This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | → | Archive 9 |
-- Kiyarrlls- talk 22:44, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
|class=C
in a sensible fashion, you don't need to get an 'ok' from anyone else. However, there is still the question of why you don't want the banner to handle C-Class. Why is that?
Happy‑
melon
23:04, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
In the assessment scale, there is a Needed class. I wonder how a page can be tagged as Needed. A talk page must exist in order that such an assessment can be tagged on to the page. For the talk page to exist, the main page must exist - otherwise it will be deleted. So, the page must already exist!
If my understanding is correct, about 102 always-empty categories can be eliminated. Also all the appropriate inappropriate verbiage in assessment related pages can go too, I guess. VasuVR ( talk, contribs) 16:52, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for the information and history. Sure, then we don't need to eliminate them (no screaming, throwing fit and all that). If it is underused, then it is going to be empty for 90+ % of cases. Many projects have their To Do sections, which cover such situations (that is requests for articles). VasuVR ( talk, contribs) 08:05, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps Set index should be added to the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#Non-standard grades section? OlEnglish ( talk) 02:34, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
Just a datum to help the rest of you usefully discuss an efficient way to improve things: some WikiProjects are too small to really support a meaningful rating system beyond B-class. At this moment, yours truly is the whole active membership Wikiproject Ethiopia, & due to Real Life(tm) committments I can only participate part-time in editting & rating. Therefore, my priority at this moment is trying to improve stubs into start class (or better) articles -- one way I can contribute without the benefit of a community. (This also means not creating any new articles if I can help it.) That is the primary reason why there won't be any "C-class" articles in the WP:ETHIOPIA space: I would rather make articles "B-class" than to repeat article evaluations. So it's more than likely that there are more "A-class" & "GA-class" articles in Wikipedia than reported: there are simply not enough qualified people to either judge them or improve them to the appropriate level, so some topics will be overlooked. And I don't consider this necessarily a bad thing in itself, nor something that can be easily fixed; it's just something that needs to be remembered when proposing new solutions. -- llywrch ( talk) 18:53, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
Appartement du roi was mentioned here a few days ago as "a lot of good content but currently backed by few inlines". In fact (to a non-specialist), it seems to be as complete as one would wish for an encyclopedic article on the subject, and is fully referenced. WikiProject Architecture had rated it A-class, no doubt for those reasons. However, it is far from the prettiest article you will find on WP (it has no section headings, for example) and WikiProject France had rated it B-class, probably for that reason. I'd agree with them (WP:FRANCE), but it shouldn't take much to fix up the worst of the style problems, and I might actually go and do it myself!
The day after it was mentioned on this page, another editor came along and changed both assessments to C-class! Fair enough, we're each entitled to our opinions, but if such practice became generalized it would be very dangerous for the encyclopedia.
As far as I'm aware, we haven't formally changed our asessment criteria on WP:CHEMS since 2005. An article which was pretty much comprehensive (ie, A-class) in 2005 is probably still pretty much comprehensive in 2009, give and take a few recent developments and of course the effect of "unhelpful" editors. Other areas of Wikipedia certainly have changed their criteria since 2005: the MoS, for one, is much longer and more intricate than it was four years ago! This is a classic example of Parkinson's law: "Work expands to full the time available for its completion".
All the time we spend on ensuring compliance with ever more stringeant MoS compliance is time that we're not spending on encyclopedic content, either in article improvement or article assessment. If article assessment grades are tied to the same level of content but an ever more stringeant MoS compliance, we have grade deflation, rather than the grade inflation which people tend to worry about. This would be thoroughly pernicious, because it means that we would be giving ever less recognition to those editors who improve our encyclopedic content. Are we really saying that content is ever less important to our encyclopedia? Physchim62 (talk) 16:18, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
I was wondering how those talks were going about importing the assessor script that the French Wikipedia uses. Thanks, §hep Talk 02:27, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
Should A-Class officially be placed below GA-Class? It looks right now like A-Class articles can already be GAs, but they don't have to be, so it's kind of inconsistent. Perhaps a reordering to Stub, Start, C, B, A, GA, FA would be good at this point.
Also, maybe an official system for gaining A-Class assessments should be put into place (similar to the GA system, but a bit more open). Most WikiProjects right now either don't have an A-Class or their reviews to make articles A-Class are inactive... even WP:BIOG's A-Class review department is inactive. Thoughts? - Drilnoth ( talk) 20:29, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
In some projects with no formal A-class review, then the mean and median of As is sometimes worse than GAs. But not in this WikiProject. Having said that with the evolution of standards, some FA/A relics from 2006 and before are worse than a lot of GAs, which are more fluid, so that archaic GAs are booted off more quickly. YellowMonkey ( click here to vote for world cycling's #1 model!) 23:13, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
Can we maybe a get a link to this up on the watchlist page? The more input we get here the better prepared we will be to arrive at a discion on this matter, whatever that may eventually be. TomStar81 ( Talk) 16:45, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
Stub-Start- C - B - A GA - FA
I have just tried to read this. Has there been a proposal made to remove A-Class or merge it into GA as a default somewhere? (Is this one of those perennial proposals then). Can someone point me to it if there has been. I just think that with PR, GA and FA all needing reviewers something has to give. If we remove the A-class as such, there might be more impetus on a project working those articles for FAC instead (as birds, dinos and fungi did/do) rather than keeping it in-house. Striking while the iron is hot and having everyone around, FA seems a small step beyond A-class, so maybe it is time to do away with A-class review. Casliber ( talk · contribs) 00:47, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
After the above discussion started, it has been determined that an RFC is needed. The question at hand is: How should A-Class assessments and reviews be handled? Template:Grading scheme states that A-Class articles do not need to be GA, but both the WP:MILHIST and WP:FILM WikiProjects have A-Class review systems placing them above GAs. Additionally, many WikiProjects don't use A-Class at all at this time.
Options for what should be done include: leaving A-Class as it is, up to each project separately; standardizing A-Class below GA-Class, and standardizing A-Class between GA and FA-Class. Also up for discussion is the possibility of making A-Class reviews project wide, rather than being covered by each WikiProject separately.
There is precedent for adopting MILHIST-style review systems because the currently-used B-Class review system (the six-point checklist) was implemented after MILHIST had already been using it.
