User:Wugapodes/Good article status is no big deal

Despite being called a "good" article, the good article criteria measure whether an article is "decent" or not. Ideally, every article should be decent, so promotion to good article status is no big deal. While article classifications help by pointing out models to emulate and topics that need work, editors should not become so caught up with the process and results of reviewing good articles that they lose sight of the purpose of Wikipedia.

Why it's no big deal
Jimmy Wales in February 2003 said of adminship (called sysop here): "I want to dispel the aura of 'authority' around the position. It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone." The same can be said of Good Articles. A Good Article, per the GA criteria, is "decent", and every article should aim to be, at the very least, decent. It is simply a technical matter that not every article is decent yet.

The Good Article criteria measure decent articles, so in passing or failing an article, the question is whether the article is decent. The article does not need to be comprehensive. The prose need not be brilliant. It does not need to follow all fifty or so pages of the manual of style, but only five. The criteria are important and a high bar to pass for some articles with limited sources, but they need not, and likely should not be the best of the best. If they are, they probably should have been sent to Featured Article Candidates.

Purpose of a review
The ultimate purpose of a review is for reviewers to give other editors concrete ways to improve the article, all working together to make it a better article. Not every article can be a Good Article, but every article can be better. Listing, not listing, or delisting an article are all by-products of the review process. The end result should be an article that is better than when the article was nominated, or in the event of quick passes or fails, with suggestions on how to make it better. In fact, the essays and policies related to Good Articles continually recommend that reviewers give suggestions on how to improve the article beyond the GA criteria.

In the end, the goal of reviewers is to help improve the articles and the encyclopedia; if there was no room for improvement, there would be no need for Good Articles. But until that day comes, reviewers should give solutions, not problems first, and worry about separating the decent from the not-yet-decent articles second. While classifying articles is important, it is equally important to remember why articles are classified in the first place. Classifying articles is not to glorify certain contributions, rather it is to provide guidance for other editors as to what a "decent" article is, and letting other editors know which articles need the most work to get up to decent quality.