Peer Review Wordpress Plugin

Category: Writing

Published: 01/12/2010 01:28 p.m.

Ever wanted to have your writings edited by someone else? No, I'm not talking about some picky english major. I mean a normal person who can read over your writing. Like a second set of eyes.This would be awesome. Here's how it would work:

Writing

First, you save a draft and submit it to be peer-reviewed by a stranger. The draft gets put into a big queue, and somewhere someone else reads it over and makes edits and recommendations. "Re-word this, it's confusing." "I think you meant 'your'." And so on. This would check the obvious mistakes you made, but it can also help on some of the logic.

The next step is it is sent back to you with edits attached or inline. You can review the peer-reviewed version and decide what changes you would like to keep. You don't have to accept any of the changes, and if you want, you can submit it to be reviewed by another person.

Reviewing

To have access to get reviews, you must also take part and give reviews. By reviewing someone else's work, you would earn a credit. Each credit can be used to get someone else to review your work. For every draft you edit, you get a credit to have someone edit your drafts.

All of the blog and author information would not be included in the draft, though some posts with internal links may tip someone off. The biggest point would be to be that second set of eyes for someone. Make sure you correct their grammar and typos. Give recommendations about possible re-writes or any complicated parts. Help them to publish better writing.

What about Spam?

Showcasing the reviewers on a social networking site would probably not be great. We don't want to encourage people to game the system by providing sloppy edits. I want there to be an equal trade of reviewing. Perhaps there could be a cost of membership ($3) and then a feedback system to make sure people are providing good edits. I think a tiny initial cost could really keep out a lot of the bots and things.

I am aware that there are peer review services that exist for fees and other offers, but I would really like to see something like this integrated within WordPress itself. I just started using After the Deadline (which is fantastic) and it makes me want a more human version of this kind of editing.

If you are bold enough to take on this project I would love to hear about it. If it already exists, please let me know.