Complete, total, and utter support for the buddy system. I thought there were only a few projects which do a project Peer Review A-class review, but as I look through
Category:WikiProject peer reviews,
this search I see a butt-load. Granted, many of these aren't very active, or haven't been active at all for a while, but it shows the interest is there. The question is how to promote such a system...I was thinking it might be best to set up a subpage, here or at Peer Review, for WikiProjects seeking a Peer Review A-class review partner. We could then mass-message all the WikiProjects, seeing if they'd be interested in partnering up. They wouldn't even necessarily have to be close in scope (although that would be desirable), since a fresh set of eyes from a non-specialist is always great. Or we could set up some sort of system where we construct sort of a WikiProject Tree, where we trace all the listed "Parent WikiProjects" upwards and worked towards setting up peer reviews there. Anyway, I'd be in favor of almost any system that gets more projects into Peer Reviewing doing A-class review for their own articles.-
Running
On
Brains
15:51, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
I've always thought of it as a two-dimensional space, with "quality" (maybe "style" would be a better term) and "content" the two axes; like the image to the right. Articles usually start in the bottom-left and (hopefully) end up in the top-right. But the assessment grade boundaries aren't straight: some areas prioritise improvements in quality, while others focus on content improvement. So for instance an article does not need to increase significantly in "style" to move from GA-Class to A-Class, but it does need to increase significantly in "content". The reverse is true for B to GA. That's just a rough sketch: some things are still significantly misplaced (C-Class article with no content at all?) and I don't really think the square box is a good model for the limits, but you get the general idea. The important thing is that there's no loss of linearity: you can't have an article that continues to improve get to A-Class without meeting the GA-Class requirements. Happy‑ melon 17:09, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
I suggest that projects be able to award A-class as they see fit, but that it should take at least two project editors' agreement that an article has reached A-class to so designate it. -- Ssilvers ( talk) 06:21, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
As a possible method to implement A-Class as a "content, rather than style," while being on the same "level" as GA-Class in regards to articles quality, I have a proposal.
All WikiProjects large enough to handle it have an A-Class review department, as do all of the projects which are "top" in the hierarchy (that is, all "parent" projects). Whenever an A-Class review is requested for an article that doesn't have a project associated with it that does A-Class reviews, the parent projects look at it instead... e.g., WP:RPG articles would probably go to WP:BTG. This way, all articles will be able to recieve A-Class reviews.
The exact method by which A-Class reviews would work is to be determined... certainly a group effort, rather than one person, and probably modelled after the MILHIST system.
Regardless, GA and A-Classes are fully separated: GA evaluates style only, with a bare minimum requirement for content. A-Class is the opposite, focusing almost entirely on an article's content. This way, the two assessments are separate but compatible and equal with one another.
Once an article has passed both GA and A-Class reviews, I see there as being two options, since neither A-Class or GA-Class assessments would work for such an article. The first option would be to create something like an "Excellent Article"-Class, which isn't quite featured but has passed both of the lesser reviews. The other option would be to actually do away with the entire FA review system and say that, once any article has passed both GA and A-Class reviews, it becomes Featured. This would probably lead to an increase in total FAs, but it would also take some of the strain off of that part of the review system so that more effort could go into GA and A-Class reviews. This latter would be my personal preference, although I understand that it would be a rather drastic change.
If there is any support for this type of idea, I can write up an official proposal. - Drilnoth ( talk) 14:35, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
So, while I admit that in one or two projects A-class works well, for the vast majority of projects, it doesn't. It's unnecessary, or extraneous, or irrelevant. I think there are two options:
(Unindent) I still don't see the problem here. If a system only works well in a few cases, but doesn't work well in most cases, there are two choices:
It seems to me that we have not really tried #2, and it seems logical to try getting the system to work before we jettison it entirely, especially when it clearly fills a gap in the assessment scheme. Also, if GA were renamed A, it would really confuse everyone even more than they are already, mixing two different types of assessment in one scale! And if we went ahead and did #1, scrapped A-Class altogether and renamed everything, I predict that within a year or two this page would have newbies proposing that we create a new class. We wouldn't fix anything, we'd just move things around a bit and annoy MILHIST and FILMS and a few others. I'm pretty certain that some projects would retain A-Class, even if the 1.0 scheme abandoned it, so we'd end up splitting up the system.
Let's also remember that MILHIST and FILMS are not the only projects that use A-Class properly. A-Class is supposed to be a small class, so 0.03% is not unreasonable when set next to 0.13% that are FAs. I'd have said the ideal would be around 0.1%, because we still need to get a peer review system working on other projects.
When we got this system going, I always expected A-Class to be patchy in the early days - i.e., while projects were starting up and learning about assessment. It would've been premature to talk about A-Class review when a project only had 50 articles tagged out of 5000. So the statistics above don't surprise me at all. But many projects have now been assessing articles for a year or two now, and they have both the experience and the "inventory of articles" to institute a formal A-Class review. In other words, the startup phase is over, and the majority of articles have been tagged and assessed; this is where projects can move to the next stage of refining their systems, and doing things like A-Class reviews. Let's facilitate that! All we need is to create an environment that supports projects with mentoring, support from sister projects, scripts/templates/bots to make life easier, etc.
I think the negative comments above are (in effect) abandoning the system before it's really been tried. How can a project know that A-Class is useless for them, when they've never really known how to use it? And we've never made any effort to support and grow the A-Class review system.
If we abandon A-Class, the only way for an article to progress to FA is via GA. In other words, our standard system for generating our "ideal" articles involves no review by subject-experts, unless they happen to hang around the FAC pages. Look at an article like Aldol reaction; how much of that article do you understand without clicking on hundreds of links? How can you tell if it's nonsense, and if it's really comprehensive? Do we really want to send the message that we don't want the input of WikiProjects in preparing articles for FAC?
In summary, we need A-Class anyway, so let's make a decent effort to get A-Class review to work well throughout all the projects like it does in MILHIST and FILMS. This discussion should focus on how best to achieve that - unless someone has a really good alternative (which I haven't seen yet!) Only if that effort fails to propagate peer-review should we talk about merging A-Class into other classes. Walkerma ( talk) 22:42, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
With the introduction of C-class, we (WP:ANIME) set up a proper assessment page, set up assessment guidelines, came up with a proper list of examples per class and reassessed all of our articles. We also had a long debate regarding the whole A-class issue (The latest being Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anime and manga/Archive 33#A-Class, for real), and our conclusions was as follow:
Walkerma makes some valid comments above regarding the use of a project review to validate articles — I would expect those potential issues to be fixed by the time an article gets to GA class, though. At WP:ANIME, we have set the bar for B-class rather high in order to achieve this.** (Even if a B class assessment is not requested, any and all B class upgrades are reviewed).
