Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States/Assessment

Purplebackpack’s Long-Winded Biography Proposal

My proposal is somewhat limited in scope, in that for the time being, I’m only focusing on 200 or so well-known American biographies (not because I think the scope of WPUS should be smaller, but so that we can have a more pinpointed focus and therefore get more Top and High articles to where they need to be). These American biographies should cover multiple facets of American life, but all the Presidents, as well as several other current political figures. For right now, I’m not designating any lows, only Top, High and Mid; we can do the Low if this works. The people I have picked haven’t necessarily been tagged yet; they are theoretical examples.

General criteria:

Article importance grading scheme

Label	Criteria	Examples
Any	Has made a significant contribution, or gained notoriety, throughout the whole of the United States
Top	Very well-known, and unquestionably influential. In essence, the U.S. wouldn’t be the way we know it. Limit to 20 biographies, who should have project consensus to be rated as such	George Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr.
High	Generally the most important people in a field or discipline (such as politics, art or sports), but did not completely alter the course of American history.	Frank Lloyd Wright, Babe Ruth
Mid	Lesser-known in their field or discipline.	Warren G. Harding, Norman Rockwell

Here is the general criteria, now for a few specifics:

Presidents of the U.S.

We seem to agree that all 43 should be tagged here. I think the default rating for a President should be High (this jabs with the rating scheme on most other projects for past executives). If he didn’t serve a full term, drop him down to Mid (except for JFK, these are forgettable presidents). If he changed the course of American History, put him up to Top

Current politicians

The current president should be Top. I think that we should also assess a few other current politicians as well. If Obama is Top, I think it logically follows that Biden (the VP) should be High, and Roberts (the Chief Justice) and Boehner (the Speaker) should be at least Mid. Maybe tag the SecofState and the Fed Chair.

Other fields/disciplines

I think at least the top person or two (and probably more in certain fields) in each discipline should be High or Top. For politics, obviously the top people are Washington and Lincoln, and they’re Top. But there are other disciplines, such as Art/Architecture, Business, Literature, Music, Science/Tech, and Sports. And each of them should have at least one high biography, and probably a couple mid biographies.

Top-Importance articles

I said 20…and here are some of the ones I propose:

• The current president (Barack Obama for at least 2 more years)
• George Washington
• Abraham Lincoln
• Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Thomas Jefferson
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Benjamin Franklin
• Thomas Edison
• Theodore Roosevelt

You can make suggestions to round out the list on your own. It’s likely that most of the Top-importance bios will probably also be Core bios at WP:BIO.

There’s my proposal. Comments? Specifics? Purplebackpack89 19:22, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Excellent list. Wondering about women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Amelia Earhart or Betsy Ross. --Tomwsulcer (talk) 20:11, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

They'd definetely be at least high...probably Anthony or Stanton should be a top Purplebackpack89 21:15, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Comments

One approach would be to start with somebody else's list. The Atlantic has a list at [1] and American Heritage has a response at [2].

At present there appear to be only four people with TOP ratings in the project -- King, Lincoln, Obama, and Robert E. Lee. Tom (North Shoreman) (talk) 21:30, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

I know this is a matter of personal opinion, but I think that the biography curve is shifted way toward the "High" end. How about only 20 biographies at most should received the "High" rating, all US Presidents (other than any "High" rated ones) should receive the "Mid" ranking. Anyone else mentioned by name in the articles United States or History of the United States should be "Mid", and every other bio should be "Low." I am saying this because each of these biographies probably is already covered by four other WikiProjects and is not worth spending a lot of time and attention. Again, there is no scientific way to set the importance scale. It depends on how you see the scale being used. If one has no preconceived notions, one could say that there are 5 possible rankings, so stick 20% in each of the five buckets. If you see the WikiProject as focusing on broad nation-wide articles, then biographies would be hard to classify as "Top." It is not worth a big battle, and I can't prove that any approach is the correct one. Thanks, Racepacket (talk) 21:31, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Martin Luther King is covered by 10 projects yet is only B Class. Arguably the two most famous Virginians, Robert E. Lee and George Washington are covered by 5 and 7 projects respectively and are only rated Class B and Class C. Abraham Lincoln is covered by 12 projects and only recently made it to Class GA. Franklin D. Roosevelt is covered by 12 projects and is rated B Class. It's not how many projects cover an article but what the projects do with their coverage. Tom (North Shoreman) (talk) 21:55, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. Tom, I believe GW is also a top priority, and should be if he isn't. I agree that Lee is definetely deserving of High or better, though I might give Jefferson #2 Virginian...though I'm not sure the importance of that in a national rather than state project. Also, FYI, the AmericanHeritage list is more attributable to John Steele Gordon rather than the magazine itself; JSG is generally skewed toward a business and economic interpretation of things. I'm fine with starting with the Atlantic Monthly's list, and then filling in the gaps with additional people (for example, Betsy Ross, Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman are absent from their list, but are widely enough-known). Race, you are correct in saying that this is skewed to the "Top" and "High" end, because any article that would be classified as "Low" might not be worth this projects' time anyway. I'm just starting with 20 Top, 100 High and 100 Mid...if we think it works out, we can add 500 more mid and 500 low. This is essentially a silly semantics argument, as you are just arguing that everything should be demoted one category. Also, the more I think about it, the more I realize that an article being tagged by multiple WikiProjects is a good thing. Gives you more editors, and a higher probability of getting an editor who is really passionate or knowledgeable. If any of you are interested, I'm starting to formulate the list of who should be Top, Mid and Low at User:Purplebackpack89/WPUSRatings...a list that can be discussed, edited, and perhaps projectspaced. Purplebackpack89 00:29, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Also, the more I think about it, the more I realize that an article being tagged by multiple WikiProjects is a good thing. Gives you more editors, and a higher probability of getting an editor who is really passionate or knowledgeable. Pretty much sums up what I was trying to do all along. --Kumioko (talk) 00:43, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

