Featured Articles

[Layer-09]

Featured articles are considered to be some of the best articles Wikipedia has to offer, as determined by Wikipedia's editors. They are used by editors as examples for writing other articles. Before being listed here, articles are reviewed as featured article candidates for accuracy, neutrality, completeness, and style according to our featured article criteria. Many featured articles were previously good articles (which are reviewed with a less restrictive set of criteria). Featured articles comprise 6,744 out of a total of 7,004,565 articles on the English Wikipedia (about 0.1% or one out of every 1,030 articles). Articles that no longer meet the criteria can be proposed for improvement or removal at featured article review.

A good article (GA) is a Wikipedia article that meets a core set of editorial standards, the good article criteria, passing through the good article nomination process successfully. They are well-written, contain factually accurate and verifiable information, are broad in coverage, neutral in point of view, stable, and illustrated, where possible, by relevant images with suitable copyright licenses. Good articles do not have to be as comprehensive as featured articles (FA), but they should not omit any major facets: a comparison of the criteria for good and featured articles describes further differences.

The wiki is currently hindered by a lack of comprehensive articles, due to the fact that new contributors lack the know-how on how a good article should look like.

I believe a Featured articles protected section could be added in the toolbar, right under/above "Recent changes", where articles are added by popular vote.

[doggobit0]

I am all for it, but I would advocate for showcasing this directly on the main page itself.

As for the link in the sidebar, I would advocate for implementing this via a Category:Exceptional articles, which we can link similar to how we do Category:Community. We can go ahead imo already implementing a small notice template similar to Template:Disambiguation that automatically applies that category.

[Mic92]

what does it need to enable this?

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I don't think Mediawiki has the functionality for automating it, so something along what @doggobit0 proposed. I imagine the process would go somewhat like this:

1. Any registered editor nominates an article by adding a {{FAC}} template to the article’s talk page.

{{FAC
 | nominator = X
 | date = Y
 | reason = Z
}}

2. Admins or trusted reviewers evaluate articles based on defined criteria.
3. After a review period (e.g., 7–14 days), admins decide to:

Promote: If all reviewers are satisfied.
Extend: If there are unresolved issues.
Reject: If the article is far from meeting criteria.

4. If promoted, add article to Category:Exceptional articles and a visual icon/banner like {{Featured}} is added at the top of the article.

After that, it's anyone's guess. If it goes well, we might "upgrade" the process with statistics and a Featured article of the day (FeaturedFeeds extension).