[WikiEN-l] "Submit review"

[Nathaniel Sheetz]

On 7/29/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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


Why the excerpt?  And how would the length be determined?  Including the
lead might be good, but there's huge variability in size there.  I'd say
just include the article title.

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


Would we require that they check the last box?  Obviously if they don't we
can't copy it to the talk page, but it might be useful anyway (forward the
email to the article's primary editor, etc.)

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."


I like the email list idea.  Easy to use, somewhat private, less "scary".
We need to accomodate these people as much as possible, and soliciting
reviews via email seems like a good way to go.  We would have to make sure
that we take action quickly, however--asking for feedback and then failing
to act on it wouldn't do much for our image.  We'd need enough volunteers to
keep this running smoothly.

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.


With or without email confirmation, I wonder what the noise to signal ratio
will be.  Worse than just the normal spam, which is easy to identify, will
be the cases where malicious folks write something that to the untrained eye
might pass as expert opinion but in reality is complete bunk.

Nathaniel