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Good Lists

There is a proposal to set up a new classification level, Good List. Please add your comments there. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:25, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Discussion on auto-assessment of articles

See this discussion, which suggests a bot task that would auto-assess some articles for WikiProjects based on other WikiProject templates on the page. ~ RobTalk 05:59, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Stand-alone lists being nominated as Good Articles

FYI
 – Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations#Request for comment on stand-alone lists being nominated as Good Articles

--Redrose64 (talk) 23:01, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Note that one of the three proposals in this RfC involves creating a separate "Good Lists" rating and process independent of the GA process. BlueMoonset (talk) 18:18, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Requested move 29 January 2017

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject assessment. Clear consensus for a move and this variant of the proposed title (de-capped, singular) had the most support. Jenks24 (talk) 14:24, 15 February 2017 (UTC)


Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment → Wikipedia:WikiProject assessments – (Or alike.) It's actually WikiProject assessments, so it's a redundant separate category. Furthermore it's not just "1.0" but simply not related to any version of Wikipedia. Note: in addition I also proposed a merge of the Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments. Fixuture (talk) 01:47, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

  • Conditional Support. I use this page a lot for assessing multiple WikiProjects that are not related to the Version 1.0 editorial team. The condition of support is that the page include some mention (preferably near the top) that assessments generated from this scale were developed by and originally purposed for the Version 1.0 editorial team. By removing this subpage from the Version 1.0 team's project page, we risk cutting them off from the rest of the project, so it should be very important to attribute this rating system to them. Icebob99 (talk) 16:08, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  • Support for a change to Wikipedia:WikiProject Assessment – It would be good to have an organised project for this. J947 22:28, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Support An organized project sounds good. -- Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 23:10, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Conditional Support as per Icebob99: As one of the people involved in setting up the assessment system, I accept that it has (I'm glad to say) become much more important than the 1.0 project (which is still going on behind the scenes, but on a smaller scale). It also exists largely independent of the project, though we (usually) help to maintain the bot when it stalls! Walkerma (talk) 03:34, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Seems like there is a clear consensus to move, but not the exact title it should go to. Could we get a quick vote on what people would prefer out of WikiProject assessments, WikiProject Assessments, WikiProject assessment, WikiProject Assessment (or some other variant if you want)? I know it's pedantic but I'd prefer to get it right now, rather than having to revisit such a minor issue in the future. Pinging Fixuture, Icebob99, J947, Iazyges, Walkerma. Jenks24 (talk) 07:31, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
  • The assessment of individual articles should be left up to individual WikiProjects, since they often have specific rating scales for quality and importance, and even if they don't, they sometimes have specific ideas of what constitutes different ratings. I think such a WikiProject should have a relatively small scope, dealing with maintaining the quality scale, answering the questions of different communities related to assessment, and cooperating with the Version 1.0 team. Specific assessment projects could be to assign pages without a WikiProject to a suitable WikiProject. Another topic I think this could cover would be WikiWork factors. I kind of imagine this as being a semi-directory for assessment on Wikipedia which is actively maintained by a few project editors. Thoughts? Icebob99 (talk) 14:24, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
  • As I said in my !vote, I would prefer a change to Wikipedia:WikiProject Assessment. J947 16:02, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Good question, however the suggestions with a capital A in Assessment would fail MOS:CAP. --Fixuture (talk) 21:44, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
  • @Walkerma: you mentioned that you were part of the Version 1.0 team, how does the team feel about this proposed change? Icebob99 (talk) 14:24, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
  • @Imzadi1979: Well in that case we need a new maintenance page for WikiProject assessments in general. And I don't think that it would be worthwhile to keep them separate. Any info about the historic use / set up of the assessments can be featured in the broader-scoped page on WikiProject assessments in general. Also having two pages would only be confusing - especially as much of this page isn't restricted to the Version 1.0 team's assessments (anymore). --Fixuture (talk) 21:44, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
  • One role of this new project, if it comes to fruition, could be to maintain a tracker of the different wiki project standards, likely the largest, and perhaps all active wiki projects, basically a "parity scale" giving a definition and then saying "this definition would make an article b class for x wiki project, and c class for y wiki project. It should also maintain a list of "oddities" for lack of a better word. I.e. How some projects have a "super-stub" or B+, and it should define them, and say what projects use them. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 16:03, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
Much more ambitiously, it could attempt to form a standardized criteria, and use that criteria to explain all the other classes of projects, I.e. "Meeting criteria 2 and 3 will make the article a start class for wiki project x and y, but it will still be a stub for project z. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 16:03, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
  • @Iazyges: Exactly! There are all sorts of possibilities what could be featured in such a broader page. Criteria-standardization would be one major potential use I see here as well, but it's also other things like info on the use of WikiProject assessments in datamining and on analysis as well as an avenue for relevant discussions, criterias & policies. However it's not a "project" (or "team") − it's no subgroup but an open page with Wikipedia itself at large being the collective to which this feature matters and who is involved in its use, a meta page. --Fixuture (talk) 21:44, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
@Iazyges: - I had read the new page to refer to "Assessments done by WikiProjects", not "A new WikiProject that will oversee assessments". If you're proposing a separate WikiProject to oversee assessments, I'm not sure that's really a good idea. You certainly shouldn't start telling WikiProjects how they should do their assessments, or you will be very unpopular with some! (The 1.0 Project has the "right" to do that because we created the scheme, but having laid the framework we let each WikiProject implement it in whatever way they want.) As for the other members of the 1.0 project, I'm actually the main person still active on offline releases (we actually have a rough new collection assembled), but most of my collaborators are not active editors or are on other language Wikipedias. Walkerma (talk) 04:35, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
@Walkerma: In no way do I intend it to tell people how to do it, just to track how it is done. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 04:39, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
That's good - I hadn't thought so, but I wanted to be sure. I'd certainly love to see people using the metadata for things other than us putting selections together, and I'd love to have some people to talk to on these pages! Tracking how people do A-class peer reviews, or how B+ class is used in Maths articles (if it still is!) would be interesting for me and would get my support. Walkerma (talk) 07:07, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
I mentioned this and a few other ideas somewhere above, I think these ideas are great. But I'm starting to think that this idea of providing a one-stop shop of WikiProject assessments could fit into the Version 1.0 Team, in which case all the editors interested here could simply join the team. I think this idea of tracking the assessment patterns of other projects fits naturally in with 1.0 anyways. Icebob99 (talk) 14:33, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Importance / priority

Is there any plan to use this page to give an overview of importance/priority ratings used by WikiProjects? This is currently tucked away at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Release Version Criteria#Priority of topic. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:24, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Assessment

I am thinking this article's assessment should be revised. It should be downgraded to a stub-class article. Not sure it yet qualifies for start-class status. SecretName101 (talk) 22:50, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

@SecretName101: this is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Wikipedia:WikiProject assessment. Please make your comments at the talk page for the article concerned. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:43, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
This is embarrassing. Not sure how I did this. Must have accidentally switched windows or something and not noticed before commenting. Clearly this was intended for an article talk page, not this page.SecretName101 (talk) 11:29, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

This article's rating

Which class of quality does this article belong to? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Plnml (talk • contribs) 18:33, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

Which article? --Jameboy (talk) 23:35, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

Unsatisfied needs

I recently started an article on Ana Estefanía Dominga Riglos, a woman whose husband was interim head of state of Argentina in 1816. All I could find was birth / marriages / children / death and a few snippets about minor incidents. The article was assessed Start, which seems reasonable. It is quite incomplete. But if there really is no more available information, it could be argued that the article is A. Readers may want more but they are not going to get more. The article is as complete as it ever will be.

Should we adjust "Start: Readers's experience" to say "Provides some meaningful content, but most readers will need more – and more information is available". Something like that? Aymatth2 (talk) 11:24, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

The assessment process

There are several questions/comments I have about the assessment process which are not covered in the article:

  • surely as good standard practice the assessor should provide some comment on their assessment and justification for reaching their conclusions - in particular what could be done to improve the article to the next level.
  • should there be some process for challenging or querying the assessment - it can feel arbitrary and subjective, and surely be based on consensus not individual opinion. Indeed perhaps there should be a discussion on the talk page to establish consensus before assessing a page.
  • similarly should their be some process for removing/ updating an assessment after a passage of time - they seem to stick there in many cases almost regardless. I have been tempted to delete them if so out of date, but not sure this is appropriate. But there should be some guidance here (or even in the assessment template itself)

I will confess my own experience - did a lot a work reworking the via ferrata article a while ago to get it about as good as I could feel it could be without original research, using the limited formal sources to the full - to then have somebody give it a C rating without so much as a comment. Rather disheartening for new or inexperienced editors and not in keeping with the constructive spirit of Wikipedia.Marqaz (talk) 00:04, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

The essay Wikipedia:Assessing articles covers some of those points, but it is just an essay, without much force. I think most assessments are done by a small number of new page patrollers who tag articles for project lists, which may be useful, but assess based on length: 1-2 paragraphs = Stub; longer = Start. It can be discouraging, particularly to newbies, when an article that says all there is to be said is rated Start. I think some rule somewhere says anyone can change an assessment below GA/FA any time. I doubt if many editors know that. Perhaps it is time for a serious debate about the whole purpose of the assessment process, and whether it should be either fundamentally changed or dropped altogether. It seems broken to me. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:56, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

Importance scheme

Is {{Importance Scheme}} still a proposed template? Or is no longer just "proposed" but a template? Thinker78 (talk) 19:58, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

It's in widespread use. Where is it suggested that it is "proposed" (whatever that means)? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:44, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
In this revision under "Importance assessment". Thinker78 (talk) 19:54, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
That text was added over eleven years ago by Walkerma (talk · contribs), and the word "proposed" was removed earlier today by Mfb (talk · contribs). There had been no significant changes to the paragraph in the meantime. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:40, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for updating that, finally! Walkerma (talk) 02:56, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

More recent examples in table?

