Wikipedia:Requirements for very good articles/New

The requirements listed here are based on consensus that is forming on Wikipedia talk:Proposed very good articles. They can and should be tweaked as new consensus is formed and/or current consensus changes. Please do not make any major changes without first talking about them on the above talk page or at this page's talk page.

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 {{vgood}}. 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 called Featured articles.

Requirements for very good articles

1. The article must be about a subject which belongs in Wikipedia. There is no use improving articles that do not belong here, and better fit another Wiki, like Wikibooks, Wikispecies, Wiktionary...
2. The article must be comprehensive. A comprehensive article is not missing any major facts and details.
3. (This point is under discussion.) The article must have a certain length. A minimum is 5 kilobytes (about 3 screens), not including infoboxes, images, references, other websites, interwiki, and categories. There is no use in denoting very short articles as very good.
4. The article must have gone through a few revisions, possibly by different editors. No one writes perfect articles.
5. The article must be placed in the appropriate category. It must have at least one interwiki link.
6. The last few revisions should be minor changes (like spell-checking or link-fixing).
7. All important terms should be linked and there must be no 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.
8. If there are any illustrations, they must be pertinent to the article. They must also be properly labelled.
9. There must be no templates pointing to the fact that the article needs improvement. These templates include {{complex}}, {{cleanup}}, {{stub}}, {{unreferenced}} and {{wikify}}. The article also should not need them.
10. (This point is under discussion.) 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. The article must not have or need an {{unreferenced}} or similar tag.

How to make an article very good

To be able to mark a certain article very good, there is a certain procedure that should be followed.

1. An article is identified as a potential candidate. It should be listed on the peer review page to allow other editors to make improvements.
2. When the article meets at least 6 of the criteria mentioned above, a named contributor can add it to the Proposed very good articles page. He or she can also add the {{pvgood}} 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.
3. When the article meets all ten of the criteria, it can be voted on. For this, the article is moved to the voting section on the Proposed very good articles page. Any named editor can vote. Within one week of being listed under the voting section, 80% of named editors must agree that the article is indeed very good. There is a required minimum of 6 named voters.
4. If the voting is successful, the {{pvgood}} tag is replaced by the {{vgood}} tag on the article's main page and {{vgood-large}} is added to the top of the article's talk page.

Making large changes to very good articles

Because the process of becoming a very good article is long, larger edits (beyond spellchecking/link-fixing) to current very good articles should be talked about on the talk page of the article before they are made.

Demoting very good articles

Sometimes a very 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 very good article status. Demotion of a VGA can be done in this way:

1. A named editor notices that the article no longer meets the criteria.
2. The editor places the article on the designated page and adds a special template that shows that the article is currently being reviewed and improved.
3. 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 "vgood" tag back.
4. 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 VGA status and will follow the full promotion process from beginning to end.