Point well taken but on Wikipedia the practice of simply tagging articles are not
generally well encouraged. It is much better (and in some cases even rewarding) to expand
articles. It has been my experience in the Wikify campaign and while I was working on new
articles that your efforts are better appreciated if you addressed the shortcomings of an
article by adding references, expanding the lead and expanding the article rather than
adding the {{wikify}} tag or as in this case tagging an article as A, B, C, Stub class
etc.
I can understand that this campaign will allow task-forces to work better with certain
articles but it has again been my experience that good articles with high notability tend
to get worked on faster with contributions of all kinds of editors on Wikipedia - even
those outside a task-force, while those with lower notability (as it happens with local
sports events) tend to get abandoned. If you go through the list of un-assessed articles
you will find that most of these articles don't have anything to be added to and so
will never make it to higher levels of quality. You can try spending your time on them.
Best of Luck! from my end
Finally, we are all volunteers who take time out of our schedules to work on Wikipedia.
Won't you feel better to adopt one article, expand it and work on it to make it more
notable and better quality and some day see it get nominated for a FA or good article
category, rather than tag 3000 articles and win a so-and-so barnstar?
Oh, BTW, I am the editor who dropped out.
Regards,
Shagnik Saraswati,
Mob: +918802424179
________________________________
From: Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur(a)gmail.com>
To: WikiProject India mailing list <wikimedia-in-en(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 2:07 AM
Subject: [Wikimedia-in-en] The Need for Assessment of Articles
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
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