Dwarf Fortress Wiki talk:Quality

Stone, gem and similar articles

Any thoughts on how to rate these? Many of them seem to be tagged as stubs, but the stone template in particular seems to me to cover most of the salient information. Oddtwang of Dork 20:20, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

who rates those articles

who rates those articles?

I have been. If I shouldn't be, someone say so now. Also, should ~100% of content articles be rated? --StrongAxe 18:42, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

As there isn't much of a vandalism thing going on here, I think it should be the original author of the article who rates it, with some admin verification following--Smd 15:25, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

Anyone and everyone should be rating the articles. Don't agree with an article rating? leave a note why on the talk page and re-rate the page in question. --Briess 01:35, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Anybody can rate an article, it's a wiki and we're supposed to all work together. Just try to correct or update anything that needs changing. If you spot vandalism, go to the history tab next to the discussion/edit tabs and revert the page to a pre-vandal version. 97.90.193.201 17:57, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Changing levels

There was a discussion on the forums involving changing the quality levels to Fine, Exceptional, and Masterwork. Yes/no?--Draco18s 17:29, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I think this is a great idea. Mason ^(T-C) 17:31, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I second. The forum thread linked above garnered broad support for -Fine-, +Exceptional+, *Masterwork* after discussing several options. -Grae

Agreed, with the quality modifiers in place, they're awesome for this wiki. I mean, what's more Dwarf Fortressy than having a good *article*? --Aescula 21:32, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Indeed, it seems to fit the game better rather than fit with common player perceptions of the races in game.Vattic 20:51, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Although I think the Fine, Exceptional, Masterwork is a better grading scheme I have to question the need for more than two levels. Either an article doesn't have enough information (currently Elven) or it does (currently Human or Dwarven. The distinction between the top too levels is mostly in how it links to other articles which I think is a poor way to grade. For example you could make a Human article Dwarven by removing any red links or badly formed links but arguably this reduces the quality of the article itself. So I'd suggest just having a rating for poor pages and leaving good ones without any tag. --Shades 14:51, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

I think there is some value to pointing out articles that are not only accurate and full of all the information, but also easy to navigate within and between. Hence the distinction between what is good and great. Mason ^(T-C) 16:28, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

But that is not what we are doing as by removing the links on a Human article you can end up with a Dwarven article. That is not a good reinforcement. --Shades 07:50, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

I added another category requirement for an Exceptional article now. --Briess 00:15, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Template/method

I see that this was set up with different templates for each quality level. Is that really the best way to go? Couldn't instead of {{elven}} {{dwarven}} {{human}} could we do {{Quality|<low>}} {{Quality|<med>}} {{Quality|<high>}} (for whatever those three are)? Thoughts? Mason ^(T-C) 17:50, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

That seems far more sensible to me. The three tags are now very confusing if you don't happen to have been around while the quality thing's been introduced. Oddtwang of Dork 15:47, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

I also agree - it would centralize the formatting rules, and even potentially allow people to set what kind of label they want to see. --Krenn 07:06, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Feel free to implement this if you feel so inclined. --Briess 00:15, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Alright, I'll try to work on this tonight. Mason ^(T-C) 19:30, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

This started out as a project to point what needs fixing. Fine is a terrible name for the bottom quality rank. If you are hell-bent on driving the DF reference all the way, make the lowest rank XShoddyX VengefulDonut 12:39, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Also, the comments on the forums seem to be more objections than suggestions. Perhaps the original elven/human/dwarven ranking would work. VengefulDonut 12:45, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

I'd also like to nitpick that the current labels, "-Fine-" "+Exceptional+" and "*Masterwork*", are wrong - they should be "+Fine+" "≡Exceptional≡" and "☼Masterwork☼". --Quietust 13:00, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

I think the purpose of pointing to what needs fixing works just as fine regardless of names. Anyone who cliks those links (which anyone who wants to fix things on the wiki probably will) understand what fine pages need more work.

I don't think elven/human/dwarven was any better at showing what needs improvement. While fine/exceptional/masterwork might not accurately measure the bottom level, at least it shows a gradient which elven/human/dwarven does not. I have no objection to bumping it to 4 levels (I think something LIKE stub could be there, shoddy isn't bad) that seems like a very good idea to me.

Vengeful, I know there are a lot of objections but when asked for some suggestions this change seemed very highly requested. I simply implmented it because I agreed that "elven" doesn't really equal "bad" or even "worse then human".

Yeah, Agreed Quiest, I'll change that. Mason ^(T-C) 14:30, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

We don't need more levels. We just need the labels for the current levels to match their purpose. The bottom level, which represents "needs improvement" articles, needs to have a tag that sounds bad. xTatteredx and xShoddyx would fit the current theme. Replacing it all with number ranks would solve it (say, level of magma). As long as the label doesn't directly conflict with the purpose of the category, the way fine does. VengefulDonut 14:54, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Sounds good, it was a little work to make sure the shift happened correctly. If you want to do the change to "Shoddy" or "Tattered" then cool, otherwise I'll maybe do it sometime this week. Mason ^(T-C) 17:24, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Something a little negative about that, isn't there? "Stub" says 'this needs more adding to it' whereas "shoddy" says 'what's here isn't much cop'. I agree that "Fine" is probably a bit generous. Offhand, however, I don't have another suggestion for the lowest level.

