User:Dinoguy1000/Assessment category RfC

Why standardize?

 * Why?
 * Templates
 * Scripts
 * Bots
 * Why not?
 * Project individuality
 * Project needs
 * Makework

Notice
Ideally, a notice would be posted to the talk pages of all projects and project banners which use the assessment and/or importance schemes, and to the talk page of any user who has contributed significantly to one or more such banners, as well as having a notice added to WPBannerMeta. In reality, that would probably ruffle a lot of feathers, so *maybe* just a notice via, notices on the really big and otherwise closely concerned projects, and the usual discussion advertising routes would suffice?

Issues
The following issues would be discussed:
 * Capitalization
 * Start-Class vs. Low-importance - completely arbitrary, but maybe "importance" should always be capitalized as "class" currently is?
 * X articles/pages vs. x articles/pages - also arbitrary, but if "-Class"/"-Importance" should be capitalized, this should be too, maybe? Or, per the talk page, perhaps it should just clone whatever categorization/punctuation a given project has chosen for their name (makes the most sense).
 * Class vs. Quality - "class" is fairly vague and can actually refer to either class (as currently used) or importance; "quality" sidesteps that issue but raises another - many assessments (template, redirect, future, needed, merge, etc.) are not indications of page quality but are instead types of pages. This suggests the possibility for a third assessment scale for "type", but this has been discussed elsewhere and falls far outside the scope of this particular proposal.
 * Unassessed vs. Unknown - it's a logical fallacy to say that the importance of an article is "unknown", since assessments are determined by individual projects, and one project member may assess differently from another, even if both assessments fall completely within the concerned project's assessment guidelines; therefore, "unassessed" works much better (and on that note, it should probably be "Unassessed-Class", with "-Class", to avoid confusion between the two)
 * [Category/Template/Image/File]-Class X articles/pages - categories, templates and images/files are not types of pages (and definitely not articles), they are technical constructs which function as pages for technical reasons; therefore, naming like "WikiProject X types" or "X types" (or even "[WikiProject] X-related types") is vastly preferential to "Type-Class X articles/pages"
 * articles vs. pages - articles is valid for pages that *are* articles, but for redirects, dabpages, and other non-article pages in the mainspace, as well as project and portal pages, "pages" is more correct; similarly, unassessed pages aren't definitively known to be articles, so again, "pages" is more accurate - also, there are plenty of custom classes used by a single project, with no rhyme or reason to really define what is or isn't an article (and, in theory, really specialized projects may actually assess non-article content as though it were articles), so maybe just using "pages" across the board is better?

Related pages

 * WikiProject/Naming convention
 * WikiProject Council/Banner standardisation

Discussion
All discussion should go to the talk page, please.