Wikipedia talk:Good Article proposal drive 2023

Support for this proposal. There isn't much recognition out there for GA reviewers, even though it can (especially with thorough source checks, see below) be a very time-consuming task. And who doesn't like collecting shiny things? Not sure how detailed the awards could be, but maybe there could be something for people who review old and/or very long nominations. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽

This can be started by any editor, and I encourage those who want this to

WP:BEBOLD and start sending out the barnstars. I would also support a page where editors can brag about the number of reviews they have done, similar to Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of DYKs, but for reviewers. Z1720 (talk) 02:14, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

I have whacked together a simple GAR award message in my sandbox as a starter for ten for an alternative to the usual barnstars. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 12:29, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Unexpectedlydian I've drafted a quick sample here. Honeslty, there are a lot of templates broken. Please add to is as you see fit. Etrius ( Us) 20:37, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What about an incremental awards system like the one at DYK? It seems to be hampered by a lack of visibility, but I'd be lying if I said those awards weren't a strong motivation for me to get involved in DYK. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:42, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I rate this suggestion a sure, why not. I don't expect this to have a particularly large positive effect, but on the other hand I think the likelihood of significant negative outcomes is negligible. That is to say, this might entice some editors to put in the time and effort to review nominations a bit, but I don't think we're going to see any notable increase in low-quality reviews from editors who just want to collect awards if we implement this. TompaDompa (talk) 22:43, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment I guess I'm with TompaDompa here - I'm not really interested or motivated by awards, but if it encourages others then it's a net positive for the project as a whole Mujinga (talk) 12:30, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support per comment above Chidgk1 (talk) 12:58, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Yeah, I'm in the Sure Why Not camp as well. It can't hurt and it might help. We need to try anything and everything that we think will help WP & the GA project. As an editor it is quite disheartening to put in the hard work to level up an article only to have it then languish for a seemingly long time, unreviewed... Takes the wind out of your sails y'know? Shearonink (talk) 03:53, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, it might possibly encourage a few people, and as folks say, it can't hurt. Not my cup of tea but no matter. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:10, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose because when similar efforts have happened through review drives or through
  WP:CUP it has ended in a lot of poor reviews of short articles to game the system. --Rschen7754 03:20, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  We could exclude bad reviews from the count? We do this during GA backlog drive, and NPP drives? MaxnaCarta (talk) 11:51, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  This requires meta-review (how do you find "bad reviews"?), the main reason why it takes forever after a backlog drive to award barnstars. —Kusma (talk) 15:47, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The main reason the barnstars take forever to award is that all the other coords abandon the drive after a few weeks (one never participated at all) and leave all the work for me. June 2022 isn't complete still because I refuse to do all the barnstar awarding myself like I did for the January 2022 drive. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 16:03, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I know :) I'm not complaining about you here, just wanted to point out that something as simple-sounding as "exclude bad reviews" adds a lot of extra workload to an otherwise lightweight process. —Kusma (talk) 16:21, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak oppose. I used to give out barnstars at FAC for high-volume reviews, and stopped because of concerns about quality. Not sure it would be an issue here but I also think the overhead of administering this fairly is probably not worth it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 04:16, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, but I'll note that this is not really the kind of thing that needs to be approved by an RfC. In fact, prior to getting distracted in August, I had been reading a conversation along these lines, and came up with a whole set of ideas about this. My thinking was to go the whole nine yards, and make barnstars and topicons for GA reviews – along with their own special icons that can go in all the same places as the GA icons do. jp×g 07:57, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This user has received {{{1}}} Five Awards.

Ah, yes, here we go. Look at this puppy: Doesn't that make you wanna put it on your userpage? And check out the userbox as well. I think it goes well with what we have: article creations are gray, DYKs are blue, GAs are green, FAs are bronze, and GA reviews are fuscia. I've also created WP:Five Award, with a very rough sketch of what I think could be useful in this regard. jp×g 08:32, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I want that. But in all seriousness, I'm not sure if the Five Award is viable. The point of the Four Award is that all of its aspects are part of the same article, but this one has an added requirement that's completely unrelated. I really do like the fuchsia symbol though. As far as accessibility, how easily can colorblind users tell it apart from the standard GA symbol? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:56, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. It would be better make a variant of the

WP:FOUR is very much about everything is the same article. —Kusma (talk) 17:17, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

See

WP:CROWN. I like the idea of a five award but perhaps it should be refined a little to apply to the same article. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 03:00, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

I agree with Kusma. 4A is a really specific award that recognizes steady improvements in a single article by a single person. Previous attempts to add 5A/6A for things like being

WP:FT, have been rejected as out of scope for the award because they don't denote improvements to the article. Reviewing other articles is also obviously out of scope for 4A, and thus not appropriate for being added as a 5A. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:30, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

Note: I've figured out how to use a text editor to change the colors in SVGs, so check out File:Symbol star FA gold spun 180.svg and File:Featured article star spun 180.svg. I am thinking that these might be good for something along the lines of the proposal, somewhere down below, for featured/distinguished/etc GA reviews. jp×g 22:14, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Tend to support: although we'd likely need to set some pretty high milestones, just in order to balance this award with something like
  Wikipedia:W Award, this could be a good way to attract potential new reviewers and encourage them to meet expectations right from the start - something I'm currently experiencing right now, by the way. Obviously, it would be crucial to keep valuing quality over quantity, in order to avoid "GA farming" tactics. Oltrepier (talk) 18:52, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Weak oppose. I'm not sure this would provide significant incentive to get people reviewing. I also share Rschen7754 & Mike Christie's concerns about it providing a perverse incentive for weak reviews if we just count everything. On the other hand, given the subjective nature of reviewing, I'm not sure we can come up with an objective standard for what constitutes an 'awardable' review. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:37, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @Premeditated Chaos could we not exclude bad reviews like we do during the GA backlog drive? MaxnaCarta (talk) 11:49, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Who's gonna do the labor of spot-checking hundreds of reviews? We hardly have enough reviewers, let alone reviewers of reviews. Almost no one bothered doing checks of reviews during the last backlog drive, so it mostly fell on @Trainsandotherthings, and as he will tell you, it's a damn lot of work. I'm just not sure the work to reward ratio is in our favor here. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 19:20, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Can confirm, doing the work for January 2022 probably took me something like 10 hours at least. I'm on strike now; until the other coords do their part or someone else volunteers, the June 2022 backlog drive will never have all its barnstars awarded. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 21:18, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Very fair points. I never got mine, and this is probably why. I've gone from "Why the heck not" to 51/49... MaxnaCarta (talk) 02:18, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. Maybe add in civility reminders that thanking / praising good reviewers is appreciated, but reviews are very subjective. This requires subjective awards, which rules out most "contest" type schemes that would just count reviews. SnowFire (talk) 09:07, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - Measures to encourage reviewing are a good idea. There tends to be more nominations than people willing to review. Gaming is not something I am concerned about. People can already game by waiting until a backlog drive occurs in order to review if they are purely chasing badges. Just like when we have a backlog drive, standard awards can be made contingent on the issuer of the award spot-checking reviews to ensure they have been done properly. If we consider people undertaking tasks because there is an award on offer to be "gaming" then it is something most people who have participated in positive conduct can be guilty of at some stage. I am motivated to write good content, sure. But why? I do very much enjoy writing and that is a huge component of it. However, sometimes I spend hours polishing the chrome because I want it to be as good as it can be. Part of that is pride in my work, Part of it is also because I want to receive a GA, DYK, or FA badge I can be proud of, or see a high readership. Nothing wrong with a little dopamine hit. The issue would be on high numbers of poor quality reviews in order to earn badges. That is clearly unacceptable, but people doing this would be caught out pretty quickly when their work is spot-checked. It is not a massive problem during backlogs, so it should be fine in the ordinary course. MaxnaCarta (talk) 11:47, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  turns out it IS a massive problem during backlogs...so will need to consider my position. MaxnaCarta (talk) 02:19, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong oppose please please no; the reward culture is already a considerable problem in the GA and DYK processes, along with quid pro quo reviewing, and this will only encourage more among those editors for whom the reward culture is a driving motivation (which most certainly does not apply to all who participate in GA). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:35, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Please see Proposal 4a, which I support as an alternative (why wasn't that put under this one)? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:07, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Trainsandotherthings, spot checking is already required : see Wp:reviewing good articles. Also, I do not know how a reviewer could certify that the article is free of original research without checking some of the sources. I would, however, be in favor of making the requirement more prominent. (t · c) buidhe 21:52, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I have no idea how this would/could work in practice, but is there a way to force reviewers to do source checks? Maybe when a review is started and a talk page is created, there is a default section for source checks on that page which must be filled in by the reviewer in order for them to pass/fail an article. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 22:09, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I know that using review templates is currently optional, but have we considered automatically including one when creating a review page? For example, when nominating a featured picture, a template is automatically included when generating the nomination page. Perhaps creating a review page could automatically generate one of the review templates, giving new reviewers an existing structure to expand off of, with the added perk of implying what types of things (including spotchecks) should be done. Krisgabwoosh (talk) 22:21, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I imagine some reviewers will want to retain the flexibility they currently have when formatting reviews, so if this was going to be implemented it would have to be high-level. Maybe the reviewer has to check off the criteria in some sort of table, and if any criteria remains unchecked (e.g. source checks), the review can't be completed. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 22:54, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Granted, but perhaps the templates could still be optional even if they are included by default. When the review page is generated, there could be a comment on the top telling users that using the provided template is only optional, allowing more experienced and prolific reviewers to just remove it if they so wish. It may be a slight annoyance for prolific reviewers o always have to remove it, but I'm sure they'll survive the extra five seconds out of their day. Krisgabwoosh (talk) 23:28, 1 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. The blank review page is probably more of an intimidation for new reviewers than a default table would be an annoyance for experienced ones. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 23:41, 1 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Strong Support to TAOT's proposal. The most realistic way this could be added is to place the instruction under

WP:GA that our policies are either 'just known' or buried under a series or redirects. Half the time I end up at Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles which defeats the entire purpose of migrating the project to here. Etrius ( Us) 03:04, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply

]

You and I both know in practice spot checks rarely happen. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 22:22, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I should note that

WP:RGA, which buidhe cited, is a separate page from the actual reviewing guidelines on the main project space. Having something more explicit than a "generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow" would be ideal. For example, Step 3 states "Read the whole article. Understand its sources." Perhaps rephrasing that to "Read the whole article. Check its sources." would better indicate that we want reviewers to actually look everything over. Krisgabwoosh (talk) 23:10, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply

]

I must confess I didn't even know

WP:GACR. Ovinus (talk) 07:58, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply

]

Proving my point that something more explicit and concrete directly on the project page would be very helpful. Krisgabwoosh (talk) 08:30, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Would anyone object to me merging

WP:GANI? From there, we can trim/refine the article to be more clear. We already have too many overlapping instructions/templates imo. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 23:29, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

That would be really nice. Given it's a guideline (albeit a little-used one), the discussion to merge should probably be planned carefully and advertised on CENT. Ovinus (talk) 23:44, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There’s also some useful stuff in

WP:GACN which could be incorporated. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 11:11, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

Definitely would like to see a merge here. Have always used GANI and feel it would benefit from beefing up. REDMAN 2019 (talk) 21:31, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You and I both know in practice spot checks rarely happen.

Do we, @Trainsandotherthings? I don't know that. Does anyone ever admit to it? (I imagine that there could be circumstances in which it wouldn't be unreasonable, like 100% offline or paywalled sources.) I find dozens of people talking about paywalls last year, which they probably wouldn't notice if they weren't trying to check sources.[1] Similar searches for other phrases about checking sources were also successful. What's the evidence for spot checks being "rare"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:04, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, in whatever form it comes to (making it more explicit or rewriting). Also support the good idea of including it in all of the default templates. We don't require users to use those templates, but it's a strong signal and will help new reviewers. I find the model Ovinus is currently hitting me with at Talk:East Timor/GA1 to be a good one (just a header, a relative to diff/oldid link, and a list of sources), although perhaps we can cut to somewhere between 3-10 in the templates and then add a "..." below. CMD (talk) 10:13, 1 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Absolutely This is a great way to make sure that good articles are actually, well, good and not something randomly thrown together in two hours. Unlimitedlead (talk) 02:40, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak support the one concern I have is given that quality/academic sources tend to be
  WP:PAYWALLed or and higher quality sourcing. Additionally, not all sources are in English. Ironically, this may have unintended effect of more reviews of articles with lower quality sourcing like online newspaper etc.. All in all, still a good proposal. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 02:45, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  Spotchecking wouldn't require reviewers to look at every source, especially those that are paywalled. Just ensure that at least most are up to par. 02:56, 3 January 2023 (UTC) Krisgabwoosh (talk) 02:56, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose.
  WP:V. If it needs clarity that the only way a reviewer can ensure that quotations and contentious material are sourced appropriately is to confirm the citation in the source (i.e., spot check), then I could support codifying that. Otherwise a blanket spot check is not needed, as GA is only a minimal compliance check. Requiring GANs to be like the example above is a recipe for increasing the backlog, as it puts undue burden on the reviewer and requires nothing of the nominator. We should generally do the opposite. I would support a requirement that the nominator confirms that they've spot checked the refs, to make confirmation by the reviewer easier. czar 05:03, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support, so long as this is a spot check, meaning that it only requires a check of some of the sources. Something like "check a minimum of 5% of the sources, and no less than five in total". If we get much beyond that this is no longer a lightweight process. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:42, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Support for this particular suggestion. We should agree on the percentage and minimum number, but I think this is a good way to make sure spot check but keep it lightweight and not intimidating. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 11:14, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Agreed, a minimum yet reasonable number of spotchecks should be explicitly stated. Krisgabwoosh (talk) 12:45, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I usually check 3-5 sources that they cover the specific sentence that I'm reading, and I see no reason why this wouldn't be suitable. My issue might be that I don't really know how you would police this. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:24, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, per Czar, and a little bit per Lee. GA is intended to be a relatively lightweight process. Even FA doesn't require spot checks except for first-time nominators (nb. this is a bit buried but it's discussed here). Forcing spot checks at GA will only increase the burden on reviewers, which will increase the backlog, and I doubt it will have any great increase in text-source integrity for a couple of reasons.
  First, I don't believe there is a widespread problem with source-text integrity at GA. Most nominators are acting in good faith and have a reasonable understanding of their topic areas, so most spot checks are going to be extra work just to prove that everything is, indeed, fine. If an editor is known to be repeatedly nominating articles that turn out to have serious issues, we should be much quicker to topic ban them instead of upending our entire process just to attempt to deal with them.
  Second, if we require checks but state that only a portion of sources must be checked, most reviewers will check what is easiest to access. This means that the most difficult sources, such as those that are offline, paywalled, or not in English - precisely the ones that are most likely to need checked - will in most cases go unchecked. So again, we are burdening the reviewer with extra work yet will explicitly be allowing them to avoid looking at the sources most likely to be problematic. All in all, I simply don't see the cost-benefit ratio working out here. (And third, indeed - how do you police it? Are we going to have people spot-checking the spot checks? Who will spot check their spot checks?) ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:43, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong support: since it's unclear whether or not spotchecks are already required, let's make it explicit. They are required. Before we get into the weeds of how this will affect the backlog and so on, we have to ask what the point of a review is. It is to assess whether the article meets the
  verifiability. — Bilorv (talk) 23:25, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Oppose, we must not make the rules repetitive and overlapping. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:10, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose should be lightweight, and what if books or offline newspaper articles are used as sources? What then? --Rschen7754 03:21, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Spot checks would only apply to accessible sources. CMD (talk) 06:17, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  And what about when 50-75% of them are offline (as in many of my articles)? What then? --Rschen7754 20:35, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  25% accessible sources is already far more than would be expected to be looked at, so if that is the extreme example then there isn't likely to be much of an issue. CMD (talk) 01:10, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Maybe, but it makes the spotcheck look like useless bureaucracy that does not actually improve the status quo. --Rschen7754 22:32, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support (as not explicitly stated above). We need to make it clear that this is expected of reviewers. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 16:59, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Support. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 15:59, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal 2a: Specify a minimum number of sources to check

Separating this proposal out into its own heading as it is related to proposal 2 but may benefit from another thread. To repeat what @Mike Christie has written above, a rule could be "check a minimum of 5% of the sources, and no less than five in total". To give my opinion, I was thinking more "around 10% of the sources, and no less than five in total". Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 20:45, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support I would probably push for somewhere closer to 30%, it is a lot but source reviews are hugely important in the GA process. The only problem with this rule could be with it’s implementation, not sure how to accurately gauge how many sources the reviewer has checked. Personally I always try to read or at least skim the majority of sources in an article I’m reviewing but I appreciate others may find this too much. REDMAN 2019 (talk) 21:04, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• @Unexpectedlydian I would support this, but would also want some indication it actually happened, a question Lee Vilenski raised. Easiest way to do that, without requiring a peer review, would be to have the reviewer list which of the sources they spot checked. Since writing that out can be tedious, lowering the number to 3 sources or 5% of sources would be reasonable imo. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 21:04, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• What proportion of GA nominations have predominantly or entirely offline/paywalled sources? I imagine the average GA reviewer has access to Wikipedia Library, but even so, it's something that would need to be taken into consideration. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:10, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I am weary of codifying any rules that specifically state you shouldn't review pay-walled options. In practice it doesn't happen since it would be unreasonable to find someone with a subscription to obscure websites (e.g. the Des Moines Register), but that precedent led to the infamous Coldwelling. Maybe recommend that reviewers install a paywall blocker or have access to the Wikipedia Library before reviewing. Something noncommittal but still a suggestion. Etrius ( Us) 22:55, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  A few times I've had someone find a book I used in a local library (one DYK reviewer found a copy of The Rail Lines of Southern New England in their university library and took a look out of curiosity), but in general we can't expect people will always be able to access paywalled or offline sources. I had to pay $35 to get a copy of one of my books for my current FAC; to ask a reviewer to spend money to get a copy of a book just to spot-check would be absurd. There needs to be some amount of AGF, but we should at the same time be doing some amount of due diligence and check a few sources. If everything is offline, you could ask the nominator to provide an excerpt from the source. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 23:59, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I will note that in recent reviews, I have generally stuck to at least five, and beyond 50 total in-line citations 10 percent, selected by random number generator. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 22:25, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment Support the idea, don't support the 10%. GAs differ in length, 10% can be a lot. 5% maybe. Five is fine. I don't think paywall is an issue, this is just to get a feel for text-source integrity, it's not meant to be a thorough investigation. Reviewers not checking paywalled and offline sources is fine. CMD (talk) 02:17, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. I think it's extremely rare to find an article where the offline sources have been misused -- too closely paraphrased, or copied directly -- while the online accessible sources are used perfectly. If I spotcheck three sources and one is a problem, I would check at least three more, and if I run out of online sources I would ask the nominator to quote the material from other sources. I've failed GAs because of material quoted in that way. True nominator malfeasance, where they lie baldly, is rare enough that I've never seen it. So I think a small sample, starting with whatever sources the reviewer can access, is good enough, so long as the reviewer knows to check more if any fail. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:46, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I like this approach. I'm not sure that it's compatible with writing a specific rule, but I think it's a good approach. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:08, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support any percentage between 5% and 10% and/or any minimum number of sources between 3 and 10. This should be taken
  AGF: a reviewer doesn't need to give numbers of each source they spotchecked, just like they don't have to specify that they've checked each GA criterion.

