Welcome to the assessment department of the Chicago WikiProject! This department focuses on assessing and recording the quality and the importance of Wikipedia's Chicago or Chicagoland articles. There are two parameters within the Chicago Project template used for recording the assessments. The Importance parameter records the importance rating and the Class parameter is used for the quality value. While much of the work is done in conjunction with the WP:1.0 program, the article ratings are also used within the project itself, or by other editors and readers, to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying articles in need of further work. A reader may use the parameters to decide which articles to read if they were interested in the general topic Chicago or Chicagoland.
An example of how the assessment parameters are used - Filling in the rating in the Class parameter of the {{WikiProject Chicago}} template on the talk page of an article causes the name of that article to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:Chicago articles by quality and filing in the rating in the Importance parameter will place the article within the appropriate sub-categories of Category:Chicago articles by importance. These two lists serve as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist offered to the Chicago Project members by the WP:1.0 project team.