User:Steven Crossin/Adoption/Reviewing Articles

Reviewing Articles
Another skill editors should know is how to review an article. It's not something overly useful, but it's still good to know. Wikipedia grades, or "assesses" its articles on a scale according to how much information they provide and how well. This assessment scale is largely unofficial, with the majority of assessments made by WikiProjects who claim jurisdiction over the articles. There are, however, two official ratings which are given to those articles which are nominated by editors and reviewed to see if they meet a series of criteria. The full ranking is as follows:

Other types of pages are graded outside this criteria. Lists are no more than that, long lists of topics that all relate to the main theme of the list. Lists don't provide any prose, and any references are there simply to confirm that the topic does meet the criteria for inclusion. Each list must provide a specific criteria for what is considered a member of that list. Usually this is clear in the title, such as in List of current heads of state and government, and only needs a little more background as to how the list should be organized. Other lists don't at first glance seem as exclusive, such as List of people affected by bipolar disorder, and require some strong referencing to merit inclusion.

Disambiguation pages are designed to help people find the right article. Some topics share names with other topics, leading to confusion. For example, if you were to search for George Washington, you're probably looking for George Washington, but you could also be looking for George Washington (who was featured on the Main Page last April Fool's), George Washington, George, Washington, or perhaps one of the George Washingtons. That last sentence contains a total of 8 links, all of which lead to a George Washington of some variety, and I certainly could have included more from George Washington (disambiguation).

The assignment
Now that you've seen the different kinds of articles, take a look at some of these and tell me what you think they should be graded as. Don't look at the talk pages, just read the article and give it your own assessment. Give a short reasoning of why you have graded it such. If you believe an article does not meet the requirements of any level, mark it as a "sub-stub". Once you have done that, leave me a message on my talk page.

So, to complete this lesson, click the random article, say, ten times, and assess each article on the above scale (without looking at the talk page) and give me a short reasoning on each of the 10 articles, on my talk page. Cheers.