  Even a small sample is generally enough to hit most systemic issues in sourcing. And if you encounter the same type of issue with two sources, you either need to fail the article or review more sources. The point of spotchecking is to identify issues across the whole 100% of sources, not to make sure there is at least 10% verifiability in the article. — Bilorv (talk) 23:34, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Oppose as pointless. As others have said above we require articles to meet WP:V and contain no copyright. At a minimum this means some sources need to be checked anyway. Setting any required number is going to be arbitrary. Plus there is no way to enforce this. Aircorn (talk) 15:54, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as above, this isn't the way to go and it's basically unverifiable given the lack of available oversight. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:12, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  By extension, this means that the entire GAN process is unverifiable, if nobody is conducting any oversight and we let people get away with no source or spotchecks. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 16:05, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment I understand that this would be difficult to verify, but I think we need to be realistic in making instructions for reviewers which will actually force people to check sources. In current reviews, unless a reviewer explicitly states that they have checked sources x, y, z, you have to just assume they did spot-checking. At least with a rule like this, you have more certainty that a reviewer has fulfilled that requirement. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 20:28, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as above in Prop 2.
  WP:GACR#2b already covers the extent of our "spot check" needed (to confirm quotations and contentious material). Beyond that, checking random refs has diminishing returns for which the reviewer cannot be held responsible for picking the "wrong" links to spot check. GA is only confirming the bare minimum of policy compliance. czar 17:14, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Weak Oppose While I'm very in favor of Prop 2, this seems overly bureaucratic and perhaps even unenforceable if enough off-line sources are utilized. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 15:59, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'd just like to preempt any such concerns by explaining that any implementation of QPQ would probably require a grandfather clause. I.e., a prolific nominator with 100 nominations and only 1 review would not suddenly need to review 99 articles to start nominating again. Rather, they'd need to review 1 article in order to nominate their 101st article. There are questions as to how we would monitor that. The easiest would be to simply reset nomination and review numbers, though that might prove unpopular. Krisgabwoosh (talk) 22:24, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't yet made up my mind on a QPQ rule. But before we impose a requirement, I say we ought to observe the backlog after the recent addition of GA review count to each nominator. To avoid shaming people who have a very high nom-to-review ratio, but without something artificial like "reviews since the epoch", we could also add "number of ongoing reviews" next to the number of total reviews, or # of reviews in the past month. Seeing that a nominator has a review or two open themselves may be encouraging. Ovinus (talk) 07:53, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Not a fan of QPQ here, it doesn't fit like it does at DYK. Both writing GAs and reviewing GAs are significant tasks, and asking them to run concurrently or sequentially feels disruptive. If the issue is over-prolific nominators, better to address that in another way. CMD (talk) 10:08, 1 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I would be in favour of this. Right now there's no consequence for editors who nominate lots of articles but do not review. Telling them that they have to review if they want more nominations might encourage them to start contributing to the process. Z1720 (talk) 01:33, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• There would result in an overall net negative. Forcing people to do reviews when they don’t want to will inevitably result in a lower quality of review. Reducing the backlog is not worth that. Aircorn (talk) 04:18, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• QPQ has been rejected for Good Articles several times, and for good reason in my opinion. Given how big of an ask it is, it would stifle contributions in both quality and quantity. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:45, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Wouldn't be in favour of this right now. DYK QPQ is necessary to ensure there are always reviewed DYKs ready for the front page. GAs don't have the same urgency. And as others have mentioned, I wouldn't want to discourage people from writing GAs. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 18:10, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I'm opposed. The potential benefits do not outweigh the drawbacks of potentially (1) discouraging high-quality nominations and (2) encouraging low-quality reviews. TompaDompa (talk) 22:35, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Reluctantly oppose. I'd like to see editors have this attitude about their own reviews and nominations, but enforcing it has negatives as several have noted above. Even the limited version suggested by Krisgabwoosh below has the same negatives. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:45, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• How do we feel about a sort of "semi-QPQ"? Perhaps, rather than a 1-to-1 review per nomination, it could be 1-to-5 review per nomination or even 1-to-10. I agree with @Chipmunkdavis: that QPQ runs the risk creating many lackluster reviews by people who want to get it over with to continue nominating. Oppose I'm starting to see the drawbacks of QPQ myself and I don't entirely agree with the solution I proposed. Krisgabwoosh (talk) 02:33, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose I say this as someone with 28 reviews and a total of two noms. This would encourage low quality GAN reviews while being inflexible about the different skill sets involved in reviewing and writing articles. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 11:07, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose consistency in the quality of reviews needs to be improved, as others have noted, I see this as potentially doing the opposite. Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 11:28, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 13:29, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Too many drawbacks unfortunately. In an idea world this would work amazingly, but Wikipedia isn't there. Etrius ( Us) 13:39, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose on the basis that Mike Christie's idea below is better. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:26, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Also preferring the idea raised below. REDMAN 2019 (talk) 20:55, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• In a perfect world, everyone would voluntarily do a review for each nomination they do, and all would be in balance. But we don't live in a perfect world. In theory I would support this, but in practice we know it would result in people either doing drive-by reviews or just boycotting the GAN process entirely. So reluctantly I can't support this. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 00:00, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - Having recently decided to nominate an article for GA, I was going to do some reviews and when I was looking over the GA Nominations page I was stunned when I realized that there are some GA Nominators with zero reviews but many many GAs. No wonder we have a backlog. No wonder. I am going to pay serious attention to that stat in the future when I decide what articles to review. The editors who have a more proportionate ratio of reviews to GAs will get my attention...I had no idea. Shearonink (talk) 05:24, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose regretfully. Unfortunately, this seems like it has a huge potential for abuse, as it might encourage quick passes or quick fails. I'd prefer something like proposal 9, in which prolific reviewers' nominations are prioritized. – Epicgenius (talk) 23:59, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Too much hard work for people like me who don't enjoy reviewing Chidgk1 (talk) 13:07, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, this is exactly not what we should do; as Epicgenius says, it could readily encourage counterproductive behaviour. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:13, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have gotten some great GAN reviews in the past; these two stand out for their thoroughness, but I'm not sure they are great examples for exactly this reason. Has anyone got a really well done, but less lengthy review that could serve as a model? (t · c) buidhe 08:51, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Guerillero's review for me at Talk:Black Christian Siriano gown of Billy Porter/GA1 was really good, in my opinion. It concisely nailed what needed to be fixed to bring the article to FAC (since he knew that was a possibility). It is more freeform and doesn't directly address the GA criteria in the review, but it could be useful as an example of a GA review style that doesn't slavishly follow the GA templates. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 09:01, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My first-ever GA nomination was for the article Germán Busch. Looking back at User:Tayi Arajakate's review (Talk:Germán Busch/GA1), it was probably one of the best intros to GA I could have had. I was a fresh editor back then and the article I nominated clearly did not meet the standards for GA. Rather than quick fail it, as they easily could have, Tayi took the time to walk me through the steps of making it up to par. Krisgabwoosh (talk) 22:32, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• The last thing we wont to do is standardise reviews. Would be in favour of writing an improved guideline to outline expectations to help new reviewers, but the strength of GAs is in that apart from some minimum standards it doesn’t dictate how reviews are conducted. Aircorn (talk) 04:27, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am not calling for standardization of reviews, but I do think there should be a diverse set of reviews that are recognized for their quality. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 04:31, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • I don’t think the diversity exists. Quality reviews could range from a simple pass/fail to a detailed review longer than the article itself. It depends on subject matter, broadness, experience of reviewer, quality of nom and a whole host of other factors. I feel this is much better described in a guideline format. Aircorn (talk) 04:46, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I would support this, and I'd like to add to Sammi Brie's comment that the selection should be diverse. Shorter reviews and longer ones, reviews that use templates and those that don't, and maybe reviews for different types of articles (biographies, history articles, science topics, movies, etc) because the approach can be different depending on the type of article. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:49, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I believe we should be more opinionated about what templates to use, to take away the guesswork involved for newbies. Perhaps preloading a template when creating a new page, a spot for the 5+ sources spot checked (if Proposal 2A passes) etc.. Experienced reviewers can disregard the default templates still. And extra emphasis on highlighting the reasonable/short reviews as realistic/aspirational ones, not the most extensive/complex ones that will scare prospective reviewers away. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 21:12, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to suggest that a some "model" failed review examples should be included too. Xx78900 (talk) 12:46, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• It's a nice idea to reward exceptional/thorough reviews, which I think happens organically with barnstars as it is, but I would leave the "model" examples to WikiProjects to curate, as we hardly need more reasons to point to GA reviews as not being thorough enough "as the models". Minimal acceptable "models" could be useful for reviewers who only present the criteria and need guidance to add some explanation of how/why the article meets the criteria. czar 05:10, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @

  Czar, the idea isn't to "reward" exceptional reviews, it's to provide examples of various review styles for editors who are new to GA to look at. One of the biggest concerns I see from people asking about getting into GA reviews is not feeling like they understand how to do them, even when following the GA instructions and templates. Having models provides people with examples to follow and check themselves against. If you're opposed to the idea of picking extant reviews, I suppose we could write up some entirely fictional reviews as examples. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 15:29, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

  ]

  It may not be the intent of this proposal but I think it's the natural conclusion. Designating "models" inherently creates a standard/bar by virtue of its existence. For a new editor requesting a model article, reading in-between the lines, they really want to know the standard of reviewing. I'd sooner direct them to random, recent GA reviews so that they understand the variety of quality instead of "ideal" reviews (which most reviews will not be). Having the encouragement to start at any level of quality is more important than following a specific model of review.

  I think a second natural conclusion of choosing "model" articles is the honor of peer recognition of exceptional reviews, which I'm arguing is a good thing and a side-effect that should be made into the point of the proposal. The act of selecting the best peer reviews (across any forum—GA, PR, FA, talk pages) of the month would honor that time-intensive work in a way that we currently do not as a community, and in so doing it creates a high-water mark for quality without creating the implicit pressure that this should be the norm for a new reviewer.

  Not opposed to extant reviews at all, just mindful of what it socially reinforces. czar 06:32, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Right, I see where you're coming from. I like your suggestion about using random recent reviews instead. I wonder if there'd be a way to implement that with a simple link, like, "click here to see a recent review" or something, like how Category:All orphaned articles lets you click for "Random page in this category". There's discussion below about changing the default instructions, maybe it could be placed there, or on the mentoring page if that takes off. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 06:45, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, along with 4A below, for reasons that I explained there. When I started writing articles to nominate for GA, I had a very good template to work from: a long list of GAs and FAs written on the same subjects, which many people had signed off as being paragons of quality. But when I started reviewing GAs, there was basically nothing to go off. Even if I looked through a list of recent GA reviews, there was no way for me to tell which represented a good and thorough review, a lazy review, or an overly particular review: as a consequence, I held off on doing one for quite some time. At this point, I am very comfortable with the process, and I think so is everybody commenting here, but for those who haven't been properly initiated, I think we are asking a lot; "you should do a review that meets our standards, but we will only give you general criteria with very wide room for interpretation, and we don't even have examples of what it's supposed to look like". jp×g 22:26, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @JPxG, would you need authentic reviews, or would some pretend reviews be useful to you? I share your worry about following a flawed model, and many GA reviews are imperfect in some respect. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:16, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. I think this is a great idea that would make the nominating process less daunting for newcomers. I know that when I started nominating articles, I would have loved a few models to help me get better situated.--Gen. Quon_[Talk] 19:07, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Open a page to collect noms on a rolling basis for a perennial "Exceptional Review of the Month" recognition. Let's not get lost in the details of what qualifies, as the point would be mainly to recognize exceptional reviews affirmed by the community. I.e., reviews of difficult subject matter or broad/Vital topics, reviews that are exceptionally welcoming to a new reviewer, reviews from an expert in the field who wouldn't normally review. Basically we'd encourage nomination of these and any reviews over some voter threshold would get barnstars and their review shown in a place of honor for some limited time. This would effectively address the heart of Props 4 and 1 while providing a format for peer recognition. I'd like for editors to "collect" exceptional review recognition the way that other editors collect GA and FA icons. czar 09:23, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support – I think this is a nice idea to encourage a positive community of reviewers and ensure that reviews don't disappear into the ether once an article becomes GA. This system promotes quality over quantity, the reverse of which is an issue some people have raised with proposal 1. It would also create a handy list of "Model reviews" as per proposal 4. As you say, the criteria for "exceptional" doesn't have to be overly-complex. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 17:12, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I like this one, but it might need a bit of work to get up and running. —Kusma (talk) 18:31, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  One idea could be to do this during backlog drives, and to give out "good review" prizes in addition to the "many reviews" ones. —Kusma (talk) 23:19, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support Perhaps it could be a modified version of Proposal 1. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 04:31, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, as an adjunct to Proposal 1: perhaps some bronze-star version of the fuschia GA symbol () would be in order, like the one over to the right here. I have seen some very good GA reviews, and they are basically never read by anyone apart from the reviewer and nominator themselves! jp×g 08:45, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

To go into a little more depth: I remember when I did my first review of a GA nomination, I was really confused because I'd never done it before, and I was worried that I would either be too harsh or too lenient on each of the criteria. This was compounded by the fact that there was no system for me to have my review signed off on by a more experienced user; I was concerned that I might just do a crappy review and have it etched in stone on an article somebody worked hard on. I tried to look for some "typical GA reviews" to base mine off, but even when I looked at the similarities between other reviews, it was pretty hard to figure out the difference between "you're supposed to do this" and "a lot of people do this out of laziness". jp×g 22:20, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 16:00, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: I agree that this could be a nice sum-up of the Proposals 1 and 4. As a beginner myself, I'm striving to improve my general skills as an editor and, in some cases, a reviewer, so it would definitely be useful to have some kind of "cornerstones" to look at during this process. It would be a really nice positive feedback for the nominated reviewers, too! @
  Czar This would look similar to WP:EOTW in its main targets, right? Oltrepier (talk) 19:52, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  Not opposed to that, definitely. I was personally thinking some kind of vote by acclamation like FASA, i.e., offer a period for others to chime in, complimenting the aspects they liked, such that the final talk page message recognizing the recipient can reflect that show of support. Open to ideas and workshopping. czar 21:26, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. I like this idea, as it would incentivize folks to perform quality reviews, fixing one of the weaker elements of GAN (imho).--Gen. Quon_[Talk] 19:08, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment I would prefer some "gets the job done" reviews, which do what they need to and get out. I suspect they will be a more comfortable example for new reviewers. CMD (talk) 00:49, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, this is the kind of award that works. But I suggest !voting along the lines of how MilHist awards are done. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:38, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I support this, but overall I think the mentorship program needs to be revamped. Right now it's just a list of users, some of whom are inactive. Reaching out to someone specifically can be intimidating for a new user, and there should be a reasonable assurance that the mentor is active. I don't know what it would look like, but there should be a better system to pair mentors with new reviewers. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:54, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Wikipedia:Good article help got closed down a few years ago. The mentors are listed as a subpage of that which isn't ideal. They should probably be moved somewhere else. Not sure where though. Probably need to check a few names on there as it is quite stale. Aircorn (talk) 17:56, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Is mentorship useful? I think it would be more useful, as a new editor, to receive a pre-review as was done here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Green/Meetup/3#20-minute assessment (optional), with the idea that if an editor wants to learn, they can ask follow-up questions. czar 05:13, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @

  Wikipedia:GAN/I, and I didn't find it anywhere else. Plus, as @Aircorn and @Thebiguglyalien pointed out, there's no real indication about the activity of the various users on the list, so I had to figure it out myself. So, I definitely support this proposal, even though the accessibility issues are likely easier to solve than the ones involving the program as a whole... Oltrepier (talk) 20:08, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

  ]

