Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia essays/Assessment

Assessment statistics

Wikipedia essays by impact
Top	High	Mid	Low	NA	???	Total
15	45	90	2,322	143	24	2,639
0.57%	1.7%	3.4%	88%	5.4%	0.9%	100%

Quality scale

Assessing the "quality" of one's opinion, while a form of critical discourse in intellectual circles, is not appropriate (nor logical) for Wikipedia essays. Therefore, current consensus is for no assessment of essay quality.

Impact scale

Essays by page views (data from Template:Wikipedia essays)

It is difficult to determine the "importance" of a Wikipedia essay, so this project determines its "impact" using a weighted score system that takes into account number of page watchers (W), pageviews in the previous month (P), and number of incoming links (L). As all three of these metrics are subject to change, essays may be re-rated month-over-month. The importance of essays is determined based on their rank in the list of essays sorted by score.

The score is calculated with the following equation: W*10+P*2+L/100. As the weighted score is simply a relative score; importance of essays may be tweaked higher or lower based on factors that aren't considered by this simple equation.

Note: Only essays in the Wikipedia namespace (Category:Wikipedia essays) are assessed here. Essays in the user namespace (Category:User essays) are not under the scope of this project at this time.

Status	Template	Meaning of Status
Top	`{{essaysort}}`	This essay is of the greatest impact to Wikipedia, as it influences opinion on a grand scale and/or provides information to a great number of Wikipedians. The top 15 essays based on the weighted score scale are set to top impact.
High	`{{essaysort}}`	This essay is of consequence and has considerable impact, as it influences opinion and/or provides information to many Wikipedians. Essays with a weighted scored rank from 16-60 are considered high impact.
Mid	`{{essaysort}}`	This essay has some impact, as it influences opinion somewhat and/or provides specific knowledge. Essays from 61 to 150 on the weighted score scale are considered mid impact. Currently, that puts them in about the top 10 percent of Wikipedia essays in terms of impact.
Low	`{{essaysort}}`	This essay may be of little impact on Wikipedia, but does in fact represent the views/opinion/advice of at least a few editors, and may gain greater support (thus having greater impact) in the future. Essays with rank 151 or greater on the weighted score scale are considered low impact. Currently roughly 90 percent of essays fall into this category.
NA	`{{essaysort}}`	This page is a part of WikiProject Wikipedia essays, but is not an essay. NA should be used for essay categories and pages of this WikiProject.
None	Unknown	This essay is of unknown impact to Wikipedia. It remains to be analyzed.

How to assess an essay

An essay's impact assessment is performed by the User:AntiCompositeBot bot based on the formula in the section above, which was determined by consensus and coded into the bot. If you would like to discuss having a particular essay assessed, please post a request at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wikipedia essays.