Wikipedia:WikiProject Writing/Assessment

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: transparent;" How are articles assessed? &bull; How do I find article assessments? &bull; How do I assess articles? &bull; How do I find articles in need of assessment? &bull; Importance assessment rubric &bull; Quality assessment rubric
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WikiProjects assess articles based on their importance and quality standards. Importance refers to how pertinent the article is to the scope and goals of WikiProject Writing. Quality refers to how complete an article is based on Wikipedia's content standards.

Be mindful that Wikipedia's editing base is made up entirely of volunteers with varying levels of expertise. If you see an assessment that doesn't look quite right, you can always bring it up on the WikiProject Writing discussion page for further insight from active WikiProject Writing participants.

Quality assessments
Article quality is based on a partial letter-grade class system (See 'quality assessment rubric' for a full breakdown of each class). Content quality is somewhat standard across articles, but may contain some variation depending on the amount of reliable secondary sources available for use in the article. For example, articles on academic organizations may be much shorter or have fewer sections than foundational or field-specific topic articles due to the amount of sourcing available. The goal here is to figure out how well the article captures the sum of reliable knowledge available on the topic and how effectively it communicates this information to a public audience. Find out more about quality assessments here.

Importance assessments
Article importance is based on a low to top importance scale (See 'Importance assessment rubric' for a full breakdown of each tier). Article importance is specific to the field the article is a part of. Since WikiProjects encompass a wide range of fields on Wikipedia, those participants are the principle editors assessing importance. Since this is a fairly WikiProject-specific importance scale, WikiProjects often create their own importance assessments based on their scope and goals. WikiProject Writing has developed it's own importance scale, but if you would like to make changes or discuss a clarification, you can do so at the WikiProject Writing discussion page. Find out more about importance assessments here.

You can find article quality and importance assessments on the talk page of any Wikipedia article. At the top of the talk page, there will be a WikiProject banner(s) with a class and importance grade beneath a short description of the WikiProject. If there are multiple WikiProjects, you may need to click on the dropdown menu for each WikiProject to find their assessments. It is important to note that assessment may differ from project to project. For reference, here is an example of the WikiProject Writing banner:

''NOTE: The quality and importance grades are omitted here. They will normally appear where the 'NA class' box is located.''

Articles can be assessed by adding the WikiProject Writing banner template to the talk page of an article and setting class and importance parameters. You can go about doing this through source editor in wikitext OR by using the Rater tool which allows you to add the banner in visual editor.

'''For a full step-by-step breakdown of both methods, use the tagging and assessing articles guide. This guide also goes over how to change preexisting quality and importance assessments.

Articles under the scope of WikiProject Writing are tracked using the WP 1.0 bot. The bot generates a table listing articles that have been assessed and unassessed. All articles with the WikiProject Writing banner are included in this table. Those that have been assessed are listed alongside their quality and importance classes or grades. You can find articles in need of assessment by clicking on the number next to 'unassessed' and selecting an article.

This table was developed by WikiProject Writing participants based on the importance level of articles under the scope of WikiProject Writing. If you are unclear about an assessment criteria or a specific article you're working on, you can start a discussion on theWikiProject Writing discussion page to gain clarity/consensus on a potential revision.

NOTE: Any article which has not yet been assessed on the importance scale is automatically added to the Category:Unknown-importance Writing articles.

This quality assessment criteria has been developed by WikiProject articles for creation as a standard guidelines for quality assessment. WikiProject Writing has placed article examples for several examples sections of the criteria, but we still need help improving articles to featured article status and featured list status.