I've just removed a criterion from § Step 4: Closing a review which previously read "If a request is unanswered for more than one month." Because of how understaffed the peer review process tends to be, I regularly find that reviews can go unnoticed for months before an interested editor comes along and provides comments. I don't think it's a net positive to summarily throw out month-old requests and tell the nominator, in essence, that they're out of luck. Feel free to revert me if you disagree with the change and we can discuss it further if necessary. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 00:48, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Probably not, as those discussions were closed validly at the time. It would be easier to have the nominators simply open a new review page if they're still interested in comments. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 20:41, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi all, great to see your discussion above. As you probably can see from this histories I've been quite involved in the PR processes previously. Happy to respect the consensus here but I'd suggest that there is some threshold (E.g. 3 months, 6 months) that is included in the criteria. Previously, I felt that ends up being a very, very long backlog of unanswered reviews and I feel if a review hasn't attracted interest in some period, it's better off to be closed to direct reviewers to newer reviews. The reviews that are that old are stale and, unfortunately, that often means the contributes might not be so active either.Tom (LT) (talk) 11:28, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would be fine with extending the deadline to three months. It might also be useful to have AnomieBOT take over closing unanswered reviews (which it already does for reviews that have been answered and inactive for a month). —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 21:53, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry for the delay, it's been busy off-wiki. Sure, I can reach out and see if the task can be expanded to cover this case as well. Speaking of automating repetitive tasks, it might be worth workshopping a more efficient way to update the {{Unanswered peer reviews sidebar}} and {{FAC peer review sidebar}}, which is currently a rather tedious task of checking whether reviews have been closed and going through the main list to see if any other reviews qualify to be listed. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 01:35, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Anomie: Sorry about the delay; I've had a very busy week over here. I think in this case we would want to close the discussion whether it's listed in the sidebars or not — this bot task is intended to clear out the extremely old backlog when it's clear no editors will be leaving further comments. The part of the existing task that closes answered reviews after a month can also be retained. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 16:05, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ok. The bot will now close valid PRs (i.e. the PR and the corresponding article talk page both exist and are non-redirects) if (1) It's on the FAC sidebar and is inactive for 3 months, (2) It's on the unanswered sidebar and is inactive for 3 months, (3) it has only one contributor and is inactive for 3 months, or (4) it's not on either sidebar, has more than one contributor, and is inactive for 1 month. Anomie⚔20:48, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As for the comment about {{Unanswered peer reviews sidebar}} and {{FAC peer review sidebar}}, it seems like it would be fairly straightforward for a bot to remove properly-formatted links to closed PRs. Adding entries on {{Unanswered peer reviews sidebar}} for PRs with no feedback (i.e. only one contributor) that wouldn't show up on the normal list wouldn't be too bad either. Determining if feedback is "minimal" or whether it's related to a FAC seems beyond what AnomieBOT could handle though, humans would still have to do that part. Anomie⚔12:16, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Let me get back to you on this one. It might be better to place the pages in appropriate tracking categories so the bot doesn't have to do the heavy lifting of deciding whether or not the discussion is "minimal feedback" or "pre-FAC". Tom, what do you think of adding a couple of parameters to {{Peer review page}} to control these? —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 16:13, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I went ahead and wrote code for removing PRs from the two sidebar templates if they're not in Category:Current peer reviews (and, to be safe, the associated date isn't within the past month). I didn't enable that code yet though, pending consensus. I didn't try writing anything for adding to either sidebar, that would still be done by humans. Anomie⚔20:48, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Tom: If there are no objections to this change, I plan to set up the maintenance categories later this week. Z1720, since you've also been discussing the guidelines here recently, do you have any input? —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 14:58, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the ping. The unanswered peer reviews sidebar seems like lower hanging fruit that I think would be useful were addressed automatically. The FA crew really took up the pre-FAC reviews with gusto and from my take on things prefer to curate the list themselves - sometimes leaving things open for a very long time. I feel it might create some friction for that group of editors and contributors if the bot were to automatically remove reviews without checking if they would find that useful first. I'm not sure about the tracking categories - how would that be different to the present? Tom (LT) (talk) 12:13, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's mostly for the unanswered reviews sidebar that I'm proposing introducing tracking categories, as the current system of listing reviews with a single revision but also having another spot for reviews with minor additions is unnecessarily awkward. As for the pre-FAC sidebar, I don't think it should be a problem with anyone as the bot would only be removing reviews that have been closed manually or automatically after three months of inactivity (the same as all other reviews). Using a tracking category would give the bot a way to determine whether or not a particular review is "pre-FAC", which it currently has no way of doing. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 15:35, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Add "nomination at FAC/FLC/GAN" to notes in Step 1
In the PR instructions, Step 4, it states that a PR can be closed if the article is nominated for good article, featured article or featured list status. When answering PRs, I came across a situation where an article was first nominated at GAN, then nominated at PR. I would like to add the following text to the "Please note:" section of Step 1:
Sounds good to me. I also saw a situation like this recently and was a bit confused about the editor's decision to do that, as it unnecessarily splits reviewer energy between two discussion venues. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 21:55, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