The interpretation of criteria changes over time, even if the descriptions do not. I suggest to replace the examples by 2017 or 2018 versions of articles to get a more recent view how these types look like. --mfb (talk) 06:41, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Did some updates. B+ doesn't seem to be used any more and A without GA/FA is very rare. --mfb (talk) 13:02, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

Category:Bplus-Class articles has been nominated for discussion

Category:Bplus-Class articles, which is within the scope of this wikiproject, has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:30, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

User:Aymatth2/Project quality assessment

Moved to Wikipedia:Article assessment: the middle ground.
Thanks to contributors to this discussion. I have tried to reflect points made in the essay. Feel free to improve the essay. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:45, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

As of June 2018, it now lives at Wikipedia:Assessing articles.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:15, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I am wondering if this essay should be moved up from a user essay to a Wikipedia essay. The main points are that assessments often do not follow the guidelines, articles are often rated too strictly, and there should be more emphasis on C class – good enough for most readers. But it seems a bit long and, perhaps lacks a clear prescriptive focus. Any comments on what should first be changed, added, removed? Aymatth2 (talk) 21:57, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Your section Importance ratings: inconsistent definitions entirely misses the point about importance ratings. They are not about "how important is it to Wikipedia's coverage of this subject area that there should be an article for this topic" - they are specific to one WikiProject, and it is perfectly legitimate to have an article (such as High Level Bridge) assigned Low importance by WikiProject Trains, yet High importance by WikiProject North East England. Inconsistency is intentional, and is in no way a problem. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:51, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
I worded that badly and will fix it. Obviously an article can be more important to one project than another. By "coverage of this subject area" I meant to identify ratings specific to the subject area of a given Wikiproject. The inconsistency is between the {{Importance scheme}} definitions, based on notability with a geographic flavor, and the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Release Version Criteria, based on centrality of the topic to the project's subject area. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:28, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
Not all WikiProjects use {{Importance scheme}}. Some use a definition mentioning what the average Wikipedia reader is likely to look up (e.g. WikiProject China), some refer to release version criteria (e.g. WikiProject Beauty Pageants links to it from {{WikiProject Beauty Pageants}}), some define it relative to a key article related to the WikiProject (e.g. WikiProject Iran). There might be other definitions as well, I just know about these ones since I recently reviewed them for a research project. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:31, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
I will try to bring out the project-specific criteria more. Wikipedia:WikiProject Iran/Assessment#Importance scale seems quite unique. Clearly these assessments should only be done by project members, but I get the feeling they are often done by other new page patrollers. "Someone from Iran ... not very long ... I'll add it to Wikiproject Iran as stub, low." Aymatth2 (talk) 18:24, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
The approach used by WikiProject Iran is not unique. Search for "The article is one of the core topics about" site:en.wikipedia.org in Google (or your favorite search engine that supports domain-specific searches) and you'll quickly find lots of other WikiProjects with a similar definition. To what extent these WikiProjects are still active I do not know. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:37, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
I stand corrected. I imagine there is some ancestral importance scale that has evolved into various divergent families of scales that emphasize different factors. I will use some of your examples. The key point remains that assessments should be done by project members and should follow the relevant criteria. Aymatth2 (talk) 19:26, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
It's basically the same scale. What we should be indicating is that the various levels of importance mostly use the same names - viz. Top, High, Mid, Low (and NA), but the specific meaning of each name does vary. Some WikiProjects add one or two more below Low, these being Bottom and No (or None). Personally, I think that No/None is redundant: if a WikiProject feels that a given article is totally unimportant, the thing that they should do is to remove the WikiProject banner template. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:59, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
The names are the same, but the criteria are different and could yield different results. I could imagine an untalented singer gaining international notability for her outrageous performances while having little relevance to the music project, or a river in Kent having no international notability but being a "must have" article for the Kent project. The only point is that the reviewer should understand the project-specific criteria when making the assessment. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:07, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
I'm not saying that two WikiProjects must assess pages in the same way, nor that they must all assign the same importance rating to a given page. I'm saying that the general meaning of e.g. Top-importance is the same: that the specific WikiProject considers it to be a key article; that the general meaning of e.g. Low-importance is the same: that the specific WikiProject considers it to be very minor. If you consider a fairly large WikiProject, say WikiProject Biology, and look at any article talk page that bears the WikiProject's template, there is a link to the project's importance scale. Following this link, we find a table with four rows, one for each rating. These have descriptions which aren't much different from those of other WikiProjects, save for the project name. To illustrate what I mean, imagine a WikiProject for something that is not related to biology, like lemonade. We would have pages like Wikipedia:WikiProject Lemonade, Template:WikiProject Lemonade and so on. Consider that four-row table that I just mentioned, replace each instance of the word "Biology" with "Lemonade" - does it become invalid in some way? No: Top importance means "Subject is a "core" or "key" topic for the study of Lemonade, or is particularly notable for their contributions in this area to people other than students of Lemonade. They define and determine the subject of the Lemonade WikiProject." It works quite well: we might consider Lemon or Carbon dioxide to be of top importance to WikiProject Lemonade. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:54, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
@Redrose64: I think we are violently agreeing. Each project has a scale from low to top importance (sometimes with other values) that may be used to prioritise work and measure progress. The criteria are usually given in general terms and would often give the same result, but not always. Ruhollah Khomeini is High importance under the Iran project criteria but could be Top importance if the Iran project followed {{Importance scheme}}. Saying there are different formulas, so if possible project members should do or review the assessments, seems uncontroversial. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:27, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
  • I don't like the emphasis (re quality) on completeness and gaps, rather than depth, detail and quality of referencing. The essay also doesn't address the availability of information, especially in historical subjects where many or most things are just not known at all. I don't really agree that assessments should only be done by project members, even as an ideal. In practical terms this is just a non-starter, imo, though of course they can always be adjusted by project members. I certainly agree with the main thrusts of the essay, though the point that length is not the most important thing could be made more emphatically. Johnbod (talk) 12:35, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
@Johnbod: The second sentence in Wikipedia:WikiProject assessment is "The system is based on a letter scheme which reflects principally how factually complete the article is, though the content and language quality are also factors." The scale definitions keep mentioning completeness: "Provides very little meaningful content ... Provides some meaningful content ... would not provide a complete picture ... content may not be complete enough ... A fairly complete treatment". I would see depth and detail as aspects of completeness, The essay also talks about prose quality and technical style aspects like quality of references, pointing out that it may be difficult to decide which is most important. The section on "Sample article" does mention availability of information, saying if there is not much available a short article may be A, and if there is a lot available a long article may be C. The reason for pushing review by project members is that so often the assessment ignores the project quality and importance criteria, and is just an uninformed opinion. It may not be practical, but is worth presenting as an ideal. Let me think about your points though and see if I can tweak the essay. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:00, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Instructions for projects

We need a set of instructions for how (and when/why) to create an assessment system for a wikiproject. If this advice exists somewhere(s) else, it should be merged into here, because it's hard to find. I think it should cover:

  • Use {{WPBannerMeta}} to create the wikiproject's talk page banner; it auto-supports all the standard assessments.
  • Do not make up new assessments or alter the criteria of existing ones; various systems, from templates to categories to bots, depend on the assessment classes being consistent (as do editors doing the assessments).
  • Use the already existing templates for showing assessment classes, and counts of the wikiproject's assessed articles. [We'll need to identify these and what they do / what they are for.]
  • An "/Assessment" subpage of a wikiproject (i.e., a process page, with instructions and its own talk page) need not be created unless there is adequate participation in the wikiproject and interest in "staffing" this process. (Same goes for "/Peer review" subpages, for group assessment.) For most wikiprojects, this will not be the case. We have dozens (at least – probably over 100) "WP:WikiProject Foo/Assessment" and ".../Peer review" pages that are never used. If there's not enough activity to support a formalized assessment process, assessment templates can be transcluded into the main wikiproject page to show assessment stats.

That last point might see some argument/revision (e.g. that an /Assessment page should be created for the templates, just without verbiage that implies an active process exists when it doesn't.)

What else should be covered?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:46, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

PS: Alternatively, the project instructions could live under WP:WikiProject Council, as long as we point to the page from here. I favor centralization, but technically providing wikiproject management advice is within the scope of WP:COUNCIL. The question hinges on whether such advice is guideline material or essay-level. I would suggest the former, because creation of dead /Assessment and /Peer_review pages is a maintenance problem and should be discouraged; "process-forking" incompatible assessment classes and criteria is even worse.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:41, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Requested move 30 June 2018

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page(s) moved. With further complexities. — Frayæ (Talk/Spjall) 10:39, 8 July 2018 (UTC)


– "Wikipedia:WikiProject assessment" is confusing and misleading:

  • This is not a wikiproject.
  • It it not about assessing wikiprojects.
  • You do not have to be a listed participant in a wikiproject to do an assessment, just competent.
  • The more important assessment classes, GA and FA, have nothing to do with wikiprojects. The low-rung assessments (Stub, Start and C) are the same for all projects. Actually so is B, but it's more often than not applied by wikiproject participants with topical project focus in mind.
  • The wikiproject connection is simply that two assessment classes (B, to an extent, and A, entirely) can vary between projects (e.g., one might apply B-class and another might not think it's ready for that, depending on how well the article covers the aspects that pertain the project's scope). The "importance" ratings are also wikiproject stuff; they are meaningless except in a wikiproject context, being relative to other articles in the same wikiproject scope, and are for maintenance not readers (they theoretically steer project participants to work on more contextually important articles first, though we have no evidence this actually works and considerable evidence it does not, as most editing activity appears directed at improving stub-to-C-class articles on topics of recent public interest).

– I've suggested "WP:Content assessment" rather than "WP:Article assessment" because non-articles are also assessed, with classifiers (e.g. as "Redirect", "Category", "Disambiguation", etc.), and there is a portal quality-assessment system in development as we speak [type, whatever] at WT:WPPORTALS/G.
– The defunct WP:Article assessment page should be moved to WP:Article assessment (historical) so that its current name can redirect to the active page on the topic (i.e. the one that is presently WP:WikiProject assessment and nominated to be Wikipedia:Content assessment). While we do not delete old process and advice pages, we should not hesitate to usurp useful redirect names from them when they are tagged with {{Superseded}}, as in this case.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:40, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

I'm OK with this change, and I accept the main arguments, as long as there is general support for it. I do think A, B and C need WikiProject involvement to get useful assessments, since the content on a page like Mitsunobu reaction needs to be examined by someone who understand the content properly; however, all the main points seem valid. If this goes ahead we will need a bot to update the MANY links to the first page. Thanks for raising this, SMcCandish. Walkerma (talk) 23:16, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
There's no particular connection between wikiprojects and expertise; wikiprojects are self-selecting groups by interest/enthusiasm, not professional experience level, and the average Wikipedian with expertise isn't doing wikiproject stuff. Most wikiprojects only have a few dozen active editors at most. For the majority of them, it's more like 0–5. Most projects are moribund, and the super-active ones like military history, botany, mathematics, are rare.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:04, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Not yet moved.

