Wikipedia:WikiProject Oceania/Assessment

Article rating and assessment scheme
An article rating and assessment scheme has been implemented for articles identified as being of interest to WikiProject Oceania. In this scheme, Oceania-related articles ('article' here also includes lists) may be assigned: The primary purpose of this rating and assessment scheme is to provide project members and editors with a sub-categorised survey of the current status of Oceania-related 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 (ie 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 Project banner,.

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 Oceania project members – 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 which compiles a variety of listings, statistics and log data, which can then later be analysed by the Project. See the above table for links to these auto-generated and updated pages, and the associated by quality and by importance categories.

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.

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 field.

Instructions
An article's assessment is recorded via the use of certain parameters of the WikiProject Oceania project banner, which is affixed to the talk pages of in-scope articles.

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 Oceania-related 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 anglicanism-importance parameter and Quality scale for the class parameter.

The general workflow is as follows:
 * 1) Locate an in-scope Oceania-related article (or list), add the project banner to its talk page if not already there. This also applies to new articles you may create, you can add the banner and the rating.
 * 2) If currently unassessed (or when adding the project banner), determine what its class and importance assessment rating should be, using your judgment 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.
 * 3) 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.
 * 4) If in doubt as to the appropriate class or importance level, you can either leave the value unassigned for now and/or consult with another project member to decide.
 * 5) 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, then you can update the parameter yourself to reflect its new status.
 * 6) On an ongoing basis, you can patrol the various categories for improvement opportunities and also the unassessed articles for new assessments.