Wikipedia:WikiProject Peer review/History and changes

Historical information

2014: Template mergers

Every review placed on the list is formatted on that list according to the template {{PRentry}}. Prior to February 2014, each of the reviews in the list was formatted by a template unique to that topic. These are shown below.

Extended content

2014: Archiving changes

Prior to 2014, editors would have to manually copy and parse each month's archive information into a separate page, then parse it to it created correctly, as well as a number of other edits. Reviews are categorised now according to the time they were created, so editors now need only create this month's category (see above).

2015: Main page review limits added

In September 2015, peer review was inundated with a large number of peer reviews - possibly because of increased activity or decreased editor closure of reviews. This resulted in an error where the main peer review page would not transclude any reviews. This is because the "transclude limit" had been reached - see above for more details.

To prevent this in the future, large reviews over a certain size are now no longer transcluded in full. This was announced on September 2015.

2016: Backlog list changes

In March 2016, following this discussion, it was agreed that the list of unanswered reviews would be automated - now visible as "unanswered" reviews. This page only displays review requests that have been unedited. A separate template (previously the backlog template, and located here: Wikipedia:Peer_review/backlog/items) is provided for editors to add reviews which are not displaying on the page.

2020: Further backlog list changes

To further simplify maintenance, in September 2020 the list of unanswered items waiting for review was converted to a sidebar (Template:Peer review/Unanswered peer reviews sidebar). The relevant backlog pages were changed to redirect to the template (Wikipedia:Peer_review/backlog/items, Wikipedia:Peer review/PRbox), or to the list of unanswered reviews (Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog).

2020: Closing peer review changes

In September 2020, following discussion at WT:PR, some changes were made to how peer reviews are closed:

All peer reviews are added to the monthly archive category via a template ({{PR/subst}}) when they are created - previously this was done when they are closed
On peer review pages, the way a review is closed was changed. {{Peer review page|topic=X}} is now substituted with {{Closed peer review page}}, instead of {{subst:PR/archive}}. This let the message displayed when peer reviews close be standardised, and also simplified the process by removing a template with additional coding.
- On article talk pages, editors now close reviews by replacing {{Peer review}} with {{subst:Close peer review}}. This let more information be recorded when reviews are closed (like the date, page ID and name of the page when it was reviewed)
Because of the above, {{subst:PR/archive}} and {{PR/heading}} were deprecated.
A large amount of documentation was created, including the navbox {{Peer review templates}} which lists all the templates used in the peer review process