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Hmm, I definitely support this project. I'd like to point out, however, that two similar ideas have been tried (at least, one by me), neither of which ever caught on, and one of which has apparently been deleted. I don't really like the idea of anyone just adding any page to the list, though -- there ought to be some sort of approval process. People adding pages as they saw fit was the original mechanism behind WP:FA, which resulted in a lot of subpar pages being added even back when the wiki had many fewer users and even fewer malicious or short-sighted people. Perhaps there ought to be a separate list page for candidates that anyone could add to, and then they could be approved through some sort of system. I worry that people will say "oh, I just wrote a bunch of sweet articles on exceedingly minor Harry Potter characters, so I'll list them all" and that will require clean-up, generate ill will and make this project less attractive to productive editors. I do support the idea though. -- Tuf-Kat 05:02, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
...to something like making sure references are added if at all possible (i.e. if the primary author(s) are still around). But if that is not possible, it doesn't stop the article being good. Otherwise, I fear the requirements are too similar to FAC. -- Pcb21| Pete 16:49, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
Random, disjointed thoughts:
Without carefully selected criteria, and enforcment of those criteria, this list is meaningless. I agree that the criteria should look very similar to those for FAs; this list should encourage the writing of articles in the style of FAs, rewarding such work without requiring the intensive all-out effort called for by FAC voting. I like the description of "what is a good article?" as currently written; the issue is in execution. Comments above point out pretty immediate problems with self-listing; there are many others as well, which could engender lots of unnecessary ill-will. What will be most problematic is the application of these criteria. Does an excellent 3-paragraph article qualify? Does a featured article qualify? Could an article be deemed "too good" for GA but "not good enough" for FA? Is a GA an FA-in-waiting, deficient in only a few relatively minor and fixable ways, or is a GA an "unfeaturable" article?
Examples:
I would suggest an expedited voting system that requires a limited number of votes (say, 5), and automatically accepts or rejects on the basis of those votes. Rules could be that out of the five votes, one "objective" dissent (i.e. "no references") or two "subjective" dissents (i.e. "poorly written") be enough to kill it; otherwise it passes. A question -- how big will this list get? FA is 0.1% of all articles; what are GAs? 1%? 5%? 10%? We're talking many thousands or tens of thousands of articles, which begs the question of whether this list will be helpful at all. I suppose it is useful to encourage GAs as an alternative goal below the effort required to create an FA.... -- Bantman 19:46, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
Since there's mention on the main guidelines about leaving a note on the articles' talk pages when an article is removed from this list, perhaps we should look into a few talk page templates much like those that are used for the FA process...
Okay, we'll need to upload some simpler stars or other images – perhaps a thumbs-up image for good status and thumb-sideways (not a thumbs-down!) or something for delisted articles – to keep these proposed templates from being confused with those of the FA pocess. And, the wording could probably be improved on both of these, but you get the idea. -- slambo 20:46, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
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Good articles/Archive 1 was removed from the good articles list. Please discuss the rationale for the removal and improve the article to such an extent that it can once again be listed, or help this article reach featured article status. |
![]() |
Good articles/Archive 1 is a good article, which means it has been identified as adhering to the quality standards leading to a featured article. If you see a way this page can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, please feel free to contribute. |
In the German wikipedia, good articles, as well as excellent (featured) articles, are tagged direcly on the Article page. The advantage of this, imho, is that it makes readers appreciate what they're reading; most readers who are not editors will hardly ever take a look at the talk page. Furthermore, when there's a vote to declare an article as good, it can be seen much easier on the article page than on the talk page; this is another way of making non-editor readers participate in Wikipedia.
Another advantage would be that everyone would be much more aware of this Good articles project, and thus, more people might get around to contribute to it.
German templates are much smaller and, I would say, more elegant than the English ones. You can see them at de:Vorlage:Lesenswert and de:Vorlage:Exzellent, they just say that the article has been added to the list of good / excellent articles. There are also tags for addition and removal, of course. I think these tags culd be adapted to English with little graphic reworking; perhaps we could also ask their author if we want them.-- Robin.rueth 22:46, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
I think this is a good idea. I tried to add a talk box above, but couldn't seem to get it right. -- Vaoverland 17:09, 23 October 2005 (UTC)
What does it mean for an article to "be stable"? Does it mean that it has remained in a format for some length of time and that there is a lack of frequent large-scale edits? --Anon.
The image criterion reads "whenever possible, contain images to illustrate it." This can be interpreted two ways - either (a) GAs need to have an image whenever an appropriate image is extant or could be created today, or (b) GAs should have an image whenever a free / GFDL-compliant image can be located, or one could easily be created.
I propose that being "good" but not necessarily "great", a GA should be held to interpretation (b), not (a). That is, failure of a good-faith, reasonably robust search for an existing free image should not be enough to keep an otherwise good article off of GA. If not, and we choose to hold GAs to standard (a), that would require the creation of an image or photograph when no free images can be located, which for many topics would be above-and-beyond the effort that is called for here. Remember, part of the purpose of listing GAs is to encourage good work without subjecting editors to the rigors of meeting FA criteria. So on the image question, I propose that if a reasonable search for free images fails, and the image cannot be easily created, the image "requirement" should be dropped for that particular article.
