Wikipedia:WikiProject Earthquakes/Assessment

Welcome to the assessment department of WikiProject Earthquakes! This department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's articles about earthquakes, seismology, plate tectonics, and related subjects. While much of the work is done in conjunction with the Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment 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 WP Earthquakes project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:WikiProject Earthquakes articles by quality and Category:WikiProject Earthquakes articles by importance, which serves as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist.

Frequently asked questions

 * How can I get my article rated? : Please list it in the section for assessment requests below.
 * Who can assess articles? : Any member of WikiProject Earthquakes is free to add—or change—the rating of an article.
 * What if I don't agree with a rating? : You can list it in the section for assessment requests below, and someone will take a look at it. Alternately, you can ask any member of the project to rate the article again.
 * Aren't the ratings subjective? : Yes, they are somewhat subjective, 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.

See also: WikiProject Council/Assessment FAQ

Instructions
An article's assessment is generated from the class and importance parameters in the WP Earthquakes project banner on its talk page:

The class should be assigned according to the quality scale below. The following values may be used for the class parameter:
 * FA - Adds articles to Category:FA-Class WikiProject Earthquakes articles
 * A - Adds articles to Category:A-Class WikiProject Earthquakes articles
 * GA - Adds articles to Category:GA-Class WikiProject Earthquakes articles
 * B - Adds articles to Category:B-Class WikiProject Earthquakes articles
 * C - Adds articles to Category:C-Class WikiProject Earthquakes articles
 * Start - Adds articles to Category:Start-Class WikiProject Earthquakes articles
 * Stub - Adds articles to Category:Stub-Class WikiProject Earthquakes articles
 * [[Image:Symbol neutral vote.svg|16px]] Articles for which a valid class is not provided are listed in Category:Unassessed WikiProject Earthquakes articles.

The importance should be assigned according to the importance scale below. The following values may be used for importance parameter:
 * Top - Adds articles to Category:Top-importance WikiProject Earthquakes articles
 * High - Adds articles to Category:High-importance WikiProject Earthquakes articles
 * Mid - Adds articles to Category:Mid-importance WikiProject Earthquakes articles
 * Low - Adds articles to Category:Low-importance WikiProject Earthquakes articles
 * Articles for which a valid importance parameter is not provided are listed in Category:Unknown-importance WikiProject Earthquakes articles.

Quality scale
This table is transcluded here, and is identical to the one at Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment.

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 seismologists and others working within the field.

''This table has been written specifically for WikiProject Earthquakes, please read it carefully prior to making assessments of importance. It is currently UNDER CONSTRUCTION, please revise it as needed.''

Requesting an 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. Be sure to sign yourself with four tilds ( ~ ).

Assessment log

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

Unexpected changes, such as downgrading an article, or raising it more than two assessment classes at once, are shown in bold.

Version 1.0 Editorial Team/WikiProject Earthquakes articles by quality log

Articles in need of expansion and cleanup
Now that initial assessments have been completed, the most crtitical articles to attend to are those marked with "Top" importance, but only "Start" class (there are no "Stub"s in this category at this time). The most important such article is Seismology, which is one of the two flagship articles of this WikiProject (along with Earthquake) and is sorely in need of comprehensive expansion.

In general, "B" class articles which are "Mid" importance or higher should be polished up and nominated as good articles.

The easiest way to find articles which fall within a particular intersection of quality and importance categories is to use the Worklist below, which is transcluded from Version 1.0 Editorial Team/WikiProject Earthquakes articles by quality.

Worklist

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