Wikipedia:WikiProject United States History/Assessment

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Welcome to the assessment department of WikiProject United States History! This department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's United States History articles. While much of the work is done in conjunction with the WP:1.0 program, the article ratings are also used within the project itself to aid in recognising excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work.

The ratings are done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the {{USHistoryTalk}} project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:United States History articles by quality and Category:United States History articles by importance, which serve as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist.

Contents

[edit] Frequently asked questions

How do I add an article to the WikiProject? 
Just add {{USHistoryTalk}} to the talk page; there's no need to do anything else.
How can I get my article rated? 
Please list it in the section for assessment requests below.
Who can assess articles? 
Any member of the United States History WikiProject is free to add—or change—the rating of an article. Please add your name to the list of participants if you wish to assess articles on a regular basis.
Why didn't the reviewer leave any comments? 
Unfortunately, due to the volume of articles that need to be assessed, we are unable to leave detailed comments in most cases. If you have particular questions, you might ask the person who assessed the article; they will usually be happy to provide you with their reasoning.
Where can I get more comments about my article? 
The Status requester can conduct more thorough examination of articles; please submit it for review there.
What if I don't agree with a rating? 
You can list it in the section for assessment requests below, and someone will take a look at it. Alternately, you can ask any member of the project to rate the article again.
Aren't the ratings subjective? 
Yes, they are (see, in particular, the disclaimers on the importance scale), but it's the best system we've been able to devise; if you have a better idea, please don't hesitate to let us know!
How can I keep track of changes in article ratings? 
A full log of changes over the past thirty days is available here. If you are just looking for an overview, however, the statistics may be more accessible.

If you have any other questions not listed here, please feel free to ask them on the discussion page for this department.

[edit] Instructions

An article's assessment is generated from the class and importance parameters in the {{United States HistoryTalk}} project banner on its talk page (see the project banner instructions for more details on the exact syntax):

{{United States HistoryTalk| ... | class=??? | importance=??? | ...}}

The following values may be used for the class parameter:

Articles for which a valid class is not provided are listed in Category:Unassessed United States History articles. The class should be assigned according to the quality scale below.

The following values may be used for the importance parameter:

  • Top (adds articles to Category:Top-importance United States History articles)
  • High (adds articles to Category:High-importance United States History articles)
  • Mid (adds articles to Category:Mid-importance United States History articles)
  • Low (adds articles to Category:Low-importance United States History articles)

The parameter is not used if an article's class is set to NA, and may be omitted in those cases. The importance should be assigned according to the importance scale below.

