Wikinews:Reviewing articles

This is an official policy on English Wikinews. It has wide acceptance and is considered a standard for all users to follow. Changes to this page must reflect consensus. If in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcut: WN:REV WN:REVIEW

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For Wikipedians

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Etiquette

This policy in a nutshell:

All articles must go through independent Review prior to the Publish stage. Any revisions to an article that would breach archive conventions had that article been archived must be sighted by another user. Use of the Peer Review Gadget in user preferences is essential to ensure news appears in Google!

Development stage

Prior to review, the article may be developed, and this will be noted by the {{Develop}} tag. Articles in development mean that they need more information, sources, or the article is currently a work in progress.

Users in the class Wikinews:Reviewer can mark revisions of the article as sighted (review). Reviewers should not sight/review articles in development.

(Note: the term "review" in this case does not mean that the article has passed the review stage, but rather that the particular revision marked can be seen by logged-out editors and IP viewers.)

Review stage

Before publication, all articles must be reviewed by a user who was uninvolved in the development of the article. Please note that only users who have the reviewer permission should review and publish articles.

1. To ask for an article to be reviewed {{review}} should be added to the article. {{Develop}} gets replaced by the review template, once the article has enough information, and has been checked for spelling and grammar errors.
2. The reviewer should check the article against the guidelines below.
3. Once complete, the review notes along with a pass or fail of the review process, should be placed on the article's talk page by the reviewer. Templates for passing or failing review can be found here.

Checklist

When reviewing the article, the reviewer must check the following:

1. Copyright: The reviewer should check that the text and images are not copyright infringement.
2. Newsworthiness: The reviewer should check that the article agrees with our content guide and is newsworthy.
3. Verifiability: The reviewer should check that all information in the article is fully sourced, (using multiple independent sources is strongly encouraged) or has adequate Original Reporting notes.
4. NPOV: The reviewer should check that all information in the article is written in a neutral and unbiased manner, with no editorial commentary/advocacy or unsourced opinion.
5. Style: The reviewer should check that all information in the article complies with our style guide (on dateline, grammar and spelling, "inverted pyramid" structure, tone, wikilinks, categories, headline... etc.)

Publish stage and review notes

1. After reviewing an article and making the appropriate edits, {{Peer reviewed}} (with all parameters filled) should be added to the talk page of the article. At the moment this should be done with the "Easy Peer Review" gadget that can be enabled under user preferences; this performs several time-consuming technical tasks to publish the article, distribute via RSS, to Google News, &c.
2. {{Publish}} should be added to the article by the reviewer if the article is deemed satisfactory against the above checklist.

Post-publish revisions

Previously, Reviewers who edited an article where the most recent version was sighted would have their revision sighted automatically. This is no longer in effect, and now any Reviewer who performs an edit that would not have been permissible to an article that had been archived under WN:ARCHIVE must not sight that revision, and await sighting from another Reviewer. More trivial edits, including rejection of changes, can be self-sighted as before.