Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment

Question about B-Class

I'm confused by the B-Class rating. According to the Project Page:

The article meets the six B-Class criteria:

1. The article is suitably referenced, with inline citations where necessary. It has reliable sources, and any important or controversial material which is likely to be challenged is cited. The use of citation templates such as { {cite web}} is not required, but the use of < ref></ref> tags is encouraged.

The example given of article KV55 displays this characteristic, but the article on Printmaking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printmaking doesn't seem to, although it's graded at B-Class, too. In that long article, there are only 4 citations. I freely admit that I'm confused. Clarification is appreciated. Wordreader (talk) 03:54, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Assessments aren't always accurate -- feel free to update them as you see fit! Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 04:48, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Multiple assessments on the same article

My name is Daniel, I'm researching about Automatic assessing Wikipedia articles. Collecting some articles, I can see that some of them have multiple quality classes, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:American_Civil_War. My question is: Does the wikiproject have an independent point of view of the article? (e.g. one article can be a good article about history but is not so complete to be a good article about american history). Where can I found more information about it? Thanks in advance --DanielHasan (talk) 14:44, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Each WikiProject can rate the article independently. If the quality ratings are wildly divergent, that's usually a sign that some WikiProject needs to update their ratings. But for example some project have their own criteria for B-class or A-class, which other projects don't share. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:04, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I would like to add though that some WikiProject are very active such as WikiProject Military History. I would say if the MILHIST quality assessment is filled out I would go with that. If you are looking at US related articles US roads is another good one as is WikiProject National Register of Historic Places. Those three are all very active and reliable in my opinion for quality assessments. --Kumioko (talk) 17:36, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Actually, although Carl is right, we also encourage independent assessments for a very good reason. The WikiProject assessment is supposed to represent people with expertise in a certain area, and assessments beyond Start-Class involve a judgement of completeness in a particular area.

Example: I'm in WikiProject Chemicals, and many of our articles are also tagged by WikiProject Food and Drink (preservatives, food colourings, natural components of flavours, etc.). An article might have very good coverage of its chemistry (synthesis, structure, reactions, etc) but nothing about its relevance in food; such an article might be rated B-Class by WP:CHEM, but only Start-Class by WP:Food and Drink. From the perspective of the 1.0 project, that means if we are putting together a selection of chemistry articles we may include it (because it's strong in that area), but we might omit it from a selection on Food & Drink articles. (We're not yet producing more specialised releases like this, but we hope to.)

FYI - a couple of other points. A few projects such as WP:CHEM (for historical reasons) doesn't recognise C-Class (though WP:CHEMISTRY does!), and so you see differences because of that. Also, I think it has become accepted practice to allow someone from outside a WikiProject to rate a Stub or Start, and maybe a C, so often these are harmonised (I reassess many Stubs as Starts, and I put all WikiProjects on the same rating, as do many others.) This is seen as a favour to the WikiProject, since there are many articles that have improved from Stub but haven't been reassessed - it saves time. But for B-Class and beyond, you should never assess for another project. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 21:47, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Thats a good point about C class. A Class is another that is not recognized by every project and WPMILHIST doesn't usually recognize lists unless they are Featured lists. They just call them start or stub or whatever. This does make me think that perhaps having a table under WikiProject Council with the projects and the classes they support might be beneficial. Creating the table would be rather easy but it would be somewhat time consuming to fill in. --Kumioko (talk) 21:53, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Firstly, to echo the point made twice above, WikiProject Military History does not accept C-class, either so an article rated C-class by one WP might be rated Start-class by a different WP, such as MILHIST, who does not use C-class. Secondly, articles are also rated by importance and importance ratings may well be different simply because the assessment of the article can change depending on which prespective it is be viewed from: for example an article about a ferry or ship owned by a railway company might have bias towards "shiping" or "railway transportance" and this would affect how important the respective WP might regard the article to be to their WP.Pyrotec (talk) 22:01, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Good examples for disambiguation and category classes

I think there should be a either a pair of lists or classes to place featured-quality disambiguation and category pages in. Although these types of pages are generally less important than full articles, I believe that such a list or class could be powerful reference to editors, beyond a style page or list of guidelines. Gamemaster0 (talk) 20:11, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

The bot allows a WikiProject to have their own assessment classes. If your WikiProject agrees with this proposal, go ahead and tag some and put them in the appropriate category - then let us know, here. We can make sure that the bot scores them appropriately. If other projects like the idea, it will probably spread. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 05:26, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Change wording on C-class

This was originally posted at the Anime and Manga WikiProject Assessment before I realized we just used the standard transclusion of crtieria there.

