User:TCO/Essays/Bring your own reviewers
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I think you should reach out to reviewers and bring them in. Obviously, don't bother with lightweights or try to get buddy-buddy reviews (won't help ya anyway: Sandy will either discount it or even suspect collusion). Instead, I would just imagine YOU are the journal editor and then go gather the reviewers. You are not only helping yourself, but getting people engaged in this process, which benefits them as well as this whole crowd. They just can't rely on "wander by" reviews. And the directors are too busy to go and farm out reviews the way a real journal does it.
- Try to think of a couple aspects of content to check (for example with U.S. state reptiles, I got both a reptile guy and someone into Americana), as well as a lay person not steeped in the topic.
- A lot of the stuff here is heavy in prose reviewing, so getting the heavies (like Tony, Malleus, Wehwalt) to engage is helpful, but difficult as everyone wants them, but do what you can do. Like I pulled Diannaa into a review even though she was hesitant about opining on Featured Content. But the thang gonna get hamma fer gramma anyway...most people do a text review.
- For image reviews, the people you've used for image brushups at the Graphics Help Desk do great file reviews (you should be using them anyway, rocking resource, hope I am not giving away a secret fishing hole). I think we are kinda OK here as Sven and FS and Nikki are doing some. But it's really not that hard to get image people in if you just muck around in image space and meet some of them (like MissMJ or Material Scientist would do great image reviews if we wanted).
- Sandy will want a close paraphrasing check too. The only two that I know of that really run tools and all are Moonridden and Januarygirl. No reason why January could not be sweet-talked into a look-see. You could also just get a normal person to look it over, but then since they may not be as good with tools and such, might want to go to a subject matter expert who is likely to have access to some of the sources. (In that case, may as well also get him to opine on the content appropriateness of the article as well. For instance do the areas of emphasis and amount of coverage in the article make sense.)
- For super extra credit, might ask an outside academic to review it. I had that lined up for the two that I've done, but in both cases they closed before my outsider reviewed.
Project talk pages are not bad for a broadcast reachout, but the "orange bar" produces more results (for most things on Wiki). You can even use the telephone game of asking someone to name someone (like I needed a "table guy" once and Malleus sent me to RexxS. While not bringing in lightweights or people who will no review fairly, I would not feel any obligation to hunt up people that make unreasonable opposes (that may happen anyway).