Help:Reviewing revisions

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The SABR Encyclopedia uses the FlaggedRevs extension to MediaWiki to provide a process for reviewing and tidying submitted edits before they are shown on pages. This article describes guidelines for reviewers in evaluating edits.

Reviewing should be fast. Reviewing most contributions should not take a lot of your time. The objective of the review process is to avoid egregious errors, whether deliberate or accidental, in facts and in formatting. Think of the review process as triage: you're looking for serious problems in the submitted edits, and, if there are none, you are identifying what other actions might need to be taken on the article.

The 30-second rule. As a reviewer, you are not responsible for making the article perfect. As you look at edits, you will no doubt see things you might want to clean up. A good rule of thumb for this is the 30-second rule: if it is something you can do in 30 seconds, do it; if not, consider tagging the article for later cleanup instead. The time limit of 30 seconds is a guideline, and you can adjust it to your tastes. The important question is whether the change is something that is much easier for you to do now, while you're looking at the article, than it would be to come back to it later. Cleaning up simple typos, punctuation, and so forth probably fall in this category; go ahead and tidy them up as you go. Significant copyediting or wikification is probably best left to later -- and may be something someone else can do. In those cases, tag the article appropriate, and approve.

Use templates to indicate further actions. At Help:Cleanup resources and Help:Disagreement, there are lists of templates you can use to flag articles that require further action. Ask yourself: if time were no object, what changes would I make here? If there are wiki links missing, or more formatting could be done, consider flagging the article with Template:cleanup-wikify. If sources are missing, add Template:cleanup-sources, and add an entry in the talk page indicating what additional sources should be tracked down and provided. If the new edit makes changes in demographic data, consider flagging the article with Template:disagree-person-demographics, and make notes about the disagreement on the talk page. And so on; this list is not exhaustive of the possibilities. Perhaps you will later come back and take care of some of these actions yourself; but, also, perhaps someone else will be able to pitch in and help as well.

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