Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 09:44, 1 October 2007

Welcome to my talk page: please leave any comments, questions, complaints, praise, or just general chat below. I cannot promise to reply quickly, or at all, but I will usually reply here: if I take a while I will drop a note on your talk page.

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GAN instructions

We need to trim and simplify the GAN page now, it seems, as there's an FA reg bitching about it on the Village Pump. God forbid he be confused by a process he doesn't participate in. And his suggestion to remedy it is to merge PR into it, which would involve more instructions while somehow magically decreasing the backlog of both. Brilliant. Lara❤Love 16:08, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I saw that and added a brief comment. I agree that the GAN page needs some clarification and copyediting. I suggest we treat it like an article and try to meet criterion 1! :-) Geometry guy 16:12, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

		The Good Article Medal of Merit
		G'guy, for everything you have done to improve the quality of Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Good articles, I present you with this award. You have proven time and time again to be an invaluable asset to the project. Your thoughtful discussions and willingness to tackle tasks after consensus has been reached are more appreciated than you know. Thank you for everything that you do! Lara❤Love 20:14, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, not always after consensus, but what the heck, be bold. Thanks for the kind words. Geometry guy 20:21, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Your friendly advice

Hi Geometry guy. Thanks for your comments.

I have never seen a process on Misplaced Pages that generates as much emotional investment as does GA. Any criticism—and this is true since early '06—is treated as a personal insult. It makes discussion impossible. On the village pump I've been told that people are motivated by hatred in saying that GA doesn't work. Whaaa? If that's the starting point, where are we going to get to? And the emotional aspect is reflected in GA wording. It's constantly talking about itself. Constantly mentioning how it's not FA. And it's studded with misconceptions about what FA actually is. "Hell, after some debate, FAC is even accepting 'Introduction to...' articles." When did it not accept them? The opposes here were baseless. FA has accepted every class of article—except very short ones—since its inception. Toilets in Japan was made FA in 2004. I offered up this on the village pump without reply: name me five GAs that could not be FA. I've never found any.

"It isn't enough to post on a neutral forum, and leave a friendly notification on a GA regular's talk page." Why not? It's enough for most any other discussion. Must I be sprinkled with holy water before offering a comment? "You really have to understand the process you want to improve." I've been watching the GA pages for 18 months. I don't know every procedure but I understand it in general terms. And the central criticism remains: it diverts resources insofar as there is no linkage to our primary quality content process. It duplicates overhead. And, ironically, it has more overhead at this point than does FA.

Try this thought experiment: if you had to scrap all of the GA instructions and write them again, how would you do it? Don't think of that as a bad idea or an insult to work thus far. Would you not attempt to create a linkage? Marskell 06:10, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I was thinking about your 10 to 1 waiting at the doctor's office. Based on current trends, that would require GAC handling apx. 500 a month (the net FA gain in Sept. was 61 and its proportion is as high is its been in 13 mos). And as your volume increases your review page naturally becomes overloaded. So could it handle 10 to 1? Likely not. And, from a project wide perspective, we need two orders of magnitude, not one. 100K is Britannica range.

So. Think of this: a Misplaced Pages:General review where none of the nomination, reassessment, or even central list exist in present form. You make a request on a largely unmediated request page. Somebody acts on it, removing the request and going to talk; if it's not acted on after ten days, a bot removes it. The criteria are further generalized: you should be relatively unfamiliar with the topic. Imagine you are coming to it from Google and ask yourself if it basically satisfies you in terms of sourcing, prose, and comprehensiveness. If it does, after a bit of talk banter, you add a passed general review template to the talk. (Thus an overall list could still be generated, also unmediated.) If it fails, do nothing. Removing would work through talk. You come across a page that's passed general review: "Sorry, unless a good paragraph on Spoo is added this article is not satisfactory." If it's not added, remove the template. No reassessment page.

There'd be no green plus sign. That would reduce badgism, which is good, but might also reduce motivation. But, I think it could move to something like WP:DYK: a medal on the occasion of your 25th review, a barnstar for successfully requesting 10 pages, etc. All of the overhead is gone, which is what GA was supposed to be. This could easily handle an order of magnitude volume increase—there really wouldn't be a limit on the volume it could handle. Marskell 08:11, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Try it on for size

Hmm? Marskell 09:44, 1 October 2007 (UTC)