User:Odie5533/What the B-Class article criteria are not

The following is an essay to help editors assess articles for the six B-Class criteria.

B-Class criteria
The article is mostly complete and without major issues, but requires some further work to reach good article standards.

Actual criteria are shown in the yellow boxes.

1: Referencing
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 * It has reliable sources, and any important or controversial material which is likely to be challenged is cited. The use of either [[Wikipedia:Footnotes|

There is no rule that requires one citation per sentence or paragraph. For B-class, most reviewers require at least one inline citation per section, and often a majority of the paragraphs need an inline citation due to material that is likely to be challenged (e.g., statistics or statements about living people). There are a few exceptions, however, such as the plot summary for works of fiction, which are generally left uncited. B-class articles are expected to have fewer citations than the Good article criteria and FA criteria require.

Citations do not need to be fully or consistently formatted. Bare URLs are deprecated but technically acceptable for B-class.

2: Coverage

 * Sections may need expansion, and some less important topics may be missing. The A criteria says the article should be "of a length suitable for the subject", and the B-Class should have a large proportion of that.

3: Structure
The lead section must exist. It is not required to be complete or to perfectly comply with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections.

All other content must be organized into sections split using section headers. Every section that you reasonably expect, based on the topic of the article, must exist. For example, articles about diseases must have a section about treatments, articles about fictional books must have a section about the plot, etc.


 * Mistakes to avoid:
 * Requiring the lead section to adequately summarize the article
 * Requiring compliance with any Manual of Style pages, even WP:LAYOUT
 * Requiring sections match the format of similar articles you've found

4: Grammar

 * GA requires that spelling and grammar must be correct. B-Class requires the text not have any major grammatical errors.
 * Flows sensibly means the article does not jump around needlessly but maintains a flow from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph.
 * Much of the content in any given article follows usually the MoS. Asking an editor to make specific changes for B-Class assessment based on the MoS would probably constitute a rigorous application of the style guideline.

5: Periphery

 * This criteria is fairly loose.
 * Articles do not need to be illustrated.
 * Diagrams and Infoboxes etc. should be included, but are not always necessary.

6: Clarity

 * Any jargon must be defined in the article and any confusing topics should be introduced.
 * The guideline for Make technical articles understandable should be followed.