Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Harry Potter/Assessment

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Image:Dumbledore.jpg This page is within the scope of WikiProject Harry Potter, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter universe. If you would like to participate, you can choose to edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
NA
This article has been rated as Class NA on the quality scale.
NA
This article has been rated as NA-Importance on the importance scale.
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[edit] Criteria

I have some difficulties with the criteria listed for Impotance and class.

Importance goes low-mid-high-top. But if you consider this, anyone seeing something categorised as mid might expect it be average importance, wheras on this scale it is from below average to verging on unimportant. Can we think of a better name?

Class is extremely confusing and I find it an unhelpfull scale. The top three suggested are reserved for good or featured articles which have been reviewed, which I think applies to virtually no HP articles. that makes it a pretty poor scale to measure how well we think the articles are doing. Some I would rate highly, whereas this scale would imply they are all range from average to rubbish. The scale was designed by people seeking to find articles worth including in the printed wiki. It does not meet our assessment needs, we need more categories if it is to make sense, or change the current top three. Articles which have had these assessments get their own flags as featured articles etc. anyway. Sandpiper 14:55, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I think this is a great system for us. I've added in the guidelines for importance to the project page, too:
  • Top — Subject is a must-have for a print encyclopaedia. (adds articles to Category:Top-importance Harry Potter articles)
  • High — Subject contributes a depth of knowledge. (adds articles to Category:High-importance Harry Potter articles)
  • Mid — Subject fills in more minor details. (adds articles to Category:Mid-importance Harry Potter articles)
  • Low — Subject is peripheral knowledge, possibly trivial. (adds articles to Category:Low-importance Harry Potter articles)
Usually I don't feel the need to follow tradition but I think going with the standards here is very important. We do have a number of GAs (three off the top of my head are J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter, and Lord Voldemort), but so far as I know no FAs yet. If we're going to change from "FA," "A," "GA," "B," etc. just because we don't have too many article up there, that's a terrible reason. We should strive to bring articles to that level. As I went about tagging articles last night, I noticed a lot of really good ones which would make excellent GAs, A and FAs… if they were referenced. That's our weakness: we don't reference things that well. Not even the {{HP1}} templates are good because they don't allow for the selection of edition and thus page numbers. But some are really on the way, and using this sytem should raise our awareness that that's what we need to work on.
No, the reason for not using their system is that it is designed to pinpoint the wrong thing. They are interested in finding those very few articles which conform to their standard. But this lumps the large majority of HP articles into just one or two categories (100 B and 100 start, when I looked). This is not at all helpfull in assessing comparatively how good they are. I thing quite a few should be A,Very useful to readers. A fairly complete treatment of the subject as much as the existence of reputable sources allow it. A non-expert in the subject matter would typically find nothing wanting. May miss a few relevant points., as this description seems to fit rather well. So why aren't they? Because the articles fail on some technical elements which are not going to be important to readers. Hence, this is not the right scheme for us to use. Sandpiper
Besides, this system isn't for a casual reader to say, "Oh, this is a B-class article that's highly important." It's for us to assess our own department. Casual readers, of course, will come along and say that, but that's not its main purpose. I'll add a sentence in the template so that it's clear what system the rating is on.
I dont understand. My objection is that this scheme fails us. It does not show which are the better articles. Sandpiper
Anyway, I strongly object to the use of numbers in the template. I think we should stick tagging many Start and B class articles and work their way up. That's the point of assessment. --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 21:35, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, the alternative would seem to be to ignore the notional requirement for review and passing various 'exams' to grade an article. I can live with having a grading system running FA to whatever, it is after all very HP to have unusual grade names, but the actual definitions of the grades are not helpfull to readers (or us). As I posted on the other page, exactly what proportion of wiki articles is ever going to become FA? the proportion is going to fall over time, not rise. The grade will become meaningless and essentially extinct. If we ignore the absolute requirements and juust make a best fit, arbitrarily assigning the best as FA, and so forth, then we could use the system.
You yourself are partly making one of my points. You noticed articles which could qualify for the wikiproject grades with work. How did you find them? by having to look through those articles for yourself. If they had been graded 1,2,3... then it would be clear which articles the teams think are good. Anyone interested could then immediately locate ones which they could 'improve' in the areas they felt necessary. It is absolutely pointless having multiple labels on the articles which mean virtually the same thing. If we are to institute grading of our articles, then they should be graded according to what makes a good HP article, not what makes a wikiproject article. I write articles interesting to people interested in HP, not articles intended to be published (dare one say, for cash). That is perhaps a little unfair, but the general project guidelines still envisage treatise on particle physice which have been peer reviewed rather more than they do write-up's of the worlds current most famous novel. I see it as pointless to class all the articles as one mediocre level when they have big differences between them, because of specific minor conditions imposed on the grading system. Sandpiper 02:20, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I found the articles because the recent edits I made to Template:WPHP placed them all into a category of unassessed articles. Then, I clicked on all the ones I felt like rating and rated them. I'm starting to accept your points a bit now, perhaps we can compromise and use both systems? Have a FA, A, GA… rating and also a 1, 2, 3… rating? That way, it would conform with conventions but also find us what we want. Then, as articles improve over time, the 1, 2, 3 rating might subside and we'd be left with the standard. How does that sound? --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 03:55, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Is that a suggestion that instead of having four assessment banners on each article, we now should have eight? My objection is exactly that someone should assess this article ONE TIME according to the wiki publication project criteria. Then it should be up to us to make our own assessment from an HP perspective. It is four sets of assessment to exactly the same criteria which is insane. I have to imagine it must also be unhelpful for the publication project too, if this data really is going to them, then they are going to get the same article four times over. Hence we need a different grading system, which makes a point of being different quite deliberately. Sandpiper 14:02, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Explanatory page, order of entries

I have again re-ordered the entries on the explanatory page, because it seems to me that the deemed order of quality of pages is in fact FA best, GA second best, then A, B, start and stub. Is this the correctly deemed order of quality, or not? Sandpiper 12:29, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, no, it's not correct. It goes FA (outstanding), A (basically FA but not ready to be featured, not perfectly wholesome), GA (useful, of course referenced well), B, Start, Stub. I understand how one would think it would go FA, GA, A… but that's not the way it is widely used. The reason why I'm opposed to the change is because (as you can read here a little bit further), the system is in wide use, including on the vitally important WP:1.0, a release of some of Wikipedia's work to another medium. It would just be odd to switch two assessments.
Look, it's okay to have many B class articles, many Starts, and many Stubs, and fewer GAs, As, and FAs. As a WikiProject working on a topic which itself is not yet complete, that's understandable. We shouldn't try to change the system just to get some higher class articles. It also shows us where we need to work. Referencing is the key right now, so many articles would improve to GA class. After the release of Deathly Hallows we'll have lots of information to work with and hopefully it will show a surge of higher class articles for this WP. But for now, we have to deal with what material we have to work with, which is not enough to get our articles to FA, but definitely enough to get them to A as it should be. We just haven't done that work yet, and to try and solve it by rearranging the system is not the best answer. Let's try not to "put off" the improvement of articles to GA by introducing a class between B and GA. --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 03:44, 31 December 2006 (UTC)