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I just did a little a little analysis and of the 110 articles that were featured in August 2001 (the oldest time for which data exists) 26 are still featured now. I salute these examples of long-standing fine writing User:Pcb21#Still brilliant. Pcb21| Pete 09:05, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Warren County Canal was removed on April 28 but it's not listed in either archive page.
The resubmit information seems to be missing from the page or the link from the "facfailed" template is incorrectly linked. I'd like to know whats the appropriate length of time for a re-nomination since my article's 1 objection (making it easier to verify references) was fixed prior to failing. K1Bond007 15:31, May 9, 2005 (UTC)
I just thought - why not submit pic with FAC request? This could save time for chosing which pic to nominate for Main Page, and would also serve as a VISUAL mark for those viewing the FAC page - after all, for many people, pics are easier and quicker to recognize then words. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 21:51, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
Just a silly thought, but does anyone else feel that there could be a place for Wikipedia:Featured list candidates? Filiocht | Blarneyman 11:51, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
I think that there's a substantial difference in kind between, say, list of popes and list of notable libertarian theorists and authors. Random crap keeps sneaking into the latter, and there's no way of telling if it's comprehensive or not. I think the popes are featurable, the theorists are not. I'm not sure how to express that difference in the criteria, though. Something about the list being verifiably complete. Dave (talk) 13:37, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
I fail to see how a list or category can be of 'featured' quality. First, as Filiocht said, unless you stick with very clear cut, closed sets (like popes) you're bound to run into ambiguities. What is a 'comprehensive' list? Who is to say that the list should include A, B, and C, but not D. Also, a list is, um.. devoid of content. There's not really anything there to differentiate a good list from a bad one. [Raul]
Second, Wikiprojects (and categories) shouldn't be featured at all. The whole idea of 'featured' is to highlight content we feel is good. Wikiprojects are *not* content, they are designed to produce content; categories an lists are associations of content; they are not content in and of themselves →Raul654 14:45, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
It seems like two different things are being discussed here.
Personally, I think if lists and such are to be featured, they should go on WP:FA and be held to similar standards.
Featuring collections is a different question. The most common situation is when a good article grows and is exploded to subarticles; this happened to nuclear weapon and to spacecraft propulsion, for example. Of these, nuclear weapon is now a mess and shouldn't be featured regardless; spacecraft propulsion was run through the featured process again and is now featured on its own merits. However, it still derives much of its quality from the staggering number of supporting articles on individual methods of spacecraft propulsion, which were part of it when it was first featured.
Perhaps a "Featured topics" section on WP:FA would fit the bill; this would be for featuring whole collections of articles, and would link to an overview article (which should be good, of course, but it would be the quality of the detail articles that would be featured). An example (not of featured quality) would be nuclear technology. --18:12, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
Returning to my original suggestion, I think we should have featured lists for a number of reasons:
I'd just suggest that those that are interested go edit the relevant pages and lets see what emerges. Filiocht | Blarneyman 07:35, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
One final point; if there are concerns over the value of certain lists, can their resolution not be left to the good sense of those who write the criteria and who vote on the candidates, just as happens on FAC? In other words, can't we just trust in the wiki way? Filiocht | Blarneyman 07:37, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
I am pleased to say that this article's updating, revamping, and recompliation, appears to be complete. The issues raised on the FAC candidate page I have attempted to address and I now belive that the entire article conforms to every aspect of a featured article. I ask the administrators to declare it so.