When I say easily created, I'm thinking about photos of everyday items or easily made drawings, etc. An appropriate image for apple should be easily created, while an appropriate image for, say, a particular mountaintop in Tajikistan is not easily created. -- Bantman 18:20, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
I especially like the idea of allowing individuals to list and de-list per the criteria. However, aren’t all featured articles by definition at least good articles? Should they then not be added en masse? However, if the point of this page is to serve as a queue of potential FA candidates, then that may not be a good idea (unless they are IDd by being bold or something but then somebody is going to need to check once in a while to see if the article has been deFAd). Also, I can see this page getting real big fairly fast and thus require subpages and maintenance help from the various portals (each portal may want to have their own good article list). -- mav 15:11, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
Finest. Idea. Ever. Can we get consensus on some criteria and start spreading this template far and wide? - David Gerard 23:44, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
I really like this idea, so I'm going to start adding a few articles (I've just added David Beckham). I think the text on the banner needs changing: I'd like to see "adhering to the quality standards leading to a featured article" replaced with something like "meets certain standards" with a link to the standards. The way it's worded at the moment sounds a little like it's just fractionally of FA standard, which I think is setting the bar a bit high. File:Yemen flag large.png CTOAGN ( talk) 01:22, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
Category:Wikipedia good articles contains everything with Template:GA on it - David Gerard 10:46, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
Looking through some of the current articles listed as Good articles, I noticed that several of them listed the sources used under a Bibliography section instead of a References section as recommended by Wikipedia:Cite sources. While I do not consider this to be a major problem, it does raise the question of whether an article should conform to the style manual before being considered a Good Article. I personally believe that all articles should try to conform if for no other reason that the style manual allows for a consistent look and feel across all Wikipedia articles, but if someone has a well-reasoned argument for why the style manual should not be used I am willing to listen. -- Allen3 talk 13:39, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
Just by looking at the rail transport section I predict that this page is going to be swamped very quickly. My alternative suggestion would be for the various WikiProjects to identify their own articles as "good" and maintain that list as part of the relevant portal. violet/riga (t) 11:50, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
I read on the project page that "It is probably best to avoid self-nominating articles as this can introduce bias", so I thought I'd leave a comment about the Robert Clark (actor) article here and let others judge if it meets the criteria of a good article. There is a nice free license publicity photo at the top of the article, the fair use images have source, copyright information and fair use rationale on their description pages, the article is NPOV (containing quotes from critics and other people about his work), has notes and references sections to support everything, and there are no fansite links in the external links section. Was the subject of a peer review (see here), but I did not submit it for featured article status as I knew it was too short. Extraordinary Machine 13:01, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Read
WP:GA and its talk page. It's for stuff that's on its way to FA or just missed FA. I'd say anything that failed FA by only one or two querulous idiots minor objections should be put straight in -
David Gerard
10:39, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
I think the important thing is that as FA nominations attract more interest, true consensus becomes less likely and we need to be more willing to settle for large majorities. I think if we can get 75% support for an article as a FA that should suffice (is this close to what we use in practice?). "Good articles" doesn't seem like a good thing to me; it seems like a way to evade the standard process. The FAC process is what we have for this and the FAC process is what we should use. So I'd say either we should modify the FAC rules/custom or accept that articles will continue to have to meet increasingly high standards. I'm not sure which is the better route. Everyking 04:12, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
If the objections are minor, why can't you resolve them? Superm401 | Talk 04:14, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
I don't like this idea. If the article is good enough, it can certainly have a run in FAC. Besides, is there some kind of quality control to determine which articles are good ? =Nichalp «Talk»=
I'm not particularly thrilled about this idea. Like Nichalp said, I think this is more a way to evade the standard process. It also seems like a needless diverting of efforting. →Raul654 21:07, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Please do read the WP:GA page, Raul and others, and join the discussions there if you would like. It´s absolutely not intended to be ´competition´ for FAC or a means of subverting the process. Our featured articles, the very best that Wikipedia can produce, form 0.1% of our content - GA is about recognising that much more than 0.1% of our content is actually very good, if not necessarily fulfilling all the FA criteria. Worldtraveller 23:02, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
In response to some of the criticism of this process, and remembering previous writing competitions...
I've created Wikipedia:Article rating competition, a proposal for a weekly process by which articles are submitted for informal rating under a given topic. Take a look and feel free to comment on the talk page. violet/riga (t) 17:55, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
People seem to be objecting to the current process of anyone being able to list or delist articles here. I only started it off like that to get it underway, and certainly think some kind of approval mechanism could be sensible. Any thoughts on one? It needs to be much simpler than FAC. Sorry, I can´t sign any of the comments I´ve just left above because I´m on a keyboard with no tilde to be found anywhere. User:Worldtraveller.
