User:Noclip/Assessment overhaul

This page was created to suggest improvements to the current article assessment scale, which is not quite fulfilling its intended purpose in my opinion. The current system is too rigid and doesn't encourage article improvement so much as the aim to barely squeak by for the next highest "grade letter". Too great a focus is on the little letter in the template. The current scale is also very prone to misinterpretation -- I've seen at least two instances of the A-class rating being inappropriately applied after an article was not listed as a GA. Many of these problems stem from the fact that the current assessment scale tries to do two things at once in measuring both an article's information-completeness and its writing.

Proposed assessment reform
Several modifications could be made to solve many of the issues:


 * Splitting the stages of article development into two distinct assessment systems with more flexible descriptions. Such a scale would encourage improvement but prevent advancement from becoming the central focus.
 * Elimination of the grade letters to discourage a strict view of article assessment criteria at early stages.
 * Removal of A-class as a core classification. Currently only WikiProjects are supposed to assign A-class, so it makes no sense to have it as a universal classification. Only a small number of WikiProjects are using it as intended, so it should be an optional project-specific classification.

None of these changes would be prohibitively hard to implement using templates and a bot. This proposal minimally affects the Good Article assessment process and entails no changes to the Featured Article process.

Articles that did not stand out as being excellent would be assessed on an independent scale which focused on getting all the necessary information and references in the article before becoming concerned with brilliant prose. The rationale behind this is that if an article were still in need of significant expansion, even with Featured Article-quality prose the article wouldn't be very useful to readers. Additionally, such a focus would result a slew of informative articles in need of only presentational improvements.

After collecting a sufficient amount of information, editors could shift their focus to improving the article's writing and structure. The two separate assessment systems would be as follows:

Comprehensiveness assessment
Ignoring stubs, well-referenced articles with all the information one would expect to find in an encyclopedia entry would be considered comprehensive, while all other articles would be ranked as starts.


 * Stub: No changes. Self-explanatory, stubs and bare definitions would belong to this class.
 * Start: Articles that include sufficient information to serve as a basic overview of the topic. The majority of current B-class articles would be moved here.
 * Comprehensive: As the name implies, articles which provide all the information a reader familiar with the topic would expect to find.

Each WikiProject would have the option to assign an independent comprehensiveness assessment for articles within its scope to judge their value to that specific project. Additionally, a non-project-specific comprehensiveness assessment would be assigned. An article reaching Comprehensive status for all of its associated WikiProjects would signal its eligibility for what I'm tentatively calling a Remarkable Article assessment. To achieve this status, an article could go through either (or both) of two existing processes -- Good Article nomination and Featured Article nomination.

Remarkable article assessment
The scope of assessment for these classifications would shift from project based to community based.


 * Good Article: No changes.
 * Featured Article: No changes.

Templates
Many of the proposed changes may be difficult to visualize, so here are examples of the templates that would be applied. Templates should focus more on what can be done to improve an article than what "grade" it currently has.