Wikipedia talk:Compare criteria Good v. Featured article

No talk for this page and it's over a year old? Hm.

I just stumbled across this for the first time and, I must say, while I appreciate the effort that has gone into it, I find it fairly useless.


 * Differentiating "well written" vs. "professionally written" is meaningless; by definition, "professionally" should imply that someone is getting paid to write it.


 * The descriptions for "broad" (for GA) and "length" (for FA) are also essentially interchangeable. It's not clear why one is better/harder to achieve/more desirable than the other.


 * the inclusion of "needs a good lead" for an FA implies this is not necessary for a GA; this makes no sense to me as a differentiator. Any good article (not to mention a Good Article) needs a good lead.


 * Presence of images as a differentiating factor: well, I can see where this is necessary for the way FAs are presented on the main page but I suppose it is unfair for more abstract topics and leads to the creation or use of some contrived images for articles for which no concrete visual representation applies. cf. Macroeconomics.  But that's arguing with the rule rather than the presentation, and at least the rule is clear here.


 * Nearly all of the other differentiating factors have to do with technical nits (common citation format and heading hierarchy) rather than content issues, which should be the basis of deciding the status of an article. Sure, okay, FAs should have all those things, but if a GA is just an FA with less-than consistent markup and/or lack of images, just say that, it'd be a lot easier.

Jgm (talk) 23:05, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

If these are all the differences, why is there a need for an A-class rating?
Looking at the differences, it seems that there's no room for an A-class assessment level. It seems that some projects tend to use the A-class rating as a really temporary level in preparation for a Featured article candidacy and is not a full-fledged level in itself. --seav (talk) 02:17, 16 October 2008 (UTC)


 * A, B, C, start, and stub class ratings are largely managed and administrated by Wikiprojects, and not by the "community at large". The current scheme of ranking the A class "between" the GA and FA rankings is really the result of cobbling together two independent systems in some logical way.  The two systems (the project-controlled ABC system and the community-controlled GA and FA system) really operate independently.  In fact, GA and FA run entirely independently from each other; but it is patently clear that FA has more stringent requirements than GA.  In general, however, A-class is for articles that one person has adjudged to be meeting roughly FA-quality, without having gone through the usual FA vetting process.  Hope that helps explain it!  --Jayron32. talk . contribs  02:38, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually, the projects that use A-Class extensively, e.g. WP:MILHIST have a proper review structure and to attain that rating the article must be approved by at least three editors to meet a certain criteria, not one editor. -MBK004 02:55, 16 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm pretty sure the distinction that the ABC classes are WikiProject assessments as opposed to community assessments crystallized during the time C-class was introduced. But I'm operating from the original idea that the ABC assessments were created to serve the purpose of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team and that the WikiProjects were simply tapped to help. So by this case, the ABC classes are still "community-based" assessments but delegated to the WikiProjects. --seav (talk) 02:59, 16 October 2008 (UTC)


 * All of the above may be true, but the general assumption on the placement of A-class between GA and FA is still based on the assumption that A-class articles are FA-quality, or nearly so, but the article has still not gone through the formal FA vetting process, which must be said is quite brutal, and much more stringent then even the "3-editors approve" process used by MILHIST to assign A-levels... --Jayron32. talk . contribs  03:02, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
 * So you're saying that A-class is to FA as the Wikiproject Mathematics' proprietary B-plus-class rating is to GA. In this case, A-class, if they are used by some projects, is simply using the assessment scheme to mark potential FA candidates and is not an article assessment level in itself the same way Stub-level or Start-level is. Anyway, I think this is just a matter of semantics and is not really vital. --seav (talk) 03:21, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Updated the comaprison
How is it now? Cheers. &mdash;Deckiller (t-c-l) 04:18, 23 February 2017 (UTC)