Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Philately/Assessment/Importance

Guidance needed for "importance" ratings

The "importance" ratings for Philately articles are in need of reworking. Although they are overall not too bad, there are some inconsistencies in the ratings. Some guidance in a few areas would be helpful so that the ratings are less subjective, particularly for the country articles and the "top" importance level.

Country articles. Country articles are inconsistently rated as to importance (when they are rated at all). None is in the "top" importance category. Should any be? Only two, United Kingdom and Greece, are rated "high." Seven are rated "mid" importance, including Germany, Turkey, and India. Why is Germany "mid" and Greece "high"? Surely, Greece and Turkey, with comparable philatelic history, should have the same rating. What should be the rating for the United States? Also included in the "mid" importance level are some obscure stamp issuing locales of little philatelic significance, such as Ross Dependency and Falkland Islands. There are about 35 "low" importance country articles, including countries which have rich philatelic traditions and are heavily collected, such as Russia and Israel, as well as several issuers of major historical importance to classic philately, such as Tuscany.

My suggestion would be that importance be assigned by taking into consideration a number of factors, including (1) how "important" is the country in the world today, aside from philately? (2) how popular the country is among philatelists? (3) the country's significance in the history of philately (e.g., the German States). Assuming that no country articles will be rated "top", the articles for the major stamp issuing countries of the world and those heavily collected, e.g., United Kingdom, France, Russia/USSR, United States, Brazil, Israel, should all be rated "high." The obscure locales, such as Ross Dependency and (unfortunately) Tannu Tuva, should be rated "low" while the rest would be "mid". Mid would include places like Bolivia, Yugoslavia, and Sri Lanka. The German States and Italian States should merit "mid" or possibly even "high."

"Top" importance articles. There are few articles rated "top" importance. They seem to include the most basic topics in philately, such as Philately itself, Postage stamp, Postal history, Definitive stamp or Postmark. They include one specific stamp, Penny Black, and one person, Rowland Hill (postal reformer). Comparable basic topics, however, are spread throughout other ratings, such as Airmail, Stamp catalog, and Post office (all "high"), Cancellation ("mid"), and Zip code ("low").

There should be some guidance on what constitutes a "top" importance article. Just basic philatelic terms? The Penny Black, but not the British Guiana 1c magenta? Should any country articles rate "top" importance? If so, which? I raise these questions, because I really don't have much of an answer at this time. Ecphora (talk) 03:34, 26 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe we should adapt the Numismatics Project guidelines, which focus on how significant the article may be for average readers. That I believe will result in considerably more "top" ratings. Ecphora (talk) 10:54, 27 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have been following your posts. I fully agree that we need guidelines. In the numismatic assessment page, the assessment guidelines only deal generically. They only provide you a starting point. We should decide this in greater depth and debate over each issue if necessary. Why dont you whip up a userpage with draft guidelines? Let's develop it from there! AshLin (talk) 12:15, 27 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See the imbalance between articles at Top, High, Mid and Low importance pages for pointers on the issues to address while making draft guidelines. AshLin (talk) 12:15, 27 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

When I setup the assessments within the project no one else was particularly interested so I started on my own. My experience was based on being an active member of the Ireland WikiProject assessment team who have assessed 20,000+ articles mostly manually; this is obviously a much smaller project. More than a year ago we developed two importance rating example tables for which we have been complemented as being one of the best. We should probably develop something similar here for each different category even if that means we need more than one table to cover most different topic categories. Currently, in this project, we are just using the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Release Version Criteria#Importance of topic criteria but they don't specifically address philately as they are very general in nature.

The reason for the disparity in some current ratings is, firstly, that all assessments ARE subjective, so there will always be some variance though more consistency would be better, secondly, because some assessments are made by non-philatelic editors who may not know or understand the topic, and thirdly, because we are using the generic rating criteria. Concerning the two high ratings, I rated Great Britain as high-importance, over a year ago but the Greece article was assessed by one of that article's main editors who makes many Greek edits so he may have done so with a pro-Greek bias. There should probably be some agreement on certain levels of assessment. For instance, all Top-importance ratings should be agreed on by the philatelic editors and all High-importance ratings should at least be reviewed when rated by more than one project member, or can to nominated for rating, while the lower ratings can be done by individuals based on our agreed importance rating criteria that we will develop.

I am not sure I agree with the Numismatics Project guidelines criteria as being quite right for this project because they are based more on the importance to the reader and not on an article's importance within philately as a whole. I have created a new page to develop our criteria so please add it to your watchlist - the shortcut is WP:PHIL/A/I. Don't forget that after each assessment bot update you may want to view the updated quality log to check any new assessments. ww2censor (talk) 15:44, 27 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're right; This discussion indicates that "importance" should be judged within the project, not from a universal viewpoint. If one used the latter, I suppose one might conclude that all philately articles have little importance. I'll continue this on the new criteria talk page. Ecphora (talk) 22:28, 28 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion has been copied to here, from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Philately, to give context to the start of a specific discussion on the importance ratings of assessments within the Philately WikiProject. ww2censor (talk) 23:46, 28 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]