Wikipedia:WikiProject South Dakota/Assessment

Welcome to the assessment department of the South Dakota WikiProject! This department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's articles about South Dakota or the people of South Dakota. 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 South Dakota project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:South Dakota articles by quality, 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 the South Dakota WikiProject 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, 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's assessment is generated from the class and importance parameters in the WikiProject South Dakota project banner on its talk page:

The following values may be used for the class parameter:


 * FA (adds articles to Category:FA-Class South Dakota articles)
 * A (adds articles to Category:A-Class South Dakota articles)
 * GA (adds articles to Category:GA-Class South Dakota articles)
 * B (adds articles to Category:B-Class South Dakota articles)
 * Start (adds articles to Category:Start-Class South Dakota articles)
 * Stub (adds articles to Category:Stub-Class South Dakota articles)
 * NA (for pages, such as templates or disambiguation pages, where assessment is unnecessary; adds pages to Category:Non-article South Dakota pages)

Articles for which a valid class is not provided are listed in Category:Unassessed South Dakota articles. The class 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 South Dakota.

''Note that general notability need not be from the perspective of editor demographics; generally notable topics should be rated similarly regardless of the country or region in which they hold said notability. Thus, topics which may seem obscure to a Western audience—but which are of high notability in other places—should still be highly rated.''

We are currently discussing which articles should be counted as being of Top-importance at Wikipedia:WikiProject South Dakota/Assessment/Top-importance articles.

Additional criteria to use:

Top importance
 * South Dakota
 * General "X of South Dakota" (where X = things like history, geography, demographics...)
 * Sioux Falls, Rapid City
 * Black Hills, Missouri River

High importance
 * Cities with pop. 8,000 to 50,000
 * Counties with pop. greater than 20,000
 * Ellsworth AFB
 * More specialized "X of South Dakota" (Ecology, geology, courts...)
 * Major parks and monuments (National parks, Mt. Rushmore, Custer SP)
 * Daugaard, Thune, Johnson, Noem
 * State flag, state seal, state capitol
 * SDSU and USD
 * Large reservations
 * Interstates 29 and 90
 * Historical events with a major, lasting impact (L&C expedition, Dust Bowl, Wounded Knee massacre, BH gold rush...)
 * Major geographic regions and features besides those listed as "Top" (Great Plains, James River...)
 * Census-defined Metropolitan Areas (SF & RC)

Mid importance
 * Cities with pop. 1,000 to 8,000
 * Smaller counties
 * "X of [City]" (e.g. "History of Sioux Falls")
 * State government departments, agencies, etc.
 * All other elected and appointed government offices
 * Current major government officials (current secretary of X, Speaker of the House...)
 * Widely known non-politicians (Tom Brokaw, Laura Ingalls Wilder...)
 * Former governors, US senators, congressmen
 * Notable buildings and structures (DakotaDome, other airports, Missouri River dams, etc.)
 * Major media outlets (2 largest newspapers, affiliates of major TV networks, major regional radio stations, SDPB)
 * Private and smaller public colleges and universities
 * Interstates 190 and 229, US and SD highways of considerable length in the state
 * Localized yet important geographic features (Harney Peak, Lake Oahe...)
 * Smaller/less notable places managed by National Park Service, national wildlife refuges, state parks besides Custer
 * Very limited number of companies with a major historical or large current impact (Milwaukee Road, Sanford Health...)
 * Weather events of regional impact or great local impact (1993 floods, Rapid City flood...)
 * Major tourist attractions (Wall Drug, Sturgis Rally, Crazy Horse monument...)
 * Census-defined Micropolitan areas

Low importance
 * Townships
 * Cities with pop. less than 1,000
 * All CDPs, unincorporated communities, and defunct cities
 * Most politicians and government officials (state legislators, mayors...)
 * Non-politicians of lesser fame or notablility
 * Minor media outlets
 * Elections
 * Military units
 * Most buildings
 * Most organizations
 * Most sports teams
 * Nearly all companies
 * Community colleges, high schools, middle schools

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.

The Journey Museum and Gardens (Fact-of-the-matter (talk) 15:59, 7 August 2009 (UTC))


 * I've gone ahead and re-assessed it as C class. Like I said in my edit summary, the article still has issues, but is much larger than stub class. Alexius  Horatius  20:02, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Joe Kirby I think this bio is longer and more detailed than a stub.Joepkirby (talk) 00:52, 28 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Upped it to "Start" class. Alexius  Horatius  01:44, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Minnesela, South Dakota I revised and added new information to the article; it used to be Stub-class, and I am not sure which class it now belongs in. I believe it is much more than Start-class, but the Demographics section is poor (mainly due to its status as a ghost town). TCMemoire (talk) 04:07, 14 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I put it at C class (lots of references, but as you said the geography and demographics sections are really short.) I also agree that it's much more than stub and probably better than start. I think of stub as usually really short and start as "lots of information but really sloppy". You (or other members) are always welcome to change my assessments if you disagree. Alexius  Horatius  12:30, 14 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you. I do agree; the article could use some work, like I said. I will try to do more research to expand the article. TCMemoire (talk) 16:37, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

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.

Worklist

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