User talk:GeoffEighinger

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[edit] Welcome

Thanks for joining WikiProject NASCAR. Let me know if you need any help or have any questions to ask an experienced contributor. I work a lot on NASCAR articles (among other things) and I am an admin. My latest project has been getting 1992 Cup champion Alan Kulwicki's article to Good Article status, and I think it's getting close to a Featured Article nomination. Royalbroil 01:50, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

What do you mean by "How does this peer review, classes, etc. stuff work?"? Are you offering to peer review Kulwicki's article? What classes? Royalbroil 04:08, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, these are all good questions. I'll address them one by one.

1. How do the reviews work? How does one go about rating something? Do they have to be of certain credibility or is it administration only?

I can tell from your comments that you have a warped view of administrators after having some bad experiences. It can be tough getting started in here. I'll help you if you want. Hopefully you'll feel better about admins after your experiences with me. Administrator only means that other contributors have decided that the user is trustworthy enough to be able to do things that would be dangerous in the wrong hands. Things like updating the main page, blocking contributors for bad behavior, protecting articles from vandalism or edit wars, etc. The blocking and enforcement tends to give admins a bad wrap. Being an admin has nothing to do with decisions about an article's status. It's a good indication that a person knows what's going on here at Wikipedia. There are plenty of other trusted contributors who never become administrators.

You should be able to rate articles, especially things that you are familiar with like NASCAR articles. Stub means that an article is short - from only a few sentences to around 1000 or 1500 characters. You can see the number of characters in an article by looking at its history. Start class means that it's beyond a stub to somewhat complete. B class means that it's at least somewhat complete to complete and that it has decent [{WP:REF|references]] from reliable sources. Good Article (GA) means that it passed a review in a semi-formal process. Get involvement from other experienced GA contributors before you do anything like that. "A" class means it's above GA class and it could be a featured article nominee. FA class is the highest class. It's a long and involved formal process.

Peer reviews are reviews by other contributors. They review the article to see how well it is written, if it follows the Manual of Style, makes sure it has solid references, etc.

2. In the WikiNASCAR Project, who determines whether something is a stub or higher or whatever?

Anyone can review the article based on the criteria that I outlined above.

3. Is there a way to continually work on an article without it being visible?

Yes! You've figured out one of the most importance things as of late. You need to create a sandbox (formally called a user subpage). That's how I now start all of my articles. The concept is that you start the article in your own (user) space so that you have time to develop the article without someone staring down at you. Too many articles are started that don't meet notability standards or are vandalism, so the new pages are watched carefully. Here's the directions on how to start your own page. When I started I liked to copy an existing page on someone/something who/what is simular to the new article. Royalbroil 05:08, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

You created the user sandbox correctly! I made minor modifications to the categories on Bob Latford's development article, which you can see by clicking on the history of the article. You cannot use another Wikipedia article as a reference in a different article. What you should do is transfer the reference used in the regulations article into the new article. Latford's article should have enough notability, so you should be able to publish it. To publish it, all you have to do is move the article (on the "move" tab on the top). I see more good information on him when searching on google, so I'd finish developing it first. You can directly publish article on NASCAR drivers if you have as much information as you do on Rick Newsom's sandbox article. NASCAR drivers, even with just one start, have proven to be notable in deletion discussions. Royalbroil 13:04, 22 April 2008 (UTC)