Talk:Archive:Approval and Feedback

Delighted to see the editors here. Please feel free to develop this page as you see fit. My basic notion of this initiative is that it will organize and implement improvements to the approval and feedback systems. It will also take the lead in pushing toward more approvals, not just engineering the approval system. --Larry Sanger 21:44, 12 February 2008 (CST)

Where to start

I'm not really sure where to start here, but I notice that we already have two proposals in the queu. Feel free to take them up as I read through the instructions;-) --D. Matt Innis 13:56, 10 March 2008 (CDT)

Easily fixable, and not so easily fixable

The current list of problems on the page includes:

• "Too much confusion about what the process is
• No simple, prominently-placed version of instructions
• No easy way to get the word out to specific sets of editors that we want reviews"

These are all relatively easy to fix, I think; well-written documentation should take care of the first two, and for the second, a link from the workgroup page to a mailing list should be able to get word to the editors. Yes, we have to populate those lists of editors, but again, that shouldn't be that hard.

I'm more concerned that we need a more efficent approval system (and I'm not talking about just the mechanical details, although those are a problem too). To the extent that the approval system is inefficient, we're going to pay that inefficiency price on every article which gets approved.

I know that to some degree these costs are inevitable; just as with things published in any medium, an editor is going to have to slog through the text. But we could make it easier for them.

E.g. we could recruit 'assistant editors' who will look through a document and check every linked item to make sure it takes you to the appropriate page (and not to another one of a similar name, e.g. Enlightenment instead of The Enlightenment - click on them to see what I mean). And we could have copyediting volunteers, who copyedit the text and make sure that it's properly structured for naive readers (who are, after all, our targets).

I mean, we can't simultaneously insist on high qualifications for editors, and then insist that they perform the menial drudge work that magazines hire fact-checkers. copy-editors, etc, for.

And I won't get into how clunk the actual mechanics are (move the page to /Draft, copy the approved version over, protect it, etc) because I know that's inevitable until we get more developer support.

In any event, I don't think that's too important, because my guess is that the time/energy to do those mechanics is small compared to the intellectual work involved, and that effort is what concerns me. J. Noel Chiappa 20:42, 25 March 2008 (CDT)