On 6/6/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On 6/6/07, Joe Szilagyi szilagyi@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/6/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Some people thought it was important to have a single person choosing which
articles are featured on the front page. Those of us who disagreed
and
thought that it should instead be chosen by a collaborative process
were
outvoted, and conceded. Mark was named "featured article dictator",
then
it was changed to "featured article director", and proceeded to extend
his
powers to what they are now. No one really challenged him, because
those
of us who wanted the process to be community pretty much stopped participating altogether in the whole featured article mess.
I never messed around much with FA during my time. Who on earth made that dumb decision to give him (or anyone) alone such power? And why on Earth hasn't it be undone in the name of common sense?
I believe it was User:Zocky that came up with the idea, and the vast majority of people who commented supported it.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Zocky/FA_Tomorrow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/archi...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/archive_2#A_simple_proposal
While reading this I see there is need for some more background. If you recall, the original front page of Wikipedia was just a list of categories, similar to [[Wikipedia:Categorical_index]] but in black and white text without the pretty icons and with fewer categories. (Actually I don't know if this was the "original" front page but it was the one there when I got there.) Then the page was prettified with "in the news" and "featured article" and all that other stuff. I'm not sure exactly when the page protection was on or off but eventually a system was devised where the main page consisted solely of templates and the main page was protected but the templates weren't. Featured articles was one of these templates. Mark (User:Raul###) was the one who pretty much always updated the featured article template, daily.
Back in 2004 the use of so called "fair use" images was rampant. I was one of the big proponents of the idea that these images should not be used at all in a free encyclopedia, and that to the extent they are used it should be a very rare occurrence. Anyway, one thing I had a huge problem with was the use of non-free images on the front page of the project. My feeling was that even if we are going to have such images in the encyclopedia, we shouldn't be featuring them on the front page. One such image was put into a featured article blurb, and I got into an edit war on that template page over the inclusion of the image. That template was declared untouchable by anyone but Mark and his minions, and I was temporarily banned from the site for edit warring on the main page.
So that's the background of the situation, and what is meant by "wishing to decrease the likelihood unfortunate incidents occuring again".
Anthony