• Don't want to hijack your idea, but I wonder if we could actually make the mentorship more proactive. I have had maybe three editors reach out to me in about ten years (I don't have the name recognition of others on the list, but still). Mike Christie how hard would it be to make a page that displays editors with less than 5 reviews that have a current review open and keep it updated? If we had such a page and enough experienced reviewers available it would be easy for them to reach out to the reviewer. Just a simple Hi "name", I see you are relatively new to reviewing Good Articles. If I can help in anyway feel free to ping me. If it could be signed off at that page so other editors know it is taken care of that would be useful. Maybe it could even be expanded so new nominators and second opinions get listed there. Sort of a one stop shop for people needing help. Aircorn (talk) 09:21, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That would be fairly easy to do. It could also be a section on the GAN page, or a flag or note on the entry line in the GAN page. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:39, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I like this idea and would support it being implemented, as well as signing up as a mentor. —Ganesha811 (talk) 03:15, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. I would be happy to be a mentor, as well. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 16:00, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There are some editors who have several open GANs who are choosing not to review, perpetuating the backlog. By limiting the number of nominations, editors will hopefully spend more time reviewing. This in turn will improve their review/GAN stats and encourage more editors to review their own noms. It would also encourage editors to nominate their best work first, as less comments in a GAN will get their article promoted faster, freeing up another spot for their nomination and reducing the amount of time a reviewer needs to spend giving comments on the article. I think five open GANs would be a good number, but other suggestions are welcome. Z1720 (talk) 02:03, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose, with the disclosure that I currently have nine nominations open. We should be incentivizing reviews, not disincentivizing other contributions. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:56, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Maybe if we can tie it to review ratio. I can think of a couple of editors who nominate multiple articles, yet pull more than their fair share in reviews. I can also think of a few who nominate multiple articles and never review any in return. Practically it might be too difficult to implement though. Aircorn (talk) 18:04, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Support A side effect of the default order being changed is that multiple noms in the same area are bunched together much more than previously. I think a cap is needed to keep the items on the list varied as mutliple noms usually nominate in the same area. I would support a cap for each editor in each category ideally, but a total cap is acceptable. Aircorn (talk) 08:22, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose anything that tries to avoid people making good content is contrary to what we should be doing. If I wanted to review 50 article and nominate another 30, there should be no issue with that. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 22:31, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I don't think this is a good idea. For one thing, I'm not convinced that the existence of editors who nominate a lot more than they review is in itself a problem. Writing high-quality articles and reviewing nominations are to some (not insignificant) extent separate skillsets. For another, limiting the number of open nominations would not in itself reduce the effective backlog, only hide it. If an editor has 20 articles that are ready for nomination but they can only nominate 5 of them, the other 15 may be hidden from the publicly visible backlog but they are in practice only put on a waiting list to be nominated. Without an increase in throughput, limiting the number of open nominations does not in any meaningful way ameliorate the backlog issue. The idea that editors might spend more time reviewing is, I think, a bit optimistic. As I said, reviewing requires a different set of skills and I think it's more likely that they would either keep on doing what they're doing or disengage from
  WP:GAN entirely. That last point is the most important one to me: this might discourage the nomination (and for that matter creation/curation) of high-quality articles. That's not, to me, an acceptable price to pay for reducing the backlog. TompaDompa (talk) 22:59, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Not making any friends with this comment, but I support a limit. I think no more than 20 is more than reasonable. This would also stop the practice of flooding GAN which a few editors have done, adding a large number of nominations at once. We need to balance the desire to have more GAs with the desire to avoid excessive draining of volunteer time. I can only imagine how an editor new to the GAN process would feel submitting a nomination and then having to wait months because a few editors have flooded the list. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 00:20, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • For context, there are currently two editors with more than 20 open nominations. Both have 31, so if this were implemented right now it would reduce the backlog by 22, from 604 to 582 (3.6%) or from 505 to 483 (4.4%), depending on if one counts all nominations or only the unreviewed ones. TompaDompa (talk) 00:32, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    Worth noting this is also preventative; there was a time not long ago when Doug Coldwell had 50 nominations active at once (as we know, it's because he was half-assing them, but still). Trainsandotherthings (talk) 00:03, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. The point of the GAN list is not to show every article that could feasibly be rated as a GA but to curate a list for active consideration. For comparison, eswiki limits to one active nom per nominator and ruwiki limits to two. czar 02:43, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I suppose the counter argument to the deal at Eswiki is - does that add an atmosphere indicative of creating content? GA is only really an award style process, where we award status to an article. It doesn't mean other articles aren't at that level. However, from my end, a lot of the pull of making content better, in fixing an article up to become GA or featured is part of the reason for doing the work. It is also the same in reverse, if I didn't have lots of things to review, I wouldn't do as many reviews, so in real terms everything goes more slowly. I'd be fine with pushing for a certain amount of reviews before you can nominate another article, but flat out having a limit stifles a lot of my creative wants. I get why this often comes up, but I don't think it's the way to go. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 07:44, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I have supported such a measure in the past, and continue to do so. My previous suggestion was a maximum of 3 unreviewed noms per section. Objections regarding discouraging content have never made sense to me, content can be built without GAN, and even if built for GAN, there is no time limit which means submissions must happen immediately after improvement. CMD (talk) 04:17, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I concur with the above, I don't see a limitation to the number of open nominations discouraging content creation. Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 09:52, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Abstain I am willing to support this only if the limit is ~30 noms. I don't want to punish people for their contributions but we are not repeating 50 concurrent noms from a single user. The most prolific contributors generally sit around 25-30 GA nominations, anything higher than that likely is sacrificing quality for quantity. That being said, the backlog is a major problem that delays nominations being assessed, thus artificially inflating people's numbers. I was a major supporter of this in the past, but do understand the reality of
  WP:GA makes this difficult to implement without hurting specific users. Etrius ( Us) 13:55, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Oppose. We should be encouraging quality content creation and Good article nominations. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 14:33, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Respectfully, you have 153 GAs and exactly zero reviews. You have no right to say that limiting nominations is wrong when you're a major contributor to our current issue. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:40, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  They do have a right to oppose; their position is consistent with the belief that the backlog is not a problem. I added proposal 9, below, because I think it's better to make information visible and let reviewers make the own decisions, without a need to change nominator behaviour. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:55, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Exactly, this discussion effects them more than most. They are just the person we need to hear from and I am glad they are commenting. They better than anyone can answer the question of why editors who clearly value Good Articles and know the criteria don't want to review. If understand that and can figure out a way to get them involved in the process it is a win-win. Aircorn (talk) 09:09, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I suppose it's worth pointing out that this obviously effects me and a couple editors more than others too. Whilst I don't always have lots of nominations up, I do sometimes provide 20-40 noms at a time, but I would also provide proportional reviews for those that I nom (I do aim for two reviews for a nomination). I can understand why people are annoyed at a large amount of noms with no reviews, but in my eyes the better way to deal with that is to have them appear at the bottom of the list. Whilst it does make the number of nominations larger, the speed of the actual backlog increases. I know my review numbers wouldn't be the same if I were limited to the amount of noms. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 09:22, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I object to calling it an "issue" when a user successfully contributes good content. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:07, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That's fine, the community should simply respond by boycotting all nominations by those who repeatedly nominate but refuse to ever review. I follow that practice now, and hope others will join me. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 02:47, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  To elaborate further, imagine that the GAN process is akin to Take a penny, leave a penny. Submitting a nomination is the equivalent of depositing a penny, while reviewing is the equivalent of withdrawing one. Now apply the metaphor to a prolific nominator who never reviews. Our nominator has deposited more than 150 pennies into our take a penny, leave a penny system, and never removed any. This is good, you might say - they're contributing, right? But while each penny in the real world is essentially the same in value, this is where the metaphor diverges from the actual situation. Each one of those pennies is a nominated article. And when you show up and flood the tray with pennies, you are burying other nominations.

  If a reviewer deposits 20 pennies and also removes 20 pennies (by reviewing), the system remains in balance. But when someone comes along and drops a train car filled with pennies onto our little take a penny, leave a penny tray, they throw the system seriously out of balance. To restore balance, other volunteers must make a net withdrawal, by completing more reviews than nominations. To restore the system to balance, over 150 times people have had to balance out one editor's additions by completing reviews. This is immensely selfish behavior by the nominator. The balance of our system has become seriously skewed by this behavior, repeated many times by many editors, and therefore we have a major backlog. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 03:42, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Sorry, but I have to agree with what a couple others have said. Contributing quality content is not an "issue". Re: "Respectfully, you have 153 GAs and exactly zero reviews. You have no right to say that limiting nominations is wrong when you're a major contributor to our current issue": Yes, I've promoted 150+ articles to Good status, but that's over 15 years of editing and I rarely have more than a couple articles nominated at the same time. I don't think my GA work is problematic. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 23:50, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak oppose I don’t think people should be prevented from submitting GAN’s point blank, but I have been thinking for a while that people who are submitting large numbers of GA noms should maybe receive a note on their talk page or something nudging them in the direction of taking up some reviews. (strength of nudge is up for debate) REDMAN 2019 (talk) 20:51, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support even a strict number like 1-2. If there's no backlog, the number limit wouldn't matter anyways. As long as there is a backlog, prolific contributors/writers can take the discretionary decisions of which Article to nominate. The most prolific/high quality contributors tend to receive the quickest reviews anyways, because they know the ropes. But newer nominators will be able to stay focused on improving their current nom, instead of seeking a shotgun method to nominating. I would rather review the best noms per each individual believes they made. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 21:09, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The most prolific/high quality contributors tend to receive the quickest reviews anyways - In my experience at least, that isn't true. I usually have to wait 3-4 months before my oldest nominations are reviewed, even though I've nominated quite a few articles over the years, and even though many of the GA reviews have found relatively few issues. Furthermore, the current list of

  WP:GANs shows numerous nominations by prolific nominators that have been sitting around for months, including in the math and music sections. – Epicgenius (talk) 16:59, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

  ]

• Support some kind of limit on concurrent noms - 10-20 maybe, I think 30 is too high to produce any useful reduction in the backlog, and anything less than 10 is too restrictive. And perhaps those with low review ratios could receive talk page reminders per Redman's suggestion. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:35, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I'd support this only if coupled to the user's reviewing rate. Something like the following: If you have more than 5 GAs and your reviews-to-GA ratio is under 0.5, you can have two open nominations. If your ratio is between 0.5 and 1, you can have five open nominations. If your ratio is between 1 and 1.5, ten nominations; 1.5 to 2, twenty, if your ratio is better than 2, you may have fifty open noms. Numbers open to tweaking, of course. As a compromise extraneous nominations could be displayed "below the fold" instead of on the main GAN page. —Kusma (talk) 14:50, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  As nifty as such ratios might be, I don't think we have the capacity to manage them. A flat number is simple to understand for everyone. Linking this to reviews might make nominations feel QPQish. CMD (talk) 15:08, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I'd be open to this. Considering we do actually have this as a raw number already, it's actually doable. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:16, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It might be best to view this as a version of Proposal 9: display all nominations by people who pass the criteria as normal, but create a "hidden"/"below the fold" section for all excess nominations. The bot could easily decide what gets displayed prominently and what is a further click away, and the criteria can be as complicated as needed as they are evaluated by bot. —Kusma (talk) 15:53, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I think any approach that hides some nominations under some conditions is equivalent to QPQ for those nominators. If we're not hiding, just changing the order of display, then I agree that this is just another proposed sort order. Any reasonable sort order is possible, but I think if we're going to mess with the sort order we should do something simple and easy to understand to start with. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:23, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't think hiding is equivalent to QPQ; hiding "excess" nominations just means non-reviewing nominators will only have some of their noms visible in the normal queue. It is a throttle that means they may need to wait longer, not a requirement to do any reviews. —Kusma (talk) 16:42, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  OK, I see your point -- it doesn't require them to do reviews, it's just an incentive. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:46, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support-- I can think of no reason someone would need to have more than 10-20 GANs open at once. It just overwhelms the system and overshadows the nominations of other users. I'd prefer Kusma's suggestion above, but I think some limit is better than none, even if relatively high. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 21:27, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • A reason? --- because GANs can languish in the queue for as much as 130 days ... and yes, some of them may have been worked on bit by bit over several years, until eventually a bunch of are ready ... and if you look at the list, setting the cap at 10 would only cut the queue by 55 (assuming you quickfailed the surplus? is that really what you want to do?); setting the cap at 20 would cut the list by only 18 out of 597 today, i.e. basically it'll make no difference to the queue length, just be a pain for those of us who've been waiting a long time already...
  • So, Oppose, the measure won't achieve anything useful. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:09, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    No, the proposal would presumably only take effect on nominations made after it was instituted (nominators with more open nominations than the cap would likely be 'grandfathered' in). It's more to prevent swamping of the queue in the future, in my understanding. We have seen nominators with completely unreasonable numbers of nominations in the past and it is reasonable to assume that it would happen again. Also, a queue that is 55 smaller does seem to me like a worthwhile decrease to me, almost 10%. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 14:05, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    A technical note: grandfathering should be fairly easy to do -- there's a nomination timestamp for each nomination, and anything prior to that date could be ignored for the purposes of a cap. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:23, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support - I know this perennial discussion provokes a range of opinions, but for me it's clear, I only ever tend to have a maximum of two GANs open, mainly because just as I wouldn't do too many GA reviews at the same time, it seems unfair to nominate more articles than I could work on all at once. So for me it seems absolutely reasonable to say maximum 5 GANs, since I don't know how anyone could deal with more than that all at once. And as a happy corollary it would bring the total number of open GANs down considerably. Mujinga (talk) 12:28, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. It seems reasonable even from a nominator's point of view, as having too many of your GANs reviewed at the same time would be hard to cope with. I'd support a limit in the 10-20 range as suggested by others above. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 22:15, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose: there is no easy cut-off number and there are a number of prolific nominators who I trust to have taken time and care over each article they nominate. Individual contributors should be contacted in a low-stakes, low-profile way in the first instance if there is an issue, like on their talk page. If there are no
  CIR issues and the nominator is putting effort in then we shouldn't be suppressing nominations, particularly if QPQ is not required.

  For topics I am really interested in, I'll take up a GA review ad hoc as soon as I see it's been nominated. Otherwise, I try to review when I nominate or periodically to help the backlog. I don't know whether my behaviour is typical, but if it is then the true backlog (articles that people want reviewed) decreases faster the more articles that are nominated concurrently. This is because the larger the list, the more knowledgeable a reviewer can be about their chosen article. — Bilorv (talk) 23:48, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support Xx78900 (talk) 12:47, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak oppose limiting open GANs per editor would only work if the waiting time for reviews was very low. But many nominations don't get reviewed for several months. So this would make it impossible for industrious editors to continue contributing while they wait for someone else to review their current nominations. I think connecting it to the review ratio could work, as suggested by Aircorn and Kusma: this way, there is something the nominator can do if they want to post more nominations. Phlsph7 (talk) 16:00, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose a hard cap, but support a soft cap. While I would not want a hard limit (in which you can't make any more nominations ever until one of your articles is reviewed) I'd support a soft cap of between 10 and 20. For example, "if you have 20 nominations, you can only nominate an additional article if none of your current nominations have been picked up for a week". The statistics at
  WP:GANR suggest that this would only affect a small number of people, though (including me). A hard cap of 10-20 would merely push these people's nominations in the future. Anything lower than 10 would be overly restrictive - other than the Coldwell incident, there is no evidence that nominators with multiple concurrent GANs exhibit a pattern of nominating faulty articles. – Epicgenius (talk) 16:55, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  I believe a limit is also preventative. You're certainly one of the most prolific nominators in GAN history, but there's no question that your articles are of sufficient quality (as opposed to Coldwell who spammed half-baked articles into the GAN queue). With that said, you have over 400 GAs and far fewer reviews, though I know you have been reviewing more recently and asking you to do 300 reviews and no nominations is ridiculous. My thinking is a hard limit of 20 would encourage those who hit the cap to review other nominations, bringing the backlog down and making their own nominations get picked up sooner. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 18:35, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That is a fair point. I'll admit that I've dropped the ball on actually reviewing articles, especially since 2019, when my ratio of GAs to reviews only hovered around 2:1. Having over 400 GAs and only 45 reviews is quite embarrassing, which is why I really do plan to review more articles now.

  On the other hand, a soft cap makes more sense to me than a hard cap, as a soft cap would prevent people from nominating 50 pages simultaneously, but it doesn't penalize a nominator for not having their GANs picked up (as a hard cap would). If it is true that a reviewer can get their GAN picked up more rapidly by reviewing more nominations, then this distinction would not matter. However, I've observed that conducting a large number of reviews doesn't always correlate to having their GANs picked up more quickly, especially for complicated topics. Hopefully proposal 9 would fix that, but complex topics such as STEM-related topics might still languish. – Epicgenius (talk) 19:57, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The differences in topic and therefore associated reviewers is part of why a per-section limit would be more beneficial than an overall cap, allowing an editor to say keep nominating a bunch of animal articles even if their GAN on obscure musical notation languishes. That said, if the overall cap is as high as 10 or 20, this might not be a significant issue. CMD (talk) 01:12, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm not opposed in principle to a soft cap; my concern is how we would implement and enforce it. Assuming technical details could be worked out, I wouldn't stand in opposition, though I retain a preference for a hard cap. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 03:40, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  One of the ways to implement a soft cap is to figure out what's abnormal, and post that. At Wikipedia:Requests for comment#Multiple simultaneous RfCs on one page we added a box that says it's rare to have more than two RFCs open at a time. We aren't imposing a rule; we're just telling them what's common. Providing a factual statement seems to be enough to restrain people from opening six or ten RFCs (which was rare, and is now basically non-existent). We could do something similar here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:49, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, so long as the cap is set fairly high -- at least 10. And I'd prefer an approach that means the nominations can still be viewed if a reviewer wants to see them -- e.g. ones past the cap are in a collapsed section at the end of the list. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:23, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - any limit... 1-2, or 10-20, whether "hard" or "soft" as proposed above. I don't think that limiting GANs will stop people from making content, but I do think that not limiting GANs overwhelms the available reviewers. Levivich (talk) 03:08, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support a limit of 10 (15 or 20 also feasible). Some people nominate a ton, and I think it's reasonable to have an incentive to reduce the backlog if you are adding a lot to it over a short time period. Nominations above the limit should be allowed but hidden, so that no more than 10 per nominator are visible at any time. —Ganesha811 (talk) 03:14, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak Support conditional to 6A. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 16:05, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support a limit of five, but suggest that by a consensus discussion, individual editors might be temporarily exempted (see how
  WP:FAR handles nominations)-- for example, I'm sure Ealdgyth can handle as many as she wants. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:42, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support any reasonable limit. A small cadre of writers shouldn't have a majority of the open GAs to review --In actu (Guerillero) ^{Parlez Moi} 11:56, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There's been a fair amount of debate about a limit, with more support for more generous limits. I think a cap of 20 is more than reasonable, and to get consensus I'm proposing it as a separate item. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 04:35, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

To make this more specific, can you say what happens to excess nominations -- would they be collapsed or completely invisible? And would we grandfather old nominations? E.g. no nomination prior to adoption of this proposal would be made invisible because of this proposal? My own preference would to grandfather old nominations, and to collapse rather than render invisible. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 04:48, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'd have them invisible (well, I'd have them not nominated, so I don't fully understand the question, are you suggesting a bot filter?), and I don't see why it would need to affect current noms. CMD (talk) 06:19, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I was thinking this would be a bot filter -- nobody wants to manually police something like this. The bot could silently not list the newest surplus noms, or list them in a collapsed section, in the topic or subtopic or at the end of the GAN page. If it's a bot filter the grandfathering question is relevant because the bot would need to know that older noms get a pass. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:39, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A limit of 20 is going to hit almost no one. Very little effect on the visible backlog, not worth the effort even if we ignore the downsides. —Kusma (talk) 13:52, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If this is going to be bot controlled and thus not even cause the delaying of nominations, a smaller limit feels much more feasible. CMD (talk) 14:00, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

On the other hand, perhaps a limit of 5-10 per nominator and section could help increase the variety of what nominations are open. I prefer 10 species, 10 breweries and 10 video games to 30 football seasons. —Kusma (talk) 14:10, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And yet people further down are screaming that this would directly harm multiple editors. I'm confused. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 03:54, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support a bot controlled limit of ten or higher (meaning the closest number ≥10 that consensus can be found for). Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 14:08, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support a bot filter of 10 which hides/collapses the excess nominations and grandfathers in nominations that precede this proposal. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:45, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. Spammed nominations and other poor quality mass nominations are already dealt with. The only people that this would affect are a small handful of our most efficient content contributors, and I strongly condemn the targeting of a few specific editors because they're too good at contributing. I will oppose any proposal that wants to lower high-quality input instead of raising high-quality output. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:51, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Eddie891's proposal. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 17:00, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment There are two main ways to decrease the backlog: (1) more reviews and (2) fewer nominations. Limiting nominations per nominator targets mainly industrious contributors and may result in fewer high quality nominations without more reviews. We should instead focus on reducing low-quality nominations and on creating additional incentives for reviewing. If a limit has to be implemented, then it should be high (maybe 20 is ok but 10 is too low). It would be preferable if additional nominations are allowed but put in a less visible location like the bottom of the list or a collapsed list, as suggested by Mike Christie. Phlsph7 (talk) 17:20, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Limiting nominations per nominator targets mainly industrious contributors and may result in fewer high quality nominations without more reviews. Do you not recall when Doug Coldwell flooded the queue with shitty nominations less than a year ago, having 50 at once? This is preventative, not punitive. With no evidence to back these claims, I cannot find any merit in them. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 00:55, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Low-quality nominations can already be removed out of hand. Your proposal exclusively targets editors that make high-quality nominations, and I think it's unfortunate that some of our most valuable contributors are being treated so dismissively on this talk page; the whole point of GA reviews is to support these users, not to sideline and insult them. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:37, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  If you think my goal is to "target" and "treat dismissively" editors who make "high-quality nominations", you are severely mistaken. This is not just about quality, I care far more about keeping the GAN process from decaying to a point it takes half a year or more to get articles reviewed (and for some article we have already reached that point). There's no obligation that editors can submit an infinite number of nominations at any one time. That you think this is motivated by "sidelining and insulting" editors shows you're quick to attack me simply for having a different point of view. I'm very disappointed you'd accuse me of such things. Nobody is being targeted specifically by this proposal, though you interpret it that way (wrongly). Furthermore, many of our editors who create the "high-quality nominations" you are pearl-clutching about already have the self-control and awareness to limit the nominations they have open at once, to reduce the backlog and avoid overwhelming our pool of reviewers. I do this myself - or do I not count as someone who makes your supposed "high-quality nominations"?

