Guild Wars 2 Wiki talk:Projects/Featured pages

anything anyone want to change?

so i just copy pasted from gw1w so if you guys want to talk about how you want to change this project feel free to purpose that here.- Zesbeer 02:17, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

I think I want to remove some of the bureaucracy from it, because really, all we are doing is deciding that pages are good enough to be on the main page. We only need a "mission statement" and a brief selection process that is either successful or unsuccessful. Aqua (T|C) 15:08, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

To elaborate, I think that we really don't need the whole ridiculous system to pick, something much simpler would suffice. Perhaps we could make a list of criteria. While most of them would be somewhat subjective, I think we all have a somewhat good idea of what an exhaustive, definitive reference looks like.

Also, "Removed Pages" seems unnecessary. The way I see it, we make a decision when the page is brought up, and make a secondary decision right before making it the featured article. The decision system I suggest would remove a lot of the miscellaneous stuffs. That and, aren't we all capable of assessing whether an article is or isn't featured article material. Aqua (T|C) 15:58, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

I think have a list of criteria would be a good idea, but try to keep it basic so that it wouldn't become too subjective. I think with the list a lot of the bureaucracy would go away because you could say "doesn't meet point 3...rejected" and would shorten the process considerably. I also agree with removed pages seeming unnecessary. It doesn't look like the GWW uses that either.

So I say expand this "There is only one requirement for featured pages, and that is no maintenance tags (that includes and is not limited to: dispute, merge, move, stubs, cleanup, rewrite, deletion, or any other tag that requires work on the article). Once all maintenance tags are dealt with and removed, the article can be considered for being featured. Whether an article will be featured or not, is based solely on consensus in the discussion on this page." To include a bullet list of things we are/are not looking for in a featured article. Like:

This is a list of basic requirements for featured pages:

• No maintenance tags (that includes and is not limited to: dispute, merge, move, stubs, cleanup, rewrite, deletion, or any other tag that requires work on the article)
• Must contain wiki generated content (Cannot be a page that was entirely copied or quoted from another source)
• Must be at least <insert number> minimum length
• Must have a related picture on the page that can be used on the main page to highlight the featured article

Once all of these requirements are met, the article can be considered for being featured. Whether an article will be featured or not, is based solely on consensus in the discussion on this page.

That was just a list of stuff I have heard on featured articles here and on the other wiki that seem pretty straightforward. With something like this I think it would be easier to streamline pages that are worth being featured and also give an idea of what pages need to improve on before they are nominated. The minimum length doesn't need to be too crazy, but the page would need to be at least like 2 paragraphs long so we have something to put in the featured article section on the main page. 17:40, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

the one thing I disagree with is the requirement to have a picture that can be shown on the main page. there are some pages that just wont have images on them but that wont mean that they are not good pages.- Zesbeer 21:51, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

No need for removed pages as Aqua said, though he doesn't seem to understand the point of it - it was created on GWW because a lot of articles went through a concision while it was featured, such as gw1:Storybook, which then removed some of the worth of it being featured - it might be worth bringing into later, but as it stands it's just a waste of space, and hopefully we can avoid such since some/most of us already have good wiki-article-making experience where we can already keep things concise without reducing quality (which was not the case in most GWW articles while the GWW's feature article project was active). A side note: The reason why the GWW doesn't use it is because the project became inactive shortly after its addition.

I also agree with having a list of criteria and in regards to Mattsa's list - I'm iffy on having a length requirement, unless it's not too large (how would one count the length? Paragraphs? pixel height? byte size? The only good way would be paragraphs imo, in which we only really need 2 or 3 paragraphs for the front page). I disagree with the wiki-generated content. While such would be good and preferred, it's not 100% necessary, imo - what is necessary is having wiki-generated content for the front page (GWW has an unspoken rule that the main page content must be from the article, hence why GWW disallows non-wiki-generated content articles). I however do think a picture should be required - a bunch of text isn't all that eye pleasing for the main page - but note that it doesn't have to be of the topic, but related to the article enough for it to be on the article (also note that it does not need to be in the article, imo - for instance, if we were to feature Charr, then we can use any image which features a charr or something charr-related, such as images from Category:Charr concept art). Konig/talk 00:06, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

