User:Improv/SEM

SEM is a project to collect articles that rate highly by four factors:
 * How appropriate their topic is by Encyclopedic Notability
 * How well-written their content is (grammar/style)
 * How well their content covers the topic
 * How free their content is

Export Types
SEM is intended to facilitate the export of subsets of Wikipedia that comprise a traditional, academic encyclopedia, with similar quality and topic expectations. Its scope is intended to be more narrow than Wikipedia as a whole (how much more narrow is the focus of ongoing Deletionist/Inclusionist debates). There are two export types that SEM is intended to be used for: The only difference between SEM-a and SEM-b is how Encyclopedic Notability is interpreted - the other criteria are the same
 * SEM-a - SEM-a aims to hold very strictly to Encyclopedic Notabity, and aims to be moderately small. Coverage of historical topics, for example, is expected to be textbook-summary level.
 * SEM-b - SEM-b aims to hold less strictly to Encyclopedic Notabilty, and will be somewhat larger. Coverage of historical topics, for example, can go into journal-level detail, and complete-list type information is more welcome when it is highly pertinent to academic interest.

Topics: Encyclopedic Notability
Encyclopedic notability is a measure of the appropriateness of a topic for coverage in a traditional encyclopedia if space were less of a concern. It consists of several subcriteria:
 * Of Greater Importance to Society
 * Meets/Will Meet the Test of Time
 * Scholarly in nature

Greater Importance to Society
Is the topic something that makes a difference in the course of societies/the world? Is it of only esoteric interest, or is it an important part of the sciences, arts, philosophy, or history?

Test of Time
Will this topic still be of plausible interest to academic/educational readers in 50 years? 200? Very recent/ongoing events should probably not get coverage under SEM even if they are otherwise notable by SEM standards - incomplete/inaccurate coverage is considered worse than no coverage.

Scholarly in Nature
Is the topic covered in (non pop-culture) academic journals?

Collection-type information
Although SEM-a and SEM-b differ in all of the above categories, a key difference is in inclusion of collection-type information. SEM-a should have only very rare inclusion of entire categories of articles - things like the periodic table may be included piecemail in SEM-a but entirely in SEM-b.

Content: Quality Writing
Articles should meet Wikipedia style guidelines, have good grammar, and good/consistent spelling. They should generally "read well" - attempting to read the article aloud (see WikiProject:Spoken Text) will often reveal problems on this front.

Content: Good and Appropriate Coverage
Articles should have a level of coverage appropriate to the type of article they are. For human subjects, their greater importance to society should be covered, with information on their background present but taking a secondary role. For science or philosophy topics, greater importance to society (and raw data, if relevant) should be the focus, with history/discovery and other perspectives on the topic present as a secondary focus. List-type data should be kept to a minimum, both because traditional encyclopediae do not include such information and because SEM articles will often be presented in spoken media, where raw lists are not as appropriate. For SEM-a, a single article per concept is preferred (e.g. a major war), while for SEM-b, articles on important subtopics of an important concept (e.g. individual large-scale engagements in the war) may be included.

Freedom
Content from SEM is intended primarily for off-wiki use. To avoid the possibility of license issues with downstream recipients of the software (especially as some of them may be embedded onto devices that cannot be easily updated), only content that is PD or GFDL will be accepted. Fair use content will not be included in dumps, and all included media in approved revisions should be double-checked for acceptability.

Templates

 * SEM-needswork - Needs work before any version will be accepted
 * SEM-a - Meets SEM-a criteria. Include link to specific revision in article history
 * SEM-b - Same as SEM-a, except for things that meet SEM-b
 * SEM-a-license - SEM-a, but will need to have 1+ individual media purged for license reasons
 * SEM-b-license - SEM-b, but will need to have 1+ individual media purged for license reasons