Forum:Featured Content voting issue: Difference between revisions

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:::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 [[User:K6ka|'''<span style="color:#0040FF">k6ka</span>''']] [[User talk:K6ka|<span style="color:#0080FF"><sup>Talk to me!</sup></span>]] [[Special:Contributions/K6ka|<span style="color:#0B4C5F"><sub>See what I have done</sub></span>]] 03:35, 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 [[User:K6ka|'''<span style="color:#0040FF">k6ka</span>''']] [[User talk:K6ka|<span style="color:#0080FF"><sup>Talk to me!</sup></span>]] [[Special:Contributions/K6ka|<span style="color:#0B4C5F"><sub>See what I have done</sub></span>]] 03:35, January 5, 2015 (UTC)
::::{{ec}}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. {{WHsig|03:43, January 5, 2015 (UTC)}}