On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 1:44 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: [snip] Right. And even if we'd catch up with today's rate, tomorrow might still be faster. A second article would *double* the coverage. I think thats a pretty good return on inches of screen space. Clustering is an interesting idea. I'd support whatever. I'd especially support mixing it up and trying different things. We can tell which one people click on, though we can't tell which order they were when they clicked. (that could be done, though, I suppose) The reordering code was something I did for the WMF board elections two-ish years ago. I wasn't aware of the decision to run two articles until it was already live, then add in the time it took for an EnWP admin bold enough to make the change. Unfortunately the site JS is cached, so not everyone will see the random order. Fortunately (for once) IE and Firefox have dumb caching which won't preserve the cache across sessions, so I expect most of the public will get the random ordering. I'd like to see a consensus demonstrated that flagged revs would have been better here because even past proposals to use them strictly as a replacement for protection have come under fire.

2008/11/4 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>: Oh we understand it we just don't trust it. -- geni

On 11/4/08, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: The operator, surely. —C.W.

On 11/4/08, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: The former should not be changing on a regular basis (and certainly not on a per-article basis), so probably the latter. One need not look too far to see that current protection policy is disregarded more often than not. Part of it might depend on whether versions can be unflagged and flag-wars can erupt, or on what sort of policy is adopted and whether anyone pays it any mind. There may be a de facto (or even de jure) variation of standards for deciding whether a version should be flagged/sighted/stable/cabal-approved/etc. If so, if "these articles must be free of any unsourced sentences" but "those articles need only be free of obvious vandalism" we'll really be no better off than now. These are the known unknowns but there may be more. I haven't played around with it all that much, not in English anyway. I'll install it on my site and get back to you on this. —C.W.

On 11/4/08, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: By all means let's give it a try. There might ultimately be nothing to gain from it, but there isn't much left to lose either. But like I've been trying to say I doubt anyone will be evaluating the software much, probably to focus more on how the community behaves with it. Harder to program, I know. —C.W.

How about some sort of special, one day a week where it happens every Friday. that way it will keep must of the people against it happy(ish) as well.

2008/11/4 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>om>: With what settings?

2008/11/4 Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com>om>: Haven't seen much wikipedia based opposition yet. The opposition I've seen so far was offsite and mostly comes from FSF supporters who trust CC less than I do. -- geni

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 9:51 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Or just randomly display one? (Can be done via JS, so no caching interaction) Every 12 hours would mean that some geographies would mostly see one, others the other. I don't think that is desirable.

The way it works now for selecting Today's featured articles is to choose featured articles representing a variety of topics, with extra weight given to core topics. Meanwhile, we try not to overrepresent some topics (e.g. hurricanes, video games, roads) where we have numerous featured articles. Do you want hurricanes, video games, or roads on the main page nearly all the time? With the way it works now, if I write a bunch of featured articles on the same topic, then I do so, well aware that they won't all go on the main page. Or if I write a FA about a hurricane, I do so knowing it probably won't be on the main page. Also, some are rather short and perhaps not suitable as TFA. (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Route_373) The current situation with one featured article a day may encourage people to write featured articles on underrepresented topics, and core topics, if their articles appearing on the main page is a motivating factor for them. -- Aude

2008/11/7 Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: In some ways, I think the double-header can be better than alternating FAs. If the blurbs are kept short, and the layout is set up correctly, it looks really quite tidy; I only saw the main page once or twice on the 4th, but as I recall it looked clear and neat. That said, it really relies on the two articles being related. [[Delhi]] and [[London]] would make for a coherent section; [[Delhi]] and [[Henry VIII of England]] wouldn't. For an unrelated pair, you'd probably have to seperate it out into two adjacent sections. When we discussed double-FAs before, we were thinking of two unrelated topics - perhaps picking related pairs would be a good way forward, instead? Articles on two linked people, two battles, two chemical elements, two animals, two cities... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 7:12 AM, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: There is also a statistics page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_statistics That page shows the change in FAs per month (taking into account the number of demotions through the featured article review process), though for the purposes of looking at the number of pages in the queue for the main page, it is the number of new FAs that matters. It would also help to know what the current backlog is. That list is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles_that_haven't_b… Though it hasn't been updated since 1 September 2008 (as it says on the page). And the process for selecting the TFA is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Today%27s_featured_article/requests Apologies if this has all been mentioned earlier. I've only just joined the mailing list. The last time this came up on-wiki, I said something along the lines of trying to encourage directing more people towards portals or the featured content portal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Featured_content But that is, admittedly, a very different reading experience to the Main Page, and anything other than the Main Page will get far less click-throughs. But there must be *some* way to showcase our best articles other than having various lists. Possibly the *other* ways of distributing the TFA (the RSS feed and the e-mail feed) could be expanded with less worries about screen space. How much are those distributions methods (e-mail, RSS) used by the public? For past discussions on the FA page queue, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/requ… The really big debate (leading to the reform of the request page) was at "Discontinuing the use of this page", though this was all back in May 2007, so things may have changed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/requ… Some examples of sections in that discussion, or following that discussion, are: (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/requ… "Make it clear they can't all be TFAed" Marskell said: "The fact is that if we don't do some version of two per day we have to accept that close to 50% of promotions are never going to make it to the main page. The stats speak for themselves: net FAC increase is 35 to 40, while FAR consistently removes 15 to 20; that's a gross of about 55 per month, and thus 25 surplus." Marskell 12:00, 16 May 2007 (UTC) (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/requ… "Some more thoughts" (3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/requ… "Promote existing pages to increase exposure of featured content" (4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Today%27s_featured_article/requ… What is the second most-visited Wikipedia page" Of particular note, I think, is what Sandy said at one point (agreeing with Marskell): "Not all FAs will appear on the main page. Period. Are people really writing FAs for that purpose? Weird — I would really think a number one rank on Google would do the trick [...]" SandyGeorgia 15:14, 16 May 2007 (UTC) That is a fair point, though I still think that imaginatively using *all* the FA content we have in multiple ways (repackaging it according to the audience), rather than having an excessive focus on the Main Page, would help to raise the profile of Wikipedia's best articles still further. Carcharoth PS. Sorry if more than one post gets through - a mix-up between gmail and googlemail domains.