With vote changes, withdrawals, and recasts, this is now I count the tally:
Counting the questionable opposes, its a dead tie but I believe everything possible has been done to turn this into an outstanding article. It matches other Featured Articles I have seen (see Medal of Honor and Order of the Bath) and I hope that the hours of work into this article will now be rewarded with Featured Article status. Thank you and Good Night! - Husnock 04:40, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
I've been hesitant to either promote or archive this nom (along with Papal Tiara) on the page because they seem to be getting a lot of commentary. →Raul654 07:55, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
As Phils wrote in Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Anschluss: "most of what we do here (suggestions, objections, discussion, etc.) belongs in WP:Peer Review. Ideally, articles in Peer Review are the ones with a "basis for a FA", but that aren't quite ready yet. When your article lands here, there shouldn't be much left to correct (relatively speaking, of course, improvement is always possible)". I agree completly. Should we make this an official policy? PR first, only then FAC? -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 11:36, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
Not everyone needs peer review, particularly those who've been through FAC numerous times, however, it should definately be recommended so we don't get half baked articles on FAC, the question is how do we effectively recommend peer review to articles approaching featured status?-- nixie 03:48, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
I found PR to be a really good way of delaying progress on my article. I put it up there for the regulation month. I got a few comments early on and I solicited others. After a few days there was no more traffic, except for my occasional pleas for further guidance. I knew that the article was not yet at FA standard but I could not see what needed to be done and could solicit no advice so I put it back on FAC and got immediate constructive feedback. I am still going through the improving iterations but this is all stuff that I would have hoped to get on PR. I will put future articles through PR too, but I do not expect it to do any more than introduce a one month delay in the improvement. -- Theo (Talk) 22:08, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
More and more we are seeing calls for inotes to be used in featured articles. I really hope they remain non-mandatory. Inotes are useless to readers because they don't even know they exist. They have some value to other editors but no more so than other referencing systems do. Also because they are so free-form (indeed the implementation is blank) these templates are never likely to be used by some fancy software-supported referencing/metadata system. Pcb21| Pete 22:15, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
Personally, I hide the source citations because I find them intrusive in any of the conventions that are currently available. My overriding concern is the readability of the text. I want my reader to get the core information smoothly. Subsidiary information begs a subsidiary system and I prefer footnotes to the interuption of inline citation; this is an encyclopedia, not an academic archive. Wikipedia:Footnote3 is approaching an acceptable solution but it requires one to eschew other inline links. In a perfect world the reader would be able to right click on any text to see a pop-up note about sources. In our less perfect world I would accept small superscript numerals as note indicators but they must not require me to manually code the numerical sequence. I used to use html comments to hide the source data. Now I use inote because it promises to make the data more accessable one of these days. -- Theo (Talk) 19:53, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
The following (hopefully coherent :-) comments:
Wikipedia is an amazing resource. I think this is a given, however we are now fast approaching the point where some of our articles are so comprehensive that other articles will be able to use them as a source! For instance, the Mozilla Firefox article has whole sections that reference more specific subarticles — this is great, but has left the article with a serious lack of references. The subarticles, however, have many references. I think that we should be including the Wikipedia article as a source using the citing Wikipedia standard - this, of course, uses the date and time of the revision referenced by the article. What do people think? - Ta bu shi da yu 17:40, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Hold on all, we have a criteria that we must note all the source of an article. If we use summary form, we only choose the most essential information and leave out all the extraneous stuff — yet if that extraneous stuff is referenced in the subarticle and then we copy ALL the references from those articles, won't that be a bit misleading? As for being a "publication that cites and references itself" - well, we already do this through wikilinks. With Raul's objection: yes, I agree that's not the best solution. However, I was really only referring to the subarticles. After all, what happens when an article loses it's references due to summary form causing them to be removed? - Ta bu shi da yu 05:08, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
Personally I think that an article that is or should be a summary of other more detailed articles like Germany should not contain references because they take so much space but insted refer to the more detailed articles for references. Andries 16:26, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
What's happened to FAC? I don't see too many people voting anymore :-( have things slowed down that much? - Ta bu shi da yu 03:27, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
I have had a lot of work lately, and I like to read FACs entirely before voting. I hope I can start voting on every FAC again soon. Phil s 20:44, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
Question about inactionable votes. If someone "opposes" a Featured Article Candidate but writes something silly like "this article stinks" or "this piece of garbage should never be an FA", are other users permitted to line out the objection so it doesnt get counted with legitimate votes? I recently ran a featured article candidate and it was called names by two users who offered no items to fix, simply stated they thought the article was stupid. I felt then, as I do now, that I should have been able to just line those comments out. Opinions? - Husnock 05:52, 27 May 2005 (UTC)
