Wikipedia talk:Requests for feedback/Guidelines

Nice start. Some comments follow:

Pre-review
I like the pre-review steps. I haven't always done the check to see if it is an existing article, but it is easy to do, and would save a lot of discussion if it does exist, so I'll try to incorporate that into my routine. Similarly, I haven't regularly checked for copyright. Sometimes, if the wording seems too professional, I have checked, and found occasional problems, but I probably need to make it part of a routine.

I do not Afd or prod - is this OK
I'll use this discussion to mention a personal rule I tend to follow: if someone goes to the effort of asking for feedback, I don't feel right sending it to Afd or prodding. I doubt that I have policy backing for this position, but it just doesn't feel right. (Obviously, in the case of copyvio or a BLP attack page, steps must be taken, but when it simply doesn't pass muster as is, I'd prefer to point out shortcomings, and not try to wipe it out.) I don't even propose that it should be a rule, more of an informal agreement, unless someone persuades me I'm being a total wimp, and we are better off being tough.

Quality assessments
Regarding the purpose section: another personal rule I've adopted is that RFF is for review of articles at an early stage, but not the place for quality assessments. It is my observation that quality assessments tend to be done by Projects, but I haven't seen that written anywhere. If it is written, we could link to that advice, if it isn't written and we agree, we could write up some words to that effect.

Talkback
Should we encourage adding a talkback after adding some feedback> I do it and some others do, but if it is considered a good practice, it belongs in the guidelines.

Copy feedback to article talk page
In the case of a user subpage, I think it makes sense to place the feedback at RFF and a talkback to the requester, but in the case it is an article in main space, someone suggested adding the comments to the article talk page, so that over-eager NPP might seem them. I thought that sounded like good practice, but let's discuss.-- SPhilbrick  T  16:40, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * AFD/prod Me too. I feel the act of listing at RFF is a good-faith request for help, and tagging for deletion as a reviewer would be a violation of that good faith.  I would only ever do so if an article turned out to be (a) an unsalvageable copyvio (per policy, even in userspace) or (b) an attack page.
 * Quality assessment I don't think of QA as being part of the RFF process. To me, RFF is about assessing how well a new article complies with policy and guidelines, and suggesting how it should be made compliant if it isn't, and how it might be further improved if it is.  QA is about assessing articles that are at least minimally compliant already, and determining how good they are.  It might be helpful to tag article's talk pages with a project tag if there's one that obviously fits, though.  That would at least flag them up for QA by the project members.
 * Talkback I don't always do it, but I do think it's good practice and I shall try to incorporate it into my routine.


 * Feedback on article talk page? It's a possibility.  I also wondered about tagging the mainspace articles (rather than their talk pages), automatically via bot if possible, as soon as they are listed on RFF, with a link to the article's RFF discussion.  This might head off hasty deletion tags, and encourage patrollers to find RFF and contribute.  My first draft of a tag is here.   Ka renjc 18:13, 2 October 2010 (UTC)