Thread:Talk:Article feedback/Is this a positive or a negative?/reply (7)

My spelling and possibly even my poor Grammar have improved as a result of my time on Wikipedia. But those improvements have come from specific feedback from other editors either correcting my work or leaving a message on my talkpage. The problem with the article assessment tool is that it gives general and anonymous feedback - general so you don't know what improvements the assessor wants and anonymous so you can't even discuss it with them. If someone assesses your article poorly you can try adding more references rewording or adding examples, but with this assessment tool how are you supposed to know that their concern is that they'd rather you'd written it in American English, or they disagree with you as to whether dates should be CE/BCE or AD/BC, or your article about a mountain in South America covers the biology, mountaineering and vulcanology aspects but omits any mention of it being the abode of the Gods of the local pre-Columbian civilisation. My experience is that not all negative feedback requires changes to the article, but the more specific the feedback the better and sometimes you need to discuss and clarify people's concerns.

Currently editors get all sorts of feedback ranging from a typo fix to a complete rewrite, but if another editor simply blanks the page, blanks a section or reverts a contribution then unless they justify their edit in their edit summary we are liable to treat that as vandalism. The risk of the article assessment tool is not that it gives feedback, but that it could give vague unusable feedback of the sort that we are used to treating as vandalism.

Knowing what the readers think about the text would be great, but is this tool giving us specific actionable feedback of the sort that articles benefit from or vague unfocussed criticism that serves no more useful purpose than adding a cleanup tag without giving an explanation on the talkpage?