Objections (no images, no references) have been corrected. -- FuriousFreddy 08:24, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
I wrote this article a long time ago, and have been constantly improving it since. So far it has been through three failed but close FAC nominations and one peer review. I think it certainly qualifies as a Good article. — Wackymacs 23:29, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Hello. Regarding, good articles, what do you think of Wikipedia:Stable versions (formerly Wikipedia:Requests for publication) -- Zondor 03:27, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to see this be a place for the top 2% of WP articles. I don't know that a single page with one link per title is the right way to go in the end; we need to find better ways to view tens of thousands of articles effectively. But a layered system of tagging, something like
0.2% - FA (featured) 2% - GA (good) 20% - HA (half-decent)
would be very useful to me -- and likely to reusers looking for a quick cull of good content for specific applications. If we have a rating system set up, its output could be used to auto-generate an HA list. A GA list could be maintained by hand; with O(100) additions a day. An FA list can continue to be maintained by extensive debate, both moderating the list and improving our quality guidelines as time goes on. +sj + 08:06, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
The two talk page templates were just tagged with TFD this afternoon. I voted keep as they are a part of the process we've been working on here. Slambo (Speak) 23:59, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
I really think that the criterion for images should mention that the images be properly tagged with copyright information. It seems a bit redundant considering that it already is official policy on Wikipedia, but it's worth mentioning. -- Jtalledo (talk) 16:10, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
I wanted to mention that other work on identifying good articles is going on at the Wikipedia 1.0 project. I think much of what we are doing is complementary to the GA proposal. The main assessment method is described here and is based on the WP:Chem system, are the criteria helpful for this project? As you can see from the WP 1.0 page, we have three subprojects trying to identify good articles that are not FAs but good enough for publication. One of these, WikiSort, is linked up with the plans at Meta to automate the article validation process, something people here should be aware of. I think your work here will be very helpful for us at WP 1.0, keep up the good work! Walkerma 06:55, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
I recently added all of the articles from the WP:Chem Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemicals/List of A-Class articles. These articles relate only to chemical compounds, and they are the result of work at the project worklist that tracks around 380 articles according to these criteria. I should mention that some of the articles I have added were written or heavily modified by myself, but in every case the "A-Class" assessment was the result of peer review within the WikiProject. Meanwhile over at Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry we recently began a similar worklist; this is officially just at the proposal stage but people seem to be happily adopting it, so I expect we will be able to provide some more general chemistry articles to the GA list quite soon. Walkerma 07:08, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
A good policy should have a clear unambiguous purpose and its measures should achieve this purpose, without other unintended consequences. In other words it should 'say what it means and mean what it says'. The Good Articles (GA) policy does neither.
The stated purpose of the GA policy is to indicate high quality in articles that are unlikely to to achieve Featured Article (FA) status. However, the lack of effectiveness of the policy is there for all to see, in the form of the articles that are already listed on the page. As far as I can see, most of these articles could indeed become Featured Articles. On Wikipedia:Templates for deletion, it has been proposed that the templates associated with this article be deleted. Of those that have opposed this move, some have given as their reason that the GA policy will help identify articles that could become Featured Articles, even though this is clearly at odds with the stated purpose of the policy.
The long-term consequences of a policy should be considered. With this policy I forsee 'GA wars'. User A, believing that the purpose of the policy is to identify articles for FA status, nominates a GA for FA status. User B withdraws the nomination, believing that because the article has been accepted as a GA, it must not be nominated for FA, and can cite the wording of the GA policy in support. User A deletes the GA template from the article, thus removing it from the GA list. User B simply reverts this action. The big loser here is the article, because in will be trapped indefinitely in 'GA space'. A longer term consequence could be that the FA process becomes obsolete through a lack of articles for nomination, because any article that might apporoach the standard will already have had a GA template slapped on it.
Alan Pascoe 20:32, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
Several reasons have been mentioned already, but one I've been thinking about: I think there'd be vastly less objection to this if it had a list exactly like the current one, but didn't but a huge, brightly-colored template on every single page someone happened to think was "good", and even worse, a meaningless "removed good article" template (is there any actual difference between a "formerly good" article and one that was never "good" to begin with, other than the fact that an editor made a mistake? it's not like these things had strong support for being Good and then later degraded in quality and were formally removed, as is the case with former FAs).
Certainly there's no objection to discussing and working on this Wikipedia proposal, but where it starts to go over the line is where it's spamming hundreds of Wikipedia articles with information (in the form of a big ol' box) that in no way furthers the editing process. Couldn't the "goodarticle" template be converted into a boxless template with just Category:Wikipedia good articles in it, and use the much less obtrusive categorization process to link to other Good articles rather than the box? At least until "Good articles" is no longer a proposed policy, but is an actual, accepted-by-consensus feature on Wikipedia, like WP:FA. Until then, these templates seem like almost like a campaign to force this system on every other Wikipedian (by propagating it all over article Talk pages to advertise this project), when we should just be in the testing phase currently. - Silence 05:21, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
One concern I have with this proposal is that with only one person nominating a GA, it is far too subjective. I have been doing quite a bit of assessment work with WP 1.0, and found that people's opinions can vary a lot. Different people use different criteria – completeness, balance, language quality, images, references, etc. This is going to cause problems down the road for the GA concept as individuals go adding and removing GA articles.
I would like to propose that there be two tracks for accepting GAs. These are just ideas, please amend them in ways you think appropriate.
The general user of Wikipedia is extremely interested in quality/peer review issues (read any Jimbo interview). This would demonstrate to the outside world that the GA tag means something more than "Joe thought this was pretty good". Comments please? Walkerma 17:34, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
I think we could easily enough lose the 'former good article' template, and just remove the good template where necessary. But I think it's quite inappropriate to call adding the templates 'spamming'. They have received considerable support, when they were listed on TFD, and if you look further up this page you can see David Gerard being very positive indeed about their use. Silence, your arguments about the template make sense, but I do feel that you're trying to railroad us into agreeing with you by threatening to remove tags whether or not anyone else agrees with you.
Potential featured articles? That would be totally redundant. The point of this is not to identify articles that just need a little bit of work to become featured - it's to identify quality content, whether or not it is in the form of an article that might become featured in the future.
Approval mechanisms - bolting it onto the FAC process could not be the only way. FAC is rigorous and hence slow, and we have 700-odd FAs to show for almost 5 years work on Wikipedia. I started this page as a means to rapidly identify the quality content that exists beyond the 0.1% of articles that are FAs.
