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February 2008 change in nomination and archiving process

The nomination and archiving process for peer reviews has been changed. The main reason for this change is to fix a problem with the previous process: when an article received more than one peer review, the previous peer review page needed to be moved, and all of the links to the previous peer review had to be fixed. In the new process, every peer review will be placed on a new unique page, so that peer reviews never need to be moved. In order to do this, the nomination process has changed.

• Instead of adding the {{peer review}} template to the talk page, you need to add {{subst:PR}}. This finds the next available peer review page. (It only works if there have been fewer than five previous peer reviews, but I don't know of any cases where this is not true.)
• The process for resubmitting peer reviews is identical to the process for requesting peer reviews, which should make it easier to do correctly.
• The process for archiving peer reviews is simpler: it only requires two edits, and no page moves.

The templates which make this possible are new, and quite complicated. Please report any issues here. Geometry guy 00:16, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

The new page names confused me at first; seeing a PR I was working on get moved to an archive subpage made me think that the PR was archived. Instead of having the word archive, I suggest simply having /1, /2, /3... It would also be nice if the bot edited the archived PR and said that the PR is archived. The way things are done now is non-intuitive, at least for me. But those two small changes would fix that. Just my 2 cents. --mav (talk) 04:10, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree...by placing archive, many users may feel like the peer review is closed and they will not contribute to the review. I started a peer review for Heroes (TV series) and when I saw the title changed to archive, I at first thought someone had closed the peer review and it had ended...this will surely confuse people who are new to the process of contributing to peer reviews. Please make a note of this for future updates.--Chrisisinchrist (talk) 05:28, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

I told someone I would do a peer review and they said not to bother as it had been archived for some reason - I knew what was going on, but it can be confusing. Ruhrfisch _><>° 05:46, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I completely understand this issue with the changes, and I largely agree: before introducing this system at PR, I introduced it at Good article reassessment, and there I used /1, /2, /3 ... exactly as mav suggests above. GAR has no history of storing each discussion in a separate page so I could start afresh with the "ideal solution".

On the other hand, PR has a long history of using such pages, and the format "/archiveN" for the permanently linkable discussion has been the standard for some time. It is also the standard used at WP:FAC and WP:FAR, where GimmeBot maintains the archives. So, it was a compromise, and we simply settled for maximum consistency with the past. The legacy of peer reviews at really quite random locations is only now being sorted out.

I hope this is largely a transitional issue caused by me actually having to move some current peer reviews to the new location. In future, and it is already happening, all peer reviews will start on the /archiveN page, which should make it more than obvious to everyone that they are active. Anyway, it is clearly worth adding a couple of notes to the PR instructions to clarify this issue, so thank you all for commenting on this.

I'm not sure if I understand mav's comment that "It would also be nice if the bot edited the archived PR and said that the PR is archived." There is no bot editing archived peer reviews: however, I think this concern might be addressed if I changed the archiving template {{PR/archive}} so that it adds the text "This peer review has now been archived." to the peer review when someone archives it. Is that what you have in mind? If so, do others agree that this is a good idea? It works for me. Geometry guy 20:00, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

In the case I cited, the question was directly caused by the move to the ".../archive1" naming format. It makes sense that once people are used to making the archive from day one, this may be less confusing. I do think some sort of message that the page is archived would be very useful - before you knew it from the page move, and the archive notice on the article's talk page still works, but just looking at the peer review page now does not tell you it is no longer active. Ruhrfisch _><>° 20:34, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Peer review is getting full

The post-expand size of Misplaced Pages:Peer review is 1865773 out of 2048000 bytes (182227 bytes left). This is an automated message. -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:48, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Back down to 1600KB now, thanks VB. Geometry guy 12:02, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Peer reviews by topic

Further to several discussions on this page, I've now set-up a demonstration of a peer review page with peer reviews organised by topic. The possible topics are:

Arts · Language and literature · Philosophy and religion · Everyday life · Social sciences and society · Geography and places · History · Engineering and technology · Natural sciences and mathematics

At the moment the mock-up only lists the current peer reviews for which a topic is specified. To add your peer review to the demo, just fill in the topic parameter in the {{Peer review page|topic=}} template on the review page for the article. Short names for the topics are:

arts · langlit · philrelig · everydaylife · socsci · geography · history · engtech · natsci

(Or "math", as an alternative in the last case.) Peer reviews without a specified topic will be listed in a separate section for "General" peer reviews.

If editors are in favour of this change, it will now be extremely easy to implement. Most, if not all, previous comments on this idea have been in favour. So take a look at the demo, and comment below on whether we should go ahead. Thanks, Geometry guy 21:12, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay, lets try it. Comments welcome. Geometry guy 13:25, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

As someone who does all the semiautomated peer reviews (as AZPR) and helps a lot with archiving, I see some potential problems with this. When the peer reviews were chronological, I would start at the top and work my way down for semi-automated peer reviews. Similarly I would start at the bottom and work my way up for archiving. Now I will have to work my way through each section - not impossible, just more work. I wonder if people looking for new peer review requests will ignore those towards the bottom (the General category)? Ruhrfisch _><>° 13:49, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like an argument for more fully automating the archiving process, if that's possible. Mike Christie (talk) 14:01, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I'd like to see that happen, and am hoping that HappyMelon or Gimmetrow will be willing to help. At the moment HappyMelon is very generously sorting out the existing PR archives. Geometry guy 14:20, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I understand those concerns, which were issues when sorting by topic was tried in the past, and was partly why I waited a full week for comments before trying it! Sorting by topic has only been made feasible now by streamlining the archiving process. The articles are still sorted by date in each section, and there are still the same number of pages to add SAPRs to or archive, so the difference in the work involved should not be too large. Also several sections have very few articles in them, so that one can see at a glance whether they need SAPRs or archiving. If it really proves to be a lot more work, then we can revert to the old system.

