WikiFur talk:Featured articles

Article of the Day?

Just to comment: I run the interlingua wikipedia, which has roughly as many articles as WikiFur does right now, and we do an article of the week, not article of the day. Until WikiFur gets to about 10'000 articles, that might be a better choice. Almafeta 12:21, 27 Sep 2005 (UTC)

To date, we have featured 39 articles of 1618, or 1 in every 41. That's probably more than is appropriate - although the article quality has been pretty good so far, it's not easy to find good articles to feature. Even if articles keep being added at their current rate (around 15-20 a day) this ratio will actually get lower, although this could partially be compensated for by improved quality of existing articles.

One possibility at this point is to start the cycle again, on a once-a-week basis. There weren't as many people on Wikifur back when you started running feature articles, so I think there'll be little of the "Oh, I've seen that" syndrome. --Tom Howling 16:40, 28 Sep 2005 (UTC)

As I see it, there's a few options:

• Continue on the current one-a-day schedule and hope that better articles start springing up
• Slow the schedule to something more sustainable - say, once or twice a week, maybe keeping older ones linked there for a while
• Change our system of featuring, perhaps to a combination of "featured article" and "X of the week", or similar

Whatever we do, I believe people could be more ivolved with the process of making good articles, although some of that might have to wait for the reconstruction of the Community Portal.

So, what do you guys think? Random opinions welcome! --GreenReaper^(talk) 04:58, 28 Sep 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Almafeta's suggestion to move to weekly features, or at least (as you suggest) to slow the schedule to no more than two per week. As for finding articles to feature...perhaps getting a volunteer to take on the role of featured article editor? I suspect having one person responsible for the selection would make it happen more reliably than the "Wiki way" of waiting for random acts of boldness, and in this case we're interested in some sort of reliable schedule. Given the perk of it being such a visible role, I'd be surprised if it turns out that difficult to find a stream of volunteers interested in holding the post for a few weeks apiece. --Sebkha^(talk) 09:31, 28 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Just a quick vote for "one per week" - your second option. Tevildo

Another vote for one per week.--Duncan da Husky 12:04, 28 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Just for comparison purposes: Wikipedia has marked 1 in 961 articles as being 'featured'. I would personally prefer 2/week, not 1/week -- maybe we could set two days as 'New Featured Article Day'. Almafeta 16:16, 28 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Proofreading and checking-through of featured articles

I think we could do with some sort of policy / things happening flow to proofread and check through (potential) featured articles. It's disconcerting to see such things as ill-formed section headings (too many capitals rather than the house style of lowercasing) and obvious grammatical errors in featured articles. -- Sine 05:09, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't disagree. I usually do a more careful check of our featured articles, but this time I only had a quick look over things to make sure it didn't look bad, as I have had little time this weekend (extra work to do for Monday) and I also wanted to remove the old featured article which had been there for three weeks.

The thing is, nobody has actually participated in the current featured article process for any length of time, and so it's tended to fall upon me to make it happen, usually when the week rolls around and we start getting redlinks on the front page. Sometimes that works out well, but not when I'm rushed. I would like to have more people involved, but it doesn't seem to happen.

• Is the system too complicated? (in which case what would simplify it)
• Do people think featured articles are something that should just be left to me? (not a view I share)
• Are people just not motivated to do something about it until it looks wrong to them? (if so, what would motivate them?)

I want to improve our featured article system. How should we go about it? --GreenReaper^(talk) 05:22, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

GreenReaper wrote "[..] when the week rolls around and we start getting redlinks on the front page". What was generating those redlinks? Was it that the system thought it was switching to a new feature article but one hadn't been selected? (I'm guessing you're not talking about the FurPile feature that used to be on the front page) --EarthFurst 20:04, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes. The system works by including the contents of the page at [[WikiFur:This week's featured article/Week {{CURRENTWEEK}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}]]. When the week changes, CURRENTWEEK increases by one. If that page is not there, it shows the link to the page instead. --GreenReaper^(talk) 20:10, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

GreenReaper asked about participation and motivation. I have two guesses:

• (1) previous contributors being less available (Searching for jobs, housing etc. Vacation Etc.)
• (2) new potential contributors not being aware of the need for their input in the selection of FA (features articles).

As for why I haven't been participating in the FA process

• (A) I've had sporadic net access (mainly from sharing computers and RL-tasks such as a successful search for a new apartment to rent) (for a week I was dogsitting for someone and their computer sucked horribly) so I'm behind on things such as email,
• (B) I wasn't aware of the lack of shared participation on the FA process
• (C) I've thought about nominating Furgonomics, but I assume it should be a stronger article before it gets nominated (I'd like to add examples to the Furgonomics article, but can't think of any such examples) --EarthFurst 20:41, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Another 2 thoughts on FA participation.

• (3) Maybe some are being scared off by the thought of analyzing (various?) large articles

As for myself,

• (D) I'm not familiar with some of the subjects being nominated .. so unsure if an article is deficient.
• (E) I try to allocate time to start articles that I think should be at WikiFur and thus that time is spent not checking nominated pages) --EarthFurst 21:02, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

The moderate success of Comic of the Week shows that people are at least willing to nominate articles. However, if they have to go through a process of posting notification messages and writing a separate template of justification, that chance of participation goes way, way down. I think we need to radically simplify it. --GreenReaper^(talk) 21:06, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Just thought of another possible solution. Add a request to nomination rules. Request that people (whether or not they are the nominator):

• (A) contact forum(s)/mailing-lists(s) dedicated to the nominated subject for assistance with nominated articles.
• (B) after posting to those forum(s)/list(s), post to the nomination thread saying where contact has been made. --EarthFurst 21:15, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

New articles?

Are we going to have any new featured articles, the current one has been up for some time now.