Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2013/November

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14:45, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

16:52, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Reviewers?

This is sort of the Never Ending Sermon 'round here, but reviewing turnaround has dropped to near-basement levels of-late. God knows print journalism isn't sexy (technically, it never was).....but we could really use a jolt of life!! Any ideas?? --Bddpaux (talk) 20:22, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

(Sorry I haven't gotten to your article, yet; I hope to do that next.)
My perspective, fwiw: I worked out some years ago that the first step in long-term mitigation of the review gap had to be tools to aid reviewers, because doing a full review is such a massive task that even those capable of it aren't often able to donate the big solid lump of labor to do it. And that somebody had to fill the gap while longer-term measures were pursued. I reckoned further measures, beyond semi-automated review assistance, would have to wait until we had the semi-automation so we could see where we were then. The filling-the-gap has made the tool-development difficult, but I sense I really am close to getting the first layer of tools operational. The first layer aren't the actual review assistance tools, but building blocks from which to build review assistance tools. Once the first layer is operational, building stuff on top of it will be a big challenge too. And I've always known the semi-automated assistance wouldn't magically solve all our problems; it was always to be a necessary first step. --Pi zero (talk) 22:30, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure how to specifically address this problem at the moment. I have some ideas, but none of them are easy fixes. It would be good if we could get some of our existing reviewers to be more active, or even create some sort of alert for Twitter or Facebook or a mailing list that says when an article needs reviewing that reviewers can subscribe to in order to increase awareness of materials needing to be reviewed. --LauraHale (talk) 10:22, 19 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]