 Assessment
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| A department of the U.S. Roads WikiProject | ||
Welcome to the Assessment Department of the U.S. Roads WikiProject! This department focuses on assessing the quality of U.S. road and highway related articles on Wikipedia. The process follows the goals of the WP:1.0 program, but the article ratings are also used within the project itself to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work.
The ratings are done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the {{WikiProject U.S. Roads}} project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:U.S. road transport articles by quality and Category:U.S. road transport articles by importance, which serves as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist.
Assessments
editWe assess articles in a manner that is slightly different than other projects. Nearly all articles on routes have three major sections: Route description, History, and a junction list. Below, we'll call these the "Big Three". The lower half of the scale is assessed based on the presence of any of these three sections; while the upper half of the scale goes through a more rigorous process. Articles on interchanges may simply ignore the junction list requirement. The progression of articles along the quality scale is described in greater detail below.
The "Big Three" sections
editThere are three main sections to most USRD articles: Route description, History, and Major intersections. An article's quality assessment is dependent on these three sections. If it only has one section or none at all, it is a Stub, any two and it's Start-Class, all three and it's at least C-Class. If you have improved an article, it is generally OK for you to change an article's class among Stub, Start, and C.
| Stub | Big Three: 0–1 sections. The first stage of an article's evolution is called a stub. A stub is an extremely short article that provides a basic description of the topic at best; it includes very little meaningful content, and may be little more than a dictionary definition. |
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| Start | Big Three: 2 sections. A stub that undergoes some development will progress to the next stage of article evolution. An article at this stage provides some meaningful content, but is typically incomplete and lacks adequate references, structure, and supporting materials. At this stage, it usually contains a route description and a junction list and will be assessed as a Start-Class article. | |
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| C | Big Three: 3 sections. As the article continues to develop, it will reach the C-Class level. At this stage, the article has all three sections and contains substantial content and supporting materials, but may still be incomplete or poorly referenced. As articles progress to this stage, the assessment process begins to take on a more structured form, and specific criteria are introduced against which articles are rated. | |
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Higher classes
editOnce an article has reached C-Class, it has reached the point where another editor should review it before its assessment is raised further. There is a gentlemen's agreement among USRD editors to not give their own work a B-Class rating in most cases. Above that, there are formal review processes at GAN, ACR, and FAC, which increase in rigor with each step, to determine if an article should be raised into the upper tier (GA-, A- or FA-Class).
| B | An article that reaches the B-Class level is complete in content and structure, adequately referenced, and includes reasonable supporting materials; overall, it provides a satisfactory encyclopedic presentation of the topic for the average reader, although it may not be written to the standard that would be expected by an expert. Articles at this stage commonly undergo peer review to solicit ideas for further improvement. B-Class is the final assessment level that can be reached without undergoing a formal review process, and is a reasonable goal for newer editors. | ||
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 GA
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After reaching the B-Class level, an article may be submitted for assessment as a good article. Good articles must meet a set of criteria similar to those required for the B-Class assessment level, and must additionally undergo the formal good article review process.
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 A
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A good article that has undergone additional improvement may be considered for the A-Class assessment level. An A-Class article presents a complete and thorough encyclopedic treatment of a subject, such as might be written by an expert in the field; the only deficiencies permissible at this level are minor issues of style or language. To receive an A-Class rating, a candidate article must undergo the formal A-Class review process at the Highways WikiProject. The A-Class rating is the highest assessment level that may be assigned by an individual WikiProject; higher assessment levels are granted only by Wikipedia-wide independent assessment processes. | ||
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 FA
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The featured article rating represents the pinnacle of article evolution and the best that Wikipedia has to offer; an article at this level is professional, outstanding, and represents a definitive source for encyclopedic information. Featured status is assigned only through a thorough independent review process; this process can be grueling for the unprepared, and editors are highly advised to submit articles for A-Class review prior to nominating them for featured status.
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Other classes
editNon-articles can be assigned other classes, which do not affect the WikiWork scores.
