Forum:Featured Content voting issue

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There's an issue with Featured Contents that has bothered me for long. Sometimes there are too few nominees in a Featured Content nomination list, or only a few people voted for something. The problem is that it isn't uncommon that a nominee becomes featured just because it is the sole option, or that it outnumbers the 1-0 vote with the only other nominee. This results a guaranteed outcome just because something is nominated—and not because it's worthy to be featured.

The practice is more obvious in Featured Article, seeing that it only has a couple of nominees each month, and there aren't too many people who participate in this certain Featured Content. I got the impression that we are striving for something to be featured no matter what, as long as it's nominated and it has votes. I personally prefer not to feature anything if nothing is worthy instead.

I'd like to propose to implement a threshold limit for the nominations. Let's say, the threshold is 5 votes. If none of the nominees reach the 5-vote minimum, then nothing is featured, and it will be suspended until the month after. Otherwise, the Featured Content procedure works normally. This may or may not be applied to Featured Editor due to the nature that the votes are cleared up every month.

Any thoughts? Nikel _{Talk – Vote!} 13:08, December 1, 2014 (UTC)

ETA: I'm reconsidering that this will discuss about a low number of votes / participations, no matter how many or few the nominees are. Now I think the number of nominees is irrelevant. Nikel _{Talk – Vote!} 14:12, December 1, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion

In principle, I agree with your idea. But in practice I feel like it will cause more harm than good. If the problem is that winning nominees (be it a winning article, image, editor, or whatever) receive so few votes, then it seems that we're better off determining why there are so few votes cast, rather than trying to mandate that a nominee passes some certain arbitrary threshold. - LostInRiverview ^{talk • blog • contribs} 13:18, December 1, 2014 (UTC)

Well, if we could get more people to participate in the Featured Contents, we don't need to have a threshold. If we could get more participants for the votes / nominees, that's a better solution. But I think this is the case where there are 5 nominees, four of which have 1 vote and one of them has 2 votes, the one with 2 votes becomes featured. I feel like just because a nominee somehow outnumbers the others, it isn't worth featured. Nikel _{Talk – Vote!} 14:07, December 1, 2014 (UTC)

My response to this earlier was brief because I was in a rush and didn't have an answer prepared. I've thought about it some more and I have more to add.

It probably goes without saying that these problems all stem from a lack of activity in featured content selection. The minimum threshold would maintain some minimum level of quality but it doesn't solve the problem of lack of activity, and additionally adds a high bar that submissions need to pass, which may ultimately severely reduce the amount of content that is featured. Now admittedly this may be good from the perspective of ensuring that only high-quality content is featured. But, as it relates to ensuring that we have new content featured on a monthly basis (to ensure that the old features don't become "stale" and that we continue to highlight new features), having a threshold would make it much more difficult to keep featured content updated.

I do have an idea on how to solve this, though it may seem a bit drastic. First, it may be ultimately a good idea to standardize the voting systems and requirements for each featured content category. Featured articles are nominated and receive a 14-day voting window before the nominations and the votes both "expire," featured media votes and nominations never expire, and featured editor votes all expire monthly whereas the nominations do not expire. It may be best to set some standard length of time and vote threshold for all of them, so that any other overarching rules we apply will be applied evenly.

I think it may be useful to re-imagine how we handle these featured contents. To explain this rethinking, consider the following regarding featured articles as an example (since I'm the most familiar with how it operates). Every month, the wiki selects a new article, which is the featured article for <month, year>. So at any one time, the wiki has only one featured article. If a threshold system is introduced, it is possible that one article will remain the featured article for several months at a time, especially if votes for featured article continue to expire at the same rate they do now (every 14 days). Even without this expiration, any threshold is likely to result in this problem simply because featured content voting is sadly less popular than it ever used to be. Featured articles are meant to be a selling point for the wiki and, as such, it's important that the featured article changes regularly. So, having the same featured article for several months due to a vote threshold is not an ideal situation and should be avoided.

