NetHackWiki talk:Featured articles

Choosing the next featured article

So who's in charge of choosing the next featured article? Or is it that anyone can step in and choose? —Shijun 10:43, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, there's a list of candidates...Normally an admin does this sort of thing, but if no others show up by this afternoon I'll go ahead and promote one. Lotte 13:57, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

September

So it is now September 11th, and the featured article is still on August... not sure who can change this.Spazm 16:49, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

OK since it is now September 22nd, I am changing the featured article to Knight. I hope i did it right. Spazm 16:49, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Automatizing the featured articles

In Wikipedia the featured article changes daily instead of monthy like here, so it's not done by hand but prepared beforehand and changed automatically. There's this Mediawiki special code that produces the current date: "{{#time:F j, Y}}" renders as "November 21, 2024". Now, put that code inside a template call and you can call a different template each month: you could have {{Featured article/January}}, {{Featured article/February}}, etc. and you'd just need to edit those.

Of course someone would still need to work as the editor but they could do their job up to a year in advance. Also, that scheme would rotate the featured articles in 12 month cycles in case anyone forgot to add new content to the templates, but I find that acceptable. Who remembers what was featured a year ago, anyway?

What do you think? It takes some setting up but I believe it would be worth it because we wouldn't run into awkward situations where we'd have last month's featured article on the main page. —ZeroOne (talk / @) 14:22, January 10, 2010 (UTC)

Sounds good, in my opinion we should do as you describe. A minor pitfall could be: someone would still need to manually brush up the articles before they automatically and silently get featured. -Tjr 14:55, January 10, 2010 (UTC)

I agree that this is a good idea, though I have one suggestion: it might be easier if we use template parameters (e.g. {{Featured article|January}} and {{Featured article|February}}) so that we don't have to maintain 12 different templates. —Shijun 22:53, January 10, 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments! I'm not sure if maintaining one lengthy template is any easier than maintaining 12 short ones? We could also use the template parameters as a front-end but "behind the scenes" use those smaller templates. I have setup something like that in the Civilization IV wiki, take a look at it here: Civ4 Wiki:Featured articles. Notice how the FA-template automatically generates those headers and edit links when it is given an additional parameter. In the main page the parameter is not used so neither the plain header nor the edit link will be rendered. —ZeroOne (talk / @) 12:56, January 11, 2010 (UTC)

Now that we have agreement in a general sense to automate the system and we have a good suggestion to start with (Civ4), is there anything to stop us from setting this up? If there is no further discussion or action, I'm going to copy the Civ4 code verbatim for the March featured article. -Tjr 01:20, January 25, 2010 (UTC)

Done. I'm only doing features it this one time. -Tjr 18:21, March 1, 2010 (UTC)