Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Africa/Assessment

Consistency

There is a slight problem here with regards to this {{AfricaProject}} template. Compared with the {{Football}} template, there seems to be a red-link in the Cat section of the Africa template. However, in the football template, there is no such red-link and the Cat is spelled Category. Does anyone know how to fix the Africa template, so that it would be similar to the football template? For a good example, please view this page. Notice the difference between the two templates. --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 04:49, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Template:Football does not supply a category parameter to the xxx-Class template it invokes, while Template:AfricaProject does. This makes the links for the GA, FA, etc. class football articles (which aren't categories) go to the generic categories for this class of article, e.g. Category:GA-Class_articles rather than Category:GA-Class football articles, although the page is actually added to the football specific category. Any category class page tagged with template:Football is put in the default category, i.e. Category:Unassessed football articles but the table on the page does not provide a link (see Category talk:Football (soccer) clubs for an example). I suspect rather than "fix" this template, we should actually fix template:Football. I'll bring this up at template talk:Football. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:12, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I have changed the {{AfricaProject}} template to be similar with the {{football}} template. This is to achieve greater consistency between the two templates. --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 08:44, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Isn't this going the wrong direction? The link to the xxx-class category from the table sure seems like it should go the category the article is placed in, rather than the generic category. I'm working on adding a category parameter for the football template and will partially revert the change to this template so they end up consistent. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:41, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

More important than templating for improving quality

...would be to help each other with peer review of Africa-related articles.

Case in point: last November, after adding a good chunk of material to Iyasu V of Ethiopia, I felt that it was at least a strong B-quality article & listed it at WP:GA to get some feedback & ideas to make the article even better. I didn't expect an immediate response, but 6 weeks passed before anyone took a look at it, by which time I was busy with other things and couldn't attend to the issues raised in a meaningful way. Now a few more months might pass before I can get back to it, & I am trying to use this article to work my way into improving more important articles like Menelik II of Ethiopia and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. (I've gathered the material, so I believe this is doable.)

At the moment, WikiProject Ethiopia is asleep, so asking for help there is not very useful.

What I would like to see is for other African specialists to help each other. We know the material better than other Wikipedians, so we ought to be able to share useful comments that will produce GA-, A- & FA-quality articles. Relying on whoever happens to be contributing at Wikipedia:Peer Review and related centers is beginning to look too much like a crapshoot. In fact, I'm willing to extend an offer: do a peer review on an Ethiopia-related article, & I'll return the favor on one of yours. Heck, contact me about one of your Africa-related articles, & I'll take the time to offer a critique. Let's work together, & promote more of our articles to the top! -- llywrch (talk) 21:00, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Importance

How is the importance of African articles determined? Important to whom? These rankings seem very subjective and arbitrary to me. Thank you in advance for an explanation. USchick (talk) 20:40, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

I've made this same point on several other project. It is extremely subjective and seems to be determined by whoever feels they "own" the article. Take importance ratings with a pinch of salt and (I would say) alter them as you see fit and see what happens. An African example: Mau Mau Uprising (Top) and HIV/AIDS in Mali (Low). Don't make much sense to me. Maybe some people use Google hits to determine the relative importance. That would explain why for instance the Mau Mau article rates top importance - it's currently in the Anglo-centric news because of ongoing court cases. Just my 2 cents worth.1812ahill (talk) 21:19, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Automated assessment of article importance

Hello everyone! I'm currently working on a project with Aaron Halfaker where we are studying how to do automated classification of article importance. In case you're wondering who I am and why I'm the one working on this, I've added a short explanation of that at the end of this post.

One of our project's goals is to make article importance predictions for articles within a specific WikiProject, and we have been making good progress towards that goal. We are now reaching out to a handful of WikiProjects to learn more about how useful and accurate our models are. These projects were chosen because almost all of them mention what the "average Wikipedia reader" is likely to look up as a criteria when determining article importance, a concept that corresponds to our usage of article views as input in our model, and because they have a large number of articles rated as "unknown importance", something we can build tools to assist with. WikiProject Africa is one of these projects, which is why I'm posting here.