  I am open to solutions to increase reviewing without applying things such as caps. But it's clear that we have issues, and caps are a valid consideration. You can disagree with that without attacking me. A cap doesn't limit how many articles one can work on or write, just how many can be submitted to GAN at once. FAC caps editors at one nomination at a time, is that also a great evil and an insult to nominators? Twenty open nominations at once is more than fair for a cap; indeed, some have called for 10 or even less.

  You also choose to ignore the history of Coldwell's misconduct; it took multiple ANI drama threads and extensive wasting of editor time to deal with him. I am motivated by a desire to prevent anything like that from reoccurring. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 03:52, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  If it seems that I'm accusing you personally of anything, I do apologize. I'm concerned that these will be the things caused by such a proposal. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 04:23, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The parallel with FAC had not occurred to me, but it is true that FAC has a limit of 1, or 1.5 since you can also have a co-nom, and it hasn't harmed the production of quality. What it's harmed is the recognition of that quality, which is less of a concern. There are editors with dozens of FAC-ready articles who will never get them all promoted, but they keep writing those articles. Similarly at GAN Sammi Brie has said she has scores of articles ready to nominate but has not, in order not to flood the list. This proposal wouldn't limit anyone's ability to write good articles, or to nominate them; it would only limit how many of them would display on the GAN page at a given time. I don't think that would discourage almost any article writer. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 04:45, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I think Trainsandotherthings is right that there have been some cases where such limits would have been useful to prevent spamming low-quality nominations. But is that a real problem or just an occasional occurrence? For example, if we were to impose the cap today, would it remove mainly low-quality or high-quality nominations? Spamming of low-quality nominations could be prevented by other measures, like banning drive-by nominations, as is already being discussed, or making the rules for quick fails wider. We could also modify instructions to encourage high-quality nominations. Phlsph7 (talk) 07:04, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose Wikipedia should not be discouraging good articles. It takes a long time to build a good article and I do not think that anyone can flood the zone with frivolous nominations. If someone is spamming nominations then deal with it at that point. Jorahm (talk) 18:30, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support 10 as being more reasonable than 20, but I'd support 20 as better than 0. Levivich (talk) 19:45, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, not need for penalty for prolific writers. It wouldn't solve the problem, but can discourage few editors who wrote a lot of GAs. Artem.G (talk) 20:06, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose this specific suggestion (as I already did the more general one above). The implicit assumption here is that a handful of editors having several nominations open at the same time causes, rather than results from, the backlog. I'm not seeing compelling evidence that this is the case. Like Thebiguglyalien and Phlsph7, I think our approach should be to try to increase the number of reviews rather than reduce the number of nominations. I see minimal potential benefits and major potential drawbacks to implementing this suggestion. TompaDompa (talk) 22:25, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I think it is perfectly reasonable to restrict number of nominations open per user as large numbers can overwhelm a fairly static reviewer capacity, especially without clear ways to drastically increase the reviewer base. FAC already does have such restrictions-- indeed to a far greater extent than this proposal--yet I doubt anyone commenting here would oppose those limits as punishing people who write content. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 01:00, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The differing dynamics at

  WP:FAC caused by each nomination needing the support of multiple editors in order to pass alone makes the situations not directly comparable. TompaDompa (talk) 04:47, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

  ]

  I agree that they are not directly comparable, but they are also not completely different… Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 13:36, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I hope that people who opposed any limit in Proposal 6, like mine, will be taken into account by the closer. — Bilorv (talk) 23:31, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support a limit of 10 (15 or 20 also feasible). Some people nominate a ton, and I think it's reasonable to have an incentive to reduce the backlog if you are adding a lot to it over a short time period. Nominations above the limit should be allowed but hidden, so that no more than 10 per nominator are visible at any time. —Ganesha811 (talk) 03:13, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. If editors can create enough quality content to have 20+ GA noms at once, major kudos! ---Another Believer _(Talk) 03:41, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per Levivich (I made a comment near the beginning but did not give a clear position). I'd much prefer a per-section cap as I have expressed before and as Kusma has also expressed above, but alas this has not gained any traction. There is no "penalty" for those writing GAs; at worst it makes their oldest GANs more likely to be reviewed first, at best it might produce a less intimidating GAN page that brings in a few more reviews, benefiting prolific nominators the most. CMD (talk) 04:48, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. So what if all 20 get reviewed and put on hold at the same time or even a few days apart? I can't see any nominator being able to respond in a timely manner. --Rschen7754 05:24, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. I've done a fair number of reviews, and I've also nominated ten GAs in the same day; I think that at least some amount of restriction is necessary, although I don't agree with the "two per editor" limit that some have alluded to above. There are also situations in which someone just has a bunch of articles that become ready around the same time, and telling them to take a hike would be a mistake. I think that something that might work is for there to be a limit per user (like ten or fifteen or twenty) after which point an optional QPQ comes into effect to raise a user's limit. Let's say, for example, I submit ten articles to the queue, wait for them all to be processed, and then submit ten more: that would be allowed. And I would also be allowed to submit ten articles, review ten, and submit another batch on top of the first one. Or I can just wait and do it normally. I think this would give people more flexibility than just a limit -- although, if everyone thinks this idea is stupid, just having a limit would be fine too (as long as it was reasonably high). jp×g 08:53, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I think this is overly bureaucratic; IMO the community can generally moderate what is "too many" reviews, as was the case with Doug, which it seems like many are implicitly (and some explicitly) referring to. Hard limits seem impractical to me, but an upper limit of 20-ish is not horrendous to me, but that's the lowest I can imagine actually helping. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 16:03, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support collapsing any nominations above a certain number (say 20) as an alternative to a soft cap. As a last resort, I would support a hard cap. However, very few editors nominate more than 20 GANs at once, and those who do tend to be experienced editors, whom, with the exception of one particular editor, tend not to have systemic issues with their nominations. Epicgenius (talk) 20:02, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support 10, 20 if need be. I don't think a hard cap is worth the burden of enforcement. Since the goal is to keep WP:GAN appetizing (as the main discovery surface for reviewers), it would suffice to suppress any reviews above the limit, if ChristieBot can facilitate that as first-in-first-out. As I've said elsewhere, I'd be in favor of other spin-off listings of all GANs with different sort orders and filters. (There used to be something like this for AfD noms but I can't find it now.) If one of those alternative listings wanted to include the firehose (all suppressed reviews), that would give us the best of all worlds. czar 21:41, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. GAN doesn't have unlimited capacity; if an editor has more than 20 GANs pending, something is probably up. Would potentially allow an even tighter limit, but it'd probably be a soft cap Epicgenius style of "no more than 10 a month" that would still allow going up to 20 if spread out over time where the problem is just a lack of reviewers. SnowFire (talk) 09:11, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Second choice Oppose 20 is too high, but defer to whatever Ealdgyth says she can handle. Anyone who is nominating this much is after it for reward culture, and not likely to be pushing quality SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:43, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I recognize you want a lower limit, but the current status quo is no limit, and a limit of 20 is an improvement over no cap at all, is it not? Personally I'd support 10, but I am skeptical it would get sufficient consensus. We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 15:52, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree with TAOT. The status quo is no limit, and I also understand your preference for a low limit. However, 5 may be excessively low, given how long GANs tend to languish (often up to 3-4 months).

  I'd also say that Anyone who is nominating this much is after it for reward culture is an unfair statement to make, as some editors actually do have legitimate reasons for nominating 20 at a time. For instance, I have 20 nominations right now, but many of them are several months old, and I tend to wait a while before nominating many of my GAs. In other cases, people may nominate GAs that are relatively short but don't need much work to meet all the criteria. Thus, prolific nominators can't all be painted with the same brush. If, on the other hand, it is found that a prolific nominator consistently submits problematic articles for GAN, there are other ways to deal with this (i.e. with a topic ban). – Epicgenius (talk) 23:08, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Adjust above. Five is my first choice, but I would accept 20 as second choice if five doesn't pass. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:55, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  PS, Epicgenius, if the process had Coords (as when Geometryguy used to act as a defacto Coord), you could have a hard limit subject to exceptions granted by the Coords, as we have at

  WP:FAR. In that case, five would work, and your situation could be handled as an exception, subject to consensus and granted by the GA Coords. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:57, 21 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

  ]

• Support any reasonable limit. A small cadre of writers shouldn't have a majority of the open GAs to review --In actu (Guerillero) ^{Parlez Moi} 11:41, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Most GA reviews take less than three months, right? In order to clog up your 20 nom limit, you'd have to nominate an article every 4.5 days for three months, ish. And that's assuming every single review takes exactly three months, which, it won't. While that's certainly possible, I don't think that much work for such an extended period of time is very healthy. Additionally, editors have in the past been sanctioned for a constant stream of low-quality GAs - forcing people to take that extra time to chew could lead to them spotting possible improvements on a later day, saving the reviewer's time.
  I agree with SandyGeorgia and EpicGenius that this should not be a brightline rule, however, I believe going from stub to GA in 5 days 20 times in a row isn't likely to produce content beyond the bare minimum. casualdejekyll 00:05, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support GA nominations require human reviewer time, which is both limited and precious. Ideally we'd have enough available reviewer time to complete all requested reviews in a timely manner. Since we perennially struggle to accomplish that, I think it makes sense to limit nominations from prolific nominators. If those folks wish to continue nominating articles, they can take on more reviews themselves -- thus freeing other reviewers to keep the system running. As others have noted above, this seems to work just fine at FAC. The rationale for respecting reviewer time by focusing on a limited number of nominations holds here as well. Ajpolino (talk) 18:11, 4 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some nominations remain open for several months and no one wants to review them. In the past, when I reviewed very old nominations the nominator had sometimes left Wikipedia and the time I spent on the review is wasted. This proposal would cause nominations that are very old to expire and be automatically quick-failed. This can hopefully be set up by a bot to lessen editor time. The article can be nominated again. Z1720 (talk) 02:03, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• This may be worth considering but only once we get past this current backlog environment. The longest-sitting GA, WVPX-TV, passed six months today. The editor is active; it's just that (as my experience with this topic area can demonstrate) the article title seems to scare people off. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 03:07, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I'd argue this is
  WP:TOOSOON. The idea has merit but would require a far more proactive reviewer base. Perhaps modifying this to automatically remove pages for editors who've been inactive for a set period of time would be a fairer system to implement. Etrius ( Us) 03:35, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

I would oppose automatic expiry, but some other system should be in place to ensure that a user is still active if their GAN is open for a while. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:58, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• From past experience I would recommend anyone reviewing old noms to contact the nominator first. It might also be worth doing a simple review first and wait for a response before getting too in depth. Writing a detailed review and getting no response is one of the more demoralising aspects of reviewing. To be fair I have also had this issue with relatively recent nominations. Aircorn (talk) 18:14, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Maybe ChristieBot could add some kind of warning to a nomination if the nominator hasn't made any edits in 30 days, so that users are aware the nom may have dropped off. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:02, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I would support automatic expiry but only for users that are no longer active, rather than GANs open a certain amount of time. For example it took Sorley MacLean over a year to find a reviewer. (t · c) buidhe 05:07, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Concur with buidhe, editors inactive for a period should not retain nominations. Perhaps set limit to 45 days of inactivity, warning at 30? Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 11:18, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I'm fine with a note about non-active users, but it'd be horrible if you are waiting for a reviewer just to find out it's been removed from the page as being too old if you are active. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:27, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I'd oppose expiring GAs, but for inactive users a note is easy to add and I'd support that. If it turns out that there are a lot of inactive nominators we could have a separate section at the end of the GAN page. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:57, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Expiring is a non-starter as long as we have this much of a backlog. I have a GAN from August 2022 that was only just picked up for review 2 days ago. I've been active that entire time. If the nominator is inactive, the review can be failed after a week since they would fail to respond to comments or concerns from the reviewer. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 16:42, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, finding a way to identify inactive nominators is a better solution here. Identifying drive-by nominations is another good time-saver, and something I hope Christiebot will end up being able to do. CMD (talk) 02:22, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  If ChristieBot could list an error or warning when it sees a nomination by someone who's never edited the article in question, that would be very useful. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 11:55, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  This is certainly possible in theory, though it might be slow in practice. I can investigate further if this idea gets support. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:27, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Drive-by noms are being discussed below at propsal 11 - let's not split the discussion. I've created a separate section at 7A just below to formally propose flagging of inactive nominators. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:22, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I'd oppose this for active nominators. (If the nominator goes inactive for a few months, we could talk about it). I see it as one of the great things about GA as opposed to FA that nominations only fail if a reviewer finds issues, not just because nobody can be bothered to look at the article. —Kusma (talk) 14:42, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose: this artificially decreases a backlog number without solving the actual issue. I also oppose expiry based on an inactive nominator. Sometimes people do keep an eye on their GANs and make their first edit in several months to respond to a review. Even in the case of an inactive nominator, if they've put the work in then why don't they deserve to have that reviewed? I wouldn't oppose a bot comment on the GAN page that the nominator hasn't edited in 30 days—a good tip-off for the reviewer to assume that the article is static and they'll need to pass or fail as-is (or make improvements themselves). — Bilorv (talk) 23:53, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  assume that the article is static and they'll need to pass or fail as-is - If we don't wind up with consensus on expiring inactive nominations, as a second option I like the idea of making this explicit somewhere in the instructions. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:59, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose Why should my nomination which has been waiting for ages have to be resubmitted? As it would have a new date it would be less likely to be reviwed and the reviwer would get less kudos. Chidgk1 (talk) 12:55, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - it does not actually get rid of the backlog, it merely pushes the backlog further into the future. Some articles may have to wait a long time simply because of their topic matter or length. I would support having the bot make a comment about inactive or drive-by nominations, though. – Epicgenius (talk) 16:49, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - Backlog stays the same, just wastes a few seconds of the nominator's time re-submitting it. Often it seems that articles that sit around the longest are those that are complicated or possibly controversial, such as those relating to the Holocaust. That editors are sometimes wary of reviewing articles, or the article is waiting for a more appropriate reviewer, should not mean the nomination needs re-submitting. Pickersgill-Cunliffe (talk) 20:17, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Although I have seen similar things happen before at WP:FAC, I don’t think this should be added as a hard line at WP:GA. Others have already pointed out it doesn’t actually help solve the backlog issue as the article can be re-nominated, but also having a nomination you have worked on and waited for months to get reviewed get failed simply because no-one got around to working on it could be rather discouraging to users new to the GA process. REDMAN 2019 (talk) 09:44, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - if you remove the items that waited the longest, they just get resubmitted as soon as caps or whatever allow, so the queue just takes even longer. Not obvious how that would help in any way. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:18, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to split this out into its own proposal so it doesn't get buried under #7. Assuming it's technically possible via ChristieBot, a flag of some kind should be added to nominations whose editors have not edited in 30 days. The flag would be removed if they start editing again. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:22, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Support per above. — Bilorv (talk) 23:54, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Support, per my comment above (t · c) buidhe 00:23, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Support This feels like an obvious solution. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 00:51, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Support, and perhaps we will need to decide what happens if those noms hang around at a later date. CMD (talk) 01:22, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, if we don't get consensus above that noms should expire, Bilorv makes a good suggestion about treating these nominations as static and either passing or failing them as-is. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:23, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Support the idea of a flag. I don't think we need to prejudge how reviewers would treat the flag -- if I decided to pick one of these up I would start by leaving a note at the review page pinging the reviewer and asking if they were active. If not I would do a static pass/fail, without leaving many detailed review notes. Others might choose to treat it differently, leaving detailed review notes in case the nominator ever returned. I don't see a reason to legislate how the review itself should be conducted. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:50, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Support I see clear benefits to doing this, and no obvious drawbacks. TompaDompa (talk) 20:50, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support more metadata on
  WP:GAN to inform reviewer decisions, per below czar 02:17, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support A easy way to prioritize nominations that will be replied to quickly. REDMAN 2019 (talk) 09:46, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• support seems like a no-brainer. Anything that can be informative is helpful. No need to state what you have to do it the nominator isn't active. You can ping/find someone at the project to do BEFORE you do a full review. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 10:02, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support This provides some benefits and I do not see any downsides. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 03:41, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. make sens to me. Shearonink (talk) 03:56, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Support, this is a practical proposal; it is very depressing reviewing a GAN that then never gets actioned. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:18, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Edit the template in my sandbox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rjjiii/sandbox (update: moved to its own page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rjjiii/GA ) This is a rough draft to give a concrete idea of what I mean about a template with instructions. The actual instructions should come from someone more involved with GA, and I've tried to just copy and paste from the GA instructions and essay as much as possible. I don't think experienced editors will be greatly inconvenienced by deleting something like this before a review. For new editors I think having a kind of form to fill out, will be more clear than the current blank slate. The language of these instructions should mirror whatever is on

• Not sure about adding it to a default template, but I had a go at simplifying the instructions a while ago. See User:Aircorn/sandbox. Didn't get around to doing the guideline. The idea was to make the instructions more "what to do" and the guideline more advice on "how to do it". I think overtime the instructions bloat out a bit as editors add to them resulting in repetition and a bit of editorialising. Maybe the guidelines could become a tab when they are improved? Aircorn (talk) 17:38, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Okay, so I misunderstood how Wikipedia would render the template. I've made a static version of what I'm talking about on the same sandbox page.

  I think I get what you're saying about a "what to do" and a "how to do it" page. If so, my thought, and again I would try to poll more potential reviewers on this, is that the page with the concrete, step-by-step instructions, should be the default landing area. That should be the main place to send a reviewer, and if the reviewer doesn't open all the links, then they should still end up with a halfway decent result.

  Rjjiii (talk

  ) 04:03, 4 January 2023 (UTC

==== No original research ====

It contains [[Wikipedia:No original research|no original research]]:

<!-- Check at least 1 of every 15 sources to see if the content in the sources backs up the sentence, clause, or paragraph where it's attached in the article. Make note of any sources that do not verify the article's content. -->

This looks good, I'd support having something like this auto-generated on the review talk page (with the option of deleting it if the reviewer wishes). Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 12:29, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@

Rjjiii I would be happy to edit this template to preLoad with the name of the Article being reviewed and any other info. I like that this is very beginner friendly, without requiring curly brace heavy tables. The less manual work for reviewers, the more welcoming we become. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 14:21, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

Thanks! I do still think of this as a draft though. If this or something like it was going to be preloaded, it should be up for the OG's to look over. I tried to copy straight from existing instructions where I could. And I haven't yet put any instructions for broadness because I didn't find anything concrete enough.

Rjjiii (talk) 14:54, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

• I don't use the review templates myself, and would prefer not to, but I won't oppose this so long as it's clear the reviewer can just delete it if they want to. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:35, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes, this might possibly help some new reviewers, so why not. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:19, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes, a preloaded template like the sandbox draft would be good: new reviewers are likely to find it useful and reviewers who don't need it are not harmed as they can delete it. — Bilorv (talk) 22:03, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Preload. We already have preloaded text when starting reviews, so it's simple enough to revise one of the existing templates (add more instructions as hidden text) and use that. Advanced reviewers can always remove what they want. czar 08:56, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I like this idea, though perhaps replace the sub-subheadings with bullet points so that you don't overwhelm the new reviewer with a big TOC. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 22:30, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Thanks for feedback. That's a good point. I've updated it to use only one level of headings.