For the second concern, it will be interesting to see what happens. The hope is that nominators will be encouraged to add topic names to their PR requests to make them more visible to interested reviewers. Geometry guy 14:17, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Additional comment: there is now also a page Misplaced Pages:Peer review list (with shortcut WP:PRL) which lists current peer reviews without transcluding them. Some reviewers may find that page easier to browse. However, it only supplies the automatically generated dates, which, for articles not in the "general" section are the dates when the topic parameter was added, so it will be a little while before these dates are a good reflection of the date when then peer review was started. (Stabilizing most of these dates is another reason why I waited a while before trying sorting by topic.) Geometry guy 14:27, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Semi-automated discussion

Just so you understand how AZPR works, I always have to open each article and cut and paste the semiautomated peer review into a word processor, then paste a bunch of those into the current WP:PR/A. As for the notices in the individual peer reviews, it used to be that I could add up to 20 notices in the peer reviews themselves at a time, with essentially one click. This broke when the page went to transclusion from the Veblenbot list, so then it became opening each separate peer review, adding the notice (that is still automatic once that peer review is opened) and then navigating back to the next peer review (going back takes 3-4 clicks, so for 20 requests I went from 1-2 clicks to about 80-100). Since they were in chronological order, I always knew where the last one I added was and worked to there and stopped. Now I have to check each category. Each incremental change has not been that much extra work, but together they are a lot of extra work. Would it be possible to still make the chronological list and put it in some lonely page not widely advertised? Just curious, Ruhrfisch _><>° 15:35, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, this information is useful, although it is a pity we were not having this discussion a week ago! :-) At the moment, there is not a chronological list of all the current peer review pages, but there is a chronological list of all article talk pages of current peer reviews: it can be found at User:VeblenBot/C/Requests for peer review, and I can use this to generate a chronological list in whatever format you would like.

However, such a list would not "know" which "archive" page the peer review is on, so it probably wouldn't be much use to you. If I move fairly swiftly, I may be able to recreate a chronological list of current peer review pages from Category:General peer reviews by taking advantage of VeblenBot's caching feature: if I re-add all current PRs to the category, VeblenBot should still have a record of when they were originally added. I think this cache lasts 48 hours. I can't guarantee that this would work and will need Carl's help, but I'm happy to give it a go.

It sounds to me, from your description, that we need to automate, at least partially, the semiautomated review process. In particular, adding the notices is a repetetive task which should be done automatically, either using a bot, or some template magic. In the former case, we will have to ask one of our bot operating friends. In the latter case, we need some way for the peer review page of each article to "know" if a semi-automated peer review has been generated. Unfortunately, pages cannot read their own backlinks, so the only way I can think of doing this is to place SAPRs on separate pages and use "#ifexist" or a category, and that would mean that you couldn't add a bunch of them at a tim, which will probably add to the work rather than reduce it!! If anyone has any clever ideas, please comment here! Geometry guy 16:18, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Thinking out loud here, there may be a way to do this. If each automated peer review had an "onlyinclude" section containing something like {{#ifeq:{{PAGENAME}}=pagename of peer review|display the notice}} then the automated peer review page for the current month could be transcluded onto each peer review page. A template substitution could set this up on each peer review page, and another template substitution could be used to provide the required code on the automated peer review page. Thanks to the new preprocessor, this would probably add very little to the size of the transcluded peer reviews. Would that work? Geometry guy 21:19, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I am not a programmer here - AndyZ wrote the script and shared the AZPR account with me when he became less active here (I had done the SAPRs by hand before when he was on wikibreaks). So I am not sure how the script works exactly and am not the best person to ask - I have AndyZ's email address and can contact him if you want (or his email address was enabled last I checked). Let me explain how the semi-automated peer review works in theory and painful detail. I will pick the article Jane Zhang at random. In the Jane Zhang peer review I pasted the following notice just by clicking the edit button as AZPR:

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style. If you would find such a review helpful, please click here. Thanks, APR _t 15:25, 5 February 2008 (UTC) (I fixed the link, see below)

To save space, the actual SAPR is in Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Automated/February 2008, specifically here. The new naming convention has brken this too as the script now links to Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Automated/February 2008#Jane Zhang/archive1 but the actual file is Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Automated/February 2008#Jane Zhang. Anyway, the idea I had was could a bot just check if there was a SAPR in the Automated file for that month? If not, add one there and the link to it in the PR itself. If so, skip it. Ruhrfisch _><>° 22:35, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I've used this example to test my concept: I've replaced the link at Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Jane Zhang/archive2 by a transclusion of Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Automated/February 2008. The idea is that every peer review page will automatically transclude the /Automated page of the current month at the time the peer review requested. (This will simply be added to {{PR/subst}}.) Then the peer review script needs to be modified so that the introductory sentence (in the variable initMsg_PR) is modified to include in addition the text

<onlyinclude>{{#ifeq:{{BASEPAGENAME}}|Peer review/(article name)|*A script has been used to generate a semi-] review of the article for issues relating to grammar and ] style. If you would find such a review helpful, please click ]. Thanks, ~~~~}}</onlyinclude>

I don't know enough JavaScript to write the code that will produce the month name and article name, but it should be fairly straightforward to do. (The current month could also be passed as a parameter in the peer review page transclusion.)

