Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Shakespeare/Assessment

First set of ratings
I just did a quick burn-through of all articles to weed out all of the clear start or stub class articles. I hesitated to do the other articles because I think that many of them may gain from comments on why the rating given was given. I didn't have time to give comments, yet.

Is there anything we should look for specifically in giving these comments? Wrad 20:44, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Importance scale
Also, I was thinking we may want to be more picky than myself and others originally thought about giving out top-importance ratings. I think otherwise we would be in danger of spreading ourselves thin by not prioritizing well. Maybe we should make a rough top 10 of most important articles in the project, and then discuss where to go from there.

Here is a first draft (not necessarily in order):


 * 1) William Shakespeare
 * 2) Romeo and Juliet
 * 3) Hamlet
 * 4) Macbeth
 * 5) Julius Caesar (play)
 * 6) Henry V (play)
 * 7) The Tempest
 * 8) King Lear
 * 9) Shakespeare's plays
 * 10) Shakespeare's sonnets

So, basically, I'm putting this up for debate. The top articles may or may not actually be important in the sense of scholarship (otherwise the authorship question would be up here), but in the sense that lots of people will be looking at them, so they are important in making our project look good. I tried to outline the articles people would likely look at, especially ones covering broad subjects or popular plays.

Any suggestions or comments? Wrad 20:44, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Here is a quote from another Wikiproject's importance rating standards:

"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 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.'"

One possible way to gauge popularity would be to look at how often an article is edited, however, this may be faulty because an article's edit count is based on controversy as well as popularity.

This may help us hammer this out, however, it is just for the one wikiproject and not official policy. We may do it different. Wrad 21:00, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think importance scale is really pointless for a cultural and literary icon like Shakespeare. We can do away with it. With the deluge of scholarship and references to him, even anything remotely related gains a lot more significance. Mandel 10:08, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * "Rather, they attempt to gauge the probability of the average reader of 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.'" Was there a discussion leading to this scale's enforcement? Sounds more like "Popularity scale" than Importance scale to me. Mandel 10:14, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Well, that was the whole point. Importance was based on the likelihood of people to look at the page. It made sense to me. Otherwise there's no way to prioritize and work gets spread out everywhere. Wrad 21:20, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

The Importance scale could, strictly speaking, probably be removed entirely with no great loss. However, I think, if we have the resources to make real use of it, it can be a usefull tool for the project; mainly for internal categorization and setting priority. For instance, the Judith Quiney article should probably have a Mid or High rating because Shakespeare's children are quite important to those focused on Shakespare-the-man (but much less so to those focused on Shakespeare-the-author). Similarly for the articles on the early Shakespeare scholars (Rowe, Malone, Halliwell-Phillipps, etc.) or, say, William Henry Ireland. For those focused on the plays, the early plays (for instance) would be quite important and as would certain key plays which define his style or development as a playwright. And, of course, there are things like Romeo and Juliet which are important because they are prominent in popular culture and hence likely to be read by your average Wikipedia visitor.

I think most of us probably have a gut feeling about the importance of any given Shakespeare related article, but, depending on focus, that gut feeling will differ; so making it explicit in the form of the Importance scale would be a good thing for common understanding. Setting an Importance rating that's disputed will lead to discussion and hence, hopefully, to common understanding.

I would propose that we attempt to add Importance ratings to articles, and that for the lower importance categories we try to err on the side of more importance (cf. the man vs. the author); but that we're conservative about what gets added to the highest importance category. Anything that ends up on the highest importance category should automatically be a strong candidate for also being on the project Collaboration list.--Xover 12:35, 19 August 2007 (UTC)


 * And putting my Edits where my mouth is, I've gone through the remaining Unassessed Shakespeare articles and given them both |class= and |importance= (Quality and Importance) ratings. Some of them were probably a bit hit and miss, so it's probably not a bad idea to keep an eye out for badly rated articles in the course of your normal editing.--Xover 13:37, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Troilus now GA
Although Shakespeare's treatment of the character is only a small part of the content of the article, I have discussed the treatment of the character by the Bard in Troilus and elsewhere and also Dryden's attempts at "improvement". You may wish to put the article in your statistics. If you do, I wouldn't mind a Shakespearean view on anything else that should be covered in the Shakespeare and Dryden section. --Peter cohen 23:22, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Top Vs. High Importance
The topic was discussed above in a different light, but that was between 24 and 21 months ago. I'm also not quite sure it came to any solid conclusion. User:Xover put it best by saying "I think most of us probably have a gut feeling about the importance of any given Shakespeare related article." However, what I propose to change is very simple:

