User:LukeSurl/grades proposal

CURRENTLY THIS IS IN DRAFT FORM (and I may never submit it)

Summary: Simplify the content assessment system for articles.

Motivation

The assignment of good and featured status are subject to well-established protocols. Stubs are defined on project-wide criteria. Between these however, the assignment of the "standard" grades of Start, C, and B (and occasionally A) status is delegated to Wikiprojects. Content assessment provides guidance for these, but otherwise there is no significant "central" control over this large body of ordinary articles, nor is it practical for there to be any.

Many Wikiprojects, although assigned large numbers of articles, are almost or wholly inactive. Even for those with active participants, the quantity of re-assessment work required to make Start-through-B grades meaningful would be burdensome and not necessarily a good use of their time. Nevertheless, every Wikiproject is effectively tasked to grade all non-stub articles assigned to it on a Start through B scale, and then this information is used at project level to make assessments about the quality of the project. Practically, what happens is that the talk page of new articles are filled with relevant Wikiproject banners (most inactive), assigned a semi-meaningful grade, and then this assessment is rarely revised.

Overall, Start-through-B assessment is a burden on Wikiprojects that does not produce useful information in most cases. It is an unnecessary complication, and simplicity is a virtue.

Therefore, I suggest that, by default, all these assessments would be merged to a catch-all "standard" grade unless an active Wikiproject chooses to maintain the old "alphabet" system. For the "federal" bot-collected statistics on article grades, the simplified system would be used. This would relieve the top-down assigned burden of article assessment to Wikiprojects, who would be free to decide degree of assessment they choose to do. A particular advantage to this, is that tasks of assessment are no longer, by default, assigned to inactive Wikiprojects.