Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Assessment

Welcome to the Assessment Department of the U.S. Roads WikiProject! This department focuses on assessing the quality of U.S. road and highway related articles on Wikipedia. The process follows the goals of the WP:1.0 program, but 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 U.S. Roads project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:U.S. road transport articles by quality and Category:U.S. road transport articles by importance, which serves as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist.

Assessments
We assess articles in a manner that is slightly different than other projects. Nearly all articles on routes have three major sections: Route description, History, and a junction list. Below, we'll call these the "Big Three". The lower half of the scale is assessed based on the presence of any of these three sections; while the upper half of the scale goes through a more rigorous process. Articles on interchanges may simply ignore the junction list requirement. The progression of articles along the quality scale is described in greater detail below.

The "Big Three" sections
There are three main sections to most USRD articles: Route description, History, and Major intersections. An article's quality assessment is dependent on these three sections. If it only has one section or none at all, it is a Stub, any two and it's Start-Class, all three and it's at least C-Class. If you have improved an article, it is generally OK for you to change an article's class among Stub, Start, and C.

Higher classes
Once an article has reached C-Class, it has reached the point where another editor should review it before its assessment is raised further. There is a gentlemen's agreement among USRD editors to not give their own work a B-Class rating in most cases. Above that, there are formal review processes at GAN, ACR, and FAC, which increase in rigor with each step, to determine if an article should be raised into the upper tier (GA-, A- or FA-Class).

Other classes
Non-articles can be assigned other classes, which do not affect the WikiWork scores.

WikiWork
We use the seven quality classes to calculate a metric we call WikiWork, which tells us the current status of our articles. There are two main WikiWork numbers which are used. Cumulative WikiWork (ω) is the total number of classes (that is, improving a stub to start is one class) needed for all U.S. Roads articles to become featured articles. Relative WikiWork (Ω) is ω divided by the number of articles. This lets us know what class the average USRD article is.

Cumulative WikiWork is calculated like this:
 * $$\omega = a + 2g + 3b + 4c + 5s + 6t$$

In this calculation, $$a$$ is the number of A-Class articles, $$g$$ is GA-Class articles, $$b$$ is B-Class articles, $$c$$ is C-Class articles, $$s$$ is Start-Class articles, and $$t$$ is Stub-Class articles. The current ω is 0.

Relative WikiWork is calculated like this:
 * $$\Omega = \frac{\omega}{number~of~articles}$$

This calculation takes the above calculation and divides it by the number of articles, including featured articles, which is 0. This gives us a relative WikiWork of /(++++++). Using the scale from the cumulative calculation, a Start-Class article is given a 5.0 and a C-Class article is given a 4.0, so the average USRD article is between Start- and C-Class.

Early on in the project, we had to calculate the project's and each state's WikiWork by hand. Thankfully, this task is now handled by a bot. The table can be found at WikiProject U.S. Roads/Assessment/States. A "live" version of this table, which is useful if you cannot wait until the bot runs, is located at WikiProject U.S. Roads/Assessment/Live.

Reviewing articles
There are a number of ways to assess the quality of USRD articles. At the peer and A-Class reviews, USRD collaborates with other national highway projects (Australia and Canada, notably) to perform these reviews under the Highways WikiProject banner.

Peer review
The peer review process is not used to evaluate an article for a particular assessment level directly; rather, it is a forum where article authors can solicit ideas for further improvements. Peer review is most often requested when an article is at the C-Class or B-Class level; articles at lower levels are typically so incomplete that a meaningful review is impossible, while articles at higher levels go through more formal review processes.

To begin a peer review, follow the instructions at Peer review.

Individual review
The individual review process is used for all assessment activities up to the B-Class level. In this process, any editor may review an article against the listed criteria and assign the corresponding quality rating themselves. If an article nominally meets the criteria for a certain level, but one section is severely lacking, a level may be deducted from the rating.

Article authors are free to assess their own articles under this process. However, by general agreement among our editors, the final assessment for a B-Class rating is typically left to an independent editor; requests for reassessment may be made by adding yes to.

Good article review
The good article nomination process is an independent review mechanism through which an article receives a "good article" quality rating. The process involves a detailed review of the article by an independent examiner, who determines whether the article meets the good article criteria.

Full instructions for requesting a good article review are provided on the good article review page.

A-Class review
The A-Class review process is the most thorough and demanding assessment of article quality done by the U.S. Roads WikiProject. An article that undergoes this process will be assessed against the A-Class criteria. During this time, independent editors critique the A-Class candidates by suggesting improvements or stylistic changes. Each reviewer's comments conclude with a simple support or oppose vote. For an article to be approved, three more reviewers must support promotion than oppose. Starting in 2014, the process is also provisionally reviewing list articles to award AL-Class; these reviews are being done using the featured list criteria as a starting point.

To request an A-Class review, simply add yes to and follow the instructions on the banner.

Featured article and list review
The featured article candidacy and featured list candidacy processes are separate, independent, Wikipedia-wide quality assessment mechanisms; these processes are the only way an article or list can receive a "featured" quality rating. The process involves a comprehensive review of the article by multiple independent examiners, all of whom must agree that the article meets the featured article criteria or featured list criteria.

Full instructions for submitting a featured article or list candidacy are provided on the appropriate featured candidacy page. Editors are advised to carefully review the submission instructions; failing to follow them correctly may cause the submission to be rejected.