Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Using the A-class review toolbox

If you are filing for a Military history Wikiproject A-class review then you have probably noticed that each individual review page contains a small white colored box, located in the upper right hand corner of the review, which displays what at first glance appear to be external links. Until now, you probably might have not thought much about it because the box had little impact on your article as a whole. But for those who review, this box is an important aspect of the A-class review process, because it allows us to rapidly check the article to ascertain who has been editing the article, what the status of the links in the article, whether the online material present in an article is working, and whether the images in an article are using alt text.

These three factors can tell a reviewer a lot about the article before a user even looks at the material in the article undergoing the A-class review, and in many cases the information presented by the toolbox is summed up in the article's review. It is important to understand what the box does and how to address comments or opposition brought on by usage of the toolbox.

What is the toolbox?

The toolbox automatically appears in an article undergoing an A-class review by virtue of its inclusion in the nomination filing process. The toolbox was added to our A-class review process after being successfully introduced at Featured Article Candidacy some time back. The actual box, which can be seen here, is located to the right of page, and while not visible at first glance to those passing through the list of A-class candidates, it is visible on the actual A-class review page for those who move to review an article.

The toolbox contains what appear to be eight external links, which are labeled alt text, analysis dashboard, citation checker, disambiguation links, external links, peer review, redirects, and ref links.

Alt text

The first link checks the images in an article for alt text, or text that describes the image for those who may be unable to load, or see the image. Alternative text (alt text) is used as a replacement for an image, whenever the image cannot be seen. Alt text is not the same as a caption. Alt text is meant for those who cannot see the image, whereas the caption is intended for all readers. In general, alt text summarizes the image's appearance, whereas the caption helps all readers interpret the image, to focus on its most essential elements and to connect it with the article text. A helpful way to think about alt text is to imagine that the web page is a script for an audio recording, and that the page's alt text is the part of the recording that describes the image to someone who cannot see the image.

The alt text should be concise and should emphasize the image's most important visual aspects: it should summarize the gist of the image rather than describing every detail. Above all, alt text should describe the image to visually impaired readers who are using assisting technologies such as JAWS and Orca. It should also make sense in a graphical browser with images turned off, and it should fit with the surrounding text when viewed with a text-only browser such as Lynx.

Page history analysis

The second link is used to determine the number of edits that have been to the article based on user accounts. As a rule, a person nominating the article for A-class review should have spent some time bringing the article up to speed for the A-class nomination, so the nominator should have made a significant contribution to the page. If an editor has few or no edits to the page then the project coordinators may choose to close the nomination early on grounds that the A-class nomination was a "drive by nom". Essentially, this is a nomination in which the person who is nominating the article is not the main contributor and as a result is assumed to be unfamiliar with the assessment scale and the sources and other factors in the article which taken as a whole means they will most likely be unable to address any concerns brought up during the A-class review.

Citation bot

The third link is the citation bot. It was originally designed to add digital object identifiers (DOIs) to references; it now does much more, adding other identifiers (PMIDs, ISBNs), links to open access repositories, and fixing common formatting errors. The bot obtains citation data from a range of sources including Google Books, CrossRef, AdsAbs etc. Because scraping data from web pages is unreliable and resource-intensive, these databases are the main source of data; unfortunately the bot is unable to tell when these databases contain errors or incomplete information. Any such error or omission should be reported directly to the data repository maintainer.

Dab links

The fourth link is used to determine the number of disambigious links present in the article. Such links are those that go to a page where the general term is covered rather than to a specific page the article contributor had in mind. For example, if you are reading a Star Trek article and click on a link titled USS Enterprise, you will end up at a page where every ship in the US Navy, Continental Navy, and Starfleet that ever bore the name Enterprise are listed so that the reader can get to the article he or she wants. The problem with these kinds of links is that the person reading the article may not be familiar enough with the material presented on a disambiguation link page to know where to go if they end up there. As a result, this tool allows reviewers to locate such links in an article and inform the author they can look for the links. As a rule, there should be no disambigious links in an article undergoing an A-class review unless the disambigious links are advantageous. This is rare, but some disambig links – like those included through the use of the {{otherships}} template – need to remain in an article in case a person arrived at the article accidentally and needs to get to the disambigious page to find the right article.

External links

The fifth link checks the external links present in the article and sorts them in a color coded scheme based on the availability of the webpage. The color key for the sorting is present on the external link checker page in the upper left hand corner; while any color coding may indicate trouble of some sort, the most important color to look for is red. An external link checked by the automated script that determines a web page to be dead is presented in red, and dead links must be removed, revived, or acceptably substituted before the A-class review is finished or the review will end in failure.

Peer review

The sixth link generates an automated peer review analysis. Despite its name, reviews created by this script are not carried out by peers, but by a JavaScript (written by peers, though). The word "peer" in this case is used to clarify the purpose. The suggestions generated by the script focus largely on style issues, based on the Manual of Style. Though most of the tips are generally accurate, some will not be accurate/applicable for the article in question. Fixing the generated issues is not mandatory, nor will completing them guarantee that the article will pass both. The goal of the script is to supplement the advice of manual reviews by looking for common issues often overlooked by editors, as well as setting up a starting point for problems to work on while editors review articles with more comprehensiveness. The script can be installed for additional features, that are generally disabled from the link.

Redirects

The seventh link generates the list of all links that redirect to the article in question. This is a verification tool for redirects, is based on Special:WhatLinksHere. It can be used not only to check whether relevant variants of the title redirect to page, but also to check for any misleading redirects to the page.

Ref links

The eighth link can be used to fix reference links. It is a python script in the pywikipedia collection which adds title to bare references in the forms of <ref>[http://example.com]</ref> or <ref>http://example.org/</ref>. It is widely used to check and convert URL-only references into full citations.

During the review

Usually an editor making use of the toolbox for the review will leave a remark that looks something like this:

• Comment You have xx number of disamigious link that need corrected. There are xx number of websites that need to be checked. Xx number of images have no alt text, please add the text to the articles.

If you see this during your review then your next step will be to use the links in the toolbox to determine what the exact nature of the problems are and how to fix them. Note that the scripts load in relation to both the size of the article and the number of links used in an article that need to be listed, so if you have a lot of disambig links, relied heavily on web content for your sources, or added a lot of images in your article it may take a minute or two for the scripts to load the related material.