List every play as "Top" importance. That's not that many, and even fewer to change. The fact that plays like Othello and Twelfth Night are High-, not Top-importance, and that all the Henry's are marked as Med is a pretty big oversight in my oh-so-humble opinion. Let me know how you guys feel; if there's agreement I'll make the changes.

In semi-related news, I removed the from Tempest, as there's no point having a disambiguation page marked as High importance. ~ Amory (talk) 06:50, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Requesting an assessment
Hi. I've been adding to Don Pedro (character). I'd love if someone could take a look at it. Samsmachado (talk) 01:46, 7 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi . Some good work there. It's definitely not a stub, I'm going to bump it up to a Start for now. I don't think it quite rises to a C yet, but it's a good foundation. My main recommendation would be this: at the moment, most of the article is a list of facts revolving around who played the character where. I think you need to work in more scholarly material, not only to bolster the analysis section, but to ensure WP:Notability. The article's not in any danger of being deleted or anything, but if you can improve the academic coverage of the character, by default, you'll be adding to the notability. Stick to significant sources (the Oxford, Cambridge, and Arden editions of the play, for example, all of which can be searched on Google Books and Amazon). You don't need to kill yourself adding 150 references, but showing academic engagement with the character will only help improve the article. Bertaut (talk) 03:57, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , ; perhaps you gents have some thoughts? Bertaut (talk) 03:58, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Looks pretty good to me. I wonder if the statement "a potential source of the character of Don Pedro is King Piero d'Aragona" can be expanded on. I'd be interested for any details about the connection - especially since the article for Bandello doesn't have any info about the 22nd novella. The list of performances in the "elsewhere in America" section bumps into WP:INDISCRIMINATE territory for me. It might be a good idea to limit it to venues and actors that have wikipedia articles or at least trim it a little. Now that is just my suggestion and if you are happy with it that is fine. Thanks for your work on it . MarnetteD&#124;Talk 04:16, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * BTW I remember seeing the 1977 production at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Most enjoyable. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 04:21, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Great work! I'm going to echo the comments by (thanks for the ping, btw!) and, except that this is an easy C-class, and probably close to B-class (see the detailed criteria). You can probably find some inspiration for fleshing it out in Jessica (The Merchant of Venice), Prince Hamlet, and Ophelia. I would say the biggest current weakness is the somewhat excessive and list-y performance history. I would recommend saying more about fewer performances, and if necessary putting the rest of them into a plain list. This part also relies too heavily on primary sources (performance databases) rather than critical assessments (which indicate notability and context).On a more technical note, I see you've included external links for your quotations from the play. We do not use external links in the article body so these will need to be addressed. My recommendation would be to instead use  which gives you a short citation including a link to the right place in the Folger Digital Edition (the Folger editions are modern and professionally edited, in addition to being freely available online). As I've recently been reminded, the docs are a bit sparse at the moment, but you'd use it like , which will show up like a footnote marker: And the actual footnote will look like this:


 * You will also want to make sure your quotes actually match the text in the Folger edition. Please let me know if you need any help with this. --Xover (talk) 19:14, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you Xover, MarnetteD, Bertaut for all your advice! I'm pretty new to Wikipedia, so any advice/feedbakc is welcome. I really appreciate it. I am working on improving the article some more following your advice. Samsmachado (talk) 21:11, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You are welcome . I'm glad to have been of some help. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 22:09, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Samuel Daniel
I would like to request an assessment for the article on Samuel Daniel, which I have substantially revised recently. The link on the main Project Page here, that is supposed to take you to a section on assessments requests, does not seem to be working, unless I'm missing something (if I am, my apologies). Is there an official way for me to put in a request for an assessment.Musophilus (talk) 17:50, 8 June 2021 (UTC)