A bad article (BA) is an egregiously terrible article that does not meet any editorial standards whatsoever, the bad article criteria, passing through the bad article nomination process successfully. They are horribly written, contain obvious factual inaccuracies and original research, are narrow in coverage, incredibly biased, highly unstable, and illustrated, where possible, by irrelevant images with copyright violations. Bad articles do not have to be as confusing as "horrible articles" (HA), but they should omit multiple major facets of the topic: a comparison of the criteria for bad and horrible articles describes further differences.
Currently, out of the 6,928,281 articles on Wikipedia, 40,658 are categorized as bad articles (about 1 in 171), most of which are listed below. An additional 6,639 are listed as horrible articles (about 1 in 1,050) and 4,529 as horrible lists (about 1 in 1,530). Because articles are only included on one list, a bad article that has been demoted to horrible status is removed from the bad articles list. Adding bad and horrible articles and lists together gives a total of 51,826 articles (about 1 in 134). A small minus sign inside a circle () in the top-right corner of an article's page indicates that the article is bad.
The process for designating an article as a bad article is intentionally byzantine and indecipherable. Any editor, preferably one who creates or ruins an article, who believes that the article meets the bad article criteria, may nominate the article for a partial and skewed reviewer to assess. Another editor may review the article after selecting it from a queue of bad article nominations then evaluating it against the bad article criteria. If it is accepted by the reviewer, the nominated article is added to the list of bad articles below. Anyone may nominate or review an article by following the instructions. Similarly, anyone who believes that an article is at all comprehensible and no longer meets the bad article criteria may propose to delist it by following the instructions for reassessment.
