Wikipedia:WikiProject National Football League/Assessment

This is the assessment department for the National Football League WikiProject. This department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia articles relating to the National Football League. 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 National Football League project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:National Football League articles by quality and Category:National Football League articles by importance.

Frequently asked questions

 * How can I get my article rated? : As a member of the NFL 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 the project is free to add—or change—the rating of an article, but please follow the guidelines.
 * Why did someone change the assessment of a particular article? : You should start by asking the person who assessed the article; if you leave a note on their Talk page they will usually be happy to provide you with their reasoning. If you'd like a second opinion, then list the article in the requesting an assessment section below and someone will take a look.
 * Where can I get more comments about my article? : You may consider listing the article for a Peer review.
 * What if I don't agree with a rating? : Relist it as a request or post a note on the project talk page.
 * 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.

Quality assessment

 * The quality parameter should be assigned according to the Quality scale below.

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 baseball. Importance does not equate to quality; a featured article could rate 'mid' on importance.

One way to think of importance is this: imagine a person with absolutely no knowledge of the NFL who is researching the topic on Wikipedia. Importance can be defined by how greatly the absence of an article on a particular subject would be felt and/or how quickly that article's absence would be noted.

WikiProject importance assessments
See the table on the right for a summary of manual assessment levels. Keep in mind that the importance assessment of an article bears no relation to the quality of that article, nor is it a reflection on the amount of work editors have put into that article. It's simply a measure of the relative importance of that article within the sphere of the NFL project.

Importance must be regarded as a relative term within this project. Assessments should only reflect the perceived importance to the NFL project. An article judged to be "Top-importance" in one WikiProject's context may be only "Low-importance" for another WikiProject. For example, a player may have an exemplary college football career where he leads his team to a national title and wins major individual awards, but then has only a short, non-distinguished NFL career. The article covering this player could be regarded as "Top-importance" to the College Football project but as "Low-importance" to the NFL project.

Consider a hierarchy such as National Football League (Top) -> NFL Draft (High) -> 2011 NFL Draft (Mid)-> List of 2011 NFL Draft early entrants (Low). As one can see the centrality to the overall scope of the NFL of the topic being covered by each article in this hierarchy decreases. Another example of a hierarchy one could consider: National Football League (Top) -> 2005 NFL season (High) -> 2005 Minnesota Vikings season (Mid)-> Minnesota Vikings boat party scandal (Low).

Ranking within this project will be helpful in determining which articles should be the focus of editing efforts put forth by the project participants. Additionally, ranking could be helpful in deciding which articles are included first as the scope of the Wikipedia 1.0 project expands. An article labeled as "Top-Importance" for the subject of the NFL would almost certainly warrant inclusion in all general print encyclopedia releases.