Wikipedia:WikiProject Law/Assessment
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Welcome to the assessment department of WikiProject Law! This department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's articles about the law and legal system. While much of the work is done in conjunction with the WP:1.0 program, the article ratings are also used within the project itself to aid in recognising excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work.
The ratings are done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the {{WikiProject Law}} project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:Legal articles by quality and Category:Legal articles by importance, which will (hopefully) one day serve as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist.
Contents |
[edit] Frequently asked questions
- How can I get my article rated?
- Please list it in the section for assessment requests below.
- Who can assess articles?
- Any member of the WikiProject Law is free to add—or change—the rating of an article.
- What if I don't agree with a rating?
- You can list it in the section for assessment requests below, and someone will take a look at it. Alternately, you can ask any member of the project to rate the article again.
- Aren't the ratings subjective?
- Yes, they are, but it's the best system we've been able to devise; if you have a better idea, please don't hesitate to let us know!
If you have any other questions not listed here, please feel free to ask them on the discussion page for this department.
[edit] Instructions
An article's assessment is generated from the class and importance parameters in the {{WikiProject Law}} project banner on its talk page:
{{WikiProject Law
|class=
|importance=
|attention=
|needs-infobox=
|peer-review=
|old-peer-review=
}}
The following values may be used for the class parameter:
- FA (adds articles to Category:FA-Class legal articles)
- A (adds articles to Category:A-Class legal articles)
- GA (adds articles to Category:GA-Class legal articles)
- B (adds articles to Category:B-Class legal articles)
- Start (adds articles to Category:Start-Class legal articles)
- Stub (adds articles to Category:Stub-Class legal articles)
- NA (for pages, such as templates or disambiguation pages, where assessment is unnecessary; adds pages to Category:Non-article legal pages)
Articles for which a valid class is not provided are listed in Category:Unassessed legal articles. The class should be assigned according to the quality scale below.
[edit] Quality scale
| Label | Criteria | Reader's experience | Editor's experience | Example |
 FA{{FA-Class}} |
Reserved exclusively for articles that have received "Featured article" status, and meet the current criteria for featured articles. | Definitive. Outstanding, thorough article; a great source for encyclopedic information. | No further editing is necessary unless new published information has come to light; but further improvements to the text are often possible. | Supernova (as of February 2007) |
| A {{A-Class}} |
Provides a well-written, reasonably clear and complete description of the topic, as described in How to write a great article. It should be of a length suitable for the subject, with a well-written introduction and an appropriate series of headings to break up the content. It should have sufficient external literature references, preferably from "hard" (peer-reviewed where appropriate) literature rather than websites. Should be well illustrated, with no copyright problems. At the stage where it could at least be considered for featured article status, corresponds to the "Wikipedia 1.0" standard. | Very useful to readers. A fairly complete treatment of the subject. A non-expert in the subject matter would typically find nothing wanting. May miss a few relevant points. | Minor edits and adjustments would improve the article, particularly if brought to bear by a subject-matter expert. In particular, issues of breadth, completeness, and balance may need work. Peer-review would be helpful at this stage. | Durian (as of March 2007) |
 GA{{GA-Class}} |
The article has passed through the Good article nomination process and been granted GA status, meeting the good article standards. This should be used for articles that still need some work to reach featured article standards, but that are otherwise good. Good articles that may succeed in FAC should be considered A-Class articles, but having completed the Good article designation process is not a requirement for A-Class. | Useful to nearly all readers. A good treatment of the subject. No obvious problems, gaps, excessive information. Adequate for most purposes, but other encyclopedias could do a better job. | Some editing will clearly be helpful, but not necessary for a good reader experience. If the article is not already fully wikified, now is the time. | International Space Station (as of February 2007) |
| B {{B-Class}} |
Has several of the elements described in "start", usually a majority of the material needed for a completed article. Nonetheless, it has significant gaps or missing elements or references, needs substantial editing for English language usage and/or clarity, balance of content, or contains other policy problems such as copyright, Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) or No Original Research (NOR). With NPOV a well written B-class may correspond to the "Wikipedia 0.5" or "usable" standard. Articles that are close to GA status but don't meet the Good article criteria should be B- or Start-class articles. | Useful to many, but not all, readers. A casual reader flipping through articles would feel that they generally understood the topic, but a serious student or researcher trying to use the material would have trouble doing so, or would risk error in derivative work. | Considerable editing is still needed, including filling in some important gaps or correcting significant policy errors. Articles for which cleanup is needed will typically have this designation to start with. | Munich air disaster (as of May 2006) has a lot of helpful material but contains too many lists, and needs more prose content & references. |
| Start {{Start-Class}} |
The article has a meaningful amount of good content, but it is still weak in many areas, and may lack a key element. For example an article on Africa might cover the geography well, but be weak on history and culture. Has at least one serious element of gathered materials, including any one of the following:
|
Useful to some, provides a moderate amount of information, but many readers will need to find additional sources of information. The article clearly needs to be expanded. | Substantial/major editing is needed, most material for a complete article needs to be added. This article still needs to be completed, so an article cleanup tag is inappropriate at this stage. | Real analysis (as of November 2006) |
| Stub {{Stub-Class}} |
The article is either a very short article or a rough collection of information that will need much work to bring it to A-Class level. It is usually very short, but can be of any length if the material is irrelevant or incomprehensible. | Possibly useful to someone who has no idea what the term meant. May be useless to a reader only passingly familiar with the term. At best a brief, informed dictionary definition. | Any editing or additional material can be helpful. | Coffee table book (as of July 2005) |
[edit] Importance scale
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" but which are of interest primarily to students of the law.
Note that general notability need not be from the perspective of editor demographics; generally notable topics should be rated similarly regardless of the legal system in which they hold said notability. Thus, topics which may seem obscure to a common law audience—but which are of high notability in other places—should still be highly rated.
| Status | Template | Meaning of Status |
|---|---|---|
| Top | {{Top-Class}} | This article is of the utmost importance to this project, as it forms the basis of all information. |
| High | {{High-Class}} | This article is fairly important to this project, as it covers a general area of knowledge. |
| Mid | {{Mid-Class}} | This article is relatively important to this project, as it fills in some more specific knowledge of certain areas. |
| Low | {{Low-Class}} | This article is of little importance to this project, but it covers a highly specific area of knowledge or an obscure piece of trivia. |
| None | None | This article is of unknown importance to this project. It remains to be analysed. |
[edit] Importance assessment
An article's importance assessment is generated from the importance parameter in the {{WikiProject Law}} project banner on its talk page:
- {{WikiProject Law| ... | importance=??? | ...}}
| Top |
| High |
| Mid |
| Low |
| ??? |
The following values may be used for importance assessments:
- Top - The article is about one of the core legal topics. Adds articles to Category:Top-importance legal articles
- High - The article is about the most well-known or historically significant aspects of the law. Adds articles to Category:High-importance legal articles
- Mid - The article is about a topic within the legal field that may or may not be commonly known outside the profession. Adds articles to Category:Mid-importance legal articles
- Low - The article is about a topic that is highly specialised within the field of legal studies and is not generally common knowledge to lay people. Adds articles to Category:Low-importance legal articles
[edit] Requesting an assessment
If you have made significant changes to an article and would like an outside opinion on a new rating for it, please feel free to list it below.
- I have been working on the newly created Hamer v. Sidway article. An objective initial assessment would be appreciated. I promise I won't be offended by a shredding. Scienter 18:44, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