*: I have yet to see an editor that lists the articles they have gotten up to A-class, as is widely done with GA and FA class.
**: Walkerma, have a look at the B class examples. Would you say that they are at (what you define as) the B class level?
In short: we have deprecated A class for the purposes of WP:ANIME until further discussion, recommending a GA review, a Peer review, and a B class review instead. If a workable system comes up, we would be happy to reconsider it again. I hope the highlights some of the problems that needs to be addressed for the smaller Wikiprojects to properly use A class.
G.A.S talk 05:35, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Well, given the persistent debates over A/GA/B/C class I'm not sure why there is such a big fuss, given that within any "class" of any WikiProject there is a big variation in quality!
I would say the most glaring trouble is that the undisputed top rank of Wikipedia, the FAs, have an increasing variance in quality due to the tail in the distribution due to old FAs that are now B-class articles, and that too, disorganised-type B-class articles. YellowMonkey ( click here to vote for world cycling's #1 model!) 00:30, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
There's a big list of Wikipedia:Unreviewed featured articles. It's just that hardly anyone nominates the articles, and let's face it, a lot of people do the bare minimum to drag across the FAC barrier and won't fix up a nominal FA that is only of B-grade quality unless the star gets put under the hammer. YellowMonkey ( click here to vote for world cycling's #1 model!) 00:14, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
YellowMonkey complains that C-class articles can be no more than Start-class. [1] Some wikiprojects do not recognise C-class. [2] GA-class interrupts the symmetry of the A-B-C hierarchy.
How about instead of a system which assigns a letter, we switch to one that builds on the Start-Stub classification. A standard article should comply with the B-class criteria. So, how about renaming B-class to "Standard-class" and merging C-class back into Start-class? This provides a new structure: Featured - WikiProject Approved (call it A if you will) - Good - Standard - Start - Stub. DrKiernan ( talk) 10:03, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Stub-Start-C - B - A \ \ GA -FA
I didn't say/mean that C-class articles can't be more than start. I just pointed out that the lower grades of ranking are never applied consistently and that the mean proponent of C-class apparently views assessment only as an inflationary statistical means of feeling better. YellowMonkey ( click here to vote for world cycling's #1 model!) 00:10, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
Take a look at WP:GA, which has a nice counter for how many articles are FA, FL, or GA. I believe that, as GAs are graded by the community, not its relevant Wikiproject, and that they are considered to have a higher distinction than A-class, they should be separate and above A-class. An article cannot be both A from its project and GA from WP:GAN. If I were revising the rating system, it would be FA, GA, A, B, C, Stub, with A distinct from GA, and C-class essentially being the same as start, though that's another story. Projects can assign an article up to A-class to indicate that it is close to GA, and it receives visible distinction at GA. Many very good, acceptable articles are B-class but are so much better than other Bs. With A-class below the review-required GA, Wikiprojects can more easily assign its best articles A that have not been independently reviewed. Reywas92 Talk 21:08, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
Many very committed editors have already pointed out the problem of the smaller WikiProjects. I think we should be clear that all the WikiProjects are small when it comes down to having enough people with enough time to do the things which everyone agrees are desirable. WP:CHEMS is one of the larger and more active projects, but we have fewer than twenty active editors, many of whom have other WikiInterests or WikiResponsabilities as well. A "solution" to the "A-class problem" which involves our best editors spending more time checking articles which are already pretty good – and so less time improving those that are very much less than optimal, or even writing those which still don't exist – that is no solution at all.
When A-class was invented, it was meant to mean "no need for any more work on this one". That isn't the same as saying that the article can't be improved, simply that it has covered all the points of the subject in a reasonable manner; the concept was entirely linked with encyclopedic content, although obvious style faults would fall under the heading "needs more work". Of course there is still FA-status but, given the number of simple grammatical errors which pass WP:FAC, I have to question whether the star is worth anything. Both WP:FAC and WP:GAC are snowed under with candidatures, and couldn't cope with any extra workload on those editors whose choose to spend their time there.
Any "A-class review" system would have the same problems as the current WP:FAC: too much work and not enough editors. Why can we not assume good faith on the part of the WikiProjects, and raise queries through those projects' talk pages? Physchim62 (talk) 01:01, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
What about the 50,000 B-class articles? Would it not be a productive use volunteer time to review the B-class articles to see which of them can be brought up to A-class with a little work? Obviously, only the projects could do such a review. Physchim62 (talk) 20:54, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
I would support completely scrapping the A-class process myself. GA and FA are close enough that going through another hoop is just a waste of time and doesn't really do anything to improve the article. Wizardman 15:41, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
That depends on what you define as "important" and "improving the article". If an article jumps from B to GA to FA, that means that nobody has asked themselves a formal question about the article's content at the highest level. Maybe problem will be picked up at WP:GAN or WP:FAC, but there's no real guarantee, especially as neither of those processes are really structured for assessing the factual accuracy and completeness of an article. Do we really want to say to the world that we don't care about the content of an article after a fairly low level (B-class)? That after that level we are only worried about its style? That we can't be bothered with a quality control system on content because it's too difficult and irritates a few of our more independently-minded editors? I don't think we should go down this path because MySpace already does it better :P Physchim62 (talk) 16:06, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
I agree with DrKiernan here. Few articles use A-class rating; it should be maintained for those articles that have it, and for the WikiProject(s) that still have an active A-class review system, but it should be deprecated for all other purposes. With the new WP:Article alerts system available, and being subscribed by most wikiprojects I interact with, I expect much fewer content embarrassments at GAC/FAC; before article alerts was available, one could easily sneak through articles at FAC/GAC with superficial reviews from editors not familiar with the content (I can give you examples of 2008 FA bombs if you insist). Xasodfuih ( talk) 13:54, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
It looks as if some key people can't make an IRC meeting this Sunday, and I don't want to drag people away on Valentine's Day, so I think we will have to hold the IRC meeting instead on Saturday 21st or Sunday 22nd, probably around 1900h UTC. I you want to discuss this on IRC, please let me know if a particular date or time is good or bad. Walkerma ( talk) 21:28, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
(←) If I could convince someone who particpates in the discussion to write up a brief overview of the discussion (10-15 sentences) I would like to include it in the next DRAMA report for the Signpost due Feb. 23. I have a feeling that discussions will be a lot to read if I end up not being able to monitor everything live. Let me know if you're interested. Thanks, §hep Talk 02:32, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
(Sorry I was a bit busy till now, though it is still 22 Feb in my time zone! Please correct anything I missed/misunderstood.) The complete meeting log is here.
