Poor, Edmund W wrote:
Today, the main page's current event box had this
for its lead story:
>Nearly 380 tons of explosives are missing from an Iraqi site
>meant for Saddam Hussein's dismantled nuclear program but never
>secured by the U.S. military.
>
>
Well, this story shouldn't have even been there to begin with. The
point of the Current Events section on the front page is to highlight
quality Wikipedia articles of timely interest, not necessarily to put
the most breaking news of the day. The article that story linked was
not very good, and at least when I last checked it, there was very
little information on this topic in it---essentially one bullet point in
a timeline repeating that exact sentence. We should only link articles
on the front page when they've been updated with significant information
on the story, such that a user clicking through actually finds something.
Similarly, there was an item on verdicts in the Pitcairn trial, but the
story it linked to at the time hadn't actually been updated with the
verdicts, and was littered with future tense of "will be decided" and so on.
I think in many cases it's not really people deliberately doing this,
but just not realizing what the main page section is for. It's *not*
for whatever is the most newsworthy item of the day, but for newsworthy
items *on which we have the best articles*. I think a good general
guideline is to not add anything to "in the news" unless you've
personally edited the page you're linking to make sure it's up to date
and contains a reasonable amount of relevant information.
-Mark