it impossible to tell if even recent reviews are of any kind of quality. However, we can't really afford to spend thirty years sweeping. In all likelihood, we're reaching a turning point which will demand either a radical realignment or a complete deprecation of the GA process, as the backlog of likely-out-of-compliance GAs grows so high as to be completely unmanageable.
The solution is to break the process into chunks. Rather than sweeping every GA, we sweep GAs in high-risk categories that are more likely than average to be noncompliant, and high-view GAs that make up a disproportionate share of the reader experience. My current thought is to sweep all GAs shorter than 800 words; in my opinion, relatively few articles below a thousand words are able to give sufficiently broad content coverage. (Opinions on this front vary quite significantly, and many short GAs are perfectly within standards -- 'relatively' is a powerful word -- but I am confident the given length range will contain a far higher proportion of articles needing further review than average.) This makes up [shit I need to run a quarry or something] GAs.
A sweep of high-view GAs will also be necessary at some point. Details can be worked out once I figure out how many GAs are below that length benchmark.
How to handle length benchmarks? Getting numbers for prose size is exceptionally difficult. Numbers can be gathered for absolute character length; 8000 bytes or shorter gets you 660 GAs, the longest of which are a bit over 800. This is a good base to work from, but a lot of short GAs are much longer than this in absolute bytes and may make up a disproportionate share of substandard GAs. I've noticed a lot of poor-quality (including BLP vio) GAs for entertainers in the sub-800 range that are much longer than that on absolute bytes because of the inclusion of filmography, discography, etc tables. Will need to run multiple queries broken down by e.g. individual project to get a full list.
One consideration about the rapidly rising number of GAs is that it represents not just a lack of reassessing old GAs, but also a lack of people bringing articles to FAC. Sweeps shouldn't focus exclusively on substandard articles, but also on high-quality ones with FA potential. Potential FAs should have plans developed to bring them to that standard, and their authors encouraged to work towards the goal.
A repository for half-baked ideas. Don't rely on these or assume any sanity from them.
The history of GA, to the best of my ability to backfill, is that of an originally embarrassing Brilliant Prose-style 'process' that got whipped into shape c. 2008-2009. A major part of this shape-whipping was a systematic sweep of all extant GAs to assess their compliance with the standards. This was a vitally important process that permitted massive strides and maintained the quality of a broad swathe of articles.
It also took nearly three years, and we have over ten times as many GAs now as we did then.
The current situation is unsustainable. Many GAs have not been looked at in well over a decade, and the varying standards in the Reviewer Roulette process make it impossible to tell if even recent reviews are of any kind of quality. However, we can't really afford to spend thirty years sweeping. In all likelihood, we're reaching a turning point which will demand either a radical realignment or a complete deprecation of the GA process, as the backlog of likely-out-of-compliance GAs grows so high as to be completely unmanageable.
The solution is to break the process into chunks. Rather than sweeping every GA, we sweep GAs in high-risk categories that are more likely than average to be noncompliant, and high-view GAs that make up a disproportionate share of the reader experience. My current thought is to sweep all GAs shorter than 800 words; in my opinion, relatively few articles below a thousand words are able to give sufficiently broad content coverage. (Opinions on this front vary quite significantly, and many short GAs are perfectly within standards -- 'relatively' is a powerful word -- but I am confident the given length range will contain a far higher proportion of articles needing further review than average.) This makes up [shit I need to run a quarry or something] GAs.
A sweep of high-view GAs will also be necessary at some point. Details can be worked out once I figure out how many GAs are below that length benchmark.
How to handle length benchmarks? Getting numbers for prose size is exceptionally difficult. Numbers can be gathered for absolute character length; 8000 bytes or shorter gets you 660 GAs, the longest of which are a bit over 800. This is a good base to work from, but a lot of short GAs are much longer than this in absolute bytes and may make up a disproportionate share of substandard GAs. I've noticed a lot of poor-quality (including BLP vio) GAs for entertainers in the sub-800 range that are much longer than that on absolute bytes because of the inclusion of filmography, discography, etc tables. Will need to run multiple queries broken down by e.g. individual project to get a full list.
One consideration about the rapidly rising number of GAs is that it represents not just a lack of reassessing old GAs, but also a lack of people bringing articles to FAC. Sweeps shouldn't focus exclusively on substandard articles, but also on high-quality ones with FA potential. Potential FAs should have plans developed to bring them to that standard, and their authors encouraged to work towards the goal.
A repository for half-baked ideas. Don't rely on these or assume any sanity from them.