Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools/Assessment/Archive 1

Dedicated assessors.
We need some dedicated assessors who will grade requested articles for assessment. Maybe we can make a section with the names of the dedicated assessors. --EvaGears 03:10, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree and have added the section Adam McCormick 05:35, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Importance grading of school articles
As a matter of curiosity could someone please advise on the criteria used for assessing the importance of school articles. I note that Reading School has been assessed as being of low importance despite being the tenth oldest school in England and one of the best-known grammar schools in the country. It also has no fewer than four listed buildings so is of architectural importance too. I can only think that all schools are considered of low importance in encylopaedic terms. Do any schools get rated with a higher level? If so, on what grounds? Dahliarose 00:36, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Further to my comments above I am still puzzled about the importance assessments of school articles. I note that the Pinkerton Academy in America has been assessed as of medium importance and is the only school so far assessed which has received this importance rating. Is there a pro-American bias amongst the assessors? What criteria are being used? I see nothing in the article which suggests why this American school founded in 1793 should be more important than for instance Reading School in England which was founded in 1125 and has a long and distinguished history. It also has many notable alumni, far more than the Pinkerton Academy, which seems to have been graded "medium" on the strength of its alumni, most of whom are unknown outside the U.S. Dahliarose 11:55, 25 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, there isn't any standard regarding article importance. It's supposed to be project based, but WikiProject Schools has yet to set any real criteria on the matter. When I originally created the new version of the project banner with its categories, I was going to leave out the importance scale entirely to avoid controversy. But user BlankVerse made the excellent point that some articles, such as Los Angeles Unified School District, were more important than others. This needs to be discussed on the main Project talk page and perhaps with the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team. --Jh12 06:08, 8 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks. That's a great help. At least we now have something to work on. It's interesting to compare the different articles. I can see that it is very difficult to make an objective assessment about a school's importance but it does seem to me at the moment that there is a distinctly pro-American bias and that American articles or those with an American interest are assessed as more important than those elsewhere. I will raise the issue on the main project page. Dahliarose 11:46, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Creation of new category of assessed school articles
I note that the Architecture Project categorise all their articles according to quality. I think it might be useful if we could do the same thing for school articles but I'm not sure how we got about doing it. The architecture articles seem to automatically go into a category once they've been assessed. See:

Category:Architecture articles by quality

Dahliarose 22:45, 1 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Our WPSchools project banner automatically places everything into the proper categories. It's just previously been a little tricky getting to the category pages.  I added some links to the assessment and main project page that should help, but feel free to change how the page looks. --Jh12 05:54, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

A Little Clarification
I'd like to help out by assessing some of the Colorado school articles but I'm not sure how to go about it. Do I need to sign up somewhere, or do I just start ranking? And How do I use the assessment levels? Adam McCormick 16:31, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

I have assumed that we just add our names to the lists, get edit/assessing and wait for a Barnstar when the grown-ups get back. I'm not sure if we have to add every assessment to the "March" list - I have done alot but didnt add them to the list presuming that the automatic tools will find the assessment. Victuallers 17:27, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Assessment Template
Ok, so I'm doing a lot of assessments right now and I'm use this template-ish thing, and ideas on making it official?

And then I just add my comments and sign. I'm wondering if one of the coding wizkids out there might know how to maybe automate this into a template, maybe something that would add the reasoning bit to the assessed articles list? Well I can dream...Cheers! Adam McCormick 07:11, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Shiny Template
Well, I got bored and kind of hacked my own but it looks shiny if I do say so myself:

have a look at it here WPSchoolsAssessment

And tell me what you think. It works just like the main banner but you can add either info= or assess=no to concatenate my assessment template. Schould make life easier (no more cut and paste text). Adam McCormick 07:39, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Update, this doesn't work so well, I'm trying to fix it, I'll post an update when it works correctly
 * So I had to ditch the autodate and signature bit. If anyone has any idea how to make a template automatically sign and date from it's original use I'd love to hear it, maybe a second layer of templating? Oh well, works fine but now you have to sign in the info string. Adam McCormick 02:43, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

School articles in other encylopaedias
I thought it might be helpful as a reference point to include here a list of school articles from other encyclopaedias. Presumably all these schools should be considered as of top importance for Wikipedia.