[edit] Quality scale

Article progress grading scheme
Label Criteria Reader's experience Editor's experience Examples
Featured article FA
{{FA-Class}}		 Reserved exclusively for articles that have received "Featured article" status after peer review, and meet the current criteria for featured articles. Definitive. Outstanding, thorough article; a great source for encyclopedic information. No further editing necessary, unless new published information has come to light. India (as of July 6 2006)
A
{{A-Class}}		 Provides a well-written, reasonably clear and complete description of the topic, as described in How to write a great article. It should be of a length suitable for the subject, with a well-written introduction and an appropriate series of headings to break up the content. It should have sufficient external literature references, preferably from the "hard" (peer-reviewed where appropriate) literature rather than websites. Should be well illustrated, with no copyright problems. At the stage where it could at least be considered for featured article status, corresponds to the "Wikipedia 1.0" standard. Very useful to readers. A fairly complete treatment of the subject. A non-expert in the subject matter would typically find nothing wanting. May miss a few relevant points. Minor edits and adjustments would improve the article, particularly if brought to bear by a subject-matter expert. In particular, issues of breadth, completeness, and balance may need work. Peer-review would be helpful at this stage. Sydney
Good article GA
{{GA-Class}}		 The article has passed through the Good article nomination process and been granted GA status, meeting the good article standards. This should be used for articles that still need some work to reach featured article standards, but that are otherwise good. Good articles that may succeed in FAC should be considered A-Class articles, but being a Good article is not a requirement for A-Class. Useful to nearly all readers. A good treatment of the subject. No obvious problems, gaps, excessive information. Adequate for most purposes, but other encyclopedias could do a better job. Some editing will clearly be helpful, but not necessary for a good reader experience. If the article is not already fully wikified, now is the time. Eric Bana, Uluru,Kannur District
B
{{B-Class}}		 Has several of the elements described in "start", usually a majority of the material needed for a completed article. Nonetheless, it has significant gaps or missing elements or references, needs substantial editing for English language usage and/or clarity, balance of content, or contains other policy problems such as copyright, NPOV or NOR. With NPOV a well written B-class may correspond to the "Wikipedia 0.5" or "usable" standard. Articles that are close to GA status but don't meet the Good article criteria should be B- or Start-class articles. Useful to many, but not all, readers. A casual reader flipping through articles would feel that they generally understood the topic, but a serious student or researcher trying to use the material would have trouble doing so, or would risk error in derivative work. Considerable editing is still needed, including filling in some important gaps or correcting significant policy errors. Articles for which cleanup is needed will typically have this designation to start with. Boomerang.
Start
{{Start-Class}}		 The article has a meaningful amount of good content, but it is still weak in many areas, and may lack a table. For example an article on Africa might cover the geography well, but be weak on history and culture. Has at least one serious element of gathered materials, including any one of the following:
  • a particularly useful picture or graphic
  • multiple links that help explain or illustrate the topic
  • a subheading that fully treats an element of the topic
  • multiple subheadings that indicate material that could be added to complete the article
 Not useless. Some readers will find what they are looking for, but most will not. Most articles in this category have the look of an article "under construction" and a reader genuinely interested in the topic is likely to seek additional information elsewhere. Substantial/major editing is needed, most material for a complete article needs to be added. This article usually isn't even good enough for a cleanup tag: it still needs to be built. Jimmy Barnes
Stub
{{Stub-Class}}		 The article is either a very short article or a rough collection of information that will need much work to bring it to A-Class level. It is usually very short, but can be of any length if the material is irrelevant or incomprehensible. May be useless to a reader only passingly familiar with the term. Possibly useful to someone who has no idea what the term meant. At best a brief, informed dictionary definition. Any editing or additional material can be helpful. Coffee table book (as of July 2005)
Needed
{{Needed-Class}}		 The article does not exist and needs to be created.      

[edit] Importance scale

The criteria used for rating article importance are not meant to be an absolute or canonical view of how significant the topic is. Rather, they attempt to gauge the probability of the average reader of Wikipedia needing to look up the topic (and thus the immediate need to have a suitably well-written article on it). Thus, subjects with greater popular notability may be rated higher than topics which are arguably more "important" but which are of interest primarily to students of India.

Note that general notability need not be from the perspective of editor demographics; generally notable topics should be rated similarly regardless of the country or region in which they hold said notability. Thus, topics which may seem obscure to a Western audience—but which are of high notability in other places—should still be highly rated.

Status Template Meaning of Status
Top {{Top-Class}} This article is of the utmost importance to this project, as it forms the basis of all information.
High {{High-Class}} This article is fairly important to this project, as it covers a general area of knowledge.
Mid {{Mid-Class}} This article is relatively important to this project, as it fills in some more specific knowledge of certain areas.
Low {{Low-Class}} This article is of little importance to this project, but it covers a highly specific area of knowledge or an obscure piece of trivia.
None None This article is of unknown importance to this project. It remains to be analyzed.

[edit] Importance standards

To be filled later

[edit] Requesting an assessment

If you have made significant changes to an article and would like an outside opinion on a new rating for it, please feel free to list it below. If you are interested in more extensive comments on an article, please use the peer review department instead.

[edit] Participants

Please feel free to add your name to this list if you would like to join the assessment team

  1. Corvus coronoides (talk · contribs)

[edit] Example assessments

To assess an article, paste one of the following onto the article's talk page.

Quality

  • {{USHistoryTalk|class=FA}} - to rate an article at FA-Class
  • {{USHistoryTalk|class=A}} - to rate an article at A-Class
  • {{USHistoryTalk|class=GA}} - to rate an article at GA-Class
  • {{USHistoryTalk|class=B}} - to rate an article at B-Class
  • {{USHistoryTalk|class=Start}} - to rate an article at Start-Class
  • {{USHistoryTalk|class=Stub}} - to rate an article at Stub-Class
  • {{USHistoryTalk}} - to leave the article un-assessed.

Importance

  • {{USHistoryTalk|importance=Top}} - to rate an article at Top importance
  • {{USHistoryTalk|importance=High}} - to rate an article at High importance
  • {{USHistoryTalk|importance=Mid}} - to rate an article at Mid importance
  • {{USHistoryTalk|importance=Low}} - to rate an article at Low importance