Forum:Featured Content voting issue

Forums: Index → Community discussions → Featured Content voting issue | Post

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)