With this in place, you would never have to edit individual peer review pages. Also, it would be possible to automatically put peer review pages without an SAPR into a category so that you can easily find them. This feature could be switched off by nominators who don't want an SAPR. Geometry guy 13:39, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Cool, so only the SA peer reviews would have to be run and pasted into the correct folder and then they would show up. I have also thought of two things - one is the current SAPRs seem to get a bit lost, so do you think it would be useful to have a subheader or something to set them off more? The other is unrelated to this question - do you think it would be useful to add a notice to peer reviews that have no replies after a week reminding them of the volunteers etc? I will email AndyZ about this next - I do not even know where the code is for the script (monobook?) Ruhrfisch _><>° 01:25, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Second thought - if the notification sentence is now part of what is generated by {{PR/subst}}, why does it have to be changed in the semi automated peer review script at all? The script would only be used to generate the SAPR itself, not the notice, right? Or am I missing something? I left a notice on AndyZ's talk page and emailed him. Ruhrfisch _><>° 01:44, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

(←) I haven't forgotten this! The script is at User:AndyZ/peerreviewer.js: I've checked I can edit this (I think any admin can), so we don't necessarily need AndyZ to reply (although it would help): DrKiernan has some experience with editing this script, so he may be able to check we don't make a mistake. Concerning the notice, at the moment it is not in {{PR/subst}}, but is placed in the "onlyinclude" section of the SAPR itself. (Open edit previews at Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Jane Zhang/archive2 and Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Automated/February 2008#Jane Zhang to see how it is done.) I agree with you that most of the notice could be placed in {{PR/subst}}, but not all of it, for two reasons.

1. The article's peer review page has no way to know if an SAPR has taken place: there needs to be some information on the SAPR which the article's peer review page can read: it could just be <onlyinclude>{{#ifeq:{{BASEPAGENAME}}|Peer review/(article name)|yes}}</onlyinclude>, but there needs to be something.
2. The article's peer review page has no way to know when an SAPR has taken place, and who generated it. To fix this, the "onlyinclude" section needs to at least contain <onlyinclude>{{#ifeq:{{BASEPAGENAME}}|Peer review/(article name)|~~~~}}</onlyinclude>. The rest could be put in {{PR/subst}}.

So some edit needs to be made, either to User:AndyZ/peerreviewer.js or to User:AZPR/monobook.js. Does that clarify? Geometry guy 21:19, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation - I think I understand it and why the script needs to be modified too. I archived and ran the SAPRs earlier and just checked my email and there is no word from AndyZ yet. I would say go ahead and fix it. If for some reason you need access to the account, let me know. I have some other ideas to suggest, but will do that below. Ruhrfisch _><>° 02:53, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I've made an edit which I think will add the above onlyinclude information to each SAPR. Could you check that SAPRs still work. Note I have not yet implemented the automation of the notice: I want to be sure the script change works okay first. Revert my edit to User:AndyZ/peerreviewer.js in the event of any disasters! Thanks for moving the other ideas to a new thread. Geometry guy 21:51, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm here (sorry for being so slow) — but I'm having a bit of trouble following all of the naming changes etc that have occurred, so I'm reading through everything right now.

I'm fixing the Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Automated/February 2008#Jane Zhang/archive1 link issue, but theres a bunch of other link changes that I have to chase through. Responding to the original topic; I should be able to get a batch 'add notice' button directly to User:VeblenBot/C/Requests_for_peer_review, but for some reason I can do everything but add the actual button itself (think it may have to do with changes I've missed from while I was away). AZ _t 01:10, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

(Edit conflict)I ran some SAPRs as AZPR and it works except for a new bug - when you open the article there is an error message that says "There are already suggestions here. / Continuing will cause the old suggestions to be overwritten. / Do you wish to proceed? If you click the red X or cancel, the SAPR window shows up but it just says "undefined". Clicking OK gets the regular SAPR. I pasted two into Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Automated/February 2008: Expo '88 and Francis B. Wai, but did not add notices to their requests. I did add some notices on others and that worked fine. Ruhrfisch _><>° 01:49, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

The only change I made is this and it seems to have had the desired effect on the two peer reviews you mention. The /archive1 link issue doesn't need to be fixed, since the notice will soon be generated by {{PR/subst}}. Geometry guy 09:01, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

I made another change to switch from "onlyinclude" to "noinclude": I'm not sure if this was necessary. Anyway, I've fixed up PR/subst to add the current month to PR/header, which tells the latter to look for an SAPR and display a message if there is one. This is working on the recent SAPRs. The automatic notices may fail if the article title has slashes or non-standard characters in it. Please report any problems here. Geometry guy 11:02, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Troubleshooting

