Forum:Featured articles

You all probably know what featured articles are. On this wiki, they are articles showcases on the Main page.

My home wiki is Wookieepedia. There, we have three different statuses an article can have. Comprehensive, good, and featured. The articles are all high-quality; the only difference is that CAs can have no more than 250 words, GAs no more than 3000 words (but more than 250) and FAs more than 1000 words. I'm member of both the AgriCorps and the Inquisitorius. Those are the reviewing panels managing the status article systems. We have a very high quality expectation for our articles to ensure that no un-worthy article passes. Now, why am I telling you this?

Because, your featured article system... sucks. No offense, but it does. You are essentially pulling random long articles from the wiki and then voting on them, without seemingly putting any effort into them. You then apparently vote for it, but there are really no demands except a small numbers of rules that really do not concern the quality of the article itself. For example, currently Zombies (mode) is up for voting. I looked at the article for five seconds and immediately spotted some errors, including the improper capitalization of a heading. Of course, I'm part of the review panels on Wookieepedia so I am pretty strict in reviewing, but it really struck me how your articles are inconsistent and are not looking good.

What am I trying to do? I am not looking to introduce a review panel and a strict set of rules, because that's a way too big step. I suggest that the voting system is changed: An article needs x support votes in order to pass. In addition to this, there will be an "Oppose" section. Under this section, users can leave improvement suggestions. An article wouldn't be able to become a featured article if there are any outstanding suggestions, a.k.a. objections. Other users would try to improve the article according to the suggestions and eventually the one who left the objection would strike it and support the article.

Instead of having a weekly featured article, I suggest just nominating articles like explained above and add them to a list. Using option tags, you could have a "random featured" article on the page. The current system forces the wiki users to every time choose a different article, which leads to lower-quality pages being selected. Obviously, these changes have a lot of small details that need to be defined, but we'll work on that once we agree something must be done.

Does this seem to make any sense? Agree with my concerns? Discuss and debate below. 1358 (Talk)  20:07, November 1, 2011 (UTC)