Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Gilbert and Sullivan/Assessment

The Assessment Department debuts
I've added Quality and Importance to the G&S-project template, emulating a system already in use on many of the other WikiProjects.

Quality
Quality is determined on a scale established for Wikipedia 1.0. Unfortunately, the top three categories have some pretty stringent requirements that no G&S Article currently satisfies. These categories are:
 * Featured Article (FA)
 * A-Class
 * Good Article (GA)

Some of the G&S articles might, with a bit of concentrated effort, be brought up to A-Class or GA-Class, but none of them are there now.

That leaves B-Class, Start-Class, and Stub-Class. Of 148 articles, I rated 98 in B-Class, 32 in Start-class, and just 8 in Stub-Class. The dividing line between Start-Class and B-Class is pretty fuzzy. I was more lenient in awarding "B-Class" to short articles that, by their nature, will probably never be very long.


 * We might be able to get some of the short articles GA-rated. It's relatively easy to get a short article up to standard. Am trying The Sapphire Necklace to try and see what level is being asked for. Adam Cuerden talk 03:10, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Importance
Importance is determined on a four-tier scale. I rate:
 * 6 articles as Top-importance
 * 26 articles as High-importance
 * 40 articles as Mid-importance
 * 67 articles as Low-importance

Again, this is subjective, but I think these ratios are about right. I asked myself, "How important is it that this article eventually reach "featured-article" or "good-article" status. So, as I see it:


 * For Top-importance articles, we should be striving for A-class, and eventually FA status.
 * For High-importance articles, we should be striving for Good-article status.
 * For Mid-importance articles, Good-article status is nice-to-have, but not essential
 * Low-importance articles will probably never be "Good articles" as that term is now defined.

Note that importance was assigned from a G&S perspective. In other contexts, some of these articles might have higher or lower importance.

I think the Importance parameter gives a pretty good idea where the G&S Project ought to be spending its time. Marc Shepherd 20:39, 14 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I have to say that some of the choices are... somewhat odd. I mean, after all your promotion of Princess Toto as a much needed article, you then promptly rated it Low Importance. Likewise, a lot of the shorter articles seem to have gotten rated "Start" when they have all or most of the information that could be added to them, e.g. Overture di Ballo, The Sapphire Necklace.


 * The description of Start says "Substantial/major editing is needed, most material for a complete article needs to be added. This article still needs to be completed, so an article cleanup tag is inappropriate at this stage." However, it's very hard to see for some articles what the missing sections are, and this makes the rating choice somewhat useless: How are we supposed to move forward on an article that's missing sections when it's not apparent what's missing?


 * Obviously, this doesn't apply to things like Princess Toto, with an obvious missing section. - Adam Cuerden talk 23:53, 14 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Response
 * First of all, take a very deep breath. The quality/importance ratings are nothing personal. I ripped through the G&S articles very quickly, making quick assessments. Sam went through afterwards and changed a number of them. It is not an exact science.


 * Second, although there are six quality ratings, three of them are unavailable to us (FA, A, GA), and another is almost always inapplicable (Stub). That leaves "Start" and "B". I made the best calls I could. You could argue that 100% of the articles are "B".


 * Third, the importance ratings aren't useful if we exaggerate. I rated plenty of articles as "Low" that I myself had spent significant time on (e.g., His Excellency, Haste to the Wedding, Fallen Fairies, The Beauty Stone, Haddon Hall). Realistically, in the grand scheme of things, these are comparatively unimportant. If they aren't low, then what is?


 * I am inclined to say that His Excellency, Princess Toto, Mountebanks, Haddon Hall, Engaged and other stage works that are still stageworthy ought to be rated a medium, whereas stuff like Fallen Fairies that no one would stage can be a Low. I'm going to go ahead and do the ones I know about.  --Ssilvers 01:53, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Surely the best WP:NPOV measure of stageworthiness is who has in fact staged it. Except for Engaged (which was already "Mid"), none of these works has had a professional production in the last 75 to 100 years. Amateur productions are on the order of about one or two a decade, or less.


 * Obviously, on a personal level I am interested in these things. But realistically, for a generalist encyclopedia, one must recognize that there is a pecking order among these works. By and large, nobody but G&S specialists cares about them. Let me again emphasize that I have nothing personal against the material, as for several of these articles I created them myself. Marc Shepherd 02:26, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree, but it seems odd to mix the very-specialist with the merely specialist. Princess Toto and Masque at Kenilworth are leagues apart. A fifth tier might be useful, to note this distinction. Adam Cuerden talk 02:56, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I've been saying for a long time that it would be more worthwhile to improve the articles we have than to add new ones. That is still my position. Any articles we add now would almost certainly be rated "Low", with maybe an outside shot at "Mid"; certainly not "High" or "Top". We should focus on getting our "Top" articles to FA or A-Class.