Change the first section to read:

The article is substantial, but is still missing important content or contains a lot of irrelevant material. The article should have a significant number ofreferences to reliable sources - especially secondary sources., butHowever, it may still have significant issues or require substantial cleanup.

The article is better developed in style, structure and quality than Start-Class, but fails one or more of the criteria for B-Class. It may have some gaps or missing elements; need editing for clarity, balance or flow; or contain policy violations such as bias, over reliance on primary or related sources or original research. Articles on fictional topics are likely to be marked as C-Class if they are written from anin-universe perspective.

This reflects the current practice for the WikiProjects I am afiliated with directly and some of them indirectly of requiring secondary sources to not only flesh out material, specifically in reception and impact sections which are generally seen as a requirement to have something there. Also relying too heavily on the primary source material (or press releases and the like) has generally been seen as a sign of lower-quality start-level article.

This is especially the case for fiction related articles. The WikiProjects I work with almost exclusively would not grade an article as C-class if it was mostly just primary sources. Many of the articles will have only plot info and release info and dates (thereby bypassing WP:NOT#PLOT's by detailing non universe info). The info can be quite substantial at this point, and heavily referenced, but generally most of these references come from primary sources, press releases and the like something that I don't think meets the spirit of C-class, but as currently written could be construed to be as "reception" or "impact" and "development" generally are not the majority in most such articles.∞陣内Jinnai 23:27, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Why don't more WikiProjects use A-Class?

I believe that A-Class is a fairly good idea; A-Class articles have a better chance of reaching FA-status than GA status, but why are they fairly rare? In fact, it has the fewest members of all the classes; there are more Featured articles than A-Class articles. With its quality, it would be expected that the number of A-Class articles would be somewhere between the numbers of Featured articles and Good articles. Why is this so? I read that it is due to the difficult of finding reviews, but why not have a system of assessments no different from the other classes? And if only a few articles have, why isn't the class just abolished and all the remaining articles be promoted to FAs or become GAs? And I don't understand the reason that there are only a few WikiProjects that have enough members for the use of A-class: There are plenty of WikiProjects which have just as many or more members than WP:MILHIST, WP:SHIPS, WP:ROADS and WP:ELEM. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 04:35, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

It's not merely a question of having enough members, but of overcoming the intertia of doing nothing. Hadling a review, and the process behind it, takes a lot of time and effort from people willing to go to that trouble. The projects I work on don't see the A-class as worth bothering over. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:38, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Between the above response and the discussion currently at the top of this page about the benefits of A-Class andalso why it's not so common, there's probably not much to add. As to why there are fewer A-Class articles than Featured Articles under the auspices of projects that employ the former, such as MilHist, that's because A-Class Review is often used as a stepping stone to FAC, rather than as an end in itself. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 05:34, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Possible changes in "importance" ratings

God knows that I am not really looking forward to seeing any of the changes I propose here being done, because of the amount of work I think it might well give me. However, I do wonder whether we might maybe benefit from adding three, maybe four, "importance' assessment grades.

Right now, the "Top" importance articles are, more or less, those which we think should be included in any encyclopedia. Well, as we now have our own "release version" encyclopedia, maybe it might be a bit better way to bring attention to these most important articles, and related articles, by adding assessment grades for them. The proposals I could see being included might include three or four grades for "core" importance articles, something like the following:

• "Central core" - Articles which bear the name of one of the core topics. A rough approximation might be the articles included in the Encyclopedia Britannica macropedia.
• "Inner core" - These would include articles which are the most important direct "child" articles of the central core articles. Like History of Christianity, for instance. It might also include articles which are not direct child articles, but are of outstanding importance in a field anyway. One example might be the importance of The Beatles relative to rock music.
• "Outer core" - This would include the articles which would be roughly equivalent to those included in the Britannica micropedia.
• "Peripheral core" - This grade I myself would have reservations about, but I can see how, in some cases, one of the central articles might have one or two important direct subarticles which do not necessarily direct relate to the main topic except in a limited way. A bad example, but one which might be in some way useful, might be Abortion and some related articles dealing with the abortion debate and broader bioethics.

Anyway, just an idea, but I think doing something of the type might better help get a bit more input in those articles selected for release versions. John Carter (talk) 21:00, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Are these meant to replace the current Top/High/Mid/Low scale, or to be parallel to it? — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:35, 12 February 2012 (UTC)