1. The bug I described above is still present - when I open an article as AZPR or when I open the script as Ruhrfisch, there is the error message and I have to click OK to get the actual semi-automated peer review (so two clicks are needed now where one was before).
2. I also notice that when I open a request, I see the SAPR there, but it is not visible in the big list. The problem is I then have to open each request to see if it already has a SAPR or not.
3. Finally, I noticed that when I submitted a PR request recently it took a while for it to go to the final PR (still had the do this to finish the request, but when you clicked on the link, it was done and showing up). Now at Wikipedia_talk:Peer_review#Kannada_literature a similar problem is being reported. Ruhrfisch _><>° 03:29, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

It probably needs someone who understands the full workings of the script to see why this is happening. In the meanwhile, the best I can do is try to isolate the issue. That is, I will undo AndyZ's edits (to fix the /archiven issue, which shouldn't be necessary), so that the only change is a single edit to the script by me. If the problem persists, we then will know that my edit has some unintended consequence, and can try to figure out what that is and fix it.

Concerning the PR request issue. If I understand correctly, what you are saying is that the article talk page still shows "Follow this link" for a while, even though the peer review page has been created, and it should be showing "A request has been made"? I believe this is a cache issue, and it probably isn't enough to bypass your own local cache, as the article talk page doesn't change when the peer review page is created. So, you either need to make an edit to the article talk page, or purge the server cache (just go to the talk page history and replace "action=history" in the URL by "action=purge" and reload).

I'm afraid this is a price we pay to prevent Misplaced Pages from grinding to a halt! Geometry guy 09:52, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I numbered the issues for clarity. In reverse order, I understand the cache issues with #3, thanks for clarifying. As noted, the peer review request worked despite appearing "unfinished", so I don't think it is a problem and, as you note, there is not much we can do about it. As for #2, I am not sure if it is a related problem to the cache issue or not - none of the reviews have shown up yet (a couple of days since the first SAPR only in WP:PR/A without the manual notice). Now that the reviews are sorted by topic, I rely on the SAPR showing up on the main page to know whether or not to add it. When I do it as AZPR, I can't easily check either as the script automatically adds the SAPR notice if the peer review for an article is opened. I suppose I could do the SAPRs and note the date and time and then just add them to articles listed after the time of the last SAPR run. As for #1, let me know when you have made the change(s) and I will test as AZPR and myself. Thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>° 16:41, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Concerning #1, I've now undone Andy's two edits, so please check if this makes any difference. Concerning #2, it is possible that this is a side-effect of no longer posting a manual notice, but this will require further investigation (and probably help from Andy). Concerning #3, I think I can provide a partial fix by making the link to the article talk page on the peer review page automatically bypass the server cache. The cost to the servers will be tiny, and it would provide a reassuring check for nominators. Geometry guy 21:03, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

1. 1 is still present when I run SAPRs as Ruhrfisch and as AZPR. As for #2, I also logged in anonymously and the SAPR shows up right away when you click on the review from the main WP:PR page, but still does not appear on the main page itself. I am not very worried about #3. On an earlier comment, I meant to say that the AZPR script does not work on ampersands and other special characters anyway, so I run them as Ruhrfisch and will manually add a notice on those few cases (Mirth & Girth is one currently up on PR). Thanks for all of your work on this, Ruhrfisch _><>° 03:26, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

#1 (I had randomly selected ~~~~ to be a seed to see if the suggestions were already opened, and then when Geometry Guy added the new initial message it contained ~~~~). #2 is going to be considerably more difficult. Perhaps we could go back to doing the SAPRs in chronological order thru the VeblenBot subpage, but that doesn't give the archive number I believe. I don't know if ampersands are fixable or not, due to regular expression limitations. AZ _t 16:54, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) Thanks Andy, runs as myself and AZPR found no trace of bug #1. I can work around #2 for now (I did yesterday without too much trouble with a second anonymous window open to check). Ruhrfisch _><>° 17:46, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I've been stalling doing this, but the need is now clear: I'm going to recreate a category list containing all peer reviews with archive numbers, along the lines of User:VeblenBot/C/Arts peer reviews. I'll need Carl's help to get the cached dates of the current peer reviews. This should provide you with the chronological list of all reviews that you need (and which Ruhrfisch asked for at the very start of this SAPR discussion). Geometry guy 18:09, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Doesn't appear under "requests"?

I requested a peer review for McFly (band) but it doesn't seem to be under "requests". Did I do something wrong? -- Stacey _{talk to me} 20:13, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

No, you did fine: I predict it will appear at about 20:36 UTC, assuming VeblenBot approves of your request :-) :-) Geometry guy 20:20, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Prediction wrong. There may be a temporary problem with the servers. If it doesn't appear in the next hour, I'll investigate. Geometry guy 20:42, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I had a look, and I think the problem is that VeblenBot is on a temporary mission. VeblenBot is an "it", not a "she", so isn't so great at multitasking. Please be patient, your peer review will be listed in due course :-) Geometry guy 22:13, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

The issue isn't the special mission; there's no reason why the categories should stop being updated while those edits are made. The real problem is that something went wrong on the toolserver. I moved the code to my home computer, where the rest of VeblenBot's functions run, and everything seems better. I'm expecting it to run again at 1:20 UTC and I'll check it then to make sure. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:23, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

It's working now: apologies to VeblenBot for doubting its abilities! Geometry guy 09:05, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Peer review is getting full

