Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20170702/Feature1

Feature: Shiny Wikipedians - A Featured Content Leaderboard

 *  Submitted by Thibbs 

In comments from readers of the last feature we ran (Vol. 9, No. 4), it was suggested that the significance of a leaderboard for article creators was minor in comparison with some of the other more involved activities that WP:VG members take part in from time to time. Specifically, the topic of high-quality content production was raised as a more meaningful metric by which to consider the development of the project. The idea of a quality-based leaderboard is rather more complex than that of a basic growth metric like article creation, and some of the issues include: (1) whether to focus on "Featured" content or to include "Good" content as well; (1a) whether to award more significance to Featured content than to Good content or whether to consider them equally for the purposes of the leaderboard; (2) whether or not to consider former featured/good articles; and (3) how to consider the roles of the nominator, co-nominator(s), and promoter (i.e. the person responsible for closing the discussion and officially listing the article as featured/good content). With regard to these specific issues, the decisions were made: (1) to only cover "Featured" content, (2) to consider former featured content alongside currently featured content, and (3) to list all noms and co-noms while ignoring the promoter. In the future, the Newsletter may re-visit this topic to expand it to all high-quality content including good articles as well, but for now we will limit ourselves.

This quarter the WP:VG Newsletter turns its attention to Featured Content - those select few articles, lists, topics, images, and portals that have been thoughtfully expanded, scrupulously sourced, and artfully streamlined and trimmed of any cruft, NNPOV, OR, unsourced claims, and other hobgoblins that tend in time to infiltrate our crowd-sourced prose. This content has been massaged through the article quality scale by small teams of editors and reviewers until they can rightly be described as representing Wikipedia's best output. And that matters. Since its inception, Wikipedia has struggled to emerge from the common criticism that because it is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, it is only as reliable as its least reliable editor. To an extent this is true. Every Wikipedian with more than a handful of edits has seen problems—even glaring problems—in published content, and these problems give fodder to Wikipedia's critics. But the criticism begins to ring hollowly when the entirety of the encyclopedia is taken into account, and unless the Perfect is needlessly made the enemy of the Good, a significant counterargument can be made simply by proffering some of Wikipedia's best content.

It's no surprise to anyone that Wikipedia's content plays host to some certain amount of vandalism, factual inaccuracy, and POV slant, but the process by which content is improved to the point where it is promoted to "Featured" status by a panel of peers acts as its own safeguard and serves to protect quality content. In recognizing a moment when the content (article, list, etc.) met our highest standards, and by linking to it from the milestone section of the associated talk page as the FA version of the content page, we provide a reference point against which all future edits to the page can be compared. Ultimately it provides a snapshot of the article to which state it can be restored at any time in the future in case problems crop up. And with that as the relevant background, we present our Featured Content Leaderboard. It covers 138 unique editors, so in the interest of space we have repeated the layout of the previous leaderboard and merged usernames at the low end of the table. If you have any questions about the positions of any editors not individually named, please leave a comment in the comment section.

Please read on! In our second feature this quarter ProtoDrake will walk readers through the process of getting the Final Fantasy VII article to FA status. The more featured material we can produce as a WikiProject, the more our members shine!