— Frayæ (Talk/Spjall) 10:12, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Subpages

Accessibility issues with "Importance" and "Class" colors

Please see the discussions at Template talk:Importance/colour#Color scheme doesn't meet accessibility requirements and Template talk:Class/colour#Color scheme doesn't meet accessibility requirements. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 16:03, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

Content Assessment - Importance level

I find this topic puzzling. There are some conflicting criteria:

  • template at {{Importance scheme}} - "Other projects are strongly encouraged to emulate this customized approach"
  • separate scale for rating articles for importance or priority
  • And just above that scale, under "Priority of topic": "This is judged using both manual assessment by a WikiProject member, and "external interest" judged by links-in, interwiki links and number of hits. For more details, and the formula used to balance these parameters, see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/SelectionBot" - This is fine to count hits etc then using Log10 formulae to give a figure, but that article then does not advise on what that figure means. If I derive a value of 400 does that make the article a Top importance article or a Low importance article?
  • Some projects advise to assess importance based on "notability" - but remain unclear on how that might be done. This is my favorite: "...subjects with greater popular notability may be rated higher than topics that are arguably more important..." Huh? We are trying to assess importance.
  • It is clear that there are different definitions being used for what "importance" actually is, and therefore inconsistency between projects.

My view is that importance should be based on the number of hits averaged for a year - let the users drive it. Somebody needs to come up with a table and some method of scaling that can be used across all projects in order to gain some commonality, simplicity and consistency, eg:

Rating Top High Mid Low
Points 400 300 200 100

In summary, give me a tool that is consistent and accepted across Wikipedia and I will start doing assessments, but currently that tool does not exist. William Harris • (talk) • 12:00, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Priority and Importance are merely different terms for the same thing. Each WikiProject can choose the term that it prefers, with Importance being the default. Apart from that, the importance ratings are intentionally different between WikiProjects: something that is Top-importance for one WikiProject may well be Low-importance for another. Consider Oxford Street which is a major thoroughfare and shopping area in central London: it is High-importance for WikiProject London, but Low-importance for WikiProject Retailing. This is not an error: it merely means that WikiProject Retailing do not wish to devote so much attention compared to the attention given by WikiProject London. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:24, 4 January 2019 (UTC)
As another example: Talk:Barack Obama - obviously top importance for the (now inactive) WikiProject Barack Obama because the project wouldn't make sense without this article. The article is mid importance for the WikiProject Hawaii and low importance for the WikiProject Columbia University - you don't need the article for a good coverage of their project scopes. --mfb (talk) 07:05, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
You are missing my point - clearly what is important to one project will be unimportant to another. My point is that there is no objective process defined on how you would rate importance. An individual project rates importance how, exactly? This article has been in existence since 2005, and in all that time has provided little in the way of guidance on this matter. William Harris • (talk) • 08:35, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
At Wikipedia:Content assessment#Importance assessment, there is a link to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Release Version Criteria#Importance of topic. In that there is a table. This gives the information you require. Then there is Wikipedia:Assessing articles#Importance ratings: a variety of definitions. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:33, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
The first link that you provided leads to another link, which leads to the second link that you provided. This is one of the links that I had included in the top of this section, which indicates that you did not click on it. It also returns us back to my point. William Harris • (talk) • 07:41, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
There is no objective process because there can't be one. There are the general guidelines but typically projects have individual criteria defined on the project pages, e.g. here for spaceflight, here for rocketry, here for Chicago and so on. --mfb (talk) 19:34, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
If there is no objective process for classifying importance within a project then the entire concept should be done away with - get rid of it from Wikipedia articles altogether. The "general guidelines" are both conflicting and of no value, as I indicated above. There is no point depending on "Projects" to do this work, because they don't. Individual editors are classifying importance based on their personal views with no oversight from the projects, whose membership varies from year to year. I can see that this is going nowhere, so I will leave this issue now. William Harris • (talk) • 07:41, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
The existing process is good enough for most people. You personally might not like it, but don't generalize that please. --mfb (talk) 10:24, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Edit request: Grammar

Under the detailed B-class criteria, "Diagrams and an infobox etc." should be "Diagrams, an infobox etc.". I can't figure out where this text actually comes from, as it's hidden behind nested transclusions. Kranix (talk | contribs) 15:35, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

@Kranix: If you follow the little v-t-e links at top right of the section, you are taken to Template:Grading scheme. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:27, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
True, but the text isn't written there, either - it must be nested in templates further down. Kranix (talk | contribs) 22:06, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
It is one layer deeper, in Wikipedia:Content assessment/B-Class criteria. --mfb (talk) 23:45, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
Changed. --mfb (talk) 10:26, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Ping project

After having fun with Talk:Ping project, please add instructions how interested contributors with a login allergy can suggest a re-assessment of an "obviously wrong" class + importance (C + low instead of B + high, WP:42 references exist).
If it's "spam TEAHOUSE" or similar, fine, I'd do that; if it's add attention=yes, no, it needs no "immediate attention", it needs a bored volunteer looking for fun work; and if it's "shoot for a GA peer review", no, the idea is to get as near to GA as possible before this.
While at it, is there a place for an external link to a shared Google Photos album with 100% clean CC-BY photos, where I could ask for a "copy to commons" volunteer? Only the existing commonscat has to be correct, I'd fix anything else in need of fixing: Add License review request, add attribution parameter to the CC-BY template, check date + real source = not me, I only extracted 19 images from a CC-BY video, etc.
My login allergy is perfectly harmless, alternative fact: a global spam filter did not allow me to put a link to the mw: custom search engine on my c: user talk page, real reason: there is no ex in ex-Wikiholic. –84.46.53.151 (talk) 14:22, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

For a specific article? Put it on the talk page of that article. Or be bold and change it directly. --mfb (talk) 22:02, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
Bold example, this can be rather disruptive, the guideline boils down to "anyone can edit depending on the project". I'm familiar with computing projects. Working on a few BLPs of musicians / actresses is only for fun, and only one is old enough for the women in history project: Specific article Emma Blackery, the YouTube importance "low" can't be as it should be. –84.46.53.16 (talk) 05:39, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
Well, IP edits in these templates are more likely to be reverted. No history of constructive edits. --mfb (talk) 06:56, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
Objection, no history of constructive edits is not related to the class or importance of a BLP. Anything below A or GA should be obvious, if it's not start it can be C, and if there are enough references and no "fix this now dated 2007" hat notes it can be B.
The importance of "participated twice in YouTube Rewind + got some VidCon award" should be also obvious. I've now noted this nit on the talk page planning to pull a bold as suggested if nobody objects soon. –84.46.53.83 (talk) 07:53, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
Directly talking to projects also has drawbacks, they are either dead or busy with fighting PRODs + AFDs. –84.46.53.83 (talk) 12:36, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Re-assessment?

Can an article be re-assessed at a later date, after it has been developed? If so, what is the process for seeking re-assessment? Headhitter (talk) 16:56, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Of course it can. This is why we have formal processes like WP:FAC and WP:GAN - I don't know of any featured articles or good articles that went straight to that level without passing through at least one of the lower levels first. To rate an article as B-Class and below (C, Start, Stub), anybody may assess to that grade at any time without needing formal review; although it does mean that your assessment may itself be reassessed by somebody else. And so on. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:11, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Poor assessment of articles

Being in a mildly irritated state of mind, let me bring up what I believe is poor and careless article assessment. Many of the articles I have created have been rated "start." That assessment may be correct in a few cases--but not many. Let me give an example of an article I recently created that has been rated "start." The Sánchez Navarro latifundio article contains 1,979 words and 16,159 bytes. The article has 33 footnotes from 7 different scholarly sources, four photographs, and one map (which I made myself). I won't claim the article is perfect or even "good", but it is certainly better than "start." What seems to be the prevailing assessment process is that assessors automatically rate articles "start" without evaluating the article for quality and completeness. I think it would be better not to assess articles than to do so in a perfunctory manner. Serious editors, e.g. yours truly, don't like to see their efforts rated "start."

Perhaps it should be a requirement for an assessor to explain his rationale for assessing an article? Smallchief (talk) 12:47, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
Smallchief, If you don't like it then fix it. Look at the criteria and assess accordingly. If anyone disagrees they will change or discuss. It is not rocket science. Many people will rate an article as start because it is obviously better than stub, but they don't have the time or inclination to actually check against all the criteria. You can rate up to B for articles for which you are a major contributor as long as you do it fairly and use a checklist to show that you have examined and considered all the criteria. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:10, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Pbsouthwood. Thanks, I'm aware that I can kick the assessment up to "C" and I may do that. But my real complaint is about the demoralizing aspect of creating a lengthy, complicated article and having an assessor wander by, glance at the article, and call it a "start." Complaining about what I consider a misjudgment might cause an assessor to take more care. That's my objective.Smallchief (talk) 11:29, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Smallchief, If you want the person who assessed a specific article to take more care, you would have to identify them and complain directly to that person. Whoever it was is probably not watching this page, and even if they were, you have not mentioned which article(s) you found inaccurately assessed. Best place to do it would be on the article talk pages, where other interested parties might also see it and it is directly relevant. I would recommend that you are specific about what the person got wrong, otherwise your objection is unlikely to be understood. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 16:13, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

The content assessment system is broken - suggestion for fixing it.

The way things are, this system is mostly useless. There are over 3 million stub articles, and almost 2 million start articles. Perhaps 90% of those I have looked at are wrong - a stub article of several paragraphs with multiple footnotes, for example. No one is ever going to look comprehensively at these articles and correct their assessment. There are nowhere near enough editors to do so.

Suggestion: set up a bot or multiple bots to assess them. As is done now with the multiple new article bots. Please note that I am NOT proposing that a bot replace humans with A, FA, GA. But for the lower categories of stub, start, C, and B, and candidates for A, a bot could only help. With consensus-decided rules: how long is it? Does its length reflect the topic assessment? Does it have citations? Are they correctly formatted? Does it have wikilinks? And so on.

I know I'm not the first one to suggest some automation of the process. deisenbe (talk) 00:44, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

@Deisenbe: I'd be happy to help with the bot side. --DannyS712 (talk) 00:49, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Bot requests/AutoAssessBot. There have been several Village Pump discussions. deisenbe (talk) 00:51, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Useless link?

At the top of the article, there is a sentence saying that "For a more general overview of assessment at Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Assessment." However, clicking the "Wikipedia:Assessment" simply reloads the page (i.e. redirects it to itself). Should I just remove the sentence? Thank you. William2001(talk) 22:20, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

By "article," I mean the "project page." William2001(talk) 22:22, 17 June 2019 (UTC)
It's a redirect, and it used to go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Assessment FAQ; it was changed as a result of Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2019 May 11#Wikipedia:Assessment. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:19, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Priority and importance section (again)

In this version, the entire paragraph is

Importance assessment
There is a [[Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Release_Version_Criteria#Importance_of_topic|separate scale for rating articles for ''importance'' or ''priority'']], which is unrelated to the ''quality'' scale outlined here. Unlike the quality scale, the priority scale varies based on the project scope. See also a template at {{tl|Importance scheme}}.

The paragraph transcluded reads

There is a separate scale for rating articles for importance or priority, which is unrelated to the quality scale outlined here. Unlike the quality scale, the priority scale varies based on the project scope. See also a template at {{Importance scheme}}.