I partly agree with konig, what I disagree on is the picture rule, I do think that in most cases there is some sort of picture that we can get and use. so if there is one that we can get awesome if there isn't one it shouldn't bar it because I feel that there might be a situation where that might come up (where the page is a good one but has no real picture that we can use). also I propose that we test nominate the two pages that I already had up there.- Zesbeer 01:59, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Just came to say it's awesome to see this project continued here. Have to admit I'm proud to recognize some of my original wording in the text. ;)

I'd recommend against establishing a length requirement or anything. If you get a few pages OK'd by discussion and consensus alone, they can serve as a reference for further discussion about which pages to feature, eliminating the need for any sort of bureaucracy. I also wouldn't say that having a picture relating to the article is necessary either - the current main page looks all fine and dandy without one. But by all means feel free to do whatever you guys think is best with this project, I'm just passing by. Good luck! — Why 22:00, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

A minimum length should be preferred - nothing too large mind you, it'll just be to prevent half of the article being on the main page's 1 or 2 paragraph description of said article. At least that's how I view any length requirement. Konig/talk 22:07, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Format

For nominating articles, perhaps we could use the Wikipedia AfD format (the same one used for RfAs)? It would consist of a nomination and explanation of the nomination of the article by a user, a discussion and, if accepted, a development of the feature text. And that could all be kept together and categorized as a single entity, as opposed to what we have now. Aqua (talk) 15:39, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. No objections here. - Infinite - talk 16:13, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

What's featured?

I'm looking for the list of featured articles, and not seeing it. Do we have just the one article on the HoM? —Torrenal 03:55, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Right now, yes. See an article you want to nominate, nominate it. Konig/talk 05:13, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Self-link count and black-links

The Movement of the World didn't have a self-link in the lead paragraph and lacked a picture so they were limited to the heading and "read more". Hall of Monuments does have a self link in the first handful of words and its picture, which bumps the link count to 4. Seem a bit of a overkill to me in the amount of text that gets featured. Perhaps my main irk comes from the link in the heading: By default it is not blue, which my mind has become accustomed to represent a hyperlink. Consistency is the key. Thoughts/suggestions for changes:

1. heading unlink. Alternatively, do away with this, much like Wikipedia has -- the content in the featured article section is should be written well enough to provide a cue.
2. article in lead paragraph neutral. Unlinked means the user has to read (or skip) the section before getting to the "read more" link at the end. Linked allows for the reader to go to the article much earlier.
3. image unlink. Default link to file, or make decorative.

Black hyperlinks just don't seem to fit in a "blue link and black text article" environment--at least without a visual cue. --BryghtShadow 11:34, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Frequency of Rotation of the Featured Pages

Hall of Monuments is getting somewhat stale. I would like to see it changed out prior to early access day. In general, I think changing the feature on the 1st and 15th of every month would be reasonable. Also special in-game events should get priority (like a holiday event) and jump in to the rotation to coincide with their in game dates. How often are people suggesting that the featured page be changed? What was the consensus on how long to run a feature on the GW1 wiki? neobolts 20:01, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

On GWW, it should (note: doesn't always due to inactive folks who can change it/care about changing it) on a bi-weekly basis. GW2W should follow. It's just that there's no accepted feature-worthy articles to, you know, feature. Because people are more interested in documenting than showcasing atm (which is a good thing). Konig/talk 01:13, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

on top of that if there are a abundance of feature's we can make it change every week but that all depends on getting pages accepted as konig pointed out already.- Zesbeer 05:22, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

Lower requirements

I think we should lower are requirements for a time being other wise we are going to have the hall of monuments page for a very long time... - Zesbeer 21:01, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Status of the Featured Pages project

Hi everyone,

I noticed that the main page mainly hasn't changed its feature page in a while and that this project didn't seem to have a lot of activity lately, I was wondering if anyone is still working on/updating it? Thanks.--Stephane Lo Presti talk 21:30, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Personally, I'm waiting for the wiki to be more complete - while most of the wiki is a work in progress with only one in five pages, give or take, are not a stub, it's hard to determine whether an article is feature worthy or not. As such, I'm personally putting more effort into establishing formatting standards, getting things set up, and keeping information accurate while filling in things I see. I suspect others are mostly doing the same. Konig/talk 23:04, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback Konig, I'm sure others will chime in and we'll get a better picture soon. (It's one topic I'd like to mention in a possible future WikiChat, although I'm very unsure when this could happen; I created this discussion in anticipation of that) --Stephane Lo Presti talk 23:10, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

agreed with Konig but I also think that as I stated in the above section that this might be a good tool to help make better pages. Maybe we should lower the requirements for this for the time being because one side affect of this project is that once a page gets featured everyone goes to said page and it gets alot of community polish.- Zesbeer 23:52, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Or just find a page that is fairly complete? I'm sure we have at least a few that would qualify. —Dr Ishmael 23:54, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I think we have some articles in the wiki that I would consider on par with the Hall of Momentum article. Btw, a wiki chat would be kind of nice... - Yandere 00:36, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

