Forums > Senate Hall archive > SH:3000 word GAs
This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments or questions on this topic should be made in a new Senate Hall page rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record. —MJ— Jedi Council Chambers 03:20, January 25, 2013 (UTC)
Can I ask why the maximum word number for Good articles is at 3000 when the minimum requirement for an FA is 1000? I keep seeing articles that are GAs but have the requirements for FAs, like Tor Vizsla and Black Vulkars. Commander Code-8 To say hi, press 42 03:50, December 1, 2012 (UTC)
- I tend to think that this should be given consideration. I personally think that it should be more restricted for GANs with a max of 1000, and FANs start at 1001, or something of the like. I think the reason why we still have 3000 word GANs is because not everyone wants to jump right into an Inquisitorius review, even with an article over 1000 words. However, I still think it makes more sense for there to be a shorter word-count for GANs.—Cal Jedi
(Personal Comm Channel) 03:56, December 1, 2012 (UTC) - I think it has to do with the origins of Good articles. Rule 9 on the GAN page states: "(a GA must) …have significant information, especially a biography for character articles. For articles under 1000 words in length, comprehensive detail is required with all information covered from all sources and appearances. For articles over 1000 words, broad coverage addressing all major aspects of the topic is sufficient." Originally, there were two types of GAs --- articles under 1000 words that were ineligible for FA status due to their length, and articles over 1,000 words that weren't written with enough detail to be an FA. The latter has become a relic of the past by this point, though, and it's probably worth starting a CT to strike that from Rule 9 and to make 1,000 the maximum word count for a GA. The modern GA is required to meet all of the same standards as an FA save for the word count. Menkooroo (talk) 03:59, December 1, 2012 (UTC)
- (After many edit conflicts) Anything above 3000 words or even 1000 for a GA is pushing it. Normally if you exceed 1000 words and are planning for GAN, you might as well go to the FAN page. I would say that, as of late, nominators are following the 250-999 word range for GANs, while anything above 1000 words would be appropriate for the FAN. Tor and Black Vulkars are older GAs that might need to be looked at. JangFett (Talk) 04:00, December 1, 2012 (UTC)
- edit-conflicts So yeah, I agree with Cal. Although if we were to lower the max word count to 1000, I would hope we could extend a grandfather clause to all old GAs over 1000 words and let them be. Menkooroo (talk) 04:02, December 1, 2012 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) I would support cutting off GAs at 999 words. However, I have a problem with how the word limit is handled on CAs. Currently, if a CA is expanded beyond 250, it can actually be stripped of status if not taken to the GAN immediately. I don't like that; if it's still of high quality, there's no reason to remove the status. IIRC, Lando sat around as a GA for a long time after the 3,000-word limit on GAs was imposed, as the limit was only enforced while the article was actually undergoing the nomination process, not on AC review. I won't support any change in the system that would allow the AC to strip GAs of status solely for being too long if there's nothing else wrong with them. By all means enforce the limit on the nomination page, but not once it's passed. I'd also like to see the CA rules changed in that regard. —MJ— Comlink 04:09, December 1, 2012 (UTC)
- I'm probably in a slim minority here, but I really don't like how GAs have become FAs in all but word count. The old style was put in place for a reason: to denote an article that is very well written, reasonably detailed, but which doesn't include every snippet of information from every single source. Because we have gotten away from longer GAs of the "good enough" variety, we've basically cast a whole slew of articles to the dustbin of "never gonna be status." Think of Twi'lek, Human, and Wookiee—these are unlikely to ever reach status without a huge, concerted effort by lots of Wookieepedians. Not impossible, but probably not going to happen. Thus, we let these articles languish, falling well below the quality standards of other articles on less-prominent topics. In my mind, we should be able to GA Twi'lek, say, by including all relevant information from the major sources on them: The Essential Guide to Alien Species, The New Essential Guide to Alien Species, The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia, etc. Such an article would not necessarily be comprehensive in that it wouldn't need to include all the random background Twi'leks to be a GA, as we now require for status aliens articles. In short, bring back the long GAs so we can incentivize people to work on these much more daunting articles. Because they are so commonly featured in canon, we need some sort of mechanism to encourage people to work on their articles without being overwhelmed. ~Savage
15:20, December 1, 2012 (UTC)