Microsoft Encarta 2004 edition

 * City of London Freemen's School
 * City of London School
 * Dame Allan's Schools
 * Downside School
 * Dulwich College
 * Eton College
 * Dundee High School
 * Durham School
 * Gordonstoun School
 * Haberdashers' Aske's School
 * Harrow School
 * High School of Glasgow
 * Joffrey Ballet School
 * King's School, Canterbury
 * Marlborough College
 * Millfield School
 * Roedean School
 * Rugby School
 * Sherborne School
 * Shrewsbury School
 * St Paul's School Which one? Adam McCormick 00:52, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Stowe School
 * Wellington College
 * Westminster School
 * Winchester College


 * All of these now have ratings with High importance Adam McCormick 01:15, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Encyclopaedia Britannica Concise CD-Rom edition

 * Eton College
 * Harrow School
 * Summerhill School


 * I'm not familiar with the submission process for articles in encarta, but I'm not particularly sure that it should dictate the importance to this project. This should still be very useful though. Thanks! Adam McCormick 19:14, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
 * There is a Wiki policy that this pedia should contain at least a super set of all other pedias, sorry lost the place where I read it. So I think this is why these are seen as top priority. Victuallers 22:46, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't know about top, but in light of that fact, high priority. I'll ignore K for a bit and get to work. Adam McCormick 05:32, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
 * The relevant page is WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles. There is also a list of missing schools articles WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/High schools though it seems somewhat dubious (it was compiled by journalists at facebook.com) and is probably not a helpful guideline. Dahliarose 22:38, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm pretty sure that it's the UK edition of the encyclopedia...Adam McCormick 00:51, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Assessment Summaries
I recently changed the subheadings for the last few days of assessment summaries in March 2007. I can think of reasons for listing work on specific days, but don't the signature timestamps sort of do that anyways? I don't mind keeping the monthly summaries -its good to be able to compare work done over that length of time on a monthly basis. Any thoughts or comments? SkipperClipper 03:47, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Mostly it's just so that we can find them easier, I started doing it because eighty-ninety summaries make it hard to find a specific one or to locate a specific day, this also allows editors to get to the most recent dates from the top quickly. Adam McCormick 05:11, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Hide old assessments feature
I have noticed that some of the hidden assessments are not showing correctly when displayed (look at March 19th). I have not been able to fix this, can anyone else help? Camaron1 | Chris 10:58, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Woking on it Adam McCormick 16:41, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The problem is the font tag in your signature. The template won't take it.
 * OK, I will remove the font tags whenever I archive sections. Camaron1 | Chris  10:10, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

I am having trouble archiving Aprils assessments, due to the style of error that is appearing I think it might be signature causing the problem, just like mine used too. However, my attempts at reformatting have not been successful and the error still occurs. Can anyone help? Camaron1 | Chris 19:31, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * OK, Fixed. The problems were that had posted an external link which doesn't hide well and  had a pipe character (verticle bar used in wiki templates) as plain text in her signature. Adam McCormick 00:58, 3 May 2007 (UTC)


 * OK, thank you for fixing it. Camaron1 | Chris 19:23, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Some Advice about assessing "The School"
One of the tasks I set myself was to try and work on schools that began with "The". One reason for this was that I saw that some schools that began with "The" ... say "The King's School" would sometimes appear under K and othertimes would appear under "T". Given the way that directories and the functionality of Wikipedia I have sorted all the schools called "The King's School" (yes there are many) under "K".

I had a note today where unbeknown to me I have got into an edit skirmish (too well mannered to be a war). With the prime editor of two pages that both begin with "The". We need some advice/ suggested policy or we someone needs to find the existing advice.

I have quoted Pkortge's note below in order that we can discuss

On 26th March, you changed all external links for The Springfield College from "T" to "S" and for the The Lakes College from "T" to "L".

On the same day I changed them back, only to have you on the 31st March again change (only) The Springfield College - and I've again reverted your change today (1st April).

Please be advised that the correct (and full Registered) name of the schools are The Springfield College and The Lakes College.

You've also done similar sorting changes to some (but not all) other schools that have "The" as part of their name - with some you've been correct, with others I think you've been wrong, and with some - like The King's School, Canterbury which you've decided should come under "K" - I'm not sure what is correct ;-). On their website, in general text they refer to themselves colloquially as "Kings", but for their full name, they formally show The King's School.

PS: I am aware (and agree) that in certain contexts (e.g. cataloguing books in libraries), very common words (such as articles) at the beginning of a sequence of words are not considered for ordering, or are moved to the end, but this should not be the case for legal entities (as it is with these two private schools).

I've also read Wikipedia:Categorization and believe these to be an exception.

