This WikiProject uses the standard criteria for assessing the quality and importance of its articles. Articles in most urgent need of work will fall in categories to the bottom-left of the statistics table below.

You can help by:

1. Assessing articles per the quality schemes below
2. Picking an article, and trying to move it one grade up the scale

The criteria used for rating article importance are not meant to be an absolute or canonical view of how significant the topic is. Rather, they attempt to gauge the probability of the average reader of Wikipedia needing to look up the topic (and thus the immediate need to have a suitably well-written article on it). Thus, subjects with greater popular notability may be rated higher than topics which are arguably more "important" but which are of interest primarily to students of the Geology.

Note that general notability need not be from the perspective of editor demographics; generally notable topics should be rated similarly regardless of the country or region in which they hold said notability. Thus, topics which may seem obscure to a Western audience—but which are of high notability in other places—should still be highly rated.

An article's importance assessment is generated from the importance parameter in the {{WikiProject Palaeontology}} project banner on its talk page:

{{WikiProject Palaeontology| ... | importance=??? | ...}}

The following values may be used for importance assessments:

• Top - The article is about one of the core topics of Palaeontology. Adds articles to Category:Top-importance Palaeontology articles
• High - The article is about the most well-known or culturally or historically significant aspects of the Palaeontology. Adds articles to Category:High-importance Palaeontology articles
• Mid - The article is about a topic within the field that may or may not be commonly known outside the Palaeontology community. Adds articles to Category:Mid-importance Palaeontology articles
• Low - The article is about a topic that is highly specialized within the field of Palaeontology studies and is not generally common knowledge outside that community. Adds articles to Category:Low-importance Palaeontology articles
• Unknown - Any articles not placed in any of the above categories will be automatically placed in the Category:Unknown-importance Palaeontology articles.