Difference between revisions of "Talk:Featured Article of the Week"

Revision as of 19:33, 22 March 2015

Proof that "nothing escapes the eye of the mods", I am going to salvage a particular deleted comment (originally posted on the AdminBlog talk page) to bring up some points about the AotW.

What worries me about the "Article of the Week" is the same thing that worried people with the Page of the Month. This very first [AotW] is a page of one of PDB mods friends...
and the quote taken from the article is quote written by a character of one of the mods. This might all be a coincidence...but it seems like it's just another "popularity/favorites"
game.

I know you might be skeptical about this, but please remember that it's only the first week: you're going to need to give the program some time to run its course before you start poking holes in it. I can tell you that I was the one who posted the kickoff entry, and despite the fact that I'm a mod, I actually have very little familiarity with the rest of the CO community (even among those who post here, heck, among the mods themselves).

Remember what I said about the problem with recognition programs not being easy to solve? There's always going to be something "unknown" or "wrong" if people keep looking for things to pick on-- whether it be the process of how we're even running the AotW, the fact that a certain subset of the community has a dominating presence on the website, to who happens to know who, the fact that you simply might not like the character/player that gets their turn in the limelight for a week for whatever reason.

PotM was flawed because the community made it that way (due to breaking the nomination process), and then the fixes we tried to put in place sealed its fate. How we're doing the AotW now is no less flawed, since we mods now have a target on our heads for people to throw rocks at at the slightest pattern. This being the internet, we know our words aren't good enough, but we're going to have to ask you to trust us on this (Twelve forbid us filming ourselves clicking on the Random Page button every week to appease the masses). --Δ Epelesker (talk) 20:47, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

You didn't need to comment on that, but it's appreciated. I deleted that, after posting it, for a reason, because I realized I was being shortsighted and it was wrong of me to even call it out to begin with. Jta101987 (talk) 21:10, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

I tend to end up being one of those pre-emptive people at times, myself (usually on the defensive side, as you might see). Even with you retracting your comment, I did feel it was a good opportunity to get some air cleared over issues that will inevitably crop up, why we made the change of systems, and how much harder it'll be for us to do upkeep because of expectations. But we're up to the challenge! --Δ Epelesker (talk) 21:41, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

I like the direction away from the PotM, and its "prize/winner" feel, and towards the AotW, with its "here is a good example" feel. However, I think that there ought to be some sort of Last Edited constraint on the AotW selections. Several of the selections thus far have not been edited for a year. Two reasons: one, it may alienate/demotivate players who have more recently and/or actively updated their page(s), and two, it may alienate/demotivate new CO players/RPers who have come to the PDB to see what that side of the community is like.

...annnnd then this week's pick hasn't been updated in two years. Really?

I'm finally seeing this now, been really busy outside my mod duties and such. Looking at the last edit of a page was something that never really came up in our planning discussions as far as I recall, again stemming back to the bias accusations that were flung about in the old PotM. And looking for more criteria-- of which the only one that we really have is "is the page 90-100 percent done?"-- will end up limiting what we can use. --Δ Epelesker (talk) 08:10, 20 March 2015 (UTC)