Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Membership/News/2024 Annual Report
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Introduction
Welcome to the Guild of Copy Editors' (GOCE) annual report for 2024, a summary of activity in our Drives and Blitzes, and our Requests page. Thank you to everyone who has helped improve the standard of Wikipedia articles by making them "say what they mean and mean what they say". If you've recently joined this WikiProject, welcome; we hope you'll feel at home here. In 2024, editors working with the Guild helped remove 1,627 articles from the copy-edit backlog and responded to 369 requests for copy edit.
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The backlog is edging towards 2,600 articles because each month, about 200 or more articles are added to the tracking category and as we write, the Requests page has a five-month backlog. The Requests page is as busy as ever, though waiting times have reduced somewhat since peaking at 130 days in October.
Thank you all for your hard work throughout 2024; we hope you'll continue to be enthused and inspired to improve the standard of prose in Wikipedia. Happy editing!
Membership
[edit]GOCE membership is open to all editors in good standing who are interested in copy editing. Please see our list of participants for information about signing up, and remember to add your username to our mailing list to receive Guild news. Guild membership is voluntary and informal, and editors do not have to be members of the Guild to participate in its activities. Many editors perform copy editing outside our organized events, but we have no means of tracking such efforts.
At the end of 2024, there were 2,463 pages populating the Guild's membership category, 758 names on the Guild's list of participants and 789 names on the mailing list. This is a respective growth of 107, 89 and 27 from the end of 2023. Since we don't actively monitor or audit these lists, they include many inactive and deceased editors, and some whose accounts are blocked or banned.
The best way to know when the GOCE's bimonthly Drives and Blitzes are happening is to add Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Ombox to your watchlist.
Category news
[edit]Two of the categories the Guild uses have been renamed. Category:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors members is now Category:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors participants; and Category:All articles needing copy edit is now a soft redirect to Category:All Wikipedia articles needing copy edit. Links to these former categories should be updated when possible.
Coordinators
[edit]The GOCE coordinators play an important role in the Guild. They are responsible for coordinating Guild activities, maintaining our pages, organizing Drives and Blitzes, looking after the Requests page, and performing other maintenance tasks that keep the Guild running smoothly. Coordinators are chosen twice a year through consensus voting.
| Term | 2024 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 1 – June 30 | July 1 – December 31 | January 1 – June 30 | |
| Election | December 2023 | June 2024 | December 2024 |
| Lead coordinator | Dhtwiki (talk) | Dhtwiki (talk) | Dhtwiki (talk) |
| Coordinators |
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Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate. Elections are scheduled for June and December each year. All Wikipedians in good standing are welcome to nominate themselves or others with their permission. Please consider helping out if you can.
Requests page
[edit]Requests for copy editing are one of the Guild's main activities. In 2024, our ever-busy requests page saw about the same level of activity as in 2023. In 2024, 351 requests were submitted, and 21 were declined or withdrawn. 48 copy editors completed 347 requests, which were submitted by 185 editors. There were 53 pending requests at the beginning of 2024 and 28 at the end of the year.
Compared with 2023, 0.3% more requests were made and 2.1% more requests were completed.1 We copy-edited 347 (94.0%) of the 369 requests we processed; the remaining 22 (6.0%) were declined or withdrawn. As of 24 February 2025, all requests from 2024 have been processed.
A full list of the year's requests is available at our 2024 requests archive page.
Any editor with good English-language skills can accept requests, but we prefer those who are new to or inexperienced with copy editing on Wikipedia to gain experience with articles in the backlog before handling requests—particularly those headed for GAN, ACN and FAC.
In 2024, 54.4% of submitted requests were for Good Article (GAN) or Featured Article (FAC) nominations. Among the requests received were:2
- 133 for GAN
- 2 for GAR
- 58 for FAC
- 2 for FAR
- 1 for FLC
- 7 for PR
- 5 for ACN
- 0 for ACR
- 4 for BCN
- 1 for CCN
- 11 for DYK
- 4 for TFA
- 0 for section copyedits
- 9 declined
- 12 withdrawn
- 110 unspecified
| 2024 Month |
Requests | Mean days to completion[a] | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Received[b] | Processed[c] | Completed [d] | ||
| January | 33 | 20 | 18 | 53.6 |
| February | 28 | 25 | 24 | 76.4 |
| March | 45 | 57 | 55 | 44.8 |
| April | 24 | 29 | 27 | 60.5 |
| May | 35 | 27 | 25 | 49.2 |
| June | 30 | 26 | 23 | 66.7 |
| July | 23 | 20 | 18 | 60.9 |
| August | 26 | 20 | 19 | 75.3 |
| September | 23 | 23 | 22 | 100.1 |
| October | 27 | 44 | 41 | 130.1 |
| November | 24 | 35 | 34 | 56.4 |
| December | 33 | 43 | 41 | 31.4 |
| Total | 351 | 369 | 347 | 67.1 mean days |
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- Notes
- ^1 Figures were arrived at by exporting tables from the relevant request archives into a spreadsheet for analysis.
- ^2 Some requests were made for multiple reasons; these were listed in each applicable category.
- ^3 Figures for completed requests omit any requests that were declined or withdrawn. Figures for requests submitted, received and processed include requests that were ultimately declined or withdrawn.