I really want to make a 2nd WikiChat, but I've got to juggle with too many things to be able to in the short term (including a couple of things for the wikis on the backend). I can't promise when it'll happen but I can tell you that it's on my list of things to do. --Stephane Lo Presti talk 00:48, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

@Dr Ishmael and Yandere nominate said pages plox.- Zesbeer 03:00, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

(reset) One question on this. I think many articles on the front page are good. Are these subject to spotlighting, or are just articles which are not immidately reachable by the main page suggestable? - Yandere 07:11, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Currently, any article we agree upon can work for featured articles (though personally I'd like to avoid things linked on the main page already, but this is as said personal preference).

This said, I think - given how GWW's Featured article project went overall - that the best coarse of action would be to either look at GWW's featured article pages or find a "starting base" of GW2W articles for feature, find the aspects which make us want to feature said articles, and create a list of requirements with x amount of said requirements being met (some perhaps manditroy while others being a case of "any x amount of these") so that we don't have to discuss, debate, and argue over each article. And just simply add new articles which fit this discussion to a randomized list of articles (much like gw1:Main Page/featured article) that would automatically update (could do the same on GWW tbh). That should get the project up and going, and so long as there's at least one person actively watching the quality of articles with this in mind, we can get new articles in said list. Konig/talk 07:56, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

How does it work?

While I admit, it may be well possible, that I have just overseen something important... I just don't get it, how to finally get an article on the featured article spot :) I nominated yesterday the Page Shadow of the Mad King, and since I think in this case that some rush is needed to get it to the main page while it is useful (and all (2) comments been positive) I moved it already today to the accepted section. But what, and when, will happen from now on??? If a "short text" is needed, I am willing to write s.th., Picture shouldn't be a problem. But who is now in charge of it, and is (s)he at all aware of it? Additonally I think it is crucial, that we have agreed on the next article after halloween is gone. The event page shouldn't be featured after the event and going back to the monument of heroes again wouldn't look good either.

Edit it into Template:Main Page/featured. If you don't want to deal with the formatting, just provide the text and image and I or someone else can do it for you. —Dr Ishmael 16:10, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Active page features

So someone went a head and accepted lost shore as a page to be featured and changed the next feature to it. I would like to purpose that we are more active this time around and when we catch wind of a big content update coming to the game that we have a higher level of content for that we should go ahead and make that new content a featured page. what are peoples thoughts ideas? I just think that the method that we had for gw1 was good because when we started that project most of the pages were done as for here the most of the pages are no where close to being in a final state.- Zesbeer 22:34, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

The issue of project activity and a proposed solution

This project’s activity is… pretty non-existent. There's seldom more than 2 or 3 comments per proposal, and the only articles that actually got put up are monthly content articles – mostly out of necessity to change it, and they give a good excuse to do so. As such, I’d like to make a proposal for restructuring this project and, effectively, leaving it unnecessary to continue except creating an entry once a month. My proposal would be to feature articles for half a month (2 weeks on average), with half being the monthly content (to do this best, we’d need to get Anet’s help like we did with The Lost Shores, where we had enough early information and images to have a worthy article and preview for the main page). The other half would be articles we choose. That’s 24 articles featured yearly. This works primarily so long as ArenaNet continues their once-a-month large updates, which I suspect they shall for quite some time. The articles we choose will cycle on a yearly basis – showing for 2 weeks every year. Of these 12 articles, I propose 6 feature lore-related topics and 6 feature mechanic or gameplay feature related topics. My suggestions for the list is as follows (I can only think of 3 each):

