| Class |
Criteria |
Formal process |
Example |
 FA |
Reserved for articles that meet the featured article criteria and have received featured article status after community review. |
Featured article candidates |
Tourette Syndrome (as of July 2007) |
| FL |
Reserved exclusively for articles that have received "Featured lists" status, and meet the current criteria for featured lists. |
Featured list candidates |
FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives (as of January 2008) |
| A |
Reserved for articles that have received A-class status after review by the assessment department. Such articles are required to be passed as a good article, and are expected to have largely met the featured article criteria, and must be comprehensive, accurate, well-sourced, and decently-written; however, they may require some further fine-tuning in certain aspects. |
Requests for assessment by the department. NOTE: may need to be a former feature article candidate, prior to the department making a decision on whether to grant an article this grade. |
Durian (as of March 2007) |
 GA |
Reserved for articles that meet the good article criteria and have received good article status. |
Good article nominations |
International Space Station (as of February 2007) |
| B |
Commonly the highest article grade that is assigned outside a more formal review process. Has several of the elements described in "start", usually a majority of the material needed for a comprehensive article. Nonetheless, it has some gaps or missing elements or references, needs editing for language usage or clarity, balance of content, or contains other policy problems such as copyright, Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) or No Original Research (NOR). With NPOV a well written B-class may correspond to the "Wikipedia 0.5" or "usable" standard. Articles that are close to GA status but don't meet the Good article criteria should be B- or Start-class articles. |
May be assigned by any reviewer |
Jammu and Kashmir (as of October 2007) has a lot of helpful material but needs more prose content and references. |
| Start |
The article has a meaningful amount of good content, but it is still weak in many areas, and may lack a key element. For example an article on Africa might cover the geography well, but be weak on history and culture. Has at least one serious element of gathered materials, including the following:
- multiple links that help explain or illustrate the topic
- a subheading that fully treats an element of the topic
- multiple subheadings that indicate material that could be added to complete the article
- a particularly useful picture or graphic (optional)
|
May be assigned by any reviewer |
Roman Catholicism in India (as of October 2007) |
| Stub |
The article is either a very short article or a rough collection of information that will need much work to bring it to A-Class level. It is usually very short, but can be of any length if the material is irrelevant or incomprehensible. |
May be assigned by any reviewer |
Real analysis (as of November 2006) |
| List |
Should be lists of live links to Wikipedia articles, appropriately organized. May be assigned by any reviewer only for pages that begin with the name "List of" (like in the example). If an article is felt to be an exception to this rule, a request for assessment by the department must be made in order for it to be allowed. |
See criteria. |
List of aikidoka (as of June 2007) |
