Forum:Featured Content voting issue
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)