What a defeatist and ill-informed Featured Editorial this article is, especially as it was written by one of the two editors of this Newsletter. Overall, is it mostly ill-informed scaremongering, based on under-reporting some figures whilst over-reporting others, and is perhaps an example of gutter journalism at its very worst. Much of it appears to be based on the unnecessary maligning both the efforts of earlier reviewers and nominators and the quality of the most of the existing GAs.
I will briefly go over some of the points raised:
- There is no evidence whatsoever that "...(articles promoted since 2007) and most of them are in an urgent need of verification". As of 1 February 2013, there were 16,731 GAs. The newsletter refers to "the discovery of a hoax (a fake article) that was listed as a good article in December of 2012", I believe that should stated "was listed as a GA in October 2007 (and unsuccessful submitted to WP:FAC in December 2007)" and the "fabrication of sources by another user named Legolas". I don't know how many articles had fake sources produced by Legolas, but let us take the arbitrary figure of 15 articles. So that is possibly 16 fake (and now delisted) GAs in over 16,700 GAs, which works out at 0.1 percent of GAs were faked or had fake sources, perhaps much less. Where does most GAs "are in an urgent need of verification" come from?
- GA Sweeps was created due to concerns in 2007 over the standards of many of the articles that had "gained" GA status prior to August 2007. Verifiability has always been a GA criteria, but in the early days of GA, it was less strictly enforced and reviewing was mostly done on the article's talkpage, without using a separate /GA1 review page. I came into Sweeps in June 2009, and the article Hurdy gurdy, is perhaps a typical example of some of the problems that were found: it was awarded GA status in January 2007 after two WP:Peer reviews and it is a "good article (not a Good Article)", is an informative and well illustrated article, but its almost unreferenced, so I delisted it in June 2009. There were 52 reviewers involved in GA Sweeps and on average each reviewer "delisted" almost as many articles as they "kept", some delisted proportionally more and some delisted perhaps only half of what they kept (see here). It took nearly three years to review 2,808 articles and, interestingly, two reviewers, did almost one-third of the work between them (606 and 321 reviews, respectively).
- The statement that "with an average of 1,500 new articles per year" is incorrect. The figures can be found here and are: in 2007 about 1,650 new GAs; in 2008 about 2,400 new GAs; in 2009 about 2,150 new GAs; in 2010 about 3,070 new GAs; in 2011 about 2,700 new GAs; and in 2012 about 2,690 new GAs. Note: the graphs on this page are not up to date, and I'm working on that; I hope to have a new set later this month. GA Sweeps reviewed GAs created before 26 August 2007, so there were about 465 unreviewed GAs for 2007 to cover. It did not cover delisted GAs, nor GAs that had become FAs.
- At the time of writing, there are 2,126 delisted GAs (see Category:Delisted good articles), not the "several have been delisted" as stated in the newsletter. I suspect that possibly half of these delistings came from GA Sweeps, followed by WP:GAR delistings.
- The Newsletter states "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" but there is no evidence and none was given that articles awarded GA status between August 2007 and the end of 2010 are any worst than those awarded GA post 2010, nor that there is an urgent need to re-review them.
- Typically, in generally, the quality of the reviews decreases during GA backlog drives, quality is trade off against quality, so if reviews need to be rechecked, the priority aught to be reviewing GAs awarded during these backlog drives.
- The Newsletter claims "showed promising results of participation with the June-July 2012 backlog elimination drive". However, prior to that review serious concerns had been raised on the talkpages about the quality of some reviews carried out during previous backlog drives. So review checking was carried out on this drive and several reviewers with high review rates had some of their reviews struck out. I've not checked if the articles concerned were re-reviewed, but in some cases Leads were not being checked for compliance with WP:Lead, articles with copyright violations and/or close copying were being awarded GA status and "claims" being made where a second reviewer had appeared raising "problems" on the review page that the primary reviewer had ignored or overlooked. There were many good reviews carried out during the drive, but a significant number of some reviewer's reviews were clearly unacceptable to the backlog drive.
- The Newsletter claims "... those hopes were squashed to the underground with the subsequent drive". This review was organised with little or no publicity, and was targeted at giving preference to the oldest nominations. I regard it as a success, as most of the oldest nominations were reviewed (see List of oldest nominations in Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/GAN backlog elimination drives/November-December 2012/Totals). Near the beginning of November, before the drive started, there were nominations going back to early July 2012 (see here) and by 5 January 2013 (see here) most of the older nominations had been reviewed. As of today, some the oldest nominations at GAN go back to October and November 2012, but a lot of them are this year's nominations. Interestingly the three named coordinators appeared to have "walked away" from the backlog elimination drive, since it was Noleander who did most of the checking of the reviews in early January 2013 and it was Noleander who issued Barnstars to the reviewers in early February 2013.
- It is somewhat irrelevant that now many users have to wait at least a month to get their articles reviewed, there is a limited supply of reviewers and the number of articles that gain GA status continues to grow in real terms, up from 0.140% of all articles on 1 August 2007 to 0.403% on 1 February 2013. The number of Featured Article is virtually static at 0.09%. There is a queue of nominations, that merely signifies that there is a demand for articles to be reviewed. I've seen nominations that have had a review opened within one hour of listing and others for which a review has been opened the same day, but some nominations clearly wait many months (which is too long), as are reviews that sometimes last many months.
- Let us be clear on what is being proposed here: two GAs that were fake or had fake references were found so all article have to be reviewed up to the end of 2010. So the requirement appears to be full copyright verification on approximately 8,000 GAs (10,648 GAs on the 1 January 2011, less 2,699 GAs on 1 August 2007 or 2,808 the number reviewed in GA Sweeps up to 26 August 2007). GA sweeps was not about copyright checks, most articles that were "delisted" were failed because they could be seen (a visual check) to be mostly or significantly unreferenced. And, this is to be done on top of the existing reviews (at GAN and GAR.
Reality checks.
- Clearly there are editors, two have been mentioned, that will go to the effort of producing fake articles or making fake references, and clearly such articles don't deserve GA-status. I suspect, without hard evidence, that its a small fraction of the sixteen thousand GAs.
- There are a few editors that "shop" for GAs: when/if their nomination is failed, it is then immediately resubmitted without change.
- There are reviewers doing superficial reviews of the type "I can't find any problems", have a GA". In some cases the article is a "deserving GA article", when clearly the review is not adequate; in other cases the article may only be marginally a GA, or marginally deficient; and in other cases the article aught not to be a GA. As an exaggerated opinion, it can quite easy to superficially review a nomination that is clearly GA material and its also quite easy to superficially review an article that is clear non-compliant. Doing a good review and especially doing a good review on an nomination that is borderline between a pass and a fail is somewhat harder to do. In contrast, very many reviewers take care to review nominations fairly against the criteria (WP:WIAGA]]) and very many editors take care to produce high quality, well referenced articles. In addition, articles that are GAs, as well as article that are not GAs, are on people's watch lists and they are maintained and fixed after any vandalism. Why there is a divide between pre and post-2010 is not given, but that is given as the "cut off" for the new Sweeps.
- What is being suggested as "just another GA sweeps", if its justification is the detection and the removal of GAs on fake topics and/or those based on fake sources, is clearly much more than the last GA Sweeps. Particularly, if its aim is to cover the period 2007 to the end of 2010.