Changes to the Featured Articles (un)nomination process?

Glowsquid

Shine Sprite
Retired Forum Mod
Retired Wiki Staff
'Shroom Consultant
The process for featuring and unfeaturing articles is kind of a mess. Nominations run months (which wouldn't be that big of a problem... if that didn't involve posting an eyesore of a template on the relevant articles in the meantime) before anyone realize that yeah, this isn't going anywhere, half of the pages are taken by worthless support votes that have no point and all-around, it's a clunky process that has been on life-support for some time. Obviously, the fact that most of the eligible pages have already been featured is a factor, but I think the system also has a role in that.

changes I'm proposing:

Support votes

In response to concerns about "fan votes" shitting up the system, the rules were amended so that only the nominator can give a reason and every support votes after that can't have anything written next to them. This means that half of any given FA nomination page can be taken up by a bunch of links that are actively required to have no value whatsoever, and when some peoples do write something more than a link to their userpage, it's edited out because "it's against the rules". That is asinine.

What I propose is to simply scrap the support vote header entirely and have whoever nominates the article write a reasonably lengthy (ie: more than two lines) text explaining why they feel the article is good enough to be a FA, perhaps highlighting bits of exceptionally good writing and technical info not present in other, lesser articles, and pre-emptively responding to potential oppose reasons (For ex, "There are a bunch of one liners sections near the end but that's because Toad's appearances are really that minor in all of them)", and have whoever agrees with the nominator duke it out in the comments. It will cut the fat and perhaps encourage better though-out nominations rather than someone posting yeah this article is great!!!! for a shitty page without explaining why.

With the removal of support votes, there could be a minimum number of opposers needed to block a nomination (I'm thinking 5), as to prevent headaches due to inactive users and filibuster.

Deadline

The "A nomination may fail if it has been there for 4 months and the opposers to supporters ratio is 5:1." and "delete after a month of inactivity" rules just don't work. Perhaps because of laziness (as it requires manually checking the edit history), perhap because's nobody's sure what "resets" the counter, but either way, I suggest to just have a flat deadline (like say, two months) instead, with said deadline being included at the template at the top of every FA nominations page (something like "[article] was nominated for Featured Article status at 08:33, 24 July 2012‎. If the nomination does not pass by 23:59, September 25 2012, it will be considered failed").



Anyway... thoughts on the above? Any suggestions to improve the system? Or is it even worth changing the FA system at this point?
 
Just a question: How does the nomination pass?
 
Have the nomination last for a certain ammount of time (preferably more than one week since FAs are kind of a big deal) without the required number of oppose-but it might be an idea to require a certain number of users to "co-sign" the nomination to ensure that a sufficient number of peoples are aware of it before it pass. I don't really think there could be a scenario where a bad page gets featured simply because nobody except the nominator saw it, but you never know.
 
Actually the reason the one month thing doesn't work (I know because I actually check them) is because everytime a nomination get's close to passing or failing somebody fucking votes for it.
 
Anyone remember how the Luigi nomination went on for about two years or so? Good times...

On topic, I'm a little dubious of the usage of "co-signing". It just seems exactly like what we have already.
 
GreenDisaster said:
Anyone remember how the Luigi nomination went on for about two years or so? Good times...
Look at the unfeatured thing for the Goomba article it's not going to pass but for reasons that I don't understand people keep voting on it
EDIT: also glowsquid I do have a problem with your proposed system because it would theoretically allow this Shy Guy to be featured despite the fact that as I pointed out on the Nomination page it doesn't have information on all of it's appearances
 
The problem with free-for-all discussions is that stuff can slip by. Requiring at least five other users to sign-off is really the only way to prevent "no quorums" from being ill-advised passes, however "co-signers" and "supporters" are essentially the same thing. Maybe the "Support" header shouldn't be scrapped, but as long as there's five supporters, the overall number is irrelevant, with the real decision being waged in the comments, not the votes.

On the other hand, I'd argue that rather than having users vote "Oppose", the cutoff tally should be of counter-arguments themselves - that way, if an issue is fixed, there's no worry of outdated opposing votes preventing the FA from passing. I.e. there could be bullets saying "crufty Personality section, incomplete History, disorganaized stats section". While anyone could add the points, they can also be removed by anyone after discussing it in the comments (i.e. if two or three people agree that a counter-argument's unreasonable, or that the issue's been fixed). As long as there's valid counter-arguments (or some threshold), the FA nom can't pass, but if there's no issues and at least 5 supporters, it's good to go.


A flat 2-month deadline is a good idea, as is including the date in template.
 
I strongly agree to change the process. By nominating the Shy Guy page, I hoped to have dedicated Shy Guy fans work together to improve the page vastly and feature it. What DID happen? Thirteen n00bs plus IceShadow support it with NO REASON. Well, at least MiniStar volunteered to clean up the Mario Party section, but come on. The only "improvement" I've seen to the page since my edits is a higher-quality image for TTYD courtesy of Lindsey. We really need to have a more organized system for featuring and hopefully we can have truly amazing featured articles.
 
Thirteen n00bs plus IceShadow support it with NO REASON

And they're not doing anything wrong. I can't be arsed to find whatever proposal amended the rules, but the FA page clearly states
[quote author=The How to nominate section]If you support, simply sign with your name, without adding a reason (unless you are the first supporter and thus the nominator).[/quote]

and, as mentioned in the OP, anyone who (gasp) actually give their reasons have it edited out because "it's against the rule". A great example of false compromise.
 
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