Wikipedia:WikiProject Biology/Assessment

Welcome to the assessment department of the WikiProject Biology. This department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's Biology articles. While much of the work is done in conjunction with the WP:1.0 program, the article ratings are also used within the project itself to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work.

The ratings are done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the WikiProject Biology project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:Biology articles by quality, Category:Biology articles by importance, Category:Biology articles needing attention, Category:Biology past collaborations, and Category:Biology past selected articles. The quality and importance ratings serve as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist. There is also Category:Non-article Biology pages) for things like redirect pages, templates, categories, images, etc.

Frequently asked questions

 * How can I get my article rated? : As a member of the WikiProject Biology, you can do it yourself. If you're unsure, list it in the requesting an assessment section below.
 * Who can assess articles? : Any member of WikiProject Biology is free to add—or change—the rating of an article, but please follow the guidelines.
 * Why didn't the reviewer leave any comments? : Unfortunately, due to the volume of articles that need to be assessed, we are unable to leave detailed comments in most cases. If you have particular questions, you might ask the person who assessed the article; they will usually be happy to provide you with their reasoning.
 * Where can I get more comments about my article? : Contact WikiProject Biology who will handle it or assign the issue to someone. You may also list it for a Peer review.
 * What if I don't agree with a rating? : Relist it as a request or contact WikiProject Biology who will handle it or assign the issue to someone.
 * Aren't the ratings subjective? : Yes, they are (see, in particular, the disclaimers on the importance scale), but it's the best system we've been able to devise; if you have a better idea, please don't hesitate to let us know!

If you have any other questions not listed here, please feel free to ask them on the discussion page for this department, or to contact the WikiProject Biology directly.

Instructions
Articles can be easily rated by installing the Rater tool. Ratings can also edited manually by adding the WikiProject Biology project banner to an article's talk page and updating itsclass and importance parameters. You can learn the syntax by looking at the talk pages in edit mode and by reading the info below.

This is the rating syntax (ratings and dates are samples, change to what applies to the article in question):
 * displays the default banner, showing the project info and only ??? for the quality and importance parameters.
 * all assessed articles should have quality and importance filled in. Leaving the other parameters off does not hurt anything.
 * if an article needs immediate attention, add the attention tag and please leave talk notes as to why. "yes" is the only valid parameter here. If it doesn't need attention, leave the parameter off.
 * if an article has been the SATM or COTM, these tags get added in this format. This is the actual project tag of
 * if an article needs immediate attention, add the attention tag and please leave talk notes as to why. "yes" is the only valid parameter here. If it doesn't need attention, leave the parameter off.
 * if an article has been the SATM or COTM, these tags get added in this format. This is the actual project tag of
 * if an article has been the SATM or COTM, these tags get added in this format. This is the actual project tag of
 * if an article has been the SATM or COTM, these tags get added in this format. This is the actual project tag of

The following values may be used for the class parameter:


 * FA (adds articles to Category:FA-Class Biology articles)
 * A (adds articles to Category:A-Class Biology articles)
 * GA (adds articles to Category:GA-Class Biology articles)
 * B (adds articles to Category:B-Class Biology articles)
 * Start (adds articles to Category:Start-Class Biology articles)
 * Stub (adds articles to Category:Stub-Class Biology articles)
 * NA (for pages, such as templates or disambiguation pages, where assessment is unnecessary; adds pages to Category:Non-article Biology pages). This means "non-article", NOT non-applicable.

Articles for which a valid class and/or importance is not provided are listed in Category:Unassessed Biology articles. The class should be assigned according to the quality scale below.

The following values may be used for the importance parameter:


 * Top (adds articles to Category:Top-importance Biology articles)
 * High (adds articles to Category:High-importance Biology articles)
 * Mid (adds articles to Category:Mid-importance Biology articles)
 * Low (adds articles to Category:Low-importance Biology articles)
 * All other articles will be automatically added to the Category:Unknown-importance Biology articles.

The parameter is not used if an article's class is set to NA, and may be omitted in those cases. The importance should be assigned according to the importance scale below.

Quality scale
Note: A B-class article should have at least one reference.

Importance scale
The criteria used for rating article importance are not meant to be an absolute or canonical view of how significant the topic is. Rather, they attempt to gauge the probability of the average reader of Wikipedia needing to look up the topic (and thus the immediate need to have a suitably well-written article on it). Thus, subjects with greater popular notability may be rated higher than topics which are arguably more "important" but which are of interest primarily to students of hagiography. Importance does not equate to quality; a featured article could rate 'mid' on importance.

''Note that general notability need not be from the perspective of editor demographics; generally notable topics should be rated similarly regardless of the country or region in which they hold said notability. Thus, topics which may seem obscure to a Western audience—but which are of high notability in other places—should still be highly rated. Rate international region/country-specific articles from the prespective of someone from that region.''

Assessment log
The logs in this section are generated automatically (on a daily basis); please don't add entries to them by hand.