This is issue has come up quite a few times on FAC lately, and was raised by User:Karmosin (Pete Isotalo) in the discussion about the Starfleet insigna article FAC; I want to settle this issue once and for all. Do other FAC regulars (or anyone for that matter) think that any article about any subject, as long as said subject is notable/verifiable enough to have an article, can be featured, so long as it complies with all FA requirements? (formulated otherwise: Can you object a FAC because you think the subject is too specific/not appropriate for FA, although it "deserves" coverage in an article?) I have already voiced my own personal opinion on the matter; I think one of the only strengths of Wikipedia over printed encyclopedic reference works is the amount of detail found about obscure topics. As such, any article, whether it is about a well-known topic or extremely specific should be "featureable". User:Karmosin has raised the issue of some articles being "not encyclopedic enough" to be featured; I assume by encyclopedic he means "broad in scope". I believe this conception originates in the old-fashioned conception of extremely broad encyclopedia articles we can find in printed encyclopedias (for example, in a printed encyclopedia, most information about Star Trek would be put under one Star Trek article, and entries like "Enterprise" or "Spock" would point the reader to that article). Wikipedia as a whole has long moved away from this model; this is exemplified by the use of "sub-articles" to avoid pages that are too long. We have more space, and thus can provide more detail: that's what makes us interesting, and that's what we need to show off. The idea that an encyclopedia article must give you a broad view of a concept as a whole (which I think is User:Karmosin's conception, after reading what he wrote on the project page) is not applicable here: we have hyperlinks, so that people can quickly look up things they don't know. A good example for a class of very specific articles that has become popular on Wikipedia are articles about songs (many of which are featured, like Hey Jude). What is your view on this? Phil s 21:01, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
The problem I see with the article and Trilobite eloborated it well, is that particular article contains a significant amount of original research, stuff fans have inferred from watching the tv show and movies. We're not going to put suburban reading groups x's interpretation of The Davinci Code on the main page, and it would probably be deleted from any article I tried to add it too and from the main namespace. If anything this artilce is protected from deletion given the precedent to keep most stuff on star trek and star wars. I thank this article would be perfect featured material for the Star Trek WikiCites (if there is one yet) but not for Wikipedia-- nixie 03:24, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
"We're not going to put suburban reading groups x's interpretation of The Davinci Code on the main page." Exactly. As I see it there are two problems here. The first is the question of whether FAC should have notability criteria over and above those of VfD. Just because we tolerate an article's presence in Wikipedia, does that mean we should tolerate its featuring on the main page? I don't think we should, but I see that many people take it as a given that any article notable enough for inclusion is notable enough for the main page, and Raul agrees with their assessment. Filiocht says it's non-negotiable, and with the greatest respect to him, I cannot see why that's the case. It's quite possible of course, that the likes of me and Peter Isolato are in the minority on this, in which case I'm happy to accept community consensus and shut up. There is a second problem though, which refers specifically to the article we're all currently arguing over, but could conceivably apply to many other fancruft articles. This article isn't primarily about a work of fiction, but penetrates a long way into the realms of arbitrary conjecture about fiction. The fans have put together an entirely suppositious area of study based on conjecture about the military structure of a fictional body belonging to a fantasy universe, part of which is glimpsed through the lens of a fictional TV series. We would be mad to slap it on the main page and present it to the world as a showcase of our greatest work. — Trilobite ( Talk) 12:11, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Lets be clear here, that since the criteria now have nothing in them about the topic of an article, that not liking the topic (even by every editor) cannot keep an article from being featured. The only thing that can, is the article not meeting the criteria. If we wished as consensus to have a limit on what topics can be featured (by adding a new criteria), that could be done, but I think there are many good reasons above why that shouldn't happen and I am quite confident that there will be many editors that would never support a limit on what topics can be featured articles. Now we do have a separation that articles not believed to be suited for the main page can be marked as such so that they do not go there, so offensive articles and such are covered by that. - Taxman Talk 14:03, May 31, 2005 (UTC)
(After edit conflicts and server errors.) Filiocht and others make a good case, and since I'm finding myself in the opposite camp to several editors I hold in high regard (and who make persuasive arguments), I'm going to withdraw my objection based purely on the subject matter. I don't know if the featured criteria should be changed, but it's worth thinking about. There's not much point me continuing with inactionable objections to the Starfleet article now I've made my point, but I still think the article describes in more detail than is sensible the intricacies of a fantasy world constructed by some fans around a fairly two-dimensional work of fiction. Blowing up minutiae into a big article raises issues of original research and verifiability. I still think the analogy of a reading group's impressions of The Da Vinci Code is quite a good one. Next time an article that consists of highly detailed fancruft comes up on FAC, the same problems will come up. It is not easy writing a featured article on very obscure and conjectural topics. — Trilobite ( Talk) 14:27, 31 May 2005 (UTC) (Now how about this? I just googled "minutiae" to confirm my spelling, and what should come up but this site. Their introductory paragraph is very fitting. — Trilobite ( Talk) 14:32, 31 May 2005 (UTC))
![]() | This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
← ( Archive 10) |
![]() |
( Archive 8) → |
I just did a little a little analysis and of the 110 articles that were featured in August 2001 (the oldest time for which data exists) 26 are still featured now. I salute these examples of long-standing fine writing User:Pcb21#Still brilliant. Pcb21| Pete 09:05, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Warren County Canal was removed on April 28 but it's not listed in either archive page.
