Measuring quality (narrow focus)
Possible baseline (feel free to amend or edit):
- Inclusion/encyclopedic - Article is likely to be encyclopedic and/or meet any inclusion criteria (NOT, Notability, etc), and does not fall within any rapid deletion process for that wiki (eg "speedy deletion" or "prod").
- Neutrality - Article has been reviewed by an uninvolved user and appears reasonably neutral
- Where neutrality issues exist, appropriate action and tags are in place
- Original research, Verifiability, Copyright - Article appears to meet these criteria.
- Cites - Key and controversial statements cited, and cites checked. Unchecked statements and uncited issues are tagged.
- Tone/style - Article is in an encyclopedic tone, in reasonable and readable
Englishlanguage, broken into reasonable sections with encyclopedic section structure if necessary, and promotional style material has been removed. - Intro/summary - Contains a broad overview, or for articles with an introduction, the introduction provides a broad overview.
- Links, templates and categories - obvious internal links are linked; external links are appropriate; very obvious navigation templates are included; at least one category.
- Checklist of common issues - A checklist of common issues is reviewed and the article tagged if needed (eg reference improvement needed, limited geographic scope, missing perspectives, relevant WikiProjects, etc)
- Other concerns - Conflict of interest, controversial or complex topic, or other specialist issues, either cleared, or clearly tagged and flagged for attention
Most articles could be assessed by such a checklist in minutes, and (except where there is an editing dispute) these kinds of basic issues fixed or properly tagged (as "open issues for attention") within an hour.
In 5 obviously we need to replace English for the language of the project.
The rest is pretty much reasonable. but depends on what we call baseline qualityy/ For instance the two-sentence article cited above would not be tagged as a baseline quality article since it does not contain introduction. Also, it does not contain sources even though it is pretty much obvious where the sources could be found. We basically can decide whether in this example is acceptable to tag the absence of sources and intro rather than to require a quality reviewer to add them him/herself/
Item 5 ("English") edited.
As for the 2 sentence article, a baseline quality article that is very short might not need a separate introduction. That's a matter for the local community.
Maybe we don't mind a baseline article being short, so long as it's decent quality. Or maybe this means there are two levels of quality we can distinguish: - "baseline quality" (any length, even just 2 sentences, but has the key features as above) and then "expanded baseline article" (long enough to have sections and separate introduction). I think even the shortest and most obvious topic should have sources for its key facts, to satisfy baseline quality.
Who adds them and is tagging enough - separate question. I think tagging for sources is different from tagging for NPOV (which is why I put sources, verifiability, OR etc separate from NPOV). Users can sometimes argue for years about if it's neutral. So tagging and discussion may be reasonable. But it should be easy to require key or contentious facts to be sourced/verifiable/not OR. Hence why I categorized those two separately.