[WikiEN-l] "Submit review"

Sun Jul 30 03:00:14 UTC 2006

On 7/29/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> How would people feel about a "Submit review" tab that is only shown
> to unregistered users, and that would result in a page showing
>
> a) A brief excerpt (~1000 characters) of the article from which the
> user clicked "Submit review", and a link to open the whole article in
> a separate window
>
> b) A note that we encourage people to directly correct errors, with
> further links on how to get started
>
> c) A form with the following elements
>
>  Reviewer's name
>  Reviewer's e-mail address
>  Reviewer's professional background / affiliation (if any)
>  Review text
>  [ ] You agree that text of your review may be quoted, copied and
> otherwise used
>  under the terms of the GNU FDL
>
> The reviews would be sent to a to-be-created mailing list, e.g.
> reviews-l at wikipedia.org. Besides the form information, the messages
> would include an exact revision ID of the article that was being
> reviewed.
>
> Might such a strategy be a way to bridge the gap between experts and
> the larger wiki world? One reason why experts may not want to
> participate directly is that they simply do not want to waste their
> time arguing with Wikipedians about what is right and wrong --
> instead, they feel that their expertise should carry some weight. We
> could even put out a press release: "Wikipedia solicits experts
> reviews."
>
> With a mailing list, volunteers could look at each submission, and act
> upon the ones which are legitimate (perhaps posting excerpts to the
> talk page etc.). At the same time, such a system would not undermine
> the regular community processes. It would also be easier to use than
> talk pages, and encourage providing credentials.
>
> Another advantage of such a solution is that it's almost trivial to
> code -- in fact Angela wrote a "Contact us" extension that could be
> used as a basis for such a form.
>
> To prevent spam and abuse, e-mail confirmation could be required
> before a review is processed. But perhaps it should be tried first
> without that.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Erik

An email list for this is a *horrible* idea. You're proposing that
something that could receive hundreds and hundreds of emails a day
(assuming even a extremely tiny fraction of the 1.25 million articles
or whatever get reviewed), each one possibly lengthy, and each one
possibly needing a subject area layman or expert to meaningfully deal
with, be sent to an extremely obscure mailing list no one in their
right mind would want to subscribe to or deal with.  We tried
something like this once; you remember that ML that was so
dysfunctional that it had to be chucked and moved over to OTRS (which
I hear *still* can't cope with the flood)? And there are other
problems; people tend to mean reviews to last for a while, at least
until all the issues are dealt with. Wanna bet how fast each review
will be forgotten in the onrush? I'll give you a hint: look at how
many people review old AFC pages which need reviewing.

What this should be is a nice and easy form for adding a section to a
talk page. It is transparent, scalable, and might even get the review
to the editors in a particular subject area who know what the deuce
the anon is talking about and might  do something about it. Any more
is hopeless, and possible instruction creep.

~maru