There's probably an argument to make that the middle level would be better as "Fine" if the lowest is changed - I think there's a clearer distinction then between it and the top level. Oddtwang of Dork 21:02, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Quality categories by version namespace

Is there a relatively simple way to view a list of, say, all DF2010 articles of Fine quality? If not, could there be? It would be quite handy for targeting articles to be improved. --FunkyWaltDogg 03:29, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Doing so would require editing the {{Quality}} template itself, though it might not be a bad idea. --Quietust 04:04, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

I was thinking of doing that. We'll leave this here for a little so people can comment on it, but then if noone opposes I'll make the change. Mason ^(T-C) 17:22, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

With this in place, would calculating the "Overall quality rating" for each version not be more useful? Either for each namespace or for each + the articles in the mainspace, maybe? Oddtwang of Dork 21:05, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

I've just updated the progress bar template to allow it to focus on a single namespace. 40d has a reasonably high rating, while 23a is way worse than even DF2010. I've also tweaked this Quality page to list the quality stats for all 3 namespaces - it's a bit busy, but the information should be useful. --Quietust 13:57, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Looks great IMO, thanks! --FunkyWaltDogg 15:02, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

There's no mention of the "Version:Quality" style categories on the quality page. Should those be added immediately, or are we waiting until we've reached a decision on if ratings will differ between versions? Because I would add them, but I don't want to screw things up. Señor Pwnage 02:36, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Drop in overall quality rating

Why has the quality rating seen on the main page dropped so precipitously? It was at over 20% a week or two ago, now it is at 11%. Is this due to articles being rerated downward, or due to the hundreds of nearly-stub pages such as DF2010:Aquamarine? Has the calculation method changed? Or another cause?
—0x517A5D 20:19, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Almost certainly the latter, and probably partially my fault - whenever I find a page that has no rating at all, I just give it a "Fine" rating so it at least has a rating at all - I'm of the opinion that it's better for a page to be underrated than completely unrated. --Quietust 21:33, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

And I agree, the lowest rating should be applied to the worst articles. Mason ^(T-C) 17:21, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Given that a bunch of the articles have been blindly categorized as "Fine", I'm going through and rerating a bunch of them as "Unrated" which will place them in a distinct category so other users can provide more accurate ratings. It would probably be beneficial to make the template recognize this rating and list it on this project page (and somehow include them on the progress bar thingy). --Quietust 19:36, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

I'd suggest not doing that. Fine is currently the "bottom" rating. We can that name if we want, but having to go back and change unrated to "new bottom rating" will be a lot of unnecessary work, imo. Don't you think? Mason ^(T-C) 22:50, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

"Unrated" was not intended to be a "new bottom rating", but a way of denoting that an article needs to be (re-)rated - since the intent is that every page (or at least all of those in the DF2010 namespace) should have a quality rating, it's useful to be able to explicitly categorize an article as needing a rating without having to rate the article yourself (for those who are very poor judges of quality). --Quietust 22:55, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm also rather shocked at the brutal re-rating of everything. Not one Masterwork article? Seriously? If everything's just going to end up in a morass of Fine, where Fine can be anything from a pointless stub to a half-decent, usable article, then the system really isn't helping. --Krenn 05:08, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Ah - replying to my own post in case anyone else has the same confusion I did; the problem is that the links to the categories from the Quality page go to non-version specific categories of Fine, Exceptional, and Masterwork, and nothing is in those anymore. All articles are now of a quality rating specific to their own namespace, IE: Category:DF2010:Masterwork Quality Articles. I still think rating is being too harsh, though, as there's only 3 masterwork right now and that seems low. --Krenn 05:14, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

I'll fix this. Also, the count is just how many articles are labeled masterwork, if you can find some other than those three that are masterwork, please label them such :). Mason ^(T-C) 06:15, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Criteria

Currently, having a "substantial number of redlinks" is grounds for an article being rated as Fine. While this is okay for new pages, it's a bit unfair to articles in the 23a namespace, where most of the content is concrete but simply hasn't been imported from the Archive wiki yet. Should this distinguish between redlinks due to incorrect formatting versus redlinks due to pending creation of other pages? --Quietust 19:48, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

I tend to think the rules should be substantially different in the 23a namespace, as it is essentially historical content being ported into the current wiki for reference purposes. So I would actually argue that 23a pages should not be rated at all, nor taken into account in the quality rating.
Speaking of that, it used to be wiki policy to make minimal edits — don't these repeated ratings lead to extra entries in the page histories and extra disk space consumed? Or are the ratings handled thru a database entry maybe?
—0x517A5D 19:57, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

By that argument, should not 40d articles also be exempt from being rated? --Quietust 20:20, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Disk space is not a concern. However, fine as the bottom rating of articles is not fine. --Briess 20:22, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Proposal: No ratings for 40d and 23a

Those parts of the wiki are mostly static (and hopefully generally complete) and increasingly of historic interest only. The way I understand the rating, it's mostly to show the ongoing process of completing a new version and telling a user how to evaluate an article.

We could alternatively introduce separate rating templates for 40d and 23a.. --Höhlenschreck 21:52, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps just alternate categories? Mason ^(T-C) 22:48, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Specifics of implementation aside, I think a ratings system that only counts current version and mainspace articles in the overall wiki score is a good idea. --FunkyWaltDogg 00:39, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

This is now implmented, the "score" is DF2010 only. Hohlenschreck, does this meet your ideas? Or do you not want labels on older articles at all? Mason ^(T-C) 06:30, 12 May 2010 (UTC)