The resubmit information seems to be missing from the page or the link from the "facfailed" template is incorrectly linked. I'd like to know whats the appropriate length of time for a re-nomination since my article's 1 objection (making it easier to verify references) was fixed prior to failing. K1Bond007 15:31, May 9, 2005 (UTC)
I just thought - why not submit pic with FAC request? This could save time for chosing which pic to nominate for Main Page, and would also serve as a VISUAL mark for those viewing the FAC page - after all, for many people, pics are easier and quicker to recognize then words. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 21:51, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
Just a silly thought, but does anyone else feel that there could be a place for Wikipedia:Featured list candidates? Filiocht | Blarneyman 11:51, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
I think that there's a substantial difference in kind between, say, list of popes and list of notable libertarian theorists and authors. Random crap keeps sneaking into the latter, and there's no way of telling if it's comprehensive or not. I think the popes are featurable, the theorists are not. I'm not sure how to express that difference in the criteria, though. Something about the list being verifiably complete. Dave (talk) 13:37, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
I fail to see how a list or category can be of 'featured' quality. First, as Filiocht said, unless you stick with very clear cut, closed sets (like popes) you're bound to run into ambiguities. What is a 'comprehensive' list? Who is to say that the list should include A, B, and C, but not D. Also, a list is, um.. devoid of content. There's not really anything there to differentiate a good list from a bad one. [Raul]
Second, Wikiprojects (and categories) shouldn't be featured at all. The whole idea of 'featured' is to highlight content we feel is good. Wikiprojects are *not* content, they are designed to produce content; categories an lists are associations of content; they are not content in and of themselves →Raul654 14:45, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
It seems like two different things are being discussed here.
Personally, I think if lists and such are to be featured, they should go on WP:FA and be held to similar standards.
Featuring collections is a different question. The most common situation is when a good article grows and is exploded to subarticles; this happened to nuclear weapon and to spacecraft propulsion, for example. Of these, nuclear weapon is now a mess and shouldn't be featured regardless; spacecraft propulsion was run through the featured process again and is now featured on its own merits. However, it still derives much of its quality from the staggering number of supporting articles on individual methods of spacecraft propulsion, which were part of it when it was first featured.
Perhaps a "Featured topics" section on WP:FA would fit the bill; this would be for featuring whole collections of articles, and would link to an overview article (which should be good, of course, but it would be the quality of the detail articles that would be featured). An example (not of featured quality) would be nuclear technology. --18:12, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
Returning to my original suggestion, I think we should have featured lists for a number of reasons:
I'd just suggest that those that are interested go edit the relevant pages and lets see what emerges. Filiocht | Blarneyman 07:35, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
One final point; if there are concerns over the value of certain lists, can their resolution not be left to the good sense of those who write the criteria and who vote on the candidates, just as happens on FAC? In other words, can't we just trust in the wiki way? Filiocht | Blarneyman 07:37, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
I am pleased to say that this article's updating, revamping, and recompliation, appears to be complete. The issues raised on the FAC candidate page I have attempted to address and I now belive that the entire article conforms to every aspect of a featured article. I ask the administrators to declare it so.
