Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles

WikiProject focusing on important articles From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ask yourselves: why didn't you look up Wikipedia's articles about economy, Dmitri Mendeleev, man, or land even though you know little about them? Simple, because they suck. Millions of people feel the same way too. This is not acceptable on our side and this must be changed by making these articles good.

Subpages

Past work

30 kB drive
47 articles expanded to 30 kilobytes; 26 July 2022 – 31 August 2022
Vital GA Drive
Land to good article status, unsuccessful; 1 September – 15 November 2022

Function

This WikiProject is designed to be a public space that has neat stuff to do or learn about, and to serve as a place where you sit down, relax, and make edits or discuss with others. Its purpose is to improve the Vitals articles and lists. We always welcome anonymous and new people here (and if you are one of them, have a chat at the talk page!)

There is no such thing as "joining" or "registering" for this WikiProject, as it is an overarching project that aims to gather other WikiProjects together for collaboration. If you're actively improving vital articles, you're already a member of this WikiProject. If you want to find people that are working on Vital articles, use this link to find recent edits and talk to them directly.

Tasks

A list of articles needing cleanup associated with this project is available. See also the tool's wiki page and the index of WikiProjects.

Improving a Vital article

See also: Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/Tools

While we might not know the exact formula for mass-producing Vital GAs, we do know ways to tackle and improve these kind of articles. Here are some techniques that you can use:

  • Don't be afraid to try and don't be a perfectionist. Yes, that paragraph that you just wrote might not be there once the article is at GAN, but it will be an important stepping stone for recognizing further improvement. As long as your own content is significantly better and more reliable than the rest of the article, you've done a good job.
  • Be concise and keep the summary style in mind. An article should not be too long or else the readers will become dizzy (~60 kB of readable prose is the ideal size). Pro tip: one of the best way to quickly raise article quality is to trim bad content, such as cruft, unsourced sections, original research, etc.
  • Be mindful of systematic bias. For vital articles specifically, the most commonly encountered bias is American-European bias. For example, there's a tendency of using European allegories or paintings to illustrate abstract ideas. Don't just swap these images for the sake of diversity however. Remember, the best images are the one that is relevant, high-resolution, sharp, shows the subject clearly in the small thumbnail and is applicable to all cultures.
  • Patrol sources and ensure their quality. If you find a low-quality source, either replace it with higher-quality ones or jank the content if it doesn't warrant inclusion in the first place. The WP:RSP list, User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen and User:Headbomb/unreliable are some of the best tools available to detect bad sources, though remember to use your own judgement as well.
  • Copyedit the text and make sure that the text looks more Wikipedia-like. If in doubt, take a look at Wikipedia:Basic copyediting, Wikipedia:Writing better articles, WP:Manual of Style and more.

If you had completed all of these basic techniques, here are some of the more specialized yet powerful ways that you can improve Vital articles. Enjoy these dishes with extra Wikipedia:Ignore all rules and common sense:

  • Use the bold, revert, discuss cycle to garner attention and quickly adding improvements the (old) Wikipedia way. This method is especially useful for editing popular country articles provided that you're prepared. Just make an edit that you think it would improve the article, the edit then gets reverted, and both people discuss to reach a better solution.
  • Use AutoWikiBrowser and other automated tools to quickly correct errors in many Vital articles. For example, you can use AWB to monitor typos and fix them accordingly. Detailed instructions for some tools such as WP:PetScan and user scripts can be obtained at Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/Tools.
  • Import good content from subtopic articles. For example, in a section about the properties of numbers, it may be helpful to get the content from smaller scope articles such as natural numbers. However, you will need to attribute the source per Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia and can be pretty tedious when messing with the template. An IAR and simpler way might be to make a talk page section and list all of your articles that you've copied, including their oldid.
  • And perhaps, the most spicy of 'em all is using large language models such as ChatGPT, GPT-3, etc. for brainstorming ideas on Wikipedia. These neural networks as of 2023 are one of the most powerful tool to face the writer's block and give clues at expanding broad-topic articles, and they have the potential to do far more in the future. It should NOT, however, be used to generate original content because of original research and verifiability policy.

Awards

We have a good roster of awards given to those that help us advance the goal to make all Vital Articles GAs and FAs. These awards may be awarded by anyone to anyone worthy.

Barnstars

Vital Barnstar
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The Vital Articles Barnstar
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Userboxes

Vital articlesThis user contributes to vital articles on Wikipedia.
This user has received a Vital barnstar.
  • {{Good Vital infobox}} – Userbox for those that have successfully nominated a Vital good article.
This user has helped promote vital good articles on Wikipedia.
This user has helped promote vital featured articles on Wikipedia.

Assessment

For mobile readers, you can click here to switch to desktop mode to read the table more easily. This Vital article assessment scheme is meant to be subjective and complementary to Wikipedia:Content assessment.

