[WikiEN-l] Two main page FAs per day.

Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell at gmail.com
Tue Nov 4 18:33:54 UTC 2008


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.

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.

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.

(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...)



More information about the WikiEN-l mailing list