- As I recall, that was the whole reason for why it was set at 3000 in the first place, though it wasn't discussed in the revamp CT, so it may have been in the IRC. I've never been a fan of calling GAs "FAs in all but length" for the same reason as Bob. Because of our very literal interpretation of rules, it cuts out articles that are nebulous, like Luke Skywalker. New users might not know about Project Wormhead, but that was our only concerted effort to get Luke up to status. When we updated the FA rules to the current standards, the plan was to get it GA'd instead, because perfect coverage would be impossible. A specific word count for "broad coverage" is silly in my opinion, since we're always going to run into articles where broad coverage would take it to Wedge Antilles length and beyond, but getting rid of the qualifier entirely for slavish adherance to comprehension against the logistics of the article's sitution is equally silly. Our major articles have numerous and still-proliferating update tags, and that's not just because they have major parts in those books and it would take time to update. It's because there's no incentive to keep them up-to-date, since they're projects outside any range of plausibility, much further than Wedge, so what's the point? NaruHina Talk
19:01, December 1, 2012 (UTC)
- The point is that Wookieepedia is here for us to present its quality. It's not here to cater to our laziness in not wanting to fix articles.—Cal Jedi
(Personal Comm Channel) 05:17, December 2, 2012 (UTC)
- You seem to be assuming that the reason no one has FA'ed Luke Skywalker or Human is because of laziness. I would counter that it's rather pragmatism. Again, as I said above, under current FA rules, it is next to impossible to FA something like Human. It would require reading, probably literally, every piece of Star Wars fiction ever released. Not wanting to do that isn't laziness, I think—it's sanity. :) Likewise, I don't see how an article on Humans that fails to mention every random Human character that appears in a cantina somewhere is somehow of low quality. It'd be great to do so, sure, but a slavish devotion to comprehensiveness shouldn't prevent the article from being deemed "good" if it otherwise covers the important aspects of the topic. There has to be an alternative mechanism for these type of articles in my opinion, and GA is supposed to be it. ~Savage 12:57, December 2, 2012 (UTC)
- Yeah, that was one of the original purposes of the "Good article," but it seems to have been lost over time. I get your point about species FAs, as they have things like the NEGTAS and UUA from which to draw the "most important" points, but I do wonder if there would be a lot of subjectivity involved in articles like Luke Skywalker and what should be considered important. With that said, I do wish there were more of an incentive for articles like Luke to be expanded. I'd love to see improvement drives make a comeback. Menkooroo (talk) 13:47, December 2, 2012 (UTC)
- I'd say every novel needs to be checked for information and a certain percentage of the sources with specificly designated important sources checked, at least. That's still daunting, but novels are prime locations to find background info on species or people. On the other hand, sourcebooks mainly have raw statistical data, or a certain character who was of that species. Most of it isn't important. Since we endeavor to be fully comprehensive, it's certainly significant, but it's not important that there was a Gotal in the background of a picture in some RPG expansion. They do sometimes contain profiles that detail the bakgrounds of species, but those are generally rehashes of information in the main species guides, so as to avoid mistakes and angry fans, anyway. NaruHina Talk 22:52, December 2, 2012 (UTC)
- Here I disagree with you, Naru. In my opinion, Star Wars sources are like secondary sources in academia, while appearances are like primary sources. That is, the secondary sources summarize and compile the data from the primary sources. In my opinion, a GA on a huge topic like Human or Wookiee would need to check the secondary sources but not hte primary ones. That would be the various Essential Guide books, the Encyclopedias in their various iterations, the RPG sourcebooks on aliens, etc. It would most definitely not require checking all the novels and comics since those are most assuredly where you'll find 99% of your random background Wookiees who are there simply as set dressing. I'd argue that something similar would hold for a character like Luke; you can probably write a good article on him (in the non-Wookieepedia sense of the word) by compiling information from the Essential Guides (including the recent Reader's Companion) and so on. ~Savage 23:00, December 2, 2012 (UTC)
- Well, it's certainly okay for us to disagree about implementation now, since the point is that we agree ubiquitous subjects should have distinction and, since we think differently, disputing specifics won't really advance that idea at this stage. I hope one day we'll be able to hold that debate, but one step at a time, y'know? :) NaruHina Talk 23:54, December 2, 2012 (UTC)