More information Class, Criteria ...
ClassCriteriaReader's experienceEditing suggestionsExample
 FA The article is professional, complete, engaging, and has been vetted by WP:Featured article candidates.
More detailed criteria
  1. It meets the featured article criteria. (most important)
  2. It doesn't suffer from systematic bias.
  3. It will not be ridiculed for experts for over-generalization, yet is still understandable by a secondary school student.
  4. It feels "structured" – navigable, accessible, intelligible, editable, and translatable.
  5. It has a good selection of see also and further reading links, akin to a professor's reading/interactive content recommendations for the student.
 Experts and casual readers alike will find the content easy to digest, accurate, and engaging. You can format the article to look like an actual Nature journal article and it would look believable. Improve the prose, update the information, remove vandalism, make the text more professional and engaging, all the WikiGnome stuff! Try to make the text more readable and engaging to a wider audience if you dare. Solar System
 A The article is well organized, complete in terms of content, and has been examined by a dedicated WikiProject department such as WikiProject Military History A-class assessment. As a special assessment rank, it meets the A-Class criteria. The actual criteria can be slightly different due to nuances within individual WikiProjects. Readers will find it complete, but experts will know better and still have grumbling at missing/incorrect information throughout the article. There will still be hiccups or typos when you read the article top-down. Expert knowledge may be needed to tweak the article, and style problems may need to be addressed. Consider contacting experts at your relevant A-Class department for more advice. Napoleon
 GA The article is reasonably complete and suitable for translation to other languages, after being vetted WP:Good article nominations.
More detailed criteria
  1. It meets the good article criteria. (most important)
  2. It is applicable to the global population and is suitable for translation/porting to Abstract Wikipedia
  3. It is a good resource as a beginner introduction to the topic.
  4. Its heading layout is mostly complete and require little to no adjustments.
  5. It has a rough consensus by the talk page participant as being worthy for the good article status (ask the talk page to see if anyone has any objections before passing the article)
  6. Almost all secondary sources are written from the late-20th century (1970s) onwards. This criterion would ensure that the article is up to date.
 Fairly standard quality level for a top-tier Encyclopædia Britannica article but with less generalization and dumb-downness. Readers will at least not be drowned in text, and experts will find it usable for refreshing their memory. Detect Wikipedia:Systemic bias in the article and address them; more viewpoints generally meant better article at this point. Touch-up on your citations and style and make sure the text is in line with your sources. Make sure that the text is appealing to a wide audience and not a slog to read. Marie Curie
B The article is kinda complete, reliable and suitably organized. From this point on, there is no need to revamp the article layout.
More detailed criteria
It meets the six B-Class criteria:
  1. The article is suitably referenced, with inline citations. It has reliable sources, and any important or controversial material which is likely to be challenged is cited. Any format of inline citation is acceptable: the use of <ref> tags and citation templates such as {{cite web}} is optional.
  2. The article reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain obvious omissions or inaccuracies. It contains a large proportion of the material necessary for an A-Class article, although some sections may need expansion, and some less important topics may be missing.
  3. The article has a defined structure. Content should be organized into groups of related material, including a lead section and all the sections that can reasonably be included in an article of its kind.
  4. The article is reasonably well-written. The prose contains no major grammatical errors and flows sensibly, but does not need to be of the standard of featured articles. The Manual of Style does not need to be followed rigorously.
  5. The article contains supporting materials where appropriate. Illustrations are encouraged, though not required. Diagrams, an infobox etc. should be included where they are relevant and useful to the content.
  6. The article presents its content in an appropriately understandable way. It is written with as broad an audience in mind as possible. The article should not assume unnecessary technical background and technical terms should be explained or avoided where possible.
 "Seems good", a reader thought. Citations, prose and images are better than average, but lots of cruds still remain. Experts would likely look elsewhere for content, maybe at a specialist encyclopedia or journal articles if they need answer to specific questions. A few aspects of content and style need to be addressed. Expert knowledge may be needed. Start addressing systematic bias since this article will be translated to other languages and the inclusion of media should be considered as well. Atom
C The article is still missing important content or contains much irrelevant material. It may still have significant problems or require substantial cleanup. It may have some gaps or missing elements; need editing for clarity, balance, or flow; or contain policy violations, such as bias or original research. When a reader scrolls down, they would see a vast amount of text no more useful than at a random website, with no coherent theme, and dumpster fire of terrible sources. "This article could be better" – they thought. Providing references to reliable sources should come first; the article also needs substantial improvement in content and organization. Also improve the grammar, spelling, writing style and improve the jargon use. Food preservation
Start The article sorely lacks content, and lacks a lot of it. The article has a usable amount of good content but is weak in many areas. Quality of the prose may be distinctly unencyclopedic. Readers find it just a bit more useful than a dictionary definition, and experts will scoff on it. And they would definitely not read more than the lead portion of the article. Find sources and add content based on them. Make sure that you make the article structure easy to expand upon. Think about a general "theme" or "flow" to the article – what do you want it to look like? Equation
Stub A very basic description of the topic that needs a ton of content expansion. The article will need much work to become a meaningful article. "Ah yes, that thing exists on Wikipedia" – a reader thought. Then they close Wikipedia and search on Google to hunt down more reliable/comprehensive content. Add content like there's no tomorrow. Keep doing it. Add more content! Rapids
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Statistics

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