Criteria - people seem to be saying they are not exact enough, but they're closely modelled on FA criteria. I think rigorously specifying criteria would bog down the process.
Marskell - I have yet to hear the argument that "good" indicates anything meaningful - you must have your fingers in your ears! You've got the project page, various comments here, and various comments on the TFDs explaining what 'good' means. I don't really know what you want to hear.
GAs killing FAs? Can't see that happening at all. What I believe is more likely is that GAs will go some way towards killing the urge many of us feel to create a quick stub and then leave it. I've done plenty of those, but now I feel I'd much rather create something that has at least one image and at least one reference, and then maybe I could list it here. I don't mean to brag but I've written more FAs than almost anyone else, and naturally intend to keep on raising as many articles as I can to FA status.
A system - my own feeling is that what is needed is a wikiproject to manage this page. A small group of people could easily develop consistent standards, and review additions to this page to see if they meet those standards. If we have a 'good article candidates' process the whole thing will slow down enormously, and really it shouldn't be such a slow process to find good content.
And identify our good content we must, if we are not to be seen as a collection of a few hundred well written articles among 800,000 pages of rubbish. The FA process strongly favours articles on topics about which a lot is known - I think GA can encourage higher standards on the huge numbers of other topics which deserve good coverage but are not rich pickings for people who like writing FAs. Worldtraveller 20:12, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
== Reasons this article was removed from Good Articles ==
{{ DelistedGA}} doesn't seem to serve any purpose other than to emulate the featured article template cycle. Templates for failed or delisted featured articles are useful because they link to an arena of discussion which indicates why it failed or was delisted. On the other hand, all this template says is "this is an average joe article", which isn't saying much. If someone wants an average article, they can click the random article link. To reiterate, noting "good" articles may be useful because it provides a list of articles which are ready to be corralled into featured articles, while noting articles that are not "good" serves no purpose. I think instead if someone disagrees with a GA listing, they should just remove the template and apply an appropriate cleanup template for the area it is lacking (probably {{ Unreferenced}}) or just say why in the edit summary.— jiy ( talk) 16:14, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
I humbly suggest that this policy proposal be linked with the proposed Wikipedia:Stable versions. In my neck of the woods (mathematics), we've got maybe a thousand articles (out of 12,000) that could be marked as "good", but I am exhausted by the vandalism patrol needed to keep them good. For example, gravity: every science-punk high-school snot thinks they can "improve" this article, and the result is a horrid mix of genius and utter crap that no one wants to maintain. Slapping a GA label on it helps no one, as it will continue to be vandalised, and I'll still be exhausted trying to patrol it. I want a mechanism that will allow me to focus on writing and editing, instead of patrolling. linas 20:51, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Because the History section has grown so large (itmay actually be larger than the Rail transport section), I've transcluded it to its own page, much as the nominations at AfD are done. I hope this change won't confuse anyone. -- llywrch 19:38, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
I tried to add a designated good article to its appropriate section. I clicked save page and it showed up on that little subpage that comes up after you edit a section, but when I went back to the main article, it wasn't there. I refreshed the page, nothin'. Then I clicked the little edit link and it showed up on the edit page. I looked at the history section and it didn't show me as having made an edit. Anyone know what in God's name is going on? -- Hurricane Eric - my dropsonde - archive 01:21, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
If any user can tag a page as "good article" for subjective reasons, as it is now, this page is entirely arbitrary and therefore pointless.
If a vote is taken on whether an article is "good", then this page would be redundant with WP:FAC and therefore pointless.
Either way, it's pointless. In particular, please don't put tags on talk pages that "this article is good" as long as there's no solid criterion for that. R adiant _>|< 13:50, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
I've been reading the comments on here for sometime and while I do support this I must stand with the others who argue that there needs to be a process for nominating and removing articles otherwise this proposal will fall flat. The only suggestions for a process so far is one that will mirror FAC and FARC. Can anyone suggest anything better or shall we begin to go about setting up GAC and GARC? What needs to be done to set these up? *Exeunt* Ganymead | Dialogue? 16:39, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia will have a rating feature very soon, which will allow editors to rate articles. This will obviate the need for a "good articles" process - any article above a certain rating can be considered "good". R adiant _>|< 22:48, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
GA is certainly finding consensus, with over 400 articles listed within a month by many people and plenty of positive comments here (including one describing it as the best idea ever!). When I started the page I mentioned it in many places, such as the mailing list, talk:FAC, Wikipedia 1.0, etc etc - it can't really be said that it's some kind of evil plan hatched in secret. Don't know if you noticed that the templates were listed on templates for deletion, and resoundingly kept - that also to me indicates a consensus that their use is not a problem. My point about the criteria stands - whether you believe that GA is widely supported or not, its criteria are clearly defined. The process for determining whether articles meet those criteria is still evolving, but the criteria are clear. Worldtraveller 21:11, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
A lot of people complained that {{ delistedGA}} was too obtrusive on talk pages. I've just created {{ delistedGAbecause}} as an alternative, in a different format which I hope will still draw attention to the reasons why an article might have been removed, without being obtrusive. Worldtraveller 16:23, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Someone more active on this than me may want to have a look at Antoine Lavoisier, listed as a GA. Not a single citation, as far as I can tell, just a "Further reading" list. Looks essentially correct, but I'm not sure I'd have singled it out. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:37, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