It may be more practical in the long run to feature articles more than once. Right now we have a Featured Articles queue which is populated by articles which pass the nomination stage. We could use this queue to feature articles that have already been selected. The articles can be re-added to the queue by a curator with input from the community, and changed on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. For this to be effective, we would want to develop some system to evaluate past FAs to ensure that they are still featured article quality (something which I have been personally advocating for some time regardless), and then weed out those articles that fall below FA standards or improve them until they meet those standards again. On top of this, we would have the FA nomination process (along with a vote threshold or some other means to ensure that only quality articles are chosen) to bring new articles into the rotation.

I personally would prefer this approach. I feel like it's a bit of a shame that once articles are featured they cannot be featured again. And if we are having difficulties selecting worthy articles to feature, as it appears we are, then we should be instead highlighting those articles that we have already determined (and subsequently re-affirmed) to be high-quality, rather than leaving the same article featured continuously for months or leaving the space blank altogether. Plus this system would take the pressure off the FA nominations process. Right now in order for the wiki to have a featured article, an article must pass the nominations process. If we are allowed to use articles that have already passed, then we no longer need to get articles from the nomination page. That means we can be more selective with the articles that we do feature.

Now granted, everything I described above is about featured articles, but I feel it could just as easily be applied to other wiki features. In all cases the benefits would be the same - it would allow us greater control over the quality of the items we feature, ensure that the items we feature continue to maintain their high quality after their selection, ensure that the featured content that we display on the main page remains "fresh" and frequently changing, and eliminate the need to merely settle for the winner of a nomination in order to have a new item to feature. I feel like this approach in tandem with some sort of vote threshold (the exact threshold being a matter of some discussion) would be a pretty good option going forward. -- LostInRiverview ^{talk • blog • contribs} 05:40, December 2, 2014 (UTC)

Bump - LostInRiverview ^{talk • blog • contribs} 02:42, December 23, 2014 (UTC)

My opinion regarding what LiR calls arbitrary thresholds largely aligns with LiR. I'd venture to say that the wiki activity itself has grown down, and the enthusiasm for featured materials have gone down in general. It's been quite some time since Featured Fanon and Fan Fiction became obsolete, and Fanon Battles generate nowhere near the activity that the regular battle does, despite a fairly healthy start. My opinion is that the problem, at least in case of the fanon-related things, simply involves the glut of fanon material of acceptable yet not outstanding quality. I'd personally would wish for a big fanon critiquing/revision project to spiff up fanons, especially of the more active fanon authors who could use other peoples' inputs (such as myself, who believe my fanons, at least at the beginning, is a pile of incoherent pile that needs a bit of patching up). As for the featured tutorial, my opinion on that matter is that not many people come here for tutorials, asides the most basic ones like extracting headshots, thus tutorial section as of the moment has serious limitations given competition like the various modding sites and youtube videos which cover more technical things. MILK FOR THE UNYUUFEX, FLAT CHEST FOR THE CUTENESS THRONE, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL PROBES (user talk:Mathetesalexandrou) 06:04, January 4, 2015 (UTC)

I think the fanon critique idea is a good one. Since it's your idea, maybe you should run with it and try to implement it? Or else try to get a discussion going towards implementing it, if you feel doing it unilaterally is too bold (I personally don't think that it would be too bold). And I think your point about featured game guides/tutorials is right on as well; our Game Guides namespace has always been a little disappointing. The idea when it was created was that it would be a place for more technical help with the games. That did not occur, I think mainly for two reasons; 1 - a lack of members on TSW with significant technical knowledge about the games, and 2 - as you mentioned, the prevalence of other sites that offer that information already. That's not to say that I'd advocate for getting rid of the namespace, but I think you're right that there's simply not enough content there to begin selecting features. -- LostInRiverview ^{talk • blog • contribs} 02:38, January 5, 2015 (UTC)

