Wikipedia:Vital Direct

Logo of the WikiProject Vital Articles, showing a curved trajectory from the Wikipedia globe to the Vital Article's logo. At the top and the bottom are featured and good articles icon constellations.

The Vital Direct plan is an informal outline to how the WikiProject Vital Articles will work. It is intentionally somewhat vague. It is not being made to advocate the plan to the letter, but rather to prove that making 1000 Vital GA/FA in 10 years is possible if we want to do so. We must do it in 10 years or else the plan would stagnate. There would be no rush to complete it and thus no reason to actually accomplish the goal.

In short, the Vital Direct plan is as follows: Make two Vital GAs, one broad, one controversial. Doing so would give us a lot of experience at tackling other Vital articles, as well as giving cred to the project (similar to how the WP:MILHIST and WP:AVIATION have done in the past). Making 2 GAs would also prove that the first success is not just a fluke or hype. Improve the lead/image/layout first, then add citations to uncited statements. Only afterwards does experts' knowledge is required, which the experts would probably be noticed by a flurry of activities in the article. Lure them in and collaborate with them. Do not improve the prose – just make them readable first.

These above processes would probably take about 2-6 months if done efficiently. Then, once the group is satisfied, a simple copyedit and final check take place, then the article gets nominated for GA. If the nomination failed, improve till the last reviewer is satisfied. If the nomination is successful, well done, go out, have a drink or something, and get back to work with the other GA. The articles can be pushed all the way to FA if we want to, but it is not mandatory nor necessary. Hopefully by then these efforts would inspire other editors to take initiative and do the same.

First drive

Simpler is better. No need to rewamp GAN and FAC to start working on Vital articles.

The first drive of the Vital Direct program would start improving 1 very broad article to GA, corresponding to the level 1 Vital list. And then, improve 1 controversial-ish Vital article to GA. Starting the mission by doing so would serve us a few favors. First, the drive is far less intensive and can be done by one person only – vital if the plan is just starting out. Second, we would prove that systematically making Vital GA and FA is realizable, crushing the myth of "some Vital articles are just too controversial or broad to be a GA". And finally, setting an initial attainable goal would make the ultimate goal all the more alluring.

Let's go to the details. In many cases, particularly controversial ones, the article is way too long. No articles should exceed 70,000 characters of prose, because reading that much text would take 45–60 minutes at average speed. People's attention span are short and hence should be valued. Another more important reason however, is that it encourage redundancy and cruft, both gradually would lower the article's quality. Simultaneously, you should fix up obvious case of undue weight, tune up the article's layout, and replace images with better ones from Wikimedia Commons. The last one is the most underrated in my opinion – better pictures would make the article much more appealing to readers.

Then, the citations should be checked thoroughly. Because original research on Wikipedia is not allowed, the only way that we can make good articles is to get good sources. Unreliable sources should be stripped away as soon as possible, and spot-check must be done to ensure that the text is actually mentioned in the source. This will take some time, so be patient. It would also help if you can gather a group of people to your cause, which should be easier due to the fact the article's topic is broad. After that, brush up the prose to be readable, not excellent, and make sure that information is paraphrased, not copy-or-pasted or being excessively quoted.

Why just make the prose readable, not excellent, you might ask? This is because this is what the GA nomination are for. Dirty secret: in most cases, the GA reviewer would never check the sources. And it's understandable: a lot of times, the sources are offline, which means you couldn't easily check it. Plus, it's a lot of work. Some might say that the focus at prose and layout make the GA and FA like a rubber stamp to those that can play the game and please the reviewers. We will get into how to change the GA/FA processes later on in this essay. But for now, let's play with the system – after all, we want to make our first Vital Direct drive as cheap, light, and robust as possible, and revamping the GA/FA isn't gonna help with that.

This Vital Direct plan would also work if you want a WikiProject to start improving Vital articles. Just pick a very broad-topic article and a controversial one, and you are set. For WP:WikiProject Tropical Cyclones, those would be tornado and tropical cyclone. For WP:WikiProject Trains, those would be rail transport and steam engine. In fact, this may be the smarter way to do it than what I'm doing, as you can gather support to the cause a lot easier.