- Well, it's certainly okay for us to disagree about implementation now, since the point is that we agree ubiquitous subjects should have distinction and, since we think differently, disputing specifics won't really advance that idea at this stage. I hope one day we'll be able to hold that debate, but one step at a time, y'know? :) NaruHina Talk
- Here I disagree with you, Naru. In my opinion, Star Wars sources are like secondary sources in academia, while appearances are like primary sources. That is, the secondary sources summarize and compile the data from the primary sources. In my opinion, a GA on a huge topic like Human or Wookiee would need to check the secondary sources but not hte primary ones. That would be the various Essential Guide books, the Encyclopedias in their various iterations, the RPG sourcebooks on aliens, etc. It would most definitely not require checking all the novels and comics since those are most assuredly where you'll find 99% of your random background Wookiees who are there simply as set dressing. I'd argue that something similar would hold for a character like Luke; you can probably write a good article on him (in the non-Wookieepedia sense of the word) by compiling information from the Essential Guides (including the recent Reader's Companion) and so on. ~Savage
- I'd say every novel needs to be checked for information and a certain percentage of the sources with specificly designated important sources checked, at least. That's still daunting, but novels are prime locations to find background info on species or people. On the other hand, sourcebooks mainly have raw statistical data, or a certain character who was of that species. Most of it isn't important. Since we endeavor to be fully comprehensive, it's certainly significant, but it's not important that there was a Gotal in the background of a picture in some RPG expansion. They do sometimes contain profiles that detail the bakgrounds of species, but those are generally rehashes of information in the main species guides, so as to avoid mistakes and angry fans, anyway. NaruHina Talk
- Yeah, that was one of the original purposes of the "Good article," but it seems to have been lost over time. I get your point about species FAs, as they have things like the NEGTAS and UUA from which to draw the "most important" points, but I do wonder if there would be a lot of subjectivity involved in articles like Luke Skywalker and what should be considered important. With that said, I do wish there were more of an incentive for articles like Luke to be expanded. I'd love to see improvement drives make a comeback. Menkooroo (talk) 13:47, December 2, 2012 (UTC)
- Before we engage in throwing around buzz-words like "lazy" as though that sole word is the deathstroke to what we've said, let's just note that people who'll say it haven't put significant work into updating the articles in question themselves. Not because they were "lazy," of course, but because they had their own projects to work on. Let's also ask ourselves, if writing an article like Luke or Lando—no, one of us simply dedicating his-or-herself to keeping it current would win someone the accolades of everyone, why doesn't anyone do it? NaruHina Talk 22:34, December 2, 2012 (UTC)
- You seem to be assuming that the reason no one has FA'ed Luke Skywalker or Human is because of laziness. I would counter that it's rather pragmatism. Again, as I said above, under current FA rules, it is next to impossible to FA something like Human. It would require reading, probably literally, every piece of Star Wars fiction ever released. Not wanting to do that isn't laziness, I think—it's sanity. :) Likewise, I don't see how an article on Humans that fails to mention every random Human character that appears in a cantina somewhere is somehow of low quality. It'd be great to do so, sure, but a slavish devotion to comprehensiveness shouldn't prevent the article from being deemed "good" if it otherwise covers the important aspects of the topic. There has to be an alternative mechanism for these type of articles in my opinion, and GA is supposed to be it. ~Savage
- The point is that Wookieepedia is here for us to present its quality. It's not here to cater to our laziness in not wanting to fix articles.—Cal Jedi
- As I recall, that was the whole reason for why it was set at 3000 in the first place, though it wasn't discussed in the revamp CT, so it may have been in the IRC. I've never been a fan of calling GAs "FAs in all but length" for the same reason as Bob. Because of our very literal interpretation of rules, it cuts out articles that are nebulous, like Luke Skywalker. New users might not know about Project Wormhead, but that was our only concerted effort to get Luke up to status. When we updated the FA rules to the current standards, the plan was to get it GA'd instead, because perfect coverage would be impossible. A specific word count for "broad coverage" is silly in my opinion, since we're always going to run into articles where broad coverage would take it to Wedge Antilles length and beyond, but getting rid of the qualifier entirely for slavish adherance to comprehension against the logistics of the article's sitution is equally silly. Our major articles have numerous and still-proliferating update tags, and that's not just because they have major parts in those books and it would take time to update. It's because there's no incentive to keep them up-to-date, since they're projects outside any range of plausibility, much further than Wedge, so what's the point? NaruHina Talk
