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

[Thomas Dalton]

2008/11/4 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:
> 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.

This was suggested before (on this mailing list, I think) and people
didn't seem keen (I like the idea, personally). I remember someone
pointing out that at the current rate even with 2 articles a day we
would never catch up, but that's not a reason not to try - even if we
accept we can't feature every FA, we can still try and feature as many
as possible.

> 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.

My idea last time was to split FAs into two categories (I think I
suggested pop culture articles and more academic articles, although
someone else suggested bios and non-bios which might be better -
easier to define, certainly) and take one from each, that way people
are more likely to find an FA they are interested in. An exception
could obviously be made when they are topical articles or interesting
pairs.

> 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.

I didn't realise it was randomised, that's clever! I'd assumed it was
alphabetical by surname (which is how it displayed for me for the
first time - I've refreshed now and seen it switch, very clever
indeed!). Are we gathering the appropriate stats at the moment or was
that just an idea for the future (it's a good idea, either way)?

> (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...)

It was unavoidable in this case - flagged revs would certainly have
been a better solution. We'll get there eventually!