The post-expand size of Misplaced Pages:Peer review is 1848023 out of 2048000 bytes (199977 bytes left). This is an automated message. -- VeblenBot (talk) 20:48, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

• I just archived several, really should do this every day, sorry. I also was wondering about limiting the number of requests a single user can make at one time. For example, last month there were 7 or 8 wrestling articles in a row nominated by the same user and all but 1 or 2 got no comments (and my guess is that the articles were similar enough that a good PR on one of them would have had useful tips for all of them). Something similar has happened recently with some indie wizard rock albums, except these are back in the pipeline again already (I don't normally nominate articles at AfD, but if these go back into PR right away this time... ;-) ). Would 3 or 4 active requests at a time be OK? I also think replying to a good PR takes time, so there is that issue. I also wonder about a time limit to renominate PRs, but can understand the frustration there if no one replies but the APR script. Sigh, Ruhrfisch _><>° 21:20, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

  Thanks! I just untranscluded two very long peer reviews: in terms of the pressure on this page, long reviews are probably more of an issue than many short requests (although that depends on how many short requests there are and how long are the reviews!). I'd be hesitant about saying "you cannot nominate more than 4 PRs at a time" per WP:BEANS: it will become an entitlement to nominate 4 at a time, rather than a restriction!

Anyway, we're back to 1.6MB now, so lets see how soon action is needed again. I'm willing to do the untranscluding every 3-4 days, if you are willing to do the archiving! Sympathetic sigh, but more hopeful cheers, Geometry guy 21:48, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

I worry about instruction creep, but perhaps something on it being a good idea to have a single model article up for PR, and solve the problems there first, then go on to other similar articles? Thanks for transcluding - I have been fairly involved in PRs for two of those (Fanny Imlay and List of National Historic Landmarks in New York). I am used to doing the PR script every two or three days, but perhaps I should pick a time of day and just archive every day then. Ruhrfisch _><>° 22:24, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Discussion pointer

A discussion on a unified reviewing system may be found at Misplaced Pages:Grand Unified Reviewing Discussion. — Thomas H. Larsen 08:49, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

There seems to be a backlog

in peer review archives. I have two articles I would like to nominate for FA but can't because they've spent the last two weeks with their peer reviews still active, even though no additions have been made in that time. Is this something to do with MelonBot's conversions? Serendious 14:16, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

I don't understand the question. If you nominated an article for peer review and want to take it to FAC, then you are free to archive the PR discussion yourself. Geometry guy 15:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

I've tried to make this more explicit in the guidelines, by adding that nominators can withdraw their own requests. However, in accordance with the spirit of the existing guidelines, I've suggested that this is not recommended for active discussions. Does that seem to be the right balance? Geometry guy 16:08, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Seems OK to me Ruhrfisch _><>° 15:09, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I would like to request a peer review

I would like to request a peer review on Peyton Manning so that I can get the article up to Featured Article standards. Given that my previous request for a peer review was completely ignored, and given that the peer reviews I requested for two other articles were also completely ignored, it appears that this whole process is a bit of a joke. When articles are being reviewed consistently, will some one please notify me on my talk page so that I can re-request a peer review and actually get some feedback for once? Thank you. Dlong (talk) 17:13, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, I would not say it was completely ignored as it received a semi-automated peer review (SAPR), which might not be what you wanted, but had some useful suggestions. It appears that you ignored the suggestions as I just reran the SAPR script and several of them are still valid (and will need to be acted on to get it FA status). These were all in the original SAPR, and are still coming up now:

• Per Misplaced Pages:Context and Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (dates), months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.
• Per Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (numbers), there should be a non-breaking space -   between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 147 yards, use 147 yards, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 147&nbsp;yards.
• When writing standard abbreviations, the abbreviations should not have a 's' to demark plurality (for example, change kms to km and lbs to lb).
• Please reorder/rename the last few sections to follow guidelines at Misplaced Pages:Guide to layout.
• Per WP:WIAFA, this article's table of contents (ToC) may be too long – consider shrinking it down by merging short sections or using a proper system of daughter pages as per Misplaced Pages:Summary style.
• This article may need to undergo summary style, where a series of appropriate subpages are used. For example, if the article is United States, then an appropriate subpage would be History of the United States, such that a summary of the subpage exists on the mother article, while the subpage goes into more detail.
• The script has spotted the following contractions: doesn't, can't, isn't, if these are outside of quotations, they should be expanded.

I know this can be frustrating, but have you tried asking one or two people from Misplaced Pages:Peer review/volunteers to look at it? I recently submitted a peer review, asked two volunteers, and got helpful comments from each. Oh, I see you have this at FAC already - good luck. Ruhrfisch _><>° 19:16, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I will look over the list again, but the entries I have looked at did not apply. For instance, regarding the links - All dates linked are provided in the format ], ]; exactly what Misplaced Pages:Context#Dates says to do. Regarding the contractions, a ctrl+f search for common contractions (shouldn't, couldn't, wouldn't, didn't, can't, isn't, I'll, I'd, let's, it's, we've, and we'd) only finds such words in the titles of referenced works or in exact quotations.

