Wikipedia:WikiProject Mesoamerica/Assessment



Article rating and assessment scheme
An article rating and assessment scheme has been implemented for Mesoamerica-related articles, which is monitored and maintained by WikiProject Mesoamerica. In this scheme, all Mesoamerica-related articles ('article' here also includes lists) may be assigned: The primary purpose of this rating and assessment scheme is to provide editors with a sub-categorised survey of the current status of Mesoamerican articles, which can then be used to prioritise the overall workload and highlight articles needing improvements at various stages.
 * a particular rating which indicates an assessment of their class (overall quality), and
 * a particular rating which indicates an assessment of their importance (priority or relative significance).

For example, higher-priority articles (those most essential to any encyclopaedia) in need of most work (i.e. lower quality) can be readily identified for attention and collaboration.

There will be a number of secondary benefits from the scheme, such as being able to track which kinds and topics of articles are 'neglected'.

This assessment and rating scheme follows the precepts adopted by the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, see Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment and Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Work via Wikiprojects for details.

The class and importance ratings are recorded by setting appropriate values to the parameters of the main WP:MESO Project banner, WP Mesoamerica (or alternatively the WP:AZTEC subproject banner, WP Aztec ), which are placed on the corresponding talk pages of in-scope Mesoamerican articles. See the template instructions for details on these and other parameters which can be set.

See the Quality scale for guideline criteria for rating an article by class/quality. See the Importance scale for guideline criteria for rating an article by importance/priority.

The assessments of class and importance are assigned manually by WP:MESO project members (or other interested parties)– see the Rating instructions for details. Assigning a rating will automatically place the article in an appropriate rating category.

Once assigned, behind the scenes a bot runs periodically (scheduled daily, about 0300hrs UTC) which compiles a variety of statistics and log data, which can then later be analysed.

It is expected that this rating and assessment scheme will require periodic and iterative maintenance, as new articles are created or identified, and existing articles are progressively improved (or, hopefully much rarer, demoted), requiring the status to be reassessed (indicated by changing the parameter value).

Of course, anyone is free to edit any of the articles they choose without regard to priority, however it is hoped that this will provide some basis for a more methodical approach to the longer-term overall improvement of content and coverage in the Mesoamerican field.

Instructions
An article's assessment is recorded via the use of certain parameters of the WP Mesoamerica and/or WP Aztec project banners, which are affixed to the talk pages of in-scope articles. Note that there are some other (optional) parameters to the project banners as well, see template talk:WP Mesoamerica for full description.

The two parameters used for this exercise are class (indicates an assessment of the article's current overall quality) and importance (indicates an assessment of the relative priority or significance of the particular article to general knowledge of Mesoamerican topics). Usage summary (note the parameters are in lowercase):

These parameters flag the article according to the values chosen (which then appear on the project banner), and also assign the article to a corresponding category. The possible values of these parameters and guidance criteria on which value to choose are detailed below: see Importance scale for the importance parameter and Quality scale for the class parameter.

The general workflow is as follows:
 * 1) Locate an in-scope Mesoamerica-related article (or list), add the WP Mesoamerica project banner to its talk page if not already there. (Note this also applies to new articles you may create, ie you can add the banner and the rating as you go).
 * 2) For articles in the specific scope of WP:AZTEC, you can use the WP Aztec banner instead, its class and importance parameters function in the same way and they will categorise into both Aztec and Mesoamerica-level categories.
 * 3) If currently unassessed (or when adding the project banner anew), determine what its class and importance assessment rating should be, using your judgement and the criteria given here. Try to be as frank as possible in the assessment, the aim here is to appropriately identify articles needing later improvement and there's nothing to be gained by "over-ranking" them.
 * 4) Add the selected parameter values to the project banner template call, per the specified syntax. Once previewed/saved, you should see the values updated in the banner and the appropriate categories assigned.
 * 5) If in doubt as to the appropriate class or importance level, you can either leave the value unassigned for now (ie omit the parameters), and/or consult with another project member to decide.
 * 6) If the article already has a rating, but you disagree or the article has subsequently been edited by you or someone else so that its overall quality has changed (hopefully for the better!), then you can update the parameter yourself to reflect its new status.
 * 7) Since we may (naturally enough) not be the most objective assessors of one's own work, it might be an idea in these or other unclear cases to invite another party to give the assessment. This can be done by adding the parameter/value combination &#124;reassess=yes to the project banner, which will automatically assign the article in question to Category:Mesoamerica articles needing reassessment. You can also request reassessments/second opinions at the main discussion forum.
 * 8) On an ongoing basis, you can patrol the various x-class categories for improvement opportunities, and also the unassessed cats for new assessments.

Importance scale
The following values may be used for the importance parameter (they should be entered exactly as given): The importance parameter is not used if an article's class is set to NA, and may be omitted in those cases. If the importance parameter is not yet set, or contains an invalid value, the article will be assigned to Category:Unassigned-importance Mesoamerica articles.

Quality scale
Each article may also be assigned to a particular class, intended as a point-in-time assessment of its overall "quality" - relative to the criteria given in the quality scale which is detailed below.

This quality scale follows the definitions employed at the Version 1.0 Editorial Team's assessment system.

The following values may be used for the class parameter (they should be entered exactly as given):

Articles for which a valid class has not yet been provided are listed by default in Category:Unassessed Mesoamerica articles.

Detailed criteria by class
These are the detailed criteria per class/quality division, following the assessment scheme used by the Wikipedia V1.0 Editorial team.