User talk:Vaticidalprophet/GA reform

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Some good ideas here. A really lightweight process would be to go through the page that lists GAs with active cleanup tags (I know this exists but can't find the link) and get it to zero. But a lot of articles are never tagged. I'm also not convinced that screening for prose size will be helpful because in my experience most very short GAs are narrow topics competently covered. Screening for total length might be better because really short articles will also be short in the references department. (t · c) buidhe 11:26, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I recall seeing the page you're mentioning too, but unfortunately am also blanking on it...Length is complicated. There are definitely many excellent short articles (at both GA and FA), but I think it does overrepresent ones that need greater breadth of coverage; I've lately seen some short celebrity GAs and GANs that I've had serious questions about the coverage of (James Charles (Internet personality) which I quickfailed, and Gigi Goode which has GA status but IMO has both coverage/weight issues and BLP 'controversies' cited to very borderline sources). Running the 9000-bytes-or-fewer query also brings up quite a few articles that seem to have issues for other reasons, such as The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit, which was written by a sockpuppeteer with serious copyvio issues (and has never AFAICT been checked for them but has some wording that strikes me as incredibly suspicious), and Slackers CDs and Games, which almost certainly needs updating; I think the density of such articles would be lower with a less length-focused criterion. The thing that catches me with regards to prose size vs absolute bytes is that while what you note about insufficient citations is very true, there's also the matter that many GAs with short and possibly substandard prose have their byte length bulked out by extensive use of tables, templates, etc. Vaticidalprophet 11:59, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That page is here. As of last update (July 6) there were 34,380 articles (pretty close to the 34,445 currently listed, probably just lag) in there with 11,362 having various cleanup tags (33%) for a total of 20,049 cumulative tags. It's not quite as bad as it seems because the 20,049 include fairly minor issues such as "CS1 errors: invisible characters" (7 articles) or "Articles using infobox body of water without alt" (36 articles). My instinct would be to start with some lists of the most serious or bizarre issues - such as the three GAs that have no incoming links from the article space (for instance all the links to Greene v Associated Newspapers Ltd seem to be from WP, portal (still unconvinced that portals are a thing that should still exist), user, etc), the 10 instances of obsolete information, or the 187 failed verification. I don't think a full GA sweeps of the several tens of thousands will be doable at the start, but hitting the low-hanging fruit is a way to build some momentum. Hog Farm Talk 16:23, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Buidhe and Vaticidalprophet: - I half-assedly created User:Hog Farm/GA cleanup listings 2021 for listing the articles flagged on three of the more "serious" issues on that cleanup listing page. Some look like spurious tags, some are in bad shape. If this is gonna be potentially useful, I can do something like this off and on. Any thoughts? Hog Farm Talk 05:12, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hog Farm's list

Continuing discussion of User:Hog Farm/GA cleanup listings 2021 here to permit some kind of centralization/not keep track of a million talk pages as things expand. The article standing out to me on that list is of course Asthma. On some further look, it's one of the several (Down syndrome, which I've complained about before, is another) medical GAs promoted by Doc James in the mid-2010s after being delisted at FAR in the late 2000s. Generally these are quite major/popular disorders that would need a lot of updating and upkeep, and James is much less active these days for reasons, although still edits. In addition to the maintenance issue, a lot of those articles broadly have the things that annoy me in medical articles -- presenting text (especially symptoms) as tables or lists when it's better formatted as prose, very short subsections, and a "we should use every section WP:MEDMOS suggests" attitude that gets you stuff like this.

I agree with the broad position that some of the tags have more weight to them than others. I'm quite lenient with external links, for instance, and while they want a bit of maintenance I don't think any of them here rise to problematic levels. Vaticidalprophet 16:06, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I was expecting based on the "spam" heading that there would be blatant promotional content in them. Shouldn't be hard to fix some of the link farms. Hog Farm Talk 19:37, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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