Talk:Wiki/GA2

GA Review

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Reviewer: Ritchie333 (talk · contribs) 10:32, 28 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'll give this a go.

As initial remark, I want to make sure all the reverts are just minor or undoing vandalism, and the article is long-term stable.

Toolserver link check returns two dead links at the end.

Characteristics

This section has several unreferenced paragraphs. While it might be obvious to us what the characteristics of a Wiki are (we've got as far as understanding the GA criteria, after all), articles should be written to the layman to help their understanding of the subject, and hence need to be factually correct and verifiable.

Are the three bullet points from The Wiki Way a direct quotation or a summary of it? Either way, we need a reference, ideally down to the page number in the book.

The quotation from biomedicalcentral.com appears to take up the entire paragraph, and might be a borderline copyright infringement. It would be better to simply rewrite what the source says in our own words.

Editing wiki pages

"The style and syntax of wikitexts can vary greatly among wiki implementations" - this probably wants some actual examples of what the differences are.

As you're probably aware, the MediaWiki visual editor is now out of alpha grade and available generally here.

Might also be worth mentioning that some wikis provide hooks to allow custom user interface code to be written (I've personally done this)

This section is unreferenced

Linking and creating pages

This section is unreferenced

Searching

Half of this section is unreferenced

History

This section has a when? tag on it and the paragraph containing it is unreferenced.
The last sentence is in a single paragraph. In general, we prefer to merge these

Implementations

This section is completely unreferenced.

Trust and security : Trustworthiness

This Nature reference (cited in the middle pargraph immediately following the quotation) returns 401 : "Subscription based". Probably not an issue.

Trust and security : Security

What does "virtual vandalism" mean?
soft-security is cited to UseModWiki. The rest of the first paragraph is cited to Assothink Wiki. Wikis are generally unreliable sources.

Most of the second paragraph is unreferenced. You might want to consider examples from the German Wikipedia.

Citizendium "creating an almost "vandalism-free" ambiance." Are you sure? This definitely needs a citation!

Communities : Applications

The Alexa traffic reference is five years old and should be updated
This Brighthub reference (cited in second paragraph) returns 416 "Download error".
None of the three references citing "Wikis can be used for project management" look particularly reliable.

Communities : WikiNodes

I'm not sure the only source in this section, a now dead link (archived by the Wayback Machine) to wikinodes.wiki.taoriver.net is a reliable source.

Conferences

The references that verify the conferences certainly verify their existence, but I'm not sure they're all notable enough to be mentioned. Really each one wants a third party source. For instance, This news source involving Wikimania is third party.

Rules

I think in order to be broad in coverage, this section should give one or two other examples aside from Wikipedia and Conservapedia, such as Citizendium or RationalWiki

Legal environment

The second paragraph is unreferenced

More later. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 10:32, 28 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

It is reasonably well written.
a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):
It is factually accurate and verifiable.
a (reference section): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
It is broad in its coverage.
a (major aspects): b (focused):
It follows the neutral point of view policy.
Fair representation without bias:
It is stable.
No edit wars, etc.:
It is illustrated by images and other media, where possible and appropriate.
a (images are tagged and non-free content have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
Overall:
Pass/Fail:

Okay, I've done a sweep through the article, and as it currently stands there are major problems with sections being unsourced or questionably sourced. In my view, it will take a significant amount of work to fix this so the article meets GA Criteria 2b ("inline citations"), 2c ("no original research") and 3a ("broad in coverage"). As I don't like suddenly turning up and quickfailing GA candidates, I'll wait and see what your response to the issues raised is first. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 12:15, 28 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to go off-topic, but (nice as it might seem to some) what's with all the coloured text? 78.147.86.1 (talk) 21:28, 17 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Excellent feedback! I tagged a bunch of problems and cleaned up the minor ones:

Fixed the actually-dead links.
Updated Visual Editor status
Tagged {{example needed}} for wiki synatx variety
Merged 1-sentence paragraph
Implementations: This is mostly summarizing linked internal articles; normally I would defer references to them. Care to tag anything in particular you feel could benefit from a direct citation?
Tagged Nature reference {{Subscription required}}
Defined "vandalism" (removed "virtual")
Tagged unreliable sources
Tagged out of date Alexa reference
The WikiNodes source is somewhat primary, but it's some of the only evidence I could find for this usage. I would tag it as unreliable, but I'm not sure there's a better source out there.
Tagged all the "citation needed" spots

Other than what's now tagged on the page and whatever you think in Implementations that needs a citation, I would take your suggestions as additional todo items:

Editing wiki pages: "Might also be worth mentioning that some wikis provide hooks to allow custom user interface code to be written (I've personally done this)"
Trust and security/Security: "You might want to consider examples from the German Wikipedia."
Conferences: "The references that verify the conferences certainly verify their existence, but I'm not sure they're all notable enough to be mentioned. Really each one wants a third party source. For instance, This news source involving Wikimania is third party."
Rules: "I think in order to be broad in coverage, this section should give one or two other examples aside from Wikipedia and Conservapedia, such as Citizendium or RationalWiki"

I'm certainly not going to have time to fix the problems identified, but I'm glad we now have a new todo list to move toward good article status. Since this article was previously nominated and most of the previously identified problems were fixed, I thought it was time for another look. Thanks for taking the time! -- Beland (talk) 16:18, 2 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and the BMC quote points to an article that says "This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)". But I agree, that was an excessively long quote, so I cut it down for brevity. -- Beland (talk) 16:26, 2 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll mark the review as "failed", but as ever, all that means is an article isn't in shape to pass the GA criteria yet. And, as you say, the review can be kept and referred back to as a todo list, and you've already made the article better than its pre-review state. So it's really a net positive. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 17:14, 2 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]