Advice please. Sub problem "University of Aardvark" .... is that under "U" or "A" Victuallers 13:27, 1 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Hmmm...This is a conundrum, but one that is not unique to Wikipedia. Take a look at school lisitings (using college guides, etc) and they tend to have no uniformity of style. My thought is to go with the rule used by libraries and bookstores: The Hardy Boys becomes 'Hardy Boys, The.'' I'm not proposing we change the names of the schools with this. It would simply seem to make sense to treat "The" as if it weren't there, as Adam has basically suggested. I'd also suggest the same course of action for "University of." To clarify those searching for schools, could we not put a note or disclaimer indicating how schools are categorized. SkipperClipper 16:09, 1 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I think that the "The" should not be used to index as most of the (english speaking) world ignores it anyway and tries to index by the second word. I think if those editors are so up in arms, they could concievably cross-categorize the school, but it should be categorized under the second word anyway. As far as universities go (Even though that isn't under this project) I think it's a bit more touchy. University of Colorado at Boulder, for example, is usually called "CU" so Most would say C is the correct category, but a school like The University of Michigan is "U of M" so U is still viable but so is M. I think that the best solution for universities os to let the name stand and to cross-categorize into other applicable letters. Adam McCormick 16:34, 1 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The issue is very "murky" indeed - Back in the "old" days of manual "Card Indexes", librarians solved their problem by ignoring the "The", and when they "computerised" they continued this, thus setting the "trend". Aside from books, there are two distinct issues, which can be seen in the following examples ... 1/. A suburb in Queensland is called "The Gap" and is listed in Australia Post's official booklet "An Alphabetical List of Postcodes throughout Australia" under "T" (along with over a dozen other suburbs with "The" in the name - BTW they also list "The University of Adelaide" and "The University of Sydney" under "T"). In my mind, any entity (School, University) that starts with a Town/City/Suburb name containing "The" should be sorted under "T". 2/. Legal entities that commence with "The" (like The Springfield College, The University of Sydney etc.) have made the point of incorporating the "The" into their names. If they are legally to be referred to as such, why should they be categorised incorrectly ? Pkortge 05:03, 2 April 2007 (UTC)


 * They should be categorized in such a way that they are easily located, legal issues aside. And anyway, if the pages are cross-categorized it's not even an issue. Also as per Naming_conventions this is a non-issue. "The" should not be the indexing term. Adam McCormick 06:19, 2 April 2007 (UTC)


 * See also Naming_conventions_%28definite_and_indefinite_articles_at_beginning_of_name%29 for the specific statement that Universities and shools are NOT an exception. Most if not all of the "The" articles here are also indexed by the second word. Adam McCormick 06:50, 2 April 2007 (UTC)


 * A-Ha ... I had an email from Chuq. He points out that there is a useful construction that looks like this


 * If this is included before the category section then all the entries will be sorted in that way. A useful addition as anyone adding a category entry quickly will get there entry correctly indexed. Oh and thanks~very much to all for the advice and research. Victuallers 07:54, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Useful on the main article page but the same change needs to be made on talk pages. For this the page attribute in the assessment template can also be usedAdam McCormick 03:10, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Clearing Assessment Requests
I'm going to go delete MOST of the completed Assessment Requests from this page. I'll leave some so folks can see progress is made on the list is added. However, I see no reason for keeping the full list. If people want to see the assessments that have been done, there are other venues, including on this page. I don't really see the need to archive this work either. If you feel I am in serious error here, please revert.SkipperClipper 16:02, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Just go ahead, it's a bit overdue. Adam McCormick 16:39, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

A question of scale
We have had a number of people over the last few few weeks chipping away at the number of unassessed schools. It remains at around 4,000 although we now have a significant increase on the magnitude of those that are assessed. A second thread to my thoughts is the debate between those who want to delete un notable schools and those who would like to have every school with a page. Now. A warning. This isn't meant to be accurate Maths. I'm trying to estimate a very approx figure.
 * say there are 6,000,000,000 people in the world )some est this as higher)
 * say people on average die at 60 (much higher in some countries)
 * say people go to school for 5 years of their lives (much higher for 1st world)
 * so we have a 12th of the population in school so that is 500,000,000 children.
 * If schools are of average size of 2,000 (much smaller for most schools)
 * Then we will have 250,000 schools eventually.