- To be honest I've never during my time here viewed GAs as not-quite-FAs because, whether you want it or not, you will not be able to pass the GAN with an incomprehensive article these days. That might've been the situation several years ago, when the GA process was introduced, but I think that time is behind us and that no status article should be incomprehensive. tl;dr I am for lowering the GA upper limit to 1,000 words because, really, there is no excuse to nominate a >1,000 word article for GA anymore. 1358 (Talk) 17:02, December 4, 2012 (UTC)
- That's precisely the issue, though: we have shifted away from allowing GAs to be "nearly comprehensive" if the topic is otherwise near impossible to take to status, so this SH is to bring that shift into question. Human, Wookiee, and Twi'lek aren't the worst articles on the site, but they do need lots of work. Getting them to a state that rivals and surpasses their entries in The New Essential Guide to Alien Species would make them "good" in my opinion, despite the fact that they aren't comprehensive. In short, as I see it, if we stick with the status quo—no GAs on these immense topics; they must be FA'ed—articles like these will languish, as FA'ing them is beyond the realm of feasibility on a volunteer-based encyclopedia. I don't think that serves the interests of our readers much at all. ~Savage 13:50, December 5, 2012 (UTC)
- I would vehemently oppose such a major change to the current GA system — FAs are comprehensive high-quality articles while GAs are comprehensive but short high-quality articles. Adding a "somewhat comprehensive long high-quality articles" group to GAs wouldn't work, in my opinion. If we were to promote "somewhat comprehensive articles" to any kind of status, the best approach would be to create a separate tier of articles, and to be honest, I can't see this getting much support. It's too hard to outline what constitutes a "comprehensive" (=/= WP:CA) article; x % of all sources covered? Eh, that seems arbitrary at best. That said, reintroducing the improvement drive wouldn't be an entirely bad idea at all. In the worst case, we gain nor lose anything; in the best case, the subject of the ID would be much improved. 1358 (Talk) 13:59, December 5, 2012 (UTC)
- I think it's worth noting that what Bob's suggesting wouldn't officially be a change to the GA system, but would rather just be following the rules as they were originally designed and as they still technically allow (see rule 8, "For articles over 1000 words, broad coverage addressing all major aspects of the topic is sufficient."). It would be a practical change, since the "somewhat comprehensive" GA has long since fallen out of the levels of acceptability, but if we follow the rules to the letter then it should technically still be OK. I do like the idea of creating another separate tier of articles, although my ideas are probably a bit too wacky to gain much support: Make Good articles the "somewhat comprehensive" kind that Bob's advocating and that are what Wikipedia calls "Good articles," make Comprehensive articles 1 - 700 words, and make Featured articles 700 words and more. It may sound crazy, but remember that the current cutoff of 1,000 words is entirely arbitrary. Menkooroo (talk) 14:18, December 5, 2012 (UTC)
- I don't think that's a bad idea at all. We'd keep the same number of nomination processes and solve all these issues. ~Savage 15:56, December 5, 2012 (UTC)
- I kinda like this idea myself, though it'd be a pretty major shift. Reclassifying the 1,586 Good Articles would be daunting in itself. However, I fail to see how creating a new tier would be much different. After a recategorization of all the Good Articles as either Comprehensive or Featured, we would still be left with an empty Good Articles category because of how the rules have been enforced heretofore. If we added a new tier, we would just have the empty tier. They're pretty interchangeable options as far as I can see, but either way it won't be like the Comprehensive Articles boom: the tier will take some time to fill in at all. NaruHina Talk 18:14, December 5, 2012 (UTC)
- Also, there's the fact that CAs have largely and justifiably neglected the intro, and mixing the pool of intro-less articles with the fully-LG-compatible GAs would be pretty weird. NaruHina Talk 18:22, December 5, 2012 (UTC)
