Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/Through WikiProject assessments

Another way of finding articles to work on is using the assessment criteria on English Wikipedia. If you have ever looked at a talk page of English Wikipedia, you might have seen messages like "this is a C class article in WikiProject Nigeria", or "this is a stub class article in WikiProject Biography". These are quality assessments and every WikiProject, almost every WikiProject on English Wikipedia has these assessments.

And so this link allows you to pick any WikiProject you like, any topic you like -- I'm demonstrating with Nigeria -- and it gives you this table. And this table tells you that out of a total of 22,000 articles that have been identified as relating to Nigeria, there are a total of four featured article -- that's FA -- 37 Good Articles, 169 B-class articles 1300 C-class, etc.. It tells you the current quality level and you can see that there are, for example, 6500 stubs, very short articles related to Nigeria. So you could work on one of them.

But the other thing that this table does is it helps you identify the importance of the articles, like how central are they to the encyclopedic coverage of Nigeria? And if you look at the intersection of low quality, high importance, then your efforts can be the most meaningful!

We can look at what are the top importance articles about Nigeria that are stubs by clicking on this number 10 here, and we see that, say, the article about the Tupuri people is of top importance -- it's a whole people, or tribe! -- and we only have a stub about them. We can click that article and see that indeed, it is a fairly short article, and if you have a way of improving or expanding this article with sources, that's a good article to work on.

I hope that it's clear how this tool can help you identify things that are, on the one hand, really in need of improvement, but on the other hand are high importance or top importance. I think it's a very good tool. And that is linked here from this slide. And you can instead of Nigeria, you can type the name of any other WikiProject: music, military history, Nigerian cinema, whatever.