User talk:Mono/Two-tiered review system

Feedback and discussion on the revised reviewing policy (see User:Mono/Two-tiered review system) is welcome. theMONO 04:19, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm focusing on the "Checked revision" points. Below are a few comments/suggestions.


 * User:Mono/Two-tiered review system
 * "checked by a reviewer that was not significantly involved in developing the article". I would suggest replacing this with "checked by a reviewer not significantly involved in writing the article. My reasoning is that collaboration could be carried out with an author and a reviewer that fails in the current/first version, but is allowable in the second.
 * User:Mono/Two-tiered review system
 * "check that the text and images are not copyright infringement". I propose: "check that text and images are not obvious or blatant copyright infringement(s)"
 * I propose rewriting "Verifiability" as follows:
 * "3. Verifiability The article, if not including original reporting, cites three or more reliable sources; if original reporting is included, the reporter should be accredited &ndash, or have a history of accurate original reporting, adequate reporting notes must be provided and the reviewer should be able to confirm any withheld notes (eg email exchanges) exist. All sources should be check to see cited titles and dates match."

I believe the above changes give more flexibility in relation to original reporting, and ensure that a 'minimal' sniff test is carried out against sources. --Brian McNeil / talk 12:44, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I note there seems to be a missing step here. Articles should be going from check to checked which has an option to then do a review and promote to our "current" reviewed/published stage.
 * I believe this is required because checkedis what I would expect used on breaking news articles. --Brian McNeil / talk 13:50, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Further to that, an article should, using this process, be able to go from checked to archived without actually bing formally reviewed. In such circumstances, I believe the article should be going to an archived-unreviewed or archived-checked-only state. --Brian McNeil / talk 14:11, 12 April 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree with your points in general. When writing the page, I attempted to leave room for interpretation in the spirit of the rules. I agree that certain things were overlooked and need clarification. However, I have to disagree with your point regarding copyright. It is irresponsible and unethical to publish an article with copyright concerns and call it our own work. My position is if the reviewer believes the article characterizes a copyright violation, it should not be published without re-wording and re-structuring. Also, I believe that our original reporting articles are rather unique and that we should attempt to preserve the credibility of that process. I do not wish to change the original reporting process—the goal of 'checked' revisions is to speed up the reviewing process for breaking news and non-'Special Report' items. I will add the bit about titles and dates to the proposed text. theMONO 04:02, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The formal review is somewhat a legacy feature; though some reviewers may want to do a full review right off the bat. The steps are somewhat redundant: if the article passes copyright and newsworthiness on the checked revision, it probably doesn't need re-checking. Your point brings up a possible issue. Say a reviewer performs a full review and it fails the fact-check. Would it be checkable? I think not, but that's a logical dilemma. Finally, FACs would have to be reviewed—checked articles that never got peer-reviewed would be archived-unreviewed. We could add some more incentives to do a full review. Maybe to have a 'Special Report', you must get a peer-review? This suddenly isn't quite as clear cut. What does the community think about this? theMONO 04:09, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

My comment at the water cooler (from about two hours ago):
 * The proposal as I understand it is that for publication articles are checked for copyright but not accuracy. If it's not checked for accuracy, that'd be a blog rather than a news site; and even if that weren't so, if the sources haven't been consulted thoroughly enough for fact-checking, they haven't been checked thoroughly enough for copyvio or neutrality either.  (Even though some kinds of non-neutrality are superficially obvious, neutrality cannot be determined unless you know what the facts are.)


 * Also note that deferring "peer review" until archiving (though apparently both tiers of reivew you're suggesting are by uninvolved parties, so calling only the second "peer review" seems odd) is late review, which has been opposed on the grounds that changes necessary to pass such a "peer review" cannot be made neutrally after the story is no longer fresh.

--Pi zero (talk) 14:19, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
 * In the academic world, colleagues of professors peer-review pieces. They are generally uninvolved, but they are 'peers'. I had to call it something ;). I can't completely agree with your entire statement—the tone of an article combined with the reviewer's background knowledge can usually detect a slant. The ugly copyright violations are when the author borrows words and phrases (close paraphrasing); it's simple to deal with copy and paste copyright violations. Again, it seems as if we differ on our interpretations of neutrality. I think unbiased; you think differently (I'm still figuring that viewpoint out). Ideally, late review is not desired—we might be able to boost the featured articles program through peer-review. Cheers, theMONO 04:16, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Two key practical factors here (not the only ones) are
 * At what point does the article get pushed to GNews etc.?
 * The previously floated proposal was underdefined, and seems to have been misunderstood between different parties, on this point: as far as I could tell, some people assumed that "unreviewed publication" would only mean the article would appear in grey on the main page, but of course no such article would be pushed to GNews etc.; others assumed that unreivewed articles would be pushed out (and the push-unreviewed parties presumably didn't care about keeping our GNews listing).
 * When an article ultimately fails to pass the higher level of review, what is its subsequent fate?
 * Right now, the article that never passes full review ultimately gets deleted. Another variant would simply automatically archive it after a certain time, no matter what its quality.  Yet another would require it to achieve a certain level of acceptability before being archived (either holding it up as long as it takes to achieve that, or deleting it after some period of time or other if it fails to achieve acceptability, or some variant); the rules for post-freshness changes may be different than during-freshness changes, and presumably articles achieving acceptability late will be marked differently in the archives than normally fully-reviewed articles.  Still other arrangements could be envisioned.
 * If articles are not pushed to GNews etc. until-and-unless they pass a timely full review, and if they aren't archived unless they do so, then the lower level is really just allowing some of the developing articles in the newsroom to appear in grey on the main page listing. If we go any further than that down the slippery slope, we're cutting the ground out from under our ability to produce our high-quality articles &mdash; because in the long run, we can only produce our high-quality articles if we throw ourselves wholeheartedly into that goal, without having part of our will drawn off into a lesser form of "good enough".


 * Note, I've posted on the water cooler that our problem is not our publication standards at all, but what we expect of newcomers. --Pi zero (talk) 12:09, 13 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Another point I really should comment on: I mean that without thorough fact-checking, it is possible for an article to be biased by what it presents as the facts.  That's not a different sense of "neutral", it's simply recognizing that neutrality is not just a matter of how you say things, but of what you actually say.  Propaganda outlets can create extreme bias by using neutral "tone" to present false and/or highly selective facts.  --Pi zero (talk) 12:15, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

I don't get it. We have a "check" (like the review currently?), then it's published like it is now, then after seven days, someone re-reviews it for ... something ... and then it's archived?  — fetch · comms  02:50, 14 April 2011 (UTC)