Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-05-04/Dispatches

Re-examining the process

Looking through the current FLCs, I see the same types of lists being nominated. I get the feeling that people are just reaching for the low hanging fruit and working on the easy FLs. [...] It's frustrating that people are aiming so low. In many cases, pages are created (some with questionable notability) and brought to FL, whereas I would prefer to see more users improve existing pages. And the reason we are getting so many FLs in certain topics is because of how easy it has become to get them promoted. The problem is that they seem to exist just so they can become FLs.

—Scorpion0422, [1]

In his essay titled "State of the FL process", Featured List (FL) director Scorpion0422 stated that he believed the overall quality of the FL process had deteriorated. Among other things, he blamed the problem on a lack of a criterion that focused on stand-alone lists. He felt that although certain lists were technically eligible for FL status, they did not need to be split off from the parent articles (for example, List of awards and nominations received by Ray LaMontagne, a recently failed Featured List Candidate (FLC), from Ray LaMontagne) and therefore did not represent Wikipedia's "best work". Scorpion0422 also attributed the decline in quality to a lack of FLC reviewers (an ongoing problem in other content review processes), lack of variety in Featured Lists, and, at times, lack of directorial oversight of the process. In particular, Scorpion highlighted two types of FLs that "hurt the process":

• "Easy FLs" – Lists that users nominate primarily to gain featured credits rather than for readers' benefit.
• Recreations of lists from parent articles – Sublists that recreate content of their main articles without providing further detail.

After writing this summary, Scorpion0422 compiled a list of Featured lists that he considered to not meet the current criteria, categorizing them according to their issues. He posted the results at the FLC discussion page, noting that numerous FLs (nearly 20% as of 25 March 2009) did not meet the FL criteria at the time.

Revised criteria

A series of proposals for a revised criteria was started.

1. Usefulness – With the number of small lists growing, some believed that there was a hole in the criteria that allowed for content forks to become Featured Lists. The usefulness criteria was meant to establish that a FL had to be worthy of a stand-alone list and not recreate content from another article.
2. Images – Because many FLs contain a large number of images (e.g., List of Nobel laureates in Literature and List of United States Naval Academy alumni), editors felt that adherence to image-use policy needed to be a more prominent provision of the criteria.
3. Naming conventions – Lists are named according to Wikipedia's conventions on naming stand-alone lists.
4. Length – Several times, discussions has been raised over whether smaller lists truly represent Wikipedia's best work. There has been an unofficial limit of ten items enforced by the reviewers, but no hard limit had ever been established. Due to the widely varying types and formats of FLs, establishing a hard, enforcable limit is difficult, and a proposed criterion stated that "exceptions must be discussed beforehand on a case-by-case basis." Discussion was moved to Wikipedia talk:Stand-alone lists#Proposal to advise against short lists.
5. Lead sentence – A number of FLs used to start with "this is a list of..." before changes in the MOS and at FLC were made. A number of current FLs still start in this fashion, so a proposal was made to clarify the manner in which FLs should begin. However, it was soon dropped because the criteria already required an FL to have an "engaging lead section", making the proposed clarification redundant.

After more than two weeks of discussion and four proposed drafts of the new FL criteria, the following changes were introduced:

• 3 (b) "In length and/or topic, it meets all of the requirements for stand-alone lists; it is not a content fork, does not largely recreate material from another article, and could not reasonably be included as part of a related article."
  • This criterion had the largest effect of all of the proposed criterion as its implementation meant that dozens of current FLs automatically failed it.
• 5 (b) "It has images and other media, if appropriate to the topic, that follow Wikipedia's usage policies, with succinct captions or "alt" text. Non-free images and other media satisfy the criteria for the inclusion of non-free content and are labeled accordingly."

New FLRC delegate

On April 5, The Rambling Man was named co-delegate of the Featured List Removal Process, filling the spot vacated by Dweller in January. Delegates act as directors and determine the exact timing of the process for each nomination. Sephiroth BCR served as the sole delegate for several months because due to the lack of activity at FLRC, there was no pressing need for a second delegate.

An administrator and bureaucrat, The Rambling Man's first Featured List was List of Italian football champions, promoted on April 26, 2007. He has since successfully nominated 18 FLs. In May 2008, he was appointed one of the first co-directors of the Featured List process. He served as director until September, when he resigned in preparation for a trip he was taking. The Rambling Man returned not long after the revised criteria discussion started. With the revised criteria close to being implemented, it was decided that a second delegate would be able to help control the potential increase in activity. The Rambling Man accepted the FLRC delegate position and his confirmation went through unopposed.