 * Sorry, but I don't necessarily agree. I plan to work on rounding out the G&S/related articles (e.g., the curtain raisers and the German-Reed operas) before I would try to polish up the articles that are already in pretty good shape.  On the other hand, it would be good to submit one article, say "Sullivan", to the "Good Article" process to see what non-G&S fan readers would do to improve it.  That might give you good clues on what you need to do to the other core articles to get a "Good article" rating.  But maybe I don't understand:  Can you explain what the advantage is of getting an article rated higher does for us? -- Ssilvers 01:53, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * It is a pretty easy matter to read the Good Article criteria, and see that Sullivan doesn't yet cut the mustard. Getting just one of these articles to Featured Article status would get more "non-G&S" eyes on it than almost anything we can do on Low and Mid-importance articles. Marc Shepherd 02:31, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Peer-review, then? Adam Cuerden talk 02:56, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I believe my comment about Princess Toto came after you had added The Sapphire Necklace, probably the least important "work by..." article we have to date. I mentioned that if you were eager to add new works, there were plenty others more important, and I gave Toto as an example. As Gilbert's output goes, it is still unimportant.


 * Eh... the GWOSes are underrated at present. Clay's stuff has started to hit concert use - it may be he's moving towards an upsurge akin to the Sullivan one. Adam Cuerden talk 02:56, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Personally, I agree the GWOSes are underrated. As Sam knows, I spent a year engraving the vocal score of His Excellency, then organized a concert in which Sam played Mats Munck. That was original research on my part. However, with my Wikipedia hat on, I have to acknowledge that this point of view has not yet caught hold in any citable literature. There are many G&S subjects here where my personal opinion is different than what the articles say. But WP is the place to record the consensus of human knowledge as it now stands, not to advance new viewpoints&mdash;however laudable they may be. Marc Shepherd 13:56, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * nod* just that they, like te Sullivan works a couple decades ago, seem to begining to be rediscovered - concerts and productions are beginning to happen more regularly. This may be an indication that they're about to change, as it were. Adam Cuerden talk 14:43, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Again, sorry, I disagree. One of our great opportunities here is to teach people about the other stageworthy works of G&S, like Engaged, Princess Toto, Haddon Hall, etc.  So, I think it's very, very good that Adam is working on Princess Toto, which I have seen done and feel is a very stageworthy work.


 * Again, it's all relative. Yes, I agree Princess Toto is stageworthy. (I believe I saw the same production you did.) But it is less important in his career than the Bab Ballads, the operas with Sullivan, Engaged, and probably a number of other works as well.


 * If The Mikado is Top, Iolanthe is High, and The Grand Duke is Mid (as they all are, at the moment), then surely Princess Toto is one step below. I mean, Toto was so unimportant to Gilbert that it is one of the few works he left out of Original Plays. Marc Shepherd 02:31, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I know first-hand that adding new material is a lot easier. You don't have to worry about fitting into a structure that was started by someone else. And because nothing is there, by definition anything you do will be an improvement. Improving existing articles is a lot harder.


 * "Now there I think you're right. Then we might all...." -- Ssilvers 01:53, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Nevertheless, we should not have an exaggerated sense of the importance of our own contributions. The fact is, if we spent as much effort improving our Top and High-importance articles as we've spent adding new Low-importance articles, perhaps we'd have the Gilbert and Sullivan article ready to submit as a Featured Article candidate. Marc Shepherd 01:29, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Maybe, but again, why is that important? -- Ssilvers 01:53, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I should work more on W.S.Gilbert. All I've done so far is replace the really awful stuff that was there. So much more I could do...But all these links will help, I think. Adam Cuerden talk 02:56, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Core?
I note that the Biography group have the further qualification "Core". Adding this in, or possibly instead a division between Mid and Low, might allow a more sensible allocation of the articles in the "Low" category between the genuinely minimal and the not-so-much. Adam Cuerden talk 17:38, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
 * What are you talking about? These are the Wiki classes and "importance" assessment levels.  We can't just make up our own.  Forget about this.  IMO, There is plenty of useful work for us to do without worrying about stupid Wiki assessment definitions.  -- Ssilvers 03:43, 24 September 2006 (UTC)