The real policy question here is how the biography distribution curve compares to the non-biography curve. If one believes that the primarly scope of the WikiProject is national-level, then the emphasis will be on topics like United States or History of the United States. The biography area is already heavily occupied, so it should be a curve that is shifted toward the "low" end compared with the non-biography curve. Racepacket (talk) 12:25, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Why? Having solid articles about 20 people who made the nation the way it it today seems to be to be as important to me as having articles on other topics of national scope. Purplebackpack89 15:44, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Is the importance scale a measure of how important is an article for a reader who wants to learn about the United States or what priority WPUS should give to this article in its overall efforts? I assume it is the later, and I would place a lower priority of biographies because so many other WikiProjects cover them. Racepacket (talk) 19:09, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Both actually. And just because they are covered by another project has no bearing on the article to this project. Barack Obama is Top importance on many projects (about 20 last I looked) and rightly so. --Kumioko (talk) 19:27, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

I could see President of the United States having a top importance, but the individual presidents being Mid with a few High. Racepacket (talk) 08:15, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I think that the point of who is top, high and mid is a discussion that in itself will require more discussion and itself could be very subjective. I tend to disagree with what Racepacket says here that most pressident woiuld be mid however I think there are only a few that would rate as Top but I do agree that there are certainly some that did little while in office to rate significant attention until we have a chance to address the others of a higher importance. --Kumioko (talk) 14:22, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Medal of Honor Recipients

Hey, I noticed that several Medal of Honor recipient are listed as High importance. I think that the default position for a Medal of Honor recipient should be dropped from High to Mid, as the High importance tag puts them in league with some of the more , and many of them are not notable aside of what they did to earn their medal of honor. Using the "mother-daughter" theory, we should keep Medal of Honor as a High priority. I know these men did very important things for our country, but the standards seem to dictate this. Purplebackpack89 07:54, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

A reasonable call. Of course if a Medal of Honor winner becomes known for another attribute, such as being elected President, they get the higher importance. Racepacket (talk) 08:11, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I was actually in the process of reducing most of these to low. There should only be about 80 left. --Kumioko (talk) 12:12, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Requests for assessment

I don't know how many users have this on their watchlist but the project has a page for requesting third party assessments of articles here Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/Assessment/Requests. There are a couple articles needing assessment for anyone who may want to take a look. --Kumioko (talk) 19:25, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Top and High Importance

We said we were going to take a long, hard look at what's Top Importance and what's high. There are 54ish articles now, add someone mentioned up to 200 earlier, so we can expand the list significantly. First off, here's what's Top right now:

1. American Civil War
2. American Old West
3. American Revolutionary War
4. Articles of Confederation
5. Arts and entertainment in the United States
6. Baltimore–Washington Metropolitan Area
7. Cuisine of the United States
8. Demographics of the United States
9. Economy of the United States
10. Environment of the United States
11. Federal government of the United States
12. First Amendment to the United States Constitution
13. Flag of the United States
14. Founding Fathers of the United States

1. General officers in the Confederate States Army
2. Geography of the United States
3. Health care in the United States
4. History of the United States
5. Thomas Jefferson
6. Martin Luther King, Jr.
7. Robert E. Lee
8. Abraham Lincoln
9. Louisiana Purchase
10. Marbury v. Madison
11. Music of the United States
12. New York City
13. Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
14. Barack Obama

