editors: Thread: Advice for (content) reviewing

I wanted to share a bit of advice from the world of theatre criticism
(I'm not a theatre critic at all, but it was a theatre critic who told
me this) about the terms of a good review:

    A good review engages with the work on its own terms. It doesn't
    discuss how the review would be better if it dealt with a different
    subject or had different themes. It doesn't discuss how the work
    would be different if the reviewer had created it. It simply aims to
    help that piece of work achieve its own goals.

For the LDP and many similar projects there is also a relevancy test
(for example "HOWTO review theatre" might be an excellent work but not
have a place in the LDP...), but this is probably something worth
keeping in mind for technical reviews.

-Mary