So far so good.
If you click the first link, you end up at page that says it is inactive and is kept around for historical reasons. Proposal Let's merge the operative text for this sub-topic into this page so we don't have to root around in WP:MULTI places, and then be confused when those targets are marked "historical". NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 17:47, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

@CoolSkittle:, why did you do this? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:13, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
FYI, I deleted the historic tag and boldly tried to clean that page up a bit so its less confusing. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 00:22, 18 July 2019 (UTC)
@Redrose64: and all.... what would you say to just importing the priority assessment over here? See thread 2019 update proposed. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 10:26, 18 July 2019 (UTC)
Didn't think that was still active. Apologies, and thanks to NewsAndEventsGuy for the edit. CoolSkittle (talk) 18:10, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Editor rapidly assessing dozens of articles

For the second time in a couple of weeks, an editor has been marking assessments on articles. See User talk:GeneralPoxter#Please stop setting article "importance". This is the second editor I've seen doing this; the earlier one was blocked. Mathglot (talk) 05:50, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Started this ANI discussion. Mathglot (talk) 06:20, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
I posted at ANI. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:18, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Merge in the assessment FAQ

We don't need two pages on this. Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Assessment FAQ should merge into Wikipedia:WikiProject assessment either as a section or as integrated content. The merge should happen in this direction, because this is the better-developed page, and because assessment is a community process instituted under Wikipedia:Version 0.7 and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 then broadened into a site-wide article classification system (not just for producing CD-ROMs, an old goal); it's not under the thumb of WP:WikiProject Council, the wikiproject about wikiprojects. While the assessments are typically done by topical wikiproject participants, this is not at all required (anyone can assess, they just need to do it well), and even when it is, it has nothing to do with WP:WikiProject Council, which is mostly a gatekeeper for whether you should create "WP:WikiProject underwater basketweaving" or not, and home of the list of wikiprojects.

PS: it's wrongheaded for WP:ASSESSMENT and WP:Assessment to go to two different pages; WP:Redirects for discussion doesn't tolerate such a confusing situation.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:46, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Well obviously this isn't a very hot topic. But for what it's worth, I'd support that merge and would be happy to carry it out. It is apparently uncontroversial. Still think it's a good idea? Ajpolino (talk) 21:02, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
 Done (Sorry just noticed that User:SMcCandlish is on a break). It looks like several people watch this talk page, so feel free to trim as you see fit! I've redirected that page here. Thanks! Ajpolino (talk) 21:37, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
And, yes, I still agree it's a good plan. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:45, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

B-class checklist

What is the meaning of "broad in coverage" according to a B-checklist? Does this breadth needed to be treated with a degree of substantive breadth as well? I am looking at Sara Sheffield. It is well written and well sourced, but there does not seem to be enough content to warrant a B-rating. Am I misinterpreting the B-class criteria? Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 15:39, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Oldsanfelipe2. I interpret it as "broad in relation to what is known to be available in reliable sources", as we cannot and may not go beyond that. Some topics are narrower than others, but that does not necessarily prevent then from being as good as is currently reasonably practicable. Take a look at a few featured articles, and compere the broad topics with the narrow ones. Some of the articles on medieval bishops are as good as they can reasonably get, but are quite limited in content, because there is not much information on record. Others, like Sea and Underwater diving have had to be condensed quite relentlessly to keep them down to an acceptable length, and have literally hundreds of associated articles going into the finer detail of what is summarised in the main article. Ask yourself what is missing, and if it is likely to be available in the literature. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 20:26, 10 February 2020 (UTC
Pbsouthwood, Thanks for your response. I have looked at several articles rated under the Military History banner, which appear to be applying your interpretation of the B-standard, but I do not think this is the normal way that articles are assessed. Do you disagree with my supposition? Or if you agree with it, do you think that the assessment process needs to be reformed? Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 21:36, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
@Oldsanfelipe2:. I am not sure I understand what you mean by "the normal way that articles are assessed". Could you clarify? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 07:43, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood:, Let me rephrase into an open-ended question: what is common practice? Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 13:48, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
@Oldsanfelipe2:, I don't really know for sure. I follow the instructions using a checklist and when all six criteria are checked off as good, I list as B-class. I think this is a fairly common practice as it is the recommended procedure. I don't often check how anyone else is doing it, but there is usually a checklist somewhere on the talk page with the six items checked off. There will be some variation as people interpret the criteria differently, and occasionally someone will dispute a rating. What is more likely to happen is that over time the article changes enough to be clearly a different class, and will either be taken to GA or downgraded to C. If you downgrade it is customary and expected to explain why.
For example, if you think the content of Sara Sheffield is insufficient, which is quite plausible on superficial inspection, and you choose to downrate to C on this basis, you would be advised to first check that there is other relevant information supported by reliable sources that should be in the article. If you find such information, and there is not too much of it, it may be simpler and more helpful to simply add it to the article. If on the other hand you found that some of the sourcing is unreliable, then tagging for failed verification and downgrading might be more appropriate. Some user discretion and common sense is expected. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 17:27, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood:, I have no affiliation or experience with WP Military History, and I have no desire to downgrade an article unless there is an obvious case of an article failing one of the criteria. However, my experience at comparing articles with their assessments (admittedly, an incredibly small fraction of six million articles) tells me that articles are being assessed as stubs and start class mostly based on the amount of text. Similarly I see assessors start to account for quality better as the word counts go up. So higher word counts seem to be a necessary condition for a C- or B-class article for many evaluators. I have followed this practice when creating assessments for new articles. And an assessment gadget I tried (though I never used it for live edits) a few years ago seemed to be making assessment recommendations based on an algorithm using word counts. So I am now contemplating the other plausible interpretations of B2. Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 18:22, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
@Oldsanfelipe2:, The amount of text is a poor indicator of the quality or completeness of an article. Like number of edits is a poor indicator of the value of one's contributions. In both cases they are used only because they are easy to automate. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 19:02, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: Yet GA and FA require both quantity and quality. Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 19:51, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
@Oldsanfelipe2:, The quantity required for GA and FA is sufficient to cover the topic without gaps, but not too much. How many words would that be? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 08:03, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
Try Halkett boat for size. It's been FA for almost ten years, and nobody has complained about its length apart from a couple of days when it was TFA. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:45, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Removing stub tags

As can be seen here, this user removed the stub tag due to its "uglify"'ing of an article. Is this a valid reason for its removal? Robvanvee 13:12, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

The rationale Mike Novikoff provided is not legit, though there's a case to be made that the article is long enough to not be a stub. Often editors will complain that maintenance templates make the article ugly, which is really just a statement of their perceived ownership. I don't think the stub template needs to be re-added but Mike clearly needs to have a discussion with the community. Chris Troutman (talk) 13:40, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
Thanks Chris. Still waiting for him to reply to me on his talk page but just want to know what the protocol is in such cases. Robvanvee 13:49, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Improving how article assessments are presented to readers

One of the biggest things we can do to improve Wikipedia's reputation for trustworthiness is to be clear to readers about which content we have the most confidence in — otherwise, the less-trustworthy content (which, we need to acknowledge, exists in some amount despite our best efforts) they encounter will color the project as a whole. Our main way to do this is through our indications of article assessments on article pages (since casual readers essentially never visit talk pages), so I want to open a discussion about ways we might change how they are presented. Currently, what we have is:

  • Good articles are identified with and Featured articles with . Hovering the mouse over them displays the text "This is a featured article. Click here for more information." or "This is a good article. Follow the link for more information."
  • Stubs are identified with a variation of {{stub}}, which displays as this:

    This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

  • Start-class through A-class articles are identifiable only through the talk page

There are a few problems here:

  1. It's not clear to readers that featured articles are our top designation and good articles below that. This could be solved by using different terminology, such as "this is a top-quality article" for FA and "this is a high-quality article" for GA. (Also, we should standardize the text about clicking through for more info.)
  2. It's too difficult for readers to figure out that the rating of an article can be found at the top right corner. This could be solved by using different symbols that actually have the title incorporated.
  3. We don't identify start-class through A-class articles, and stubs are identified in a different spot. (I'd be fine with keeping the text at the bottom, just adding something in the upper right as well.)

What do you all think? Sdkb (talk) 01:54, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Stub tags at the bottom of articles are nothing to do with content assessment, there has been much confusion on this matter. Stub tags are within the scope of WP:WSS. Similarly, the {{good article}} and {{featured article}} icons are under the control of WP:GA and WP:FA respectively. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:31, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Thanks for the clarification of projects. My proposal relates to all those projects, then, I guess. Is there somewhere else to which I should move this conversation, or should I just issue invites there to come here? Sdkb (talk) 19:42, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
There are scripts that will display metadata just below the title. Any time I open an article the quality assessment is the first thing displayed after the title, followed by a few other things like number of edits, who created the page, the short description and other useful and interesting stuff and a link to detailed page statistics. Any registered user can load the gadgets and scripts needed. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 18:00, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: That's good to know. I'm thinking here mainly about the large mass of casual readers who never even visit talk pages, let alone consider installing a script. Assessments are easy for experienced editors to find, but for information to reach casual readers, it'll need to be made default. Sdkb (talk) 19:42, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
Sdkb That is the kind of change that would require very wide participation in an RfC to get consensus before making that sort of change. A request to WMF to make some of the changes may be necessary, or all may be possible locally. It is difficult to find out what casual readers want, but some of the people who edit without registration have strong opinions on what they want to be shown by default, and registered editors tend to be hostile to unexpected changes.
You could try WP:VPR but read the header notice first. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 07:37, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: I'm aware that I'm proposing a significant change. I'll probably take it to the Village Pump Idea Lab next, but wanted to get feedback first from those of you here most closely associated with assessments. What do you think of the general principle of making article ratings more accessible to readers? Have any of my proposals been brought up before? Regarding WMF, I don't see how any intervention would be needed from them, since the {{featured article}} template or similar is what adds the star/etc.
As one indication of how little visibility the current system has, though, consider that I just noticed the star was removed by an IP from Pacific swift, which is literally today's featured article, and no one noticed until I just corrected it twelve hours later. Sdkb (talk) 22:14, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
Sdkb In principle I like the idea of indicating assessed quality to the readers by default. Even more so to editors, whether logged in or not. In practice there may be reasons why it may not be a good idea, but opening an RfC is probably going to make the pros and cons a bit clearer, so I think it would be a positive move, even if it only clarifies why we should not do it. One of the objections likely to come up is that the majority of assessments may be out of date or plain wrong, and there would be a lot of work required to get them up to date. For example I have a fairly long list of nearly B-class articles that I want to get up to B at some point, but it is a thing I seldom get around to doing. Article assessment seems to be associated with WikiProjects, and a lot of those have faded into inactivity, which is unfortunate as I think they were good for planning structure and navigation of Wikipedia and filling the local gaps. Getting things rolling again might also get some of the more skilled hackers into building gadgetry to do some of the grunt work, which could eventually lead to semi-automated assessments. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 07:27, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
My feeling is that start-through-B class ratings tend to be much less reliable than the articles that they rate, and that A-class is (at least within the classes of articles that I edit) defunct and non-existent. These ratings may be somewhat helpful to editors, despite their unreliability, as a way of targeting articles in need of improvements, but they should not be shown to readers. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:30, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
@David Eppstein: I agree that they're not as reliable as would be ideal, but I think they're still better than nothing. Making them more visible might also encourage editors to keep them more up to date. Sdkb (talk) 21:40, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
Read what I wrote. You are arguing that they are helpful to editors, not readers, which is in agreement with what I wrote. I don't think they should be visible to readers who are not editors, and I don't think your argument is persuasive that they should be. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:58, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
Sorry, I wasn't clear. By "them", I meant the ratings, not the articles. Sdkb (talk) 23:49, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Music of Quebec

I would like to see the Montreal artist Michel Pagliaro added. He had big hits in French and English on pop music 23:57, 28 March 2020 (UTC)70.29.120.38 (talk)charts in the 1960's and 1970's.

