User:Kingsif/Review things quick

Among my specific areas of interest, I also do a fair amount of article reviewing on Wikipedia, predominantly at DYK and GAN. This can be considered a weighty task and something that can lead to burn-out quickly. I won't say it's easy to review articles that are particularly long, technical, or otherwise complex – things that can often be established at a glance and turn reviewers off. That just leaves a handful of particularly dedicated reviewers to bite into them, which is probably worse for everyone, ultimately.

Of course, I still do it. And I have a few tips to review things quickly, without doing it in a rush, that may get others to do it, too.

1. Know the guidelines. The better you know and fully understand the criteria of the review process you're involved in, the easier it will be for you to review. There will be no need to keep checking it, no need to follow to a point the outline reviewer template, no need to ask questions. It also means you can get stuck into the review and approach different areas of concern as they appear, rather than re-reading. But make sure you do understand them.

2. But, it can help to have a 'starting' process. There may be parts to approach first without needing to read the whole article at all. At GAN, it's easy to use the earwig tool to check for copyvio first; this also lets you know if there's any flagrant violations that would halt the review before it's even started. Similarly, a source check can be done through the refs and skim-reading at GAN and DYK. Having a 'starting' process also makes reviewing feel less unwieldy: you're not looking a big, messy, article thinking "oh no, where can even start". You know where to start.

3. Don't skimp on source reviews. They're important, even if it feels lengthy and tedious and hard. For DYK, isolating the correct single or few source/s should be relatively easy, and a Ctrl/Cmd+F within that source (if online) for choice keywords will prevent you needing to read it all (unless it's something like a journal article that argues the point throughout, or similar). A lot more editors are also adding helpful page numbers to citations. Offline sources either need to rumbled from an online library version or given good faith, and some questions can be useful. It may be easier to open all the sources in new tabs before you begin to get everything laid out.

4. Also don't forget article history. Article history is needed for both DYK and GAN in different ways. It can be overlooked, but on top of contributing to criteria can also tell you other things about the article. I can only say you'll know how when you see it, if a certain edit sticks out for, perhaps, being a large page change or a small collection by an otherwise uninvolved editor. Red flags that may not be all too noticeable in the article text may include little POV inserts throughout or replacing a source URL with spam, all the way up to surreptitiously removing entire sections or image vandalism. Who knows what you'll find.

5. If you see a recurring problem, scan over it through the rest of the article. This may sound like strange advice, but if for the first two sections you notice there's consistently an issue with using the wrong quotation marks, or the same weasel words, or something else in the range of 'likely to persist' – and these generally come under GAN style issues – then make a note of it in the review, suggest a fix, and forget about it. Try not to let your brain activate every time you see it, because even if you don't list every instance in the review, your thinking time is going up. Similarly with phrasing; if there's issues with how things are phrased per the appropriate MOS, you probably don't need to suggest ways to fix each instance. Instead, link to the MOS and try to descriptively identify the underlying problem so all instances can be worked on in the same way. Most editors can take the initiative.

6. Flex the appropriate MOS. Different subject WikiProjects have different specifics in manual of style. If you think you're dealing with a specialist topic article, go to the project on the talk page and familiarize yourself with any MOS/essays/other guidelines they have. This helps you give better targeted advice and prevents giving advice that doesn't apply or is plain incorrect for the style required.
 * Kingsif (talk) 03:25, 22 December 2019 (UTC)