- Past performance
| Year |
Requests | Mean days to completion[a] | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Received[b] | Processed[c] | Completed [d] | ||
| 2013 | 535 | 554 | 546 | 40.2 |
| 2014 | 489 | 502 | 486 | 28.4 |
| 2015 | 542 | 557 | 537 | 24.1 |
| 2016 | 690 | 680 | 669 | 17.3 |
| 2017 | 588 | 603 | 573 | 26.0 |
| 2018 | 692 | 669 | 649 | 15.4 |
| 2019 | 616 | 634 | 607 | 18.5 |
| 2020 | 752 | 720 | 684 | 23.4 |
| 2021 | 644 | 635 | 596 | 35.0 |
| 2022 | 397 | 374 | 340 | 67.7 |
| 2023 | 350 | 360 | 340 | 66.0 |
| 2024 | 351 | 369 | 347 | 67.1 |
- ^ a b Mean average days to completion for requests we completed that month (year). Includes requests we received the previous year and processed in 2024 (that year), and excludes declined and withdrawn requests. Rounded to one decimal place.
- ^ a b "Received" means all requests we received between 1 January and 31 December, inclusively.
- ^ a b "Processed" includes requests remaining from the previous year. It also includes declined and withdrawn requests, but excludes all requests that were processed the following year.
- ^ a b "Requests completed" excludes all requests we declined or were withdrawn. Requester-blanked requests are not always archived.
Backlog Elimination Drives
[edit]The Guild's main efforts toward reducing the number of articles tagged with {{copy edit}} were six month-long backlog-elimination drives held every other month, starting in January. There were 2,419 articles in the backlog at the beginning of the year and 2,499 articles at the year's end.
| Drive Pages |
Numbers of Editor Signups |
Numbers of Editors Editing |
Total Articles Edited |
Total Word Counts |
Barnstar Pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 46 | 32 | 289 | 626,729 | January |
| March | 53 | 34 | 300 | 587,828 | March |
| May | 58 | 33 | 251 | 475,952 | May |
| July | 59 | 38 | 293 | 482,133 | July |
| September | 67 | 39 | 507 | 682,696 | September |
| November | 54 | 31 | 151 | 432,320 | November |
Drive totals for the year: 117 editors claimed credit for removing 1,791 articles from the backlog and the Requests page, for a combined total of 3,224,658 words. The Guild awarded 337 barnstars for participation in Drives in 2024.
- Notes
- ^1 Month-end backlog totals were taken from the drive pages. Participation was taken from the blitz and drive pages and their respective barnstar pages. Numbers for requests were taken from historical versions of the Requests page. Some of the tables were exported and merged in a spreadsheet for easier counts and analysis.
- ^2 These figures show articles for which editors took credit on the Drive page. Additional articles are removed during drives by editors who do a quick or minor copy edit and don't record it on the Drive page, remove a copy-edit tag because it is inappropriate or no longer needed, or nominate an article for deletion.
Blitzes
[edit]We ran six one-week Blitzes in 2024, alternating months with the backlog drives.
| Blitz Pages |
Numbers of Editor Signups |
Numbers of Editors Editing |
Total Articles Edited |
Total Word Counts |
Barnstar Pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| February | 18 | 13 | 32 | 100,293 | February |
| April | 14 | 9 | 20 | 55,853 | April |
| June | 25 | 13 | 41 | 169,404 | June |
| August | 15 | 10 | 31 | 71,294 | August |
| October | 15 | 13 | 35 | 76,776 | October |
| December | 23 | 16 | 46 | 143,417 | December |
Blitz totals for the year: 39 editors completed 205 requests and articles from the backlog, for a total of 617,037 words. The Guild awarded 75 barnstars for participation in Blitzes in 2024.
Closing thoughts
[edit]By Baffle gab1978 and Dhtwiki
A warm welcome to editors who have joined the WikiProject in the past year or so. Thanks to outgoing coordinator Wracking for their work here and a welcome to new coordinators IQR and WikiEditor5678910.
The backlog is longer than they've been for a while. On our side, seeing an accumulation of work in one's in-basket can also be dispiriting; the work is piling up ... will it ever get done? Well, we've done it before, so surely we can do it again, and there's no deadline in Wikipedia—with enough willing and able volunteers, it'll be sure to get done eventually!
The Guild continues to assume responsibilities for several copy editing chores, through template redirects and resolving bot-discovered typographical errors, which add to the copy editing backlog.
Wikipedia always need more active copy editors. Copy editing is a skill, it does require practice and it involves more than just fixing typos. If you're new to copy editing, or perhaps uncertain about your abilities, why not work on some articles from the backlog and ask us for feedback at the GOCE talk page? You can also use the basic tutorial and the more-advanced tutorials by Tony1. As you build your skills, consider accepting a request or two. You'll get to work on some interesting and usually well-written articles, improve them for our readers and have fun fixing those errors.
We also need more editors to involve themselves in coordinating the WikiProject. If you're interested in becoming a coordinator and you have some experience participating in the copy editing Drives or Blitzes, you're welcome to post on the coordinators' talk page or any of our other project talk pages. Our next election of coordinators takes place in June; we announce these at Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Ombox, which you can add to your watchlist. Coordinators are elected on an approval basis and usually serve a six-month term.
From the first 2025 coordinator team, thank you to everyone who helped out at the GOCE in 2024; be it copy editing articles, helping out with Drives and Blitzes, or simply looking after the Guild's pages. Your help is always appreciated. One way or another, you're helping to improve Wikipedia, and to make its articles say what they mean and mean what they say. We wish everyone an excellent year in 2025; have fun and happy (copy) editing.