2008/11/4 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
For some time now featured articles have been promoted at an average rate exceeding one per-day. The undeniable consequence of this is that unless the rate of FA promotions drops off most featured articles will *never* make it to the main page. I see no reason to expect the promotion rate to fall, an several arguments why we should expect it to increase.
Yet, being featured on the main page is still cited by users as a big motivator behind their work on featured articles.
There is a simple measure that we could take which would substantially reduce this gap: We could regularlly run two featured articles on the main page like we are doing today.
This was suggested before (on this mailing list, I think) and people didn't seem keen (I like the idea, personally). I remember someone pointing out that at the current rate even with 2 articles a day we would never catch up, but that's not a reason not to try - even if we accept we can't feature every FA, we can still try and feature as many as possible.
By doing so we could also have more flexibility in our choices. When two interesting things fall on a single day, we could possibly run both. We could run similar articles for comparison, or dramatically different articles for contrasting.
My idea last time was to split FAs into two categories (I think I suggested pop culture articles and more academic articles, although someone else suggested bios and non-bios which might be better - easier to define, certainly) and take one from each, that way people are more likely to find an FA they are interested in. An exception could obviously be made when they are topical articles or interesting pairs.
With the order randomization that we're using for today's two articles we could compare differential click through rates and learn more about what people will click on. We could offer readers additional choices. To me this seems like a lot of advantages, at the cost of a little less attention on a single article.
I didn't realise it was randomised, that's clever! I'd assumed it was alphabetical by surname (which is how it displayed for me for the first time - I've refreshed now and seen it switch, very clever indeed!). Are we gathering the appropriate stats at the moment or was that just an idea for the future (it's a good idea, either way)?
(When we're done with this discussion we could move onto the fact that both of today's articles are hard-full-protected and how nice it would be if we were using revision flagging with display-flagged instead...)
It was unavoidable in this case - flagged revs would certainly have been a better solution. We'll get there eventually!