From what I'm getting skimming over, it seems that the primary force of the declining "featured awesomeness" sections of the wiki is the lack of editor activity. Fewer and fewer editors are voting. Not to mention some things are too small to warrant a "featured this-and-this" section, like the game guides. Considering our collection of game guides is so small and often not as thorough or well-developed as game guides on other websites, and our article probably only makes it on the first page of Google because The Sims Wiki on Wikia is a shining beacon in The Sims world. Granted, we do have some very popular game guides, such as Game guide:Avoiding corruption, which is the first entry you get when Googling "The Sims 2 corruption", and Game guide:How to delete a Sim correctly, which is the third result when Googling "The Sims 2 delete a Sim" and first if you add "correctly" (by contrast, the original guide, written by J.M. Pescado, doesn't appear on the first page of either of those search terms, so our game guides, while not receiving the attention that would make a "Featured Game Guide" more than just tumbleweeds, is still at least a valuable asset). However, let's be fair... most of our game guides are not of good quality. Some were copied-and-pasted directly from other sites, most of them aren't written in the best tone ever, and again, most readers looking for help probably don't even look at The Sims Wiki. The official EA websites are the first places a distressed Sims player goes to, followed by maybe TSR and MTS. There are tons of guides on those sites that we don't have. I suppose maybe I could try expanding the game guides section, but even then, considering how I procrastinate a lot and how real life gets in the way (and how I seem to be capable of cranking out a new article every three months, not including off-time), we'd probably need to find the editors to crank out a new *quality* game guide at least every month and have them all of good quality or at least really, really informative, before I could probably say that a "Featured Game Guide" section is even plausible. --I am k6ka ^{Talk to me!} _{See what I have done} 03:35, January 5, 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Regarding fanon critique: during my painful couple of days a couple of months ago where I added defaultsort tags to something like 500 articles I did take note of the quality of fanon, as just about anyone would. I'll get to the point and just say that a large amount of the articles I noticed weren't up to what I would call a good standard, with some of them being a paragraph or so with an infobox. I'll refer to this particular standard as "average" from this point. I tagged the ones that are of low quality with formatting issues, no content and the like with cleanup, a few of which I went over last night. The issue is that these articles which I refer to, the ones that are of a somewhat acceptable standard, the one paragraph ones, are pretty common, and its very difficult to find lengthy fanon sim articles, with the majority of these being written by the same users time and time again. This difficulty in actually finding good content is an issue which I believe you could say is the main problem we have in regards to featured fan content. You could also throw in stuff like people not caring enough to make nominations or not even knowing but sadly that will probably always be a thing.

While there would be a couple of ways to fix these issues with fanon content in general I don't like any of the ones I've come up with. We could increase our standards but that would make it harder for new users to get into fanon, especially those who don't have editing skills and the like. We could go through the entire namespace and delete a bunch of pages of the average standard I mentioned to improve the quality overall, but this is probably even worse as I really don't want to do something dramatic that could upset the userbase. Additionally, the idea of editing other users fanon is something I don't know if I really like, even if its for the purpose of fixing minor errors like incorrect parameters. If you've actually read this far, thank you, but I'll give a summary anyway: tl;dr - the quality issues with the fanon namespace are getting more prevalent as time goes by and I honestly can't think of a solution. Additionally, I would support (and probably help out with) some sort of fanon assistance thing. I may make a thread about the general quality issues with fanon later, if I remember.

In regards to the game guides/tutorials, it pains me to say so but I think it needs some work. With the exception of the featured game guides I think we should do some sort of cleanup, as there is a fair few guides that really fall under common sense. Either delete these, write up some better standards (amend TSW:NP?), or make some sort of commonsense catch-all article.

I'll go back to something LiR said earlier in regards to featured content. The idea of recycling already-used featured content is something that I wouldn't mind seeing if we can't get enough votes. I've also got another idea, being that admins or other users form some sort of "featured content selection committee". While I'm sure there is probably a better name for this, essentially these users would just pick content to be featured, removing the voting stage completely and therefore theoretically fixing the issue with lack of activity. In addition, there could also be an add-on to this where users can suggest articles for consideration. While this does have the downside of removing voting to an extent, its not like voting is used much anyway, and personally I'd take the increase in featured content. What do you guys think?

That's just about all I can think of in regards to everything that's been posted so far. ―ฬђ ^talk 03:43, January 5, 2015 (UTC)

I think that everything that has been said about fanon so far is very deserving of an in-depth discussion, and it seems as though we have a few people who might be interested in talking about it. That being said, it's branching off of the original subject of this forum thread, so I think it would be best to continue the fanon discussion in a separate thread (which I have now created - Forum:Fanon quality discussion).