With vote changes, withdrawals, and recasts, this is now I count the tally:
Counting the questionable opposes, its a dead tie but I believe everything possible has been done to turn this into an outstanding article. It matches other Featured Articles I have seen (see Medal of Honor and Order of the Bath) and I hope that the hours of work into this article will now be rewarded with Featured Article status. Thank you and Good Night! - Husnock 04:40, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
I've been hesitant to either promote or archive this nom (along with Papal Tiara) on the page because they seem to be getting a lot of commentary. →Raul654 07:55, May 19, 2005 (UTC)
As Phils wrote in Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Anschluss: "most of what we do here (suggestions, objections, discussion, etc.) belongs in WP:Peer Review. Ideally, articles in Peer Review are the ones with a "basis for a FA", but that aren't quite ready yet. When your article lands here, there shouldn't be much left to correct (relatively speaking, of course, improvement is always possible)". I agree completly. Should we make this an official policy? PR first, only then FAC? -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 11:36, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
Not everyone needs peer review, particularly those who've been through FAC numerous times, however, it should definately be recommended so we don't get half baked articles on FAC, the question is how do we effectively recommend peer review to articles approaching featured status?-- nixie 03:48, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
I found PR to be a really good way of delaying progress on my article. I put it up there for the regulation month. I got a few comments early on and I solicited others. After a few days there was no more traffic, except for my occasional pleas for further guidance. I knew that the article was not yet at FA standard but I could not see what needed to be done and could solicit no advice so I put it back on FAC and got immediate constructive feedback. I am still going through the improving iterations but this is all stuff that I would have hoped to get on PR. I will put future articles through PR too, but I do not expect it to do any more than introduce a one month delay in the improvement. -- Theo (Talk) 22:08, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
More and more we are seeing calls for inotes to be used in featured articles. I really hope they remain non-mandatory. Inotes are useless to readers because they don't even know they exist. They have some value to other editors but no more so than other referencing systems do. Also because they are so free-form (indeed the implementation is blank) these templates are never likely to be used by some fancy software-supported referencing/metadata system. Pcb21| Pete 22:15, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
Personally, I hide the source citations because I find them intrusive in any of the conventions that are currently available. My overriding concern is the readability of the text. I want my reader to get the core information smoothly. Subsidiary information begs a subsidiary system and I prefer footnotes to the interuption of inline citation; this is an encyclopedia, not an academic archive. Wikipedia:Footnote3 is approaching an acceptable solution but it requires one to eschew other inline links. In a perfect world the reader would be able to right click on any text to see a pop-up note about sources. In our less perfect world I would accept small superscript numerals as note indicators but they must not require me to manually code the numerical sequence. I used to use html comments to hide the source data. Now I use inote because it promises to make the data more accessable one of these days. -- Theo (Talk) 19:53, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
The following (hopefully coherent :-) comments:
Wikipedia is an amazing resource. I think this is a given, however we are now fast approaching the point where some of our articles are so comprehensive that other articles will be able to use them as a source! For instance, the Mozilla Firefox article has whole sections that reference more specific subarticles — this is great, but has left the article with a serious lack of references. The subarticles, however, have many references. I think that we should be including the Wikipedia article as a source using the citing Wikipedia standard - this, of course, uses the date and time of the revision referenced by the article. What do people think? - Ta bu shi da yu 17:40, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Hold on all, we have a criteria that we must note all the source of an article. If we use summary form, we only choose the most essential information and leave out all the extraneous stuff — yet if that extraneous stuff is referenced in the subarticle and then we copy ALL the references from those articles, won't that be a bit misleading? As for being a "publication that cites and references itself" - well, we already do this through wikilinks. With Raul's objection: yes, I agree that's not the best solution. However, I was really only referring to the subarticles. After all, what happens when an article loses it's references due to summary form causing them to be removed? - Ta bu shi da yu 05:08, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
Personally I think that an article that is or should be a summary of other more detailed articles like Germany should not contain references because they take so much space but insted refer to the more detailed articles for references. Andries 16:26, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
What's happened to FAC? I don't see too many people voting anymore :-( have things slowed down that much? - Ta bu shi da yu 03:27, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
I have had a lot of work lately, and I like to read FACs entirely before voting. I hope I can start voting on every FAC again soon. Phil s 20:44, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
Question about inactionable votes. If someone "opposes" a Featured Article Candidate but writes something silly like "this article stinks" or "this piece of garbage should never be an FA", are other users permitted to line out the objection so it doesnt get counted with legitimate votes? I recently ran a featured article candidate and it was called names by two users who offered no items to fix, simply stated they thought the article was stupid. I felt then, as I do now, that I should have been able to just line those comments out. Opinions? - Husnock 05:52, 27 May 2005 (UTC)
