Forum:Featured Article Revamp

I think we need to change up the Feature Article (FA) from what it is right now. The idea is still great, but I think it needs to be changed, and here's some reasons why:


 * 1) We're running out of featured articles.  There are fewer and fewer votes and nominations every week and the quality of the articles have been going steadily downhill, IMO.  We don't have a billion articles to use, so the really good ones are going to go first.
 * 2) It's becoming an improvement drive.  I'm of the opinion that articles should be of featured quality before they're nominated, not nominated and then fixed up to become featured quality.  We're going to have a clean-up thing that will deal with this issue whenever the main page gets revamped.
 * 3) A week is too short. Pages that are of good quality go down too fast to be replaced by other ones that aren't always as good.
 * 4) A week is too long. A week seems like a long time to find an article to nominate, especially when you can't think of anything or the stuff nominated isn't up to scratch.
 * 5) Fewer and fewer votes/nominations.  I haven't voted or nominated in a while not because I don't like the idea or concept, it's that I can't think of anything to nominate that would be worthwhile. Articles that I do see nominated, I don't always agree with, therefore don't vote.
 * 6) Articles are being nominated for the wrong reasons.  Too often do I see things like "we should nominated X because we haven't had X in a while" or "X should be featured because X was featured", or similar.  That's not the point.  Featured articles should be featured because of their quality not because of any relation to anything.  If it's good, it deserves to be featured, end of story.

While it may seem that I'm beating this to death, here's my solution: We switch it up from weekly to monthly. A lot of other wikis have monthly featured articles, and it seems to work fine. A month is plenty of time for an article to get the limelight it deserves and enough time to improve/find another article in the meantime. We also wouldn't run into the problem of having to use lower-quality articles. If it's decided, we obviously need to be more extensive with voting and nominating, with a strong majority rather than a win by default with one nominated article and two votes. Rad140 (Message) 17:44, May 25, 2010 (UTC)