2008/9/24 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
An easy way to do that is to separate all the articles into two categories (just in an abstract sense, I'm not talking about any kind of fork, just listing some articles in one column in Raul's notebook and some articles in the other) and pick one from each category each day. There are various pairs of categories that would work, I think "traditional" and "pop-culture" (fairly loosely defined to make sure every article fits into at least one of them, if it fits into both, no harm done) would be best.
I suspect a neater split might be "biographical" and "non-biographical" - we have 2350 FAs, of which 550 are biographical; the number of biographical FAs seems to be growing at 15-30 a month, and they're generally speaking a topic that lends itself well to a one-person drive to get to FA status.
On the other hand, I don't think we need such a split :-) We're not under any obligation to show every FA on the front page - indeed, even if we do ramp up the number featured at any one time, we'd likely get ahead of ourselves again in a year or two.
Perhaps rather than having any formal two-stream system, we should just do what DYK does and increase the frequency of updates? Running two FAs a day might be simpler if we just changed over at 00.00 UTC and then again at 12.00 UTC... but then we'd have to stop calling it "today's featured article". Hmm.