Thanks, Tim Reed

Tim, you're looking for WP:Article requests. You won't get more of a response here since this isn't the proper forum. Best wishes, Sdkb (talk) 16:45, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

The Star

I have been trying to order a Toronto Star for the last week by phone and there is no answer. All I want is to have a Star delivered. How am I to do this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:1970:496A:FE00:A41F:1787:16BD:810B (talk) 15:16, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't the place to get help with that. You want to contact them directly via their website. Sdkb (talk) 16:47, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Question about something I never really thought about

Am I allowed to rate my own articles when they're still new? Prana1111 (talk) 23:52, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

I occasionally rate my own articles stubs when they're clearly not anything more, but more recently, I've stopped doing so. I think it's better for an external rater to come in so that there's another pair of eyes on the article, and one making an independent judgement. I don't know of any firm policy/rule about it. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 00:15, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
@Prana1111: So long as your assessment is considered in line with the quality scale (most WikiProjects use Wikipedia:Content assessment#Quality scale perhaps with slight variations) you can assess up to and including B-Class. For the three highest article classes (FA, A and GA), outside involvement is mandatory. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:08, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Viewing a subset of assessment candidates

I was recently asked about possibly contributing to assessment of biography articles, and I wondered whether it's possible to view a subset of biographies that involved translations from other languages, or by extension, biographies in some particular topic area. Mathglot (talk) 06:53, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Time to deprecate A-class?

I don't know a ton about the history of the class system, but it does seem fairly clear that in practice A-class is pretty much deprecated. If someone who knows the history better feels similarly, it might be time to make a formal proposal to deprecate it. In the meantime, we should definitely be explaining better what the difference between A-class and GA is, since our documentation on that currently doesn't make it clear. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 08:11, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb:: There was Bplus-Class, which shared the same color scheme to GA-Class, means that GA is equivalent to B+. And in a similar way, FA is correspond to A+. There is a huge gap (mainly in comprehensive) between GA/B+ and A-Class, but it's not far (style-like issues) from A-Class to FA or from B-class to GA. It's difficult to imagine that an editor writes FA-level stuff but satisfied with an A-Class assessment. Treating A-Class reviews as FA pre-reviews would be fine, but we already have Peer review. A-Class has its important theoretical value, but awkward to most of WikiProjects.--Lopullinen 21:03, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
Lopullinen, that's interesting (and definitely complex). Would others hold the same view you do, or is the distinction between them a fuzzier matter that hasn't been fully settled? If the former, we should document better, and if the latter, we need further discussion. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:07, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
@Sdkb: A-Class assessment works well in WikiProject Military history. Asking them may might be helpful. --Lopullinen 21:13, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Where did List-Class go?

List-Class has gone missing - the page describes FL-Class and also SL-Class, and most WikiProjects still recognise |class=list, so why is it not described? Has it been removed at some point? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:13, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

@Redrose64: This edit seems to have done the trick. A previous one (diff) introduce a <noinclude> tag that prevented everything below Stub-class from being transcluded. -- Black Falcon (talk) 04:39, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
@Black Falcon: Thank you. @Diametakomisi: Why did your edit add an unbalanced <noinclude>? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:53, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Proposal to deprecate Deferred-Class

This grade was previously used by WikiProject Firearms, but is now unused. A proposal at the WikiProject by User:Molestash to discontinue this grade met with no objections, and currently there are no articles in Category:Deferred-Class Firearms articles. Therefore, I am proposing to discontinue support for this grade at Template:WPBannerMeta and remove it from this page. -- Black Falcon (talk) 04:52, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Black Falcon, support. If the class is unused, this seems like just a formality. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:02, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Atom example of a lifetime of an article

Atom has recently been delisted from FA status and is now currently C-class. Should we keep the atom example of how article classes progress over time, or should we use another example now? Lazman321 (talk) 16:42, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

C class seems a bit low for the article, although I know how difficult it is to present such a significant topic in a single article (I was part of the team that got the German article featured). An article that got featured more recently might be a better candidate, yes. --mfb (talk) 18:47, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

Rating the rating

How about a system similar to those widely used in commercial sites (e.g., Amazon) where the rating (N of stars) is presented along with the number of raters? would this make the rating more transparent and less influenced by individual whims ? or show them as such? Tytire (talk) 17:26, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

No, all ratings other than FA, FM and FP are essentially one person's opinion. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:55, 20 December 2020 (UTC)
individually yes, cumulatively not, possibly. WP's contributions are built on the same principle, very broadly speaking. This 2006 paper says indeed that a system like Amazon's was under discussion then. What's the story since? Tytire (talk) 00:38, 26 December 2020 (UTC)
Assume that in 2015 I rated an article as Start-class. Then assume that in 2020, somebody else reassesses it as C-class. In the five-year interval between those assessments, how do we know how many people agreed with the Start-class assessmsnt? We don't. So, we can only be sure that one person felt that it was Start-class five years ago, and that one person feels that it is C-class now. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:26, 26 December 2020 (UTC)
How about if, like in Amazon, the system records who gave how many stars when ?
Not perfect but the system now borders on meaningless IMHO. Tytire (talk) 10:13, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

Should I, or should I not, assess my articles?

I'm perpetually confused by the assessment system, and getting more so by the day!

  • I used to create articles without assessment. Then I was told by someone (mentioning no names here, but a new page reviewer) that I should add assessments to my articles, so I started doing that, using the values suggested by the Rater tool.
  • Next, I was told by another editor (something of an expert, from what I gather, in one of the projects I often create articles for) that this was not just unnecessary but undesirable, because the assessment should be done by someone who knows the subject well enough to pass judgment, and that I should not be assessing my articles for their project, and generally speaking should only be adding blank templates but leaving them without ratings.
  • For the last few articles I've created I've done just that for most of the projects, adding the suggested rating only for the one project that I feel I know sufficiently well to assess — and within a day or so, a bot goes and fills in the ratings for the other projects, apparently based on the one that I've added. So I'm expecting to be told off any moment now for having again done something wrong!
  • Reading the FAQs on this project page didn't help much, either: it says that "anyone can add or change an article's rating", and then IMO somewhat contradicts this by adding that "individual WikiProjects may have more formal procedures for rating an article".

Clearly I'm too thick to understand — can anyone advice what, if anything, I should be doing regarding assessments in the articles I create (and also more widely, but let's start with that)? Many thanks in advance, --DoubleGrazing (talk) 11:11, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Ask the first two users to discuss? I don't think I have assessed articles I started, except for maybe adding stub class, but I didn't start many articles. I don't think there is harm either way as long as the assessment is reasonable. --mfb (talk) 12:49, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
@DoubleGrazing: In theory, any user can assess the quality of any article up to and including B-Class, but some WikiProjects request that you complete a five- or six-point B-Class checklist if going above C-Class. This means that a number of articles are B-Class for one WikiProject but C-Class for another; but apart from that, most WikiProjects use the same scale for quality (with some variations - the number that use A-Class is in the minority). For the higher ratings (GA, A-Class and FA), you need the involvement of at least one other person. Lists are much easier: if it's not passed a WP:FLC to make it FL-Class, it's either going to be List-class or Stub-class - although some WikiProjects recognise SL-Class for stub lists.
Importance ratings can be harder: a page that is high (or even top) importance for one WikiProject may well be low-importance for another. This difference is intentional: it's the importance to that specific WikiProject and not to Wikipedia as a whole.
In practice, I never assess articles that I create myself for quality, although I always add appropriate WikiProject banners. Sometimes these have |importance= filled in (if it's clear to me), sometimes they don't; but I always leave |class= blank unless the page is in mainspace and it's a disambiguation page, in which case I set |class=dab. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:54, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
Thanks @Redrose64: what you say there about the quality criteria being more or less the same across WP probably explains why, after I've rated my article for the one project that I feel competent to do so, a bot comes and applies the same rating across all projects; makes sense. And your other point about the importance varying across projects also makes sense; would be strange if it didn't. Thanks for explaining that. --DoubleGrazing (talk) 13:25, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
Which bot is that? Please give an example of a page that was rated in this manner. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:17, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
Hi @Redrose64: this is the one I'm using: User:Evad37/rater. And here's an example of what I assessed using it: Maaria Eira. The tool suggested C (for all projects), and I just accepted the suggestion. It was subsequently re-assessed by another editor as Start (mostly commenting for one project, but changing the rating for all), commenting that it was "too short with obvious gaps". Which is fine, I've no issue with it either way, as long as I understand what if anything I'm supposed to do. Cheers, --DoubleGrazing (talk) 06:11, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
People sometimes disagree. In fact, if you look back through the thousands of articles that I've rated over the years, you'll find that I've disagreed with myself. It's rarely worth worrying about. The most I might do is to ask that editor for some hints about how the article ought to be expanded, and whether they could recommend any sources. But honestly, I'd probably not bother to do even that much. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:53, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
@DoubleGrazing: You state The tool suggested C (for all projects), and I just accepted the suggestion. That doesn't sound like any kind of bot to me - they work in the background, performing edits like this - notice the user name, if you click it you're told This user account is a bot with some more explanatory text - try clicking some of those links. Indeed, User:Evad37/rater is not a bot, it's a user script. If you trigger it into action, anything and everything that it does to a page when you click Publish changes is your responsibility. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:14, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
Sorry @Redrose64: we're at cross-purposes — that Evad37/rater is the tool I use(d) to rate my articles, and for that I of course take responsibility (never said otherwise). I only mentioned a bot in the context of, where I fill in the assessment for just one of the projects, some bot goes and fills it in for the others. I can't remember what bot it is, but I will go back and try to find out. --DoubleGrazing (talk) 05:25, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
Seems I was wrong. There is a bot in the picture, the Dreamy Jazz Bot, but it only fills in the assessment for one project, Biography. (In some of my articles there were only two projects, the one I assess and Biography, so I erroneously thought it was doing all the other projects when it only does that one.) There is then someone who does do all projects, seemingly on the basis of the one I've assessed using Evad37/rater, but that is a human editor. My mistake. --DoubleGrazing (talk) 05:47, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
@DoubleGrazing, I agree with @Mfb: Whenever you get conflicting advice, let the people giving you unsolicited advice settle their differences directly. If you're looking for a third (fifth?) opinion on it, I'd prefer that you rate as many articles for quality yourself, especially when the rating is an obvious stub or obvious start (which is most articles).
Hi @WhatamIdoing: thank you, noted.
The ORES project has been used to do quality ratings. If you're using User:Evad37/rater, it'll automatically calculate/guess the quality rating for you. I think it tends to slightly over-rate well-sourced articles and articles that contain lists, but if your own opinion aligns with it, then it is a very defensible quality rating. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:35, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
Yes, that is the one I'm using. And yes, it does seem to err on the high side, albeit not by a huge margin (from what I can gather). Which, as the article creator (I mostly rate my own), I'm of course happy to accept. :) --DoubleGrazing (talk) 06:11, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

