Wikipedia:WikiProject New York City Public Transportation/Assessment

Welcome to the assessment department of the New York City Public Transportation project! This department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's articles on public transit in New York City and its environs. 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 project banner banner for each article's talk page; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:New York City public transportation articles by quality and Category:New York City public transportation articles by importance.

Frequently asked questions

 * How can I get my article rated? : Please list it in the section for assessment requests below. Alternatively — as it may be a long wait — assess it yourself.
 * Who can assess articles? : Any member of the New York City Public Transportation WikiProject is free to add or change the rating of an article.
 * 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.
 * 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, 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.

Instructions
An article becomes part of this WikiProject based on one of three templates being incorporated at the head of its talk page:
 * TrainsWikiProject if it is an article about trains, train operators, or train routes
 * WikiProject buses if it is an article about buses, bus operators, or bus routes
 * WPNYPT if it is a public transportation article about neither trains nor buses

Some articles' talk pages include both the train and bus templates; for instance, MetroCard (New York City). The WPNYPT template should not be used if either the train or bus template is present.

All three templates have multiple parameters, but for purposes of article assessment, these are the important ones:


 * or
 * or


 * or
 * or



An article's assessment consists of the values supplied for the class and importance parameters.

Note that, for the train and bus templates, the importance parameter indicates an article's importance for the parent project, while the NYPT-importance parameter indicates its importance in the New York City public transit context. The class parameter, on the other hand, is a single value that applies both to this project and to the parent project.

The following values may be used for the class parameter:


 * FA (adds articles to Category:FA-Class New York City public transportation articles)
 * A (adds articles to Category:A-Class New York City public transportation articles)
 * GA (adds articles to Category:GA-Class New York City public transportation articles)
 * B (adds articles to Category:B-Class New York City public transportation articles)
 * Start (adds articles to Category:Start-Class New York City public transportation articles)
 * Stub (adds articles to Category:Stub-Class New York City public transportation articles)
 * Disambig (adds articles to Category:Disambig-Class New York City public transportation articles)
 * Template (adds articles to Category:Template-Class New York City public transportation articles)
 * Cat (adds articles to Category:Category-Class New York City public transportation articles)
 * List (adds articles to Category:List-Class New York City public transportation articles)
 * NA (for all remaining pages, such as project pages, where no assessment is necessary)

Articles not yet classified are listed in Category:Unassessed New York City public transportation articles. The class should be assigned according to the quality scale below.

The following values may be used for the NYPT-importance parameter:


 * Top (adds articles to Category:Top-importance New York City public transportation articles)
 * High (adds articles to Category:High-importance New York City public transportation articles)
 * Mid (adds articles to Category:Mid-importance New York City public transportation articles)
 * Low (adds articles to Category:Low-importance New York City public transportation articles)

The parameter is not used if an article's class is set to NA, and may be omitted in those cases. Articles not yet given an importance rating are listed in Category:Unknown-importance New York City public transportation articles. The importance should be assigned according to the importance 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 literature.