This makes me think about whether we can keep up. Any thoughts?Victuallers 08:36, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Well there are clearly a lot of schools in the world. However, most that are assessed are in English speaking countries except a few major ones, which brings the numbers down significantly. I generally agree that all schools are notable, but loads have so few people that can and are willing to contribute articles about them to the English Wikipedia, that the amount of school articles will probably not reach that number for a long time. Camaron1 | Chris  14:47, 5 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm of the school of thought that says every school should be mentioned in an article or list but not that they all need articles. Regardless, I like the figure, If there are enough contributors that 250,000 school articles are created, I say bring them on. Adam McCormick 15:14, 5 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your views - I just wanted to share how large this task might be. I hadn't thought about the English speaking angle .... but I suspect that many schools will create pages in their second language to show off their skills. I find it worrying that so few schools can find someone who can turn out a start article for their school. Those who do may use English as well and this may increase the quantity a bit.
 * My calculations were much too low ... there are about 133000 American schools alone Victuallers 16:49, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Article that has moved projects
After reviewing the assessment logs of March I noticed that this rather important India University article has had its WikiProject Schools template replaced with that of WikiProject University. I think that is right, it is a university article, but I thought I better let everyone know. Camaron1 | Chris 18:57, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * This article has also been sifnificantly improved since I reviewed it. I believe I did this review befor I understood that Schools didn't include Universities, oh well. Adam McCormick 19:10, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

"Best" picture
Just for fun what about Annandale High School — Preceding unsigned comment added by Victuallers (talk • contribs)
 * Well that is one of the best school logos I have seen! By the way, I added the article to the WP Schools Project, it has not been assessed yet however. Camaron1 | Chris  20:51, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * This article has now been assessed. Camaron1 | Chris  16:21, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Articles that need reassessing
After completing an assessment request I noticed a lot of school articles with Template:M-DCPS have been assessed by. The problem is a lot of them seem to be have been over assessed in importance, with most been "Mid" and quite a few "High" such as New World School of the Arts. I think they are going to need reviewing - I might later leave a note on this users talk page on assessment procedure. Camaron1 | Chris 19:55, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think we should make it clear to this user now that simply placing an assessment really isn't enough. The quality rating also need some work. I'll give it a more thourouly later unless you beat me to it. Adam McCormick 06:37, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I have left a friendly note on this users talk page on the issue. I am now planning to re-assess all those article as part of my next set of assessments if nobody objects. Camaron1 | Chris 14:08, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

confused
Ok so these two questions are totally unrelated to each other but...


 * 1) ...after reading the first paragraph of this page I'm confused.  I've thought all along that WP Schools used 1.0.  And yet the first paragraph suggests that it's used partially and this is in the assessments general cat and not Category:WikiProjects participating in Wikipedia 1.0 assessments (well I suppose the project as a whole would be).  What's used in re assessments?


 * 1) Peer review that is now archived--does that mean that whoever did the peer review is not watching the page--what exactly does it mean? Miss Mondegreen | Talk   12:26, 21 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't really understand the first question. The assessments as far as I know are done to help show weaknesses in articles and help in future improvement, nothing directly related to offline versions of Wikipedia. For the second question, peer reviews or discussions are needed to give an article a quality rating higher than B. If a peer review is archived, that means it has finished because it became inactive or reached consensus, or the article has become an FA status candidate according to Peer Review. Camaron1 | Chris 13:32, 21 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Peer review... certainly the pages may not be watched. There are 5 or six people doing assessments actively. There are about 2,500 schools that have been assessed. OK there are less than a hundred at "B" or above (ie those that should be peer reviewed) - but there are lots (definitely 1000s, maybe 10000s or 100000s coming). Sorry this is one of my worries ...Victuallers 13:36, 21 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Well I have noticed problems with the occasional person rating a lot of articles far to highly in both importance and rating without any of the assessment team noticing - this is why I find it a good idea to check the categories that articles are placed in for high and top importance, and GA, A and FA rating once in a while. Camaron1 | Chris 13:47, 21 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Agreed we need to do it.... thats why we have peer review for the top cats. The daily report should show up rogue changes/ mistakes. But we will all move on and we cannot rely that "someone" will watch changed pages. At the moment there are less than a hundred. Are you doing it cos its a good idea or cos its part of our procedures? Victuallers 14:07, 21 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Sorry I am a little confused, doing what? Camaron1 | Chris 15:15, 21 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Ok the reason I'm asking is the article in question was peer reviewed. The peer review was as follows:
 * "I am trying to nominate this article for GA status in schools. I'm looking for input on its formatting and content, and any general input on its importance rating. Feedback is appreciated and I will try to respond as well as i can. Thanks! Adam McCormick 21:00, 5 March 2007 (UTC)"
 * The article was never nominated for GA status and I don't know of anything that comes before nomination--maybe there's something within wikischools that I'm not aware of and it didn't pass there, but the article never received any notification. Several replies were posted--i.e. feedback, fairly quickly to the peer review.  And nothing.  No reply.  No follow-up.  Nothing.  If the peer reviewers can't even keep track of what they are supposed to be nominating and where they invited comments, we have a problem.  I certainly wouldn't have commented there had Adam McCormick not asked for feedback--I would have gone to his talk page.  I appreciate that there are few reviewers doing a lot of work, but the system clearly isn't.


