When it comes to peer review, good peer review isn’t just about selecting important papers. An important part of peer review is offering suggestions for improving a post before it gets published for public consumption. When I write posts that I want to be referenced in the future getting quality feedback to improve them feels important.
Currently, that can be done by circulating a Google Docs draft but there might be a better way to go about it.
Yep, the original title of this essay was actually “Peer Review and Google Docs” and started going into details of why Google Docs accomplish a lot of the goals of Peer Review, and that we’ve considered just saying “y’all should treat Google Doc review as an important part of the LW posting process”, but that my current take is that it’s worth replicating Google Doc’s features so they can be more obviously and tightly integrated into the LW ecosystem.
I guess that’s actually the 80⁄20 (maybe 95/5?) of the remaining essay right there, but I will still try to flesh it out fully at some point.
(Started to make a top level comment, but commenting here still felt right for the sake of replying to the “google docs” bit.)
I really like the ideas floating around in the post, and I’d be excited for things to move in this direction.
Having google-doc-comments and a system around them which makes sense does seem like a fairly obvious potential big win here. I’m glad you aren’t fixating on that and are exploring the shape of the problem first.
A public comments / private comments distinction may be associated with this; lots of ways that might work out. (Is there a group of “reviewers” who can make private comments? Can they see each other’s comments? Who sets such a group? Probably that’s too inorganic… but the dynamic of public vs private comments could get weird...)
When it comes to peer review, good peer review isn’t just about selecting important papers. An important part of peer review is offering suggestions for improving a post before it gets published for public consumption. When I write posts that I want to be referenced in the future getting quality feedback to improve them feels important.
Currently, that can be done by circulating a Google Docs draft but there might be a better way to go about it.
Yep, the original title of this essay was actually “Peer Review and Google Docs” and started going into details of why Google Docs accomplish a lot of the goals of Peer Review, and that we’ve considered just saying “y’all should treat Google Doc review as an important part of the LW posting process”, but that my current take is that it’s worth replicating Google Doc’s features so they can be more obviously and tightly integrated into the LW ecosystem.
I guess that’s actually the 80⁄20 (maybe 95/5?) of the remaining essay right there, but I will still try to flesh it out fully at some point.
(Started to make a top level comment, but commenting here still felt right for the sake of replying to the “google docs” bit.)
I really like the ideas floating around in the post, and I’d be excited for things to move in this direction.
Having google-doc-comments and a system around them which makes sense does seem like a fairly obvious potential big win here. I’m glad you aren’t fixating on that and are exploring the shape of the problem first.
A public comments / private comments distinction may be associated with this; lots of ways that might work out. (Is there a group of “reviewers” who can make private comments? Can they see each other’s comments? Who sets such a group? Probably that’s too inorganic… but the dynamic of public vs private comments could get weird...)