- Overhauling a system that currently works in reaction to a minor problem is not the way to go. And yes, I said minor. Its a triviality at best. Vague wording about "broad coverage" is subjective; what you might consider broad coverage I might consider to be lacking or too detailed to fit the requirement. And then another reviewer may have the opposite opinion. All I'm seeing is a lot of talk about how certain articles will never achieve a good tick or featured star. While articles should aspire to be the best they can, achieving status is not the be all and end all of writing articles. It almost as if you're saying an article is not worth working on unless you can get a marker in the corner. Such articles will never be stable enough to retain their status in any case under the other rules governing the GAN and FAN. Maybe we do need another tier of articles, but maybe not one that requires reviews and objections. All the articles mentioned here are from the movies, and are iconic in their own right. Perhaps an "Essential Article" tier that would encompass selected "essential" articles such as major characters or locations. These articles would be able to present major articles as comprehensive and broad in scope rather than totally complete. They would have to abide by certain rules (sourcing, coverage, etc), but this doesn't preclude them from attaining good and featured status in addition to being "essential." It could also assist in the removal of overcrowding templates such as {{Doomed}} from major articles. - Cavalier One(Squadron channel) 20:00, December 5, 2012 (UTC)
- Yeah, I think my comments above can read as if the FA/GA symbol in the corner is the goal of all this, but I didn't mean to give that impression. While personal esteem is likely at least part of the reason that a lot of us aim at status articles, I think that the FA/GA process primarily should be about serving our readers. The star assures them that the material they are reading has gone through a peer review process and been deemed of a certain level of quality. The problem remains, then, that there are certain articles that likely will never make it through the processes we currently have in place, or, as you state, Cav, will have a hard time maintaining status due to stability issues. The fact that these are such high-profile articles suggests that we need some way to deem them quality productions for our readers—which is why I don't necessarily see this as a minor problem. All that said, I'd certainly support an "Essential TIer" process that would help allow us to achieve that goal of creating and assessing quality work on such major subjects in canon. Maybe that's the way to move forward. ~Savage 21:41, December 5, 2012 (UTC)
- While I'm not all that opposed to creating an "essential article (EA) tier", I can't help but to think this would be somewhat unnecessary. How would we deem what should be an FA and what would be an EA? Creating a new article tier for just specific articles seems like too much work for too little gain. It has been proven many times that it is not impossible to promote huge, essential articles to FA (Executor, Jaina, Caedus), and creating a new tier that interferes with articles within the scope of the FA process could lead to more users going for EA instead of FA. It's really hard to outline any kind of policy for what constitutes an EA—the other processes are more straightforward: The nominees have to be "perfect". I'd be more willing to pursue the creation of a new, ID-style project; I mean, we already have community projects (a.k.a. barnburners) that bring the community together to work on one thing. Maybe we could have a "movie character" barnburner or something to spruce up these "main articles" and eliminate more and more {{Doomed}} tags. 1358 (Talk) 10:52, December 6, 2012 (UTC)
- Barn burner 6: The improvement drive. Dammit, I'm sold. Menkooroo (talk) 10:54, December 6, 2012 (UTC)
- All of these are great ideas. I'd counter, though, that Jaina, Caedus, even Wedge are an order of magnitude (or two) less complicated to fix up than Luke, Han, Leia, Wookiee, and Human. I doubt any editor working alone could really ever hope to get those to FA status and thus assure readers that they are viewing high-quality write-ups. Improvement drives and barn burners help, but they're temporary solutions. Some sort of Essential Article program would still be helpful, I think. We'd have to hash out rules so it's not a way to sidestep FAN. Just brainstorming, but there could be a requirement that the subject have more than 200 sources and appearances, say (I counted: YT-1300 light freighter, for instance, has 318 appearances and 47 sources, though I suspect the number is actually much larger. In contrast, it has 5 sources cited.) Or perhaps we could have a two-part process; first an article is proposed as "essential" and other people vote yes or no. If the majority think it is, the article can be nominated for the Essential tier. Just throwing out ideas here, but if we can get Palpatine or the Millennium Falcon into some decent shape, our readers will be well served. ~Savage 13:03, December 6, 2012 (UTC)
- To quote Cav: "[Essential Articles] would have to abide by certain rules (sourcing, coverage, etc), but this doesn't preclude them from attaining good and featured status in addition to being "essential." To allow them to be both would be the best solution in my view, that way we side-step the whole "aiming for EA instead of FA" problem. They mean two different things. An Essential Article should be one that has been thoroughly researched and presented well, while an FA on the subject is "Through the Fire and the Flames" on Expert without missing a keystroke. Besides, if it were to be completed to the point of Featured status, how in the world would that disqualify it from being on a list of our ubiquitous subjects that we want to advertise to readers as having been completed to a satisfactory degree? NaruHina Talk 14:48, December 6, 2012 (UTC)
