The process for featuring and unfeaturing articles is kind of a mess. Nominations run months (which wouldn't be that big of a problem... if that didn't involve posting an eyesore of a template on the relevant articles in the meantime) before anyone realize that yeah, this isn't going anywhere, half of the pages are taken by worthless support votes that have no point and all-around, it's a clunky process that has been on life-support for some time. Obviously, the fact that most of the eligible pages have already been featured is a factor, but I think the system also has a role in that.
changes I'm proposing:
Support votes
In response to concerns about "fan votes" shitting up the system, the rules were amended so that only the nominator can give a reason and every support votes after that can't have anything written next to them. This means that half of any given FA nomination page can be taken up by a bunch of links that are actively required to have no value whatsoever, and when some peoples do write something more than a link to their userpage, it's edited out because "it's against the rules". That is asinine.
What I propose is to simply scrap the support vote header entirely and have whoever nominates the article write a reasonably lengthy (ie: more than two lines) text explaining why they feel the article is good enough to be a FA, perhaps highlighting bits of exceptionally good writing and technical info not present in other, lesser articles, and pre-emptively responding to potential oppose reasons (For ex, "There are a bunch of one liners sections near the end but that's because Toad's appearances are really that minor in all of them)", and have whoever agrees with the nominator duke it out in the comments. It will cut the fat and perhaps encourage better though-out nominations rather than someone posting yeah this article is great!!!! for a shitty page without explaining why.
With the removal of support votes, there could be a minimum number of opposers needed to block a nomination (I'm thinking 5), as to prevent headaches due to inactive users and filibuster.
Deadline
The "A nomination may fail if it has been there for 4 months and the opposers to supporters ratio is 5:1." and "delete after a month of inactivity" rules just don't work. Perhaps because of laziness (as it requires manually checking the edit history), perhap because's nobody's sure what "resets" the counter, but either way, I suggest to just have a flat deadline (like say, two months) instead, with said deadline being included at the template at the top of every FA nominations page (something like "[article] was nominated for Featured Article status at 08:33, 24 July 2012. If the nomination does not pass by 23:59, September 25 2012, it will be considered failed").
Anyway... thoughts on the above? Any suggestions to improve the system? Or is it even worth changing the FA system at this point?
changes I'm proposing:
Support votes
In response to concerns about "fan votes" shitting up the system, the rules were amended so that only the nominator can give a reason and every support votes after that can't have anything written next to them. This means that half of any given FA nomination page can be taken up by a bunch of links that are actively required to have no value whatsoever, and when some peoples do write something more than a link to their userpage, it's edited out because "it's against the rules". That is asinine.
What I propose is to simply scrap the support vote header entirely and have whoever nominates the article write a reasonably lengthy (ie: more than two lines) text explaining why they feel the article is good enough to be a FA, perhaps highlighting bits of exceptionally good writing and technical info not present in other, lesser articles, and pre-emptively responding to potential oppose reasons (For ex, "There are a bunch of one liners sections near the end but that's because Toad's appearances are really that minor in all of them)", and have whoever agrees with the nominator duke it out in the comments. It will cut the fat and perhaps encourage better though-out nominations rather than someone posting yeah this article is great!!!! for a shitty page without explaining why.
With the removal of support votes, there could be a minimum number of opposers needed to block a nomination (I'm thinking 5), as to prevent headaches due to inactive users and filibuster.
Deadline
The "A nomination may fail if it has been there for 4 months and the opposers to supporters ratio is 5:1." and "delete after a month of inactivity" rules just don't work. Perhaps because of laziness (as it requires manually checking the edit history), perhap because's nobody's sure what "resets" the counter, but either way, I suggest to just have a flat deadline (like say, two months) instead, with said deadline being included at the template at the top of every FA nominations page (something like "[article] was nominated for Featured Article status at 08:33, 24 July 2012. If the nomination does not pass by 23:59, September 25 2012, it will be considered failed").
Anyway... thoughts on the above? Any suggestions to improve the system? Or is it even worth changing the FA system at this point?