Much of the discussion focused on how to encourage wider use of A-Class, given that it is hard for a small (or even medium) WikiProject to sustain a rigorous A-Class review. There were several solutions suggested, any one of which might be helpful for a particular project:
The consensus was that there was no single solution for all projects. Centralizing the work to a community-wide review was seen as duplicating GA/FA, and ducking the content issue. All participants seemed to value the use of A-Class for allowing a "content first, style issues later" approach to article-writing. One suggestion was well received, to have GA/FA separated from WikiProject assessments in project templates. It was felt that A-Class has to mean something if a project is going to work towards more A-Class articles; clearly a project review would foster that, and be driven by personal/project pride, as well as the desire to get an article's content right before FAC. It was proposed that a small team – perhaps coordinated by Walkerma and Drilnoth – work to promote A-Class reviews where appropriate. Coordinators of active WikiProjects will be contacted and asked to share their ideas and viewpoints, on A-Class and other issues, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Coordinators%27_working_group . Walkerma ( talk) 04:37, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
As you may already be aware, I am finalising a draft proposal at Wikipedia:Featured articles/Proposal which would move the primary responsibility for choosing Main Page articles to the WikiProjects. The proposal still retains an important element of "Community oversight", but not in the current form of WP:FAC (which would be, quite simply, abolished). The aim is to ensure – better than at present – that the articles which represent Wikipedia on the Main Page have good and reasonably complete encyclopedic content on their chosen subjects and, in whatever case, represent our "very best work" in that particular subject area.
Comments are welcome at the talk page. I raise the matter here and now because it might have implications for any system of Community A-class review. Physchim62 (talk) 00:57, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
Ok, here is the issue. Saint Croix Macaw is a short article, for which most information is already included in the article. Sometimes, there is just not much info for a species. So, when I go through the criteria of the various classes, this is my assessment:
{{
cite web}}
: Empty citation (
help) is not required, but the use of <ref></ref> tags is encouraged.
So, my questions is, what do I miss that requires the article to be stub or start class only and not a B? -- Kim van der Linde at venus 00:35, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
Not sure where the best place for such a discussion is, but I've started one here as that's where Template talk:Portal-Class redirects to. Comments welcome. PC78 ( talk) 16:33, 10 April 2009 (UTC)
Following on from the above, I have made a proposal to adjust the colours used for Merge, Category and Template-Class. Discussion can be found here. PC78 ( talk) 17:40, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
It is relatively easy to view all articles for a Project by either class or importance. But is it possible to view a category of articles by both: e.g., Christianity articles that are class:Start, Importance: High? Athanasius • Quicumque vult 20:14, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
{{ Good Article}} has been nominated for deletion. See WP:TFD.
76.66.202.139 ( talk) 10:02, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
I'm not quite clear on what "A-class" means. 1) There don't seem to be many A-class articles. 2) I've seen articles that say, "_____ is a former Featured Article", and they're always GA-class. 3) The few A-class articles I've seen appear to be on the same level, quality-wise, as Good Articles. 74.33.174.133 ( talk) 20:29, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
I propose a new column for articles that are tagged for needing immediate attention. Cra sh Underride 18:27, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
Does an article need to be adopted by a project to be able to be assessed? I can't find the templates to do it if not. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 21:43, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
I had an interesting experience with the John Keats article just now. It looks seriously deficient to me, but has been rated "B-class," i.e., by the definitions here, "mostly complete and without major issues." The rating is, in my opinion, simply wrong. Digging into this a bit, it looks like WikiProject Biography has rated it a B on the basis of a plausibly complete "Life" section, but WikiProject Poetry has rightfully rated it a start-class article, apparently based on the obvious lack of any substantive discussion of Keats's poetry.
I experimented by reducing the Biography rating to "start" (I immediately restored it to "B" after this test) and saw the article's overall rating drop to "start." This verifies my impression that whatever combines ratings from multiple projects is taking the maximum rating from any project. I contend that the minimum rating ought to be used, at least if the WikiProjects involved are equally significant to the subject of the article. In the case of John Keats, WikiProject Poetry ought to be given at least an equal say, if not the final say: if the poetry discussion is inadequate, the entire Keats article is inadequate. I wonder if whoever has developed the article-rating mechanism can reconsider this aspect. -- sharpner ( talk) 01:26, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
Sharpner: What do you mean by "overall rating"? Where did you see it displayed? I am trying to decide if this is an issue with my software, or with some other javascript. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:49, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
It seems that A-Class is extremely underused. As far as I know, only around a thousand articles (please correct if I'm mistaken) make use of it. I feel this is regrettable, as there is a large but often unrecognized gap between WP:GA and WP:FA. Only one WikiProject really makes widespread use of A-Class, WP:MILHIST. Most other projects simply ignore this. I was wondering if it's possible to make an effort towards "revitalizing" A-Class and making it more readily usable. Any thoughts? – Juliancolton | Talk 02:17, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
(unindent) Thanks KrebMarkt for raising this. I took a good look at the quality task force discussions. I see that you did discuss article assessment on around 29th, but it has been dormant since then. I do think believe that if you want to improve quality, you need to have assessment to measure that, though such a system should be kept simple and universal (which is what I think we have on en:WP). If an assessment thread pops up again, I'll be sure to add my 2c.
Meanwhile, as for reviving A-Class, I think the way forward for me personally is to start doing this much more at WP:CHEMS, including writing content to raise articles to A-Class, and then try to spread the interest (with help from people like your good self, if you can). I think that several projects already do something like what was intended for A-Class but they call it "strong B-Class"; if we can find the right tools to organize A-Class many of these strong B-Class might become A-Class again. Ideas are welcome, but personally I need to put in some hours of hard work first! Walkerma ( talk) 06:15, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | → | Archive 9 |
-- Kiyarrlls- talk 22:44, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
|class=C
in a sensible fashion, you don't need to get an 'ok' from anyone else. However, there is still the question of why you don't want the banner to handle C-Class. Why is that?
