Wikipedia:April Fools/April Fools' Day 2022/Horrible article criteria

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Horrible article nominations
Horrible article nominations

The horrible article criteria are the six standard or tests by which a horrible article nomination (HAN) may be compared and judged against to ensure it is a horrible article (HA). A horrible article has met (and does not exceed) the horrible article criteria, and may not have been deleted.

Criteria

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The six horrible article criteria are not the only aspects that should be considered when assessing whether to pass or fail an article. However, it is essential that a 'pass' is applied only to an undeniably awful, terrible, or completely unreadable article.

Immediate passes

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An article can, but by no means must, pass without further consideration if it meets the following criteria:

1. SEO farming:
a. The page is clearly used to bump the page rating of other sites as part of a SEO farm service.
b. The page contains entirely of external links

The six horrible article criteria

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A horrible article is:

1. Terribly written:
a. The prose is unclear, self-contradicting, and contains verses written in the first or second person;
d. Deceptive in wording or formatting;
c. It's grammar and spelling does not exceed elementary or middle-school expectations; and
b. It is difficult to discern useful or encyclopedic content from the text within the article.
2. Unverifiable or Original:
a. It is a complete work of fiction or difficult to verify in any sense;
b. Citations are either unreliable or cite other horrible articles; and
c. It has notable or obvious plagiarism.
3. Biased or a WP:BLP violation
a. If it is a biography of a living person, it must contain libelous, false, or otherwise 'dirty' information on the subject;
Tip: A good sign of a BLP violation is frequent edit-warring over an {{Unbalanced}} template.
b. It clearly contains personal agendas or beliefs of the editors involved in the article; and
c. One or more of it's editors should actively be breaching the WP:PAID or WP:COI guidelines.
4. Terrible aggregations
a. If the page is an aggregation, it should be considered a bad or useless aggregation;
b. It should contain comparatively few entries, or none at all; and
c. The topic the aggregation is performed upon should be trivial, useless, or completely inappropriate.
5. Unstable
a. It must have major layout, formatting, or information changes within a considerably short span of time; and
b. Information is updated without regards to citations.
5. Illustrated, if possible, by crayons.
a. It must illuminate the topic in a confusing, confounding, or irrelevant manner; and
b. It should contain works in a subpar quality, such as screenshots.

What should I nominate as a horrible article?

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What cannot be a horrible article?

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  • Featured articles, good articles, and deleted articles: These inherently, simply by their nature, violate the principles that a horrible article is based on, and cannot be nominated or accepted for horrible article status.
  • Redirects: All redirects are protected by and under the jurisdiction of the Redirects for Discussion page.
  • Drafts: As drafts must be reviewed for quality issues before they are accepted into Mainspace, drafts cannot qualify for horrible article status.