WikiFur talk:Featured article candidates

OK, so we finally have a process for choosing featured articles. In theory, this procedure should get some interest in editing said articles before they hit the front page, and hopefully ensure they are consistently of a high quality.

I'm not entirely sure we have sufficient editorial interest to have enough debate about featured article candidates for this to work, but I'm willing to give it a go. If this doesn't work out, I'll go back to doing it myself, but I'm hoping that this will at least make my life easier (and red links on the front page less likely :-). --GreenReaper^(talk) 18:42, 11 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Future candidates

How about if we create a list of potential future candidates for Featured article? That is, articles that need some fixing up but which could be good Featured articles once they've been expanded and improved. For example, I noticed there haven't been any Featured articles about movies yet, and I think either Animalympics or The Lion King would be good candidates but they need a bit of expansion and/or polish before they're ready. I know of several other articles in a similar state and I'm sure others can think of some too. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mwalimu (talk • contribs) .

That would be pretty much what this list is for. Ideally if you can see the problem you should fix it first, but if not, I don't see a huge problem with just listing it here in the hope that someone else can. --GreenReaper^(talk) 09:25, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

9/11 Furry Status Page

Is 9/11 Furry Status Page a good enough article to be a feature article? (Perhaps as a feature article for the second week of September?) --EarthFurst 09:59, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Nominate it and find out. I think it's got some interesting promise and because of the timing, it could be relevant. What I'd like to see is as much of those red names turned blue as possible and maybe some sort of image. I don't know what, I don't think that an image of the Towers burning would be appropriate. Ideas?--Kendricks Redtail 10:50, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Archiving

I'm boldly moving various nominations into Archive/ since I don't think discussion from a year and longer previous is helpful. -- Sine 07:18, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Marking as ratified

This page has been marked as {{proposed}} since it was created. The fact that this is the way we've done this for so long gives us de facto consensus on the actual featured article process. Changing the template from {{proposed}} to {{guideline}}. --CodyDenton 07:42, 2 June 2011 (EDT)

Sadly it's clearly not ideal as demonstrated by the consistent lack of featured articles. Suggestions on streamlining the process are welcome. (I'm half-tempted to replace it with the lede of a random article meeting certain criteria.) --GreenReaper^(talk) 03:13, 9 June 2011 (EDT)

If a random article is selected, it could be chosen from here: User:Rat/CandidatesForFeaturedArticle --Rat 13:04, 9 June 2011 (EDT)

Holy--the page about me is on that list! I'm thunderstruck. Equivamp 13:09, 9 June 2011 (EDT)

I'm not sure that it's the process that's broken. How much of this is just that we are SO much smaller than Wikipedia, with a proportionally smaller number of active editors? Admittedly the process to actually promote an article is non-trivial, but it should be somewhat so. (The rationale being, it's easy enough for an experienced editor to figure out the process, and it serves as a sort of competency metric.) It might be better if nominating an article were more straightforward to newer users though.

Having said all of that, I agree that we've gotta do something to freshen up the front page. If things look static, it will reduce pageviews over time. Less traffic means less new editors and content, which further erodes traffic. How hard would it be to code a rotation, that loads a different featured article from the pool each time? Sure, it means that content gets rehashed. But isn't that what's happening now, for months on end? Far better to have a rotation of articles than a single stale one, because we're getting new visitors all the time and those articles are still new to THEM.

Yes, I do think we need more featured content. Now that I've put out several fires in RL, I am trying to be active in helping with that, but I'm only one person. The curators, likewise, have their paws full. I think we've got a nice supply of featured article candidates for a good start, but I definitely feel that a rotation is an important element to this if it can be implemented in the Wikia code. (I don't know MediaWiki under the hood, although I'm tempted to install an instance of it for an internal wiki at my company so I can learn it. Looks like there are variables like CURRENTDOW / CURRENTDAY that can be used to set up daily rotations but I can't find anything akin to the standard PHP "random rotation" scripts.) --CodyDenton 21:55, 9 June 2011 (EDT)

Comics?

We've recently had our second Featured Article in a row about a comic. Why are we doing this when we already have a Featured Comic on the front page? Are we that short on ideas for other articles worthy of featuring that we have to recycle previously featured comics as featured articles? (Both of the comics in question have previously been Featured Comics.) I'm open to the possibility of allowing previously Featured Comics to be re-featured in that section (which we currently don't do), but I'm ambivalent at best about comics as featured articles, recycled or not. --mwalimu 13:38, 23 November 2011 (EST)

I agree that the current situation is unacceptable. The issue we face is that:

• There isn't enough of a drive to create articles good enough to be considered worth featuring
• As there aren't a ready supply of such articles, anyone seeking to feature an article needs to work on it, which most don't have time to do
• The lack of newly-featured articles causes there to be even less of a reason for people to work towards them in the first place

What we could do with is someone who will commit to making sure we have a featured article every {period X}, even if they have to write it themselves. Failing that, it might be best to consider replacing the section entirely, perhaps with some random or semi-random selection of article ledes, or a random pick from prior features. --GreenReaper^(talk) 18:17, 21 January 2012 (EST)