Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Newsletter/February 2013/FE

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By — ΛΧΣ²¹

Thousands of new good articles have been promoted since 2007, and most of them are in an urgent need of verification. With an average of 1,500 new articles per year, the total of articles promoted after the end of 2007 and before the beginning of 2011 rises to six thousand or even more. Many of them have become featured articles; several have been delisted, and others have been left untouched, outdated and maybe completely abandoned. Therefore, the need to verify them to make sure we keep only those which meet the good article criteria rises every day. Also, after the discovery of a hoax (a fake article) that was listed as a good article in December of 2012, the need to verify that all our good articles treat existing topics arose too.

Additionally, another discovery (fabrication of sources by another user named Legolas) increased the need to develop another version of a program that ran for three years and which goal was to check the list of good articles: the GA Sweeps. Yes, created and tasked to check all the good articles promoted before August 2007, the first GA Sweeps checked around 2,800 articles and lasted for almost three years. Back then, a bunch of frequent collaborators managed to make a very big task, and checked all the good articles that were needed to be checked, and accomplished this incredible feat. Now, facing several difficulties and worries with our good articles, and having not checked those promoted after August 2007, we have to move fast to verify at least those promoted until the end of 2010 and make sure they are completely compliant with the correspondent guidelines.

The main issue is that the list is big, and the ones who can collaborate are a bit scarce. The GAN project is just the shadow of what it was several years before, and now many users have to wait at least a month to get their articles reviewed. Even after 2012 showed promising results of participation with the June-July 2012 backlog elimination drive, those hopes were squashed to the underground with the subsequent drive, which lasted from mid-November to mid-December. Although, and after that drive improved on many areas the GAN community was unable to solve before, we are still facing the issue of the quality of our current good articles, and what are we going to do to make sure we only keep those who really deserve the little green ribbon.