Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Public Policy/Quality rating/Screencast

Script

 * This is a draft script for a screencast explaining the article quality assessment system and walking through an example evaluation.


 * Each new line represents a transition to a new slide.

This is a walkthrough of the

article quality assessment system of WikiProject United States Public Policy, which we're using as part of Wikimedia's Public Policy Initiative to gauge improvement in article quality over the course of the project.

The basic concept is to rate six separate aspects of article quality:

comprehensiveness

sourcing

neutrality

readability

formatting

and illustrations. These ratings are then automatically translated into the

rating system used across English Wikipedia, known as the Wikipedia 1.0 assessment system. This public policy system is inspired by Wikipedia's definition of what articles ideally ought to look like:

the Featured Article Criteria. But the idea is to take that standard, which packs a lot of Wikipedia's culture into a small number of words, and unpack it, to make explicit what Wikipedians expect out of articles and to put those expectations in terms that newcomers can learn quickly. First, a little of the mechanics:

We assign quality ratings to articles by going to the

talk page and

editing it to add a WikiProject banner, in this case

WikiProject United States Public Policy, and then adding the name of each factor and what its score is,

like this, with each one separated by a pipe. These banners are a special kind of wiki code called templates, which are marked by

two opening curly brackets at the beginning and two closing curly brackets at the end. And after the name of the template, each additional section separated by a pipe is called a parameter of the template.

So each of the scores, for comprehensiveness, sourcing, neutrality, readability, formatting, and illustrations, is a parameter of the WikiProject United States Public Policy template. Now let's assess this article,

"Energy policy of the United States". After carefully reading the article, we can begin. First off, we assess

comprehensiveness, on a scale of 1 to 10. Articles just a few sentences long are at the low end of the scale; substantial articles that still need more coverage of some parts of the topic are in the middle of the scale, and complete, well-rounded articles that cover all aspects of the topic in appropriate detail are at the top. In this case, the article has a lot of solid content, but a few critical areas are underdeveloped: the

history section doesn't give a well-rounded picture of energy policy, it focuses more on energy sources and consumption; the

"Energy policy budget and incentives" section lacks detail; and the

sections at the end about future policy plans and international cooperation don't say much at all. So the comprehensiveness of this article is about 70%, a score of 7 out of 10. Next we look at

sourcing, on a scale of 0 to 6. So we're looking at both the quality of the references--are they the most appropriate sources for this topic--and how much of the content is well-referenced. For

"Energy policy of the United States", most of the content has supporting citations, but these are mostly primary sources rather than scholarly policy analyses and overviews that would put details into broader context. So in many cases there are probably better sources out there that could be used instead. So sourcing earns a 4 out of 6; the sourcing is over half way there, but still has a lot of room for improvement. Next we evaluate

neutrality, on a scale of 0 to 3. Articles that fairly and proportionately represent all significant viewpoints on a topic from reliable sources get top marks; small problems with neutrality knock the score down to a 2, and an article that's mostly neutral but with one or more significant neutrality problems get a score of 1, and articles with major bias problems get a neutrality score of 0.

This article is generally neutral, but it doesn't do enough to describe different viewpoints on some of the debated aspects of the topic; it gets a score of 2. Next comes

readability on a scale of 0 to 3. Professional-quality prose that keeps the reader's interest and is free of significant grammar and style problems earns a 3, articles that are mostly solid but need a good copy-edit score 2, articles where the quality of the writing detracts from the reading experience earn a 1, and articles get 0 for readability if they are hard to understand and require a major rewrite.

Most of this is pretty readable, but it's not up to the standard of really well-written Wikipedia articles; it gets a 2 for readability. Next up is

formatting, on a scale of 0 to 2. If an article is well-organized into sections and doesn't have serious formatting problems, it gets a 2. If it has some significant shortcomings in formatting, it gets a 1, and if it's basically not formatted for the wiki, it gets 0.

This is pretty well laid out; there would be some details that could be improved to follow the manual of style exactly, but it's good enough for a 2. And finally,

illustrations, on a scale of 0 to 2. This is a rough measure of how completely and appropriately an article is illustrated. An article with all or most of the illustrations it ought to have gets a 2, a partly illustrated article gets a 1, and an article with few or no illustrations relative to what it would have ideally gets a 0.

"Energy policy of the United States" is pretty well-illustrated, with informative graphs as well as relevant photographs, so it gets a 2.

So we've added all these scores into the WikiProject banner on the talk page. And we can also rate it for importance within the WikiProject; this is one of the broadest and more central articles for the United States Public Policy WikiProject, so it gets assigned Top importances. Less central topics would be rated as High, Mid, or Low importance. Now we can

save the page. And the result is

that the template automatically uses the scores to assign an B-class rating to the article, which we can see is consistent with what other WikiProjects have rated this article. So that's how you use the article quality assessment system for WikiProject United States Public Policy. You can see more detail about how to rate articles under the "Assessment" tab of the WikiProject.