New reader-focused page

I've just created Help:Assessing article quality, which is aimed specifically at helping non-editing readers understand and make use of the quality assessments. Feedback is welcome! {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:53, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Crescent Falls is Start-class now

The stub-class example article is no longer a stub, so we need a new example for a stub-class article. Maybe Twickler Cone or Kongde Ri? I don't know if we need anything special with these examples or not. -Mr-Ace (talk) 03:03, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

We don't need a new example. All of the examples are given by means of permalinks, so that you can see the article as it was at the time that it was assessed as the given class. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:58, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Ring-tailed cardinalfish as start class example

Template:Grading scheme, which is transcluded here, gives Special:Permalink/845953970 as an example of a start class article. I'm having a hard time seeing how that fits with the criteria. The "Editing suggestions" column for start class says:

Providing references to reliable sources should come first; the article also needs substantial improvement in content and organisation. Also improve the grammar, spelling, writing style and improve the jargon use.

But this article already has many references to what appear to be reliable sources. The organization seems reasonable. I don't see any problems with spelling/grammar/writing style, other than maybe one sentence fragment and some issues with the placement of refs relative to punctuation. On the whole, I'd say it's in a much better state than our C-class example, which has a significantly lower citation density (with many {{cn}} tags), poor reference formatting, and much more questionable organization. Colin M (talk) 22:32, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Proposed re-write

Is it just me, or is this page terribly outdated? This page currently makes it sound like the end goal of the stub-class to featured article pipeline is to produce a CD-ROM version of Wikipedia for the Version 1.0 Editorial Team (when will they make a Macbook with an optical drive again? enquiring minds want to know.) The content assessment scale serves a more general purpose now, which is mostly to drive readers to exceptional content, and editors to unexceptional articles which are in dire need of editing help. Can I attempt a re-write of this page so that the historical purpose of this page is noted, but its present purpose is more understandable? Schierbecker (talk) 06:46, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Request for article re-assessment

Substantial changes have been made to Homotopia (festival), could someone please re-assess the article on the quality scale? It is currently C-Class. Many thanks. Richie wright1980 (talk) 21:42, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Statistics section "All rated articles by quality and importance" table

Is there a way for the bot that populates this table to make lists of the intersection cell contents? If you want to find (for example) the Mid-Importance B-Class articles you currently have a choice between looking through ~150,000 B-class articles or (even worse) >800,000 Mid-Importance ones. The bot obviously has this information or else it couldn't populate the table so why isn't there a clickable link in the cell to list those ~45,000 articles? Or any other combination of ratings? Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 05:46, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

@Eggishorn: Have you tried WP:PETSCAN? In the first (Categories) tab, locate the "Depth" entry item, set that to 2; locate the "Categories" box and in that, enter 
B-Class articles
Mid-importance articles
and make sure that against "Combination", "Intersection" is selected. Then click the "Page properties" tab, select "Talk" and de-select all others. Now go for the "Other sources" tab, locate the "Namespaces" selection, and select "Change to page/topic". Then click Do it!. This will list the articles. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:16, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
@Redrose64:, Thanks! That worked perfectly. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 00:03, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

Date stamps for content assessment

As of now, it is quite difficult to find out when the content assessment was made and often the assessment may be several years old and not corresponding to the current level of the article. Would it be possible to add a time stamp on these assessments (in the same way as for the templates indicating need of editing in the article itself)? Ideally, this would be done retroactively with robots going through and adding time stamps to all those assessments already made. --Olle Terenius (UU) (talk) 10:15, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

@Olle Terenius (UU), this is a good idea. I think that the way to make it happen would be to leave a note at Template talk:WPBannerMeta about getting a date parameter added, and then talk to the individual rater scripts about supporting it. This sort of thing is more likely to happen if it is done automagically, without expecting people to remember to type something extra manually. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:02, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

re. edit summary

Thinker78, if you want to snark and complain, you can do it where it leaves a record instead of in dummy edits. What do you want to snark and complain about from my removal of "Once an article reaches the A-Class, it is considered "complete", although edits will continue to be made"? Vaticidalprophet 08:45, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

Stop icon Welcome to Wikipedia. Although every user is expected to be civil, it seems that you are being too friendly. Please use Jimbo Wales' user page for any test "friendliness" you might have, and our guideline to when you have to be serious, even when sleeping. Thank you. Thinker78 (talk) 01:05, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Assess Jalal al-Din Mangburnu

Hello there. I have expanded and imrpoved the article about Jalal al-Din Mangburnu significantly. Can anyone assess it? I think it can be as high as A. --81.213.215.83 (talk) 20:34, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Rapid-fire assessment with collateral issues

I'm hoping someone with experience in quality assessment could offer some feedback at this user talk page discussion concerning bot-like quality assessment, with some other relatively minor issues mixed in. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 19:32, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Summary style/lead section and article ratings

I realize that rating are fundamentally a "developed matter" to Wikiprojects, but most of them seem to use the standard boilerplate for the "class" criteria, so I thought a central query might be of some benefit. Where does construction of an adequate lede fall? If an article has a "B-Class" body, but a minimal open section, is that arguably a matter of MoS compliance, and thus not something that a "B" must meet? But would likely (and this now gets beyond strict Wikiproject scope) fail to pass GAR? 109.255.211.6 (talk) 14:13, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Template:Class update

I'm working towards upgrading {{class}} to use Lua and a JSON definition file. Not least because this affects ~17% of all pages, I would appreciate input and/or review at Template talk:Class#Move to Lua/JSON version. Please respond there, or ping me if you respond here. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 17:36, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Examples

We should update the example articles, as some of them aren't even the same status as they were (Like Crescent Falls). Urban Versis 32KB ⚡ (talk | contribs) 19:10, 19 June 2022 (UTC)

The list has permalinks, not links to the cuuent version; and the point of using permalinks is to show the articles in the condition that they were in at the time of the assessment. This way we don't have to keep updating the list. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:32, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
Oh, I see. Urban Versis 32KB ⚡ (talk | contribs) 19:34, 19 June 2022 (UTC)

New article. Looking for review.

Hello everyone, I just joined the project. I've been working on author article: Francisco Tario and I was looking for opinions on what to improve. DemianStratford (talk) 21:07, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Are the selectors of FA massive Taylor Swift fans?

Give there are 6 million articles on English WP, how do we end up with yet another Taylor Swift song as the Featured Article on the home page of Wikipedia? GimliDotNet (talk) 04:49, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

@GimliDotNet: the short answer is that first of all, editors who are passionate about writing articles about Taylor Swift take the time to improve those articles and then nominate them at WP:FAC for promotion as featured articles against a strict set of criteria (WP:WIAFA). Per WP:FA, currently "there are 6,156 featured articles out of 6,560,549 articles on the English Wikipedia (about 0.09% or one out of every 1,060 articles)." WP:TFA draws from the pool of featured articles for its daily scheduling, not from the full corpus of articles, and every FA will typically expect to run at least once as the TFA at some point; they are eligible to run again a few years after a first appearance or for other special reasons. The coordinators do a good job of intentionally spacing out topics proportionally to their prevalence in the FA pool, but they may only choose topics from that smaller pool of articles.
The answer to the implied question is that if you'd like to see other topics appear as the TFA, we encourage you to improve the articles and nominate them at FAC. Once promoted, your favorite topic could then appear as Today's Featured Article on the Wikipedia Main Page. Imzadi 1979 → 05:13, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
As above. The subject group that I seem to see come up often are the articles on U.S. commemorative half-dollar coins (something like 40 of which are FAs). Category:FA-Class American currency articles suggests that other values are available. This means that the numismatists have quality writers with access to good sourcing. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:40, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
Actually, it just takes one. Other things the "FA selectors" aren't massive fans of are hurricanes, battleships, and English football. Johnbod (talk) 15:45, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Improper_handling_of_assessment_for_inactive_WikiProjects Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 06:47, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Standardize Disambig and Redirect-class

