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GA review

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Nominator: Very Polite Person (talk · contribs) 21:45, 17 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Viriditas (talk · contribs) 20:58, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]


Review

[edit]

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

  1. Is it well written?
    A. The prose is clear and concise, and the spelling and grammar are correct:
    Reads well.
    B. It complies with the manual of style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation:
    Looks good, but I have questions below.
  2. Is it verifiable with no original research, as shown by a source spot-check?
    A. It contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline:
    Spot check in progress. Questions in feedback section
    B. Reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose):
    Cited.
    C. It contains no original research:
    Citation 11 content borders on OR, although it is difficult to know. See feedback section.
    D. It contains no copyright violations nor plagiarism:
    No plagiarism detected.
  3. Is it broad in its coverage?
    A. It addresses the main aspects of the topic:
    Looks good.
    B. It stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style):
    Looks good
  4. Is it neutral?
    It represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each:
    Neutral, although I will address this in more detail later below.
  5. Is it stable?
    It does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute:
    Stable.
  6. Is it illustrated, if possible, by images?
    A. Images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content:
    Rationales are good.
    B. Images are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions:
    "NROL-76, the only disclosed Sentient mission" and "A portion of a presentation by DNRO Sapp at GEOINT Symposium 2016" are not complete sentences, so they don't need final periods
  7. Overall:
    Pass or Fail:
    Placing on hold due to issues found so far. Will need further discussion. Only issues are around the history section.

Feedback

[edit]
Lead
  • Lead reads well, but I wonder if it truly summarizes the main points in the article. Please revisit.
Thoughts? I think that gets all the key points now? -- Very Polite Person (talk) 19:04, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Better, but add a sentence or two about historical timeline, milestones, etc. Lead should say when it began (or approximate date), etc. Viriditas (talk) 21:00, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think (maybe) this is the tightest or at least best lede with this article so far, updated again. I'll wait on your feeback (and below) and hop over to other things a bit. Thanks again!! -- Very Polite Person (talk) 17:09, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
History
  • As a heavily classified program, public details on Sentient’s architecture and operations remain limited.
  • Public records indicate that Sentient's development program began in 2009, as highlighted by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).
    • Can you briefly explain how you reached this conclusion from the cited source? I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying it is opaque.
I think this was another primary sources casualty but here it is for the sequence:
  • This source archive of Verge first says, "Research related to Sentient has been going on since at least October 2010, when the agency posted a request for Sentient Enterprise white papers. A presentation says the program achieved its first R&D milestone in 2013, but details about what that milestone actually was remain redacted."
  • I had those linked documents here in this version back in 2024 in this version of the article in this passage: "A later declassified May 2009 report to the Congress, "FY 2010 Congressional Budget Justification, Volume IV," contains details about the National Reconnaissance Offices plans for real-time and updated satellite signals intelligence, providing context on NROs space-based missions and programs to collect data, such as Sentient, which would initially begin soliciting defense and related industry feedback in 2010.[9][6]"
  • Live article version today says: "Public records indicate that Sentient’s development program began in 2009, as highlighted by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).[6]" -- the ref there goes to this FAS material which IIRC is what led me to that RFI link. That was the genesis of the 2009 reference.
  • Using FAS here was an equivalent WP:RS secondary for 2009, matching the RFI, while skipping again using the RFI as a primary source. It seemed like an easy way to establish the start position there.
Is that synth? Do I need to go back to the RFI as the earliest reference ultra overtly in 2009? -- Very Polite Person (talk) 17:59, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • As reported by Sarah Scoles in The Verge, research and development of Sentient began as early as October 2010, managed out of the NRO's AS&T.
    • Doesn't this contradict the above?
No, but it maybe makes it needlessly confusing, if you look at Scoles here:
  • "Research related to Sentient has been going on since at least October 2010, when the agency posted for Sentient Enterprise white papers. A presentation says the program achieved its first R&D milestone in 2013, but details about what that milestone actually was remain redacted."
That's the same passage as above, where she links out to the RFI. How does this look here in this edit to try and unify all this in a simpler and easier to understand manner? -- Very Polite Person (talk) 18:09, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Very Polite Person: I'm still not getting it. It can't begin in 2009 and 2010, so there are some words missing. Do you mean to say that it was budgeted in 2009 and began development in 2010? Whatever the case, you still need to fix this. Viriditas (talk) 18:46, 16 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think I figured it out. Another relic of my primary source purging... -- Very Polite Person (talk) 19:00, 16 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • In 2016, the NRO's Principal Deputy Director (PDDNRO) Frank Calvelli briefed the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) on Sentient.
  • The American Nuclear Society published that the annual budget of the Sentient program at the time was $238,000,000 USD per year in the 2015–2017 period.
  • NROL-76, also known as USA-276, was a May 2017 Falcon 9 Full Thrust launch deployed from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station conducted by SpaceX, and is the only reported to the media NRO and Sentient program–related orbital launch and satellite deployment mission.
    • As mentioned below in spot-check, it isn't clear if this is covered by the cited source. You may need to reword for source text parity. Also the wording is muddled: "the only reported to the media" part doesn't work for me and is way too informal and breezy. "It is the only NRO and Sentient-related orbital launch and satellite deployment mission reported to the media" is slightly better, but I don't see that in the source.
  • At the 39th Space Symposium in April 2024, PDDNRO Troy Meink announced plans to field a mix of large and small satellites to increase satellite revisit times, thereby improving global coverage and enhancing resilience against emerging threats.
    • Probably okay, but I don't like the corporate-government jargon/speak. Can it be rewritten for our readers? It's probably fine as it is, but not my fave.
What do you think of this edit? -- Very Polite Person (talk) 18:16, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • DNRO Sapp stated that the NRO has been asked to give more demonstrations of Sentient and its capabilities than "any other capability since the beginning of the organization's history," in 1959.
Features
  • Well written, but I wonder if the technical aspects can be expanded with general descriptions to flesh out the jargon for our general readers. Also, while I was reading it, I was picturing examples in my head (I tend to do that, unlike other people). Is it possible to provide examples based on the sources, or do the source fail to do that?
I don't think we can get it out of the present sources too far for the deeper CS/intel cycle stuff--the users will just have to try and keep up, but the terms are kind of straightforward (or as close as possible, I guess). For the tipping and queing, Scoles helped on this edit and the iceye has a lot deeper dive on definition. The rest is just a ton of the complex workflow and there's probably no easier way to get into it without OR and SYNTH--if we exempted those rules, I could make it stupidly clear, but alas... -- Very Polite Person (talk) 18:33, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Coverage
  • Prose: Not seeing any issues here.
    • Prose is good but the structure and layout could be improved. Taking a step back, I think "coverage" is a very lazy way of approaching this. You're basically duplicating features and capabilities here and there are much better ways to present this info. Working on it now.

