User blog:AgentMuffin/Idea for good articles and featured articles

So Raptor here has reminded me how broken our whole featured system is. For those of you not in the know, the current criteria for featuring an article could be stated as "it gets lots of votes in a poll on the main page".

Now, there's a lot of things that make this system a stupid one, but I've thought up a few that may not be as obvious. First, the other polls on the main page are inconsequential to edits on the wiki. Second, people seem to vote based on how much they like the choices' subjects, not the articles themselves. Third, it's a rather mindless decision—there's no discussion, and no real way to dispute the featuring of any individual article.

I'll get more into detail about other systems we could use later, because I have a new idea, and because nobody else has any good way of seeing whether I just randomly came up with some new idea, and because the idea is new, nobody else knows about the idea. That's why I'm going to discuss it first. Or something.

Good articles
Yes, that's right. I think we should implement a system for good articles on top of all the cleanup we have to do. Well, while Wikipedia may have inspired the name and the most basic form of the concept, I have added a few purposeful and crucial differences to better suit such a system for our wiki. Most notably, it ties directly into our cleanup efforts. This idea for good articles should provide a more visible way to gauge cleanup progress.

So what factors constitute a good article? A good article is—obvious as this may sound—an article that is good. Forget my "system" idea for just a second, then take that description, "an article that is good", at face value. We still have a lot of crud to take care of the wiki, don't we.

Hopefully, the fact that good content is pretty hard to come by here should have clicked by now, so let's talk details. What specific things make a good article? It's a lot like Wikipedia's criteria, actually. A good article is: There are a few general criteria, too. Only non-list, non-disambiguation articles in the mainspace should be considered for good article status. Candidate pages should not be validly categorized as stubby, unclean, or deletable, nor should they appear to need any such categorization. Finally, if the page is far from meeting any of those six main points, the nomination should be invalidated and no related discussion should take place.
 * well-written. With our cleanup system still going rather strong, this point should have one of the more immediately obvious definitions. Syntax should be correct and standard, too. Note, however, that the writing need only be decent. If an article is made of stunningly brilliant encyclopedic prose, it could instead be featured. Good articles have no errors in spelling, grammar, voice, diction, or structure; the lack of errors matters, not the things done right.
 * verifiable with no original research. We don't do citations here, and given the wikia's subject, we don't need to. Verification should instead be established via internal links to other articles. (General stuff gets a free pass here. Meaning, stuff like the most basic, overarching details of a character's personality—Mario is stupid and really likes spaghetti, Luigi is the weak and cowardly butt of jokes, Bowser is an incompetent villain who thinks he's the expert on swag—goes without saying or citing.) In this context, the original research bit means no fanart in articles (unless it's been in a video), no unmarked theories or fanwank, and so on—almost all info comes from the bloopers (and SMG4's social media, rarely), of course!
 * broad in its coverage. This is virtually the same as what Wikipedia says here. Good articles discuss all of their respective topics' main aspects, and they stay on topic without being excessively detailed.
 * neutral. When talking about this wiki, this point overlaps with the first one quite a bit. Articles shouldn't contain idiocy or any unduly subjectivity. The unduly part means that it's okay to, for example, call a character stupid if they are meant to be stupid. However, calling an action the second-stupidest thing a character has ever done is a no-go, as is anything along those lines.
 * stable. A page's contents shouldn't be radically changing if it's meant to be a good article. That "good article" description is based on the decency of the page's contents. This is undermined if something like an edit war is continually rewriting the page, because one cannot be sure of the page's quality at any given time, and the margin for vandalism of some sort is rather larger.
 * illustrated, if possible, by images. Articles should contain a reasonable number of relevant, explicative pictures throughout. All images on a page should serve a purpose and have relevancy to the article and topic. However, there are some exceptions to the explication rule. The main image at the top of the page only needs to depict that page's subject in a neutral, and preferably official, fashion. It should show what something tends to look like. The other major exception deals with gallery images, which honestly should have exhaustive guidelines of their own. Articles have explanatory images; galleries should keep the images that only explain physical appearances.

How does this tie into cleanup? As has been stated above, only articles that don't need any cleanup work can have a valid nomination. Our top priority for any article should be to clean it up where needed, but the good article system would help make neat pages, well, good. Thus, it would be an extension of the cleanup efforts, and its priority would only be a bit lower than the that of the cleanup, because we could stand to make sure articles are good. We already aim to make every article clean, and once that's more or less said and done, we should aim to make every article at least decent.

