Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Newsletter/February 2013

By — ΛΧΣ²¹

Thousands of new good articles have been promoted since 2007, and most of them are in an urgent need of verification. With an average of 1,500 new articles per year, the total of articles promoted after the end of 2007 and before the beginning of 2011 rises to six thousand or even more. Many of them have become featured articles; several have been delisted, and others have been left untouched, outdated and maybe completely abandoned. Therefore, the need to verify them to make sure we keep only those which meet the good article criteria rises every day. Also, after the discovery of a hoax (a fake article) that was listed as a good article in December of 2012, the need to verify that all our good articles treat existing topics arose too.

Additionally, another discovery (fabrication of sources by another user named Legolas) increased the need to develop another version of a program that ran for three years and which goal was to check the list of good articles: the GA Sweeps. Yes, created and tasked to check all the good articles promoted before August 2007, the first GA Sweeps checked around 2,800 articles and lasted for almost three years. Back then, a bunch of frequent collaborators managed to make a very big task, and checked all the good articles that were needed to be checked, and accomplished this incredible feat. Now, facing several difficulties and worries with our good articles, and having not checked those promoted after August 2007, we have to move fast to verify at least those promoted until the end of 2010 and make sure they are completely compliant with the correspondent guidelines.

The main issue is that the list is big, and the ones who can collaborate are a bit scarce. The GAN project is just the shadow of what it was several years before, and now many users have to wait at least a month to get their articles reviewed. Even after 2012 showed promising results of participation with the June-July 2012 backlog elimination drive, those hopes were squashed to the underground with the subsequent drive, which lasted from mid-November to mid-December. Although, and after that drive improved on many areas the GAN community was unable to solve before, we are still facing the issue of the quality of our current good articles, and what are we going to do to make sure we only keep those who really deserve the little green ribbon.

• Several discussions about splitting some categories on the Nominations page have been held at the talk page of that page. The main proposal has been to split Sports and recreation.
• A request for comment about proposals to supplement or replace the backlog elimination drives has been started by Hahc21.
• A discussion regarding a possible new Sweeps program is currently being held.
• A requets for comment proposing a new wording for the quickfail criteria, proposed by Aircorn, is currently being held.

• There are currently 228 members of WikiProject Good Articles! Welcome to all the new members that joined this past month! If you aren't yet part of WikiProject Good Articles and interested in joining, go here and add your name. Everyone is welcome!

• This WikiProject, and the Good Article program as a whole, would not be where it is today without each and every one of its members! Thank you to all!

• January had one of the highest rates of good article promotions in a long time: 282 articles were promoted during the month, and several of them are already featured articles.
• The Sweeps task force may be reactivated if the current proposal is accepted.

• Titan (supercomputer): A supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan is an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, to use graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to conventional central processing units (CPUs), and is the first such hybrid to perform over 10 petaFLOPS. The upgrade began in October 2011, commenced stability testing in October 2012 and it will be available to researchers in early 2013. The initial cost of the upgrade was US$60 million, funded primarily by the United States Department of Energy.

• 1950s American automobile culture: An American culture that has had an enduring influence on the culture of the United States, as reflected in popular music and mainstream acceptance of the "hot rod" culture. The American manufacturing economy switched from producing war-related items to consumer goods at the end of World War II, and by the end of the 1950s one in six working Americans were employed either directly or indirectly in the automotive industry. The United States became the world's largest manufacturer of automobiles, and Henry Ford's goal of 40 years earlier—that any man with a good job should be able to afford an automobile—was achieved. A new generation of service businesses focusing on customers and their automobiles sprang up during the decade.