Propose we finally standardize "Disambig" and "Redirect" class. They should be used for all articles once we move to project-independent quality assessments, and I hope we can make this change before the project-independent proposal goes through. DFlhb (talk) 21:25, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean by standardize. Please explain more? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:39, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
They're currently listed as "Non-standard grades", despite being used by almost all WikiProjects, and i think we should keep using them once project-independent. DFlhb (talk) 22:50, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
Ah, I see your point. But this is nothing to do with quality. It is more a type of article. I would prefer to keep stub/start/c/b/ga/fa for quality and then find another way to classify pages based on type: article, list, media, template, redirect, disambig, etc. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 23:23, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
How would that work? AFAIK, almost all projects have adopted Disambig/Redirect class, and they're useful in the assessment tables; for example to get a list of all redirects and check they're all tagged with the correct rcats. Why would we separate those from the assessment mechanism? DFlhb (talk) 10:44, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
While I agree with Martin, I can see that Redirect/Disambig classes are mutually exclusive from FA/GA/B/C/Start/Stub. No redirect or disambig is ever a B-class article for example. So, I think it works good as is now. The only class I am particularly disappointed at is "Future"-class. Like what on earth is stopping a 2028 Olympic article from being B-class, or a 2024 US presidential election article from being Start-class? Furthermore, if we have "Future"-*class*, why not "Current"-*class* for events that are running currently, say, a sports championship? This particular class system needs to split out and modified into something else. —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 11:57, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
I of course agree that these classes aren't article-related; just pointing out that they're essential to assessment tables for many projects, and should be supported by the WPBannerShell once we switch to project-independent grades. I favor splitting the assessment criteria into three tables: articles, lists (as is currently done on MILHIST), and "Other pages", which would include Redirect/Disambig but get rid of the junk like Future-class, that some projects may retain, but that we'll never use for project-independent ratings in WPBannerShell. DFlhb (talk) 12:43, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
Okay, we're never going to have a featured redirect, but let consider a more obvious example: lists. (Edit conflicted with DFIhb!) Are lists articles or not? If they are, can they be assessed against the article quality criteria - for example could we not have a B-class list? Of course we already have featured lists. If they are not lists, should we have some separate criteria for lists which would allow some grades in between List-class (which basically means nothing) and featured-class? I also think there would be scope for assessing other types of article against quality criteria. For example, a disambiguation page which has been assessed as meeting all requirements in MOS:DAB could be assessed as "good" or "compliant". Templates are rated in {{Template rating}} which could be incorporated. In general there are lots of reasons to separate type from quality, and to have separate quality classes depending on the type. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:00, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
On that note, I'm going to shamelessly brag about pi:Wikipedia:Page rating which I created for use on another language Wikipedia, where I'm an administrator, but never went through with it at the end. (Yeah, I kept A-class between GA & B class, unlike enwp) —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 14:13, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
Current-class is a thing though, isn't it? —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 02:07, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, but not many WikiProjects have it set up, and even fewer seem to actually use it (see how many empty entries there are at Category:Current-Class articles). One of those that does use it seriously is WikiProject Weather, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Weather/Assessment#Quality assessments, Category:Current-Class Weather articles and (for example) Talk:2022–23 European windstorm season. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:15, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

First draft

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/B-Class criteria

First draft, feel free to tweak wording as necessary. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 21:58, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

It seems from the message from Shepbot that this went live over the US independence day holiday. The differences between the draft and Good Article Criteria seem, at first glance, to be subtle. Is there a checklist of those differences? --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 11:09, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Essentially B-Class articles should be 'wannabe GAs' in the same way that A-Class articles are wannabe FAs. In the same way that the GA criteria are watered-down versions of the FA criteria, the B-Class criteria are watered-down versions of the GA ones. In terms of specific differences, here are a few that I can see:
  • Stability is required for GA; this is entirely absent from B
  • Neutrality is required at GA; no mention of this at B
  • "Well written" (GA) verses "reasonably well written" (B)
  • A good general compliance with the MoS is expected at GA, but only a cursory check (mainly of layout and structure issues) is required at B-Class.
Hope this helps. Happy‑melon 20:30, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Versus GA

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/B-Class criteria

It seems the draft B-class criteria include something that not even the GA criteria do: coverage so broad that all major topics are covered. GA does not require this, and an article can pass GA with some material of major significance missing. The GA process will encourage inclusion of the additional material, but the criteria do not require it.

Also, a note on wording for "does not contain obvious omissions or inaccuracies". I would argue that no article ever contains omissions. If they were contained in the article, then they wouldn't be omissions, now would they? So, QED, every article will automatically pass this criterion as worded.  :) --EncycloPetey (talk) 06:33, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Shortcut

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/B-Class criteria

A shortcut to the six criteria would be extremely helpful. Bradford44 (talk) 15:44, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Reference to FA

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/A-Class criteria
...should make the article a viable candidate for FA.

What about articles that are too short to make it to FA? Can they ever become "A class"? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:42, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Infobox text

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/B-Class criteria

B-class is in many ways the key to the system, so I welcome this page. However I see it says "It should have an infobox where relevant and useful." Can this be changed to "It may have an infobox where relevant and useful." (my emphasis) Infoboxes are generally accepted for quantitative information, but controversial for biographies etc. --Kleinzach 06:29, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

If you put the emphasis elsewhere, and say "It should have an infobox where relevant and useful", it changes the meaning completely, so I don't think this is as important as it might be. Can you show us some examples of B-standard articles without infoboxes? And I still (although I haven't been looking closely) haven't seen any indication of that discussion I asked for however long ago :D. Happy‑melon 08:33, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
Infoboxes have been controversial on WP so some editors will think this is important. As for examples . . . almost all the assessments I see now are only nominal. If you want to see a series of B-class articles that have been fully assessed, see Category:B-Class Richard Wagner articles. These don't have infoboxes though they do have navboxes. In practice infoboxes are not appropriate for many articles, just like other ancillary matter. Horses for courses.--Kleinzach 09:19, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Suggested rewording (Item 5)

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/B-Class criteria

I'd like to suggest this:

5. The article contains supporting materials where appropriate.

Illustrations are encouraged, though not required. Diagrams and an infobox etc. should be included where they are relevant and useful to the content.

Best. --Kleinzach 00:29, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

To be honest, I don't see the point of changing the wording—the older version indicates that images and infoboxes are just examples of supporting materials that WikiProjects may consider appropriate. If an infobox is inappropriate in an article, then the B-Class criteria don't require it. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:11, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
I'm happy with your interpretation, but it's not what the text says. The text prioritizes the infobox both in bold and in the text below. My text above doesn't do this. I realize it's a bit of a bore to have other people pick over your sentences, however B-class is key to the system and it's better have a text with neutral nuances. --Kleinzach 04:08, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
I've now added the 'tweak' to the text as suggested. Thanks. --Kleinzach 01:53, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Why does the revised wording say that illustrations are not required, yet diagrams and infoboxes are? Sandpiper (talk) 19:09, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
An interesting point. Perhaps we should rephrase to something like Relevant and useful supporting items, such as images and infoboxes, are encouraged, but not required. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:03, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
Yes, I think one sentence would be better, but slightly reworded to avoid ambiguity: Relevant and useful supporting items, such as illustrations, diagrams and infoboxes, are encouraged, but not required. --Kleinzach 23:09, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
Does that actually improve clarity? Can you give any example of an illustration or a diagram on Wikipedia that is not an image? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:30, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
Ah, from experience I know that some people on WP think an image is a photograph. That's why I avoid using the word. --Kleinzach 23:32, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
It's Wikipedia:Ten things you may not know about images on Wikipedia #6. I'd rather educate the ignorant than make this sound like it applies to everything except photographs (which is what I think "illustrations and diagrams" will do). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:58, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
OK. Let's say: Relevant and useful supporting items (such as diagrams, illustrations, infoboxes and photographs) are encouraged, but not required. --Kleinzach 00:07, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
That's rather at odds with the bold summary, which explicitly states that such materials should be included. Aren't we really trying to say "it should have X, Y and Z where appropriate, but no individual component is mandatory"? I like the new definition of "supporting items", but changing the wording from "... should be included where useful and relevant" makes the criterion essentially useless: it sets no objective requirements. How about The article contains supporting materials where appropriate. Diagrams, illustrations, infoboxes, photographs and other content should be included where they are relevant and useful to the content. ?? Happy‑melon 00:22, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
That would also be fine by me. --Kleinzach 00:51, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
It doesn't work for me. Images are not required for B class articles. An article can have exactly zero supporting items and still qualify for this status. Images are not even required for GA class; how could we possibly say that they "should" (which rapidly turns into "must") be present to qualify as B class? It would be pretty silly to have an article that meets GA but doesn't meet B class simply because there are no relevant images available. B class requirements need to be clearly lower than GA class. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:35, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
Er, GA#6?? "A good article is illustrated, if possible, by images"?? I agree that we're implying that the criterion is subject to the media being available, when we should make this explicit. A B-Class article should contain any available media that are appropriate and useful; an absence of media because there are none uploaded should not disqualify an article, but not using media that are available should. Or should it? Where on the scale do we want to place this requirement? Happy‑melon 18:04, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
See footnote 6: "The presence of images is not, in itself, a requirement for Good articles. However, if images (including other media) with acceptable copyright status are appropriate and readily available, then some such images should be provided."
Your suggestion here is so similar to this footnote as to not be materially different. I think we should "encourage" (perhaps even "strongly encourage"), but specifically not require such supporting materials. Pretty much, I think that we must specifically not require these materials on the grounds that GA specifically does not require these materials. B class articles need to have obviously lower requirements. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:49, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Revising

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/A-Class criteria

Per this discussion, we need to revise and expand these criteria, and make them a bit more visible. In order to do this, I'll break this down into a few different discussion points. While discussing these, I think it is important to look at the current criteria but also to keep an open mind about them, and be willing to change them if needed. –Drilnoth (T • C) 13:09, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

What counts as a review?

What counts as an A-Class review? Does it need to be a more formal review, kind of like a project-scale FAC, or can a small group of editors simply agree that it is A-Class without a full subpage for discussion? Can these editors be involved with the article, or do they have to be uninvolved like at GAN and FAC? If a more formal review is wanted, the implementation of that for smaller projects can be discussed later. –Drilnoth (T • C) 13:09, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Something similar to a peers review with the A rating attributed by consensus based on defined A class criterion. Can participate to A Class review anyone knowledgeable in the reviewed article field. Editors wanting to get the most interesting input can cross post A review notice in ANY relevant project page. --KrebMarkt 08:56, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
That's kind of what I was thinking. –Drilnoth (T • C) 12:31, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Me too. I think we should encourage the idea that an A-class review needs more than one editor taking part, but that we should get the plurality of opinions by advertising the review around the Community (each article will have different needs of advertising) rather than by having a central system. We can always offer WT:ASSESS and WT:AWG as "advice centres" if editors are not sure which projects (or other Community pages) to contact.
I think it's a good idea to encourage projects to do the review at a separate page, which could be at WP:PR for small projects or an "A-class review department" for larger projects. That way we get some traceability into the process. Still, we need to be diplomatic about how we word that, so as not to disavow the reviews which have already taken place.
Another point that would be useful (IMHO) for small projects is to point out that you can place class=A at the same time as you start the review. I know the purists won't like that suggestion, but I don't think it's a huge grade inflation and it might actually motivate people to consider grading articles at A-class. If you say that you have to find the decent article, then organise the review, then follow the review, then decide consensus at the end, then remember to change the class on the article talk page, it all gets a bit bureaucratic, even for something that most projects won't be doing very often. Physchim62 (talk) 15:41, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Call me a purist if you like, but I don't like the idea of tagging something as A-Class before the review. It's no more work to add the tag after rather than before, and posting it before would devalue A-Class as a "trophy". Also, I can imagine many assessments getting lost halfway, but the A tag would probably get left. Other than that, I think the above proposals sound very workable. I'd like to suggest that for a small project, a discussion on the WikiProject talk page may suffice, as long as (say) at least three out of three people agree (including at least two not heavily involved with the content). For an example of a project talk page discussion - not for A-Class, but for 0.7 - see this example; I could imagine a similar discussion for an A-Class review. If one person objects, I'm not sure how it should go from there, but let's agree on general approaches first. Walkerma (talk) 08:02, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
Re: posting the grade before the review is complete, I agree with Walkerma. Ncmvocalist (talk) 16:05, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

What are the criteria?

