The best road to progress is freedom's road. - JFK
Florida
Taking stock of the Good Article backlog: A close examination of the efficacy of the GA Cup contest, a longstanding effort to reduce the backlog of articles awaiting review
Good articles can be identified by a green plus symbol. The plus-minus motif was not the first suggested; other ideas included a thumbs up, check mark, or ribbon.
Backlog during the third GA Cup with a 15-day simple moving average
Backlog from the end of the Second GA Cup to the end of the Third GA Cup. The blue line indicates when the Third GA cup was announced and the green line when the Third Cup began.
Discuss this story
The results of gamification
The assertion that GOCE drives. I think the Good Article WikiProject is key to objectively improving content whereas GOCE is by-and-large just fixing word salad, which almost anyone can do. Efforts like the GA Cup are our collective means of putting these articles to stringent standards. GA status is often, though not always, a precursor to pursuit of A-class or FA. I remain concerned that these contests (of which I am a part currently) attract editors who are still unfamiliar with proper reviewing. It's demoralizing to see bad reviews done, especially when you're competing for points. WikiProject Articles for Creation had 8 drives since 2012. The last drive saw a lot of poorly done draft reviews and the results were so skewed that the WikiProject hasn't held another drive since 2014. I would hate to have these drives ruined by bad editing and we can only rely on the judges of the competition to stay alert to malfeasance. Chris Troutman (talk) 21:17, 26 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
has no basis in fact. It may be true that insufficient reviews occur at the same rate so the Cup doesn't encourage the practice but let's remember that the number of bad reviews is increasing at the same time reviews, generally, are increasing. Doing GA reviews sucks because it's actual work; I have more fun doingI don't really buy into the "gamification" of this (and various similar "challenges", "drives", etc.). Maybe it really does motivate a few people, but not everyone feels competitive about this stuff. The very nature of GA, FA, DYK, ITN, etc., as "merit badges" for editors to "earn", and the drama surrounding that, led to a rancorous ArbCom case recently, and cliquish behavior at FAC has generated further pointless psychodramatics. We really need to focus on the content and improving it for readers, not on the internal wikipolitics of labels, badges, and acceptance into politicized editorial camps.
It might be more practical and productive to have a 100-point (or whatever) scale and grade articles on it to a fixed and extensive set of criteria, with FA, GA, A-class, B, C, Start, and Stub all assigned as objectively as possible based on level of compliance with these criteria (and resolving the tension of exactly what A-Class is in this scheme, which seems to vary from "below GA" to "between GA and FA" to "FA+" to "totally unrelated to GA or FA"). There are a quite a number of GA, A and probably even FA quality articles that have no such assessments, because their principal editors just don't care about (or actively don't care for) the politics and entrenched personality conflicts of our article assessment processes as they presently stand. I, for one, will probably never attempt to promote an article to FA myself directly, because of the poisonous atmosphere at FAC (which is now an order of magnitude worse than it was when I first came to that conclusion several years ago). I guess the good news is I'll have more time for GA work. :-) The more that FA, and some of the more rigid and too-few-participants A-class processes, start to work like GA historically has, the better. If, as Kaldari suggests below, the opposite is happening, with GA sliding toward FA-style "our way or the highway" insularity, then you can expect negative results and declining participation. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 09:48, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Age of nominations
This is very interesting read! One thing that I was looking for here that didn't get discussed was the effect of the Cup on the age of nominations - are reviews now sitting in the queue for less time than they were before these competitions started? (For those who don't know, I'm a judge in the Cup, after having competed in it the first year.)--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 05:13, 27 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Reviewer burnout
I took part in the first GA cup. It was a new idea with a good purpose and I felt I wasn't pulling my weight by putting more GA nominations on the pile than reducing the backlog by reviewing. Towards the end of the cup, I got burned out and reduced my activity; I still do the odd review but not as many as I used to. I know some other GA stalwarts have also stopped reviews. How can we reach out to these people and get them to participate in reviews again? Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:59, 27 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Great article
I just wanted to say that this was a really interesting read. As someone who wasn't around for the early days of the project I'd love to learn more about how some of the other now well-established processes came to be. Sam Walton (talk) 16:13, 28 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]