User blog:Drew1200/The New Article Rating System

If you've been paying attention to Wiki Activity lately, you'll have noticed that we've been working on implementing a new article rating system. This new system will allow us to be able rate the quality of an article and how well it complies with our Manual of Style. Many other wikis already have systems like this, and it typically works very well. Hopefully, in the future, we'll also be able to base editing contests on this system. Rather than having contests for numbers of edits, we'll be able to have contests for quality edits as well.

Here's how the system works: there are five classes of articles. Stubs are the lowest class, and are reserved for articles that are pretty much just totally awful. Acceptable articles are those which fail to fully meet the Manual of Style. Complete articles meet the Manual of Style, but don't include any of the additional suggest information. Good articles do contain that information, and should also be well organized and comprehensive. Great articles take that one step further, and should contain all the information we're able to find. If you'd like to see more details on any of these classes, just visit the official page.

Keep in mind that we don't plan on allowing just anyone to rate the articles. In order to do so, you have to hold at least patroller or administrator rights. We're also considering requiring some sort of brief training course, but I don't have complete details on that yet.

For the time being, we're working on setting up all of the initial ratings. This is quite a project, with nearly 4,000 articles needing rated. But hopefully we can get them all rated quickly, and get this new system running smoothly!