Happy‑
melon
23:04, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
In the assessment scale, there is a Needed class. I wonder how a page can be tagged as Needed. A talk page must exist in order that such an assessment can be tagged on to the page. For the talk page to exist, the main page must exist - otherwise it will be deleted. So, the page must already exist!
If my understanding is correct, about 102 always-empty categories can be eliminated. Also all the appropriate inappropriate verbiage in assessment related pages can go too, I guess. VasuVR ( talk, contribs) 16:52, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for the information and history. Sure, then we don't need to eliminate them (no screaming, throwing fit and all that). If it is underused, then it is going to be empty for 90+ % of cases. Many projects have their To Do sections, which cover such situations (that is requests for articles). VasuVR ( talk, contribs) 08:05, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps Set index should be added to the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#Non-standard grades section? OlEnglish ( talk) 02:34, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
Just a datum to help the rest of you usefully discuss an efficient way to improve things: some WikiProjects are too small to really support a meaningful rating system beyond B-class. At this moment, yours truly is the whole active membership Wikiproject Ethiopia, & due to Real Life(tm) committments I can only participate part-time in editting & rating. Therefore, my priority at this moment is trying to improve stubs into start class (or better) articles -- one way I can contribute without the benefit of a community. (This also means not creating any new articles if I can help it.) That is the primary reason why there won't be any "C-class" articles in the WP:ETHIOPIA space: I would rather make articles "B-class" than to repeat article evaluations. So it's more than likely that there are more "A-class" & "GA-class" articles in Wikipedia than reported: there are simply not enough qualified people to either judge them or improve them to the appropriate level, so some topics will be overlooked. And I don't consider this necessarily a bad thing in itself, nor something that can be easily fixed; it's just something that needs to be remembered when proposing new solutions. -- llywrch ( talk) 18:53, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
Appartement du roi was mentioned here a few days ago as "a lot of good content but currently backed by few inlines". In fact (to a non-specialist), it seems to be as complete as one would wish for an encyclopedic article on the subject, and is fully referenced. WikiProject Architecture had rated it A-class, no doubt for those reasons. However, it is far from the prettiest article you will find on WP (it has no section headings, for example) and WikiProject France had rated it B-class, probably for that reason. I'd agree with them (WP:FRANCE), but it shouldn't take much to fix up the worst of the style problems, and I might actually go and do it myself!
The day after it was mentioned on this page, another editor came along and changed both assessments to C-class! Fair enough, we're each entitled to our opinions, but if such practice became generalized it would be very dangerous for the encyclopedia.
As far as I'm aware, we haven't formally changed our asessment criteria on WP:CHEMS since 2005. An article which was pretty much comprehensive (ie, A-class) in 2005 is probably still pretty much comprehensive in 2009, give and take a few recent developments and of course the effect of "unhelpful" editors. Other areas of Wikipedia certainly have changed their criteria since 2005: the MoS, for one, is much longer and more intricate than it was four years ago! This is a classic example of Parkinson's law: "Work expands to full the time available for its completion".
All the time we spend on ensuring compliance with ever more stringeant MoS compliance is time that we're not spending on encyclopedic content, either in article improvement or article assessment. If article assessment grades are tied to the same level of content but an ever more stringeant MoS compliance, we have grade deflation, rather than the grade inflation which people tend to worry about. This would be thoroughly pernicious, because it means that we would be giving ever less recognition to those editors who improve our encyclopedic content. Are we really saying that content is ever less important to our encyclopedia? Physchim62 (talk) 16:18, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
I was wondering how those talks were going about importing the assessor script that the French Wikipedia uses. Thanks, §hep Talk 02:27, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
Should A-Class officially be placed below GA-Class? It looks right now like A-Class articles can already be GAs, but they don't have to be, so it's kind of inconsistent. Perhaps a reordering to Stub, Start, C, B, A, GA, FA would be good at this point.
Also, maybe an official system for gaining A-Class assessments should be put into place (similar to the GA system, but a bit more open). Most WikiProjects right now either don't have an A-Class or their reviews to make articles A-Class are inactive... even WP:BIOG's A-Class review department is inactive. Thoughts? - Drilnoth ( talk) 20:29, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
In some projects with no formal A-class review, then the mean and median of As is sometimes worse than GAs. But not in this WikiProject. Having said that with the evolution of standards, some FA/A relics from 2006 and before are worse than a lot of GAs, which are more fluid, so that archaic GAs are booted off more quickly. YellowMonkey ( click here to vote for world cycling's #1 model!) 23:13, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
Can we maybe a get a link to this up on the watchlist page? The more input we get here the better prepared we will be to arrive at a discion on this matter, whatever that may eventually be. TomStar81 ( Talk) 16:45, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
Stub-Start- C - B - A GA - FA
I have just tried to read this. Has there been a proposal made to remove A-Class or merge it into GA as a default somewhere? (Is this one of those perennial proposals then). Can someone point me to it if there has been. I just think that with PR, GA and FA all needing reviewers something has to give. If we remove the A-class as such, there might be more impetus on a project working those articles for FAC instead (as birds, dinos and fungi did/do) rather than keeping it in-house. Striking while the iron is hot and having everyone around, FA seems a small step beyond A-class, so maybe it is time to do away with A-class review. Casliber ( talk · contribs) 00:47, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
After the above discussion started, it has been determined that an RFC is needed. The question at hand is: How should A-Class assessments and reviews be handled? Template:Grading scheme states that A-Class articles do not need to be GA, but both the WP:MILHIST and WP:FILM WikiProjects have A-Class review systems placing them above GAs. Additionally, many WikiProjects don't use A-Class at all at this time.
Options for what should be done include: leaving A-Class as it is, up to each project separately; standardizing A-Class below GA-Class, and standardizing A-Class between GA and FA-Class. Also up for discussion is the possibility of making A-Class reviews project wide, rather than being covered by each WikiProject separately.
There is precedent for adopting MILHIST-style review systems because the currently-used B-Class review system (the six-point checklist) was implemented after MILHIST had already been using it.
