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Introduction
Welcome to the Guild of Copy Editors' (GOCE) annual report for 2025, 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 2025, 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 1,700 articles even though each month, about 200 or more articles are added to the tracking category. The position is lower than that in December 2024, when almost 2,500 articles bore {{copy edit}} and associated tags. As we write, the ever-busy Requests page has requests from February and March, all requests submitted in 2025 have been processed, and average waiting times have somewhat reduced since peaking at 97.6 days in October.
Thank you all for your hard work throughout 2025; we hope you'll continue to be enthused and inspired to improve the standard of prose in Wikipedia. Happy editing!
Membership
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 2025, there were 2,613 pages populating the Guild's membership category, 861 names on the Guild's list of participants and 850 names on the mailing list. This is a respective growth of 150, 103 and 61 from the end of 2024. 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.
Categories and archives reorganized
In January 2025, our page categories were reorganized. Due to past practices, many pages from the GOCE's early years were uncategorized or inconsistently categorized, making them difficult to navigate and locate for research. Among the changes were:
- All pages within Guildspace were at least placed under the GOCE's root category;
- All past Drives and Blitzes were brought under sub-categories of the Drives' and the Blitzes' main categories;
- All newsletters were placed into dated sub-categories under their own category; and
- Annual reports were given their own navigation template and category.
Also reorganized were archives from the Request page and the various talk pages. Tidying and reclassifying more than 14 years' worth of past GOCE pages was quite a task, but it's hoped using a consistent system will allow current and future Wikipedians to more easily find information about the Guild and its activities. For a full list of reorganized pages, see this talk page discussion.
Coordinators
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 | 2025 | 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 1 – June 30 | July 1 – December 31 | January 1 – June 30 | |
| Election | December 2024 | June 2025 | December 2025 |
| 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
Requests for copy editing are one of the Guild's main activities. In 2025, our ever-busy requests page saw about the same level of activity as in 2024. In 2025, 348 requests were submitted, and 11 were declined or withdrawn. 60 copy editors completed 341 requests, which were submitted by 140 editors. There were 29 pending requests at the beginning of 2025 and 26 at the end of the year.
Compared with 2024, 0.85% fewer requests were made and 1.8% fewer requests were completed.1 We copy-edited 341 (96.8%) of the 352 requests we processed; the remaining 11 (3.1%) were declined or withdrawn. As of 2 February 2026, all requests from 2025 have been processed.
A full list of the year's requests is available at our 2025 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 2025, 52.3% of submitted requests were for Good Article (GAN) or Featured Article (FAC) nominations. Among the requests received were:2
- 118 for GAN
- 2 for GAR
- 64 for FAC
- 2 for FAR
- 4 for FLC
- 4 for PR
- 3 for ACN
- 1 for ACR
- 1 for BCN
- 1 for CCN
- 8 for DYK
- 8 for TFA
- 0 for section copyedits
- 3 declined
- 9 withdrawn
- 133 unspecified
| 2025 Month |
Requests | Mean days to completion[a] | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Received[b] | Processed[c] | Completed [d] | ||
| January | 44 | 39 | 39 | 23.9 |
| February | 27 | 26 | 25 | 30.1 |
| March | 37 | 48 | 48 | 27.2 |
| April | 27 | 17 | 17 | 30.8 |
| May | 38 | 32 | 32 | 28.0 |
| June | 24 | 17 | 16 | 56.4 |
| July | 38 | 25 | 25 | 41.5 |
| August | 15 | 16 | 15 | 74.1 |
| September | 21 | 38 | 35 | 57.3 |
| October | 19 | 18 | 14 | 97.6 |
| November | 30 | 45 | 44 | 44.6 |
| December | 28 | 31 | 31 | 42.0 |
| Total | 348 | 352 | 341 | 46.1 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 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 |
| 2025 | 348 | 352 | 341 | 46.1 |
- Mean average days to completion for requests we completed that month (year). Includes requests we received the previous year and processed in 2025 (that year), and excludes declined and withdrawn requests. Rounded to one decimal place.
- "Received" means all requests we received between 1 January and 31 December, inclusively.
- "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.
- "Requests completed" excludes all requests we declined or were withdrawn. Requester-blanked requests are not always archived.
Backlog Elimination Drives
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 2,499 articles in the backlog at the beginning of the year and 1,747 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 | 55 | 33 | 237 | 611,404 | January |
| March | 47 | 28 | 207 | 479,172 | March |
| May | 54 | 31 | 216 | 384,392 | May |
| July | 54 | 30 | 151 | 379,557 | July |
| September | 63 | 43 | 265 | 693,541 | September |
| November | 65 | 38 | 240 | 590,816 | November |
Drive totals for the year: 203 editor signups claimed credit for removing 1,316 articles from the backlog and the Requests page, for a combined total of 3,138,882 words.
- 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
We ran six one-week Blitzes in 2025, 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 | 14 | 10 | 18 | 46,749 | February |
| April | 25 | 14 | 30 | 92,769 | April |
| June | 12 | 10 | 13 | 26,652 | June |
| August | 17 | 11 | 25 | 65,601 | August |
| October | 15 | 14 | 31 | 75,108 | October |
| December | 31 | 16 | 47 | 116,064 | December |
Blitz totals for the year: 75 editor signups completed 164 requests and articles from the backlog, for a total of 422,943 words.
Closing thoughts
A warm welcome to editors who have joined the WikiProject in the past year or so. Thanks to outgoing coordinators IQR and WikiEditor5678910 for their work here and a welcome to new coordinators GoldRomean and Wikieditor662 .
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. The copy editing backlog has been decreasing recently, from 2,499 at the end of 2024 to 1,747 at the end of 2025. We hope that this trend will continue. After a long time without, we have new graphs that show our progress pictorially, especially during the copy editing Drives.
Wikipedia always needs 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 often need 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 the election 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 2026 coordinator team, thank you to everyone who helped out at the GOCE in 2025; 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 2026; have fun and happy (copy) editing.