Peer review

At the week 12 congress, review two other bestiary entries against the admissibility rule and against the systems their authors proposed.

Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 10%

The brief#

Review two entries submitted to the congress against the rule that decides whether an entry is admitted at all.

The taxonomic congress in week 12 is where the entries meet readers who are not their authors. Review is the second half of the admissibility rule. An author declares which fields the cited line does not supply; a reviewer is the person who finds the ones the author did not notice.

A review has three findings to make, and they are separate.

The first is admissibility. The rule is binary. Either the entry cites a line and declares its gaps, or it does not. An entry can be elegant, well written and inadmissible. Say so in the first sentence if it is.

The second is the citation. Open the edition and look for the line. Report what you did: the 卷 you searched, the 次 section, the locus. A line that is not there is the most valuable thing a review can find, and it is not an accusation — the course’s position is that an unfound line marked unverified is a correct result. A line that is there but slightly altered, or transliterated out of the edition’s traditional forms, is a different finding and should be reported as one.

The third is cost. The entry claims something about the system it came from. Test that claim. If an author says their entry forces a habitat field to widen, check that it does. 陵鱼 (língyú) is filed with 在海中 and nothing else, so a habitat field that already accepts that will not widen for anything. If the declared cost is not real, the entry has argued itself easy.

What you submit#

Two reviews, of roughly five hundred words each, on two different entries that are not your own. Written in the second person and addressed to the author.

Each review closes with one change, specific enough that the author could make it in an afternoon. “Strengthen the commentary” is not a change. “The 其狀如 clause gives two traits and your binomial uses neither” is.

Reviews are read by the person reviewed. Write accordingly: the register is a colleague reporting a finding, not a marker assigning a grade. Disagreement is expected and does not need softening.

How it is marked#

On the reviews, not on the entries. A review that correctly finds an entry admissible and says why scores the same as one that finds a fabricated line. A review that agrees with everything has not been done.