Examples:

Data sources
Andrew Krepinevich details the commercial providers contracted to fuel Sentient’s analytics—namely Maxar Technologies, Planet, and BlackSky.[1] Maxar reports it supplies "90 percent of the foundational geospatial intelligence used by the US government."[2] In The Fragile Dictator: Counterintelligence Pathologies in Authoritarian States, Wege and Mobley compare Sentient to Spaceflight Industries’ commercial Blacksky Global service.[3] According to Krepinevich, BlackSky "hoovers up" volumes of raw collateral—dozens of satellites, over a hundred million mobile devices, plus ships, planes, social networks, and environmental sensors—to feed Sentient’s big‑data pipelines.[1] Retired Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst Allen Thomson observes that the system aspires to ingest "everything," from imagery to financial records to weather data and more.[4]
Risks
Andrew Krepinevich warns of the "avalanche" of data available from intelligence, military, and commercial sources that would overwhelm human analysts.[1] Army Captain Anjanay Kumar warned in 2021 that although the system itself is secure, its distributed ground infrastructure could be vulnerable to adversary attack.[5]
  • @Very Polite Person: How do you feel about considering a possible restructuring of the layout with more specific sections?
See also
References
  • Random spot-check
    • 7: ✓ Question: Why is Sentient referred to as the "Sentient Enterprise Program" in the cited source, but not anywhere in the current article?
    • 14: ✓ Formatting of cite is off. It should read NRO, not federal government of the US.
    • 3: I realize it is common to use sources this way, but I don't like it. How am I supposed to know which part of the sentence citations 2 and 4 refer to at a glance?
      • Tweaked here, but I need to come back to the AFRL bit. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 16:24, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
      • @Viriditas: I think I had picked up the AFRL, Wright Patterson connection from pages 215-217 earlier (I think much earlier) in drafting this when some other PDFs/sources led to me to this: https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/foia/docs/CBJ/cbj-3.PDF (which I think was part of a huge primary sources nuke someone else did last year). The AFRL, DOE labs and Wright-Pat reference is on 217, 215-217 for complete context. In hindsight it doesn't overtly say "Sentient" but has (bottom left page 217) direct connections to "Advanced Futures Lab ground processing and data fusion technologies" and "NRO advaned technology programs in partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Department of Energy's National Laboratories." That IIRC had come from me searching non-WP:RS as I often do, because they'll often link to or have various terms to search for against RS. There was other stuff about Sentient-related stuff in Wright-Pat and similar but that went back, I think, to Blackvault based PDFs, which I guess we can't even use for primary sourcing because of the domain. Does this end up OR then in hindsight? I think this was a case where the sources got muddled after I tried to clean up that one edit nuke, my own purging of primaries later, and not being as experienced then. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 17:02, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • 18: ✓
    • 22: ✗ 404. You will need to re-archive your sources.
    • 11: ✗ Are you sure this content is supported by this one source? Are you referring to other sources?

References

  1. ^ a b c Cite error: The named reference Krepinevich Sentient 2023 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Steele Logic Spring 2022 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Wege Mobley Fragile 2023 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Scoles Verge July 31 2019 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference Kumar Sentient Army 2021 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
Captions
  • @Very Polite Person: Because "A portion of a presentation by DNRO Sapp at GEOINT Symposium 2016." is a sentence fragment, it doesn't need punctuation unless you change it to "A portion of a presentation by DNRO Sapp was shown at the GEOINT Symposium 2016."
Other
  • I've asked User:Mrfoogles to join this review given their previous input on this subject.
    • Will ping User:Tryptofish as well, in the event they see any issues I may have missed.
Mrfoogles (copied from user talk)
  • Looks a lot better in the Features section, I think. I'm inferring it uses AI to detect the unusual patterns or phenomena, and maybe to integrate different modalities of information? I think it should explicitly say where it uses machine learning (if it is known of course, which it may not be), because that would be useful foe understanding how it operates. And maybe a brief mention of where the AI shows up in the system in the lead would be quite useful. Feel free to copy this to the GA review, tech for commenting there is not working right now for me. Mrfoogles (talk) 01:28, 13 June 2025 (UTC)
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