Full thing, could use some proofreading I think.
As you might have noticed, Peer Review threads for some Pokemon Analyses have popped up recently in Contributions & Corrections. These and the stickied
typothread are part of the reform of the Contributions & Corrections forum.
This reform has two main goals:
a) Allow regular users to give input on how to improve our guides. There's nearly always something that the author of a Pokemon analysis could have missed that might be very noteworthy for the Pokemon in question, or we may simply have had a bad day and made a lot of typoes and grammatical errors. The more people can give feedback, the more fixes can be made, the better our analyses will turn out.
b) Improve the efficiency of processing the reports. Those who were around might remember our old Edit an Analysis thread, which ended up being ~10 pages long and once in a blue moon a poor soul (*cough*) would run through it to clean it up completely. There was too little moderation in it, it clogged up too much, it just wasn't handy.
The problem described in the second goal will be solved as following. Every small change that does not constitute changing the structure of an analysis (think correcting typoes and awkward English, or a small fault in a damage calculation) can be reported in the
sticky thread intended for it. Please remember to actually link to the analysis you are referring to if possible (at the moment of writing this, it's not, since the beta site is down). Please quote a bit around what you would like to have changed, explain clearly what you'd like to have changed, offer suggestions on how, explain why...the clearer you are, the more likely we are going to accept your suggestion.
Every bigger change, such as an entire analysis that is outdated, geared towards the wrong metagame or generally needs a big remake, a new project should be opened. You start a new project by making a thread on Contributions & Corrections, with an appropiate title containing the title of the analysis and a vague description of what has to be changed (something like: "Rewriting RBY Jynx" or "Getting the Taunt Analysis up to date"). Then in the body you can make your own list of what you would change and how and why etcetera, and other users can post in the same thread to discuss the changes. After a while the Site Staff will have the final judgement on what is implemented, removed and changed and what is not, but they'll be sure to look over all of the suggestions in the thread.
Now, you might wonder:
who is allowed to start a new project, to suggest changes and to finally edit changes?
The first two basically have the same norm as what is required to post on about any Smogon forum: you can post whenever you want, however, if you're new, you should be very careful and probably lurk a lot to avoid making mistakes and thereby making a fool of yourself. While we accept intelligent input from everyone, CharizardTrainier14's suggestion to mention Flame Wheel on Typhlosion since it saved him against Pryce in GSC is not going to make the cut. We'll likely be handing out infractions to people who really needed some more lurking before posting. That does not mean we're infracting every piece of advice we neglect, obviously. The best ways to gain knowledge about the game are, in order of effectiveness, battling, battling, battling, reading guides and reading over the forums.
However, the group of people that finally makes the changes on the site is a lot more limited. Only people with badges are able to manage the site, and only those with the Site Staff badge
[image here probably] are able to approve those edits so that they show up on the site. This approving is called caching. The tool used to edit the site is called the SCMS (Smogon Content Managing System), a useful program written by chaos that uses HTML-ish functions. There will be a tutorial up in the near future about how it works, and you can trust me that it isn't that hard. You will have time to practice in a test page, and if you really screw up your edits can always be reversed.
New people will be able to climb Smogon's ladder of rankings much more easily with this system. Ideally, the plan would be as following:
1) You register a forum account if you haven't already
2) You lurk a lot on the forums to get a feeling of the place
3) You ask questions about what you don't understand in the Pokemon Forums if needbe
4) In the meanwhile, you battle competitively to gain actual battling experience. As effective as theorymon can be, you need to play to keep your knowledge in shape.
5) You start suggesting changes in peer review threads
6) You start a new project or two after getting the hang of that
7) You will be recognized sooner or later as an active contributor to Contributions & Corrections. You will be awarded a badge so you can make changes in the site, and the Site Staff will approve if they're good.
8) Optionally, you will be awarded the Site Staff badge if you show you stay active and helpful in the site, so that you can now cache and make your edits show up at once.
As a badged person or Site Staff, you can also work on editing out typoes or awkward English as suggested in the sticky that's been linked twice now in this announcement. Easy but very helpful stuff to do, and takes mere seconds per suggestion.
Note that it doesn't stop when you have a badge, even when it's that Site Staff one. To keep users motivated to keep contributing even after they received their award, a leveling system for badges will be implemented. This means that for example if you make more quality edits, the level of your Site Staff badge would increase. Or that the more articles you write, the higher your Contributor badge level becomes.
So if your English is adequate, your battling experience is sufficient, you are an active member of Smogon and you are able to co-operate with others well, The Smogon Staff probably wants
you to help us out. Follow the plan above and become part of the leading source of competitive Pokemon.