Sean McColl

Sean McColl

Featured Article Review

By Cryptic C62

Featured Article Review (FAR) is the process by which Featured Articles (FAs) are checked against the Featured Article criteria. After an initial review period, articles may move on to the Featured Article Removal Candidate (FARC) period to determine whether the article should remain featured. Featured article reviews have resulted in the demotion of more than 750 FAs, of which more than 30 have re-attained featured status. In addition, more than 325 reviewed featured articles have been kept due to editors' efforts to bring articles up to FA standard again. Here to tell us more about the process are YellowMonkey, Marskell, and SandyGeorgia.

1. What can you tell us about the history of the FAR process and how it has evolved?

YM:I only became mildly active in FAR in 2008. Judging by the archives at WT:FAR, the biggest changes appear to have occurred before mid-2006, when the current system was adopted, although the old process was not very busy at the time. Up until mid-2006, the structure of FAR was different to how it is now, with the FAR period which is usually at least two weeks, to discuss problems and do work on the article, and then advocating keeping or delisting in the FARC stage. Before, it was more like a long AfD, more resembling the current FAC with changes more likely to be minor.

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Under the newly adopted structure, there was initially quite a large pool of editors who tried to fix all sorts of articles at FAR, including those in topics that they were otherwise not involved in. As with now, a lack of inline citations was a common complaint, because many 2004 era articles had none at all. In the first half of 2007, there were quite vigorous and at times bitter argument there, often involving people who were associated with articles at FAR, who were very stridently critical of the FAR process and their articles being questioned. Examples of FARs that generated a lot of heated debate include this, this and this (234kb), the latter of which led to this debate. In some of those cases, the FARs resembled RFA/RFC in terms of political machination, rancour, and personalisation of issues. After that there was a decline in activity at FAR, and WT:FAR traffic went down by over 80%. Moreover, the number of people who were actually working on improving the articles dropped a lot. It really slowed down in late-2008/early-2009 but has picked up since March, especially in the last 2 months, not just in terms of the number of articles being considered (stats) but in the depth and quantity of reviews, as well as article improvements. Hopefully the politicisation and transformation of FARs into battlegrounds are a thing of the past and ideally more articles can be improved to meet the contempotary FA standards.

In terms of the actual articles, WP:WIAFA is ever-tightening, so the amount of work that is needed to sufficiently fix an article to pass FAR has also risen, especially as referencing is often a major issue cited, and the fact that the criteria has now been changed to require "high-quality" sources; I have seen a lot of featured articles taken to FAR recently that were heavily based on hobby websites and so forth, or tertiary sources such as online enyclopedia biographies instead of in-depth secondary sources. I think this is one of the reasons that the FAR save percentage has declined, in addition to the exodus of people who used to help fix third-party FARs.

Marskell: The current FAR process, with review and removal section, was instituted at the beginning of June 2006. This was a merger of the original FAR (created by User:TUF-KAT in 2005) and the old Featured Article Removal Candidates. I had originally envisioned three sections for the merged FAR, and User:Tony1 later suggested two. After some tweaks in the first month, the page settled on its current form. The basic idea was to invigorate the review process and to avoid simply having an up-and-down vote, which was how the old FARC functioned.

As time passed, the reviews became longer and longer because we were willing to leave things up when there was even a hint that someone would try to make a "FAR save." (The longest reviews have been in the range of three months.) Over the years, a number of great editors contributed, which was always appreciated because FAR is sort of thankless work. (See the 2008-02-11 Dispatches for a summary of saves.)

As YellowMonkey notes, there have been difficult reviews. This is partly the nature of the process: you are asking people to return to articles that they've already worked on and taken through FAC and are usually quite proud of. Who wants to lose their first FA star? There are also some topics—Global warming, Intelligent design—that are inevitably going to generate heat, regardless of how FAR is structured. Finally, the great inline citation debate routinely upset the process, particularly with regards to some of the well-written but uncited articles from 2004

That said, I disagree with the implication that FAR slowed down primarily because of difficult reviews. The train wrecks were always a minimal percentage of the overall number of reviews. Instead, I think a slowdown was inevitable for the simple reason that most of the old FAs were processed through FAR from 2006 to 2008. In '06 we set-up a list of articles that had no citations or fewer than ten, now at Wikipedia:Unreviewed featured articles. The total percentage of FARs with fewer than ten has dropped from 52% to 1% in three years. Not bad. The Unreviewed list now includes every FA from prior to the merger; it continues declining.

This does suggest a bit of catch-22: the more articles FAR processes, the less FAR becomes necessary. Having not been involved for the last nine months, I can't speak to the direction it is evolving toward now; it is a little disappointing to see the keep rate going down. But I do think FAR has served its purpose for three years.

2. To what extent do you see featured articles appearing at FAR or being demoted at FARC due to the original author having retired or becoming disinterested?

YM: Well people tend to nominate the oldest FAs, which are generally the ones that are furthest away from current standards. Most of the ones nominated are three or more years old, so retirement is a big factor. Also a lot of people who wrote FAs a few years ago, but are still active, have stopped writing FAs in more recent times, so there a few who ignore it as well. I think in some of these cases they don't recognise the contemporary FA standards, or consider questioning of their articles to be illegitimate or irrelevant because some of them will still go around saying that they still have such a number of FAs even though they have been delisted.

Marskell: Definitely the participation of the original author(s) is the most important factor in whether an article gets kept. People nominating at FAR are expected to notify original authors. Sometimes even when the original writers are available it can be draining because a lot of tedious formatting is needed to clean up an older FA. And, of course, people do leave; User:Emsworth's articles are the single biggest example. But there have also been successes. User:Mav has regularly come out to FAR to work on his older FAs and they have all been kept. And even without an original author it's still possible for others to save an article if they can get a hold of the references.

3. It seems that many FARs are started due to formatting issues and lack of citations. How often are newer articles brought to FAR due to emerging content issues?

Marskell: Do you mean on-going or current events impacting on comprehensiveness? In my experience, this has applied to very few. Most of the FAs that have been processed deal with historical subjects (royalty, military history, architecture). There are often comprehensiveness concerns, but not of the current event variety. One area this might apply is to music articles, which often need to be updated for emerging issues. Our large batch of astronomy FAs also need to be watched given on-going discoveries but we have a good group of editors looking after those. One article that does come to mind in terms of your question is Barack Obama—very difficult for FAR to properly process this one.

4. What common mistakes do you see FAR or FARC participants making?

Marskell: While not actually a mistake, one of the main points of debate is SOFIXIT. A nominator will come up with a list of concerns when posting a FAR and someone will retort: "In the time it took you to type all that, you could have done X, Y, Z." I say it's not actually a mistake because nominators are not obligated to work on the articles themselves. The counter-rebuttal by people posting concerns is usually that they hope that original authors will learn formatting rules by making the changes and/or that they didn't want to upset anyone by simply plunging in and making edits to a long-standing page.

One thing that almost always is a mistake is throwing up a bunch of citation needed flags along with a nomination. This almost never goes over well. One strategy for nominators is to make a couple of example formatting corrections and hope that someone more familiar with the page will carry on and systematically correct it. Also, people commenting shouldn't be so brief that no examples are provided. Writing "fails 1c" and nothing else often rubs people the wrong way. Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-end