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Timeline edit
Yuzhong,
The timeline idea was first suggested - I think by User:Arman, though you'd have to check the edit history - and then he went through an article history to find out when changes occurred. He wrote this out here in text, and I thought it would look nicer as a graphical display. The main assessment page is linked from thousands of pages, so I like to keep the information succinct, and the graphic was a way to do that. Incidentally, I used the image map option (a little known/used option in WP, I think it's fantastic!), and being a chemist I drew it using ISIS/Draw!
To find when articles change their assessment rating, you need to go to the Discussion page (where the assessment tags are placed) and click on History. You would need to go back through that, and hope that the editor included an edit summary such as "Assessed for WP:Bio" or "Now a B". If necessary, you may need to click on different versions of the talk page to find what status it had on certain dates, then go from there.
FYI, there are also logs of all assessment changes, such as this one for chemistry, and you could go through those using the "Find" option in IE or Firefox. The entries disappear after a few months (or less for a big project), but you just need to click on History to pick older versions to look at - you can see the log going back to its creation. In fact, you might even be able to get a script that could read through the logs to find all the references to a specific article.
The logs are part of a wider system of bot-generated output which provides WikiProjects with information on their articles. A typical example would be this one for chemistry. If you click on one of the lists, you can see the articles listed, and a link to the version on the day it was last re-assessed, along with the date of that. That only shows the date of last re-assessment. From the same page you can also see a link to the stats table from (which you can click to get a list of all (say) B-Class chemistry articles), as well as a link to the log I mentioned above. For a full list of the "by quality" lists available, the main WikiProject index is here and here.
Also, before the bot started in April 2006, we did manually written tables, mainly on a few projects such as Military History and Chemicals. Assessment originally started on WP:Chem in around June 2005 on this page, see this version as an example, if you need a long time period to analyse.
Let me know how you get on - there's even more behind the scenes if you need it! Walkerma (talk) 23:57, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
- Hey Walkerma, thanks very much for you information about the article assessment. It is very useful and I am now following the process you suggested.
- I saw you and Arman went through the historical revisions of the article "Atom" and identified some critical changes and when those occurred such as:
- The article started as a stub on Oct 1, 2001.
- By 8 October, 2001 it received some additions and approached the upper bound of the definition of stub.
- On 20 September 2002, the article was enriched with some more information and it moves into start class.
- The version as of 3 June 2004 is still in start class. There is a meaningful amount of information - but it needs further structuring improvement.
- On 24 June 2004, the article receives another important addition - a useful image. It has reached the upper bound of start class, but still not good enough to get a C-class rating.
- It is very nice.But I notice the "atom" article started around late 2001 when there was no wikiproject based assessment. May I ask how did you make the assessment before the start of wikiproject based assessment? Did you make the assessment yourself based on the criteria listed on Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment. Or could you please suggest some more resources for the assessment of the early development of an article started much earlier before the lanch of Wikiproject based assessment?
- Thanks a lot!
- yuzhong(talk) 17:52, 30 November 2008 (UTC)