Guide:Writing and rating articles (Meta, no ontology)

From Compile Worlds

Revision as of 19:33, 23 July 2009

Evaluating the rating of an article is split up into two processes. Firstly, the following questions are considered, and negative tags are applied as necessary.

• Does the article cover all material in its scope?
  • If there is little material because the subject is too narrow, the page is {{trivial}}, and likely to be deleted.
  • If there is little or no material suitable for Kawachan, the page should be marked as requiring a {{domain}} move.
  • If there significant material to discuss within the subject of the article under the context of Kawachan, but not all material is covered, the page is {{short}}, and additional information should be added.
  • If the article does cover everything in its scope, is within the scope of Kawachan, and covers a wide range of material, good.
• Does the article make grammatical sense? Can it be understood?
  • If not, it is {{crap}}, and should be rewritten.
  • If yes, good.
• How much logical sense does it make?
  • If it is entirely consistent with outside sources, then it has too much {{fact}}, and needs moar opinion and sarcasm.
  • If it is inconsistent with itself, or with older articles on Kawachan, it is {{wrong}}, and should be edited to restore consistency.
    • Since Kawachan is parody, statements need not be consistent with outside facts.
    • However, once a statement is established on Kawachan, newer ones must conform to it.
    • This helps to generate more humorous material.
  • If it is consistent with itself and other Kawachan articles, but partially inconsistent with outside sources, good.
• Does the article have correct spelling, punctuation, grammar and formatting?
  • If not, it requires {{cleanup}}.
  • If so, good.

If not all four questions above resulted in a good, the process stops now. Otherwise, one goes on to less important criteria to choose a positive tag:

• What is the state of the links in the article?
  • If there are few or no links, more need to be added.
  • If there are lots of links, but a large proportion are red, either add more, change some of the link targets, or write new articles from the red links.
  • If both the number and proportion of blue links is high, good.
  • Piped links should be used only to add hidden content to phrases, as in the example in this sentence. They should not be used for changing the form of a word - use redirects for that.
• How is the article tagged?
  • Rageboard will introduce a much more flexible tagging scheme; however the following are good rules of thumb.
  • Does the article have an infobox (if one is appropriate) with all appropriate entries filled in?
  • Is the article correctly placed in the category system, by both topic and type?
  • Does the article reference or link to all appropriate database templates?
  • If all of the above conditions are met, good.
• Is the article illustrated appropriately?
  • Pictures and videos should be added to the article to illustrate it.
  • If the article is generic or entirely philosophical and as such cannot be illustrated by normal media, consider adding diagrams.
  • There are very few cases where an article cannot use any media at all.
  • If the article contains appropriate media, good.
• Is the article split up into appropriate sections?
  • Sections should be neither too long (more than two screens on a 1280x800 display) nor too short (less than two paragraphs).
  • Sections should also be neither too many (more than 30 total, or more than 10 with a common parent) nor too few (less than three).
  • Sections should focus on their content without repeating information elsewhere in the article.
  • If there are overlapping parts of the subject, consider using a broader main section, with sub-sections for more unique parts.
  • If there are many short sections, consider using a definition list instead.
  • Consider splitting out sections that are very long or have a large number of sub-sections into separate articles.
  • If sections are appropriate, good.

Finally, count up the number of good answers in the previous list, and apply a positive tag as follows:

• 4: {{perfect}}
• 3-2: {{excellent}}
• 1: {{great}}