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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.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I add an article to the WikiProject?
- Just add {{WikiProject Law}} to the talk page; there's no need to do anything else.
- How can I get my article rated?
- Please list it in the section for assessment requests below.
- Who can assess articles?
- Any editor, or member of the Law WikiProject is free to add a rating to an article if they wish. However, the Assessment Team (from this department) may overrule the rating of an article if they see fit.
- Aren't the ratings subjective?
- Yes, they are (see, in particular, the disclaimers on the importance scale), 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!
- Did the reviewer leave any comments?
- If the reviewer leaves a comment, it will be found on the talk page of the article.
- Why didn't the reviewer leave any comments?
- Unfortunately, due to the volume of articles that need to be assessed, you may not receive detailed comments in all instances. If this is the case, you might ask the person who assessed the article if you have any particular questions; they will usually be happy to provide you with their reasoning.
- To what extent will the Assessment Dept. give feedback on an article after grading it?
- If you wish, the Assessment Dept. (for WikiProject Law) will attempt to keep giving feedback until the Assessment Dept. believes that the article in question is at least; slightly above a "B" grade. After reaching this stage, the Assessment Team are likely to recommend that your article be peer-reviewed.
- How can I keep track of changes in article ratings?
- A full log of changes over the past thirty days is available here. If you are just looking for an overview, however, the statistics may be more accessible.
- How does this all work?
- See Using the bot and WikiProject Council Guide.
If you have any other questions not listed here, please feel free to ask them on the discussion page for this department.
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. If you are interested in more extensive comments on an article, please use the Wikipedia:Peer review instead. Completed requests are usually placed in the archive.
Please place new requests (in the format, # [[article name]] -- ~~~~ ) at the bottom of the list.
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:
Articles for which a valid class is not provided are listed in Category:Unassessed-Class legal articles. The class should be assigned according to the quality scale below.
Quality scale
Please note that the WikiProject Law Assessment Department is in the process of updating the grading scheme, so changes may occur to the criteria and examples - the assessment department apologizes for an inconvenience caused, and endeavours to complete this task as soon as possible. Upon completion of updating, the main member of the assessment department will remove this notice.
| Class |
Criteria |
Formal process |
Example |
 FA |
Reserved for articles that meet the featured article criteria and have received featured article status after community review. |
Featured article candidates |
Tourette Syndrome (as of July 2007) |
FL
{{FL-Class}} |
Reserved exclusively for articles that have received "Featured lists" status, and meet the current criteria for featured lists. |
Featured list candidates |
FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives (as of January 2008) |
| A |
Reserved for articles that have received A-class status after review by the assessment department. Such articles are required to be passed as a good article, and are expected to have largely met the featured article criteria, and must be comprehensive, accurate, well-sourced, and decently-written; however, they may require some further fine-tuning in certain aspects. |
Requests for assessment by the department. NOTE: may need to be a former feature article candidate, prior to the department making a decision on whether to grant an article this grade. |
Durian (as of March 2007) |
 GA |
Reserved for articles that meet the good article criteria and have received good article status. |
Good article nominations |
International Space Station (as of February 2007) |
| B |
Commonly the highest article grade that is assigned outside a more formal review process. Has several of the elements described in "start", usually a majority of the material needed for a comprehensive article. Nonetheless, it has some gaps or missing elements or references, needs editing for language usage 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. |
May be assigned by any reviewer |
Jammu and Kashmir (as of October 2007) has a lot of helpful material but needs more prose content and references. |
| Start |
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 the following:
- multiple links that help explain or illustrate the topic
- a subheading that fully treats an element of the topic
- multiple subheadings that indicate material that could be added to complete the article
- a particularly useful picture or graphic (optional)
|
May be assigned by any reviewer |
Roman Catholicism in India (as of October 2007) |
| Stub |
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. |
May be assigned by any reviewer |
Real analysis (as of November 2006) |
| List |
Should be lists of live links to Wikipedia articles, appropriately organized. May be assigned by any reviewer only for pages that begin with the name "List of" (like in the example). If an article is felt to be an exception to this rule, a request for assessment by the department must be made in order for it to be allowed. |
See criteria. |
List of aikidoka (as of June 2007) |
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=??? | ...}}
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 the English 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.
Further, generally notability should not be limited to the perspective of editor demographics, or one jurisdiction or country. 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. Generally, articles on the topic in one country should have the same importance rating as an equivalent topic in another country. For example, an article on criminal law in Canada, Germany, or China should receive the same importance rating as an article on criminal law in the US.
The following values may be used for importance assessments:
| 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. The article is about one of the core legal topics. Adds articles to Category:Top-importance legal articles |
| High |
{{High-Class}} |
This article is fairly important to this project, as it covers a general area of knowledge. The article is about the most well-known or historically significant aspects of the law. Adds articles to Category:High-importance legal articles. |
| Mid |
{{Mid-Class}} |
This article is relatively important to this project, as it fills in some more specific knowledge of certain areas. 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 |
{{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. 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. |
| None |
None |
This article has yet to be rated. |
Assessment Team
The list of members below make up the WikiProject Law Assessment team. Members of the team who are bolded (below) are currently the main, active member(s) of the assessment team - they are most likely to assess articles, so please direct any enquiries regarding assessment or the assessment department towards them.
- Ncmvocalist (talk · contribs) - maintenance of assessment dept. and currently, main member of assessment team
New members
If you would like to join the assessment team, please add your name below.
- Tarun2k (talk · contribs) (special interest: tax laws, indian laws
- EECavazos (talk · contribs)
- Bearian (talk · contribs) tagging and improving all law stubs
Example assessments
Legal
articles |
Importance |
| Top |
High |
Mid |
Low |
None |
Total |
| Quality |
| FA |
4 |
5 |
4 |
5 |
2 |
20 |
| A |
1 |
1 |
4 |
1 |
|
7 |
| GA |
1 |
2 |
13 |
10 |
6 |
32 |
| B |
44 |
69 |
83 |
74 |
30 |
300 |
| C |
2 |
1 |
3 |
2 |
5 |
13 |
| Start |
63 |
177 |
430 |
593 |
289 |
1552 |
| Stub |
15 |
123 |
492 |
934 |
282 |
1846 |
| List |
2 |
2 |
1 |
667 |
61 |
733 |
| Assessed |
132 |
380 |
1030 |
2286 |
675 |
4503 |
| Unassessed |
26 |
21 |
22 |
19 |
2519 |
2607 |
| Total |
158 |
401 |
1052 |
2305 |
3194 |
7110 |
To assess an article, paste one of the following onto the article's talk page.
Quality
- {{WikiProject Law|class=FA}} - to rate an article at FA-Class
- {{WikiProject Law|class=A}} - to rate an article at A-Class
- {{WikiProject Law|class=GA}} - to rate an article at GA-Class
- {{WikiProject Law|class=B}} - to rate an article at B-Class
- {{WikiProject Law|class=Start}} - to rate an article at Start-Class
- {{WikiProject Law|class=Stub}} - to rate an article at Stub-Class
- {{WikiProject Law}} - to leave the article un-assessed.
Importance
- {{WikiProject Law|importance=Top}} - to rate an article at Top importance
- {{WikiProject Law|importance=High}} - to rate an article at High importance
- {{WikiProject Law|importance=Mid}} - to rate an article at Mid importance
- {{WikiProject Law|importance=Low}} - to rate an article at Low importance
Log
The full log of assessment changes for the past thirty days is available here. Unfortunately, due to its extreme size, it cannot be transcluded directly.
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