• Mechanics:
  • Hall of Monuments – previously featured and will become more obscure in the future, whereas before it was more prevalent (Note: I should denote, I mean the former version, not the current one rewritten by Santax - I wrote this all up a couple days ago on word, and it got changed since).
  • Character creation – both extensive and a good hub article to lead to other articles that are good but not quite feature worthy.
  • World versus World – I don’t know about others, but to me how the game presents the actual objectives other than “kill all the enemies, capture all the forts” is rather lacking and this seems to have it all, from server scoring to what doing stuff does besides giving a shiney disappearing event medal.
• Lore:
  • Elder Dragon - nominated already, and a well researched and written article.
  • Lore – the main of main lore articles, I can’t see us not featuring this. However, it could use some sprucing up and needs modern history (post-GW1, the most important part) added still, so a later feature.
  • Largos – of the non-playable races that didn’t get a blog post, this article is the most complete and nicely formatted with plenty of available imagry. Largos are also, from what I’ve seen, among the most liked races (alongside tengu and kodan).

Others' thoughts? Konig/talk 04:34, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Honestly at this point I think we should just feature whatever and let the community improve the page once its featured. - Zesbeer 01:31, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

close this project

Im not sure if this is the right place to discuss this but I would like to propose to close this project off. At the moment the featured pages are release pages of the current release. I think thats a very good thing. With the announced to have such releases every two weeks I think its hard to feature any other pages in between. More important the amount of proposed pages is very low.195.240.63.18 13:13, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

the amount of proposed pages is low because of the lack of interest in the project. that said I agree that we should think about closing the project until its needed again when anet stops the living world project. - Zesbeer 20:14, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

So here's something to bring it back: I'm trying to promote our wikis regularly (on twitter every week and Facebook every month or so). Having such a program list potential pages for promotion would help me greatly to do that, which would bring more traffic and thus editors to the wiki community. I'll add that such a program needs more than release-based articles (I often, if not always, promote the release article that always ends up being the one being featured on the main page of the wiki) as there are a lot of articles that are in a great shape and editors are spending time updating them. Let me know if you have questions ^^ --Stephane Lo Presti talk 22:39, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

I would love to keep this project going Stephane but its really only ever been me and Konig Des Todes doing it and when he got banned from the wiki I lost interest. so if you can find more people who are interested in showing off there wiki page work I would be willing to put more work into this project again.- Zesbeer 06:48, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

I was not asking you specifically Zesbeer. I perfectly understand that things come and go on a wiki, and that "responsibility" is a flexible/temporary thing. I'm just saying that there's a potential here to take this project maybe off your plate? I'm thinking of tweeting something about exactly that, could be a cool project for another editor or a passionate reader :) Thanks for supporting this project --Stephane Lo Presti talk 16:51, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Bringing back featured pages

So, I'm hearing a lot of complaints that Guild Wars 2 "has no lore", people are confused by the Living World, and that ANet needs to communicate the changing state of the game world better. As the project charged with documenting the game world, I feel like this is a task best accomplished by the wiki rather than ANet, and the best place to start is the main page. As you'll know, the featured pages project was quietly dropped a while ago in favour of just including a summary of the current release in its place. This was at a time that the current release system wasn't as well-defined, and players were still unaware that major updates were happening with regularity at all (Shadow of the Mad King, Lost Shores sort of era). This is no longer a problem, and I propose we have a sort of hybrid system whereby the current "featured article" is:

• Well-written
• Complete, (so no stub sections)
• Undisputed, in the sense that it has no {{verify}} tags or other maintenance templates
• Directly relevant to either the current release or the release immediately preceding or succeeding it
• Updated every two weeks

The article does not have to be lore related (it could be illuminating a new game mechanic), although unless the current release is a feature pack (and unless there is interest from editors not primarily concerned with lore like myself) it probably will be. The article should be changed every two weeks at around the day of the release (if this turns out to be inconvenient, for example because the page in question might require significant revision due to the release, then maybe we could do it a week out of phase with the release, so if releases come in "even" weeks the FA would be changed in "odd" weeks). Ideally, the article would be picked from a list of community-approved candidates, but given the level of activity on the project last time, and the relatively short amount of time we would have to decide, I do not anticipate this being possible the majority of the time, and so I propose that if there is not enough discussion then someone be allowed to simply change the featured article to something they feel is appropriate. Does anyone have any feelings on this? --Santax (talk · contribs) 20:59, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

I have put an example up at {{[[Template:Template:Main Page/featured|Template:Main Page/featured]]}}. --Santax (talk · contribs) 21:22, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