During the past week I have been working on building a model that predicts the importance ratings of articles within the scope of WikiProject Africa. The model uses data such as number of article views, number of inlinks from other articles (and what proportion of those come from within the WikiProject), as well as information from the clickstream dataset. I have created a page listing almost 100 articles where our model believes the importance rating of a given article should change, you can find that list here: User:SuggestBot/WikiProject Africa#Candidates for re-rating

We'd love to know whether our predictions are accurate or useful. For instance, you might find that a prediction is not spot on, but enough to warrant changing the rating of a given article (e.g. we might predict Top-importance for an article that should be High-importance, but if it is currently rated Low-importance both cases warrant an update of that rating). If our predictions are wrong, please let us know about that too! There might be aspects of importance that our model does not catch and we want to understand what those are so we can see if there are ways to fix them.

While working on building this model, I also identified many pages within the scope of WikiProject Africa that appear to need an update of their importance rating. These pages are also listed on the page linked above. For example there are many redirects and disambiguation pages that do not have an NA ("not an article") rating, and I've updated the rating of some of them. I have also identified some articles that do not appear to have a matching Wikidata item, or where the Wikidata item is labelled a "Wikimedia disambiguation page".

As I mentioned in the introduction, in case you’re wondering who I am and why I'm the one working on this: as part of my PhD I studied using machine learning to predict article quality, and I helped develop parts of ORES to enable it to make article quality predictions. Besides doing research I also run SuggestBot, a bot which recommends you articles to edit, currently available in seven languages. Thanks for your time, and I’m looking forward to your thoughts and questions! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 23:08, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

@Nettrom: Very ambitious goal you have here, and if it succeeds it would be of great help to the project. I'm sure you've put plenty of analyses into that list you've generated, but I do have some observations:

1. "Colonialism" should probably be kept as Top-importance, considering the how much of it occurred in Africa and the profound effect it had on the course of African history.
2. "Born in Africa (compilation album)" and some other articles listed as low-importance should definitely be kept there.

One suggestion I do have, in case you haven't thought of it, is when considering the number of Wikilinks that go to a page, see if the link is listed in a template. Many a time I've looked at "What links here" for some obscure village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, only to find it clogged with other articles of other obscure villages in the same province, because they are all listed in a template for "Municipalities of X Province" that's been placed at the bottom of every member page. That's about all I have to say from my end. Just out of curiosity, why have you bothered to generate a list of articles that lack a corresponding Wikidata item? Is that somehow indicative that a certain listing is more suitable? -Indy beetle (talk) 00:12, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi Indy beetle, thank you so much for your feedback! I am not sure I understand your comments about Colonialism and Born in Africa (compilation album). WP:Africa does not rate Colonialism as a Top-importance article, only WikiProject Colonialism and WikiProject Religion do (ref Talk:Colonialism). Instead, it's rated High-importance by WP:Africa. Our model predicts Colonialism to be a Top-importance article, mainly driven by its high view rate (1,881 views/day during the last 90 days per the Pageviews tool). I agree that the topic is very important for the reasons that you mention, so I was slightly surprised that it did not already have a Top-importance rating. But that's partly why we do this, to be able to find these. We've also been working with WikiProject Medicine, where the articles about Abortion and Breastfeeding were promoted to Top-importance after our model suggested them as candidates.

The article about the "Born in Africa" album is currently rated Mid-importance by WP:Africa, while our model predicts it to be Low-importance based on its low traffic (1 view/day per the Pageviews tool). There's also few links to it from other articles.

Your suggestions about looking at whether links are used in templates is spot on! It's something we have planned, but we are limited by resources at the moment. As you mention, some articles have a huge number of links pointing to them because they are mentioned in infoboxes or navboxes, and I know of at least one example where it affected our model's predictions.

When it comes to the list of articles without Wikidata items there's two reasons behind why I generated it. The main reason is that we have noticed some WikiProjects give certain topics specific importance ratings (e.g. all National Football League seasons are High-importance in WP:NFL). Using Wikipedia's own category system to identify those is very difficult, so I've been exploring using Wikidata to do it. That means that I gathered the associated Wikidata item for every article within the WikiProject, after which it was easy to identify the articles that didn't have one and generate the list for them. Secondly, I was thinking every article should have a Wikidata item associated with it, but I might be mistaken there.

Thanks again for your comments! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:35, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Request for reassessment?

Is it possible to submit a request for reassessment of an article by a neutral editor? I have done some work on Henry Morton Stanley and believe that it is now B-class, rather than C-class as it is currently assessed. Rublov (talk) 15:50, 15 January 2022 (UTC)