Onto the subject at hand... I again would come around to the idea that we don't necessarily need to select a new feature each and every month. Surely if we select something as featured content, we intend to maintain (or increase upon) that level of quality in the content, so there would then be no harm in "re-featuring" that content later on. Doing this would eliminate the need to have votes constantly to select new material to feature. In the case of Featured Game Guides, to give an example, we could pick out the handful of high-quality game guides we have and feature those on a rotating basis, without being terribly concerned that we don't have new guides to feature. And if or when a guide is improved enough to be worthy of featuring, that guide could also be added to the rotation. The same would be true for fanon articles, mainspace articles, and media.

I think Wogan's Selection Committee idea is interesting but I'm not sure how comfortable I am with it. Certainly if we were to pursue that idea we would need community consensus. Generally I think community voting on featured content isn't a bad thing so long as the voting is regulated to ensure fairness and to ensure a minimum standard of quality on selected content. The latter has been the element that we have struggled with most, as it seems to be that the more caveats and restrictions in place to ensure quality selections, the fewer people bother to participate in selections at all. This might just be a symptom of decreased activity overall, or a general trend in the TSW community away from participating in featured content selection regardless of broader wiki activity levels. All these problems could be averted by implementing a Selection Committee, but there is no guarantee that persons will want to serve on this committee or that they will honestly be any better at making content selections than regular users.

And again, this speaks to a broader issue with how we presently handle features, namely that we need to select new features on a recurring basis. If we eliminate the requirement to always select new features, then we eliminate the pressure to create a system that can facilitate that selection. By re-featuring, we can focus on fostering engagement in the selection and in maintaining a level of quality in the selections, without having to focus on getting new things to feature every month. To that end, I think our best bet is to allow re-use of previously-selected content and to remove the requirement that new content be featured regularly. -- LostInRiverview ^{talk • blog • contribs} 04:43, January 5, 2015 (UTC)

While I agree that there is some good to be had from re-allowing previously featured contents, I fear that this may lead to issues like creating a league of perennial winners, such as the likely candidate in the form of Bella Goth. Some measure must be placed to ensure that we won't have the same things winning over and over again unless all the feature-worthy contents have been featured. MILK FOR THE UNYUUFEX, FLAT CHEST FOR THE CUTENESS THRONE, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL PROBES (user talk:Mathetesalexandrou) 04:55, January 5, 2015 (UTC)

Very true. There are other issues as well that would need to be considered. Who would determine when or if content was re-featured? Would it be selected randomly, on a regular recurring basis, or would there be a user, group of users, or the community there to curate content? What would the criteria be for re-featuring; would we evaluate articles, for instance, to ensure they're still featured article-worthy? Would there be a limit on how often or how frequently a particular piece of content is featured? Just some food for thought. -- LostInRiverview ^{talk • blog • contribs} 04:59, January 5, 2015 (UTC)

In response to how often content will be used I think that featuring it at most once a year seems to be a fair time period. I've also thought up something else, which is editing the template for featured content to show several different articles through <choose> tags. This would mean we could set a bunch of articles and every time the main page would be loaded it would be pretty likely the user would see different featured content. To ensure that the same stuff isnt continually selected we could do what I said with some formof selection committee, or at the very least place it at the discretion of administrators. ―ฬђ ^talk 10:45, January 5, 2015 (UTC)

Going to another tangent, I'd also like to note about the serious lack of nominations (asides my own) in the Fanon Battles: I for one am of the notion that some of this is a poor execution largely caused by me, considering a good portion of Fanon Battles that I started gets around 1-2 votes (which I believe have partially killed it off), while Fanon Battles nominated by others usually get more, with a few exceptions. However, this is also an effect caused by a difficulty in nominating a good battle, since some of the good contents are off limits as the authors haven't volunteered to have their fanons put up.

