Let's set a palatable objective

Tired to pass for the whining annoying brat :p

While there is a lot of discussions on how to do it better and stay at the best with the very best, i feel that a palatable objective threshold should be set.

Here more proposal:

Reaching 5% Articles of B rating and above in 5 years.

For the En wikipedia that would amount more between 150,000 and 200,000 articles if we take account of the Wikipedia overall growth within the next 5 years.

Rationals:

• Set a "Real objective" with 1 article out of 20 B-and-Above in quality.
• Conciliate the effort of two mindsets of skilled editors those who focus FL/FA and those who focus on B/GA.

I do not know about this particular one, but generally I think setting objectives for the community is a good idea, with progress monitoring tools etc

Article from Stub to C class are oriented toward quantity of information.
Article B class to FA are oriented toward quality of information.

If we look at en:Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index article oriented toward quality represented less than 3% of all article.

The only way in 5 years to see if the recommendations were efficient or not is to see if that percentage will increase or not. That will be true for every Wikiproject.

But this is not the only quality indicator, even though an important one. For instance, on these projects where the flagged revisions have been already implemented the numbers of syncronized, outdated and non-flagged articles give a quality indication different from the persentage of GA's. Also, I know many people who write excellent articles but are kind of anxious to nominate them for FA/GA because they are too lazy to write the citations in a proper way, or they are afraid the topic is too specialized, or they do not care or...

That's why i counted B Class within the quality side.

There are many "skilled" editors who think that many B articles is more important than few FA. For some editors GA/FA isn't worth the bother. The GAs are increasing faster than FAs for good reason.

Unfortunately C class is a mixed bag in term of quality while B class range from correct to near-GA level of quality. Wiki projects which don't use A class anymore have more demanding B class constraints so the gap between B and GA would less steep.

A potential problem is that "featured articles" are the only ones determined by consensus. B-class (and A-class and even Good Article class) only need the rating of one editor. The shortest path to a B-class article is really just to go into the talk page and change it.

We want actual quality improvements, not just symbols.

You should try Anime/Manga B class :p

A B class article, i worked on.

Wow, I've never seen that! This is cool. I've written some great B-class articles myself. But it's nice to see some editorial review for that. Can you tell me more about the process? Do you actively nominate articles for B-class? How long does it take for a nomination to be processed? Who handles the evaluation of the B-class articles?

We just ask for re-assessment: en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Anime and manga/Assessment :p

While not a big deal in appearance but B rating is one step before GA or FL so people asking for B rating explicitly ask so and B rating was meant to be only given after project re-assessment. B class is the project sole standardized "stamp" of quality so it's not given lightly.

Assessment is handled by experienced project members and B class is really set higher because of the absence of A class rating.

Projects not using A class tends to use "Stronger" B class aiming for what a "proper" article should be in term of content, verifiability and manual of style compliance. It still need polishing and fine tuning through peer review for GA or FL but the essential is there.

For further reading: Crazy A class talk and look for G.A.S in detail explanation why animanga sticks with "Strong" B.

I'm really impressed with your turnaround time. Some of them are reviewed within only a couple of days. I guess it's easier for that to happen when you only need one person to sign off on it. Some of them take closer to a month, but that's to be expected for articles that don't meet the assessment and need more work.

I think this could be a model for measuring baseline quality. You have one independent editor read the article, and check it against some basic standard before signing off on in. It would actually be a lower (or different) standard from a strong B, IMO. It wouldn't need to be as close to featured status. For example, I would be comfortable with signing off on a short article with only partial research so long as it were written in a basically neutral tone. It's a basic safety standard, rather than a seal of excellence.

After thinking more on it.

I think we should let each language "assessment" task force decide their objectives. Some challenging yet doable within the next 5 years and a drive for all Quality contents editors.

However i wish those objectives won't be fixated on FA. We need something that could rally Quality contents editors who don't don't bother with FA preferring B or GA articles building.

Task forces and WikiProjects could come up with their own baseline stamp and their own assessment process. But I'm worried that's too soft an approach. Someone could easily ask the WikiProjects to do this by sending out a few messages tomorrow, but would it actually get done (and done well)?

@ KrebMarkt: The aim is that we set a baseline for quality and aim for 100% of articles to hit it fast. There's a number of threads on this, and covering "low hanging fruit" and how people assess quality. Quick summary: People are much more likely to assess Wikipedia by its failures (even if few) than by its successes (GA/FAs).

@ Randomran:

"I think this could be a model for measuring baseline quality. You have one independent editor read the article, and check it against some basic standard before signing off on in.... For example, I would be comfortable with signing off on a short article with only partial research so long as it were written in a basically neutral tone. It's a basic safety standard, rather than a seal of excellence."

Yes, that's roughly my idea for baseline too.

@FT2

Finding the good trade off between basic requirement and giving some slacks to new editors is critical. Time for us to show we are good to find balanced compromise.

I don't think aiming for a 100% basic requirement is realistic, saying aiming 100% of articles meeting the basic requirement is like aiming for 0% unemployment. We should aim for the 90% and above but clearly not 100%.

I do not see any problems with aiming at 100%. Obviously in the stationary regime articles created in the last several days would not meet the baseline quality standards, and the community should make efforts to improve them, but it is still 99.99%, much closer to 100 than 90. And I do not think we should recommend leaving some articles below the baseline forever. The should raise up to the baseline or disappear by means of the deletion process.

Concur.

(Yaroslav's saying the same thing as I have below, but better)

Agree with everyone -- aim high, but accept less. More useful than a "100% target" might be a timeline. Once we lay out a baseline, how quickly can we get to 10%? 20%? And so on.

The idea being taken on board is what counts. The expectation and drive for it as being important.

The wording was deliberate: "aim for 100% of articles to hit it fast".

The kind of criteria we've discussed are reasonably achievable for any article, within minutes or a couple of hours. We should aim for (and communicate we're aiming for) 100%. Not 90%.

We may or may not not get it, but we should aim and drive for it. If we aim for 100% and got 90% I'd be reasonably sure we'd made a difference to quality.