User:Spitzmauskc/sandbox4

Welcome to the assessment department of WikiProject Ice Hockey. This department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's ice hockey articles. The resulting article ratings are used within the project to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work, and are also expected to play a role in the WP:1.0 program,

The assessment is done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the Ice hockey project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:Ice Hockey articles by quality, which serve as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist.

Quality
An article's assessment is generated from the class parameter in the Ice hockey project banner on its talk page (see the project banner instructions for more details on the exact syntax):



The following values may be used:


 * FA (adds articles to Category:FA-Class Ice Hockey articles)
 * FL (adds articles to Category:FL-Class Ice Hockey articles)
 * A (adds articles to Category:A-Class Ice Hockey articles)
 * GA (adds articles to Category:GA-Class Ice Hockey articles)
 * B (adds articles to Category:B-Class Ice Hockey articles)
 * C (adds articles to Category:C-Class Ice Hockey articles)
 * Start (adds articles to Category:Start-Class Ice Hockey articles)
 * Stub (adds articles to Category:Stub-Class Ice Hockey articles)
 * List (adds list articles to Category:List-Class Ice Hockey articles)
 * NA (for pages, such as templates or disambiguation pages, where assessment is unnecessary; adds pages to Category:NA-Class Ice Hockey articles)

Articles for which a valid class is not provided are listed in Category:Unassessed Ice Hockey articles. The class should be assigned according to the quality scale below.

What are importance levels for?
The first point to make is that the whole importance rating scheme is for editors, not for readers: this is why it is placed on the talk page, and none of its content appears in the article (the only exception being the Good Article mark or the Featured Article star, but this is because the overlapping GA/FA scheme is for readers as well as editors). The primary purpose of these ratings is to help editors improve articles and to help the project track its progress. The ratings are also used to decide which articles to include in fixed versions of Wikipedia such as Wikipedia 0.5, 0.7, and the planned 1.0 release.

The importance level or priority of an article is intended to indicate how important it is that Wikipedia should have a high quality article on the subject.

In the Wikipedia 1.0 Assessment Scheme, of which this is a part, it is emphasized that importance/priority is a relative term, i.e., an article which is Top-Importance in one context, may only be Mid-Importance in a wider context (see below). In other words, importance levels are not assessed across Wikipedia as a whole, but in context. In order to understand this, it may be helpful to think of Wikipedia not as one monolithic encyclopedia, but as a family of nested, overlapping encyclopedia.

Three different ways of expressing the priority of articles are currently used.
 * 1) The importance, significance and depth of the topic within its particular field or subject.
 * 2) The extent of the topic's impact, this is done using the achievement parameters
 * 3) The bottom line: how important is it for an encyclopedia to have an article on the given topic?

These are often different ways of saying the same thing, but the current WP 1.0 summary table mixes the three approaches: Top importance is described using method 3, High and Mid importance using method 1, and Low importance using method 2.

By significance
The following table of possible importance levels lists these distinct approaches in separate columns, and provides more detail on the meaning of the individual levels, as well as examples. The last row is not an importance level per se, but is intended to provide guidance on adding (and perhaps sometimes even removing) importance ratings. In addition there is a Category:Unknown-importance Ice Hockey articles for articles which have a ice hockey rating, but no importance level: editors should feel free either to assign an importance level (Low-Importance or higher) or remove the importance rating from these articles.

Some editors may wish to add the ice hockey project template to pages which are not articles, but disambiguation pages, categories, templates or images, simply to indicate that these pages are within the scope of the Ice Hockey WikiProject. Such pages do not need an importance rating, and the tag "importance=NA" (for non-article or not applicable) should be used in the importance rating template.

By achievement (impact)
The ice hockey project has determined that some categories of articles will be slotted within the importance categories. Other articles (mostly players) will be slotted using an achievement-based rating system to reduce the subjective nature of assessment. Participants with more awards, all-star selections and longer careers or who move into management roles in the sport tend to be more important in the sport and this has been used as a factor for determining importance for the encyclopedia.

Players that become head coaches or general managers would move up a rating.

Wikipedia 1.0 definitions

 * This section is based closely on the discussion of importance at Wikipedia 1.0.

Need: The article's priority or importance, regardless of its quality Importance must be regarded as a relative term. If importance values are applied within this project, these only reflect the perceived importance to this project. An article judged to be "Top-Importance" in one context may be only "Mid-Importance" in another.

By "priority" or "importance" of topics for a static version of the encyclopedia, we generally mean to indicate the level of expectation or desire that the topic would be covered in a traditional encyclopedia.

A more detailed cross-Wikipedia importance scheme has been proposed at Template:Importance Scheme, but is not widely accepted.