User:Masem/GAA

While Wikipedia's activities are primarily defined by the Five pillars, one aspect that tends to be overlooked is article quality. We have processes in place for appropriate style, referencing, and the like, but in terms of practical application, these are rarely used to measure the quality of an article

This essay proposes the following idea:

The ultimate goal for any Wikipedia mainspace article is to reach "Good" status and "A-class" assessment.

Specifically:
 * "Good" status refers to the Good Article process while can extent to other types of content (like lists, etc.) These are non-topic specific, so they are a measure of a Wikipedia-wide standard for an article.
 * "A-class" assessment is a measure made by the specific WikiProject(s) attached to an article, and is more specific than the Good status, allowing experts from the WikiProject to determine the coverage being appropriately broad and in-depth for that field. It would be expected that all Wikiprojects attached will be able to rate the article as A-class by their own standards.

It should be noted that the goal is not to obtain Featured status; Features articles are considered "the best" that WP can offer. It is a much stricter measure, and takes much more time and effort to get there, and given the number of articles verses the number of editors that participate in this manner and the rate of article addition to WP, it is an unrealistic expectation we could ever get there. GA and assessment, on the other hand, are much more suited to this.

Once it is recognized this is the goal for WIkipedia, there are two consequences that come out of this: how to modify the existing GA/assessment processes to assure that these are measured appropriately, and how to assure this goal is reflected in existing policy and guideline.

Improving the GA/Assessment Process
To support the above goal, there would need to be a change in how we currently assess articles. Typically, as outlined in WP:ASSESS, the order of quality goes (from worst to best) as Start, C, B, GA, A, FA. This is a mix-and-match of site-wide and wikiproject-specific metrics and has been some issues in the past.

To remedy this, it is proposed that GA and FA are pulled out as their own quality scale to show how a page reflects quality relative to policy and guidelines, and leave the Start, C, B, A scale for Wikiproject-specific assessments. We can use global expectation for what we'd expect a C, B, or A class article should be from a WikiProject, but the project should define any specifics they may want to see, most likely specific sections for certain types of articles and acceptable reliable sources.

This change has minimal impact on any existing process - GA and FA would work the same, and project assessment works as normal. The various assessment tools, particularly as used in the various project banners, may need to be changed to reflect the two different scales, but this should not be difficult and non-disruptive.

The other recommended change is to add a bot or similar functionality that, after an article has passed GA, it should be immediately submitted to the various Wikiproject's assessment page for re-assessment. The idea being that the editors of the recently promoted GA

Adjusting Existing Policy and Guidelines
What this goal affects more is policy and guidelines, and more specifically in the areas of article creation and notability.

One major area of concern of recent on Wikipedia is the existence of short, stub articles where notability is believed or already presumed to exist to exist (and possibly has been confirmed through consensus discussion), but due to the nature of the topic, has no chance to grow within any reasonably immediate timeframe. This often occurs for articles on small towns, villages, and geographic features, on animal and plant species, certain types of people such as actors and athletes, and similar topics where specialized notability guidelines or typical outcomes of AFD discussions are used to justify inclusion. The fact that these articles are short is not grounds to delete the information from them as they are still likely viable search terms, but at the same time, with no realistic opportunity to grow, they will fail to make this GA/A goal.

WP:N does attempt to address this factor in the manner that just because a topic is notable, it does not need an article. But there's otherwise