![]() | This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Hmm, I definitely support this project. I'd like to point out, however, that two similar ideas have been tried (at least, one by me), neither of which ever caught on, and one of which has apparently been deleted. I don't really like the idea of anyone just adding any page to the list, though -- there ought to be some sort of approval process. People adding pages as they saw fit was the original mechanism behind WP:FA, which resulted in a lot of subpar pages being added even back when the wiki had many fewer users and even fewer malicious or short-sighted people. Perhaps there ought to be a separate list page for candidates that anyone could add to, and then they could be approved through some sort of system. I worry that people will say "oh, I just wrote a bunch of sweet articles on exceedingly minor Harry Potter characters, so I'll list them all" and that will require clean-up, generate ill will and make this project less attractive to productive editors. I do support the idea though. -- Tuf-Kat 05:02, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
...to something like making sure references are added if at all possible (i.e. if the primary author(s) are still around). But if that is not possible, it doesn't stop the article being good. Otherwise, I fear the requirements are too similar to FAC. -- Pcb21| Pete 16:49, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
Random, disjointed thoughts:
Without carefully selected criteria, and enforcment of those criteria, this list is meaningless. I agree that the criteria should look very similar to those for FAs; this list should encourage the writing of articles in the style of FAs, rewarding such work without requiring the intensive all-out effort called for by FAC voting. I like the description of "what is a good article?" as currently written; the issue is in execution. Comments above point out pretty immediate problems with self-listing; there are many others as well, which could engender lots of unnecessary ill-will. What will be most problematic is the application of these criteria. Does an excellent 3-paragraph article qualify? Does a featured article qualify? Could an article be deemed "too good" for GA but "not good enough" for FA? Is a GA an FA-in-waiting, deficient in only a few relatively minor and fixable ways, or is a GA an "unfeaturable" article?
Examples:
I would suggest an expedited voting system that requires a limited number of votes (say, 5), and automatically accepts or rejects on the basis of those votes. Rules could be that out of the five votes, one "objective" dissent (i.e. "no references") or two "subjective" dissents (i.e. "poorly written") be enough to kill it; otherwise it passes. A question -- how big will this list get? FA is 0.1% of all articles; what are GAs? 1%? 5%? 10%? We're talking many thousands or tens of thousands of articles, which begs the question of whether this list will be helpful at all. I suppose it is useful to encourage GAs as an alternative goal below the effort required to create an FA.... -- Bantman 19:46, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
Since there's mention on the main guidelines about leaving a note on the articles' talk pages when an article is removed from this list, perhaps we should look into a few talk page templates much like those that are used for the FA process...
Okay, we'll need to upload some simpler stars or other images – perhaps a thumbs-up image for good status and thumb-sideways (not a thumbs-down!) or something for delisted articles – to keep these proposed templates from being confused with those of the FA pocess. And, the wording could probably be improved on both of these, but you get the idea. -- slambo 20:46, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
![]() |
Good articles/Archive 1 was removed from the good articles list. Please discuss the rationale for the removal and improve the article to such an extent that it can once again be listed, or help this article reach featured article status. |
![]() |
Good articles/Archive 1 is a good article, which means it has been identified as adhering to the quality standards leading to a featured article. If you see a way this page can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, please feel free to contribute. |
In the German wikipedia, good articles, as well as excellent (featured) articles, are tagged direcly on the Article page. The advantage of this, imho, is that it makes readers appreciate what they're reading; most readers who are not editors will hardly ever take a look at the talk page. Furthermore, when there's a vote to declare an article as good, it can be seen much easier on the article page than on the talk page; this is another way of making non-editor readers participate in Wikipedia.
Another advantage would be that everyone would be much more aware of this Good articles project, and thus, more people might get around to contribute to it.
German templates are much smaller and, I would say, more elegant than the English ones. You can see them at de:Vorlage:Lesenswert and de:Vorlage:Exzellent, they just say that the article has been added to the list of good / excellent articles. There are also tags for addition and removal, of course. I think these tags culd be adapted to English with little graphic reworking; perhaps we could also ask their author if we want them.-- Robin.rueth 22:46, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
I think this is a good idea. I tried to add a talk box above, but couldn't seem to get it right. -- Vaoverland 17:09, 23 October 2005 (UTC)
What does it mean for an article to "be stable"? Does it mean that it has remained in a format for some length of time and that there is a lack of frequent large-scale edits? --Anon.
The image criterion reads "whenever possible, contain images to illustrate it." This can be interpreted two ways - either (a) GAs need to have an image whenever an appropriate image is extant or could be created today, or (b) GAs should have an image whenever a free / GFDL-compliant image can be located, or one could easily be created.
I propose that being "good" but not necessarily "great", a GA should be held to interpretation (b), not (a). That is, failure of a good-faith, reasonably robust search for an existing free image should not be enough to keep an otherwise good article off of GA. If not, and we choose to hold GAs to standard (a), that would require the creation of an image or photograph when no free images can be located, which for many topics would be above-and-beyond the effort that is called for here. Remember, part of the purpose of listing GAs is to encourage good work without subjecting editors to the rigors of meeting FA criteria. So on the image question, I propose that if a reasonable search for free images fails, and the image cannot be easily created, the image "requirement" should be dropped for that particular article.
