Today we had a young editor quit the assessment drive on principle that the assessment in no way added to the quality of the drive. He opined his time was better spent on the Wikify drive for March. That is a perfectly sensible decision which he is entitled to make and I have nothing to say about this editor or his decision any more.
However, it does bring an important point to notice. Why bother to assess articles? Why bother to allocate importance?
I'm sure this must be an issue which many people may not be completely clear about.
Understanding the need for assessment comes from looking at Wikipedia articles and their quality/importance from a perspective. That is the perspective of improving a body of information on Wikipedia.
Let us consider articles on Medicine as an example. No one can deny the importance of this set of articles to the people of the world. I think it axiomatic that the best way for Wikipedia to serve the interests of the heath of the people is to improve the articles on medicine, health and lifestyle. The better the information and the more the information available, the greater the likelihood of a healthier world.
But if we had no system of assessment how would one answer the following questions?
* What is the state of a <particular article> on Wikipedia? How do we rate it or compare it to others? * How do I find the articles on Medicine which need improvement the most? * Of all the articles on Wikipedia on Medicine, how many articles are satisfactory in quality and how many are of really high quality? * Of all the articles in a body of knowledge, how do we know which is most important and which should get more attention than the other? * How do I best use my limited effort to improve the articles on Medicine?
Such questions can only be answered by having in place a system of assessment.
Historically on Wikipedia, it appears that assessment was associated with WikiProjects. Articles are not assessed at the overall level of Wikipedia but at the level of WikiProjects. You already know that WikiProjects use banner templates on article talk pages of topics pertaining to that WikiProject. In these templates, by adding parameters in the Wikitext of the banner template, an article can easily be classified and allocated importance and earmarked into a Task Force/daughter WikiProject. Based on these parameters, these banners suitably categorise the articles into various categories of articles of the WikiProject.
An example:
{{WikiProject India|importance=top|quality=B|kerala=yes}}
Placing the above parameters in the WikiProject India template will result in the addition of the following four additional categories to the talk page:
* Category:B-Class Kerala articles * Category:B-Class Kerala articles of Top-importance * Category:Top-importance Kerala articles * Category:WikiProject Kerala articles
In this way, should we take the trouble to assess all the articles in a WikiProject, then they will all be neatly arranged in categories which are extremely helpful for editors.
In a small WikiProject of 200 articles or less, elaborate assessment can be done away with but in WikiProject India, with over 96,000 articles how is it possible for WikiProject Members to even come to grips with these articles?
It is here that assessment renders the WikiProject manageable - it enables members to be able to take small chunks of the 96,000 articles and work with them much more easily and conveniently than if there had been no assessment at all.
Without assessment, it is virtually impossible to handle the WikiProject articles and decide the best way to spend our limited effort and time.
It is for this reason that more than 30 editors have done more than 11,000 article assessments to date in the Tag & Assess 2012 - knowing that unless the backlog of articles are not assessed, it will not be able to manage the WikiProject properly and improve their quality.
AshLin