Dlong (talk) 02:43, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

• Since this is at FAC, specifically Misplaced Pages:Featured article candidates/Peyton Manning I looked the article over and made some comments there. As you know, as soon as an article is at FAC, the FAC rules state its peer review must be closed. So if you are at FAC, you can't also request a peer review here simultaneously. Ruhrfisch _><>° 03:27, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Just to support Dlong's frustration with the peer review I also requested a peer review of Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority and it was closed without a human review. I actually contacted one person on the volunteer's list (which BTW does not have an engineering/technology section of volunteers, making my choice difficult) and three different wikiprojects, as well as another rail article editor. I guess my frustration with this peer review project is that even unreviewed articles are archived after two weeks. This isn't the case with GA or FA nominations where they wait until someone reviews them. But it seems that wikipedia touts the peer review process as being an important part in the article improvement process, so maybe they shouldn't be archived until at least one person makes comments. I understand that this is an all-volunteer system, but the lack of feedback leaves me discouraged and unsure of how to proceed with the article I was working on. I am torn between giving up on this article and just going ahead and submitting it for FA review just to get some comments even if it isn't ready. Biomedeng (talk) 02:35, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

• Since you are not at FAC (see above) I reopened the peer review and left some comments. One problem we see everywhere is a lack of reviewers - WP:PR, WP:GAN, WP:FAC, WP:FLC, WP:FAR. As you see below this, there are so many requests on PR that unless we archive requests that have gotten no repsonses in the past two weeks, we run out of space and the PR becomes just a list (no details). This has happened this year. I know it is frustrating and try to help, but there are hundreds of requests and only so much any one person can do. I do think that if you pick an article you find interesting and make some comments there, then ask for comments in return it can't hurt and should help. Ruhrfisch _><>° 03:34, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Peer review is getting full

The post-expand size of Misplaced Pages:Peer review is 1851895 out of 2048000 bytes (196105 bytes left). This is an automated message. -- VeblenBot (talk) 19:48, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Maybe it'd be nice for the bot to add the date to the section heading when posting these, just to stop table of contents clashes. 86.21.74.40 (talk) 19:52, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I am archiving Ruhrfisch _><>° 20:55, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

The suggestion to add a date to the section title is good. I'll implement that. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:55, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Kannada literature

I just listed this article for Peer review. It appears in the "General" category when it should be in the "Language and literature" category. Can someone explain why this happened? This needs to be corrected.Dineshkannambadi (talk) 20:30, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

The original request did not specify a topic, so it was added to the "General" category. I fixed it just now, but it may take an hour or so to show up in the right place, Ruhrfisch _><>° 20:56, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks.Dineshkannambadi (talk) 21:23, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

One more issue. This article's talk page which has the peer review tag still says "Follow this link"... where as, it should be "A request has been made for this article ..." from where the reviewer could click on the request link to add comments.Dineshkannambadi (talk) 23:48, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I just looked at the article's talk page and it did not say that for me - maybe it is a case of WP:BYC? Ruhrfisch _><>° 00:16, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Took two full days for my talk page to look ok. Never had this problem before. Thanks.Dineshkannambadi (talk) 15:27, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

What hinders this twice-nominated article from attaining Featured-Article status? Comments sought.

The article Ilaiyaraaja (a biography of a musician) was nominated twice in the past for Featured-Article status. Perhaps someone can take a quick, cursory look at this article, and provide brief points (in its talk page here) about what is needed further to make this article FA-quality. The group of editors working on this article are a bit dazed and confused about what more needs be done and would appreciate any of your input very much. Thank you. Regards, AppleJuggler (talk) 04:10, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

• With all due respect, please submit a peer request like everyone else. I would look at the FAC comments and see if you have met the changes they asked for. Finally, I would also ask the users who weighed in on the FACs before to look at it again and see what they think. Ruhrfisch _><>° 03:49, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. AppleJuggler (talk) 06:14, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Two more ideas for PR

I was wondering if two things could be done to help get more reviews for requests that have none. The first would be to add a suggestion to the instructions to review one or two other requests and then ask those whose requests you commented on to comment on yours. The second would be to add some sort of requests needing feedback section. Since requests are archived after 2 weeks, perhaps those that have had no responses in a week could be listed? There are similar notices at or for WP:FAC, WP:FLC, and WP:GAN and they seem to help there. What do you think? Ruhrfisch _><>° 03:26, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I like the idea of reviewing exchanges. One problem I had as a new visitor to the peer review area is that it is unclear what guidelines I should follow to review other articles. Articles nominated for Good Article status have a clear guideline on what to review the article on. So it was easy for me to review several articles there when I nominated an article. When I came here there are only general article formatting links, but no formal guideline on the areas to review an article. Thefore I did not review any other articles because I didn't know what criteria to review them on. Another issue I have with this setup is that at Good Article Nominations there is a numbered list of nominees. So there exists a clear order of reviewing. Here the list is not numbered and it seems articles are reviewd in an arbitrary order. There is no direction to give preference to the oldest requests. Also it seems page space is a continued issue at this project. Has there been any discussion of not trascluding the entire peer review onto the page? Maybe instead there could be simly a list here, along with a way to indicate peer reviews for which there are no comments, active discussions, and inactive discussions. Biomedeng (talk) 14:14, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I know User:Geometry guy will fix long peer reviews so that only part of them is transcluded on the page. I am not sure how easy this would be to do automatically. The problem with guidelines for peer review is that articles come in all stages of the writing process and on their way to different goals - some articles want a polish before WP:FAC, others are getting ready for WP:GAN and others are just looking for general improvement. I have also seen people expecting dispute resolution (not what PR is for) or reference desk help (I need more info / sources on this topic for the article...), neither of which is usually found here. I think for a Peer Review response, a quick read through of the article and some comments is best - if it is still pretty rough, point out major areas for improvement. If it is aiming for a particular goal, looking at the GA or FA or FL criteria and pointing out what the article still needs to do is helpful. It is often the case that you can make a few comments on several articles and see what the responses are - oddly, some PR requests never seem to acknowledge or respond to any feedback, so forget those. If they reply and make changes and you see more things to work on, jump in. Hope this helps, Ruhrfisch _><>° 15:01, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