 * In re my first question, is this or isn't this a project participating in Wiki 1.0 assessments? Miss Mondegreen | Talk   14:36, 22 April 2007 (UTC)


 * For the second question, I still do not really understand, can you please provide a link to the article that was been peer reviewed and the peer review itself. For the first question, yes this assessment team is participating in WP 1.0 but the main aim to show weakness in articles and suggest future improvement as already said. Camaron1 | Chris 15:48, 22 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Talk:University High School (Los Angeles) Miss Mondegreen | Talk  20:10, 22 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I assume you refer to this peer review Wikipedia:Peer_review/University_High_School_%28Los_Angeles%29. I believe it was archived because it came inactive, though it was still useful to see faults in the article. For more detail you will need to talk to Adam. Camaron1 | Chris 20:27, 22 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Ok, I was going to nominate the article for GA, but soon realized that it was not good enough (at the time) for the nomination. I decided to leave the peer review open because I think every article could benefit from diverse input. Not retracting my statements was an oversight. Thanks for the input! Adam McCormick 04:26, 23 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Got it... Well, there's a new peer review open which you've already commented at, and I'm requesting assessment from all three projects that the article is associated with. Anyone who'd like to comment on the article, opinions would be much appreciated. Miss Mondegreen | Talk  08:05, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

unassessed categorized by importance?
How is it possible that there are unassessed wikischools of not-unassessed levels of importance? Miss Mondegreen | Talk  00:33, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Importance to the project and the quality of the article are independent. Importance should not even require reading the article (technically). That said, I never add one without the other because they are really hard to find Adam McCormick 03:57, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, but can't importance ratings change? As more is found out about the place, etc?  So, someone assessed the schools for importance only and not for quality?  Miss Mondegreen | Talk   07:02, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Ratings can change, yes, but actual importance is (from what I've been able to discern) specific to a project but constant. The idea, as I see it is that ratings of one page among several projects should all be about the same but importance is project specific, so if anything, importance should be more important to add than a rating. I don't think anyone is actively doing importance-only assessments (so a lot of these may be incorrectly tagged) but I should think that has more to do with this project not having solid importance criteria (like most WikiProjects I've seen) Adam McCormick 07:27, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Except that, importance is pretty much based on what is in the article. So for example, the Uni High article has the history pretty much incomplete--there is nothing on the teacher strikes or a variety of other topics.  In fact, in the short while since the last assessment you can see new sections that have been added that weren't even alluded to last time.  I don't know if the changes--the expanded alumni list and the new sections warrant any changes at the moment, but I'd guess that once the history is more complete this will be of much higher priority.
 * Does your earlier comment mean that reassessments only assess quality and not importance? Miss Mondegreen | Talk  07:45, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * What I'm trying to say is that importance should not depend on what is in the article. If the school is essential to the mission of the Schools project, it should be of top importance. I think that reassessments should not change importance unless importance was incorrectly assessed in the first place. I acknowledge that often it is not possible to adaquately assess importance so it may need to be reassessed but it should change only because it was originally inaccurate. Adam McCormick 18:54, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Clearly, unless something has happened important has recently happened at a school and it's level of importance changes drastically, importance assessments would only change if it was inaccurate. But I'm assuming (and correct me if I'm wrong here) that the article itself is generally all that is used for an assessment.  So if the article doesn't include information on items of importance and the reviewer doesn't know, the importance assessment would be inaccurate.  Maybe I'm underestimating the articles or the assessors or the process itself, but it just seems to me that this would happen with some frequency.  Miss Mondegreen | Talk   01:15, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
 * You will also find that importance assessments are generally the most controversial rating and can often be changed after long discussions. Though, the rest of the time they usually remain the same unless something significant happens to the topic. Camaron1 | Chris 17:04, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
 * More controversial than quality? Why?  Does a high importance rating really help an article? Miss Mondegreen | Talk   01:15, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
 * A high importance rating can in theory help an article, as it will get more attention. It is more controversial simply because it is generally harder to assess articles by importance than by quality, so there are often disagreements on how important an article is. Camaron1 | Chris 10:22, 28 April 2007 (UTC)