Subsequent GA drives

Subsequent GAs would be easier and easier. Vital Direct would become more and more effective.

Now, after a few months, you have 2 Vital GA under your belt. This is impressive as you would have add 1.5% to the total Vital GA count. That same proportions would be like making 700 random articles to GA, both giving you the sense of impact that you would have to Wikipedia as a whole, and how inefficient we are being green plus- or star-collectors. Now, for subsequent drives, just do the same thing as the first drive – pick two articles, do the work, and gather people to your cause. The next drive would be easier than the last, as you would have more people, more experience, and more leverage for each GA nom.

Yes, this sounds so easy, you might say, but what if the drives aren't successful? What if the GA nom just kept failing and failing? What if nobody cares? What if the reviewers accused us for being a rubber-stamper? Well, here's a good solution: just switch to another article. If your controversial article just being, well too controversial, then just move on to the next one. Then do the first drive all over again. Notice however that this is just a nuclear solution, don't over-do it! Else you would lose motivation and give up on the quest of Vital Articles, which is not something both of us would want to happen. If you're belonging to a WikiProject, this is a bit harder, but it shouldn't be that hard to choose another topic, or even switch to other WikiProjects entirely. After all, if the project isn't collaborating well with you, then the whole Vital Direct plan isn't going to be sustainable.

As more and more Vital articles become GA, people will start taking notice. Some would join in the efforts, while others may start raising roadblocks against it. But hopefully, the amount of people that would help us achieving the goal would be a lot more than those blocking us. (We would talk more about how to deal with them below.) From here, we can start making more ambitious plans, such as 3 GA in a drive, or even... dare I say it, a Vital FA!

FA drives

Once successful GA drives are done, we can start doing crazy things.

With about a dozen Vital GA and large amount of support from the community, we can start advancing some of these GAs to FAs. The hard thing about these drives isn't how to get these Vital articles GAs, but that on the political front. This FA drives would need to lead radical changes to make the goal of making all the Vital Articles good and featured within a decade possible. So, what should we lobby first? One good action is to expand the FAC program and making it more efficient – reduce favoritism, recruit more new blood, etc. We may also make the reviewing of FACs more pleasant, by giving positive enforcement and such. Some may which to be more radical, such as electing the FAC coordinators. Whatever we lobby, these solutions must have far and wide improvement to our quality control, which has virtually go unchanged for 15 years. And best of all, even if we failed at doing so, we would get the community's attention and gain back disillusioned Wikipedians to accelerate the Vital Direct program.

This would not sit well with a few people, who want to do FA the way we always have done. Many proposals for changing the FAC and GAN processes have been made during its existence, only to disappoint the proposers of how reluctant Wikipedia is to change. But this time will be different. The reason being that by this point, we have make Vital Direct works. We would have proved that making Vital GA systematically is possible, and there's no reason that making Vital FA systematically, without rubber-stamping, is also possible. There would be no excuses of "oh, what if this proposal doom the GA and FA noms?" Add on to this, lobbying for GAN and FAC change would be immense, because we have gathered a large amount of support to the program. Don't get me wrong, most people will welcome well-thought out changes, and FA coordinators will be thrilled to see positive changes to the FA program. But we need to prove that the concept works first, where most Vital improvement proposals failed.

Conclusion

“ We have everything we have today because of our predecessors who had the courage to leave the world of the known and go out in the wilderness and build new cities. And if we stop being people like that, then we will hand down much less to our posterity than our ancestors handed down to us. So there’s the choice in life. One either grows or one decays. Grow or die. I think we should grow. ” — Robert Zubrin

There isn't much to say at this point. We should start the groundwork at making the GA and FA Vital future possible, as the future of Wikipedia depends on it. The choice is ours.

Would we stagnate for 50 years? Or would we achieve great things in 10 years? You decide.