When I say easily created, I'm thinking about photos of everyday items or easily made drawings, etc. An appropriate image for apple should be easily created, while an appropriate image for, say, a particular mountaintop in Tajikistan is not easily created. -- Bantman 18:20, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
I especially like the idea of allowing individuals to list and de-list per the criteria. However, aren’t all featured articles by definition at least good articles? Should they then not be added en masse? However, if the point of this page is to serve as a queue of potential FA candidates, then that may not be a good idea (unless they are IDd by being bold or something but then somebody is going to need to check once in a while to see if the article has been deFAd). Also, I can see this page getting real big fairly fast and thus require subpages and maintenance help from the various portals (each portal may want to have their own good article list). -- mav 15:11, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
Finest. Idea. Ever. Can we get consensus on some criteria and start spreading this template far and wide? - David Gerard 23:44, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
I really like this idea, so I'm going to start adding a few articles (I've just added David Beckham). I think the text on the banner needs changing: I'd like to see "adhering to the quality standards leading to a featured article" replaced with something like "meets certain standards" with a link to the standards. The way it's worded at the moment sounds a little like it's just fractionally of FA standard, which I think is setting the bar a bit high. File:Yemen flag large.png CTOAGN ( talk) 01:22, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
Category:Wikipedia good articles contains everything with Template:GA on it - David Gerard 10:46, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
Looking through some of the current articles listed as Good articles, I noticed that several of them listed the sources used under a Bibliography section instead of a References section as recommended by Wikipedia:Cite sources. While I do not consider this to be a major problem, it does raise the question of whether an article should conform to the style manual before being considered a Good Article. I personally believe that all articles should try to conform if for no other reason that the style manual allows for a consistent look and feel across all Wikipedia articles, but if someone has a well-reasoned argument for why the style manual should not be used I am willing to listen. -- Allen3 talk 13:39, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
Just by looking at the rail transport section I predict that this page is going to be swamped very quickly. My alternative suggestion would be for the various WikiProjects to identify their own articles as "good" and maintain that list as part of the relevant portal. violet/riga (t) 11:50, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
I read on the project page that "It is probably best to avoid self-nominating articles as this can introduce bias", so I thought I'd leave a comment about the Robert Clark (actor) article here and let others judge if it meets the criteria of a good article. There is a nice free license publicity photo at the top of the article, the fair use images have source, copyright information and fair use rationale on their description pages, the article is NPOV (containing quotes from critics and other people about his work), has notes and references sections to support everything, and there are no fansite links in the external links section. Was the subject of a peer review (see here), but I did not submit it for featured article status as I knew it was too short. Extraordinary Machine 13:01, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Read
WP:GA and its talk page. It's for stuff that's on its way to FA or just missed FA. I'd say anything that failed FA by only one or two querulous idiots minor objections should be put straight in -
David Gerard
10:39, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
I think the important thing is that as FA nominations attract more interest, true consensus becomes less likely and we need to be more willing to settle for large majorities. I think if we can get 75% support for an article as a FA that should suffice (is this close to what we use in practice?). "Good articles" doesn't seem like a good thing to me; it seems like a way to evade the standard process. The FAC process is what we have for this and the FAC process is what we should use. So I'd say either we should modify the FAC rules/custom or accept that articles will continue to have to meet increasingly high standards. I'm not sure which is the better route. Everyking 04:12, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
If the objections are minor, why can't you resolve them? Superm401 | Talk 04:14, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
I don't like this idea. If the article is good enough, it can certainly have a run in FAC. Besides, is there some kind of quality control to determine which articles are good ? =Nichalp «Talk»=
I'm not particularly thrilled about this idea. Like Nichalp said, I think this is more a way to evade the standard process. It also seems like a needless diverting of efforting. →Raul654 21:07, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Please do read the WP:GA page, Raul and others, and join the discussions there if you would like. It´s absolutely not intended to be ´competition´ for FAC or a means of subverting the process. Our featured articles, the very best that Wikipedia can produce, form 0.1% of our content - GA is about recognising that much more than 0.1% of our content is actually very good, if not necessarily fulfilling all the FA criteria. Worldtraveller 23:02, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
In response to some of the criticism of this process, and remembering previous writing competitions...
I've created Wikipedia:Article rating competition, a proposal for a weekly process by which articles are submitted for informal rating under a given topic. Take a look and feel free to comment on the talk page. violet/riga (t) 17:55, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
People seem to be objecting to the current process of anyone being able to list or delist articles here. I only started it off like that to get it underway, and certainly think some kind of approval mechanism could be sensible. Any thoughts on one? It needs to be much simpler than FAC. Sorry, I can´t sign any of the comments I´ve just left above because I´m on a keyboard with no tilde to be found anywhere. User:Worldtraveller.
