User:Elli/Drive-by nominations

Drive-by nominations of articles for good article and featured article status are strongly discouraged. While an obvious reason for this is due to credit (as the nominator would get the credit for the article improvement, even though most of the work was done by someone else), there is a more significant reason.

Writing an article from scratch (either from a redlink, a stub, or with a total rewrite) requires becoming an expert in the subject. If it's a niche subject, you might even become the world's top expert. This process tends to require first a cursory look at the topic, then a deep-dive for sources, then careful consideration of what information in the sources is relevant to the article. Even when significant sources aren't used, the author would almost certainly know about and have considered them, and have reasons why they are not used.

Due to this process, when an article is finished and comprehensive, the author will know some details that they chose not to include and some tangential information beyond what made sense to write. They also will have a good idea of the limitations of the available sourcing. Then, in the review process, when a reviewer asks about "why not mention XYZ", or "can you elaborate more on so-and-so", the author can explain why they made certain editorial choices, or what deficiencies were present in the sourcing. This doesn't mean that the author is beyond questioning—far from it, this is where the details they know are most important. Because they've been so focused on this topic, they might not have realized what background information would be necessary to include to explain the topic to a lay audience, or what extra details would be particularly interesting to readers. They will know, however, where to find this information.

With a drive-by nomination, this research process has not taken place. At best, the nominator has reviewed the existing sources to make sure that they are reliable and that they verify the article contents. However, if asked about a detail left unexplained, or about why the article presents information in a certain way, they won't have an easy answer, because they did not write the article in the first place. This leads to a review process that is frustrating for both the reviewer and the nominator, as the nominator will be frustrated by many questions they lack the answer to, and the reviewer by the nominator's lack of knowledge about what is supposedly their article.

Improving existing articles

It's still possible to improve existing articles to become good or featured without a total rewrite. The important step here is to do a survey of the relevant sources before embarking on the writing process. Relevant sources are often not just those in the existing article, even if that article is in good shape. If relevant sources line up with existing content, and the article's structure is a good way to present relevant information, it's fine to keep it that way. However, for an article which has not gone through a thorough content review process, there are almost always significant improvements that can be made before nomination—if it looks too easy, it probably is. Once you're comfortable that the article looks similar to how you'd write it from the ground up, if nothing was there before, then it can make sense to nominate, even if most of the writing was done by others. This is a much higher bar to clear than the article simply looking good, though.