Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Newsletter/November 2007

Project News

• There are now 3,016 Good Articles listed at WP:GA. Based on the edit history, the 3,000th Good Article is New York State Route 9A, promoted to GA status by NF24^{(radio me!}_{Editor review)} at 23:31, 28 October 2007 (UTC). The exact number of Good Articles is in a state of flux, as articles are both promoted through nominations at WP:GAN, as well as demoted by re-reviewing them through the GA Sweeps program. Currently, the rate of promotion exceeds the rate of demotion.[reply]

• The most recently promoted articles are: Typhoon Paka, Jack (webcomic), The Chaser's War on Everything, Brownhills, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Superman film series, Smoking, Incoming, Rainbow/PUSH‎, He Loves to Fly and He D'ohs‎, James W. Stephenson, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Alan Davidson (cricketer), Wade Mainer, The Living Daylights, and New York State Route 9A.

• The backlog at Good Article Nominations currently stands at 137 unreviewed articles, with 28 articles on hold, 15 articles under review, and 3 second opinions requested. There are a total of 183 nominations outstanding.

The oldest unreviewed articles are: Scout Taylor-Compton, Abortion-breast cancer hypothesis, Ritchie Humphreys, Ottawa Senators, Wales national rugby union team, Key (company), Joe Szwaja, To Kill a Mockingbird, Pat Nixon, and Trade routes.

The categories with the largest backlogs are: Music (Performers, groups and composers) - 14 nominees, Music (Recordings and compositions) - 16 nominees, Sport and games people - 10 nominees, Recreation (video games) - 9 nominees, and Media (Films) - 7 nominees.

If every participant of WikiProject Good Articles could review just one article in the next week, the backlog would be almost eliminated!

• There really isn't a large backlog at Good Article Reassessment, as there are only 11 articles currently on that list. However, the Project quality task force is continuing its sweeps process, re-reviewing every existing GA to see if it continues to meet the Good Article criteria. To date, 309 articles have been reviewed under the sweeps program.

• There is currently a content review workshop, facilitated by Mike Christie, organized to evaluate the various content review programs on wikipedia (WP:FAC, WP:PR, and WP:GAN), and make suggestions and proposals for improving them. Much of the discussion has so far focused on peer review, although comments regarding improving all processes are welcome. Feel free to read some of the discussion and participate.

Reviewer of the Month

Canadian Paul is the GAN Reviewer of the Month of October, based on the results of weekly judging of the number and thoroughness of reviews performed by Epbr123. Canadian Paul is a reviewer hailing originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is an alumnus of the University of California, San Diego, and is currently a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, studying Middle Eastern Studies.

Other outstanding reviewers recognized during the month of October include:

• Awadewit (talk · contribs)
• Derek.cashman (talk · contribs)
• Johnfos (talk · contribs)
• Noeticsage (talk · contribs)
• Peripitus (talk · contribs)
• Sandstein (talk · contribs)
• VanTucky (talk · contribs)
• Yamanbaiia (talk · contribs)
• Zeus1234 (talk · contribs)

Member News

There are now 152 members of WikiProject Good Articles! Welcome to the eleven new members that joined during the month of October:

• Malleus Fatuarum (talk · contribs)
• Dvandersluis (talk · contribs)
• Souseiseki42 (talk · contribs)
• Shudde (talk · contribs)
• Thedagomar (talk · contribs)
• Universal Hero (talk · contribs)
• Carre (talk · contribs)
• Curt Wilhelm VonSavage (talk · contribs)
• Havelock the Dane (talk · contribs)
• J-stan (talk · contribs)
• Maralia (talk · contribs)

This WikiProject, and the Good Article program as a whole, would not be where it is today without each and every one of its members! Thank you to all!

Advice for New Reviewers

Here's a couple of useful tips for new reviewers. First, it would be good to become familiar with the Good Article criteria. This is the core set of criteria that all Good Articles must adhere to. It is recommended to refer to it in your reviews, and you may link to its shortcut at WP:WIAGA. The criteria consist of six items by which GAs should be checked against: prose, verifiability, completeness, neutrality, stability, and images. Some of these will be easier to check than others. For example, checking the images requirement is relatively easy; do all images have their required image copyright tag, and if fair use is being claimed, is there a fair use rationale in the image description? Stability is also a fairly easy check, as it mainly just requires reviewing the article's edit history and talk pages to insure that there are no recent (with the last month or so) edit wars, not counting simple vandalism by anonymous editors and such.

Criteria that will take more time to review include #1 (prose) & #3 (completeness). Criterion #1 will require the review to thoroughly read the article, checking for grammar, spelling, manual of style issues, and other things like sentence structure. It can also often be the easiest to fix, as it mainly just requires simple copyediting. If you're very comfortable with copyediting, and are familiar with the manual of style and have a good grasp on the use of english grammar, it is completely acceptable to copyedit the article yourself and promote it, if this is the only criteria that is lacking in your review (minor edits to articles are allowed by GA reviewers).

Criterion #3 is a little bit different to review, and may take longer. When judging an article's completeness, we want to make sure that the article covers most of the major topics that it should cover. Check the talk page for some of the WikiProjects that are listed there, and look for some of the guidelines for articles. For example, if you're reviewing an article about a city or town, look at WP:CITIES and see what sort of guidelines they have? Are all the major subsections that are listed at WP:USCITY or WP:UKCITIES present in the article? Or does it lack key topics like government, culture, or economy (or all three)? The article should also be focused, and not go off into too many unnecessary tangents. Check the use of subsections in the article. If there are a very large number of 2nd, 3rd, or 4th-level subsection headings, perhaps the article is starting to go off into unnecessary details, and some of these subsection headings should be eliminated or combined to help the article be organized better?

The most important thing to remember when reviewing an article, is to try and write a good review. The more advice that you can provide for improving the article, the better. Try to avoid only using templates like {{GAList}}, and offer suggestions on how to write a better article. It might help to memorize some of the shortcuts to some of wikipedia's help pages, so that you can easily incorporate these links in your review; some ones that you'll probably use often include WP:MOS (manual of style), WP:MSH (for header/subsection issues), WP:CITE (for citation and formatting of citations), WP:LEAD (for lead section issues), and WP:NPOV (for neutrality issues).

Also, if you're not sure whether an article meets the criteria or not, don't hesitate to use the {{GA2ndopinion}} option. This option exists primarily for newer reviewers to seek the advice of an experienced reviewer fairly easily. It may also even be used by more experienced reviewers if an article might be fairly controversial, such as if there might be some neutrality issues that you're not sure of, for example.

For more good advice on reviewing good articles, see Wikipedia:Reviewing good articles.

From the Editor

This is the very first issue of the WikiProject Good Articles newsletter, ever (Hey, you've gotta start somewhere!)! Apologies if we've left out any important topics that participants might have wanted to see, but maybe I just didn't know about it yet. If you'd like to make comments on this issue, or suggest a topic that you'd like to see in the next issue, you can do so here. We're also looking for any contributors that might want to help out by writing some of these sections as well. Are there any volunteers to write the next major topic article (like 'advice for new reviewers'), above?

Contributors to this Issue

• Dr. Cash (Lead Editor, Distributor)

Improving Wikipedia one article at a time since 2005!