Objections (no images, no references) have been corrected. -- FuriousFreddy 08:24, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
I wrote this article a long time ago, and have been constantly improving it since. So far it has been through three failed but close FAC nominations and one peer review. I think it certainly qualifies as a Good article. — Wackymacs 23:29, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Hello. Regarding, good articles, what do you think of Wikipedia:Stable versions (formerly Wikipedia:Requests for publication) -- Zondor 03:27, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to see this be a place for the top 2% of WP articles. I don't know that a single page with one link per title is the right way to go in the end; we need to find better ways to view tens of thousands of articles effectively. But a layered system of tagging, something like
0.2% - FA (featured) 2% - GA (good) 20% - HA (half-decent)
would be very useful to me -- and likely to reusers looking for a quick cull of good content for specific applications. If we have a rating system set up, its output could be used to auto-generate an HA list. A GA list could be maintained by hand; with O(100) additions a day. An FA list can continue to be maintained by extensive debate, both moderating the list and improving our quality guidelines as time goes on. +sj + 08:06, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
The two talk page templates were just tagged with TFD this afternoon. I voted keep as they are a part of the process we've been working on here. Slambo (Speak) 23:59, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
I really think that the criterion for images should mention that the images be properly tagged with copyright information. It seems a bit redundant considering that it already is official policy on Wikipedia, but it's worth mentioning. -- Jtalledo (talk) 16:10, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
I wanted to mention that other work on identifying good articles is going on at the Wikipedia 1.0 project. I think much of what we are doing is complementary to the GA proposal. The main assessment method is described here and is based on the WP:Chem system, are the criteria helpful for this project? As you can see from the WP 1.0 page, we have three subprojects trying to identify good articles that are not FAs but good enough for publication. One of these, WikiSort, is linked up with the plans at Meta to automate the article validation process, something people here should be aware of. I think your work here will be very helpful for us at WP 1.0, keep up the good work! Walkerma 06:55, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
I recently added all of the articles from the WP:Chem Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemicals/List of A-Class articles. These articles relate only to chemical compounds, and they are the result of work at the project worklist that tracks around 380 articles according to these criteria. I should mention that some of the articles I have added were written or heavily modified by myself, but in every case the "A-Class" assessment was the result of peer review within the WikiProject. Meanwhile over at Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry we recently began a similar worklist; this is officially just at the proposal stage but people seem to be happily adopting it, so I expect we will be able to provide some more general chemistry articles to the GA list quite soon. Walkerma 07:08, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
A good policy should have a clear unambiguous purpose and its measures should achieve this purpose, without other unintended consequences. In other words it should 'say what it means and mean what it says'. The Good Articles (GA) policy does neither.
The stated purpose of the GA policy is to indicate high quality in articles that are unlikely to to achieve Featured Article (FA) status. However, the lack of effectiveness of the policy is there for all to see, in the form of the articles that are already listed on the page. As far as I can see, most of these articles could indeed become Featured Articles. On Wikipedia:Templates for deletion, it has been proposed that the templates associated with this article be deleted. Of those that have opposed this move, some have given as their reason that the GA policy will help identify articles that could become Featured Articles, even though this is clearly at odds with the stated purpose of the policy.
The long-term consequences of a policy should be considered. With this policy I forsee 'GA wars'. User A, believing that the purpose of the policy is to identify articles for FA status, nominates a GA for FA status. User B withdraws the nomination, believing that because the article has been accepted as a GA, it must not be nominated for FA, and can cite the wording of the GA policy in support. User A deletes the GA template from the article, thus removing it from the GA list. User B simply reverts this action. The big loser here is the article, because in will be trapped indefinitely in 'GA space'. A longer term consequence could be that the FA process becomes obsolete through a lack of articles for nomination, because any article that might apporoach the standard will already have had a GA template slapped on it.
Alan Pascoe 20:32, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
Several reasons have been mentioned already, but one I've been thinking about: I think there'd be vastly less objection to this if it had a list exactly like the current one, but didn't but a huge, brightly-colored template on every single page someone happened to think was "good", and even worse, a meaningless "removed good article" template (is there any actual difference between a "formerly good" article and one that was never "good" to begin with, other than the fact that an editor made a mistake? it's not like these things had strong support for being Good and then later degraded in quality and were formally removed, as is the case with former FAs).
Certainly there's no objection to discussing and working on this Wikipedia proposal, but where it starts to go over the line is where it's spamming hundreds of Wikipedia articles with information (in the form of a big ol' box) that in no way furthers the editing process. Couldn't the "goodarticle" template be converted into a boxless template with just Category:Wikipedia good articles in it, and use the much less obtrusive categorization process to link to other Good articles rather than the box? At least until "Good articles" is no longer a proposed policy, but is an actual, accepted-by-consensus feature on Wikipedia, like WP:FA. Until then, these templates seem like almost like a campaign to force this system on every other Wikipedian (by propagating it all over article Talk pages to advertise this project), when we should just be in the testing phase currently. - Silence 05:21, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
One concern I have with this proposal is that with only one person nominating a GA, it is far too subjective. I have been doing quite a bit of assessment work with WP 1.0, and found that people's opinions can vary a lot. Different people use different criteria – completeness, balance, language quality, images, references, etc. This is going to cause problems down the road for the GA concept as individuals go adding and removing GA articles.
I would like to propose that there be two tracks for accepting GAs. These are just ideas, please amend them in ways you think appropriate.
The general user of Wikipedia is extremely interested in quality/peer review issues (read any Jimbo interview). This would demonstrate to the outside world that the GA tag means something more than "Joe thought this was pretty good". Comments please? Walkerma 17:34, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
I think we could easily enough lose the 'former good article' template, and just remove the good template where necessary. But I think it's quite inappropriate to call adding the templates 'spamming'. They have received considerable support, when they were listed on TFD, and if you look further up this page you can see David Gerard being very positive indeed about their use. Silence, your arguments about the template make sense, but I do feel that you're trying to railroad us into agreeing with you by threatening to remove tags whether or not anyone else agrees with you.
Potential featured articles? That would be totally redundant. The point of this is not to identify articles that just need a little bit of work to become featured - it's to identify quality content, whether or not it is in the form of an article that might become featured in the future.
Approval mechanisms - bolting it onto the FAC process could not be the only way. FAC is rigorous and hence slow, and we have 700-odd FAs to show for almost 5 years work on Wikipedia. I started this page as a means to rapidly identify the quality content that exists beyond the 0.1% of articles that are FAs.