1. Politics of the United States
2. President of the United States
3. Religion in the United States
4. Slavery in the United States
5. Smithsonian Institution
6. Social Security (United States)
7. Society of the United States
8. Supreme Court of the United States
9. Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution
10. Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution
11. U.S. state
12. Uncle Sam

1. United States
2. United States Army
3. United States Bill of Rights
4. United States Constitution
5. United States Declaration of Independence
6. United States Senate
7. United States national motto
8. Visual arts of the United States
9. Wall Street Crash of 1929
10. Washington, D.C.
11. George Washington
12. Watergate scandal
13. White House
14. World War II

Milestone Documents

The Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Indy, and Articles of Confed. Sorry, individual amendments, but you're daughter articles and should be dropped to high. I would extend the possiblity that List of amendments to the United States Constitution be top, as it is the mother article to the Amendments.

I am not so sure. Although not all amendments are equal so to speak and most of the amendments could probably be bumped down I think there are a couple that are Top importance and I do not think we shoudl think of it as the constitution is more important. They are part of the constitution. --Kumioko (talk) 17:15, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

History of the United States

Clearly History of the United States should be Top. I also propose that articles following the form "History of the United States (DATE-DATE)" be high; as that is where much of the real content is.

I agree on the over arching one but not the yearly ones. I think they should by high or mid IMO. --Kumioko (talk) 17:16, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

My bad, I wasn't very clear. I was referring to articles like History of the United States (1789-1849), which are daughters of History of the United States. Should they be High (as I suggested above) or Mid? Purplebackpack89 18:52, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

IMO History of the United States should probably be top with the others as High. --Kumioko (talk) 18:57, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

States, cities and counties

I propose the following about them:

• States are automatically assessed as High
• NYC and Washington are Top; LA, Chicago and a few other big ones are High
• Counties probably should not be assessed, as most of them are not national in scope

Well for the top 2 I agree. For the bottom one I believe most should be low with maybe a couple such as Orange County, California in the Mid range.

I thought we squashed the issue of "National scope" in that we were going to concentrate efforts on the higher National articles but that doesn't mean IMO that we should toss out the rest with the trash. As I stated before I agree that we should focus on the important ones but there is no reason why we should include the others with the project, particularly in the cases of an Inactive project like US counties where there is still utility in classifying the articles or projects such as DC, super funds, LOC or others. If we are now determining that we are not going to assess them then that also indicates that we are going to drop them from the project and to this I do not agree. --Kumioko (talk) 17:21, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I'll acquise to your proposal of counties being part of the project, but rated low unless they have populations of a million or more Purplebackpack89 18:50, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

The million or more seems like a reasonable benchmark. I'm not sure how many that will be and we may need to bump the total up to reduce the number but lets see what others think. I just believe that some of the more Famous and larger ones like San Diego and Orange Counties in Cali, King county in Washington and Dade county in Florida probably should be mid. These should all meet the million mark as you suggested as well. --Kumioko (talk) 19:01, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I think it's between 50 and 100, maybe a little more than that According to List of the most populous counties in the United States, 41 Purplebackpack89 19:12, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Oh well thats not bad then I don't think. --Kumioko (talk) 19:32, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree that some states will be TOP priorities. I think we need to seriously consider whether some state history articles should also be TOP rated. American History as taught throughout grades 1-12 always starts with Virginia (Jamestown)and Massachusetts (Plymouth Rock) history. Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York are also featured prominently in this era. As the nation expands California (Manifest Destiny, Gold Rush) and Texas (Mexican War) are featured.

In looking over other projects I noted that there are no Regional United States Projects (i.e. Southern United States) although there are regional articles. These regional articles should be TOP priority. Yes, they are "daughter" articles of the main United States articles, but they have great significance on their own. With Southern United States as a TOP article, Confederate States of America would fall naturally as a HIGH article. History of the Southern United States could be rated as either TOP or HIGH. Louisiana Purchase seems like a natural TOP article. Tom (North Shoreman) (talk) 00:22, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Your argument seems to be making the case for Plymouth Rock and Jamestown to be Top articles themselves. I am perfectly fine with Southern United States (and probably also New England, Western United States and some other regions); and am perfectly fine with the assessment of state or topical histories as High. I am somewhat worried that making some states and some state's histories could lead editors who don't understand why we did what we did to classify all the states Top importance. Purplebackpack89 01:07, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Biographies

I had proposed that we have up to 20 Top Biographies. Right now, we have Jefferson, King, Lee, Lincoln, Obama, and Washington. Above, I had proposed adding FDR, Teddy, Franklin, and Edison...there is a general consensus for that, no? Now, to get the whole 20:

• Possible demotion: Lee
• Proposed additions: Susan B. Anthony, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, John D. Rockefeller, Mark Twain
• Fight for the remaining five-six spots: Disney, Douglass, Eisenhower, Emerson, Ford, Grant, Jackson, Lee, Madison, Presley, Robinson, Wright Brothers

Remember in my earlier proposal, I had mentioned that the most important people in each field should be Top or High; which is why the top representatives of sports and entertainment are under consideration. I've also started a list of proposed High and Mid biographies at User:Purplebackpack89/WPUSRatings. Thoughts on these?