B-, GA-, and FA-Classes all have a firm list of criteria which must be met, but A-Class doesn't have a similar list. Should A-Class have similar criteria to those classes? If so, should it really be its own set of criteria (for example, emphasizing content over style), or should it be based on the GA or FA criteria? If based on GA, the main difference is that a larger number of people will see it. If based on FA, it means that a number of people believe that it should be of Featured quality, but maybe they are to involved with the article to be able to properly review it at FAC? –Drilnoth (T • C) 13:09, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

I think the guidance on this page should be KISS-compliant. At present, we have three criteria:
  • well-structured
  • essentially complete
  • reviewed
Within these wide criteria, projects might well wish to be more specific, possibly even coming up with a checklist such as this one from WP:MILHIST or this one from WP:CHEMICALS. Note that some of the MILHIST criteria are useless for assessing chemicals articles and some of the CHEMICALS criteria are useless for assessing MILHIST articles!
The three criteria are not independent of each other. "Reviewed" is there as a criteria to get other opinions on the completeness of the content, for example. Many projects have suggestions for the section headers which they expect to see in their better articles: this goes someway towards checking for "well-structured" and for "essentially complete". To give an example, WP:ELEMENTS has fairly strict guidelines as to the layout of articles about chemical elements, because otherwise they would not know when to stop writing about some of the subjects – these articles seem to be well regarded by the rest of the Community judging by the proportion of featured articles among them. Physchim62 (talk) 10:07, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
I agree entirely with this. Detailed A-Class criteria and review processes are a matter for individual WikiProjects. WP1.0 provides a framework within which such criteria can be elaborated. Lets keep it simple and rely on the wiki principle. Geometry guy 09:06, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

5 or 6 criteria?

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/B-Class criteria

Has there been a recent expansion from 5 to 6 criteria? If so, what is the strategy for implementing this project-/template-wide? I followed a wikilink on the {{WikiProject Iran}} template which only supports 5 criteria and I would have expected at least a mention of this discrepancy on this page as well as instructions for dealing with it. __meco (talk) 14:30, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

I can't see that there has been any real change to this since August. Am I missing something? --Kleinzach 02:21, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
That WPB seems to support six b-checklist parameters to me. Happy‑melon 07:32, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Question

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/A-Class criteria

Probably not the best place to ask, but how does A-class differ from GA-class?74.33.174.133 (talk) 00:48, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

The simplest difference: GA is assigned by ONE EXTERNAL reviewer (from outside the WikiProject), using the GA criteria. A-Class is assigned by (at least in principle, we're ironing it out this summer) a peer review by SEVERAL INTERNAL reviewers. Walkerma (talk) 01:13, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Expanding the use of the A-class review

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/A-Class criteria

I feel that an A-class review is useful, sorting out articles that (while perhaps not quite good enough, or well known enough, for whatever reason, to make it to FA), in terms of quality, equal those of a professional encyclopedia. I am a little surprised that only a few WikiProjects have very active A-class review sections, and am wondering if it would be possible to make this category as prominent as either FA or GA. Any ideas? DCItalk 17:34, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

I think this idea has value. A problem with some (most?) FA reviews is that they focus very heavily on the kind of stuff that the editor of a hard copy encyclopedia or magazine would do i.e. syntax and grammar, style issues etc. but not so much on the actual content. As I am much more interested in the latter my enthusiasm has waned. Writing a GA from scratch may be about the same effort as taking the same article through FA, but as often as not with very little additional information being provided for readers in the second stage. The only thing I can think of would be to make one of the criteria for an FAC to be that it is already A class. That would ensure that it had received a genuine content peer-review beforehand. Ben MacDui 19:32, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/B-Class criteria

Is there a way to find or search examples of B-class articles? --Elisunshine01 (talk) 15:31, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Category:B-Class articles has nearly 2000 subcategories. Everything in those should be B-Class. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:05, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Criterion 1

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/B-Class criteria

This sentence from criterion 1 confuses me: "The use of neither <ref> tags nor citation templates such as {{cite web}} is required." It seems that there should not be any <ref> tags or citation templates. Could this be reworded in order to make it less confusing? Bulldog talk da contribs go rando 19:53, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Better now? Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 19:56, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
That was quick. Thank you! Bulldog talk da contribs go rando 20:02, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
I'm still confused.... What is required? In order to satisfy B class, do any and all ref tags need to be removed completely? If they cannot exist in B class articles, then what should be in their place? It might be good to just have it read, "ref tags and citation templates are prohibited". Thanks. DavidBoudreau (talk) 15:33, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
@DavidBoudreau: No, where it says "The use of neither <ref> tags nor citation templates such as {{cite web}} is required." doesn't mean that <ref>...</ref> and {{cite web}} are prohibited, it means that they are optional. Various methods exist for referencing, and Wikipedia does not favour any one style over another. It so happens that one of the most popular styles uses templates like {{cite web}} enclosed in <ref>...</ref>, so some people believe these to be mandatory - but they're not. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:42, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
Thank you Redrose64- I was worried I'd have to redo a lot of citations. In any case, I still think the criteria could be expressed more clearly, for what it's worth. Maybe, as you explained, "The use of ref tags and/or citation templates such as cite web are optional, but not required." DavidBoudreau (talk) 20:06, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
Have a look at some featured articles - particularly those that have been Today's Featured Article recently (lists for March 2014 and April 2014). Featured Article is a somewhat higher standard than B-class, so if any given referencing style is OK for FA, it's bound to be acceptable for B-Class. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:32, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
Thanks Redrose64-- all the more reason to express the B class criteria more clearly on this page's explanation. :) (FA would be great! Not sure I'm quite up to that standard just yet, though.) DavidBoudreau (talk) 04:22, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
Amended. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:37, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Checklist

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/B-Class criteria

Hello, friends. This is probably my first contribution to 1.0, since having just discovered it. I would like to add to the WP:BCLASS document, the B class checklist template as seen at Template:WikiProject_Technology. It should be as easy as possible, for a B candidate to track its work in progress, and to prove to future editors how an existing B class is warranted and maintained. As with Wikipedia 1.0 itself, it's impossible to find unless you already know what it is and what it's called. I stumbled on both *far* *far* too tragically late in my editing lifetime. Even though I knew what it was, I searched throughout the night for it and finally found this document when I searched for "wikipedia b class criteria" until I recalled the specific word "checklist". This should be displayed on the article of, and explicitly supported in the banner of, every WikiProject template — as well as every article Talk page — on Wikipedia. The journey from stub to C isn't very far, and it's a hop/skip/jump to B if the subject is notable and the editors are made aware that it's there for the taking. Furthermore, I'm perfectly aware of its existence, but I keep forgetting the criteria! Thank you for everything you do.

<!-- B-Class checklist --> <!-- 1. It is suitably referenced, and all major points are appropriately cited. --> |B-Class-1= <!-- 2. It reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain major omissions or inaccuracies. --> |B-Class-2= <!-- 3. It has a defined structure, including a lead section and one or more sections of content. --> |B-Class-3= <!-- 4. It is free from major grammatical errors. --> |B-Class-4= <!-- 5. It contains appropriate supporting materials, such as an infobox, images, or diagrams. --> |B-Class-5= <!-- 6. It is written from a neutral point of view. --> |B-Class-6=

— Smuckola (Email) (Talk) 07:34, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't understand why the checklist at Template:WikiProject Technology should be added here. Each WikiProject formulates their own criteria, e.g. see Template:WikiProject Germany/doc. The one at this page is for the specific purpose of Wikipedia 1.0 (which may or may not be alive). -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 08:31, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
@Michael Bednarek: ...huh? It's the same thing we already have. But in a utility-formatted manner. — Smuckola (Email) (Talk) 19:27, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Number of references

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/B-Class criteria

What would be a suitable minimum number of references a B-class article should contain? --JorisvS (talk) 22:26, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

How long is a piece of string? --Redrose64 (talk) 22:44, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
I know there is not a hard-and-fast rule, but criterion 1 does read "The article is suitably referenced, with inline citations." [emphasis mine]. What about an article that has everything accompanied by inline citations, but only uses five different sources? --JorisvS (talk) 09:03, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
@JorisvS: As I understand it, the guideline for creating an article or for C class is at least three RSes. It would seem that you'd want your five sources to be definite and different RSes with substantial coverage. Some RSes are big books or magazine articles. Five reliable sources is a lot, if it actually covers all of a significant amount of encyclopedic content. What's the article? — Smuckola(talk) 16:24, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
Earth-grazing meteoroid of 13 October 1990. --JorisvS (talk) 17:06, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
@JorisvS: Wow, that's amazing. It has well more than three reliable-looking sources, I magically assume those sources are really impressively deep in content coverage, and they are thoroughly cited inline, so it seems suitably referenced to me. As a passerby who knows nothing of the subject to actually verify any of these assumptions, the article looks very impressive and meets the overall verbal description of the goals of B status. I've found those verbal goals to be very helpful overall, in creating outer boundaries in situations like this where I'm not sure about the inner boundaries. I can't find at the moment where those are listed, but it's a big colored table at some Wikiproject like Technology or Military History. I wish there was someone more expert than me to comment on this for you. Are you disputing or advocating the B status? — Smuckola(talk) 06:20, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
Its feel was already better than C class, but it only had five references, which is not terribly much and had me wondering if that's enough. It has recently gotten three more, though, so now it's clear it's B class. In fact, it has been nominated for GA to see whether it gets that far and (especially if not) what feedback it gets. --JorisvS (talk) 09:48, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
@JorisvS: Wow. That's the most extensive article about the quickest flash of "nothing" that I've ever seen. ;) Good job. — Smuckola(talk) 16:44, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Is this even relevant any more?

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/A-Class criteria

Does anyone do A class reviews any more? All I see are GA or FA. --Gaff (talk) 06:04, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

WP:MILHIST, certainly. There may be others. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:30, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Suggestion

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Content assessment/A-Class criteria

As I see that plenty of people even question why A-class exist, would it not be appropriate to create an A-class tag to place on an A-class assessed articles front page. Just like with FA nd GA-class. It would perhaps make it more editors willing to take time to nominate articles for A-class. Today only GA and FA class articles got a tag for the front page of the articles being assassed as such. Just a suggestion.--BabbaQ (talk) 00:45, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

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