At present the technology isn't available to do automatically what I do by hand. I hope it will be available soon, for my sake :-) Geometry guy 20:54, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

A couple of comments on ordering. First, it has been traditional at PR to add new requests to the top: this is the opposite to the tradition at WP:GAN. One argument for this is that peer reviews do not have a definite outcome, and so it is more helpful to highlight new requests. In particular, there is no tradition that "oldest requests should be reviewed first", and I think such an approach would be counterproductive for peer reviews. We want to encourage anyone to review any peer review request at any time!!

The "newest first" order still holds within each section. However, the dates are not completely reliable during the transition. But if any reviewer would prefer to review oldest articles first, they should go to the bottom of the lists, not the top.

There are no definite criteria for reviewing here, since peer review is not something to "pass" or "fail": all comments aimed at improving the article are welcome. Geometry guy 20:54, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I was bold and added a requests needing feedback section. It lists only those with no responses in a week. I hate archiving peer reviews with no responses, maybe this will help. Ruhrfisch _><>° 04:17, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Factual review

Participants in peer review may be interested in Misplaced Pages:Factual review and associated discussions. Best and friendly regards, — Thomas H. Larsen 08:21, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Requesting informal review for Eva Cassidy.

IP addresses can't create the new page needed for the peer review process. Please leave suggestions for improvement at Talk:Eva_Cassidy. Thanks.--165.21.154.93 (talk) 05:04, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

• I ran the peer review script and left the review on the talk page. Ruhrfisch _><>° 14:47, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I fixed the problems. It's now listed at Misplaced Pages:Good_article_nominations#Music--Onesixfivedottwoone (talk) 10:03, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Categories in table of contents example:Arts example:Everyday Life. Idea:contents categories style guide:peer reviews.

When was Literature not treated as one of the arts? Why is the Holywood film not listed as Arts although McFly the band and Shady records. Screenplays are screen... Arts. Again Enya is in General and Shady Records is in Arts. Yep there is a List of county routes in Rockland County, New York but its not in the Geography and places section it is in the General section. And there is an Everyday Life section therefore the table of contents is not only a guide to the list of peer reviews but is also a heap of shit. Maybe it's vandalised but 9 times of ten i'd have not looked at Everyday Life to find sport entries but for Old Trafford caught my eye. And now i see that its not a useful guide. Maybe whoever put in the categories to the contents had no suitable style guide with instructions how to list the categories or maybe the one there is up for review.

_

Peer Review : Peer Review Style guide (if such exists or creation)

And after a quick check I don't think that individual pages of a wikipedian fundamental nature have style guides or check lists ? Do they ? What are they called ?
ThisMunkey (talk) 09:53, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Literature is listed separately from Arts because otherwise the section would be too long. The classification follows closely the standard Misplaced Pages 1.0 classification.

Individual peer reviews are classified by their nominators, so if an article is in the General section it is because the nominator did not specify a topic. If it is the "wrong" place, it is because the nominator specified the "wrong" topic. If you took the time to read the instructions, before expressing your opinion, you would realise this. If you find a peer review in the wrong section, go to the peer review and edit it: look for {{Peer review page|topic=xxx}} and replace whatever xxx is with the correct topic.

I don't understand the last question, sorry. Geometry guy 10:13, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

At the top of this talk page the problem is being reviewed for votes but it only has three not including your own in as many months. I am not an administrator but I was surprised to see stuff categorised inconsistently on the administrators pages.
ThisMunkey (talk) 18:33, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Although they are including Media, vexillology, minerals and royalty. XDD. It's still good.ThisMunkey (talk) 18:41, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Questions

The instructions don't say how to add a topic parameter, and there are still several PRs listed here that are at FAC and where the article talk page says the PR is archived. I can no longer understand the instructions, so I don't know how to remove them or who is doing this, but for example, Ganymeded moon is at FAC, has been for days, and its talk page says the PR is archived. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:03, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Some additional instructions appear when you make a peer review request, and I've linked the {{Peer review page}} template now. Anyway, despite not understanding the instructions, it seems you followed them a few minutes later, correctly deducing that whoever tried to archive it before carried out step 2, but not step 1.