- To quote Cav: "[Essential Articles] would have to abide by certain rules (sourcing, coverage, etc), but this doesn't preclude them from attaining good and featured status in addition to being "essential." To allow them to be both would be the best solution in my view, that way we side-step the whole "aiming for EA instead of FA" problem. They mean two different things. An Essential Article should be one that has been thoroughly researched and presented well, while an FA on the subject is "Through the Fire and the Flames" on Expert without missing a keystroke. Besides, if it were to be completed to the point of Featured status, how in the world would that disqualify it from being on a list of our ubiquitous subjects that we want to advertise to readers as having been completed to a satisfactory degree? NaruHina Talk
- All of these are great ideas. I'd counter, though, that Jaina, Caedus, even Wedge are an order of magnitude (or two) less complicated to fix up than Luke, Han, Leia, Wookiee, and Human. I doubt any editor working alone could really ever hope to get those to FA status and thus assure readers that they are viewing high-quality write-ups. Improvement drives and barn burners help, but they're temporary solutions. Some sort of Essential Article program would still be helpful, I think. We'd have to hash out rules so it's not a way to sidestep FAN. Just brainstorming, but there could be a requirement that the subject have more than 200 sources and appearances, say (I counted: YT-1300 light freighter, for instance, has 318 appearances and 47 sources, though I suspect the number is actually much larger. In contrast, it has 5 sources cited.) Or perhaps we could have a two-part process; first an article is proposed as "essential" and other people vote yes or no. If the majority think it is, the article can be nominated for the Essential tier. Just throwing out ideas here, but if we can get Palpatine or the Millennium Falcon into some decent shape, our readers will be well served. ~Savage
- Barn burner 6: The improvement drive. Dammit, I'm sold. Menkooroo (talk) 10:54, December 6, 2012 (UTC)
- While I'm not all that opposed to creating an "essential article (EA) tier", I can't help but to think this would be somewhat unnecessary. How would we deem what should be an FA and what would be an EA? Creating a new article tier for just specific articles seems like too much work for too little gain. It has been proven many times that it is not impossible to promote huge, essential articles to FA (Executor, Jaina, Caedus), and creating a new tier that interferes with articles within the scope of the FA process could lead to more users going for EA instead of FA. It's really hard to outline any kind of policy for what constitutes an EA—the other processes are more straightforward: The nominees have to be "perfect". I'd be more willing to pursue the creation of a new, ID-style project; I mean, we already have community projects (a.k.a. barnburners) that bring the community together to work on one thing. Maybe we could have a "movie character" barnburner or something to spruce up these "main articles" and eliminate more and more {{Doomed}} tags. 1358 (Talk) 10:52, December 6, 2012 (UTC)
- Yeah, I think my comments above can read as if the FA/GA symbol in the corner is the goal of all this, but I didn't mean to give that impression. While personal esteem is likely at least part of the reason that a lot of us aim at status articles, I think that the FA/GA process primarily should be about serving our readers. The star assures them that the material they are reading has gone through a peer review process and been deemed of a certain level of quality. The problem remains, then, that there are certain articles that likely will never make it through the processes we currently have in place, or, as you state, Cav, will have a hard time maintaining status due to stability issues. The fact that these are such high-profile articles suggests that we need some way to deem them quality productions for our readers—which is why I don't necessarily see this as a minor problem. All that said, I'd certainly support an "Essential TIer" process that would help allow us to achieve that goal of creating and assessing quality work on such major subjects in canon. Maybe that's the way to move forward. ~Savage
