Wikipedia:WikiProject India/Assessment/Tag & Assess 2012/Guide - Part 1

Guide: Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4

An Easy Guide To Assessment

If you are new to assessment in WikiProject India, this article should help you.

Firstly, WikiProject India, like all other WikiProjects has a set of articles that it stewards. WikiProjects may have as few as a hundred articles but WikiProject India is humungous - it has 94,209 articles under its care (at the time of writing). When the Tag & Assess 2012 contest was launched, there was a stupendous backlog of 18,235 articles which were completely unassessed, both for class and importance. In addition, another 42,772 articles are unassessed for importance. Accordingly, this contest has been proposed to run from 01 March 2012 to 31 May 2012.

You will find in the talk page of each of these articles the talk page template of WikiProject India. Typically, it will look something like this :

Adding a simple WikiProject Template

If you find an article about India pertaining to India which has no talk page or no WikiProject India template on its talk page, please add the following text to the top of the talk page of the article.

{{WikiProject India}}

This is the simplest form of the template. If you add this simple text to the article talk page, it will look like this:

Simple WikiProject India template on a talk page

You will now find that there are two sets of question marks below the Indian flag. This indicates that the simple template is incomplete - it requires two parameters to be filled:

Quality.
Importance.

Let us examine them one by one, taking first Quality and then Importance.

Quality

Articles in Wikipedia are of different levels of completion and finish. Listed in sequence from the simplest form to the last refined form, they are:

Stub
Start
C
B
GA or Good Article
A class
FA or Featured Article

Classifying Quality

Its easy to classify if you follow this ready reckoner:

Stub - has from one sentence to one/two paragraphs.
Start- has more than two paragraphs.
C - has lead & structure, must have infobox if applicable, must have image if available
B - developed a structure, has referencing, reasonably complete in content, checked for Neutral Point of View, and has No Original Research.

After B class, one cannot self-assess. Assessment is done by the community as follows:

Good Article (GA) - needs to undergo Good Article Nomination process and assessment/improvement under guidance of any experienced user.
A Class- Precedes consideration for FA. Needs to Undergo A class review/peer review (usually after GA) in a special department of the WikiProject where a number of editors aid the nominator in improving the article's content to the best standard possible.
Featured Article (FA) - Needs to undergo Featured Article Candidature and detailed inspection/rectification by highly experienced FAC examining editors who insist on the highest possible standards.

Some unnecessary stuff. GA deals with major issues of MOS & 5 principles, A Class with content, sources, correctness, completeness. So A Class is done en route to FAC and after GA. You can do A Class directly after B Class & take it to FA without going through GA if you wish.

For more details about the Quality Scale, please see Quality Scale of WikiProject India.

Filling in the Quality parameter

Quality can be added by filling a parameter called "class" and giving it a value like this:

{{WikiProject India|class=B}}

If you add the template with quality parameter filled to the article talk page, it will look like this:

Simple WikiProject India template with quality assessed as "B" on a talk page

Classifying Importance

Importance of an article to a WikiProject is indicated by giving the article one of the following ratings:

Top
High
Mid
Low

Assessing Importance

How to decide whether an article is at what level of importance? It depends upon context. Consider the fact that this article of yours belongs to the group of 90,000 plus articles on India.

Of these only the key articles on the most important topics, such as President of India, Jana Gana Mana, Maharashtra, Indian rupee, Telugu language, etc are given the "Top" rating.

There are still a large number of articles which while not belonging to the topmost rank, are highest in importance in their category. For example, Arjun (tank), History of Tamil Nadu, Indian cuisine, Tata Nano. These are given "high" rating.

The rest of the articles are all to be classified "low", such as Khandoba, Birbhum district, Guide (film).

If they are more notable them the rest of the pack, in which case, they are to classified as "mid" importance, for example : Lothal, Chalukya dynasty, 2011 Cricket World Cup, etc.

For more details about the Importance Scale, please see Importance Scale of WikiProject India.

Filling in the Importance parameter

Information on Importance can be added by filling a parameter called "class" and giving it a value like this:

{{WikiProject India|importance=Mid}}

If you add the template with importance parameter filled to the article talk page, it will look like this:

Simple WikiProject India template with importance assessed as "Mid" on a talk page

Adding both parameters

{{WikiProject India|class=B|importance=Mid}}

If you add values for both these parameters, you have assessed an article. This is sufficient for the WikiProject to classify all its articles into groups and segregate them for information and action.

The completed assessment template for Kathakali will look like this:

WikiProject India talk page template with both parameters assessed.

What else does a parameter do?

Based on whether the parameter has been activated or not, WikiProject Talk Page Templates place the affected talk page into appropriate WikiProject category/ies. If a parameter of a Task Force is activated for a Task Force, the articles get placed in additional WikiProject categories.

Template without parameters

For example, the simple Wikipedia India template (without any parameters activated) will place the article talk page in:

Template with only quality parameter assessed

Such a template with only quality parameter filled (in this case, set to "B") will place the article talk page in:

Template with only importance parameter assessed

Such a template with only importance parameter filled (in this case, set to "mid") will place the article talk page in:

Template with both parameters assessed

Such a template with quality parameter set to "B" and importance parameter set to "mid" will place the article talk page in:

Adding value beyond the minimum

By adding the Wikiproject template and filling in the two parameters, you have done the minimum required as far as assessment goes. WikiPoject templates are complex affairs and much more functionality has been added to the Templates. This is true for WikiProject India also.

To learn more about this, please read Part 2 of the Guide.