Coordinators Election Expanded Answer
Q: Surely it would be better to abolish GA grade, which seems to overlap aspects of A and B, wastes effort in assessing an additional grade without a clear distinction from the others and which does not really help the progression from B to A, and use that effort instead to identify the better 10% of articles currently languishing on 'start'?
- Like Jackyd101, I agree that this is a loaded question designed to encourage me to speak out against the GA process. I don't see GA as a useless or wasted effort. Your points about the overlay are spot on because of how the process is structured. Let's examine the article assessment grades from B to FA:
- B - An assessment made by an individual representing a WikiProject
- GA - An assessment made after a review by an individual representing the Community
- A - An assessment made after a review by at least three individuals representing a WikiProject
- FA - An assessment made after a review by at least three individuals representing the Community
- Also, the standards and criteria for each increase as you go up the ladder from B - GA - A - FA
- Seeking to abolish the GA process is a non-starter because it is so entrenched in the community and is also the first community-level of an article's quality (and the only one before FA). Also, just getting rid of GA within MILHIST would in all likelihood drive editors away when they see articles that they have put effort into bringing to GA being demoted to B. That type of alienation is completely avoidable and unacceptable. While GA has been under-utilized within MILHIST in favor of our A-Class system, GA is making a comeback within the project because it does provide an additional review step which can and usually does make the transition from B to A easier just like an A-Class Review can make the transition from GA or B to FA easier and requires less work at FAC (SandyGeorgia, the deputy FAC director has said this herself).
- I can demonstrate this with an article: USS Texas (BB-35) is one of my pet projects along with TomStar81. When I started, Tom had expanded it and referenced it to B-Class. I initiated a GA review because I thought the article met the criteria but wasn't so sure about A-Class yet. We received a phenomenal GA review which we passed after making only a few changes. Then due to real-life events and time constraints, we let the article stay at that quality level without major changes until we initiated an A-Class Review, which also passed with only a need for minor tweaks to the article. I believe that without that GA review, the ACR would have been much more difficult and because of the ACR we have identified some items that we need to address before we attempt an FAC. To me this is the ideal way of how the system should work.
- As to using the effort to instead identify the 10% of articles that are better than Start but languish there, if the template-driven C-Class was used, that would be done automatically with only a few minutes of template work by one or two editors.
- Finally, I'd like to direct your attention to some statistics that were recently compiled in response to some project-wide discussions about A-Class. I think those statistics do speak for themselves in regards to the usability of the different levels of higher assessments (B, GA, A, FA).
- Thank you for your question, and I apologize for the length, but I feel that such an in-depth answer is necessary. -MBK004 21:06, 12 March 2009 (UTC)