Dungeons and Dragons Wiki:Rating Articles

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Rating articles is a process that helps us find and show off community homebrew favorites, while also providing feedback and critiques of those articles we don't like quite as much. All registered users are welcome and encouraged to rate homebrew articles.

Rating a Homebrew Article

There are a couple of steps that you need to follow to rate an article. These steps help us track who has rated an article, as well as what the article's overall rating is.

Rating Entry

The first step in rating an article is to add the Rating Template to the article's talk page, in the "Ratings" section. This template lists your name, rating of the article, and your reasons for doing so. Instructions on how to use this template can be found on the template page.

If there is no ratings section, or there is no header present, please add a header by adding ==Ratings== above the top rating and placing your new rating at the bottom.

Rating Tracking

After you have put your rating up, there are two lines in the author template on the main article that you will need to update.

Rating Field

Edit the article and look for the |rating= line in the author template. You need to set this parameter equal to the number of "like" ratings minus the number of "dislike" ratings. If there were 2 likes and 3 dislikes on the talk page, for example, you would set this to -1.

If there is no line, go ahead and add it after the last line in the author template, before the }}.

Raters Field

Edit the article and look for the |raters= line in the author template. This parameter is a list of the users who have rated this article before you. Add a comma after the last user in the list, and add your user name as it appears on the wiki. This is a case sensitive field, so please enter your name properly.

If there is no line, go ahead and add it after the last line in the author template, before the }}.

Legacy Ratings

We used to have a smaller group of people tasked with doing article ratings. That didn't work out for a number of reasons. They used the RC Favor template, and you should not use it for any new ratings. A RC favor of 0 is treated as a dislike, a favor of 1 is treated as a non-vote, and a favor of 2 is treated as a like vote. Articles with these ratings on them can be found in Category:Legacy Rating, and authors of these ratings should update or remove them at their earliest convenience.

Rated Pages

While adding any rating is useful, users may also want to find pages that have already been rated to add their own voice to. The following links are intended to make finding pages with existing ratings as easy as possible.

• Community favorite articles.
• Articles most raters like.
• Articles with equal likes and dislikes.
• Articles most raters dislike

Users may also want to find articles rated by a particular user. The following link is useful for this, but you will need to enter their user name in the "Value" field. This field is case sensitive, so if you enter the name incorrectly you will not get useful results.

• Articles rated by a particular user.

Community Favorites

An article that has 4 more likes than dislikes is eligible to be shown on the main page as a community favorite. These articles are show in a random rotation, with one appearing each time anyone loads the main page, and are a great way for a great piece of work to get the attention of more casual users of the wiki.

Adding an article to this rotation is not an automatic process, however, and requires a bit of additional work. It may also simply not happen, as it requires the intervention of a user with administrative privileges (due to protection of the main page), giving admin users a sort of soft-veto over the entire process.

Summary

The article must have a paragraph or two summary written up about it, in the same way that published works have a product blurb on their back cover. This may be written by anyone once the article has reached community favorite status, though the author of the article retains final say over the form of their blurb. It is strongly recommended that the summary include a picture, as they are great for catching the eyes of new users and drawing them to the work, but it is not a requirement. Lastly, the blurb should end with a direct link to the article, so that users can follow the blurb from the main page to the full work.

Adding to Rotation

Once the summary has been written and formatted, the author (or one of the co-authors) or the summary will need to ask a user with administrative access to add the summary to the main page rotation. The summary will be copied to another location, and once there can only be edited or updated by a user with administrative access, so the authors should be sure that they are happy with the summary before it is moved. The admin user will then follow the process below to add the summary to the rotation.

If the admin user is unresponsive, the author(s) should feel free to ask another admin user to complete the process. No more than one administrative user should be asked at any given time, however. There's no reason to spam these requests, and doing so may cause all of the admins to ignore the request.

Admin Process
The process will go here once the pages are live and we know what the page names are.