For some numbers, There have been 25 battles, and 12 of them were started through my nominations. However, actually taking numbers actually defeats some of my points, because some of the battles with poor turnouts that I thought was under my nomination wasn't the case, but still the point about the difficulty with the nomination and the good field of battle-worthy content out of reach could be addressed: after all, the most vote that a single battle ever got was 8, one for the first battle and the other one a Older battle between Kallistrata and Angel. MILK FOR THE UNYUUFEX, FLAT CHEST FOR THE CUTENESS THRONE, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL PROBES (user talk:Mathetesalexandrou) 01:11, January 8, 2015 (UTC)

Fanon battles is not alone in this. A new featured article has not been nominated since mid-November and a new featured media has not been nominated since early October. Regular Battles and Featured Editor both had nominations in December but so far none in January. -- LostInRiverview ^{talk • blog • contribs} 01:49, January 8, 2015 (UTC)

If you're looking to get more fanon battles I suppose you could ask specific users whose fanon you want to use if they're ok with it? I like to think most of them would be and that the reason there isn't more is because some of them don't even know you have to sign up. I don't really think fanon battles are going as badly as some other features are since they're a pretty niche feature anyway, because most people are coming here to find out about the game and not about fanon content. Still, more activity would be nice to see. ―ฬђ ^talk 02:32, January 8, 2015 (UTC)

@LiR As for the Featured Media, I don't find it problematic given it has plenty of nominations with votes ready to be updated at a moment's notice: it had around 10 even before my October nomination took place.

@WH I didn't consider that point. However, I still believe being cautious and having explicit consent a good thing, although implicit consent with opt-outs may be a good option for better Fanon Battle nomination content. MILK FOR THE UNYUUFEX, FLAT CHEST FOR THE CUTENESS THRONE, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL PROBES (user talk:Mathetesalexandrou) 17:22, January 9, 2015 (UTC)

2 months later

Bump. Ѧüя◎ґ (talk) 23:11, March 15, 2015 (UTC)

I would like to get this matter resolved as well. I had made a suggestion of curating content, particularly in regards to Featured Article, but also for other Features. I still think that may be a good idea, as it would remove the necessity to constantly nominate new content. Take for example Featured Articles. There are by my count 77 articles that have been featured on The Sims Wiki (including the current F.A.). Taken as a percentage, this makes up about 0.737% of the wiki's article content. Now look at the English language Wikipedia - as of the time of writing, en.wikipedia has 4,493 featured articles, out of 4,852,395 articles total, or about 0.093%. Now admittedly comparing TSW to Wikipedia is always a mixed bag, but I think there's something telling here. In the case of Wikipedia, it isn't necessary to continually select new Featured Articles, because doing so can reduce the standards applied towards making that selection.

We've seen this on The Sims Wiki before, where, "...a nominee becomes featured just because it is the sole option, or that it outnumbers the 1-0 vote with the only other nominee. This results a guaranteed outcome just because something is nominated—and not because it's worthy to be featured." This is indeed a problem, and removing the requirement to constantly find new Features solves the problem, alongside a possible minimum vote threshold as proposed.

As for how we would implement a 'curation system,' I'm not sure. Ideally we would have community input, but if worse comes to worse and no one is involved in the decision, there would need to be some way to handle it. I'm not particularly keen on simply having the featured article randomly chosen via < choose > tags. Additionally, it would be prudent that there is some sort of system in place to weed out those past FA articles that are no longer (or never really were) Featured Article calibur. - LostInRiverview ^{talk • blog • contribs} 18:26, April 11, 2015 (UTC)

Late bump, but I have an idea that would help somewhat with finding featured articles... my idea is that we would have article ratings, and trusted editors could evaluate an article and give it a rating depending on a variety of factors, mostly about how well the page is laid out and the quality of the text. Only articles above a certain rating can be nominated and featured, and if their rating falls before they get featured the nomination is suspended. Not sure if it helps with the embarrassing "oh no we don't have a featured article for this month", but it will at least weed out the crap that gets selected just because it's nominated. I will start its own discussion thread once I'm done writing it. --I am k6ka ^{Talk to me!} _{See what I have done} 14:33, June 18, 2015 (UTC)

Both of these systems could be implemented in tandem. It wouldn't need to be an all-or-nothing thing. In the case of a curation system, it would probably be quicker to implement than an article ranking or a "Peer Review" system (as with Fanon Peer Review), but ultimately I think an article ranking system could be useful on many levels, not just features selection. I support both initiatives. - LostInRiverview ^{talk • blog • contribs} 16:12, July 8, 2015 (UTC)