On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 7:12 AM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
John Vandenberg wrote:
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 5:33 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com
wrote:
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.
Do we have a graph indicating no. of FA's over time? Is the rate
increasing?
There's some numbers here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Featured_...
The rate of new FAs increased through 2007, but is about the same per month in 2008 as in 2007 (or even slightly lower). However that rate is still about 60 per month, or about twice as many new FAs per month as featured FAs that month. Featuring two articles per day wouldn't clear the backlog, but would at least keep it approximately constant. =]
There is also a statistics page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_statistics
That page shows the change in FAs per month (taking into account the number of demotions through the featured article review process), though for the purposes of looking at the number of pages in the queue for the main page, it is the number of new FAs that matters. It would also help to know what the current backlog is.
That list is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles_that_haven%27t_been...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles_that_haven%27t_been_on_the_Main_Page
Though it hasn't been updated since 1 September 2008 (as it says on the page).
And the process for selecting the TFA is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Today%27s_featured_article/requests
Apologies if this has all been mentioned earlier. I've only just joined the mailing list.
The last time this came up on-wiki, I said something along the lines of trying to encourage directing more people towards portals or the featured content portal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Featured_content
But that is, admittedly, a very different reading experience to the Main Page, and anything other than the Main Page will get far less click-throughs. But there must be *some* way to showcase our best articles other than having various lists. Possibly the *other* ways of distributing the TFA (the RSS feed and the e-mail feed) could be expanded with less worries about screen space.
How much are those distributions methods (e-mail, RSS) used by the public?
For past discussions on the FA page queue, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/reque...
The really big debate (leading to the reform of the request page) was at "Discontinuing the use of this page", though this was all back in May 2007, so things may have changed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/reque...
Some examples of sections in that discussion, or following that discussion, are:
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/reque...
"Make it clear they can't all be TFAed"
Marskell said: "The fact is that if we don't do some version of two per day we have to accept that close to 50% of promotions are never going to make it to the main page. The stats speak for themselves: net FAC increase is 35 to 40, while FAR consistently removes 15 to 20; that's a gross of about 55 per month, and thus 25 surplus." Marskell 12:00, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/reque...
"Some more thoughts"
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/reque...
"Promote existing pages to increase exposure of featured content"
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/reque...
What is the second most-visited Wikipedia page"
Of particular note, I think, is what Sandy said at one point (agreeing with Marskell):
"Not all FAs will appear on the main page. Period. Are people really writing FAs for that purpose? Weird — I would really think a number one rank on Google would do the trick [...]" SandyGeorgia 15:14, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
That is a fair point, though I still think that imaginatively using *all* the FA content we have in multiple ways (repackaging it according to the audience), rather than having an excessive focus on the Main Page, would help to raise the profile of Wikipedia's best articles still further.
Carcharoth
PS. Sorry if more than one post gets through - a mix-up between gmail and googlemail domains.