Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles

Ask yourselves: why didn't you look up Wikipedia's articles about economy, Dmitri Mendeleev, man, or land even though you know little about them? Simple, because they suck. Millions of people feel the same way too. This is not acceptable on our side and this must be changed by making these articles good.

Subpages

 * WikiProject Vital Articles/Tools - technical how-to on how to use tools and scripts

Past work

 * 30 kB drive
 * 47 articles expanded to 30 kilobytes; 26 July 2022 – 31 August 2022


 * Vital GA Drive
 * Land to good article status, unsuccessful; 1 September – 15 November 2022

Function
This WikiProject is designed to be a public space that has neat stuff to do or learn about, and to serve as a place where you sit down, relax, and make edits or discuss with others. Its purpose is to improve the Vitals articles and lists. We always welcome anonymous and new people here (and if you are one of them, have a chat at the talk page!)

There is no such thing as "joining" or "registering" for this WikiProject, as it is an overarching project that aims to gather other WikiProjects together for collaboration. If you're actively improving vital articles, you're already a member of this WikiProject. If you want to find people that are working on Vital articles, use this link to find recent edits and talk to them directly.

Tasks

 * Database reports/Vital articles update report
 * Unassessed vital articles – articles in total
 * Vital articles with unknown topic – articles in total

Improving a Vital article
While we might not know the exact formula for mass-producing Vital GAs, we do know ways to tackle and improve these kind of articles. Here are some techniques that you can use:
 * Don't be afraid to try and don't be a perfectionist. Yes, that paragraph that you just wrote might not be there once the article is at GAN, but it will be an important stepping stone for recognizing further improvement. As long as your own content is significantly better and more reliable than the rest of the article, you've done a good job.
 * Be concise and keep the summary style in mind. An article should not be too long or else the readers will become dizzy (~60 kB of readable prose is the ideal size). Pro tip: one of the best way to quickly raise article quality is to trim bad content, such as cruft, unsourced sections, original research, etc.
 * Be mindful of systematic bias. For vital articles specifically, the most commonly encountered bias is American-European bias. For example, there's a tendency of using European allegories or paintings to illustrate abstract ideas. Don't just swap these images for the sake of diversity however. Remember, the best images are the one that is relevant, high-resolution, sharp, shows the subject clearly in the small thumbnail and is applicable to all cultures.
 * Patrol sources and ensure their quality. If you find a low-quality source, either replace it with higher-quality ones or jank the content if it doesn't warrant inclusion in the first place. The WP:RSP list, User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen and User:Headbomb/unreliable are some of the best tools available to detect bad sources, though remember to use your own judgement as well.
 * Copyedit the text and make sure that the text looks more Wikipedia-like. If in doubt, take a look at Basic copyediting, Writing better articles, WP:Manual of Style and more.

If you had completed all of these basic techniques, here are some of the more specialized yet powerful ways that you can improve Vital articles. Enjoy these dishes with extra Ignore all rules and common sense:
 * Use the bold, revert, discuss cycle to garner attention and quickly adding improvements the (old) Wikipedia way. This method is especially useful for editing popular country articles provided that you're prepared. Just make an edit that you think it would improve the article, the edit then gets reverted, and both people discuss to reach a better solution.
 * Use AutoWikiBrowser and other automated tools to quickly correct errors in many Vital articles. For example, you can use AWB to monitor typos and fix them accordingly. Detailed instructions for some tools such as WP:PetScan and user scripts can be obtained at WikiProject Vital Articles/Tools.
 * Import good content from subtopic articles. For example, in a section about the properties of numbers, it may be helpful to get the content from smaller scope articles such as natural numbers. However, you will need to attribute the source per Copying within Wikipedia and can be pretty tedious when messing with the template. An IAR and simpler way might be to make a talk page section and list all of your articles that you've copied, including their oldid.
 * And perhaps, the most spicy of 'em all is using large language models such as ChatGPT, GPT-3, etc. for brainstorming ideas on Wikipedia. These neural networks as of 2023 are one of the most powerful tool to face the writer's block and give clues at expanding broad-topic articles, and they have the potential to do far more in the future. It should NOT, however, be used to generate original content because of original research and verifiability policy. For tips on using large language models, see Using neural network language models on Wikipedia and Large language models.

Awards
We have a good roster of awards given to those that help us advance the goal to make all Vital Articles GAs and FAs. These awards may be awarded by anyone to anyone worthy.

Barnstars

 * – good old barnstar, given to those that have done a good job.



Userboxes

 * User Vital – for members of the project.


 * Vital userbox – good old userbox, given to those that have done a good job.


 * Good Vital infobox – Userbox for those that have successfully nominated a Vital good article.


 * Featured Vital infobox – Userbox for those that have successfully nominated a Vital featured article.

Assessment
For mobile readers, you can click here to switch to desktop mode to read the table more easily. This Vital article assessment scheme is meant to be subjective and complementary to Content assessment.

Article alerts
For article alerts about a specific level, see: For article alerts on all vital articles (levels 1–5):
 * Level 3 article alerts
 * Level 4 article alerts
 * Level 5 article alerts