Reviewing process...

[Jen Reese]

Sean:
> There's really no trick to it. I keep a text file handy to mark 
> down irrelevant posts on my subject. If a post cries out to be 
> fixed, I'll fix it, but that should be far and few between, you'll 
> go mad otherwise. 

> IMHO you shouldn't be trying to code threads unless we are going 
> to have a Fantastic Threads section (not a bad idea though), we're 
> trying to keep the most relevant posts on a topic for useful 
> searching.

Carolyn:
> I think Sean is right. You have to have a certain amount of 
> ruthlessness about this process, or we will never finish. <snip>
> I tend to read the category once through with great concentration, 
> keeping notes as I go as to which ones don't fit the subject. 
> Admittedly, it takes a little while to decide in your own mind 
> what the core of the topic should be, and that may mean you get a 
> quarter or a third in, and have to go back to the beginning and re-
> think what's for the chop and what isn't.

Jen: OK, you two have inspired me to get the job done without 
overthinking it. I'll try the first read-through technique rather 
than the post-by-post method, which is cumbersome and leads to being 
ensnared in threads rather than the category at hand. Thanks for the 
tips. 

So this isn't exactly the time and place for thread reviews, but I'm 
wondering about it for the future. I've run across several posts 
which are supposed to be multi-part posts and only one is coded up, 
or where almost an entire thread is dropped except for one or two 
posts and the continuity is lost. Pulling these posts up as an end-
user, people might wonder the same thing I did, "Here's post 1, what 
happened to post 2?" Or, "I see this post by X quoted here, but I 
can't find the original to read the part that got snipped."

I'm certain each post was rejected for perfectly valid reasons taken 
out of context, but is there a point where we need to favor the 
context over the individual post? 

I think so. In the end, I'd rather read a Fantastic Thread with a 
few annoying posts to skip over rather than a Fantastic Post with 
nothing surrounding it to bouy it up or refute it. And it's not like 
we have only one or the other--there are plenty of mostly intact 
threads, and plenty of great posts which can stand alone. I'm not 
proposing a reinvention of the wheel.


Carolyn:
> On the definitions side, I am going to compile a list of what 
people 
> have decided so far on the categories we have dealt with, but when 
we 
> are reporting on a category it would be a good idea to say what 
> should *not* be included, as well as what it should be about.
> 
> Any help?

Jen: Yes, much help :). Back to reviewing, with speed this time. 
Just watch, I'll have a report by the end of the day.