Seeing as how our encyclopedia has expanded to include over 4,000 articles, I am going to suggest that we move to a weekly rather than monthly rotation of featured articles, starting with the end of June (so any voting already underway isn't effected). There are plenty of examples of great work on this site, and while I understand that not every article should be a featured article, we would still only be doing less than 2% of the entire database a year. A database that is still due for some major expansion. Willo talk contribs email 06:47, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
- I understand the principle but I have serious doubts that such a thing will be a true community effort. With a month to decide, there is time to develop competition between different choices. If it was weekly, however, one person might remember to vote and then their choice will get to be the default FA. Our community doesn't really "rock the vote" as it stands with 4 weeks, so shortening it to seven days will be pushing things. Additionally, only a handful of articles are for sufficiently significant content. We will quickly exhaust all the major character articles and then it will be a toss up between episode guides and the occasional other random article. I'm also underwhelmed when I think of how bloated Category:Featured articles will become. Blue Rook talk contribs 07:32, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
- First off, I understand your hesitation. However, I am going to propose an alternate theory to you. Perhaps because it is a month between each voting period, sometimes users don't think of voting/think they have already voted for the month. A weekly count would allow the votes to happen more often, and, quite frankly, allow the voting page to show up more often in the Recent Changes cue. That would remind casual editors to vote. Furthermore, I doubt the featured articles category would be any more bloated than, say Category:Characters. Perhaps we could have a test run in July, when traffic will no doubt be at a lull? Willo talk contribs email 19:12, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
- I think this will 1) trivialize the designation of "featured article" and 2) will also be too big a change and too much of a burden on the community to expect worthy articles to be chosen each week. Finally, though this isn't one of the major concerns, I think this deserves mentioning: 3) the process for updating the wiki for each new FA is rather involved, especially the first step... and, looking at the recent history of Template:FeaturedArticle, you can see it's mostly me and Simon who've been doing the majority of the grunt work. I know that much of the burden of updating the wiki will fall to me and Simon as usual, and I simply cannot do it. Primarily though my major issues against this proposal are #1 and #2.
- More people need to weigh in on this of course. Blue Rook talk contribs 20:30, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
I agree with all of your points, Rook. The fact of the matter is that we simply don't get a huge amount of participation in the FA voting, and now that the off-season has begun, so will our traffic. If this had been proposed this back in January, I might've entertained the idea (but probably not), but it certainly wouldn't work right now. --proudhug 03:50, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
- And I think the main issue that needs to be remembered is, as Blue Rook said, we do have over 4000 articles but less than 1/3 of them would be eligible for featured articles. I can't see Fairbanks looking very good on the main page. --SignorSimon (talk/contribs/email) 07:43, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
- Let's say it's only 1/4th of pages that would even be considered for featured article status. That's still 1000 articles. It would take 18 years on a weekly basis to go through 1000 articles. I would be more than happy to assist with the work load required to complete this, as well.
- Furthermore, I don't feel like this would "trivialize" or otherwise negatively effect the featured article status. One of the ideas of a the featured articles is that they are supposed to serve as a guide as some of the best work on the site. There is a lot of quality work on the site, and it is going unrecognized.
- Finally, I suggest the limited traffic is a good thing, not a bad thing, as it allows the wikia to operate on it's own without new users. It allows the 24 wikia community to run it out as a trial before we are hit with increased traffic again in January.