- The article must be about a subject which belongs in Wikipedia. There is no use improving articles that do not belong here, like those which fit another Wiki (Wikibooks, Wikispecies, Wiktionary, ....)
- The article must have a certain length. A minimum is half a screen, or about 2.5 kilobytes of text. There is no use in marking 3-sentence-articles as good.
- The article must be filed in the appropriate category. It must have at least one interwiki link.
- At least 3 people should agree that the article is a good one.
To be able to mark a certain article good, there is a certain procedure that should be followed.
- An article is identified as a potential candidate. It should be listed in the Peer review process, to allow other editors to fix, and contribute to it. A temporary tag is also added to the top of the article, which shows it is being reviewed for "Good Article" status.
- When the article meets all the criteria, except the agreement of three editors, it can be voted on. For this, a special section is created on the proposed very good articles page. Any named editor can vote. Within one week from when voting starts, three named editors must agree that the article is indeed good. If complete agreement cannot be reached, two thirds of the people who voted must agree. Again, a minimum of 3 people must be in agreement. That way, if four people voted, 3 must agree for the article to pass. If 5 people voted and only three agreed, the article would no longer pass (because less than two thirds of the voters had agreed).
- Once the voting was successful, the tag can be replaced by the tag saying the article is a good one. To make sure the article remains easy to read, a small tag is placed at the top of the article and a bigger tag is placed at the bottom of the article, before the interwiki links.