AARoads:Assessment

Assessment
A department of the AARoads project

Welcome to the Assessment Department! This department focuses on assessing the quality of road- and highway-related articles on the AARoads Wiki. The article ratings are used within the project itself to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work.

The ratings are done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the {{talk header}} project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:Articles by quality.

Article classes

E-Class	Big Three: 0–1 sections. The first stage of an article's evolution is E-Class. An E-Class article is an extremely short article that provides a basic description of the topic at best; it includes very little meaningful content, and may be little more than a dictionary definition.	What are the "Big Three"? Route description A prose summary of where the route takes you. There is no set length to this section, but it is reasonable to expect a 300-mile-long highway's RD will be much longer than that of a three-mile-long highway. History A chronological listing of events that have happened to the highway, such as extensions, truncations, and reroutings. Length of the section depends on the highway's role in the highway system – sometimes there is a lot to say, other times not. Route junction list A sequential table that shows you in what locations highways meet and at what mileposts. In some instances, a bulleted list is used instead.
D-Class	Big Three: 2 sections. An article that undergoes some development will progress to the next stage of article evolution. An article at this stage provides some meaningful content, but is typically incomplete and lacks adequate references, structure, and supporting materials. At this stage, it usually contains a route description and a junction list and will be assessed as a D-Class article.
C-Class	Big Three: 3 sections. As the article continues to develop, it will reach the C-Class level. At this stage, the article has all three sections and contains substantial content and supporting materials, but may still be incomplete or poorly referenced. As articles progress to this stage, the assessment process begins to take on a more structured form, and specific criteria are introduced against which articles are rated.
B-Class	This would be the second-highest classification of the scale. We use the B-Class criteria to evaluate an article for this grade and have a B-Class Review process for nomination and review. A single editor who is not the nominator will be able to conduct and close the review.	What is the "Gentleman's Agreement"? In short, we have operated on a system where any editor can assess his or her own work up to C-Class without involving another editor. Once someone is comfortable with how assessments work, the community will trust them to be fair and honest in applying those assessments to articles they work on. B-Class will require an uninvolved editor to conduct the review of a nominated article, and A-Class will require multiple editors to offer comments before the review is closed by an uninvolved admin.
A-Class	This would be the pinnacle of the scale. Articles at this stage represent our finest work. We use the A-Class criteria to evaluate an article for this grade and have an A-Class Review that involves multiple editors reviewing and commenting on the article before promotion. An uninvolved admin will close the review.

List classes

List articles, which summarize and list entire highway systems, use a similar assessment scale to articles on individual roadways. Initially, these lists may be assessed as List-Class, but as they are further evaluated against this scale, that class will be retired. While List-Class is still in use, it will be considered equivalent to EL-Class for statistical purposes.

EL-Class	Table: Incomplete, Prose: None of substance The first stage of a list's evolution is EL-Class, or E-Class List. An E-Class list is an extremely short list that provides a basic description of the topic at best; it includes very little meaningful content, and may be little more than a dictionary definition.	What are the "Big Three"? Description A prose summary of the system being listed. There is no set length to this section, but topics covered should include the numbering conventions in use by the system, who assigns those designations and some general facts about the system as a whole. History A chronological listing of events that have happened to the highway system, such as extensions, truncations, and reroutings. This section summarizes the major trends that happened to the system as a whole. List table(s) A table, or set of tables, that list the components of the system along with the basic data on each component.
DL-Class	Table: Incomplete, Prose: Incomplete A list that undergoes some development will progress to the next stage of list evolution. A list at this stage provides some meaningful content, but is typically incomplete and lacks adequate references, structure, and supporting materials. At this stage, it usually contains a route description and a junction list and will be assessed as a D-Class List.
CL-Class	Table: Complete and Prose: Incomplete or Table: Incomplete and Prose: Complete As the list continues to develop, it will reach the CL-Class level. At this stage, the list has all three sections and contains substantial content and supporting materials, but may still be incomplete or poorly referenced. Alternatively, the list may be complete, and the prose is starting to take a more developed form. As lists progress to this stage, the assessment process begins to take on a more structured form, and specific criteria are introduced against which lists are rated.
BL-Class	This would be the second-highest classification of the scale. We use the B-Class criteria to evaluate a list for this grade and have a B-Class Review process for nomination and review. A single editor who is not the nominator will be able to conduct and close the review.	What does "complete" mean? A table is complete when it is not missing any rows or columns. Each highway, past or present, in the system has a row in the table, and that row has an entry for every column except the notes. The columns are defined in AA:MURA, and include entries for the length, termini, designation dates, and decommissioning dates. The prose sections are complete when they broadly cover all of the topics about the system. For the A-Class level, the expectation is that the prose is comprehensive, and it neglects no major facts or details and places the subject in context.
AL-Class	This would be the pinnacle of the scale. Lists at this stage represent our finest work. We use the A-Class criteria to evaluate a list for this grade and have an A-Class Review that involves multiple editors reviewing and commenting on the list before promotion. An uninvolved admin will close the review.

Comparison to the English Wikipedia assessment scale

Our assessment scale is based on that used by the English Wikipedia. We simplified that scale by combining some redundant article classifications and using a single letter-grade scale from A through E. As such, an A grade is equivalent to Wikipedia's Featured grades, and a B grade here is equal to Wikipedia's Good grades, where they exist. Additionally, we expanded the classifications for lists to recognize their developmental progression, giving them a full set of their own letter grades to complement the article classifications.

Additional classes

Our articles and lists are not the only types of wiki pages that are assessed. We classify other content by their purposes and track them by the regions or topics to which they apply. This expanded set of classes include:

• Annex-Class, for pages in the Annex
• Disambig-Class, for disambiguation pages
• File-Class, for files, usually images, videos or sounds
  • AM-Class, or A-Class Media, for those files judged to be some of our best images, videos or sounds; these will be evaluated through the ACR process as well.
• Future-Class, for articles on highways not yet opened to the public
• Template-Class, for templates used in the project
• Module-Class, for Lua modules
• Project-Class, for project-level pages
• Redirect-class, for subjects that could be full articles, but currently redirect to another article.
• NA-Class, for pages that don't fit into another classification

See also

• /Connectivity