User talk:Newyorkbrad/Archive/2019/Jan

AN notice
Please see [] Hell in a Bucket (talk) 18:05, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

January 13: Wikimedia NYC invites you to Wikipedia Day 2019
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A modest proposal regarding mainpage review
I'm posting this here for now because I'm not sure which of a dozen pages it would be most usefully posted to.

Quality-control issues relating to the contents of the main page are causing an increasing amount of disharmony and ill-will within the community. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the bottom line is that the current system in which editors scrutinize DYK hooks, OTD entries, FA blurb prose, the POTD caption, etc. once they hit the main page, or at best on the day before, is not working well. The results of this system include admins having to make "pull, change, or leave alone" decisions in real-time, sometimes without an opportunity for input from the original authors or other interested parties, and without time for a consensus to develop. (Sometimes this system also raises other concerns I consider serious, such as someone deciding at the last minute that an article on a major national or religious holiday should be pulled because it has an unsourced section, creating a risk that our omission of that holiday will be misperceived as insensitive or biased.)

Would it make sense to establish a new page called "the main page three days from now" (or five days or one week or whatever time-frame is judged reasonable)? Interested editors be invited to work ahead and to flag errors, infelicities, unsupported assertions, etc. that appear on that page. This would allow reasonable time for issues to be responded to and addressed before the disputed items go live on the main page, with input from all concerned.

I understand that this system could not be applied to ITN, but I don't see why it shouldn't work for all the other components of the main page. Of course WP:ERRORS would have to remain to flag newly spotted errors already on the main page, but hopefully that would become a much less frequent occurrence.

Thoughts appreciated. Thank you. Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:47, 7 January 2019 (UTC)


 * My own view is that we may rather be too concerned with (minor) problems on the main page, relative to other often more substantial problems with other (high-view, important) articles. As a Wikipedian who has been involved with DYK as well as a little with ITN, I would also argued that DYK receives an undue degree of criticism, when the problems can be more severe with the often newly written ITN articles on ongoing stories where in quite a few cases info in articles and sometimes blurb turn out not to be accurate. Increased nitpicking with every DYK articles, which are often on marginal topics, is in my view not really helpful for the overall development of the encyclopeida. Iselilja (talk) 17:58, 7 January 2019 (UTC)


 * I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer here.
 * ITN (as you note) can't be done ahead of time; discussions at ITNC generally work well enough.
 * OTD is currently done almost entirely by (courtesy ping) and is available well ahead of time.  It's simply not scrutinized by enough people right now; if a new process gets more eyes on it ahead of time it will be constructive.
 * TFA has an even better queue (all of January is easily viewable at Today's featured article/January 2019, and multiple coordinators; I'm not sure increased visibility will improve things there.
 * DYK has the most problems; I'm not sure how to fix that process. An earlier review might just make the arguments bigger.
 * power~enwiki ( π, ν ) 19:52, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I normally do OTD updates about 2 days in advance. I'm currently trying to build up a longer lead time but only because I'll be going on vacation in the summer for 3 weeks so that I don't have to do any of it while I'm away. However, a 5-day buffer isn't a bad idea. — howcheng  {chat} 23:11, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

2019


Die Zeit, die Tag und Jahre macht

Happy 2019

begin it with music and memories

Not too late, I hope ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:16, 13 January 2019 (UTC)