- Overhauling a system that currently works in reaction to a minor problem is not the way to go. And yes, I said minor. Its a triviality at best. Vague wording about "broad coverage" is subjective; what you might consider broad coverage I might consider to be lacking or too detailed to fit the requirement. And then another reviewer may have the opposite opinion. All I'm seeing is a lot of talk about how certain articles will never achieve a good tick or featured star. While articles should aspire to be the best they can, achieving status is not the be all and end all of writing articles. It almost as if you're saying an article is not worth working on unless you can get a marker in the corner. Such articles will never be stable enough to retain their status in any case under the other rules governing the GAN and FAN. Maybe we do need another tier of articles, but maybe not one that requires reviews and objections. All the articles mentioned here are from the movies, and are iconic in their own right. Perhaps an "Essential Article" tier that would encompass selected "essential" articles such as major characters or locations. These articles would be able to present major articles as comprehensive and broad in scope rather than totally complete. They would have to abide by certain rules (sourcing, coverage, etc), but this doesn't preclude them from attaining good and featured status in addition to being "essential." It could also assist in the removal of overcrowding templates such as {{Doomed}} from major articles. - Cavalier One
- Also, there's the fact that CAs have largely and justifiably neglected the intro, and mixing the pool of intro-less articles with the fully-LG-compatible GAs would be pretty weird. NaruHina Talk
- I kinda like this idea myself, though it'd be a pretty major shift. Reclassifying the 1,586 Good Articles would be daunting in itself. However, I fail to see how creating a new tier would be much different. After a recategorization of all the Good Articles as either Comprehensive or Featured, we would still be left with an empty Good Articles category because of how the rules have been enforced heretofore. If we added a new tier, we would just have the empty tier. They're pretty interchangeable options as far as I can see, but either way it won't be like the Comprehensive Articles boom: the tier will take some time to fill in at all. NaruHina Talk
- I don't think that's a bad idea at all. We'd keep the same number of nomination processes and solve all these issues. ~Savage
- I think it's worth noting that what Bob's suggesting wouldn't officially be a change to the GA system, but would rather just be following the rules as they were originally designed and as they still technically allow (see rule 8, "For articles over 1000 words, broad coverage addressing all major aspects of the topic is sufficient."). It would be a practical change, since the "somewhat comprehensive" GA has long since fallen out of the levels of acceptability, but if we follow the rules to the letter then it should technically still be OK. I do like the idea of creating another separate tier of articles, although my ideas are probably a bit too wacky to gain much support: Make Good articles the "somewhat comprehensive" kind that Bob's advocating and that are what Wikipedia calls "Good articles," make Comprehensive articles 1 - 700 words, and make Featured articles 700 words and more. It may sound crazy, but remember that the current cutoff of 1,000 words is entirely arbitrary. Menkooroo (talk) 14:18, December 5, 2012 (UTC)
- That's precisely the issue, though: we have shifted away from allowing GAs to be "nearly comprehensive" if the topic is otherwise near impossible to take to status, so this SH is to bring that shift into question. Human, Wookiee, and Twi'lek aren't the worst articles on the site, but they do need lots of work. Getting them to a state that rivals and surpasses their entries in The New Essential Guide to Alien Species would make them "good" in my opinion, despite the fact that they aren't comprehensive. In short, as I see it, if we stick with the status quo—no GAs on these immense topics; they must be FA'ed—articles like these will languish, as FA'ing them is beyond the realm of feasibility on a volunteer-based encyclopedia. I don't think that serves the interests of our readers much at all. ~Savage
- Per Xd. However, I don't think we need an improvement drive anymore. We're not new and we certainly have enough editors to go around and edit articles/expand them. JangFett (Talk) 16:01, December 5, 2012 (UTC)
- Anyone else think this post seems to be getting fairly off-topic, it started being about changing the GA workd limit and now it's gone to talking about creating an Essential articles status. Commander Code-8 To say hi, press 42 07:31, December 9, 2012 (UTC)
- We're talking about changing the word limit, pretty much getting rid of it. Some of us just want the spirit of why the 3,000 word rule was there in the first place to be channeled and applied in a better way. The Essential Article idea is one way to do that. NaruHina Talk 10:31, December 9, 2012 (UTC)
- We're talking about changing the word limit, pretty much getting rid of it. Some of us just want the spirit of why the 3,000 word rule was there in the first place to be channeled and applied in a better way. The Essential Article idea is one way to do that. NaruHina Talk
- Anyone else think this post seems to be getting fairly off-topic, it started being about changing the GA workd limit and now it's gone to talking about creating an Essential articles status. Commander Code-8 To say hi, press 42 07:31, December 9, 2012 (UTC)