Check also WP:BYC, as this is sometimes an issue with static pages like this one. Geometry guy 09:50, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

I have been doing a lot of the peer review archiving but have not been checking WP:FAC or WP:FLC. I would be glad to archive things if you leave a note here or I could start checking FAC more often. Sorry, Ruhrfisch _><>° 11:11, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

I don't understand the instructions, and others don't either; I'm having to correct them. Also, when a PR is closed, it seems there is no link left back to the article (that is, the PR title isn't wikilinked), so I have to go through extra steps to get back to the talk page to correct. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:13, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

This is what the heading should look like when closed (including a link back to the same page isn't useful); the business of not having a link back to the article doesn't work. Editors often give up on PR and appear at FAC within a few days, as they get no feedback at PR. It would be great if something could be added to all the volume at the top of PR explaining to nominators that they need at least a month and they'll need to actively contact people for input. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:20, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Maybe if I start adding a line like this, it will encourage them to stay longer. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:27, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I added Misplaced Pages:Peer review/backlog to the top of the page to try and get reviews for articles at least a week old with no responses other than the semi-automated peer reviews (so far none of the articles listed has gotten reviewed, but I have only done it a few days). As for no links back to the article, I don't understand that. Here is the talk page for an article with a recently closed peer review: Talk:Skokiaan. The link leads to the closed review: Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Skokiaan/archive1 which has a link back to the article and to the article talk page at the top. Maybe Geometry guy can help with this. Ruhrfisch _><>° 18:10, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

PS I just tweaked the instructions (which already mentioned the PR volunteers list twice) to add reviewing other PR requests and asking for reviews in return and clarifying the topic. We also just got the first no reviews yet request removed from the backlog. Ruhrfisch _><>° 20:15, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Excuse me while I butt in... Is this topic not raised properly at the very top with no votes(or only three)?
ThisMunkey (talk) 22:04, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry but I am not sure what you are talking about - could you be more explicit please? Thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>° 22:10, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

ThisMunkey is referring to this thread, but might also want to check out this thread and this one. SandyGeorgia is referring to the fact that the level three section heading now links to the peer review page, not to the article. However, there is a link to the article immediately below the section heading. Geometry guy 09:22, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

PR Bugs?

1) Could someone please look at Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Gregory R. Ball/archive1? It had two article headers in it and I took one out and tried to fix the subheader on the comment, but now it does not show the comments at all when I edit it. Oh, I see, looking at my contributions I was editing Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Biography/Peer review/Gregory R. Ball‎, which is somehow displayed with the first one. I am confused. Could someone please fix this (Geometry guy?). Thanks

2) I have noticed that a few PR requests keep changing their date - the most recent one is Misplaced Pages:Peer review/2007 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form/archive1 which was added Feb. 22, but is now showing up in order as if added on Feb. 29. The request for List of participating nations at the Summer Olympic Games did this too (as did the Winter Games one). I thought at first perhaps someone was removing the PR template and readding it to keep the request below the 2 week archive window, but the edit histories show no such thing. Ruhrfisch _><>° 03:42, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Re (1), I noticed this too. This is a case of someone not following the instructions and transcluding a biography peer review onto a peer review page. I should have simply closed it as incorrectly listed, but wasn't quite in a grumpy enough mood :-)

Re (2), I think this may be because Carl hasn't turned on caching for subject specific peer reviews. Sometimes the Wikimedia software accidently removes and readds an item to a category: the cache protects the peer review dates against this, and against deliberate removal and readdition. I'll ask Carl to turn on caching. Geometry guy 09:28, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Re (1), I've now moved the SAPR notice to the Biography peer review page. Since the Biography peer review is still active, I didn't archive it, but deleted the copy at Peer review/Gregory R. Ball/archive1, so that this is free for the next (properly listed!) peer review. Geometry guy 11:04, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Previous PR

I've made a change to the templates so that peer reviews of articles which have had a previous peer review will automatically link to the previous peer review. This applies to new peer review requests only, not the current ones. This has been made possible thanks to the efforts of User:Happy-melon: however, the linked peer review may not be the immediately preceding one in rare cases. Please report such cases here.

Also, this kind of change is difficult to thoroughly test. Please report any errors or glitches here. Geometry guy 22:18, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Peer reviews by date

I sense that editors are divided on whether organising peer reviews by topic is a good thing, so I've set up an alternative page, WP:Peer reviews by date which lists all peer reviews together in chronological order. I hope this will also be useful the many editors :) who close PR discussions and provide semi-automated peer reviews. Geometry guy 22:23, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

I've changed the mechanism for providing semi-automated peer review notices slightly. This was done so that they will display on the main peer review pages, not just the individual pages. I hope this makes it easier to see which articles have received SAPRs and which haven't. Geometry guy 13:20, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

We all thank you. AZPR and Ruhrfisch _><>° 13:51, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

:-) In return, can I ask all those who generously manage the archiving of multiple peer reviews to adapt their archiving to the page size. The latter information can be found by viewing the page source (in Firefox, the menu item is "Page Source" under "View"): go to the bottom of the source, and scroll upwards until you find something that looks like

<!--

NewPP limit report

Preprocessor node count: 25106/1000000

Post-expand include size: 1536103/2048000 bytes

Template argument size: 126888/2048000 bytes

#ifexist count: 1/500

-->

The key issue for this page is the "Post-expand include size": this is the limit which we regularly are in danger of breaking. The above is current information for this page: as you can see, at 1.5MB, we are comfortably within the 2MB limit, but not very comfortably. If we get close to the limit, we need to archive very strictly, but as long as we are clear of the limit, we can be a bit more relaxed and give peer review requests a chance to receive responses. I mention this because it has been noted at FAC that there has been an increase in nominations with an empty peer review. Thanks, Geometry guy 20:26, 3 March 2008 (UTC)