Again I don't like the idea of setting a limit. Whether we have 5, 50 or 500 shouldn't matter if the article meets the criteria for Top, high or whatever. We are just going to end up causing big fights and arguments of symantics of why who or who should not be top. IMO its too subjective and its not worth fighting over if someone insists that Kim Kardashian should be a top priority article because she gets over 200, 000 hits (or whatever) every month. I agree with the Demotion and the promotion points though but again IMO there is no need for a notability death match to see who's going to get the coveted top seat. --Kumioko (talk) 17:25, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I guess we don't need a hard-and-fast number, but we do need a certain degree of exclusivity to our top articles; and some degree of consensus about them. I don't care for your Kardashian example; maybe that's because I don't car for what people like Kardashian and Snooki Purplebackpack89 19:31, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I admit I don't think much of her as an individual and could in the grand scheme of things personally care less about the article. With that said She is 4th on the list of Popular viewed articles for WPUS with a hit count of about 200, 000 per month and is pretty consistant. So a lot of someones somewhere cares and I think we are doing ourselves as a project a disservice if we ignore that fact and don't take advantage of that high hit count in our own favor. IF we improve the article people are going to notice and likewise take more notice of the project. That likewise should draw more interest in the project and thereby increase or members and the more contributing members we have the more improvements we can make to our articles (of course it also draws more vandals but its a viscious cycle). Kimmy K is currently a start class article so even improving it to B or GA would IMO increase eyes on the project by them thinking wow these folks are making some improvements. That particular article aside we should focus at least some efforts on the top 5 or 10 (possibly more later) articles in the popular list regardless of our personal feelings about the article itself. Many of these BTW are already rated in the Top and high category's so there is a fair bit of overlap anyway. --Kumioko (talk) 19:41, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Proposals for additions and deletions

I think the following need to go:

1. The articles about the Amendments (they should not be on the same level as their mother, the Constitution)
2. Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area (we don't need both it and WDC tagged)
3. General officers of the Confederacy (completely inconsistent to be here...if there's any article concerning the Confederacy at Top here, it should be the Confederacy itself).

...and the following need to be added:

1. Statue of Liberty
2. The Star-Spangled Banner (the song)
3. United States Capitol
4. United States House of Representatives
5. United States Navy and United States Air Force (we got the Army, why not the other branches?)
6. United States dollar
7. Literature of the United States
8. Sports in the United States

Thoughts? additional proposals? Purplebackpack89 16:58, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Are you saying we should drop these from the project or drop thier level of importance? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kumioko (talk • contribs)

I definetely don't think they should be top priority. Whether or not they are still part of the project is up to others Purplebackpack89 18:44, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. I personally do not think we need to start dropping articles from the project and I agree that some of those articles should be added to the top priority list. 1, 2 and 6 for sure IMO. Possibly 7 and 8 too but they are probably high to me. The others are probably ok at High. In regards to 5 I would say all the services would be High. --Kumioko (talk) 19:01, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Culture of the United States should probably be a TOP rated priority -- it is our number one export. I was surprised that there is not a spinoff from that article to Pop Culture of the United States -- this seems like it might be a HIGH priority article that needs to be written. This would be the place to introduce the Kardashian's of the world and would set the stage for individual current pop icons to start being listed at the MID level. Tom (North Shoreman) (talk) 00:03, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Question about content above GA

