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

[John Vandenberg]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 5:33 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at 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?

> 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.

Is there a technical description of this order randomisation
functionality?  It look like it is simply a class "dshuf" and a
JavaScript function.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Today%27s_featured_article/November_4,_2008&diff=249553958&oldid=249549295
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.js&diff=249554621&oldid=249110718

p.s. there have been some changes to the dshuf function:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki%3ACommon.js&diff=249597444&oldid=249554621

>  To me this seems like a lot of advantages, at the cost of a little
> less attention on a single article.

Browser window real-estate is precious.  Two simultaneously displayed
FAs means less space a blurb for each, and a more "busy" look.  Two
alternatives come to mind; are either of these possible with the order
randomisation code.

1. have more than one FA per day, only display one per mainpage load,
and balance them out so each obtains similar number of pageviews on
the main page.  A crude way of doing this would be to use
{{CURRENTTIMESTAMP}} or {{NUMBEROFEDITS}} mod <number of FAs> to
select which one is going to be displayed, and redirect the browser to
different main pages so that they are cached effectively.

AJAX could be used to load the next FA for the day after a reasonable
interval.  A "view next FA" button could give the same functionality
to those with JavaScript disabled.

2. use CSS/JS to display a number of FAs in tabs in the same spot
where the FA currently resides.  A similar approach to dshuf could be
used to ensure that each FA tab is given roughly the same amount of
pageviews throughout the day.

Both approaches allow more than 2 FAs per day, which means we can
"catch up" with the backlog of pages that need to hit the front page.

--
John Vandenberg