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Is there any guidance on reviewing the first post of a new user?

I have looked in meta and could not find a similar question.

All I can think of at the moment is to compare with guidance on the quesiton help here if it is a question and compare with guidance on answering if it is an answer and maybe it is simply that.

Sorry maybe this is very obvious to all except me. I know that I appreciated the helpful comments and edits I got from various people the first time I posted.

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Reviewing really comes from experience, and that's partly why it is limited to users who have reached enough reputation. I don't think there are any hard and fast rules written down anywhere on what to look for because the expectation is that users performing the reviews have established themselves in the community and know what is expected, or not acceptable, on the site.

That said, we do tend to have some tricky rules if you haven't been really active on meta. Resource/book recommendations, homework, computational, engineering, and experimental questions all have very specific policies that have many subtleties.

Aside from those, the usual correction of grammar, formatting, MathJax, removing greetings/thanks/superfluous information, and proper tagging are always safe and a good way for new reviewers to help new users.

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  • $\begingroup$ thanks for answer - I have come across the homework / book recommendations you mentioned, but not the other computational engineering and experimental ones. Will have to look that up - or if you wanted to point me in the direction of posts that would be great. $\endgroup$ – tom Dec 1 '14 at 1:47
  • $\begingroup$ @tom See edit. I think those are the latest, most relevant links, but there are no doubt others too dealing with more nuances. $\endgroup$ – user10851 Dec 1 '14 at 2:56
  • $\begingroup$ @ChrisWhite many thanks for the edit - really appreciate it. It is clear that questions about experiment design etc. might easily get labelled engineering and could be at risk of closure - great to see the guidelines of what is ok. $\endgroup$ – tom Dec 1 '14 at 3:14
  • $\begingroup$ @ChrisWhite Thanks for editing in the links. I was on my phone so I couldn't easily add the links at the time. $\endgroup$ – tpg2114♦ Dec 1 '14 at 3:41
  • $\begingroup$ @tom that's true, and in fact I think the community hasn't really settled on a clear definition of what is an acceptable (for this site) experimental physics question and what is an engineering question. Unfortunately we don't get enough experimental questions to have a good sense of what makes a good one. When it comes to those, feel free to post on meta if you run into any examples you're not sure about. $\endgroup$ – David Z Dec 1 '14 at 6:12

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