Complete, total, and utter support for the buddy system. I thought there were only a few projects which do a project Peer Review A-class review, but as I look through
Category:WikiProject peer reviews,
this search I see a butt-load. Granted, many of these aren't very active, or haven't been active at all for a while, but it shows the interest is there. The question is how to promote such a system...I was thinking it might be best to set up a subpage, here or at Peer Review, for WikiProjects seeking a Peer Review A-class review partner. We could then mass-message all the WikiProjects, seeing if they'd be interested in partnering up. They wouldn't even necessarily have to be close in scope (although that would be desirable), since a fresh set of eyes from a non-specialist is always great. Or we could set up some sort of system where we construct sort of a WikiProject Tree, where we trace all the listed "Parent WikiProjects" upwards and worked towards setting up peer reviews there. Anyway, I'd be in favor of almost any system that gets more projects into Peer Reviewing doing A-class review for their own articles.-
Running
On
Brains
15:51, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
I've always thought of it as a two-dimensional space, with "quality" (maybe "style" would be a better term) and "content" the two axes; like the image to the right. Articles usually start in the bottom-left and (hopefully) end up in the top-right. But the assessment grade boundaries aren't straight: some areas prioritise improvements in quality, while others focus on content improvement. So for instance an article does not need to increase significantly in "style" to move from GA-Class to A-Class, but it does need to increase significantly in "content". The reverse is true for B to GA. That's just a rough sketch: some things are still significantly misplaced (C-Class article with no content at all?) and I don't really think the square box is a good model for the limits, but you get the general idea. The important thing is that there's no loss of linearity: you can't have an article that continues to improve get to A-Class without meeting the GA-Class requirements. Happy‑ melon 17:09, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
I suggest that projects be able to award A-class as they see fit, but that it should take at least two project editors' agreement that an article has reached A-class to so designate it. -- Ssilvers ( talk) 06:21, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
As a possible method to implement A-Class as a "content, rather than style," while being on the same "level" as GA-Class in regards to articles quality, I have a proposal.
All WikiProjects large enough to handle it have an A-Class review department, as do all of the projects which are "top" in the hierarchy (that is, all "parent" projects). Whenever an A-Class review is requested for an article that doesn't have a project associated with it that does A-Class reviews, the parent projects look at it instead... e.g., WP:RPG articles would probably go to WP:BTG. This way, all articles will be able to recieve A-Class reviews.
The exact method by which A-Class reviews would work is to be determined... certainly a group effort, rather than one person, and probably modelled after the MILHIST system.
Regardless, GA and A-Classes are fully separated: GA evaluates style only, with a bare minimum requirement for content. A-Class is the opposite, focusing almost entirely on an article's content. This way, the two assessments are separate but compatible and equal with one another.
Once an article has passed both GA and A-Class reviews, I see there as being two options, since neither A-Class or GA-Class assessments would work for such an article. The first option would be to create something like an "Excellent Article"-Class, which isn't quite featured but has passed both of the lesser reviews. The other option would be to actually do away with the entire FA review system and say that, once any article has passed both GA and A-Class reviews, it becomes Featured. This would probably lead to an increase in total FAs, but it would also take some of the strain off of that part of the review system so that more effort could go into GA and A-Class reviews. This latter would be my personal preference, although I understand that it would be a rather drastic change.
If there is any support for this type of idea, I can write up an official proposal. - Drilnoth ( talk) 14:35, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
So, while I admit that in one or two projects A-class works well, for the vast majority of projects, it doesn't. It's unnecessary, or extraneous, or irrelevant. I think there are two options:
(Unindent) I still don't see the problem here. If a system only works well in a few cases, but doesn't work well in most cases, there are two choices:
It seems to me that we have not really tried #2, and it seems logical to try getting the system to work before we jettison it entirely, especially when it clearly fills a gap in the assessment scheme. Also, if GA were renamed A, it would really confuse everyone even more than they are already, mixing two different types of assessment in one scale! And if we went ahead and did #1, scrapped A-Class altogether and renamed everything, I predict that within a year or two this page would have newbies proposing that we create a new class. We wouldn't fix anything, we'd just move things around a bit and annoy MILHIST and FILMS and a few others. I'm pretty certain that some projects would retain A-Class, even if the 1.0 scheme abandoned it, so we'd end up splitting up the system.
Let's also remember that MILHIST and FILMS are not the only projects that use A-Class properly. A-Class is supposed to be a small class, so 0.03% is not unreasonable when set next to 0.13% that are FAs. I'd have said the ideal would be around 0.1%, because we still need to get a peer review system working on other projects.
When we got this system going, I always expected A-Class to be patchy in the early days - i.e., while projects were starting up and learning about assessment. It would've been premature to talk about A-Class review when a project only had 50 articles tagged out of 5000. So the statistics above don't surprise me at all. But many projects have now been assessing articles for a year or two now, and they have both the experience and the "inventory of articles" to institute a formal A-Class review. In other words, the startup phase is over, and the majority of articles have been tagged and assessed; this is where projects can move to the next stage of refining their systems, and doing things like A-Class reviews. Let's facilitate that! All we need is to create an environment that supports projects with mentoring, support from sister projects, scripts/templates/bots to make life easier, etc.
I think the negative comments above are (in effect) abandoning the system before it's really been tried. How can a project know that A-Class is useless for them, when they've never really known how to use it? And we've never made any effort to support and grow the A-Class review system.
If we abandon A-Class, the only way for an article to progress to FA is via GA. In other words, our standard system for generating our "ideal" articles involves no review by subject-experts, unless they happen to hang around the FAC pages. Look at an article like Aldol reaction; how much of that article do you understand without clicking on hundreds of links? How can you tell if it's nonsense, and if it's really comprehensive? Do we really want to send the message that we don't want the input of WikiProjects in preparing articles for FAC?
In summary, we need A-Class anyway, so let's make a decent effort to get A-Class review to work well throughout all the projects like it does in MILHIST and FILMS. This discussion should focus on how best to achieve that - unless someone has a really good alternative (which I haven't seen yet!) Only if that effort fails to propagate peer-review should we talk about merging A-Class into other classes. Walkerma ( talk) 22:42, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
With the introduction of C-class, we (WP:ANIME) set up a proper assessment page, set up assessment guidelines, came up with a proper list of examples per class and reassessed all of our articles. We also had a long debate regarding the whole A-class issue (The latest being Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anime and manga/Archive 33#A-Class, for real), and our conclusions was as follow:
Walkerma makes some valid comments above regarding the use of a project review to validate articles — I would expect those potential issues to be fixed by the time an article gets to GA class, though. At WP:ANIME, we have set the bar for B-class rather high in order to achieve this.** (Even if a B class assessment is not requested, any and all B class upgrades are reviewed).