| List | Meets the criteria of a stand-alone List, which is a page that contains primarily a list. |
| AL
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Provisional assessment exclusively for list articles that have been reviewed through the ACR process. |
| FL
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Exclusively for articles that have received "Featured list" status, and meet the current criteria for featured lists. |
| File | Any non-article in the File namespace. |
| FM
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Exclusively for media that have received "Featured picture" or "Featured sound" status and meet the current criteria for featured pictures or featured sounds. |
| Category | Any category. |
| Disambig | Any disambiguation page. |
| Draft | Any article in the Draft namespace. |
| Future | Any article in which all information contained is subject to change. |
| Portal | Any page within the portal namespace. |
| Project | Any page that falls under the Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads prefix. |
| Redirect | Any page that redirects to another article. |
| Template | Any type of template. The most common types of template used in the WikiProject are infoboxes and navboxes. |
| NA | Any page that is not an article and fits no other classification. |
Importance assessments
edit| Top | Articles of national and international importance, such as articles on systems and select national routes. |
| High | Articles of national importance, such as all two-digit interstates not in Top-importance, three-digit interstates that connect multiple metropolitan areas, major U.S. routes that have not been duplicated by interstates, select state highways, and freeways in major metropolitan areas. |
| Mid | Articles of state or regional importance, such as all U.S. routes and three-digit interstates not in High-importance, most state highways, and select county highways. |
| Low | Articles of local importance, such as named interchanges, minor primary or most secondary state highways, all remaining county highways, and most special routes. |
| NA | All non-articles and non-lists are automatically placed here. |
WikiWork
editWe use the seven quality classes to calculate a metric we call WikiWork, which tells us the current status of our articles. There are two main WikiWork numbers which are used. Cumulative WikiWork (ω) is the total number of classes (that is, improving a stub to start is one class) needed for all U.S. Roads articles to become featured articles. Relative WikiWork (Ω) is ω divided by the number of articles. This lets us know what class the average USRD article is.
Cumulative WikiWork is calculated like this:
In this calculation, is the number of A-Class articles, is GA-Class articles, is B-Class articles, is C-Class articles, is Start-Class articles, and is Stub-Class articles. The current ω is 52,412.
Relative WikiWork is calculated like this:
This calculation takes the above calculation and divides it by the number of articles, including featured articles, which is 12,414. This gives us a relative WikiWork of 4.222. Using the scale from the cumulative calculation, a Start-Class article is given a 5.0 and a C-Class article is given a 4.0, so the average USRD article is between Start- and C-Class.
Early on in the project, we had to calculate the project's and each state's WikiWork by hand. Thankfully, this task is now handled by a bot. The table can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Assessment/States. A "live" version of this table, which is useful if you cannot wait until the bot runs, is located at Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Assessment/Live.
Reviewing articles
editThere are a number of ways to assess the quality of USRD articles. At the peer and A-Class reviews, USRD collaborates with other national highway projects (Australia and Canada, notably) to perform these reviews under the Highways WikiProject banner.
Peer review
editThe peer review process is not used to evaluate an article for a particular assessment level directly; rather, it is a forum where article authors can solicit ideas for further improvements. Peer review is most often requested when an article is at the C-Class or B-Class level; articles at lower levels are typically so incomplete that a meaningful review is impossible, while articles at higher levels go through more formal review processes.
To begin a peer review, follow the instructions at Wikipedia:Peer review.
Individual review
editThe individual review process is used for all assessment activities up to the B-Class level. In this process, any editor may review an article against the listed criteria and assign the corresponding quality rating themselves. If an article nominally meets the criteria for a certain level, but one section is severely lacking, a level may be deducted from the rating.
Article authors are free to assess their own articles under this process. However, by general agreement among our editors, the final assessment for a B-Class rating is typically left to an independent editor; requests for reassessment may be made by adding |reassess=yes to {{WikiProject U.S. Roads}}.
Good article review
editThe good article nomination process is an independent review mechanism through which an article receives a "good article" quality rating. The process involves a detailed review of the article by an independent examiner, who determines whether the article meets the good article criteria.
Full instructions for requesting a good article review are provided on the good article review page.
A-Class review
editThe A-Class review process is the most thorough and demanding assessment of article quality done by the U.S. Roads WikiProject. An article that undergoes this process will be assessed against the A-Class criteria. During this time, independent editors critique the A-Class candidates by suggesting improvements or stylistic changes. Each reviewer's comments conclude with a simple support or oppose vote. For an article to be approved, three more reviewers must support promotion than oppose. Starting in 2014, the process is also provisionally reviewing list articles to award AL-Class; these reviews are being done using the featured list criteria as a starting point.
To request an A-Class review, simply add |ACR=yes to {{WikiProject U.S. Roads}} and follow the instructions on the banner.
Featured article and list review
editThe featured article candidacy and featured list candidacy processes are separate, independent, Wikipedia-wide quality assessment mechanisms; these processes are the only way an article or list can receive a "featured" quality rating. The process involves a comprehensive review of the article by multiple independent examiners, all of whom must agree that the article meets the featured article criteria or featured list criteria.
Full instructions for submitting a featured article or list candidacy are provided on the appropriate featured candidacy page. Editors are advised to carefully review the submission instructions; failing to follow them correctly may cause the submission to be rejected.
Graphs
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- FA: 84 (0.7%)
- A: 21 (0.2%)
- GA: 1,183 (9.5%)
- B: 1,583 (12.8%)
- C: 3,762 (30.3%)
- Start: 4,458 (35.9%)
- Stub: 1,323 (10.7%)
- Unassessed: 0 (0.0%)