As I write this, the Articles for Creation "queue" contains more than 3300 articles, 123 of which have been in the queue for more than four months. If you're reading this, chances are one of those articles is yours. Having an article stuck in limbo really sucks! I'm sorry this is happening to you! This is a guide for getting through the process as quickly and painlessly as possible, written by an AfC reviewer who spends a lot of reviewing time on the articles that have been stuck in the queue for longest.
The short of it is this: Articles for Creation is entirely staffed by volunteers, who can review articles in any order they choose to. Most articles are reviewed within 24 hours. The easier you make your article to review, the more likely it is to be one of those.
About Articles for Creation
editHere's the thing: the AfC "queue" isn't a queue at all. It's a giant, time-stamped slush pile. Reviewers, who are all volunteers (and who would probably prefer to be writing their own articles), can review any article in the queue. They are under no obligations whatsoever to review a certain number of articles, to finish a review they started, to review in any particular order, or indeed to review any articles at all. If they get bored, they can stop! If they open an article that looks like too much work to review, they can close it!
Personally, I often review articles while insomniac or while I'm in boring meetings. I can't do complicated reviews, or fix significant problems, while I'm running on 50% brainpower. So I don't. I skip those and look for easy accepts/declines instead. Other reviewers figure that the most helpful thing they can do to reduce the AfC backlog is to review as many drafts as possible, as quickly as possible. This has the same result: if it's an easy decision, you're through. If it isn't, you can end up in four-month limbo.
Most articles are through AfC in 24 hours. Another big chunk are done before the end of 48. A few more will be attended to within a week. If you're in the pile for more than a week, you're in the backlog, and you're in it for the long haul. You might have it reviewed tomorrow. It might be four months from tomorrow. There's no real way to predict this. Sorry.
What reviewers see
editScripts reviewers like to use
editWhat reviewers require
editCommon reasons for delay, and what to do about them
editProblems with footnotes
edit- Not enough footnotes: Strictly speaking, most content on Wikipedia does not require a footnote. However, reviewers want to see that all content is supported by a reliable source. If there are large chunks of the article without footnotes, you're forcing the reviewers to guess which items in the bibliography might contain that information. Most reviewers won't do this; they'll just decline your article. So make sure you use footnotes.
- Too many footnotes: Aim for as many footnotes as you need to verify the content and show that the subject of your draft has received significant coverage in multiple independent, reliable sources - no more than that. At all costs, avoid looking like a WP:REFBOMB. The more superfluous footnotes you add, the harder it is for your reviewer to find the ones that are actually important.
- do not place footnotes that do not verify the content. For example, let's say you have a sentence that says "Bob is the CEO of CompanyName." Many people want to put a link to CompanyName's website in a footnote on this kind of statement. Don't. The footnote you give here needs to be to a source that says Bob is the CEO of this company. Put the link to the company website at the end of the article, in a section headed "External links".
- do not put links to social media in footnotes, unless you're linking to a specific post to verify something in the article. If you just want to say "Bob has a SoundCloud", that goes in at the end of the article, in a section headed "External links".
- do not cite news wire stories (eg AP news, etc) multiple times, to multiple newspapers. This is like changing the font size and margins on your paper before you hand it in to your teacher to make it look like you've written more words than you have. We can all tell. We know what you're doing. Just cite the story to one newspaper, or to the press service directly.
- How do you tell you're looking at a wire story? Check for a byline. If it's a named reporter from the newspaper you're looking at, it's not a wire story. If it says something like "AP news" or "with files from the Canadian Press", it's a wire story. Do you have two articles that are very suspiciously similar, maybe even to the point that they have the same headline, even though they're in two different newspapers? Wire story.
- References are broken or useless: This should go without saying, but make sure your references actually work. Did you copy-paste the URL correctly? Do you provide page numbers when relevant?
- if your references are screwed up and you can't understand why, ask for help at the Teahouse.
Verification issues
editReviewers want to be satisfied that the references you have provided verify the content of the sentence they're attached to. They might not check every single reference, if the content looks reasonable, but the more suspicious your reference looks, and the more surprising the claim it's attached to, the less likely a reviewer is to be satisfied without personally ensuring that your references check out. If you make that hard to do, the reviewer is less likely to review your article at all.
- Non-English references: If you use a lot of non-English references, fewer reviewers will feel comfortable verifying your draft, so use them sparingly where possible. When you do use them, keep the following in mind:
- do not put an English translation of the title into the "title" field of Template:Citation (or any of the other citation templates, like Template:Cite book). This is for the original language title.
- do translate the title in the "trans-title" field. This is very helpful, since it allows reviewers to see at a glance whether the source is likely to be about the subject of the draft, or whether it just mentions it in passing, even if they can't read the original language.
- where possible, ensure that your non-English sources are text-based and online. Avoid pdfs, images, google books, and so on, if you can. This way, reviewers can easily use google translate on the source.
- Inaccessible sources: There is no requirement that the sources for your article be online. However, sources that are online, and obviously so, are much easier and faster for reviewers to verify. Consider the following:
- do provide ISBNs for any book you cite.
- wherever possible, provide a DOI for academic sources.
- when citing books, check Internet Archive to see if they have a copy; add this in the URL field if they do. Try both IA's internal search and a google search for your book title and "Internet Archive" before giving up.
- don't use archival sources at all. They're very hard to verify, and reviewers are likely to see this as original research.