  Rjjiii (talk) 17:03, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

  ]

• Support, it certainly would make a difference for first-time reviewers! —Ganesha811 (talk) 03:15, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Tend to support: to be honest, even as a beginner around here, I don't think the instructions, nor the templates are too hard to understand and apply as it stands. However, if we find a way to make the process even simpler and handier, I would happily support it! Oltrepier (talk) 20:15, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I dislike the use of hidden text in this context. If we do this, I very strongly recommend that reviewers be informed (in the text on the page) that they are allowed to remove any part of the instructions. The primary "prescriptive" action I want to see is not exceeding the minimum requirements of the criteria. Reviewers should not even be hinting that noms really ought to do something about, e.g., consistent citation formatting (which GACR has specifically rejected for years). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:54, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  What are the issues that you anticipate coming from hidden text comments versus the text on the page?

  Rjjiii (talk) 15:44, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

  ]

• Support a preload, but simpler is better and it needs to be as close to idiot-proof as possible (not that there are any idiots on Wikipedia, of course). My main concerns at the moment are that it's a bit bulky and that "delete me" will prompt users to delete all of the preloaded text even if it says where to delete. But I would expect a lot of fine-tuning before any launch of something like this. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:25, 4 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorting the GAN page so that the format is unchanged but nominators who review frequently come higher on the list will reward reviewers (since some reviewers will work from whatever is top of the list) without limiting the number of nominations or requiring quid pro quo. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:29, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thinking out loud, could this also be a way to softly implement quid pro quo and the nomination limit? Within each category there could be 2 sections. The top section would still be listed oldest to newest but would only be from nominators who (a) have as many reviews as nominations and (b) have no more than X active nominations. The bottom section would be the remainder of nominations listed from oldest to newest.

Rjjiii (talk) 00:58, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

• Support - I think our biggest issue at GAN is people nominating but not reviewing. I'm happy if someone reviews 10 articles in a row to put up 8 articles for review. If everyone did that, we'd have no backlog. I don't think limiting people to HAVE to review will work, but a softer rule around your noms being more hidden if there is a lack of review is good to me. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:23, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Per all the prior discussions about this on WT:GAN. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 07:28, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support (t · c) buidhe 07:42, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I just made (a few days late, as I didn't read this before) a similar but slightly more complicated suggestion to
  Rjjiii's (see discussion of Proposal 6 above). Hiding noms looks like a good compromise to me. —Kusma (talk) 15:55, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support Prioritisation of those who give back to the community is a good idea. Should the nomination date also be removed? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:50, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support seems reasonable Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 21:30, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support BUT I feel like having both options to sort by reviews and chronological order is the best option. I also don't favour on removing the date when the article was nominated. It just doesn't feel right for a GAN to sit in the queue for possibly a year just because reviewers don't like the article, feel intimidated to review it, or because the nominator doesn't review often. Reviewing old nominations to me seems like a way of showing respect for the nominator's patience. I agree with prioritizing frequently reviewers and that is clear as day, but we also need to keep in mind that frequent nominators contribute to the project as well. Sparkl^talk 00:12, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  To have both sort options available would require a table format, which is certainly possible, but would take longer to implement. A change to the sort order, using the current format, could be done very easily. I would prefer to switch to a table format myself, to allow reviewers to sort as they see fit, but that's a bigger change and I would rather not wait for that to try this idea. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:15, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support - Makes sense to me. In the absence of awarding GA Reviewers some type of ongoing badges, at least give them some type of recognition. Hey, as long as we're at it, why don't GA Reviewers get some sort of Service Award, like the awards for the number of edits? Shearonink (talk) 05:41, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. We could also change the top red box to include the top five GAs not just by pure longevity but also those by first-time nominators (which generally get increased priority under the sorting at User:ChristieBot/SortableGANoms). This would also help retention and engagement by encouraging users to look through the contributions of new nominators and reduce wait times. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 06:03, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I like that idea. That box is written by WugBot, so courtesy ping to Wugapodes; if we were to implement this ChristieBot could take over writing that page if it depends on data WugBot doesn't have. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:46, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @Sammi Brie and Mike Christie: That sounds like a fine idea. If what's being proposed is to add a section to the red box (Wikipedia:Good article nominations/backlog) for oldest nominations by new nominators, then ChristieBot can implement that without interfering with WugBot. The box is at Wikipedia:Good article nominations/backlog and is formatted as a table. The actual entries are transcluded from Wikipedia:Good article nominations/backlog/items which is what WugBot actually edits. So we can just add another row to the table and transclude a second page handled by ChristieBot; no need to coordinate a transition or reinvent the wheel. I set up an example in this edit with the second item list at Wikipedia:Good article nominations/backlog/new noms though the name of that page can be changed to whatever you want. — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:46, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Thanks -- that should be easy enough to implement. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:55, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I support this particular idea! Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 22:49, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. I don't think this would have the intended effect (of theoretically rewarding high-ratio reviewers as some reviewers will take what's at the top of the list) but I think the fundamental idea of promoting certain reviews has merit. Per above, if there were breakouts (top five articles) of, for example, GAN's articles with the highest annual viewership, most # of language links (high translation potential),
  WP:VITAL-rated, oldest (days nominated), shortest and longest (character count), I think that would give reviewers more options for choosing something that piques their interest. Similarly, can breakout selections of articles by high-review-ratio reviewers, by first-time nominators, by nominators who have 80%+ authorship, by nominators who need a second opinion—all of this variety breeds interest. Combine that with adding short descriptions to the GAN list (with something like {{laal}}) and the GAN list becomes much more enticing to reviewers and much more so than simply putting high-review ratio reviewers at top, although no qualms about putting a high-review-ratio reviewer breakout first atop all other breakouts. czar 23:30, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  WP:GAN is the most common entrypoint for reviewers and I'd expect a sortable table view proposed above to be more cumbersome. My recommendation is to offer multiple views of WP:GAN along what I suggested above so that reviewers have more options to help select their next review. This is better than tweaking WP:GAN to suit all audiences. czar 01:23, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. I agree with Sammi's proposal that first-time nominators should be prioritized as well. However, I think this idea would encourage editors to conduct more reviews without bogging them down with the formalities of a QPQ-style review (which could go awry in too many ways). – Epicgenius (talk) 00:02, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Oh, I never explicitly said it but I support the proposal, and Sammi's idea sounds great. I too see several advantages of this plan over QPQ or similar plans. QPQ, the nomination limit, or another hard limit will inevitably obscure some portion of the backlog. Because those proposals would push nominations into a bunch of private personal waiting areas, they would kind of paradoxically mean that it takes even longer for a nomination to get reviewed. Mike Christie's proposal, Sammi's box idea, and Mike Christie's table comment all sound like plans that will get the benefits of QPQ but will make nominations easier to access.

  Also, I think this plan is the "carrot" trying to lure a nominator to review but QPQ is the stick punishing nominators for not reviewing. I have doubts about the quality of forced reviews.

  Rjjiii (talk) 05:10, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

  ]

• Conditional Support, as long as we don't treat having NO GAs as equivalent to an infinite priority, i.e. new nominators should not go straight to the top of the list (that sounds like a divide-by-zero error to me). Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:23, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That's how I had planned to implement it, and I don't see a real problem with it -- any nominator can only have no GAs once, after all. Where in the list would you put a nomination from a nominator who had reviewed five articles and had no GAs, after all? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:26, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm having another thought about this proposal. Right now, ChristieBot will drop a talk page message when an article passes/fails. Could the bot drop a talk page message the first time an editor nominates a GA, briefly explaining the benefits of reviewing an article per this proposal, inviting the nominator to check out the nominations, and encouraging new reviewers? Something just long enough to let new nominators know (a) their nomination is now in the list and (b) it will move up the list if they review a GAN.

Rjjiii (talk) 06:36, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

@

Rjjiii it might be worth making a new proposal for that so people will see it. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 06:40, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

• Comment: There would need to be a way to make sure that it doesn't punish users that are new to GA. If there's a user that has one or two successful nominations and zero reviews, then a system like this could suppress that user's nominations, even if they haven't yet developed the skills to review. Then it would take even longer for the user to get comfortable enough with the process to start reviewing. New users are the people that we should be supporting the most. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:46, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't think this would be as big an issue as it sounds. Many reviewers don't pay attention to the current sort order anyway; they just pick an article that interests them. Some reviewers will probably still work from the backlog box at the top which will still contain the oldest nominations. Having said that, if we try this and see some nominations from nominators with one GA and no reviews languishing for a long time, we could try ways to move them up the list. But I think in many cases one GA is all most experienced editors would need to be able to try to do a review. Inexperienced editors often should not be nominating. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:58, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. I think this is a reasonable way to incentivize reviewing without there being a hard-and-fast requirement (as appears was rejected earlier). Lord Roem ~ (talk) 01:30, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment I don't oppose this exactly, as in the end I'm not sure the order particularly matters, but there seem to be a couple of potential downsides. For new participants, getting one or two GAs in but not feeling ready to review would keep your right down at the bottom of the list. More widely, since this would sort by username, I am concerned a cluster of noms from a single person may make newer reviewers averse, as it creates a perception of deep involvement which can be intimidating. CMD (talk) 01:34, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support with the caveat that first-time nominators should be prioritized above frequent reviewers. —Ganesha811 (talk) 03:16, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, and support Ganesha's suggestion as well: this is a really smart idea. I think it would also give us the opportunity to give newer submitters a little boost. In regards to it not having much of an effect -- it would certainly be possible to ignore the sort order if you didn't care at all. But I think this is part of the appeal, at least to me. There are basically three scenarios I see: you don't care about which nominations are at the top of the list and just want to review something (in which case you will help the system out), you actively want to encourage reviews (in which case you help the system out), or you don't use the sort order at all (in which case you don't help this system out, but you don't hurt it, and it doesn't hurt you either). jp×g 08:57, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support; not going to pretend like this doesn't benefit me strongly, but I do also agree with the idea in principle. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 16:07, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is an social expectation, enforced by some editors but absent from

• My personal thoughts: It is a wonderful gift to receive a peer review, but they are wasted on GAs and altogether aren't part of the criteria. The GA review is like a
  driver's test: It assesses whether some minimal acceptable standard ("decency") is met, not whether someone is a "good" driver. Extended text in a GA review, while often nice, is often conflated as a list of things needed to reach the GA criteria when they are often just friendly, optional notes to improve the article. Clarifying that the written review is separate (or optional) from the criteria assessment will undo the commitment escalation, remove the burden from the GA reviewer, and make the GAN process more accessible. czar 04:45, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support Of all the suggestions at this drive, I think this has the greatest potential to encourage reviewing and reduce the backlog. GA was always intended to be a lightweight process, distinct from the exacting criteria and thorough reviewing at FAC, but over time, we've evolved into a sort of FA-lite. Making it clear that the priority is adherence to the GA criteria - and that lengthy written commentary is optional - could be a good way to decrease the anxiety of new reviewers and encourage them to join in. It might also encourage existing people with high nom-to-review ratios to do more reviews. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:10, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support My only concern is that what is and is not criteria can get muddled at times. Criteria 1a and 1b require that the page be well written but do suggestions that make sentences more readable count as a peer review or GA criteria? Etrius ( Us) 22:25, 3 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I believe that this issue may be helped by proposals above relating to identifying example reviews and pre-loading a template into GANs. CMD (talk) 02:24, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support in principle, but curious to know how this would be accomplished. We did this somewhat after this discussion (it is a great example of how a thread that looks like it is going off the rails can be resurrected to a useful change). Personally I don't want to discourage editors who give detailed feedback. If I have read an article and notice something that I think can improve it I want to mention that and I certainly appreciate it when I get similar feedback back in turn. We say pretty prominently that this is not required and no one should begrudge a reviewer that sticks solely to the criteria. Aircorn (talk) 08:57, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Like Aircorn I think this is a good idea but I don't know how it could be done effectively. I don't want to discourage suggestions that improve the article, but I think sometimes reviewers ask for more improvements in the prose than are strictly called for by 1a: "clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct". I've passed articles that I thought had weak prose, and seen later editors come along and copyedit them with comments like "Who passed this for GA? The prose is terrible". Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:24, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I'd rather receive a peer review GA slowly than a quick ticks-all-boxes pass that does not engage with the content at all. This suggestion makes GA reviews less useful to the nominator, which I think is a bad thing. —Kusma (talk) 14:54, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose It's a bit of a risk to do this while
  peer review is as slow as it is, and especially when we're considering initiatives that formalise the GA process. At the moment, GA is the main place where you can come for FAC preparation; if you go to PR, you have to be willing to wait a third of a year. I actually think it would be a good idea to incorporate the slowly-dying PR into the GA process, perhaps as an optional second step of the nomination. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:55, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  This presumes that GA is a FAC preparation stage, but it's explicitly intended to be a separate process. Certainly, people use it as an FA staging area (myself included), but that's actually not at all what the GACR are intended to be. I find the idea of merging PR - which is largely moribund - with GA somewhat interesting, but it would require a substantial revision of GA as it currently stands. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:28, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I know what it's intended to be, but what I'm trying to say is that it's risky to prescribe what it should be, when what it actually is in reality is much more helpful. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 10:35, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  In what way is it "risky"? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:39, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That people trying to prepare for FA noninations will have a rather important step taken away from them. Sure, you might get a very cursiry review at GAN, but even that's better than no review for three months at PR. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 01:43, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Again, I recognize the value of getting a thorough pre-FAC-review, but GA is not part of the FAC process. It's a separate process with its own criteria. If we want to make FAC prep an explicit part of the GA process, we need to change how GA works.

  Personally, I think Czar is on to something with the suggestion that thorough peer review at GA should explicitly be optional. Perhaps a peer review/FAC prep/whatever parameter could be added in the GA nom template so the nom can flag whether or not they need that kind of review, and anyone who doesn't intend to seek FAC can decline. This parameter could be another useful sort parameter for the sorting overhaul being discussed at proposal 9. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 02:20, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @Premeditated Chaos can you make a Proposal 10a? I would support this detailed addendum. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 03:33, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Sure, see below. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 06:18, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose there is no "peer review expectation", however, in my opinion the purpose of the GA process is ultimately to drive article improvement and discouraging detailed feedback would detract from that. (t · c) buidhe 05:13, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The expectation of "detailed feedback" you support is itself the "peer review" expectation under discussion. And the proposal is not to ban/discourage it but to acknowledge that there is no implicit requirement and not ostracize reviewers who choose not to do it. czar 06:38, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose Peer review is one of the greatest strengths of the GA process

Xx78900 (talk) 12:51, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose - Ensuring that people understand they don't need to write essays is fine, but codifying the idea that people should (as people will take the rules as the standard expectation) mostly/only review with ticks and boxes would result in more low quality or sub-standard reviews. Pickersgill-Cunliffe (talk) 20:23, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Detailed peer review at GA should explicitly be optional, determined by the nominator's wishes. A peer review/FAC prep/whatever parameter should be added in the {{GAN}} template so the nominator can flag whether or not they're looking for that style of review. This parameter could also be another useful sort parameter for the sorting overhaul being discussed at proposal 9. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 06:18, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I am firmly of the view that some form of in-depth review should be maintained, because what the GA process was originally meant to achieve and what it now functions as are completely different. If consensus is for a return to the former, then I support this as a recognition of the latter. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:07, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Strongly Support. This removes the guesswork of what a nom wants out of their GA and saves the reviewer/nom both a headache. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 12:13, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose It should be up to the reviewer how they want to conduct the review. It already is optional if the nominator wants to respond to any non-GA comments, but we should maintain the flexibility of the process as much as possible. Aircorn (talk) 15:49, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, this is not a binary issue. A review can be quite detailed without doing much FAC preparation, and any review should show that the reviewer is engaging with the content and sourcing (otherwise you can't possibly assess broadness, focus and neutrality). It is probably a good idea to be clearer about whether issues brought up by the reviewer are optional ideas or potential points of failure. —Kusma (talk) 20:09, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose the review style should always be at the discretion of the reviewer. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 10:05, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, same reason. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:24, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose I would personally be suspicious of a review which did not have at least some commentary to go with it. Commentary akin to a peer review proves that the reviewer has actually read the article and thought about it. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 20:34, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, the review style is up to the reviewer, as others have said above. The requirement is that the review shows that the GACR are met. CMD (talk) 08:06, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose The reviewer shouldn’t be forced to conduct a review in a restricted way in my opinion. REDMAN 2019 (talk) 18:46, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Drive by nominations are currently allowed, but discouraged, by the rules: "Articles may be nominated by anyone, though it is highly preferable that they have contributed significantly to the article and are familiar with the subject." Change this to something like, "Articles may be nominated by anyone who has significantly contributed to the article. Drive-by nominations are not allowed." I think this actually fits practice better: many drive by nominations are just reverted by those of us who maintain the page; other drive by nominations, however, can use up reviewer time. Changing the policy to explicitly forbid them will discourage such nominations or at least make it a bit easier to quickly revert them. (t · c) buidhe 09:50, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The only issue with this is how do you define significant coverage? If an article is very well written, but the contributors have all left Wikipedia, or have no interest in promoting to GA, then the articles will always sit there. Those are the cases I'm happy with a "drive-by"? Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 10:12, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps a better metric would be familiarity with the article's sources? That's certainly not as easy to measure but essentially the difference between a drive-by nomination and a valid one. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 11:56, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Question What would be the correct way to nominate such drive-by nominations? I would prefer a CSD like
  WP:G6 which would keep contribution history clean. Since we don't want to mark an article has having undergone multiple GAN if it didn't beyond a technicality. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 14:18, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  Just revert the talkpage template. CMD (talk) 01:19, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, although perhaps without the explicit negative "not allowed" sentence. I have seen to my memory one case of a successful "drive-by" promotion (and that was to FA not GA), which was the work of an editor who made very high quality articles. Such rare cases fit easily into IAR. CMD (talk) 16:29, 4 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support to Lee Vilenski's concern: in that particular case, significant contributions could be recognised from the addition of illustrations and captioning, editorial work, basic substantial copy-editing, reference work etc. But for the sake of argument, let us assume that there is a perfectly ready article, copy-edited, well-illustrated, properly referenced ... and the editor who had brought it to that stage had just departed this mortail coil... well, it would not be a drive-by nomination, it would be a nomination in recognition of that editor's work. I see this particular circumstance as less as an IAR issue, but more as someone identifying another editor's work and looking to have it recognised. There's no reason why a "reasonable grounds/GF drive-by" exception can't be implicit (and there really cannot be many situations where this will actually need to happen). Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 20:01, 4 January 2023 (UTC) Comment amended: I had not meant basic in a quantitative sense, but qualitative, however, that perhaps was not clear. Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 20:43, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We don't generally consider a copyedit to be enough for "substantial", but if we did treat it as such, I'd have no issues with this. It would give us an easy quickfail criteria, and could even code a bot to say when an editor has less than... Say 10 edits to a page. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 09:24, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

