CZ Talk:Approval Process

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Draft Approval Process For discussion

The meaning of editorial approval. Editors may approve Citizendium articles, i.e., certify that they meet article standards. When an editor approves of an article, he or she is explicitly claiming that that particular version of the article meets those standards, and that he is willing to stake his professional reputation on that claim. The relevant standards are outlined in Approval standards.

An author of an article is anyone who has made a significant contribution to the content of an article, rather than a contribution that is confined to copy editing, stylistic adjustments etc. Any author may, at any time, seek approval for an article that he or she has been contributing to, but may not approve that article himself or herself.

Approval thus requires the involvement of an editor, expert in the relevant field, and who has not contributed significantly to the article content. To secure the involvement of an editor, an author may approach any CZ editor with relevant expertise, or might place a call for approval on the relevant Workgroup page. A call for approval should be made when an article is approaching a state that the authors believe to be adequate, but not necessarily in a final polished state. The call for approval should be indicated by a 'call for approval' tag placed at the top of the article Talk page. An editor who accepts in principle the role of approving an article under development should also indicate this at the top of the Article Talk page.

The approving editor should place comments intended as editorial guidance at the top of the Talk page. These comments should address conditions still to be met before the article can be approved.

When the editor believes that the article is fit for approval, he or she should simply place an Approval Tag at the top of the article page. (When the software has been written to permit this, we will want to display the latest approved versions of articles to users by default, rather than the latest unapproved version.)

Not done yet

I'm finished editing this page for now. I'll be adding more info hopefully tomorrow. --Larry Sanger 03:01, 21 December 2006 (CST)

A couple of points:

1) Involving copyeditors (informally)

I would most definitely take this beyond a voluntary step. I think articles need to be signed off on by the Chief Copyeditor, his or her designees, the Copyediting Workgroup, whatever. Make that a required step in the article approval process. We can be utterly certain, for example, that the likes of Britannica have that as an essential step in their workflow. Thus

From Author(s) --> To Copyedit "department" --> To Editorial "department" for approval --> To Sysops for placement of the Approved template

It is only in this way that all CZ articles will be appropriately standardized, tallying to a unified "feel" of the aggregate product. Without it, articles will appear (and probably actually be) uneven in style, if only because editors may interpret differently or unevenly apply copyediting standards, or because some really are better writers than others. Moreoever, onlookers of the project, such as librarians and academics, will look upon such an additional step very favorably. The keyword in articles going from authoring to final approval should be rigor. This step adds importantly to that. It is a detail the importance of which ought not be minimized.

2) Who may nominate

At least in my reading, this is currently unclear in this policy. If authors can nominate articles for approval, then state so specifically within a brief section under the heading Who may nominate.

Thanks for hearing me out.

Stephen Ewen 00:36, 15 January 2007 (CST)

Stephen:

Re (1), please see the section of the Forums about copyediting. That's where to put this. But here's why I at least have been slow to add any copyediting requirement. We certainly wouldn't want any single person to have to approve articles for copyediting (what a bottleneck), and even any one of a large group of people officially having to approve the article's copyediting would tend to slow the approval process down far too much. Bear in mind that wiki editing, particularly when approval is going on, is a very open, public process, and, in time, I think you're going to see boatloads of people offering far too many copyediting suggestions (and making many minor, conflicting copyedits) when approval time approaches. The result will be quite good--not perfect, perhaps, but large, dynamic collaborations cannot be in the business of perfectionism without grinding their processes to a halt.

Re (2), perhaps all that needs to be said is that to nominate is to approve, and only editors may approve. Authors may not nominate. --Larry Sanger 09:55, 15 January 2007 (CST)

as per Larry's request

I tried to edit the page to reflect our Biology article experience. I do have a question- what happens to the old approved biology (and by inference-other articles being replaced by new editions).? Are they archived? In this case there is very little difference between the editions, but I can imagine cases where the preceding and newly current edition might be extremely different. I think we should have a way to save them so that they are easily retrievable.Nancy Sculerati MD 17:49, 25 January 2007 (CST)

It happens I worked on the what I have just dubbed "re-approval" section just before reading this, and before actually discovering that Larry has done a very good job spelling out the distinctions between sysop permissions and Constable roles and responsibilities , a clarification which significantly improves the practical and ethical guidance in the approval process page so that difficulties like the recent editing glitches in Biology (which I was in the middle of) can be avoided in the future.

I have used the term "re-approval" deliberately because I have found the mechanics of a second approval are trickier than the first.

In that section I map out a proposal for placing version records at the top of the talk pages, and in it it is suggested that the urls to the source versions are kept in an area at the top of the talk page. Also annotation of the sysop saves of newly form re-approved articles is suggested.

These steps (or similar ones), will automatically preserve an index to old approved versions in the history logs, which are automatically preserved anyway - meeting Nancy's request - thanks to the nice properties of the Mediawiki history log (I know that Larry and others will realize this, but us newbies often don't).

These and similar procedural-ethical precedents that we are establishing semm to me to go to the heart of making CZ what we want it to be David Tribe 15:58, 28 January 2007 (CST)