I'd also like to propose an exception to the above criteria for the first article only - Living World summary/Season 1 would make a good featured article at the moment for a lead-in to the next LS release, as well as introducing wiki users to the concept of story summaries via the template at the bottom of the page. Another example of an article that would make a good FA is a wikified version of Psycho Robot's list of unique karma skins - relevant to a new feature (the wardrobe), and a good chance for the wiki to show off the dedication of its community. --Santax (talk · contribs) 21:30, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

I never liked the featured articles on GWW and I don't want them on this wiki either. Cluttering the main page with even more stuff is a bad idea; I already think the box for the current release is really huge, what with the image and all, but it's "important" because that's often the easiest way to navigate to what's happening in the game right now. If you want to just replace that, then that's better aesthetics-wise, but I'd still rather just keep it focused on the main release article.

That being said, I do agree that the Living Story needs some better and more prominent way of being highlighted, assuming Anet chooses to continue using that format for storytelling. The summary page for the first season is a good start, and an example for documenting future releases; ideally I would love to be able to learn anything and everything about <plot events>, even if I never get a chance to play them in-game. No one really does that (well) right now, so the field is open. Vili 点 21:36, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

"As you'll know, the featured pages project was quietly dropped a while ago in favour of just including a summary of the current release in its place." Maybe people don't know why then because that isn't true. We changed it because no one was updating the featured article and the only time it changed was for living world content. It has nothing to do making readers aware of living world updates. The project died because lack of contributions.--Relyk ~ talk < 22:35, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) I think we need to wait for season 2 to start before we start this back up, we don't even know if they are still doing the 2 week releases that they did for season 1. Also the feature pages had a lot of work put into them and it hasn't been featured for that long either there was a few day delay. Also how ever great Zephyr Sanctum was/is its not in the game so I would be against something that people can't jump in and play. a better feature page would be the living world summary but after the feature patch has had about 2 weeks, but also when we find out info about season 2 or what ever anet is planning.- Zesbeer 22:44, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

@Relyk as stated in the above section I was the only person after Konig got banned the first time, I lost interested (because we were the only ones contributing to said project) in the feature project. it also happened that the 2 week release started around the same time. so it was just a perfect storm.- Zesbeer 22:46, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

While I always liked the idea to feature good articles, unfortunately I have never seen the desired effect of articles being overhauled to be become featured. Yes, some articles were improved, but actually there wasn’t really an incentive to improve articles much. Also, the ultimate set of feature articles was rather small on GWW; the fact that we had some was actually because of the wiki’s age which resulted in a few well written and interesting things. On GW2W, most is documentation or entirely Living World related.

Also, the way GW2 releases content really suggests to feature the current release. During the Living World break, yes, it makes absolutely sense to highlight the summary; but after that, I don’t think we have a good number of other articles worth being featured (yet?). poke | talk 23:31, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

There are several candidates I can think of off the top of my head - but only if anyone actually felt like cleaning them up to be featured, which I don't think anyone really does (?). Vili 点 04:31, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

One problem with featured articles is that is can lead to perceived "ownership" problems - ie the person responsible for bringing the article up to featured standard then perceives the article as "theirs." I know such a state of affairs is unthinkable with lore articles, but still. — snograt 11:50, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Well...

The reception for this proposal could be most optimistically described as mixed. I assume the consensus says that we're not going through with this, but given that we now know the next release will be the Festival of the Four Winds, we'd actually be in a pretty good position to go through with this, if we wanted to. Articles on Zephyrites, Zephyr Sanctum, Captain's Council and Glint are all directly relevant and as complete as they're going to be. I'm sure there are other options as well, to do with the mechanics of the jumping puzzle zone or what have you, but I wasn't really involved with those articles so I couldn't list them (although if anyone else was, feel free to). Other options include Bazaar itself (although that article needs work), or even the article on Cantha or something to do with Cantha, since that seems to be the theme of the release (probably to thematically tie in with the Chinese release more than anything), and it would be nice to remind wiki readers that didn't play GW1 that such a place exists in preparation for the release. We know what the general theme of an upcoming release is going to be in advance, so if we compiled a list of articles that would serve as a good introduction to it (as I have above), then that gives us a week to work on them and fix them up - ample time, imo. This is something I'd be happy to do. In this particular case, there are already several articles that (in my view) would do fine, so no work would be required. –Santax (talk · contribs) 19:01, 13 May 2014 (UTC)