An editor with nine edits could be an article's sole author. —Kusma (talk) 15:48, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, although Bilorv's minimalist challenge suggests that is something of a rarity :P Come to think of it, the authorship percentage calculated by XTools could be substituted for edit count. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 16:26, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, the level can be changed - say less than 10 edits and also less than 20% authorship. I think any less than that isn't substantial at all. 10 edits isn't very much, but I get some editors might write an article in one edit. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:58, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Lee - personally I think 10 edits is a very reasonable floor, which is why I was pointing out the rarity of getting a GA at under that :) What do you think about my suggestion below to have a drive-by section on the GAN report? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:43, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Minimalist has been the Challenge with the most winners, which was not what I would have predicted initially. I think it shows I'm not so unique in my writing process (often doing all the work in one long session, not clicking "Submit" on the unreadable mess until it's fully formed). — Bilorv (talk) 00:04, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support When an editor can actually bring an article they haven't contributed much to up to GA standard, that editor is probably very experienced. They can simply leave a note: "I am not a major contributor to the article, but I have reviewed its sourcing/writing and will respond actively during the GAN process." Who to discourage is newcomers who, not knowing how GA works, just nominate a sprawling article like Human without contributing much. Ovinus (talk) 03:07, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Are drive-by newcomer nominations actually a serious issue? I wouldn't have thought this is a big part of the backlog, as it produces quickfails that are, well, quick to perform, as well as easy to identify. — Bilorv (talk) 00:05, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't know that it's a huge part of the backlog per se, but we seem to get a lot of questions about such noms at WT:GAN (there was one yesterday). Explicitly disallowing them would probably save people some time asking and responding. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:09, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  And save the fledgling nominator some embarrassment. Ovinus (talk) 04:02, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Perhaps a section for possible drive-by nominations could be added to Wikipedia:Good article nominations/Report? Anything where the nom has <X edits to the article gets listed there, and then people can remove them if they confirm it is a true drive-by and not one of the possible edge cases noted above. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 16:37, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• There's already a similar rule in
  WP:GAN/I#N1: Nominators who are not significant contributors to the article must consult regular editors of the article on the article talk page prior to a nomination. But it's kinda buried, so stating it in the lead section of that page might be a good idea. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 19:57, 5 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  That is how things get buried. If anything we should be simplifying the instructions. Aircorn (talk) 15:56, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support It should be noted that, per the FAQ "Drive-by" nominations, which are permitted. So that'll need to be updated as well. I've noticed that vital articles tend to be drive-by nomed the most. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 04:05, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support but I'd go a step deeper. What's important isn't "not drive-by" but that we actually want nominators to do work to vet the article in advance. To combine with other proposals above and if bright lines are needed, we could ask that a nominator has either contributed 15% authorship or done a pre-review on the talk page (performs a full copy edit, addresses the criteria, speaks to the source spot checking of controversial statements, etc.) explaining how the article is ready. The latter has the added benefit of letting the article's stewards know that they're considering GAN. I don't think it necessarily needs to be this prescriptive but I am considering how we might solve multiple problems at once. czar 23:14, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. This seems intuitive - nominators who haven't contributed much to an article would most likely not be able to adequately address a reviewer's comments. There might be a situation in which the original article is nearly GA-ready, but the largest contributor is no longer editing Wikipedia. An exception to this rule can probably be made for such a scenario. However, situations like this, where the article is far from ready for a good article review, seem to be much more common. – Epicgenius (talk) 00:09, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I wouldn't mind a requirement like Czar or Ovinus are expressing, where any sign that a nominator intends to take the review process seriously gets a pass. Hard limits on number of edits, percentage authorship or strict interpretations of "drive-by" are a no from me. Serious assessment that an article is ready for GA can take many forms, including the rare-but-genuine stumbling across an excellent-quality article that is ready for the process and nominating it (or nominating on a newcomer author's behalf). — Bilorv (talk) 00:10, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Bilorv & Epicgenius, how would you guys feel about a system where possible drive-by noms were bot-listed at the GAN report? Humans would then either clear them as fine or remove the nomination if they are indeed drive-bys. There would have to be baseline criteria that led to the initial bot listing, but editors checking the GAN report would have complete leeway to clear them as not a drive-by. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:20, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Epicgenius, sorry biffed the first ping. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:21, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Yeah I'd support this—anything involving human intervention is automatically fine by me. This would just be using automation to aid existing practice, which is to remove GANs that are going to waste a lot of time for no benefit. I don't think I've ever drive-by nominated, but let's say I did: either the person monitoring the bot report goes "ah, a prolific GA nominator, so will respond to reviewer comments" or they remove my listing and I have someone to yell at politely request reinstate the nomination as I do intend to take the review seriously. — Bilorv (talk) 00:27, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That sounds fine to me too. Having someone manually review possible drive-by noms would spare both the reviewer, who would be wasting time on an article that the nominator doesn't plan to work on, and the nominator, who could be discouraged by a quick-fail. I know that, as a new editor a decade ago, I made a couple of drive-by nominations; I really didn't understand what the GA criteria were at the time, and a message on my talk page discouraging drive-by noms would have been better than the series of quick-fail messages I received.

  (By the way, @Premeditated Chaos, I actually got both of your pings.) – Epicgenius (talk) 00:39, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Bilorv, that's an interesting thought - the GAN report could note the number of GAs just like the main page does, in addition to edits to page and/or authorship. So an entry at the drive-by section might look like "Cheese - Jan 6, 2023, Premeditated Chaos (3 edits to page, 2% authorship, 18 GAs)", which provides some indication that I'm a serious nominator, without the person looking necessarily having to know me by name.

  Epic, sorry to spam you. We could create a friendly little template to go along with the decline - like "hey this isn't a failure but you did a drive-by, here's why we don't do those, blah blah". ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:52, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  3 edits to page, 2% authorship, 18 GAs I would love this on the GAN page itself, whether by default or supplemented by user script. This metadata makes otherwise drab listings way more appetizing (I'd add the short description too and shorter {{laal}} listing per my comment in Prop 9), which is important if that page is the main discovery surface for new reviews.

  I would be prepared, however, for noms with 3 edits to page, 2% authorship, 18 GAs to languish—I don't think that's bound to change. czar 06:51, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• "rare-but-genuine" occurrences can be IARed. I'm pretty sure if any experienced editor came to the talkpage and said "I want to nominate this clearly good article" for example, that they would not be refused. CMD (talk) 01:24, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I think a bot is a good idea, it would help reduce the faff of checking nominations to determine whether they are drive-by or not. And a template to politely chastise drive-by nominators would also be useful. REDMAN 2019 (talk) 18:52, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Oppose any hard numbers for disqualification, but support some form of way to easily identify articles nominated that are potentially drive-by. Aircorn (talk) 15:59, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - I've never seen a review pass with a drive-by nomination. These nominations waste the time of reviewers and increase the scale of the backlog. Pickersgill-Cunliffe (talk) 20:25, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I've seen many drive-by nominations get reverted, despite them being allowed. With that in mind, I'd rather DBNs be outright prohibited than discouraged. XtraJovial (talk • contribs) 15:24, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, unfortunately they're nothing but trouble; *some* knowledge of and interest in the article is needed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:25, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment it seems like this proposal, or something very much like it, was unaminously approved at the last proposal drive a decade ago. I wonder what happened in the intervening time. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:15, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It's like a lot of these ideas here. They are good in theory, but hard to implement practically. For example look at Science that is currently up for review. Would you considered that to be a drive-by nomination? (Note they have left a message on the talk page). We could, and generally do, revert obvious ones if we come across them. They are usually articles that are a long way from GA status. Hard numbers don't work due to many different editing styles and the fact that some articles are already in near good article shape. We could add something to the quick-fail criteria about drive-by noms and leave it up to the reviewer to decide, but I am not sure how else to do it. Aircorn (talk) 05:16, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support the concept, in this case it might be good to mirror FAC. --Rschen7754 03:23, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Problems will always arise in the review and the nominator must be knowledgeable to resolve them. Schierbecker (talk) 07:15, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I am actually very surprised that anyone could nominate a good article without making some contributions. This seems like it would become a common sense fix. Jorahm (talk) 18:32, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I haven't yet seen a drive-by nomination which resulted in an article passing GA. —Ganesha811 (talk) 03:17, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Open GAR pages would be much easier to find and might get more attention if the GAR listings were on the same page as the GANs. The topic parameter of the GA template would allow the GARs to be listed in the same section as the GANs for that topic. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:10, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support - but maybe only do community GARs, which require input. Individual GARs are usually quite straightforward / would often meet quick-fail criteria. It may be a waste of community time to give them more prominence. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 15:25, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Having thought about this a bit more, I'm a bit concerned about this if we ever do a much-needed GA sweeps. It will be demoralizing to have half of the entries being GARs. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 12:42, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    If it ever winds up being an issue, it would be simple enough to stick them back on a side page, either permanently or temporarily. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 12:50, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    Fair enough :). —Femke 🐦 (talk) 20:03, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support for community GARs only, per Femke. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 18:50, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Could they be given their own section within the various sub-categories? Pickersgill-Cunliffe (talk) 20:27, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Yes -- since they are GAs, they have a GA template on the talk page. That template has a topic parameter, so the bot can figure out which section and subsection they belong to. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:39, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support for community GARs, and actually, I think individual GARs should be there as well. (Frankly I think having a split process provides little utility and just makes the process more confusing - but that's another discussion). For example, I recently opened a GAR at
  silent consensus of no one actively disagreeing. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:06, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support. Biggest issue at GAR is that there isn't enough people - I think it is because people think the process is altogether different from GA. Combining the lists would make them easier to see and action. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 10:07, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: increasing visibility to GAR would be good. — Bilorv (talk) 10:48, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I'd like to see a mockup first; I am a bit concerned this will make the effects of the backlog (super long page, hard to find anything you're interested in) worse. —Kusma (talk) 11:33, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  But generally, increasing GAR's visibility is something that needs doing. I tend to forget that it exists. —Kusma (talk) 14:41, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• This is promising as it could increase traffic, but I don't feel that GAR is that hidden away that this will solve the issue. Definitely only do community reassessments as individual ones generally aren't crying out for extra attention like community reassessment. Aircorn (talk) 04:46, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't understand why we would not want individual GARs to get attention. Right now, they're not listed anywhere, and are basically invisible to everyone except the original nominator unless they happen to be on an active WikiProject or the watchlist of an interested editor (unlikely prospects in my experience). That means there's almost no chance for anyone to notice to the GAR and rescue the article - surely a more desirable outcome than a delist. Of course not every article will find a white knight, but anything that increases the chance of that happening seems to be a clear positive in my eyes. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 13:48, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Is this a good time to question whether having individual reassessments at all is useful? Is there any harm in having every reassessment be put to the community at large? Pickersgill-Cunliffe (talk) 14:09, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Actually, I was thinking about creating a proposal for combining and streamlining the GAR process, and it might work well with the GAR coordinator role being discussed below. Something like this: All GARs are centrally listed, with anyone free to weigh in. A GAR can be closed after a week by the editor who opened it, unless someone objects to the delist. At that point participants are expected to discuss and come to a consensus about whether the issues are resolved or not. If a clear consensus develops from that, the opener can close the GAR on their own recognizance. If things get contentious, an uninvolved editor or the GAR coords (if that gets consensus) can step in and determine consensus. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 14:29, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I would be in favour of that, although the exact role of any "GAR coord" is still very much up for discussion. Pickersgill-Cunliffe (talk) 14:39, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Oh, for sure, and the proposal isn't contingent on it passing, just that it could be easily worked in if it did. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 15:16, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  They can be found at Category:Good article reassessment nominees. If the reassessor follows the instructions correctly then Wikiprojects and editors should be notified that the reassessment is open (automating that like AFD would be neat). The main use of the category is finding the old ones that editors have opened and then forgot about. Aircorn (talk) 15:50, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  If we're having to explain to ourselves exactly how the GAR system works and how to even find parts of it then it clearly isn't suitable in current form, imo. Pickersgill-Cunliffe (talk) 16:25, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Aircorn, as I said in my comments above, most WikiProjects are moribund, and many nominators of old articles are now inactive for various reasons. If the page isn't on the watchlist of someone who notices the diff where it gets GAR'd (vanishingly unlikely in my experience), it may as well be invisible. Using only a category to manage a process like this is downright stupid, as it leaves no central record of the GARs once the template is removed from the article talk page. It's also not browsable and that's annoying - you have to open each one individually. In comparison, while processes like AfD and DYK use categories to supplement organization, all AfDs and DYKs are centrally placed on one page that can be browsed and whose history can be looked at. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:21, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It was all we had. Don't get me wrong I have said for a long time that the community GAR process is broken. I am coming around to your proposal (not that I had to with the level of support it is getting). Individually I don't like the GAR reform proposals, but together I think we have got something that might just work. Aircorn (talk) 04:55, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support let's unify it. The whole GA ecosystem already has too many pages and relatively too few volunteers as is. Bringing more attention/centralized overview is a good thing. If GARs become so numerous, we can discuss separating it out after. GAR and GAN are two sides of the same coin, with goal of either improving articles (and or icon collecting) ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 14:05, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• A note to say that when I proposed this I meant it to include individual GARs, and per a couple of the comments above I still think that's a good idea. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:33, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, GANs and GARs in practice are quite different. GANs see a whole review of the article, whereas GARs usually start from identifying a few problems and then either fixing them or nothing happening (assuming the basis for the GAR is valid at all; you can have drive-by GARs just as easily as drive-by GANs!) instead of a full assessment of the GACR. Both also require the opposite sort of attention: GANs require a reviewer to pick them up, GARs require a content creator to pick them up. Putting them on the same page may mix expectations, especially for those unfamiliar with the GAN and GAR processes. Listing them in the same sections, as proposed, would make such confusion even worse. CMD (talk) 01:28, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose sort of. I have though about the proposed rejig of the GAR process and am fully on board with the proposals further down. As such I think it would be better keeping them separate. If there is a way to do that on the main page that works that is fine, but with upwards of 500 GANs plus 50 GARs I feel it will just clog the system even more. AS CMD rightly points out there is a difference between GAN and GAR reviews and this needs to be explained, which will just add more instructions to the GAN page, and create more confusion with editors. Again if there is a way to do this on one page I might change my mind, but I feel strongly there needs to be a distinction between GAN and GAR. Aircorn (talk) 06:45, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. The processes are pretty different, and community GARs can potentially take up a lot of space compared to very space-efficient nominations. Spreading GARs out by topic also seems unwieldly. At most, maybe stick a prominent link to GAR at the end of the GAN page? That's sufficient, though. SnowFire (talk) 09:14, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per SnowFire. It would clutter up the space, which is meant to be a friendly entry-level page. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:55, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per Lee Vilenski. Ajpolino (talk) 18:16, 4 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, GAR needs more visibility and organizing by topic would make it easier to find a GAR of interest. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 06:26, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Part of what makes GAR a cumbersome, months-long endeavor is that it attempts to copy the GA model of addressing problems as they are pointed out – but often times, the original GA nominator isn't around to be the point person and fix all of the issues that come up. To that end, GAR should just stick to reviewing, and not to attempting to fix major flaws in the article. GARs should be limited to two weeks; the result can either be to keep the article, to delist the article, or send it back to GA for a full review if someone (who isn't the GAR nominator) volunteers to field it through the GA process. One nice benefit about this is that if someone volunteers to take it through, they can get a GA credit for their troubles. It also consolidates the two backlogs where appropriate. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 08:57, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support as proposer, I think it'd be a good opportunity to bring GAR under a reasonable time frame. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 09:16, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. GAR does not attract enough traffic to ensure sufficient feedback is reached in two weeks. If sufficient consensus is reached, GARs can already be closed in a week, or even faster; the problem is not that we have GARs with a clear consensus of several !voters all saying the same thing yet the discussion remaining unclosed, but rather only one or two people chiming in, sometimes hesitantly. The only fix for that is more people to closely examine the article and chip in. Adding an arbitrary time limit merely gives closers a supervote. Additionally, the model for GAR should be FAR, where the ideal goal is the restoration of the article to its current status. If someone does decide to try "fixing" a GA under review, that can often take more than two weeks, and should be encouraged rather than discouraged - GARs should not be about "just reviewing." Imagine if the same standard was applied to GAN - if a GA nomination isn't taken up within two weeks, or a GA review back-and-forth takes longer than two weeks, it's quick-failed? That would clearly be silly, and I think such a standard for GAR would also be incorrect. SnowFire (talk) 09:53, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • To go into this into some more detail: there are two real problems that come up at GAR that will be exacerbated by such a change that prioritizes speed over accuracy. In one, there are "bad" GAR nominations where someone accuses an article of being inaccurate, incomplete, or not hewing to the sources, but they're wrong / biased / just don't like it/ etc. In another, there's articles that look good but are in fact deeply biased, so even if they cite the sources and are formatted correctly, they are in fact concealing a deep-seated problem: the article is slanted, inaccurate, incomplete, and so on. But distinguishing between these two cases is not obvious. Doing so requires editors willing to take a close look. If such a revamped, speedy GAR process starts stripping GA status eagerly without a close look, it will let POV-pushers easily strip GA status from articles they dislike merely because the original editor is retired; if such a revamped, speedy GAR process generally closes against nominators, then it will allow problematic GAs to fester without a long-form way to investigate the article and come to a consensus. Neither of these are good. I get that it's frustrating GAR is slow, but that can't just be wished away with a time limit - it needs to be fixed with more reviewers. If more reviewers come to GAR - and good reviewers - the slowness will fix itself in easy cases, and the hard cases will be ones we wanted more time anyway. SnowFire (talk) 09:53, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    @SnowFire: I'd be willing to cede on the time limit, that's fine – but I think there's still an inherent advantage to saying "okay, if the problems are starting to pile up, instead of wasting editor-hours awkwardly trying to fix stuff as people are pointing them out, let's delist and someone can take it back to GA with this as a guide". Like, the Russia GAR was a whole mess because of how much time was wasted salvaging sub-GA work in fits and starts. Why have two separate process for doing the same thing: putting articles that may or may not be up to standards against the GA criteria? The worst thing that happens in case of a bad delist isn't a deletion, or even a prejudice against renomination – it's just an invitation to resubmit at GA and carefully work through the problems with a reviewer, one-on-one. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 10:02, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    I mean, if GAR doesn't have a good amount of traffic, I think we should be putting the workload where we have the resources. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 10:03, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    IMO GAR currently has minimal traffic because of its low visibility and the unnecessary complexity of the process. I think the streamlined process with central listing from proposal 14 and the potential for listing GARs at GAN from proposal 12 will increase participation by removing or reducing those barriers.

