Wikipedia talk:Standard articles

Example of use in a WikiProject
You might like to take a look at WikiProject Chemicals/Assessment for an example of this sort of system at the level of a WikiProject. However, I am not convinced that it is scalable to the whole of Wikipedia. Physchim62 (talk) 08:37, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
 * I can see what your mean. The goal of standard articles is to not rank articles on Wikipedia. Rather, I want to focus on distinguishing the good articles from the bad. —M ESSED R OCKER (talk) 17:50, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Quantity, Not Quality
I wouldn't go with "good" or "bad" there(POV...), stubs serve a purpose as well, despite the fact that it never hurts to add any noteworthy information to them if you can.

Instead, i'd put this as kind of a launching pad to WP:FAC/WP:FA status, similiar to another Wikiproject subproject i'm doing here.

Also, until you get a steady stream of regulars(articles will likely be plentiful), don't impose the oppose/support system, make it DIY based on the guidelines of "Good Articles" at WP:IA.

One last thing, this will have to differentiate itself from Peer Review. A possible idea would be to identify articles that are on the verge of becoming "standard" "above standard" and bringing them up.

You've got a good start, this is a niche that has been ignored and could use some improvement. Right now, FAs are largely luck and (a user's)love. Taking luck out of the equation would be helpful. karmafist 01:56, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Good articles
How is this different from Good articles? Both seem to have roughly the same requirements for content, structure, correctness, and wikification. Fredrik | tc 12:33, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Could I suggest that standard articles be a redirect to WP:GA? Both seem to have exactly the same intent, and GA already has a couple of hundred articles listed.  It doesn´t seem sensible to duplicate effort. Worldtraveller 15:42, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
 * I think 'good' is more appropriate for the goals listed, as well. Standard-articles seems more like a replacement title for Half-decent articles... a category which would contain so many entries that we should think of better ways to peruse articles by the thousands.  +sj + 08:08, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
 * (What follows is a copy of my contribution to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29#Standard_articles)

I propose a five-tier quality system:
 * featured articles
 * good articles: I think we should categorize a great many articles as good, much more than the 1,000 that the German wikipedia has got right now. This cannot be done by a central procedure, like it is done for featured articles. I therefore propose voting for good articles should be done on the portals of the different subject areas, which would also strengthen the role of the portals within wikipedia and de-centralize things a bit. These portals could then put these good articles on display as "article of the week" etc., just like the Main Page has got its featured articles (which, of course, are still superior in quality)
 * standard articles, i.e. articles that
 * give an overview of the subject area, without having to go into great detail anywhere,
 * have a clear structure (i.e. they are not tagged for need of cleanup)
 * are not tagged for POV, lack of factual accuracy, lack of reference (we might be lenient on this one), poor style... (this list has to be completed because I'm not too familiar with all these tags)
 * articles that are tagged for one of the defaults just mentioned. (which we already do)
 * stubs
 * So "standard article" would be for me a kind of "no-problem-with-this-article" tag. Of course, we could just start from the assumption that if there's a problem with an article, someone will have told so, but perhaps it is wiser to use these "no problem" tags to give Wikipedia users some kind of minimal quality guarantee. Many people complain that Wikipedia is not reliable because anybody can edit it and nobody really cares about the qualities of the articles. Adding a "no problem" tag to (perhaps) most Wikipedia articles shows people these are articles they can kind of rely on (to put it loosely), because someone has taken a look at it. I propose that decisions for "standard articles" should be taken directly on the talk pages of each article, not on any portal or central page. Readers and Editors of each page will be able to decide for themselves whether they find this article acceptable.

We pretty much have this system already: FAs are rigorously reviewed and tagged, with WP:GA we're starting to identify and tag the good articles, stubs are tagged and as you say so are articles with the various problems such as neutrality, lack of references etc. So the only category of your five that is untagged is the 'standard' articles. I think that rather than spending time tagging tens of thousands of articles as 'OK' it would be much more useful to spend time making articles good or featured. Worldtraveller 11:53, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
 * It is a hell of a lot of work if you want to centrally tag all articles, but it isn't if everyone does it for the articles they have written; in this case, the tagging process makes them have a second look at their articles.
 * By the way, I haven't yet seen a tag for FAs or Good Articles, as the the German wikipedia has. --Robin.rueth 22:30, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Redirect to WP:GA ?
This is pretty much all the same thing as Good Articles, so how about a redirect to there?

No, because Standard articles, as I understand them, are about articles that fulfill minimum standards but are not necessarily good ones. The process is still pretty much in discussion, and I think it is two different proposals that are emerging.--Robin.rueth 12:50, 7 December 2005 (UTC)


 * My feeling is that it is not a good use of people's time to identify and tag the hundreds of thousands of articles that fall below the standards defined at WP:GA. WP:GA is intended to encourage editors to make sure all articles have references and images and are well written, but I can't see what standards Standard articles actually encourages.  So, I'd prefer to see efforts concentrated on WP:GA. Worldtraveller 15:03, 7 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I originally created Standard Articles to be something like Good Articles. Now that I know it exists, I'd like to see Standard Articles merged into Good Articles.


 * I agree as well. Ought to redirect to GA. Tuf-Kat 22:17, 8 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I understand the reasoning behind standard articles, but I think that it may now be unnecessary. I don't think that we need to tag every article. I think that tags should only be used in extreme cases, either for extremely well-written articles (featured articles and good articles) or incomplete ones (stubs and articles tagged for cleanup, NPOV, verifiability, etc.). I think that if something is untagged, the assumption is that it is average. --Cswrye 00:36, 10 December 2005 (UTC)


 * If something in untagged, this may also mean that no one has ever taken the trouble to check its quality; it may just be a lousy article that no one cares about; if it's tagged as average/acceptable/standard, we know what it is; if I'm not mistaken, one of the greatest problems of Wikipedia now is that there are so many substandard articles that people may rely on because they do not recognize them as substandard, or because they assume Wikipedia means some kind of quality because, well, someone must be in charge of this. But if an article is untagged, this may also mean that no one feels in charge of it; by contrast, the person who has tagged the article as standard will also - I assume - feel some kind of reponsibility for the article.--Robin.rueth 21:45, 10 December 2005 (UTC)