Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket/The Nets/Departments of the Cricket Project

Our project has four departments which are run internally by project with oversight from the current coordinators, although in cases where the departments mirror information from other pages there may be different parties involved in the monitoring process.

With the exception of the assessment department, which is run jointly between our project and the 1.0 assessment team, all existing departments we currently run were borrowed from other projects where the concept in use was deemed to be better than what we were currently using at the time.

Below is list of the current departments run by our project and their purpose.

The Assessment Department

The Assessment Department of the Cricket WikiProject focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's cricket articles. The resulting article ratings are used within the project to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work, and are also expected to play a role in the Version 1.0 Editorial Team program.

The assessment is done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the {{WPCRIC}} project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:Cricket articles by quality, which serve as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist.

We should like to see this department become the busiest in our project, as an indicator of article improvement. Articles are assessed primarily by assessment department participants, though any member may asses. The assessments issued are then updated in the statistics section toward the bottom half of the page; both project wide and task force specific statistics are tracked here. Each change in article statistics adds or subtracts an article from a corresponding category for the classes currently in use by the project, which allows us to track the articles within our scope in the absence of the statistics section. In addition, all articles within our scope that have a {{WPCRIC}} template but no identifying parameters are automatically added into presorted categories for tracking.

Aside from tracking the articles within our scope by class, this page also provides two other services: a table with the current 1.0 assessment team schematic and a section in which you may request a reassessment of an article within our scope if you have been working on it and feel the article in question no longer warrants its current class rank. In the case of the latter, the table will explain the rough criteria by which we judge our articles so you can get a feel for what is expected for each class. To better illustrate the concept, links to articles that are currently assessed at the class in question are provided to allow you to read an example of each article. In the case of the request for assessment, any editor may make such a request by scrolling toward the bottom of the page; there, you will find a section titled "request for assessment". Click on the edit tab, add your article and a short comment, sign the comment and save the page. Someone will then eventually reassess the article.

The Contest Department

The Contest Department was introduced to our project in April 2021. The contest department's aim is to encourage friendly competition among our contributors to foster article creation and improvement. This department is solely for contests, and entering the our contests is easy. We run four contests: the general contest, the new article contest, the photography contest, and the cricket quiz.

At the end of the month the total number of points from the general contest, which is all about progressing existing articles up the class ladder, are added up, and the top two contestants receive awards for their work on improving the quality of articles within our scope. In addition, the top two contests receive an honourable mention in our newsletter. The same process occurs for the new article contest, with the top two contestants gaining awards and an honourable mention in our newsletter; at the end of the year an award is also given to the year ending leader in both contests. Our photography contest is a means to showcase your skills with a camera, showcasing the best cricket photos on Wikipedia. At the end of the month, the winning photo is featured in our newsletter. Our quiz, which is the largest cricket quiz in the world, is a light hearted fun way to expand your cricket knowledge. The leading quiz contestant at the end of the year will also receive an award.

The Incubator Department

As the name says, it is a temporary host for new task forces and initiatives within the project while they gather interest and evolve into more permanent elements of the project's infrastructure. It can be used by editors who wish to form a task force of editors working on a particular topic area. As a user starts a work group in the incubator, other interested editors may sign up. If a group or initiative gathers a reasonable number of interested editors and demonstrates a consistent level of activity, it can graduate from the incubator and become a full-fledged task force, special project, or project department. After evaluation by the Project coordinators, a work group is moved out of the incubator. If it does not gain enough interest, then the decision may be made not to continue with the idea.