User:Raul654/Featured article thoughts
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Here are some thoughts of mine pertaining to the Featured article process. This page is a work in progress. I hope it will become more and more complete and time progresses.
Contents |
[edit] Controversial FAs
[edit] Intelligent Design and Global warming
[edit] Torchic and Bulbosaur
[edit] FAC and FAR
[edit] Length objections
Every article clearly has some things that everyone can agree should be mentioned. When there is a disagreement as to the rest, I am inclined to err on the side of having our featured articles be too informative versus being not informative enough. So when someone objects that something important is missing, I take those objections quite seriously.
On the other hand, when someone objects that an article is too long, I check to see the length, and unless it's above the usual range (in the neighborhood of 30-80 kb, I think) I usually take such objections with a grain of salt. Obviously, someone thought it was important enough to merit mentioning in the article.
[edit] Subjective vs. objective criticisms
[edit] Citations
[edit] Copyright and fair use
Where featured articles are concerned, I favor taking a pragmatic approach to copyright.
[edit] The main page featured article
[edit] Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests
I created this page, but I'm not happy with how it's being used. I do want a venue for requests, but I feel it's experiencing what in my field (computer engineering) is referred to as "greedy requests"
[edit] Deference to the article's primary author
When it comes to featuring a given featured article on the main page, I try very hard to defer to the wishes of the article's primary author(s). This doesn't mean they always get their requests fufilled (especially in the case of mutually contradictory requests, or requests that contradict standard practice) but most of the time they do.
[edit] What will and will not go on the main page
One of the main motivators for people to write spend the time and energy is to see their work featured on the main page. In computer science and engineering, we have a concept called Resource starvation - it occurs when a program is perpetually denied a necessary resource.
The selection for main page FAs should be done in such a way as to avoid starvation. That is, nobody should feel perpetually denied the chance to have their work on the main page. It's one thing that it might take a while for their work to appear on the main page; it's a very different thing to know their work will never go there. This is why I am extremely reluctant to say I won't feature such-and-such an article or class of articles on the main page. It is a sure-fire way to de-motivate people from writing about that subject.
[edit] Some articles get there faster than others
Some articles make it to the main page faster than others. This is because certain subjects are underrepresented in the FA pool (math, philosophy), where others are very-well represented (media, music, war).
[edit] The queue is not plastic
Changing the articles that have been queued for the main page is an especially time consuming and error-prone task, so I'm reluctant to do so unless presented with compelling reasons.
[edit] Selecting the image
A main page image should convey the topic of the FA with as much specificity as possible, even if you took the all the rest of the text away. For this reason, I will not use maps as main page images[1] and generally will not use country flags, except when the country itself is the FA topic.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Also note - when resized to 100 pixels wide for the main page, a map isn't much more than a meaningless blurb of color
