User talk:AjaxSmack/Essays/The Road to Today's Featured Article

Today's featured articles (TFAs) are the best of the best articles Wikipedia has to offer and are the face of Wikipedia. The road to reaching this pinnacle of achievement is long and at times opaque. What follows is a summary of the process with relevant links.

Featured articles
Articles start with nominations to be made featured articles, a key condition for being a TFA. Nominations are made at WP:FAC; discussions are filed under the format of Featured article candidates/Armed Forces Special Weapons Project/archive1.

Articles that are approved and become featured can be found under Category:Featured articles. Category:Featured articles that have appeared on the main page links to the talk pages of articles of said quality. Featured articles that haven't been on the Main Page links to the articles themselves whereas Category:Featured articles that have not appeared on the main page links ot the talk pages. There is a Category:Featured article candidate log that covers nominations in 2004 and 2005.

From FA to TFA
The "Wikipedia Signpost" dispatch at Wikipedia Signpost/2008-08-18/Dispatches is titled "Choosing Today's Featured Article" explains the system of choosing TFAs.

Requests are made at Today's featured article/requests. The requests are made months in advance and can be "nonspecific" with regard to when they will appear on the main page or designated for a specific date. If a TFA request is related to specific date, it can be manually added to the list at Today's featured article/requests/pending. Each request has its own page in the format of Today's featured article/requests/Exhumation of Richard III of England.

Sometimes the discussion is closed with either "scheduled" (e.g. Today's featured article/requests/Mary Shelley) "not scheduled" (e.g. Today's featured article/requests/John C. Calhoun) and sometimes the discussion is never closed but the article becomes a TFA (e.g. Today's featured article/requests/Barge of the Dead). The discussion closer is sometimes a TFA coordinator and sometimes not. No rationale is given for these decisions; requests with near unanimous opposition sometimes become TFAs (e.g. Today's featured article/requests/U.S. Route 30 in Iowa) and those with no oppostion are denied (e.g. the aforementioned Calhoun).

Following this step, the process is not entirely accessible to Wikipedia readers or editors. WP:TFAR notes that "requests are not the only factor in scheduling the TFA (see Choosing Today's Featured Article); the final decision rests with the TFA coordinators..., who also select TFAs for dates where no suggestions are put forward." (This is likely the reason that some TFAs, like Today's featured article/requests/Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, are "missing" a request page.)

(Some of the process can be seen at Wikipedia talk:Unreviewed featured articles/2020. Monthly tentative TSA lists can sometimes be found in sections of that talk page (like this) and editors are invited to comment on the selections.  User:Dweller/Featured Articles that haven't been on Main Page is a list of pre-2011 articles that might or might not be available for non-requested TFAs.)

Then, 1-2 months before the date of feature, TFA coordinators post a list of the next month's TFA choices and the accompanying blurbs. The selections for the current month can be found at pages with the format Today's featured article/January 2022.

TFA archives
The text of all TFAs is at pages of the format Today's featured article/January 2021 which link to individual pages of the format Today's featured article/January 1, 2021.

From 2013, TFA lists are at pages of the format Today's featured article/TFAs in 2021 which is a compilation of month pages of the format Today's featured article/recent TFAs/January 2021.

Links in list form
Stripped of all of the actual page names, the information needed to understand and participate in the TFA process appears in the following pages:

Overall process

 * Explanation of the process 1
 * Explanation of the process 2
 * Explanation of the process 3
 * Explanation of the process 4

Request process

 * TFA request page
 * Request background info
 * Source for TFAs 1 (category)
 * Source for TFAs 2

TFA schedule
As of 10 January 2022
 * Schedule 1 (1-2 months out)
 * Schedule 2 (one month out)
 * Schedule 3 (one month out)
 * Schedule 4 (current month)

Post-TFA

 * Archive 1 (monthly list with full blurbs)
 * Archive 2 (yearly list with statistics)