Now to walk through the process of nominating an article.
 * 1) The article is nominated. Well, duh. Something will be said on the article's talkpage to indicate this. We could make a template to subst a nomination-related message and category to the talkpage.
 * 2) The article is checked over against the criteria. If the page doesn't hold up to those basic guidelines, the nomination gets invalidated somehow. The nomination message wouldn't be deleted, though. With a subst-ed template, the nominee category could easily be removed. If the page meets all of the general standards, it's cleared for the next step, possibly via some confirmation template with a basic confirmation message.
 * 3) Discussion begins. People discuss their reasons for and against making the page a good article. Discussion should stay on-topic, concern valid reasons with no logical fallacies, have replies indented properly, and such. No major edits should be made to the pageOnce a reasonable number of people have posted in the nomination discussion, the next step can begin.
 * 4) Voting begins. Discussion is still open, but people can begin voting for or against the nomination. Someone leaving a vote must begin the line with their stance, support or oppose, in bold (using another template, maybe?), and explain their reasoning in full. Votes aren't the place to simply agree with others' logic, so another person's reasons should be repeated if needed, if not outright expanded upon. If a vote's reasons are logically fallacious, irrelevant to the article, nothing but agreements, or nonexistent, an admin (or anyone with any promotion?) should gray it out and add a relevant message or something, letting the respective voter try again at submitting a vote.
 * 5) The results are in. After some condition has been fulfilled, voting closes, as does discussion. A template could be added or modified to signal this. The current idea for the condition is that voting has been open for at least some number of days and some number of people have voted; both of these would have to be true before the discussion and voting could "legally" be closed. If the nomination got more supports than oppositions, an admin should transclude a good article template, which would contain a good article icon and a good article category, to the article in question. With more oppositions than discussions, an admin should instead remove the nominee category from the talkpage. From here, the article can be edited again, and stuff.

An article that was denied good article status can be nominated again after efforts are made to fix the gripes. An article that was previously given good article status may also have that status removed if it no longer meets the good article guidelines. Basically, this latter process works like the process to nominate an article, but with the opposite proposition; however, admins are responsible for removing the good article template, even if the issue is that the article doesn't hold up to the standards. (In the nomination process, anyone is allowed to invalidate the nomination if this is the case.)

Well, what do you think of this? Is there anything you would change?

Featured articles
Good articles are decent, but featured articles are the wiki's best work—or at least, they are meant to be. Right now, we're featuring popular pages; however, those can "feature" themselves, being popular and all.

The polls don't seem to work for something like this. Instead, assuming we decide to have good articles at all, we should use processes consistent with those for good articles—that's to say, the same processes, but for featuring. Of course, the discussion and voting would be more harsh for featured articles than for good articles. This leaves the criteria. All good article criteria should be in full effect here on top of the featured article criteria. (No, a featured article cannot be a good article at the same time.) The basic criteria, taken largely from Wikipedia, have been slightly honed to suit the needs of our wiki. A featured article is: On top of that, the lead section should be concise, the page should be structured well and appropriately, media should be used in practical amounts, and the article should be somewhat longer than typical without veering off-topic.
 * well-written. The text of the article should look professional, read professionally, interest readers, and look somewhat like an interesting encyclopedia entry. Efficiency is expected of diction and sentence structure; the page should be as brief as possible while maintaining a good level of detail.
 * comprehensive. All major facets of a featured article's topic are covered in sufficient detail. Lesser details may be covered as trivia points if they have enough of a connection to the page's subject. Ehxaustive detail is not a selling point here, however, so most of the focus should be on the essentials.
 * well-researched. A featured article should reference and link to a variety of bloopers for the more specific details.
 * neutral. The page should present things as they are, with no more subjectives than are justifiably necessary. The best of articles will explain why their topic is important, encyclopedic, and page-worthy early on, preferably in the lead section.
 * stable. The page can't have frequent significant edits or edit warring at the time it is nominated for featured article status.

Remember that good articles and featured articles would be chosen based entirely on their contents. For that reason, we should un-feature all currently featured articles if and when these ideas are implemented.

Now tell me your thoughts and opinions on this in the comments!