[WikiEN-l] assessing

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Surreptitiousness
<surreptitious.wikipedian at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Carcharoth wrote:

<snip>

>> I have a list of 12 articles that are either unassessed or need
>> re-assessing, if anyone is interested in using that as the basis of a
>> discussion about ratings. The articles all have one thing in common,
>> in that they were started by me! Though in some cases they have been
>> much expanded by others.
>>
> I wouldn't dream of assessing articles in subjects I have no expertise
> in.  I would have no idea how complete they were, and I could end up
> giving an A-Class rating to an article about a five pound note which
> managed to detail in astonishing depth the appearances of the note over
> the years, but somehow forgot to mention that it was used as currency.

No expertise needed to do initial ratings! (Well, that's not strictly
true, but some of the arguments over ratings could be avoided if some
people made clear they were just doing initial assessments to help get
the ball rolling). In my view, no single article should be assessed
more than two or three times before it enters a formal review process
(e.g. peer review, GA, FAC). More than that is just a waste of time
that is better spent improving the article.

What I'm asking for is these initial ratings, to get things started.
Are you sure you or anyone else don't want to take a quick look? I
could just make "to do" lists for each of the 12 articles and steadily
work through them and improve them, but getting people interested in
something they are not interested in is quite a bad idea really.

>> As soon as
>> you have all articles rated, you then need to find a way to find out
>> which ones need re-rating, and to avoid duplication of effort. How do
>> you do that efficiently?
>>
> It is relatively easy to automate assessing at stub level, which really
> only leaves the rest to collaboration.  Anyone can request a
> reassessment, and there's a sort of competitive streak in most of us
> that once we've rewritten an article, we usually want to see it moved up
> a notch. And most WikiProjects actively scour their articles for
> suitable FA and GA candidates, which tend to move them up.  This is a
> situation the wiki process is designed to solve.

Actually, I think people end up picking the articles they are most
interested in, or which have the most potential. The vast majority or
article languish unless people systematically work through them. As an
example, look at how successful the plan to bring all the WP:CORE
biography articles up to high (maybe even FA) standards has been (not
very).

Sometimes you just need to take a load of stubs and set out with the
aim of raising them a notch or so. And linking them from other
articles if that hasn't been done. Getting more eyes on an article is
sometimes the only way to get people editing that article.

Carcharoth