On 7/29/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@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@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