This is issue has come up quite a few times on FAC lately, and was raised by User:Karmosin (Pete Isotalo) in the discussion about the Starfleet insigna article FAC; I want to settle this issue once and for all. Do other FAC regulars (or anyone for that matter) think that any article about any subject, as long as said subject is notable/verifiable enough to have an article, can be featured, so long as it complies with all FA requirements? (formulated otherwise: Can you object a FAC because you think the subject is too specific/not appropriate for FA, although it "deserves" coverage in an article?) I have already voiced my own personal opinion on the matter; I think one of the only strengths of Wikipedia over printed encyclopedic reference works is the amount of detail found about obscure topics. As such, any article, whether it is about a well-known topic or extremely specific should be "featureable". User:Karmosin has raised the issue of some articles being "not encyclopedic enough" to be featured; I assume by encyclopedic he means "broad in scope". I believe this conception originates in the old-fashioned conception of extremely broad encyclopedia articles we can find in printed encyclopedias (for example, in a printed encyclopedia, most information about Star Trek would be put under one Star Trek article, and entries like "Enterprise" or "Spock" would point the reader to that article). Wikipedia as a whole has long moved away from this model; this is exemplified by the use of "sub-articles" to avoid pages that are too long. We have more space, and thus can provide more detail: that's what makes us interesting, and that's what we need to show off. The idea that an encyclopedia article must give you a broad view of a concept as a whole (which I think is User:Karmosin's conception, after reading what he wrote on the project page) is not applicable here: we have hyperlinks, so that people can quickly look up things they don't know. A good example for a class of very specific articles that has become popular on Wikipedia are articles about songs (many of which are featured, like Hey Jude). What is your view on this? Phil s 21:01, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
The problem I see with the article and Trilobite eloborated it well, is that particular article contains a significant amount of original research, stuff fans have inferred from watching the tv show and movies. We're not going to put suburban reading groups x's interpretation of The Davinci Code on the main page, and it would probably be deleted from any article I tried to add it too and from the main namespace. If anything this artilce is protected from deletion given the precedent to keep most stuff on star trek and star wars. I thank this article would be perfect featured material for the Star Trek WikiCites (if there is one yet) but not for Wikipedia-- nixie 03:24, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
"We're not going to put suburban reading groups x's interpretation of The Davinci Code on the main page." Exactly. As I see it there are two problems here. The first is the question of whether FAC should have notability criteria over and above those of VfD. Just because we tolerate an article's presence in Wikipedia, does that mean we should tolerate its featuring on the main page? I don't think we should, but I see that many people take it as a given that any article notable enough for inclusion is notable enough for the main page, and Raul agrees with their assessment. Filiocht says it's non-negotiable, and with the greatest respect to him, I cannot see why that's the case. It's quite possible of course, that the likes of me and Peter Isolato are in the minority on this, in which case I'm happy to accept community consensus and shut up. There is a second problem though, which refers specifically to the article we're all currently arguing over, but could conceivably apply to many other fancruft articles. This article isn't primarily about a work of fiction, but penetrates a long way into the realms of arbitrary conjecture about fiction. The fans have put together an entirely suppositious area of study based on conjecture about the military structure of a fictional body belonging to a fantasy universe, part of which is glimpsed through the lens of a fictional TV series. We would be mad to slap it on the main page and present it to the world as a showcase of our greatest work. — Trilobite ( Talk) 12:11, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Lets be clear here, that since the criteria now have nothing in them about the topic of an article, that not liking the topic (even by every editor) cannot keep an article from being featured. The only thing that can, is the article not meeting the criteria. If we wished as consensus to have a limit on what topics can be featured (by adding a new criteria), that could be done, but I think there are many good reasons above why that shouldn't happen and I am quite confident that there will be many editors that would never support a limit on what topics can be featured articles. Now we do have a separation that articles not believed to be suited for the main page can be marked as such so that they do not go there, so offensive articles and such are covered by that. - Taxman Talk 14:03, May 31, 2005 (UTC)
(After edit conflicts and server errors.) Filiocht and others make a good case, and since I'm finding myself in the opposite camp to several editors I hold in high regard (and who make persuasive arguments), I'm going to withdraw my objection based purely on the subject matter. I don't know if the featured criteria should be changed, but it's worth thinking about. There's not much point me continuing with inactionable objections to the Starfleet article now I've made my point, but I still think the article describes in more detail than is sensible the intricacies of a fantasy world constructed by some fans around a fairly two-dimensional work of fiction. Blowing up minutiae into a big article raises issues of original research and verifiability. I still think the analogy of a reading group's impressions of The Da Vinci Code is quite a good one. Next time an article that consists of highly detailed fancruft comes up on FAC, the same problems will come up. It is not easy writing a featured article on very obscure and conjectural topics. — Trilobite ( Talk) 14:27, 31 May 2005 (UTC) (Now how about this? I just googled "minutiae" to confirm my spelling, and what should come up but this site. Their introductory paragraph is very fitting. — Trilobite ( Talk) 14:32, 31 May 2005 (UTC))