Welcome to the assessment department of the Geology WikiProject! This department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's articles about Geology. While much of the work is done in conjunction with the WP:1.0 program, the article ratings are also used within the project itself to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work.

The ratings are done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the {{WikiProject Geology}} project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:Geology articles by quality and Category:Geology articles by importance, which serves as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist.

How can I get my article rated?

Please request a rating on the project talk page.

Who can assess articles?

Any member of the Geology WikiProject is free to add—or change—the rating of an article.

What if I don't agree with a rating?

You can request a reassessment on the project talk page.

Aren't the ratings subjective?

Yes, they are, but it's the best system we've been able to devise; if you have a better idea, please don't hesitate to let us know!

If you have any other questions not listed here, please feel free to ask them on the discussion page for this department.

An article's assessment is generated from the class and importance parameters in the {{WikiProject Geology}} project banner on its talk page:

{{WikiProject Geology
|class= 
|importance= 
|attention= 
|needs-infobox= 
|Cambrian=
|Cambrian-importance=
|Geological periods=
|Geological-periods-importance=
}}

The fields |Cambrian= and |Cambrian-importance= tag the article for the Cambrian explosion task force and rate its importance for that project. The fields |Geological periods= and |Geological periods-importance= do the same for the Geological periods task force.

The class parameter rates the quality of the article. The possible values can be seen in the "Quality" column of the table at the top of this page. The quality scale is common to the majority of Wikipedia articles. See Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#Grades for interpretation of the ratings.

Articles are stored in subcategories of Category:Geology articles by quality. For example, |class=FA adds articles to Category:FA-Class Geology articles.

The field |importance= rates the importance of the article to WikiProject Geology. The possible values are seen in the top row of the table at the top of this page. In general, a given article will be of varying importance to different wikiprojects. See Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Release_Version_Criteria#Importance_of_topic and {{Importance scheme}}.

Articles are stored in subcategories of Category:Geology articles by importance. For example, |importance=Top adds articles to Category:Top-importance Geology articles.