I have a question for the masses that relates to this. I had thought a while back that it seemed strange to have articles of GA or better rated as low importance but I wanted to ask for opinions about this. Does anyone have a problem with articles being bumped from low to at least mid if the are GA class or better and IMO articles of A, FA or FL could be high. Being placed in the higher category would allow them to be more easily monitored and I beleive would allow the article a more equal importance with their quality. It seems to me that having an FA class article with low importance is somewhat innappropriate. --Kumioko (talk) 19:05, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm not so sure how much the quality rating or number of hits (referencing Kardashian, above) should play into the importance rating. I think that the number one overarching decision for rating something should be how much it jibes with our criteria. Perhaps I would understand more where you are coming at if you gave me a couple examples Purplebackpack89 19:18, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Certainly. We currently haev 120 FA class articles in the proejct with an Importance of low. Now under normal circumstances most would probably be low but since they are FA's for example I wonder if they shouldn't be at least MID importance due to their quality. A couple examples of this are 7 World Trade Center, Benjamin Harrison and Kent, Ohio. Arguments of scope aside, IMO if we promote a Low class article from GA to A then it seems reasonable to me that we would also increase the importance of the article due to its quality. I personally can't see a Featured article as low importance? Since we only have 3 top, 27 high and 22 mid level once we clean them up initially and stay on top of them it shoudln't be hard to manage IMO. -Kumioko (talk) 19:30, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I respectfully disagree. The importance of the article is not a GA criteria. Some editors nominate low importance articles for GA because they wrote them and are interested in the subject. No consideration is given to the importance of the article. Wikipedia-wide, there are 10,903 GA articles, and many of them are rated low importance. The work plans of individual editors should not dictate the priorities of the WikiProject as a whole. Racepacket (talk) 12:49, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Although I perfectly understand you reasoning and think that perhaps use GA or maybe even A was a bad example but it seems that if an article is FA then it shouldn't be a lot priority for the project IMO. The fact that an article is FA should make it "important" enough to elevate its status I would think. Perhaps not thats why I thought a discussion on the subject was in order to see how everyone else felt about it. --Kumioko (talk) 15:48, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment on GA and A. The same reasoning applies to FA. For example, an article on a three-mile long hiking/biking trail is now at FAC, because a local resident wrote an article and took it through the GA and now FAC process. FAC does not question the signficance of the article. There is no logical reason to increase the "importance" of FA articles. As a management tool, the count of high vs low priority FA articles should tell us that people are not doing enough to polish the really important articles. The answer is to ask volunteers to bring high priority articles to FAC, not to automatically raise the ranking of the FA low priority articles. Racepacket (talk) 15:12, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I think Racepacket reflects how other projects have applied it for example Wikipedia:WikiProject_Psychology/Assessment#Importance_scale or Wikipedia:WikiProject_Novels/Assessment#Importance_scale, where the importance relates to the relevance to the "core" topics of a given set of scholarly discussion, not to how important they are in relationship to Wikipedia editors or their projects, Sadads (talk) 18:16, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Project scope affect assessment strategy

There is currently an RFC on the page WT:WPUS to clarify the scope of WikiProject United States and its relationship with state-level and subjec-specific wikiprojects. In many ways the criteria used to classify articles depends on the Project's scope and priorities of operation. I would encourage people here to participate in that discussion. I would also ask that the example articles used in the tables explaining the criteria reflect the emerging consensus to restrict the project to articles of national or regional signficance in order to avoid confusing editors when they make the decision to tag article with the project's banner. Thanks, Racepacket (talk) 12:39, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

So how does the RFC relate to this subpage? Are you really going to carpetbomb this across Wikipedia just because you don't agree?--Kumioko (talk) 15:46, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Also, I missed the part about an "emerging consensus" to restrict the project. I don't believe that is the case Purplebackpack89 16:32, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

The "emerging consensus" actually runs counter to Racepacket's position. We have adopted by consensus a mission statement with a broad scope and more limited focus. Tom (North Shoreman) (talk) 17:59, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

I think we all agree that our primary focus will be on the national and regionaly articles, in particular those that are high on the importance scale. I do not think that the majority of members feel we should restrict ourselves to only those articles as Racepacket is insisting. For one, many of these articles require advanced editor skills which many editors (including myself in some cases) do not possess and lie outside our members areas of interest (Medal of Honor recipients for example in my case). Some are going to be difficult to improve and get to the higher quality levels (such as United States for a variety of reasons). To adopt a policy restricting the entire project to that of only National or regional would also exclude a large chunk of our members as well as do a disservice to many articles that are currently not included or are not maintained by other projects for various reasons. I do believe, and have stated as such repeatedly in the past, that this project should play a role in the development of US related articles but maintain a non interferance policy with regards to the other active projects. --Kumioko (talk) 17:02, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Format for Amendment Pages

So the Pages in regards to the Amendments are, for the most part, B-class and below, and I'm going to put some resources into fixing them up. The only problem is that there are two GA, the 17th and 25th, however they disagree on issues of formatting (Small issues, yes, but issues). I'd just like to build a consensus on which of those two formats I should be emulating for the other 25. -Achowat (talk) 14:13, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Which format do you prefer?--Tomwsulcer (talk) 16:39, 19 December 2011 (UTC)