*: I have yet to see an editor that lists the articles they have gotten up to A-class, as is widely done with GA and FA class.
**: Walkerma, have a look at the B class examples. Would you say that they are at (what you define as) the B class level?
In short: we have deprecated A class for the purposes of WP:ANIME until further discussion, recommending a GA review, a Peer review, and a B class review instead. If a workable system comes up, we would be happy to reconsider it again. I hope the highlights some of the problems that needs to be addressed for the smaller Wikiprojects to properly use A class.
G.A.S talk 05:35, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Well, given the persistent debates over A/GA/B/C class I'm not sure why there is such a big fuss, given that within any "class" of any WikiProject there is a big variation in quality!
I would say the most glaring trouble is that the undisputed top rank of Wikipedia, the FAs, have an increasing variance in quality due to the tail in the distribution due to old FAs that are now B-class articles, and that too, disorganised-type B-class articles. YellowMonkey ( click here to vote for world cycling's #1 model!) 00:30, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
There's a big list of Wikipedia:Unreviewed featured articles. It's just that hardly anyone nominates the articles, and let's face it, a lot of people do the bare minimum to drag across the FAC barrier and won't fix up a nominal FA that is only of B-grade quality unless the star gets put under the hammer. YellowMonkey ( click here to vote for world cycling's #1 model!) 00:14, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
YellowMonkey complains that C-class articles can be no more than Start-class. [1] Some wikiprojects do not recognise C-class. [2] GA-class interrupts the symmetry of the A-B-C hierarchy.
How about instead of a system which assigns a letter, we switch to one that builds on the Start-Stub classification. A standard article should comply with the B-class criteria. So, how about renaming B-class to "Standard-class" and merging C-class back into Start-class? This provides a new structure: Featured - WikiProject Approved (call it A if you will) - Good - Standard - Start - Stub. DrKiernan ( talk) 10:03, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Stub-Start-C - B - A \ \ GA -FA
I didn't say/mean that C-class articles can't be more than start. I just pointed out that the lower grades of ranking are never applied consistently and that the mean proponent of C-class apparently views assessment only as an inflationary statistical means of feeling better. YellowMonkey ( click here to vote for world cycling's #1 model!) 00:10, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
Take a look at WP:GA, which has a nice counter for how many articles are FA, FL, or GA. I believe that, as GAs are graded by the community, not its relevant Wikiproject, and that they are considered to have a higher distinction than A-class, they should be separate and above A-class. An article cannot be both A from its project and GA from WP:GAN. If I were revising the rating system, it would be FA, GA, A, B, C, Stub, with A distinct from GA, and C-class essentially being the same as start, though that's another story. Projects can assign an article up to A-class to indicate that it is close to GA, and it receives visible distinction at GA. Many very good, acceptable articles are B-class but are so much better than other Bs. With A-class below the review-required GA, Wikiprojects can more easily assign its best articles A that have not been independently reviewed. Reywas92 Talk 21:08, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
Many very committed editors have already pointed out the problem of the smaller WikiProjects. I think we should be clear that all the WikiProjects are small when it comes down to having enough people with enough time to do the things which everyone agrees are desirable. WP:CHEMS is one of the larger and more active projects, but we have fewer than twenty active editors, many of whom have other WikiInterests or WikiResponsabilities as well. A "solution" to the "A-class problem" which involves our best editors spending more time checking articles which are already pretty good – and so less time improving those that are very much less than optimal, or even writing those which still don't exist – that is no solution at all.
When A-class was invented, it was meant to mean "no need for any more work on this one". That isn't the same as saying that the article can't be improved, simply that it has covered all the points of the subject in a reasonable manner; the concept was entirely linked with encyclopedic content, although obvious style faults would fall under the heading "needs more work". Of course there is still FA-status but, given the number of simple grammatical errors which pass WP:FAC, I have to question whether the star is worth anything. Both WP:FAC and WP:GAC are snowed under with candidatures, and couldn't cope with any extra workload on those editors whose choose to spend their time there.
Any "A-class review" system would have the same problems as the current WP:FAC: too much work and not enough editors. Why can we not assume good faith on the part of the WikiProjects, and raise queries through those projects' talk pages? Physchim62 (talk) 01:01, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
What about the 50,000 B-class articles? Would it not be a productive use volunteer time to review the B-class articles to see which of them can be brought up to A-class with a little work? Obviously, only the projects could do such a review. Physchim62 (talk) 20:54, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
I would support completely scrapping the A-class process myself. GA and FA are close enough that going through another hoop is just a waste of time and doesn't really do anything to improve the article. Wizardman 15:41, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
That depends on what you define as "important" and "improving the article". If an article jumps from B to GA to FA, that means that nobody has asked themselves a formal question about the article's content at the highest level. Maybe problem will be picked up at WP:GAN or WP:FAC, but there's no real guarantee, especially as neither of those processes are really structured for assessing the factual accuracy and completeness of an article. Do we really want to say to the world that we don't care about the content of an article after a fairly low level (B-class)? That after that level we are only worried about its style? That we can't be bothered with a quality control system on content because it's too difficult and irritates a few of our more independently-minded editors? I don't think we should go down this path because MySpace already does it better :P Physchim62 (talk) 16:06, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
I agree with DrKiernan here. Few articles use A-class rating; it should be maintained for those articles that have it, and for the WikiProject(s) that still have an active A-class review system, but it should be deprecated for all other purposes. With the new WP:Article alerts system available, and being subscribed by most wikiprojects I interact with, I expect much fewer content embarrassments at GAC/FAC; before article alerts was available, one could easily sneak through articles at FAC/GAC with superficial reviews from editors not familiar with the content (I can give you examples of 2008 FA bombs if you insist). Xasodfuih ( talk) 13:54, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
It looks as if some key people can't make an IRC meeting this Sunday, and I don't want to drag people away on Valentine's Day, so I think we will have to hold the IRC meeting instead on Saturday 21st or Sunday 22nd, probably around 1900h UTC. I you want to discuss this on IRC, please let me know if a particular date or time is good or bad. Walkerma ( talk) 21:28, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
(←) If I could convince someone who particpates in the discussion to write up a brief overview of the discussion (10-15 sentences) I would like to include it in the next DRAMA report for the Signpost due Feb. 23. I have a feeling that discussions will be a lot to read if I end up not being able to monitor everything live. Let me know if you're interested. Thanks, §hep Talk 02:32, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
(Sorry I was a bit busy till now, though it is still 22 Feb in my time zone! Please correct anything I missed/misunderstood.) The complete meeting log is here.
