User:Hurricane Noah/Article Assessment Proposal

Introduction
The goals of these changes are to make the quality and importance assessment more friendly to our newcomers and refine all steps to make sure they are being used instead of simply existing. New editors have often left after writing their first article and few have actually asked why. It may be because they tried their hardest and saw people rate their article either a start or stub, which indicates subpar work when compared to C-class, or their article's importance was deemed low, which may also be offensive. The changes suggested here serve to decrease the time it will take to assess articles of lower quality in the future while preserving the stepping stones between the current C-class and GA as well as between GA and FA. We need to make sure our newcomers have the help they need to continue writing so they will stick around. It takes time for people to learn how to write up to GA quality and I for one believe having a stepping stone before that will help them on their way to writing excellent content. Another goal of these changes is to try and reduce the burden of peer review on FAC. If a review process exists prior to FAC that is just below that status, then there should be fewer lower-quality nominations coming in that would require significant work in order to pass FAC.

Articles
This is a proposed assessment scale to rate the quality of articles; this proposed system would replace the current assessment scale. It consists of two parallel quality scales; one scale is used to assess regular prose articles, while the other is used to assess lists and similar non-prose articles. The progression of articles along these scales is described in greater detail below. For a list of class changes and explanations behind these changes, please see the key changes section.

Key changes

 * Needed-class is added as an official, albeit optional assessment grade in order to facilitate the labeling and categorization of redirects at notable topics. This would make it easier for editors to find topics that need articles and then create them.
 * Draft-class is added as an official, albeit optional assessment grade because it is many times the direct precursor to an article existing in the main space and an integral part of the development process.
 * The scale is modified to be less BITEY towards newcomers and more simplified. New editors do come across article ratings and may be offended when they see their work rated as either a stub or start and see C-class exists, which alludes their work is subpar. Many new editors leave after writing their first article. The goal here is change the scale to prevent them from being insulted when their work is really not below average.
 * Unassessed will become an official class and will be the default shown whenever the class parameter is left blank or it is marked as unassessed.
 * Stub, Start, and C classes will be folded into Average, which will represent the vast majority of work on Wikipedia. Most articles are rated either Stub or Start, however, C will also be lumped in since there are not specific requirements for it.
 * B-class will be renamed to Decent Class and have the same requirements
 * Good Article will remain the same, however, a similar process for lists will be created and run through the same venue.
 * A-class will be renamed to Very Good Class and gain official, centralized requirements
 * FA/FL classes will be renamed to Excellent Article/List and keep the same requirements
 * Decent (B-Class) will now have official Decent-class reviews (not required, but recommended for those new to writing encyclopedic work)
 * Very Good (A-Class) will become a centralized process with standardized requirements, which should restore trust in the rating and its function across the encyclopedia. Hopefully, this will also limit the degree to which excellent reviews take on the role of peer review
 * Very Good and Decent (A and B-Class) reviews will use the existing Peer Review resources rather than create a whole new review. This is only logical since most peer reviews are prior to GA and FA candidacies. Peer review itself will be transformed in order to handle Very Good (A-Class), Decent (B-Class), and general reviews (for articles of any quality that haven't been reviewed in a while or need extra advice).
 * Lists will have their own separate scale, including Average List (AL), Decent List (DL), Good List (GL), Very Good List (VGL), and Excellent List (EL) in order to properly categorize all lists according to their quality. As a result, List class will be deprecated.

WikiWorkshop (New PR)
Peer Review would be renamed to WikiWorkshop and provide three different types of reviews. As the name suggests, the goal of the process is to be a workshop for article improvement without strict deadlines and quality expectations. The current purpose of Peer Review is to improve articles so they can reach GA and FA. The WikiWorkshop would host a Decent-class review as a stepping stone for newer editors looking to get an article from Average (Start or C-class) to the GA level. Trying to write a GA right off the bat may be overwhelming for newcomers, so assessing their article for Decent-class would be less intense and allow them to gradually improve their writing skills. The other quality-level review at the WikiWorkshop would be the Very Good Article review. This review would have a workshop phase and an assessment phase. Given that the criteria for Very Good would be between GA and FA, this review would allow an editor to work on completing and fixing their article, leaving only minor issues for a future FAC run. These two reviews would cover most of the existing issues that PR aims to tackle. Since Very Good (A-class) was intended to be between GA and FA, centralizing the process and standardizing the criteria would restore faith in the rating and provide review resources to Wikiprojects that were unable to host their own Very Good (A-class) reviews. This would give a purpose to both Decent-class and Very Good, which were always intended to have reviews (we have icons for B-class review and A-class review). Lastly, there would be the standard peer review for those not wanting to review against Decent or Very Good and for higher quality articles that haven't been assessed for a while. The changes to the current peer review should not increase the review burden since it is only repurposing existing resources. The Decent-class review would only require the involvement of one editor (more are obviously welcome to join in). A person would list the article for review given that it is at the middle stage within Average-class. The reviewer would then review the article in its entirety against the 6 Decent-class criteria and provide advice to the editor to help them get the article to Decent-class. There would be no set time period for the improvement of the article as long as improvements are continuing to take place and both parties wish to continue. It would then be promoted to Decent-class if the reviewer believes the criteria have been satisfied. This would essentially be a less-strict review that would work to improve an article up to Decent-class. I think it would be helpful for newer editors to get them used to writing articles without expecting them to put in GA-level work immediately as is often the case with the current PR. New editors have to work to get their writing up to that level. Having a Decent-Class review would be a sort of stepping stone for newer editors to improve their skills before attempting to go for even higher quality. The Very Good Article review would require two or more editors to review. A person would list the article as a Very Good Article candidate. Other editors would then review the article against the Very Good Article criteria. The process would be divided into two parts. The first stage would be the initial reviews, kind of a workshop per se, where no support or opposition would be declared given that the article is reasonably close to Very Good status (obviously exceptions would apply). The reviewers would leave comments and work with the editor to improve the article. This workshop would last around 10-14 days or longer if it is constructive. If half of the involved parties (minimum either the two reviewers or one reviewer and the nominator) signal they are ready to move on to the next stage, a coordinator would open a subsection where people could either support or oppose the candidacy with their rationale. Once a sufficient period of time had passed, the coordinator would judge whether or not consensus exists for promotion to Very Good status, similar to how it is done at FAC currently. The peer review is a review where an editor should list his or her goals for an article so a reviewer can provide feedback in order for the editor to improve the article. Reviews of this nature would be given generally to higher quality articles that haven't been reviewed for a while, however, any article could be listed for review. This review would simply be a workshop since no rating change is taking place. There would also be no time limit as long as multiple parties agree to continue the process.
 * Decent-Class Review (B-class)
 * Very Good Article Review
 * Peer Review

Excellent Candidacies (Featured)

 * Excellent Article Candidacies
 * Excellent List Candidacies

Article Importance Change
Many editors have left after creating their first article. It hasn't been studied much as to why this occurs, but it can be argued that our assessment systems have been a bit BITEy. In the banner templates,  would be changed to , which would be less offensive to new editors. Rather than saying an article is low importance, which could offend people who have worked hard on it, we could say it is simply low priority for the groups working on it. It can be seen negatively when a group decides an article is of low importance because it may be high importance to others. I think the important thing here by changing this is clarifying it isn't importance that we are deciding, but simply the priority upon which articles should be worked on.