Criteria - people seem to be saying they are not exact enough, but they're closely modelled on FA criteria. I think rigorously specifying criteria would bog down the process.
Marskell - I have yet to hear the argument that "good" indicates anything meaningful - you must have your fingers in your ears! You've got the project page, various comments here, and various comments on the TFDs explaining what 'good' means. I don't really know what you want to hear.
GAs killing FAs? Can't see that happening at all. What I believe is more likely is that GAs will go some way towards killing the urge many of us feel to create a quick stub and then leave it. I've done plenty of those, but now I feel I'd much rather create something that has at least one image and at least one reference, and then maybe I could list it here. I don't mean to brag but I've written more FAs than almost anyone else, and naturally intend to keep on raising as many articles as I can to FA status.
A system - my own feeling is that what is needed is a wikiproject to manage this page. A small group of people could easily develop consistent standards, and review additions to this page to see if they meet those standards. If we have a 'good article candidates' process the whole thing will slow down enormously, and really it shouldn't be such a slow process to find good content.
And identify our good content we must, if we are not to be seen as a collection of a few hundred well written articles among 800,000 pages of rubbish. The FA process strongly favours articles on topics about which a lot is known - I think GA can encourage higher standards on the huge numbers of other topics which deserve good coverage but are not rich pickings for people who like writing FAs. Worldtraveller 20:12, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
== Reasons this article was removed from Good Articles ==
{{ DelistedGA}} doesn't seem to serve any purpose other than to emulate the featured article template cycle. Templates for failed or delisted featured articles are useful because they link to an arena of discussion which indicates why it failed or was delisted. On the other hand, all this template says is "this is an average joe article", which isn't saying much. If someone wants an average article, they can click the random article link. To reiterate, noting "good" articles may be useful because it provides a list of articles which are ready to be corralled into featured articles, while noting articles that are not "good" serves no purpose. I think instead if someone disagrees with a GA listing, they should just remove the template and apply an appropriate cleanup template for the area it is lacking (probably {{ Unreferenced}}) or just say why in the edit summary.— jiy ( talk) 16:14, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
I humbly suggest that this policy proposal be linked with the proposed Wikipedia:Stable versions. In my neck of the woods (mathematics), we've got maybe a thousand articles (out of 12,000) that could be marked as "good", but I am exhausted by the vandalism patrol needed to keep them good. For example, gravity: every science-punk high-school snot thinks they can "improve" this article, and the result is a horrid mix of genius and utter crap that no one wants to maintain. Slapping a GA label on it helps no one, as it will continue to be vandalised, and I'll still be exhausted trying to patrol it. I want a mechanism that will allow me to focus on writing and editing, instead of patrolling. linas 20:51, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Because the History section has grown so large (itmay actually be larger than the Rail transport section), I've transcluded it to its own page, much as the nominations at AfD are done. I hope this change won't confuse anyone. -- llywrch 19:38, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
I tried to add a designated good article to its appropriate section. I clicked save page and it showed up on that little subpage that comes up after you edit a section, but when I went back to the main article, it wasn't there. I refreshed the page, nothin'. Then I clicked the little edit link and it showed up on the edit page. I looked at the history section and it didn't show me as having made an edit. Anyone know what in God's name is going on? -- Hurricane Eric - my dropsonde - archive 01:21, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
If any user can tag a page as "good article" for subjective reasons, as it is now, this page is entirely arbitrary and therefore pointless.
If a vote is taken on whether an article is "good", then this page would be redundant with WP:FAC and therefore pointless.
Either way, it's pointless. In particular, please don't put tags on talk pages that "this article is good" as long as there's no solid criterion for that. R adiant _>|< 13:50, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
I've been reading the comments on here for sometime and while I do support this I must stand with the others who argue that there needs to be a process for nominating and removing articles otherwise this proposal will fall flat. The only suggestions for a process so far is one that will mirror FAC and FARC. Can anyone suggest anything better or shall we begin to go about setting up GAC and GARC? What needs to be done to set these up? *Exeunt* Ganymead | Dialogue? 16:39, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia will have a rating feature very soon, which will allow editors to rate articles. This will obviate the need for a "good articles" process - any article above a certain rating can be considered "good". R adiant _>|< 22:48, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
GA is certainly finding consensus, with over 400 articles listed within a month by many people and plenty of positive comments here (including one describing it as the best idea ever!). When I started the page I mentioned it in many places, such as the mailing list, talk:FAC, Wikipedia 1.0, etc etc - it can't really be said that it's some kind of evil plan hatched in secret. Don't know if you noticed that the templates were listed on templates for deletion, and resoundingly kept - that also to me indicates a consensus that their use is not a problem. My point about the criteria stands - whether you believe that GA is widely supported or not, its criteria are clearly defined. The process for determining whether articles meet those criteria is still evolving, but the criteria are clear. Worldtraveller 21:11, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
A lot of people complained that {{ delistedGA}} was too obtrusive on talk pages. I've just created {{ delistedGAbecause}} as an alternative, in a different format which I hope will still draw attention to the reasons why an article might have been removed, without being obtrusive. Worldtraveller 16:23, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Someone more active on this than me may want to have a look at Antoine Lavoisier, listed as a GA. Not a single citation, as far as I can tell, just a "Further reading" list. Looks essentially correct, but I'm not sure I'd have singled it out. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:37, 3 January 2006 (UTC)