Comment. I have recently been contributing to VA. This feels like a backward step imho. I see the VA as the "Encyclopedia Britannica" inside Wikipedia. There are a lot of marginal articles in Wikipedia (some are GA-rated and even FA-rated), and I think the VA process is important to fulfilling Wikipedia's goal of providing free access to the most important knowledge. Yes, Level 5 is problematic, and maybe just too big to handle given the smaller size of the active Wikipedia community. However, perhaps we should re-emphasize Levels 1 to 4, and just do this for Level 5? Again, I am a novice here, but I would think that the VA process should be at least as important to Wikipedia's mission as the GA/FA process? Aszx5000 (talk) 08:33, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
Whoever that person is, they're gonna get banned, sooner or later.
WP:NOCRITICISM
PS, right after you posted this, some little robot boy
"archived" the argument. Someone hit a raw nerve. The squabble continues
here.
We've never discussed the "
Vital Article" business before. The concept was started on Meta in
2004, by your lovely friend and mine David Gerard. Apparently it originated from an IRC discussion, none of this was archived, as usual. The template was invented in 2009 by Quadell, an early administrator and typical blind/stupid wikifanboy. Very few people even noticed it for the last 14 years. It looks like many other "failed projects". Wikipedians have a talent for generating projects that fail.
Some nerd tried to revive it in 2022 but to little avail.
Quadell's RFA was a bit of a joke but he made it, and his RFB in 2006 failed by a close vote. He was desysopped last year under the new "inactivity" rule, meaning less than 100 edits in 5 years.
The fucko-buckos who played that stupid game to keep their powerz really screwed up, which is why the 2023 list of
former admins exploded in January. It includes a good number of Wikipedia's worst people, plus some of its best: Raul654, Prodego, KillerChihuahua, Tim Vickers, Steve Smith, Laser brain (the bastard who used Wikipedia to openly promote an obscure music shop), Vicki Rosenzweig, Pierre Abbat, Ortolan88 (a VERY early admin), Camembert (same), SatyrTN, Merovingian, Cool Hand Luke, Fennec, Chairboy (who did one evil thing that made him a "prominent abusive admin" forever), InShaneee, The Wordsmith, Aaron Schultz, SirFozzie, Scott Macdonald, and a few others. Good or bad, all of them were regular noticeboard squabblers in Wikipedia's stupid "golden age", from 2005 to 2009. And also major Jimbo butt-suckers.
There's not much else to say about "Vital Articles" other than their failure to gain traction.