User:Gadget850/MainPage

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Featured Articles appearing on the Main Page

So- you've and a few other editors have put a lot of hard work into an article. You've put it up for FAC and got beat up by some other editors. It made FA and now it is going to appear on the Main Page. You carefully crafted article appears... and is quickly torn to shreds by vandals.

OK- we've gotten past the bad part. In my experience, every article that appears on the Main Page is subject to heavy vandalism. You may get as many as 500 edits during the day it is featured. Editors will blank your page, add nonsense and insert profanities. Some will find that one last spelling error. Others will make a mistaken change that makes you realize that there needs a better explanation. There will also be some editors that add insightful sentences or paragraphs. My experience is that about half the edits will be vandalism, half will be reverts and there will be a handful of good edits.

One of the goals of the Main Page is to attract new editors who will contribute usefully to the article. This can work if you let it, but it can also be frustrating for an article in which you have an intellectual investment. You need to step back and let go of your emotional involvement. Remember, you don't own the article. Editing when you are mad and upset is not a good idea.

Someone is going to think of asking that the page be protected. Please see the policy Wikipedia:Don't protect Main Page featured articles to understand why this is probably will not happen, and if it does it will be for a short time– perhaps an hour or so.

I recommend that the maintaining editors hold tight and let the process work. Don't drive yourself crazy by trying to make all the reverts. There are lots of other editors and bots who will see the problems and make those fixes. Unless you have a team dedicated to making fixes for a full day, you will not be able to keep up.

Before the article goes on the main page, check the page history and copy the link for the last known good version. You can use this as a benchmark and check the changes when the article comes off the Main Page. At that point you can go through the history and see what changes have been made.

Vandalism will be pretty obvious. Make notes of the good edits– ensure they were maintained in the current version of the article. Make a note of those editors as you may want to invite them back. If it looks like someone made a good faith edit that was wrong, take a look and see where the article needs improvement.

If you are an editor who is attracted to the article and see where some changes should be made, you might want to hold off until the article comes off the main page. There is going to be a lot of noise and useful edits may get lost.

You might want to a look at the history for article that went on the Main Page before yours and you will see the sort of edits that occurred. You will also see that these edits pretty much cease when the next article if featured.

Predictions:

• At some point some admin may protect the article, but it will only last ten minutes to an hour before another admin will un-protect it.
• Someone will change the footnotes to double column if they aren't already.
• An editor will root out at least one spelling error that survived FAC.
• Some smart vandal is going to jump the gun and start editing before the article goes on the main page.
• Vandals are persistent. The type of vandalism seen in today's article will be seen in tomorrow's article.
• The amount of vandalism is a proportional to the article's controversy. More current articles such as San Francisco, California will get a lot of vandalism while historical articles such as Katyn massacre will get fewer. (Someone could probably get a thesis in sociology out of this.)