Much of the discussion focused on how to encourage wider use of A-Class, given that it is hard for a small (or even medium) WikiProject to sustain a rigorous A-Class review. There were several solutions suggested, any one of which might be helpful for a particular project:
The consensus was that there was no single solution for all projects. Centralizing the work to a community-wide review was seen as duplicating GA/FA, and ducking the content issue. All participants seemed to value the use of A-Class for allowing a "content first, style issues later" approach to article-writing. One suggestion was well received, to have GA/FA separated from WikiProject assessments in project templates. It was felt that A-Class has to mean something if a project is going to work towards more A-Class articles; clearly a project review would foster that, and be driven by personal/project pride, as well as the desire to get an article's content right before FAC. It was proposed that a small team – perhaps coordinated by Walkerma and Drilnoth – work to promote A-Class reviews where appropriate. Coordinators of active WikiProjects will be contacted and asked to share their ideas and viewpoints, on A-Class and other issues, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Coordinators%27_working_group . Walkerma ( talk) 04:37, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
As you may already be aware, I am finalising a draft proposal at Wikipedia:Featured articles/Proposal which would move the primary responsibility for choosing Main Page articles to the WikiProjects. The proposal still retains an important element of "Community oversight", but not in the current form of WP:FAC (which would be, quite simply, abolished). The aim is to ensure – better than at present – that the articles which represent Wikipedia on the Main Page have good and reasonably complete encyclopedic content on their chosen subjects and, in whatever case, represent our "very best work" in that particular subject area.
Comments are welcome at the talk page. I raise the matter here and now because it might have implications for any system of Community A-class review. Physchim62 (talk) 00:57, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
Ok, here is the issue. Saint Croix Macaw is a short article, for which most information is already included in the article. Sometimes, there is just not much info for a species. So, when I go through the criteria of the various classes, this is my assessment:
{{
cite web}}
: Empty citation (
help) is not required, but the use of <ref></ref> tags is encouraged.
So, my questions is, what do I miss that requires the article to be stub or start class only and not a B? -- Kim van der Linde at venus 00:35, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
Not sure where the best place for such a discussion is, but I've started one here as that's where Template talk:Portal-Class redirects to. Comments welcome. PC78 ( talk) 16:33, 10 April 2009 (UTC)
Following on from the above, I have made a proposal to adjust the colours used for Merge, Category and Template-Class. Discussion can be found here. PC78 ( talk) 17:40, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
It is relatively easy to view all articles for a Project by either class or importance. But is it possible to view a category of articles by both: e.g., Christianity articles that are class:Start, Importance: High? Athanasius • Quicumque vult 20:14, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
{{ Good Article}} has been nominated for deletion. See WP:TFD.
76.66.202.139 ( talk) 10:02, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
I'm not quite clear on what "A-class" means. 1) There don't seem to be many A-class articles. 2) I've seen articles that say, "_____ is a former Featured Article", and they're always GA-class. 3) The few A-class articles I've seen appear to be on the same level, quality-wise, as Good Articles. 74.33.174.133 ( talk) 20:29, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
I propose a new column for articles that are tagged for needing immediate attention. Cra sh Underride 18:27, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
Does an article need to be adopted by a project to be able to be assessed? I can't find the templates to do it if not. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 21:43, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
I had an interesting experience with the John Keats article just now. It looks seriously deficient to me, but has been rated "B-class," i.e., by the definitions here, "mostly complete and without major issues." The rating is, in my opinion, simply wrong. Digging into this a bit, it looks like WikiProject Biography has rated it a B on the basis of a plausibly complete "Life" section, but WikiProject Poetry has rightfully rated it a start-class article, apparently based on the obvious lack of any substantive discussion of Keats's poetry.
I experimented by reducing the Biography rating to "start" (I immediately restored it to "B" after this test) and saw the article's overall rating drop to "start." This verifies my impression that whatever combines ratings from multiple projects is taking the maximum rating from any project. I contend that the minimum rating ought to be used, at least if the WikiProjects involved are equally significant to the subject of the article. In the case of John Keats, WikiProject Poetry ought to be given at least an equal say, if not the final say: if the poetry discussion is inadequate, the entire Keats article is inadequate. I wonder if whoever has developed the article-rating mechanism can reconsider this aspect. -- sharpner ( talk) 01:26, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
Sharpner: What do you mean by "overall rating"? Where did you see it displayed? I am trying to decide if this is an issue with my software, or with some other javascript. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:49, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
It seems that A-Class is extremely underused. As far as I know, only around a thousand articles (please correct if I'm mistaken) make use of it. I feel this is regrettable, as there is a large but often unrecognized gap between WP:GA and WP:FA. Only one WikiProject really makes widespread use of A-Class, WP:MILHIST. Most other projects simply ignore this. I was wondering if it's possible to make an effort towards "revitalizing" A-Class and making it more readily usable. Any thoughts? – Juliancolton | Talk 02:17, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
(unindent) Thanks KrebMarkt for raising this. I took a good look at the quality task force discussions. I see that you did discuss article assessment on around 29th, but it has been dormant since then. I do think believe that if you want to improve quality, you need to have assessment to measure that, though such a system should be kept simple and universal (which is what I think we have on en:WP). If an assessment thread pops up again, I'll be sure to add my 2c.
Meanwhile, as for reviving A-Class, I think the way forward for me personally is to start doing this much more at WP:CHEMS, including writing content to raise articles to A-Class, and then try to spread the interest (with help from people like your good self, if you can). I think that several projects already do something like what was intended for A-Class but they call it "strong B-Class"; if we can find the right tools to organize A-Class many of these strong B-Class might become A-Class again. Ideas are welcome, but personally I need to put in some hours of hard work first! Walkerma ( talk) 06:15, 4 January 2010 (UTC)