Wikipedia:WikiProject Chicago/COTW/Rules and Objectives

Rules
Losing nominees can be renominated 4 weeks after finishing 2nd in any vote. Other losing nominees must wait 10 weeks to be renominated in the absence of any current event or other unusual circumstance, which would make it a priority. An editor may renominate another editors nomination without the aforementioned delays. Each nominee should include a 25 word or less supporting summary of need for attention and reason for importance.

Hopefully we will have 3 or 4 nominees each week. In any week where there are not 3 nominees the administrator of this page may round out the ballot. In attempt to avoid stalemates we should limit ourselves to 3 nominees in any week that has 6 or fewer active contributing editors. When we get to 7-10 maybe we should go to 4 and above that 5.

In the event of a multi-way tie where everyone votes for their own nomination. There will be a 24 hour period where everyone has a chance to vote for their second choice. All person's who don't vote will have their first choice removed from consideration. All other ties will be decided by the shortest article at the time the first vote was cast.

In general, it is probably best if you refrain from editing articles once they have been nominated until voting concludes. This will enable everyone to make decisions about the same version of articles.

A nomination should reference a single page. That page may be a disambiguation page with closely related articles that are in need of work. For example Washington Park, Chicago is a former WP:CHICOTW. At the time of the nomination Washington Park, Chicago (neighborhood), Washington Park (Chicago park), and Washington Park Race Track were all on one page and the Washington Park Subdivision did not exist. The need to get this cleaned up made for a great WP:CHICOTW. John Burroughs Drake has also been nominated at a time when both John Burroughs Drake I and John Burroughs Drake II were redlinks. However, multiple items that belong on the same list should not be our focus unless and until we have dozens of active editors helping us in an average week.

It should be noted that it is common to nominate and vote for something because you like it irrespective of its prospects for improvement. We should keep in mind that no matter how much we like a topic, personal interest in the subject has no effect on the availability of reliable sources. Some thought should be given to the amount of information available on a topic before promoting it for WP:CHICOTW. A common fallacy is that because a topic seems very cool to me there must be other wikipedians who find it cool and have information about it. Please consider an article's prospects for improvement before promoting it. However, this is a voluntary democracy so please accept the consensus once it has been documented. More importantly, once an article has been selected be sure to earn your pay by doing your best to assisting in its improvement.

If at any time during the first 3 days of a CHICOTW's reign all editors who voted in favor of an article determine that the article was a less fruitful candidate for improvement than they had estimated, it can be withdrawn and the 2nd place nominee will replace it.

GA
Going forward 5 weeks after a term as a WP:CHICOTW article each page will go through a good article nomination. This delay will give us a reasonable goal to aspire towards for each article and keep us interested in improving articles for a few weeks after their term expires to reach this goal. It will also give us a chance to perform some cleanup tasks that may take more than a few days. Furthermore, it will give us feedback to continue improving articles after their good article review. Also, part of a good article evaluation articles are assess for stability to make sure no controversial information has been added that has led to edit wars or other forms of instability.

DYK
Going forward on the 5th day of each WP:CHICOTW we will nominate the most interesting fact from the article for the WP:DYK feature. This will hopefully get our article on the Main_Page for 6 hours or so. Such exposure will help bring our article to the attention of many wikipedians who may be able to help us improve it. Each week watch the article's talk page for discussion about the DKY nomination. Generally, once an article reaches a critical mass of well-cited information we can nominate facts. In order to pursue this objective, it is now policy that except for unusual circumstances (E.G. the week after the Olympic Committee decision we will encourage Chicago 2016 Olympic bid or a related article) only DYK eligible nominees will be accepted. Until July 27, 2007, this meant articles older than five days old must be less than 1,500 characters at the time we begin editing them. The rule has been relaxed so that some longer articles may be considered, but in order that we don't do a lot of work and get no positive review, let's stick with a 1500 character max on old articles.