Memory Alpha talk:Peer review

You need to have nominations listed here so people know when there's a new nomination... Nobody's gonna check the category page every day to see if something's been added. That's just silly. Ben Sisqo 03:17, 25 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Whether it is this or the category page, people would have to check some page regularly anyway - this could be avoided to a degree if you (and others) would actually start using the edit summary. :) -- Cid Highwind 11:25, 25 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Why is {{peerreview}} ONLY added to the talk page?

Policy currently states that the template {{peerreview}} should only be added to the talk page of an article that is undergoing peer review. Why is this? If it went on the article page as well, I think we'd alert more people to the fact that the article is being peer reviewed and, therefore, get more participants in the peer review process. God knows something needs to be done to liven up the peer review (and FA nomination) processes and get a few more participants! – Taduolus 18:07, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

I wondered about that myself. I agree 100% that something is needed for the peer review and FA nominations, and putting the peer review thing on the main page is not be a bad idea. Not everybody visits the talk page, I certanly didn't when I first opened an account here – Bertaut ^talk 19:55, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

That tag is only added to the talk page to avoid too much "clutter" for readers. The majority of people reading our articles isn't actively involved in the project, and thus doesn't really care whether an article is up for some sort of "review" process, or being considered as a Featured Article Candidate. Such things go to the talk page, where contributors might find them, and are also linked centrally at the top of the Recent Changes page (another page more relevant for contributors than for readers). On the other hand, tags that are also useful for readers (as, for example, the PNA templates showing that an article might be wrong in some way) are added to the article itself. -- Cid Highwind 21:07, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Unless something recently changed, the Featured Article Candidate template goes in the article, not the talk page. --OuroborosCobra ^talk 21:14, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I don't buy the "clutter" argument... as OuroborosCobra pointed out, the FA nomination notice goes on the article page, as do all of these! I don't think a peer review notice at the top of an article would distress the casual reader too much :o) – Taduolus 19:15, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Likewise, I don't buy the argument that you would get a single additional reply by having that template in another place - been there, done that. PR and FA simply are procedures apparently not too interesting for the active part of the community. And, as I already stated, all (or most) of these are directed at readers or first-time contributors who are not checking the talk pages. -- Cid Highwind 19:49, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

That's fine, but it still doesn't answer the original question - why is the template {{peerreview}} only added to the talk page? If the FA nomination template is added to the main page, why not add the peer review one as well? You may very well be right Cid, that it would get no extra people involved, I mean, God knows, the FA nomination goes on the main page, and that's been virtually dead since I joined up. But I think the point is 'is there any reason why the peer review template doesn't go on the main page'? And so far, it seems not. I have to say, when I submitted DS9: "Rapture" for peer review, I was really surprised that it had only gone on the talk page, I thought I'd done something wrong initially. Personally, I don't think it makes much sense to have the peer review template in one place and the FA nomination template in another – Bertaut ^talk 20:28, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

There's a difference between just "not buying" an argument for some reason, and pretending that the argument hasn't been made in the first place.

To repeat in a more verbose form, this procedure has been designed, from the start, to not put any text in article space that is not useful there. Articles are for content, and content is read by readers. Readers are not the ones who make decisions about content, or they would be contributors. Contributors have better ways to discuss content than to make content less useful for readers by putting unnecessary "administrative text" in content space... :)

FA nominations are placed in content space because the procedure about it has been designed by another group of people, at another point in time. You're right, they probably should work the same way (and as you can see above, even I intuitively assumed they already do). However, if one of them gets changed to match the other one, I maintain that it should be the FA nomination that gets changed. -- Cid Highwind 20:50, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Cid. "Administrative" stuff shouldn't clutter up the articles any more than necessary. As far as visibility, putting the text on the article pages (whether FA or PR) may make it visible to more readers, but those will overwhelmingly be casual readers, versus contributors. Do we really want casual readers involved in the FA or PR process? *I* don't think so... I added links to both FA and PR candidates to the top of the RC page months ago to increase visibility of both groups of articles to contributors, and I don't think it's done anything to coax more people to participate in the processes. (Those aren't the only processes that have low participation - new category approvals is another example.) In my mind, the FA process should be revised to be more like the FC process. -- Renegade54 21:21, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

<Ezri>"I think that the situation with talk pages is a symptom of a bigger problem. Peer review is dying, and I think it deserves to die."</Ezri>

In other words, I entirely agree FA and PR need to be, well, reviewed. They don't really seem to work well at the moment.

What's the FC process Ren54? Having a mental blank :-) – Cleanse ^talk 05:53, 20 March 2008 (UTC)