Wikipedia:WikiProject Film/Spotlight cleanup listing

Below is a listing of the project's older Featured Articles and Good Articles. Although the articles went through various forms of reviews to receive their designated status, some issues may have been overlooked, criterion may have changed, and the articles could have degraded over time. In order to ensure the articles maintain their elevated status, periodic cleanup is necessary to weed out overlooked vandalism, fix dead links, cleanup prose, and perform other tasks. Each article should be reviewed to look over three elements:

  • Images - Any non-free images used within the article should comply with WP:FILMNFI. Non-free images cannot be used to decorate an article, especially if free images are available. If an article below uses excessive non-free images, provides poor fair use rationales, or simply are not supported by critical commentary within the prose of the article, they should be removed. A separate cleanup listing page just for images has been created to focus on individual images to check off the articles below.
  • Prose - Perhaps the most difficult element of an article to maintain is the prose. Vandalism and numerous assorted edits over a long period of time can create brief and dis-jointed sentences, hindering the flow of the article. In addition, content may be added that does not comply with WP:FILM style guidelines. We need to be sure to fix any cleanup tags that may be present in the article. Go through the article and do your best to make sure that the article uses proper grammar and spelling and that all dabs are fixed. Update statistics that my have become outdated (for example, Rotten Tomato/Metacritic scores, box office totals, accolades, etc.) We also need to make sure that the article complies with WP:LEAD and has a brief plot per WP:FILMPLOT.
  • Sourcing - As articles age, links to websites may decay, making it difficult for readers to verify the information cited. Check that the article's links are working using Checklinks. If any links are dead, they may be able to be resurrected using the Internet Archive. Editors who may be unfamiliar with WP:RS or our project's guidelines may use unreliable sources to cite information in the article. When possible, try to replace these links to more reliable sources including newspapers, books, journals, and websites already determined to be reliable. All "citation needed" and similar tags need to be fixed as extensive sourcing is required for the good and featured criteria. Do your best to find a citation for the content, but if nothing can be found, move the unsourced content to the talk page detailing why it was removed with a notice that it should not be readded until a reliable source can be found.

Once each article undergoes reviews of each of the three above elements, a stable revision should be listed in the last column. This revision will be helpful for annual reviews of our articles and will help provide great examples for new editors looking to bring an article up to GA/FA. If you have an FA/GA listed below that you helped promote, it's best that you do not check off the sections (except for maybe adding alt text). This will allow for other editors to point out issues that you may not necessarily see.

As many of our older GA/FAs were passed when the criteria were not as strict, it may be more challenging and require more effort to add additional citations or perform cleanup. However, this cleanup is necessary to ensure that our project's best articles maintain their elevated status and provide excellent examples to lead to new GA/FAs. After we have established a stable revision for each article, annual reviews will be much easier to keep up with as we just need to compare all new additions to the prior year's stable revision.


Developed by StudentB