Wikipedia:WikiProject United States courts and judges/Assessment

Welcome to the assessment department of WikiProject courts and judges! This department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's articles about United States courts and judges. 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 recognising excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work.

The ratings are done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the WikiProject USCJ project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:United States courts and judges articles by quality and Category:United States courts and judges articles by importance.

Frequently asked questions

 * How do I add an article to the WikiProject? : Just add WikiProject USCJ to the talk page; there's no need to do anything else.
 * How can I get my article rated? : Please list it in the section for assessment requests below.
 * Who can assess articles? : Any editor, or member of the courts and judges WikiProject is free to add a rating to an article if they wish. However, the Assessment Team (from this department) may overrule the rating of an article if they see fit.
 * Aren't the ratings subjective? : Yes, they are (see, in particular, the disclaimers on the importance scale), 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!
 * Did the reviewer leave any comments? : If the reviewer leaves a comment, it will be found on the talk page of the article.
 * Why didn't the reviewer leave any comments? : Unfortunately, due to the volume of articles that need to be assessed, you may not receive detailed comments in all instances. If this is the case, you might ask the person who assessed the article if you have any particular questions; they will usually be happy to provide you with their reasoning.
 * To what extent will the Assessment Dept. give feedback on an article after grading it? : If you wish, the Assessment Dept. (for WikiProject courts and judges) will attempt to keep giving feedback until the Assessment Dept. believes that the article in question is at least; slightly above a "B" grade. After reaching this stage, the Assessment Team are likely to recommend that your article be peer-reviewed.
 * How can I keep track of changes in article ratings? : A full log of changes over the past thirty days is available here. If you are just looking for an overview, however, the statistics may be more accessible.
 * How does this all work? : See Using the bot and WikiProject Council Guide.

If you have any other questions not listed here, please feel free to ask them on the discussion page for this department.

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. If you are interested in more extensive comments on an article, please use the Peer review instead. Completed requests are usually placed in the archive.

Please place new requests (in the format, # article name -- ~ ) at the bottom of the list.


 * 1) A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. --TommyBoy (talk) 05:18, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
 * 1) A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. --TommyBoy (talk) 05:18, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Instructions
An article's assessment is generated from the class and importance parameters in the WikiProject USCJ project banner on its talk page:

The following values may be used for the class parameter:


 * FA (adds articles to Category:FA-Class United States courts and judges articles)
 * A (adds articles to Category:A-Class United States courts and judges articles)
 * GA (adds articles to Category:GA-Class United States courts and judges articles)
 * B (adds articles to Category:B-Class United States courts and judges articles)
 * Start (adds articles to Category:Start-Class United States courts and judges articles)
 * Stub (adds articles to Category:Stub-Class United States courts and judges articles)
 * NA (for pages, such as templates or disambiguation pages, where assessment is unnecessary; adds pages to Category:NA-Class United States courts and judges articles)

Articles for which a valid class is not provided are listed in Category:Unassessed United States courts and judges articles. The class should be assigned according to the quality scale below.

Quality scale
Please note that the WikiProject courts and judges Assessment Department is in the process of updating the grading scheme, so changes may occur to the criteria and examples - the assessment department apologizes for an inconvenience caused, and endeavours to complete this task as soon as possible. Upon completion of updating, the main member of the assessment department will remove this notice.

Importance assessment
An article's importance assessment is generated from the importance parameter in the WikiProject USCJ project banner on its talk page:



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 the English 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 the law.

Further, generally notability should not be limited to the perspective of editor demographics, or one jurisdiction or country. Thus, topics which may seem obscure to a common law audience—but which are of high notability in other places—should still be highly rated. Generally, articles on the topic in one country should have the same importance rating as an equivalent topic in another country. For example, an article on criminal law in Canada, Germany, or China should receive the same importance rating as an article on criminal law in the US.

The following values may be used for importance assessments:

Assessment Team
''The list of members below make up the WikiProject courts and judges Assessment team. Members of the team who are bolded (below) are currently the main, active member(s) of the assessment team - they are most likely to assess articles, so please direct any enquiries regarding assessment or the assessment department towards them.''


 * 1)  bd2412  T 19:04, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

New members
If you would like to join the assessment team, please add your name below.



Example assessments
To assess an article, paste one of the following onto the article's talk page.

Quality


 *   - to rate an article at FA-Class
 *   - to rate an article at A-Class
 *   - to rate an article at GA-Class
 *   - to rate an article at B-Class
 *   - to rate an article at Start-Class
 *   - to rate an article at Stub-Class
 *   - to leave the article un-assessed.

Importance


 *   - to rate an article at Top importance
 *   - to rate an article at High importance
 *   - to rate an article at Mid importance
 *   - to rate an article at Low importance

Log
The full log of assessment changes for the past thirty days is available here.