Wikipedia:Requirements for good articles
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There are many articles in Simple English Wikipedia. Some of them are better than others. To mark those articles that can be an example for how articles should be, a template has been set up. This template is called {{good}}. It can be added to articles that meet the requirements listed below, and that have been voted on by the community. In other Wikipedia projects, such articles are also called good articles.
Requirements for good articles
- The article must be about a subject that belongs in Wikipedia. There is no use improving articles that do not belong here, and better fit another wiki, like Wikibooks, Wikispecies, Wiktionary...
- The article must be fairly complete. Usually, articles should be a few kilobytes long, although shorter pages may also be nominated.
- The article must have gone through a few revisions, possibly by different editors. No one writes perfect articles.
- The article must be filed in the appropriate category. It must have at least one interwiki link.
- The article should be stable. It should not have many recent big changes or any current change wars.
- All important terms should be linked and there must not be many red links left. Red links point to articles that do not exist yet. Usually the important word or phrase is only linked the first time it occurs.
- If there are any illustrations, they must be related to the article. They must also be properly labelled.
- There must be no templates pointing to the fact that the article needs improvement. Some of these templates are {{complex}}, {{cleanup}}, {{stub}}, {{unreferenced}} and {{wikify}}. The article also should not need them.
- Content that is from books, journal articles or other publications needs to be referenced. This can either be done with <ref>..</ref><references/> tags, or as a list of publications.
How to make an article good
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.
- When the article meets at least 5 of the criteria mentioned above, a named contributor can add it to the Proposed good articles page. They can also add the {{pgood}} tag at this time. The talk page of the article in question is the place to discuss what the article still needs, or how the work can be co-ordinated.
- When the article meets all nine of the criteria, it can be voted on. For this, the article is moved to the voting section on the Proposed good articles page. Any named editor can vote. Within one week of being listed under the voting section, 70% of named editors must agree that the article is indeed good. There is a required minimum of 5 named voters.
- If the voting is successful, the {{pgood}} tag is replaced by the {{good}} tag on the article's main page.
Making large changes to good articles
Because the process of becoming a good article is long, larger edits (beyond spellchecking/link-fixing) to current good articles should be talked about on the talk page of the article before they are made.
Demoting good articles
Sometimes a good article is changed in such a way that it no longer meets the criteria above, or new information may become available about the topic, making the article incomplete. In such a case, the article should be demoted from good article status. Demotion of a GA can be done in this way:
- A named editor notices that the article no longer meets the criteria.
- The editor places the article on Wikipedia:Proposed article demotion and adds a special template that shows that the article is currently being reviewed and improved.
- For two weeks following the discovery, the article can be fixed to again meet the criteria. If there is agreement that the problem has been fixed during this time, there does not need to be a re-vote; a named editor can remove the tag from the article, and put the "good" tag back.
- If the problem is not fixed, the article will lose its status after the two week period. When the article once again meets the criteria, it can be re-nominated for GA status and will follow the full promotion process from beginning to end.