The good article criteria are the six standards or tests by which a good article nomination may be compared and judged to be a good article. A good article that has met the good article criteria may not have met the criteria for featured articles.[1] The good article criteria measure decent articles; they are not as demanding as the featured article criteria, which determine our best articles.
An article can, but by no means must, be failed without further review (known as quick failing) if, prior to the review:
It is a long way from meeting any one of the six good article criteria.
It contains copyright infringements.
It has, or needs, cleanup banners that are unquestionably still valid. These include {{cleanup}}, {{POV}}, {{unreferenced}} or large numbers of {{citation needed}}, {{clarify}}, or similar tags. (See also {{QF-tags}}).
In all other cases, the nominator deserves a full review against the six criteria from the reviewer. For most full reviews, the nominator is given a chance to address any issues raised by the reviewer before the article is failed.
Featured articles: a good article loses its status when promoted to a featured article. Accordingly, demoted featured articles are not automatically graded as good articles and must be reassessed for quality.
↑Good articles are only measured against the good article criteria. At the time of assessment, they may or may not meet featured article criteria, which determine our best articles.
↑Compliance with other aspects of the Manual of Style or its subpages is not required for good articles.
↑Wikipedia:Reviewing good articles says, "Ideally, a reviewer will have access to all of the source material, and sufficient expertise to verify that the article reflects the content of the sources; this ideal is not often attained. At a bare minimum, check that the sources used are reliable (for example, blogs are not usually reliable sources) and that those you can access support the content of the article (for example, inline citations lead to sources which agree with what the article says) and are not plagiarized (for example, close paraphrasing of source material should only be used where appropriate, with in text attribution if necessary)."
↑Dead links are considered verifiable only if the link is not a bare url. Using consistent formatting or including every element of the bibliographic material is not required, although, in practice, enough information must be supplied that the reviewer is able to identify the source.
↑Either parenthetical references or footnotes can be used for in-line citations, but preferably not both in the same article. In-line citations should preferably be of a consistent style.
↑The "broad in its coverage" criterion is significantly weaker than the "comprehensiveness" required of featured articles. It allows shorter articles, articles that do not cover every major fact or detail, and overviews of large topics.
↑Reverted vandalism, proposals to split or merge content, good faith improvements to the page (such as copy editing), and changes based on reviewers' suggestions do not apply to the "stable" criterion. Nominations for articles that are unstable because of disruptive editing may be failed or placed on hold.
↑The presence of media is not, in itself, a requirement. However, if media with acceptable copyright status is appropriate and readily available, then such media should be provided.