    There's also a social reluctance to decisively delist bad articles, just as there is a social reluctance to decisively fail GANs that aren't hitting the criteria. It feels bad to be the person saying "your work isn't good enough", especially with the current system of basically shouting into a void for individual GARs. With big articles like Russia it's even worse - it feels like a big responsibility, there's the potential of inviting trouble from people who disagree with your decision, etc. I think the increased visibility from the streamlined process will improve that as there's a greater potential for others to weigh in, taking some of the social responsibility away from the lone person proposing the GAR (even knowing there's a silent consensus is reassuring). If the GAR coords proposal passes, we will have coords with the social capital/authority/what-have-you to decisively close those big bad GARs like Russia or railway surgery, allowing regular users to focus on less contentious GARs. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:37, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    • On kicking something back to a new GAN: Sure, if problems are detected, that can be a good solution, and I've advocated for that myself in some GARs for a "take some time, revise, and visit GAN again". But if it's not clear there really are problems, I suspect many editors would be quite displeased with the article having the GA status stripped and told to renominate again, so it's not a trivial "worst case." And that's the whole rub - are there actually "problems" to "carefully work through with a reviewer?" Because there are some radioactively controversial topics where there will always be some editors unhappy with the article, and other articles that get good-faith but confused / weak rationales against them. I'm just saying that's GAR's whole reason for existence - to figure out if those problems are real, and that's the most important thing to make sure works and is given sufficient time. SnowFire (talk) 10:22, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment I feel like this is fairly similar to PMC's Proposal 14 below, which has passed. Certainly delisting GAs shouldn't be that tiresome, and I think it's unreasonable to expect reviewers to be able to fix every article that comes to GAR, if they lack the necessary resources or subject knowledge. With P14 and others implemented, however, I don't think GAR will be as slow as it currently is anyway.~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 10:24, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, I agree with SnowFire that this hits the wrong area. GAR is not usually a months long endeavour, more typically it is a five minute endeavour that simply hangs around for a few months. (Currently the situation is different, as we have a few dedicated people going through older articles, but this is unrepresentative of the usual activity.) We actually need more endeavour than the five minutes, GARs should come with a reasonable list of problems including at least a couple of specifics. FAR for example requires a talkpage post before the FAR is opened, and we shouldn't require that bureaucracy, but many GARs don't even mention the GACR. If that initial effort is put in, it is much easier to see the problems, and much easier to assess if they are being actioned. CMD (talk) 13:08, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• It's unclear to me what this proposal is specifically assessing. It seems the above commenters have rejected the idea of reducing the gestation time, so I'm going to ignore that provision (point is also moot considering Prop 14 passing). The idea that GAR could become more of an up/down vote by acclamation rather than a workshop, and generally seeking to delist and renominate rather than let a GAR languish, I can get behind but it needs firmer parameters. I.e., when there is disagreement during a GAR and a participant is asking for time to fix the article (put "on hold"), what is the desired course of events? Realistically I think the existing proposals will cover the need here. Anything uncontroversial will close fast with Prop 14 and anything that drags out should be closed after some set period with Prop 13's coordinator. czar 05:04, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I'd like to hear other's thoughts on implementation, but I'd support this in principle. No guarantees I'll sign up as a coord if this passes though. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 03:43, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  An accurate depiction of TAOT trying to no longer be a coordinator 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 03:54, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  🗿 Trainsandotherthings (talk) 03:56, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• What would a co-ordinator do that a regular editor can't? If we can't get regular editors involved, what is the going to attract editors to become co-ordinators? There is nothing stopping any editor who knows the criteria getting involved in closing reassessments. Aircorn (talk) 04:40, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• This would mean other editors could not close GARs, which does not seem a positive step. CMD (talk) 04:51, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't foresee this being akin to the FAC coordinators. As suggested below, it should be more informal, in that anyone in good standing may become a coordinator. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 15:13, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  If it's not a formal position, how does that differ from being a volunteer closing GANs? Am I, as an editor in good standing who has closed GARs, a GAR coordinator? CMD (talk) 01:30, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Coming down to oppose for now, this is not defined and we don't know what the GA process will look like after all these changes full through. Further, we didn't even have the barnstars distributed from the last GA drive, I do not find that a great omen for finding more dedicated volunteers. CMD (talk) 13:12, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support to me, this puts the onus on certain people to make sure the reviews are progressing, and being closed. Right now, all editors can close them, but barely any do. I'd rather we had something pushing for these to be closed. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 07:30, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support we have volunteers willing to coordinate, and it would not change anything for regular editors like myself who still can close GAR. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 09:13, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I have started working through the {{GAR request}} backlog, and resolving long-stuck and easily-judged community reassessments. If the role needs to be formalised, I am willing to take it up. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:17, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• No objection to people who take on the responsibility of making sure the reassessments are closed after a reasonable time, but I'd prefer this to be as informal as possible (i.e. anyone should be able to close GARs, and anyone should be able to become a coordinator). —Kusma (talk) 13:31, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree with Mike below that we shouldn't create this as a formal position at this point in time if we try something like Proposal 12; one of these might be enough. —Kusma (talk) 15:17, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I'm a bit concerned that if we have coordinators, editors who are not coordinators won't realize they also can close GARs. What AirshipJungleman29 is doing right now is what a coordinator might do. I think I'd rather try something that increases GAR visibility first, like proposal 12, and see if that helps, before doing something like this that might end up adding unnecessary bureaucracy. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:27, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Switching to oppose. I don't think this is well-enough defined, and the concerns expressed by e.g. SnowFire and CMD seem valid. The one aspect that is somewhat defined is "handle the workload"; this seems like a backward step, since it seems likely it would lead to reducing the GAR activity of non-coordinators. What does seem useful is the "freelance coordination" that I see here from some regulars -- BlueMoonset and CMD most recently; also Aircorn and some others that I'm not thinking of at the moment. By that I mean a willingness to post a note in a very old review asking about progress, or to spot drive by reviews and get them reverted/deleted, or to help out a new nominator or reviewer with a process question. That sort of "keep the place tidy" attitude is being a coordinator. I wouldn't want to restrict that sort of behaviour at all, but perhaps it would be a good idea to make a list (at GAN/I?) of the kinds of things those editors do to tidy up GAN, and point out that any experienced editor can do the same. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:42, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support to the point that I think this becomes a necessity if the below combining of individual and community GARs happens. Often GARs are opened by editors unfamiliar with the process. This is great as it is the best method we have of quality control (i.e. an editor comes across an article, notices it is marked as being good and don't think it is very good). However occasionally they shouldn't be put through GAR (edit warring, notability, dead links, crystal balling etc). The biggest advantage I can see is letting trusted editors familiar with the process close those early. As long as it is made clear that anybody can close a GAR this would be positive. Aircorn (talk) 07:05, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Another benefit would be to resolve stalemates. With low participation we need an easy way for editors that have commented on the GAR or worked on the article to close it. It happens a bit already, but making it explicit would be good. The risk associated with involved is negligible as whether an article is kept or delisted is not as impactful as other processes and there is always the GAN talk page if someone really disagrees. Done right this will work. Aircorn (talk) 07:09, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support per reasons given above. REDMAN 2019 (talk) 18:55, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support in the assumption that someone is willing to play coordinator. Jorahm (talk) 18:34, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support yeah, GAR definitely needs people willing to spin the gears. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 08:29, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. As others noted on the talk page of GAR, any editor can already close GARs, and the reason many GARs remained open for a long time was not due to the lack of someone willing to close them, but simply because they shouldn't yet be closed (and some of the "cleanup" was unwise IMO of just ending some GARs early). If the coordinator position is "someone to push things along", that's fine, but I'd argue that GAR should still maintain an "everyone can contribute" stance - it needs more contributors, not to restrict contributors even further, and no special qualifications are required to help out and/or close. SnowFire (talk) 09:20, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, as long as regular editors can still open and close non-contentious GARs. Coords should deal with contentious GARs, first by trying to get the wheels turning where participants haven't come to a consensus, and second to decisively close GARs where the above has failed and discussion has stalled out. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:45, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong support, a leader might address issues in this part of GA. That there are open GARs on less than .1% of GAs indicates there is something seriously wrong with how GAR works. It should be MUCH easier to get deficient GAs delisted, and the current process is so cumbersome that I've never engaged in spite of seeing hundreds of deficient GAs. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:48, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak support; would be strong if these were overall GA process coordinators. I have often considered proposing something similar, but not so much for contentious reassessments as to address deficient reviews. I recognize this is a bigger step than many would be willing to take. Even if we don't go this far, shepherding slow GARs, and assessing consensus on stalled ones, can only be a good thing. Vanamonde (Talk) 16:57, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - The inherent decentralization of the GA process works for nominations, but has clearly failed GARs. casualdejekyll 00:12, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Streamline the GAR process by merging individual and community good article reassessment, with a process loosely modelled on the following concept:

All GARs are centrally listed, with anyone free to weigh in. A GAR can be closed as delist after a week by the editor who opened it, unless someone has objected to the delist. At that point participants are expected to discuss the article's issues, make any necessary changes to the article, and come to a consensus about whether the issues are resolved or not. If a clear consensus develops at that point, the opener can close the GAR on their own recognizance. If participants are not able to resolve the discussion, an uninvolved editor or the GAR coords (if that proposal gets consensus) should step in and determine next steps.

With apologies for booting you down slightly Femke - I figured I would clarify what exactly is being proposed, so editors can support or oppose based on a clear concept. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:24, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Originally proposed by
  WT:GAN#We need a MUCH quicker way of delisting GAs.. A simplified process is likely to decrease the barrier to entry. This would also make clear that most of the time involved closes are okay, as consensus is usually clear. As a bonus, it makes it easier to maintain scripts/bots. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 20:02, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  Support - As someone slowly becoming active in GARs, the split between community and individual GARs makes no sense IMO. Merging them would make things easier. Onegreatjoke (talk) 23:47, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support the individual reassessment process is
  incompatible with tools. PMC's proposal above seems workable to me. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:15, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support to streamline this clunky mess. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 20:16, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Pickersgill-Cunliffe (talk) 20:30, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I understand why the two methods existed, but the Wikipedia where both made sense is ancient history. Today, I see little merit in having two methods of GARs. Those who used the individual GAR can still start one and largely guide it through the process as before. There are more benefits to allowing multiple participants in all GARs than there are drawbacks. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 20:32, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I like the idea of having all GARs be centrally located. Whether there is actual controversy is better than the current measure of whether individual GAR allowed. (t · c) buidhe 21:06, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Naturally I support my own proposal :) ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:11, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, although we should clarify the design. I would suggest all GARs are individual as a default, but that anyone is able to weigh in on them. We will need some system regarding closes though, as there are no guarantees that GARs are actually about the GACR. CMD (talk) 01:38, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  This entire proposal is about losing the distinction between "individual" and "community" GARs and moving to a place where they are just GARs. We already live in a system where there is no guarantee that a GAR is about the GACR, and little chance anyone will notice a bad GAR. I could open any number of individual GARs right now that will not be centrally listed on any page you can watchlist, so good luck finding them unless you're checking the tracking category every single day. Unless they are noticed by the nominator (often inactive), a watchlister (unliklely as most articles getting individually GAR'd are obscure), or at WikiProjects (mostly dead), there's a good chance there will be zero oversight on them. I could wait a week and close all of those as delist for totally arbitrary reasons and no one would notice. Having all GARs on a central page will significantly decrease the likelihood of that happening, simply by increasing the visibility of each GAR and creating a centralized history that will log all GARs, as well as explicitly stating that you cannot close-as-delist unilaterally if there is opposition to the delist. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:16, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  My point was on contentious closures not unseen ones. Your enhanced explanation, which was not there when I made my comment, has covered this point, so a closer can read this as a full support on the enhanced proposal. CMD (talk) 05:43, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support per Trainsandotherthings. XtraJovial (talk • contribs) 03:18, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:31, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• support merge. Honestly, I found out that there are two distinct GARs only today, and started one individual (on a topic I know) and one community (on a topic I know nothing); I see no reason why it can't be just one simple GAR process. Artem.G (talk) 18:33, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I am seeing lots of benefits to this one. It will simplify the process, it will prevent editors opening a GAR and then delisting it without giving anyone time to fix the issues, it will be easier to monitor forgotten about GARs, and it will solve the issue of low participation in community GARs (despite the sudden increase in interest I remain skeptical that this will ever be a robust process outside a few topic areas so having a simple way to close those with few low participation is good). The only downsides I see would be solved with co ords. Aircorn (talk) 07:05, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support REDMAN 2019 (talk) 18:56, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Having GAR centrally located should increase participation at least marginally. Schierbecker (talk) 07:21, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Have a bot leave an invitation to review GAN on first-time nominators talk pages if Proposal 9 passes. The invitation would briefly explain Proposal 9 and the benefits of doing a GAN review.

• I don't see any reason this could not be done,, and I agree letting nominators know about the sort order seems a good idea. Would it be better to have a permanent explanation at the top of GAN, though? Perhaps with a one-sentence note at the top of each section saying something like "The nominations are sorted by the ratio of reviews to GAs; see here for an explanation", with a link to the more detailed explanation? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:43, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I would prefer a higher threshold than one, and for passes, not nominations. Putting something up to GAN can be intimidating, more so if it suddenly comes coupled with an implied expectation of even more work. CMD (talk) 12:33, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree with CMD's preference for passes, but not the higher threshold. I disagree with the concept of five noms put forward below, I think that after an article passes a nomination for the first time, a bot could then leave a message to the gist of "Why not review someone elses?" Xx78900 (talk) 09:35, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Agree with CMD. I would generally expect people to be allowed five GA noms for free before we start nudging them towards reviewing. —Kusma (talk) 13:18, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  And five GAs is probably better than five noms as a threshold. —Kusma (talk) 13:19, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Support the proposal in principle, agree that it should be for GAs not noms. Maybe 3 GAs? Personally, by my third GA I felt ready to start reviewing. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 12:20, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I'll concede to experience. My thoughts in general come from trying to imagine a kind of new reviewer pipeline. What are the steps to bring a new GA reviewer on board? I would imagine most people first become aware it exists when they are editing an article that they (or another editor) nominate for GA. I like Mike Christie and Sammi Brie's idea about a box+message on the nominations page. This could work as a kind of next step, letting the GA nominator know about and see the benefits of reviewing. I also like the idea that Aircorn mentioned regarding an easy way for experienced reviewers to reach out during first time reviews because it again takes one of the steps (first review) and finds a way to potentially help a reviewer get past stumbling blocks.

  Rjjiii (talk) 06:08, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

  ]

• I think reviewers should have seen the GA process a little bit in action. That could be through having GAs reviewed or it could be through following links from
  WP:GA and the header, but not by being told on their first nom that they should review to get theirs reviewed faster. I wouldn't mind a message after someone's first GA pass—"now you've had an article reviewed, if you'd like to pay it forward you're welcome to review something from the list". Or after someone's second, third, fifth GA nom—whatever there's consensus for, except at the point of their first GA nomination. — Bilorv (talk) 23:31, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• For some people, reviewing seems like a really difficult task. I'm wondering whether we could identify some articles that are suitable for first time reviewers (something not too long by someone who does good work) to make it easier to get started. (No idea about specifics, so not making this a separate proposal). —Kusma (talk) 20:06, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, based on my own experience. The thing I remember most poignantly about my own GA experience is that it felt like a big deal to submit one, and it also felt like a big deal to review one – and how could I think myself experienced enough to review one if I hadn't even submitted one? Of course, now I have both submitted and reviewed a good number of GA noms, and I realize that this is not how the situation goes, but back when I was pondering after submitting Hooks Island I think something like this could have helped out. jp×g 18:29, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I also think it would be good to let usual nominators know of the new system, if possible. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:56, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support After a first pass (not nomination), and phrased like "pay it forward". I think by stressing the gamification part of it (you'll be prioritised), we may invite people that aren't quite ready to review. Also okay with notifying after second/third pass, but I think waiting till number 5 is too long.
  talk) 09:14, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• I'm not categorically opposed to this suggestion, but I am opposed to leaving invitations at too early a stage. Anything less than two successful nominations (i.e. two GAs) is too early in my opinion. TompaDompa (talk) 14:54, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If proposal 9 passes, change the backlog box, Wikipedia:Good article nominations/backlog/items, to list the five articles that sort to the top using the sort order in proposal 9. The containing page, Wikipedia:Good article nominations/backlog, would also change to say "highest priority" rather than "oldest".

Updated: Modifying this in light of the comments below to "list the five top articles by the new sort order as well as the five oldest articles". Xx78900, does this address your oppose? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:29, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• This is an idea Sammi suggested in comments on proposal 9, and I thought it was worth pulling out to get separate consensus -- it seems like a natural corollary to that proposal. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:19, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support as nominator, while noting I was proposing listing the oldest and first-time nominations. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 21:53, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Support both of these suggestions. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 12:18, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose as written I do think that adding the "top priority" articles is a good idea, but I don't think the oldest should be removed, as sometimes the very fact that they are the oldest nominations encourages people to review pages they wouldn't otherwise. As someone who has had two articles in the oldest five simultaneously, I think that had they not been there there's a reasonable chance they would still be there today. I would prefer to see both listed.

  Xx78900 (talk) 09:32, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I think it's better to extend the list than replace one with the other.
  Firstly, unless the backlog gets so small that there are only 4 nominations, there will always be "5 oldest nominations", but there is never a guarantee that there will be a nomination by a new nominator, let alone 5. Right now there's about 50 nominations older than 30 days nominated by someone with 0 GAs; for comparison there are over 400 nominations older than 30 days regardless of number of GAs the nominator has. So "what happens to the box when all nominations by newbies get reviewed" is something to think about. Beyond that, there are a handful of editors with 0 GAs who have multiple nominations open at the same time, some as many as 5 open nominations. Is only the first nomination considered to be by a new nominator or all of them until the nominator gets a GA?
  Secondly, the stats ChristieBot currently posts only lists number of GAs the nominator has, not number of nominations they've submitted. If an editor nominates a page that keeps failing, they'll keep getting featured. I don't think we want to call those "highest priority", so the metric or wording needs to be more precise.
  Thirdly, a GAN unreviewed for 6-months is a problem regardless of how many GAs the nominator has, and I don't think we need to choose one over the other as "highest priority". I think it's enough to simply list both with an objective statement about what they are---oldest outstanding, and oldest by nominators with no GAs---and leave the prioritization up to the reviewers. — Wug·a·po·des​ 21:44, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  To your question above, if a nominator keeps getting their nominations failed, they would still get treated as a new nominator under proposal 9. I think this is OK -- if they can't pass a GA we shouldn't be encouraging them to review, which is what proposal 9 is intended to do. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:12, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it does indeed, and I'm changing my vote to Support Xx78900 (talk) 18:26, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. If all the newbies get reviewed would this then move on to include experienced editors with many reviews?
  Rjjiii (talk) 20:37, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

  Yes, and if there are multiple nominations by a new nominator, as soon as the first one is promoted, the rest will move down. For example in the world history subtopic FuzzyMagma has three nominations currently listed at 5, 7, and 8 on the list. One is under review; if it's promoted the other two will move down to about 29 or 30 on the list. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:13, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The nominations page is by far the most watched and active. Everything discussed at the Criteria and reassessment page concerns the process so it makes sense to put it keep in all in one centralised place. Aircorn (talk) 07:15, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Not sure about GAR, but most of the talk pages are certainly unneeded. CMD (talk) 08:44, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, with the caveat that this only makes sense for GAR if proposal 12 passes. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:14, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I consider myself active in the project but have only recently learned this page exists. It's function is entirely redundant. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 19:41, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment The criteria page got redirected a while ago. So this will be for the
  WT:GAN. Aircorn (talk) 20:31, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support I imagined all "talk" pages would go to the "Discussion" tab until I read this proposal. — Preceding
  Rjjiii (talk • contribs) 22:15, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support: a centralised location should mean fewer comments go unseen. — Bilorv (talk) 23:31, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, volume is not high enough to justify splitting discussion. One-stop-shop is good. —Ganesha811 (talk) 03:19, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: this is just a good idea. jp×g 08:59, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, but only for GAR if proposal 12 passes. I think the GAR talk volume may increase with simplifications. Makes the process more attractive to work in / GA sweeps possible. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 20:05, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Put a notice banner for active GA nominations atop the article (in mainspace) as encouragement for editors reading the article to review it. czar 08:27, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose, I don't expect most readers to be familiar with the GACR. The tag is already on the talkpage for those interested, and already shows in the existing article quality gadget. CMD (talk) 08:46, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose putting it in mainspace will confuse readers. Generally cleanup tags in mainspace do encourage changes, but they are also a previso about the quality of the article you are about to read. GANs don't change the quality. I'm not sure if it's a gadget, or always a thing, but it already says when an article is at GAN/FAC underneath the title. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 08:52, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Preferences->Gadgets->"Display an assessment of an article's quality in its page header" is the trick. Also adds the colour coding. CMD (talk) 08:57, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose Whether an article is currently a GA nominee is not of interest to the general reader and they probably don't understand what it means. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:53, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Whilst I'm all for advertising internal Wiki procedures to casual readers, I'm not sure this is the way to do it. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 11:23, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose Per above. REDMAN 2019 (talk) 18:28, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose I think this targets the wrong audience.
  Rjjiii (talk) 06:57, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Oppose People should (and do) find their way to GAs via other routes. —Ganesha811 (talk) 03:20, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose I stumbled upon GAN, and the first time I forrayed into reviewing I made an absolute mess of things and my reviews were reverted. Now, I have 250 some reviews that I'll stand behind. GAN is one of the more complex aspects of Wikipedia and requires experience, advertising it to casual readers is a terrible idea in my opinion. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 16:11, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Require the nominator to run through a self-review of the GA criteria as a checklist on the talk page to show how the article meets the criteria. This shifts the burden of the first passthrough comments from the reviewer to the nominator. It also shows where the nominator needs coaching if they didn't understand the criteria. For instance, if we want the reviewer to spotcheck citations for controversial statements, the nominator should be able to say they checked that in advance. czar 08:50, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose in favour of Proposal 20 as an alternative.

Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 11:36, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose - seems overkill and preventative for actually nominating articles. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 18:19, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as utterly unenforceable. --Rschen7754 03:19, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I don't understand the proposal. Are nominators not expected to have their articles meet the GACR already? CMD (talk) 06:22, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  And when they're not (which, by a sampling of the GANs with open reviews, is often) the burden is placed on the reviewer to coach the nominator through the criteria. The burden should be the other way around, that the nominator vouches for how the article meets the criteria (on the article's talk page), and the review carries less of an expectation to provide the prescriptive steps to GA quality. For example, right now, it's possible for a reviewer to spend more time reviewing an article than the nominator spent preparing it for review. Nominators need more skin in the game. czar 08:19, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  This does not accord with how I have had my GANs handled, or have handled GANs. If a nomination is so far from the GACR that coaching is needed, a reviewer should fail the article. Additionally, if a nominator is putting something up for GACR, I don't see the additional step doing more than requiring the nominator to say things are met, after which the reviewer will have to check them anyway. CMD (talk) 09:22, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Almost every GA nom involves some degree of coaching, i.e., bringing things to the attention of the nominator. The difference is whether a reviewer needs to repeat the most common observations each time, which is where I thought a nominator pre-flight checklist would help. Part of what wore me out from reviewing was needing to cite the same MOS passages each time to explain the change (rather than writing it with no explanation). I developed a ton of macros from when I did more frequent reviews. This is more egregious with new nominators, I think.

  Spot-checking the edit history of WP:GAN, most of the reviews coming through are for experienced nominators, so this need not apply to them, but that is also part of the problem: It's no surprise that experienced nominators get reviewed first, as theirs are much easier to review (easier and more forgiving) than the burden of handling a first-time nominator, for reasons I just described.

  Perhaps an interim solution would be a checklist suggested to new nominators but not required. czar 21:08, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose Any form of self-review for an "awarded" article assessment is worthless and unenforceable. Short of putting a chip in editors' heads that will explode if they don't do it in good faith, it's a brief bureaucratic hurdle that will do basically nothing to help the process. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 16:13, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose The nominator should have done that already per
  WP:GAI. This, at least, is not unclear. I do not see any benefit to this proposal—which nominators have put their articles forward thinking it doesn't meet the criteria? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:33, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

When an article is nominated, have a bot provide a low-level pre-review with advice/suggestions for improvement, so the nominator is prompted to clean up the basics before the reviewer arrives. (This moves some of the reviewer's burden to an auto-reviewer bot.) I.e., anything afoul of the quickfail criteria, notice of any open maintenance tags, Earwig %, recent edit warring, reversion of drive-by nom (if approved above), paragraphs lacking citations. czar 08:50, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment The basic idea is good, especially for things that are easy to spot for a bot. One question is where the pre-review should go. Should the bot create the review page right away? Currently, the reviewer creates the page when they start the review. Or should the bot post its initial assessment to the nominator's talk page? Or something else? Phlsph7 (talk) 10:57, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support in principle. This would be both user-friendly for new reviewers and save a bunch of time on menial tasks/checks. To echo what @Phlsph7 has said above, we should decide when this review bot would run. I am not familiar with bots at all, but could the reviewer decide when to run it? A particularly long review might need a second copyvio or edit warring check at the end. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 11:35, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I guess the simplest way would probably be to run the bot right after the nomination and post a comment on the nominator's talk page. This way, the nominator has time to address the issues (or withdraw the nomination) before the review starts. Currently, there are bot messages to inform the nominator when a review has started and when it has finished. The pre-review could be one more such message right at the beginning. Having the bot create the review page, on the other hand, might cause problems for other bots that count reviews and update the overview based on who created the review page (though I'm not sure if that's how they work). Making the reviewer decide when to run the bot could also work but might be more complicated to implement and requires knowledge on the side of the reviewer of this process. Phlsph7 (talk) 12:07, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Running within 24 hours of the GA nom and posting to the article's talk page with a ping for the nominator should be sufficient czar 08:13, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment. Are there any bots capable of this sort of thing? I don't think this is a simple task. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:16, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Back in ye olde days there was a toolforge peer review program which ran through basic grammar, spelling, wiki formatting, checked if sources were dead, and a number of other useful tasks. Long gone by now, but the concept is possible. Now we just have the overlink tool. CMD (talk) 18:10, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Back when I reviewed

  WP:FLC nominations regularly, I used the tools at Wikipedia:Featured list tools (which appear to be the same ones as Template:Featured article tools) heavily. Those seem to still be around though, so are you referring to something different? TompaDompa (talk) 18:38, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

  ]

  Those aren't exactly what I remember, but I suspect the tool was drawing from those or something equivalent. CMD (talk) 06:26, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  There was Dispenser's Peer Reviewer, which was linked in the {{good article tools}}. I don't think their code is open source. Its precursor was User:AndyZ/peerreviewer, which has some good history. czar 08:12, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The MilHistBot goes through recently-tagged MilHist articles and gives them a rating of stub, start, C or B. It performs many of the checks described here. It checks referencing, word count, the presence of images and some other things. I implemented it to reduce the project's workload. Articles rated B class are flagged for human review. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:11, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I think it's not a terrible idea, but we do need to be a bit careful if we run Earwig to state that doesn't mean that there definitely isn't any copyvio in the article, and reviewers still need to check. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 18:22, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support A good idea in theory, the hardest part would probably be setting up the bot. REDMAN 2019 (talk) 18:30, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as written. It may be beneficial for potential nominators to have access to an automated review tool, but I would not wish to move any of the responsibility for the actual review from humans to bots. —Kusma (talk) 09:36, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - a perfect bot might be nice in theory, but the more I think about this, the most un-implementable it seems, and liable to cause other problems. Earwig can have false positives, for example, caused by long quotes and titles - people would still need to go look at it no matter what. More trouble than its worth. —Ganesha811 (talk) 03:21, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. I think this is likely to cause more problems than it solves, especially for newer reviewers who may become reliant on it. Also, much of what's suggested in the original post feels implausible - how will a bot determine if an article meets quickfail criteria? As a nominator, I wouldn't want a bot checking my grammar, and as a reviewer, I wouldn't want to rely on a bot's estimation of CV or other issues. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 05:40, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per PMC—we don't want new reviewers to become reliant on evaluation tools rather than actually assessing the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:34, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Changed my mind. Support on condition that the bot is limited in scope—let's say it checks for copyright violations, that images are captioned, for words that may violate
    WP:WTW, and similar low-level tasks. I don't think the bot should be helping with the mini-peer review aspect. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:35, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
    ]
• @Premeditated Chaos and AirshipJungleman29, this isn't meant to replace the reviewer but to save them the time of having to repeat macros that may be obvious to them but not the nominator. No one suggested that it would quickfail an article on its own, but it would be helpful to let the nominator know, for example, if they have cleanup tags on the article that they didn't see, or if they have a high Earwig percentage that they'll have to explain at some point anyway, or to have a heads up that an article's high editing frequency may construe edit warring. Any tool that saves the reviewer more time will make the review process less onerous. We want the reviewer to focus on the review itself, not flagging stuff like potential overlinking and sentences that are missing inline citations, as a bot can easily preemptively flag those just the same and the nominator can provide their response in advance of the actual review. czar 20:33, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  As a nominator, if you're missing cleanup tags on the article, you're not paying sufficient attention to it in the first place. As a reviewer, you're going to have to double-check anything the bot says anyway - how is a bot going to accurately judge whether an article is "a long way from meeting any one of the six good article criteria"? Checking for edit-warring takes a single click to the history page. Overlinking isn't part of the GA criteria, and actually neither is having every sentence individually cited (that's not even a requirement at FAC), so I don't know that those are things a GA review bot should even be pointing out. I just don't see how this is going to save time. I think it's going to force people (both nom and reviewer) to spend more time explaining why whatever the bot decided was an issue isn't actually an issue. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:57, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Suggestions in the vein of this example would provide some light guidance for new nominators while they wait three months for a review. They aren't obliged to do anything about it, but if their reviewer is going to complain about overlinking and inline citations (they will) as part of the peer review element of GA, this gives them a head start without the reviewer having to mention it. I'd think of this more as a peer reviewer bot than a GA review bot. czar 01:27, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• This is a hard task, and here's one example: We might prefer, as a general rule of thumb, at least one inline citation per paragraph, but excluding the lead, and most sections that consist entirely of lists and templates (e.g., ==See also==). That could probably be coded. But the other day, I reverted a {{
  fact}} tag that was on a bland introductory sentence that said something like "There are several things". The rest of the (cited) paragraphs in that section proved the both the accuracy and verifiability of that sentence. But a bot would look at that and flag it as an unsourced paragraph. This is technically true, but it's not something that needs a citation.

  If you wanted to do something fairly easy, then having a bot deliver the mw:ORES score for the article might be helpful. If it's been put up for GA and ORES says C-class or lower, it's unlikely to pass. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:44, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Weak oppose: I think i'm coming down against because my preferred project is DYK, which did have a review bot back in the day. I don't think it proved to be a huge time-saver; the problem is that all of the things it checked for (newness, length, QPQ, copyvio) were things that any human could easily recheck in under a minute, especially if script-assisted. GA has even fewer automatable tasks that can be checked, because DYK has a bunch of esoteric rules having to do with newness and stuff like that. If the community isn't yet at the point where it trusts bots to do natural-language processing, then this is probably something we should shelve for another time. theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 09:15, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Quick fails are easy reviews. This doesn't feel like a problem? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:54, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: Does the bot or a similar bot exist? The FA peer review tool is nice, but gives a lot of bogus information. For example, it will vaguely complain about multiple varieties of English if you cite sources with -isation and -ization in the titles. And doesn't rater just estimate a grade based on similarity to other articles? You mention inline citations but the GAC seem both pretty lax and pretty specific about which lines require an inline citation. I feel like it would be relatively easy to create a bot that checks a paragraph's length against a ratio of citations but very difficult to create a bot that specifically hunts down material likely to be challenged.
  Rjjiii (talk) 20:30, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

Hold an RFC on options to make GA status more prominent in mainspace. Showing and explaining GA status in a more prominent way would both help with reader literacy of status (and prompt curiosity about the criteria) while rewarding editors for their efforts. I.e., one RFC proposal could be to turn the article title the color green with a tooltip that explains how the article has been reviewed.

In a former career, I observed a high school teacher that happened to be teaching research skills on using Wikipedia. She said that the lock icon in the corner meant that it had been reviewed. Readers have no idea what our esoteric icons mean, so a little explanation of what exactly is verified and what isn't could go a long way towards mutual incentives. czar 09:33, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment This is potentially quite a big overhaul, i.e. if we're going to do it for GAs we should do it for every article with an icon. This kind of exists already—when you hover over the GA icon it says "This is a good article. Click here for more information." Perhaps all pop-up descriptions should be more descriptive upfront (e.g. "This is a good article, meaning it has been independently reviewed by another Wikipedia user as being "good"). Probably beyond the scope of this proposal drive, but I'd support a wider policy change.

Another thought—perhaps a more immediate focus should be getting icons visible in mobile view (seeing as that's how the majority of people use Wikipedia these days I'd guess). Again, beyond the scope of this proposal drive, but it's a personal bugbear of mine. Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 11:28, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Additional comment If we're going to do this, we need to make sure it doesn't look like a cleanup banner, as I think quite a lot of non-editors/casual users of Wikipedia at least have some awareness that "big banner at the top of page = something is wrong". Unexpectedlydian^♯4talk^‽ 09:19, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment/Question: As a former WikiEd student, myself, you'd be surprised how little the teachers know about Wikipedia at times. They rely heavily on the WikiEd advisors that are assigned and most aren't regular editors. I do know one who is, but its a mixed bag of competencies. They don't teach article assessment in these courses, and the general public is unaware of these assessments. If it was my design, I'd put the icon for each page's assessment in the top corner (even though its probably a bit excessive to idiot proof the site more than it already is).

I'm curious how you envision this RFC. How, in your opinion, show GA be made more prominent? Or is this strictly a proposal to start a separate discussion? 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 20:00, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think there are a number of potential visual treatment options but first I wanted to see if there was even interest in workshopping this. Personally my recommendation would be for a visual system for trust like Twitter's verified icon (notwithstanding its recent history) that accompanies plain language explaining the extent to which the article has been community vetted ("X editors have endorsed this article as meeting Wikipedia's core policies. This does not mean that all sentences match their sources. Click here to this article's last review, from January 2023.") But this is just my opinion—I think there are lighter weight options that would still be useful and I'd like to see a bunch of options workshopped. czar 08:37, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

you'd be surprised how little the teachers know about Wikipedia at times – Believe me, seeing the quality of WikiEd output on articles that I've watchlisted, I am not surprised. Just the choices of articles that they let students make is a big giveaway. — Bilorv (talk) 23:32, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've for a while thought that having a "good article(s) of the day" would be worthwhile. Since there are far more GAs than FAs, we could feature a few on the main page per day, each getting maybe a sentence. That would require a proper RfC to implement though. Just an idea. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 04:33, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is something worth considering. I wonder how it would play against DYK, which is the closest thing we have to this right now. It would probably require a similar nomination system as well, which is another undertaking altogether. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 07:16, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Technically, DYK already is putting recent GAs on the main page, as recent GAs become eligible for that section. czar 08:38, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The articles DYK puts on the main page can be GAs, but often are not. I don't think that's a reason to preclude something specifically featuring GAs. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 00:57, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There was a similar proposal at the village pump a while ago Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 174#Move good/featured article topicons next to article name. Supported then and would again. There is a user script which already changes the title colour so should be easy to implemented. Main concerns from memory were quality control, but if we are concerned about that then why even have the process. As long as we acknowledge Good Article don't necessarily mean it is a good article. Aircorn (talk) 05:33, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I like Wugapodes idea there about an A/B testing to see if the position raises awareness. Also, maybe it will come up in the future again as the new Wikipedia layout will de-emphasize the FA/GA/Protected icons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Deployment_of_Vector_(2022)

Rjjiii (talk) 06:47, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

I don't know how easy this would be to change, but the current tooltip for the GA icon feels odd to me. "This is a good article." When the more accurate statement would be something like "This article passed a Good Article review on XX/XX/XXXX." The same is true for FA.

Rjjiii (talk) 06:54, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

That's a good change, although I suspect it may need to be raised somewhere more central. CMD (talk) 09:24, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that would be better, ideally if it could imply that it is the old version that passed the review (so the current version might not be as good). —Kusma (talk) 09:41, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm opposed to enhancing the illusion of reliability of our articles. Anyone can edit our articles and change their content, so the fact that a past version has been assessed and found acceptable should not mean too much to the reader, who always needs to use their best judgment when considering whether to believe the content of the article or not. —Kusma (talk) 09:40, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support - I think an additional advantage of this might be to make the process more prominent to newish editors, who can learn a lot from going through the process. I agree with Rjjiii that the text should be changed, to make it less likely that we create an illusion of reliability. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 13:01, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: reader literacy and higher visibility of internal processes is something I generally support, so I'd be in favour of most things we could do here, like making the title colour green or having a more visible "verified account"-style GA icon next to the title. — Bilorv (talk) 23:32, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support; I've found that very few people outside of Wikipedia even realize that there is a difference between articles that undergo peer review processes and articles that don't – for a while I figured that the daily "featured article" was just a random page that people thought was cool. jp×g 09:01, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, although given the impact of these changes, and the fact that they will have to be implemented for FAs as well, the RFC will probably have to be held at
  WP:VPR. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:36, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Oppose. GA is meant to be a lightweight process. It's something that says that at least one other editor checked an article and thought it was good. But that's not enough to highlight something to the public as "approved content", at least not heavily. "Articles one person, possibly in 2011, thought was decent?" The more GA is highlighted, the larger the pressure becomes to turn GA into something like
  WP:FA. But we already have a FA process (and an A-class review process, too, for those who want a FAC-lite). Basically, either we're increasing the stress on reviewers who want to avoid starring as the bad guy in some newspaper story if it turns out the article they reviewed was wrong yet also highlighted to the public as accurate, or we're misleading the public on a casual GA process signifying more than it really does. SnowFire (talk) 09:31, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

Oppose per Kusma andbSnowFire Xx78900 (talk) 14:26, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support I agree, but not because it'll help GA reviewing. While I know many people formally see GA as a low bar, if we're being honest, on average a GA on any decent topic will be much better than a non-GA on any decent topic, and there's a far greater likelihood a reader can actually trust what they're reading. Trust that it makes sense and is reasonably broad. That's true in practice IME. We should signal this fact to readers. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 16:24, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Mixed I generally agree with
  WP:GA, but maybe it should link to the GA review? The benefit is that it actually shows interested readers what the review process was, what issues were raised (and fixed), and gives them information with which to evaluate the current article's quality. The benefit is that these are changes that could probably be implemented without a project-wide RfC since it's not changing the interface or how other icons might work.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Wugapodes (talk • contribs) 08:42, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Support. The proposal here is to hold an RfC on whether or not we should make GA status more prominent in mainspace. This seems like a conversation to have, and even those opposed are simply making substantial arguments against making this more prominent rather than actually addressing whether or not this warrants an RfC. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 18:36, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I support holding an RfC on this matter, and while we're at it the same should be done for FAs, but that's a separate issue. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 19:05, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose, one-reviewer processes should not be more prominent on the main page (and yes, that applies to DYK and OTD, too). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:49, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support along the lines of
  talk) 16:44, 22 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

I mentioned this above but wanted to break it out to a separate proposal for consideration. We now know that most editors find new reviews through WP:GAN, so it behooves us to make the page legible. Right now, each row looks like this:

• Example (edit | talk | history | protect | links | watch | logs | page views (90d)) (start review) (0 reviews, 0 GAs) WikipediaUser (talk) 00:00, 1 January 2000 (UTC)[reply]