Forum:Featured Articles revamp

This is an idea that was at the top of my "so-called" agenda, and really should have been put in a forum a long time ago. So this is it, we need a revamp of the Featured Article system. I've been wanting to this for a long time because of so many reasons.

First thing, the Featured Article should be more emphasised. At the moment, many new contributors are the only ones taking part, and you'll pretty much never see any admins nominate anything. I feel this is because of the mediocre nomiantion system and the page looks very unprofessional: out-of-place from our other pages that looked organised and professional. I'll elaborate on the specifics of the new idea later. In fact, there are people not even linking the article in question! And the archive is horrible.

Secondly, because of this system, articles like this are being nominated (often by unheard of users). That would be pretty pathetic in other wikis, but it's as if they made it and therefore they want it shown on the main page, even if it's a bad article. I'm going to use the Ratchet & Clank wiki and Wikipedia as examples of having a great FA system and will be linking to them regularly. On wikis like that, you usually need articles with over 10k bytes! That article is just over 1k bytes and most of it is See Also! Here's an example of a great featured article: http://ratchet.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Nefarious

It's over 70,000 bytes. Yeah. That long and that well written - no grammar issues.

Now here's how I think the system should be changed. It should be a section vote, like how other stuff here has been changed. Something similar to the Requests for Adminship system where there is a For and Against for every article. Now, here's one in action: http://ratchet.wikia.com/wiki/Ratchet_%26_Clank_wiki:Featured_article

Now, notice there are people voting for more than one article. This is because they use a queue there, something also used in Wikipedia I believe. Essentially, the FA gets updated every couple of weeks. Any FA that has passed in its vote gets put into the queue (que) and the first in the que becomes the next FA and so on. There is a continous flow of improving articles for them to become an FA and people are awarded for this. We even consider FAs at the R&C wiki to be more valuable as sign of contribution than your editcount! However, a que is optional and means that we need a lot of people to make FAs at one time. Also, if you don't have a que, you can make a certain article become FA for a certain date, so if a new party came out and it has a good article, you can make sure it is featured on the main page during the party, while a que may delay it. Tampering with a que is pretty sticky as well, and you don't want to end up doing that.

So what I'm proposing is a section vote for Featured articles, a queue (this is optional) and a proper archive. Examples from the R&C wiki are below.


 * Featured article voting: http://ratchet.wikia.com/wiki/Ratchet_%26_Clank_wiki:Featured_article
 * Featured article archive: http://ratchet.wikia.com/wiki/Ratchet_%26_Clank_wiki:Featured_article/archive
 * Featured article que: http://ratchet.wikia.com/wiki/Ratchet_%26_Clank_wiki:Featured_article/que

By the way, I also think that we should emphasise the Featured article on the mainpage a lot, and make sure it is well written on the mainpage as well. The current one is mess, no links, image should not be a thumbnail and nothing bolded. Seriously... -- Tigernose    Chat  •  Edits  20:20, August 7, 2010 (UTC)