Thread:Comments:Two unconscious drug-overdosed men discovered outside University of Canberra residence hall/Boring/reply (11)

Several things to mention in reply to that. Sorry this is going to come out verbose.
 * I didn't want to leave the IP comment unreplied because of how it came out sounding in the context where it occurred (not a matter of the intent of the speaker but of its effect; I addressed my remarks to appearance rather than intent).
 * The broad context is that we'd concluded what we needed to do was try harder to actively encourage students to interact with reviewers and think of not-ready reviews as an opportunity to learn rather that some sort of penalty. Many newcomers go through several reviews on their first article and never do get it published, but if they come away from that first article with the ability to submit a second article that's better on its first review, they've benefited from the first experience.  And students have mostly not asked questions of reviewers, probably because they didn't think of that as being within the parameters of their interaction with reviewers (I've been down that road myself, feeling socially constrained in how I'm allowed to interact with someone, especially in an academic setting &mdash; but in the classes I've dealt with in New England, the people you could interact with were the Teaching Assistants, and I consider that to be one of the hats reviewers wear).
 * The specific context was the entire thread of comments, leading up to the one that received the IP response. The incident started out as heckling someone who was better at writing articles that would pass review, by the end of the thread things had gotten (one hopes) straightened out, and then the IP comment seemed in danger of messing things up again.


 * Liquid threads (LQT) can be pretty confusing, yes. The IP comment makes a lot more sense if one supposes it was written without being able to see the rest of the thread.  It would still call for a reply, because of its potential effect, but, yeah.  LQT is something we love to hate, except that it turns out to work a lot better than expecting people to write their comments on a wiki page, which is what we did before LQT.
 * I point out that Wikinews does not have AGF. We have instead WN:Never assume, and have had that for many years though it took us many years to find a satisfactory articulation of the long-standing principle.