Wikipedia:WikiProject Debating/Assessment

Welcome to the assessment department of the Debating WikiProject! This department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's debate 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 Debating project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:Debating articles by quality, Category:Debating articles by importance, and Category:Debating articles needing attention. The quality and importance ratings serve as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist. There is also Category:Non-article Debating 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 Debating WikiProject, 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 Debating WikiProject 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 Debating 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 Debating 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 Debating directly.

Instructions
An article's assessment is generated from the class and importance parameters in the WikiProject Debating project banner on its talk page. 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 only.
 * 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.
 * 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 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.

The following values may be used for the class parameter:


 * FA - The article has reached Featured article status.
 * A - Could be submitted as a Featured article candidate; probably could use some small updates to make it Featured quality.
 * GA - The article has reached Good article status.
 * B - Could be submitted as a Good article nominee; probably could use some updates or may lack some features from the Good article criteria, but it presents a good overview of the subject.
 * Start - The article is more than a stub, but may lack some important aspects of the topic's discussion.
 * Stub - The article is a stub.
 * List - The article is a list.
 * NA - The page is not an article and should not be rated; it could be a template, image or category, for example.

Articles for which a valid class and/or importance is not provided are listed in Category:Unassessed Debating 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 Debating articles)
 * High (adds articles to Category:High-importance Debating articles)
 * Mid (adds articles to Category:Mid-importance Debating articles)
 * Low (adds articles to Category:Low-importance Debating 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.''

Requesting an assessment or re-assessment
If you have made significant changes to an article and would like an outside opinion on a new rating for it, please feel free to list it below. If you are interested in more extensive comments on an article, please use the peer review department instead.
 * 1) Add articles here! Newest requests on the BOTTOM
 * 2)  (and put "(re-)assessment request" in your edit summary of this assessment page), leave reasons if a reassessment.