How Wikipedia Quality Ratings Work: FA, GA, Stub and Everything Between

Wikipedia doesn't treat all of its articles as equal. Behind the scenes it runs a formal grading system, and almost every article carries a quality rating assigned by its own community of editors. Once you know how to read these grades, you get a fast, honest signal about how developed and reliable an article is — straight from the people who wrote it.

The grading scale, from top to bottom

The assessment scale runs roughly like this, from most to least developed:

• Featured Article (FA) — the gold standard. An FA is comprehensive, well written, thoroughly sourced, neutral, and stable. Reaching FA status requires passing a rigorous community review where other editors pick the article apart. Only a tiny fraction of articles ever make it.
• Good Article (GA) — a step below FA. A GA is well written and properly sourced but hasn't cleared the very highest bar for comprehensiveness. It's reviewed by a single experienced editor against a defined checklist rather than by full community vote.
• A-Class — used mainly inside certain WikiProjects; a strong, near-complete article that sits between GA and FA in practice.
• B-Class — useful and reasonably complete, with most of the important material and decent sourcing, but still rough in places.
• C-Class — substantial but uneven. It covers the basics yet has clear gaps, weak sourcing, or sections that need work.
• Start-Class — an article that has grown past a bare definition but is still obviously incomplete.
• Stub — the shortest, most rudimentary articles. A stub is little more than a definition and an invitation for someone to expand it.

What the ratings do — and don't — tell you

The crucial thing to understand is that these grades measure development, not truth. A Featured Article is comprehensive and well sourced, which makes it more trustworthy on average, but the rating is fundamentally about prose quality, structure, citations, and completeness. It is not a guarantee of neutrality on a hotly contested topic, and it's not a fact-check.

This is why quality ratings are most useful when you read them alongside other signals. A Featured Article with a low controversy score is about as solid as Wikipedia gets. A Stub on a contentious subject, edited by only a couple of people, deserves far more scepticism — not because stubs are dishonest, but because so few eyes have scrutinised it.

Who assigns the ratings

Ratings are handed out by editors, often working within WikiProjects — volunteer groups that organise around a subject area like military history, medicine, or film. The lower grades (Stub through C-Class) are usually assigned informally by whoever happens to assess the article. The higher grades (GA and FA) require passing a structured review, which is why they carry so much more weight: an article doesn't become a Good Article by accident.

One consequence worth knowing: ratings can go stale. An article assessed as "Start-Class" five years ago might be far better today, simply because nobody has re-evaluated it. That's another reason to treat the grade as one input among several rather than the final word.

Putting it together

When you look up an article on edithistory.wiki, the quality rating sits right next to the total edit count, the number of unique editors, and the controversy score. Read together, these paint a quick portrait: a mature Featured Article with thousands of editors and a low controversy score is the encyclopedia at its best, while a thinly edited stub on a divisive subject is exactly where you should slow down and check the sources yourself.