Xeno Series Wiki:Featured articles

Featured articles are the cream of the crop, the best articles the wiki has to offer. This is obviously a pretty subjective measurement, so we have a process for determining whether an article should be featured or not.

Criteria
These are the hard and soft criteria for whether an article can even be considered for featured status.

Hard criteria
If an article fails any of these checks, it is not a valid featured article at all.
 * It must not be a stub.
 * It must not be obviously incomplete. An incomplete tag on a section that's already mostly filled out might be okay; such a tag on a section that's entirely empty is not.
 * It must have at least one image, if it makes sense. Articles about music or dialogue do not need images, but most other things will.

Soft criteria
If an article fails any of these, they will count against it in the nomination process.
 * It should not have any sort of cleanup or maintenance tag. Featured articles should not need help.
 * It should not be full of redlinks. Featured articles should not be a dead end.
 * It should pass our spoiler policy.

Suggesting
To suggest an article become featured, a user should add a new section on its talk page similar to the following:

Nomination for featured status
(explain yourself here) ~ (The name of the section isn't that important, it's the template that is, since it will alert users to there being a nomination in progress.)

Users are then free to vote and discuss. You could simply post, but this is not a vote count - it is the strength of your argument that will decide the result, not the number of "yes"es and "no"es.

As part of the discussion, it needs to be decided whether the article is safe enough in terms of spoilers to appear on the main page. To get the ball rolling, the proposer should put in their initial explanation whether they believe the article can be "public" or should remain "hidden". An article that's a spoiler by simply existing is not allowed on the main page, while those that start safe but go into deep endgame stuff pretty quickly are also discouraged. The premise is that any main page featured article will not suddenly spoil an unsuspecting reader.

Discussions should last for at least a week. After this, if it looks like consensus has been achieved, a staff member may close the discussion by removing the  and adding one of these to the end of the discussion: Then, if the result was "passed",  is added to the article iteself. Hooray! The article then needs a blurb and (if applicable) to be attached to the main page (see below).
 * if there is clear agreement to feature the article
 * if there is clear agreement to not feature the article
 * is there is no clear agreement either way

Staff have the power to close any nomination for pages that clearly fail the hard criteria. Using the "failed" template in this case is optional.

Retrying
An article that failed to become featured in the past may improve enough to succeed if nominated again. There is no hard limit on how much time or effort needs to happen before another nomination is allowed, but for any re-nomination, the nominator must outline in their initial suggestion how they believe the article now succeeds where it previously failed.

Note that talk page sections should generally avoid sharing the exact same name. Using "Nomination for featured status (2)" instead is a fair idea.

Revoking
It is possible (however unlikely) for a featured article to drop back below the necessary standards of quality. If a user believes this has happened, they may offer the article back up for discussion. Everything proceeds exactly as with a new nomination - the result is still either "yes" or "no", with a "no consensus" meaning the article keeps its featured status. In other words, there is no separate process for de-featuring.

This may result in an article remaining featured despite no longer meeting the hard criteria. This is okay - there's always enough time to revert it back to its featured state, after all.

Usage
Aside from filling in Category:Featured articles, the point of featured articles is to appear at the top of the main page and be an attraction (y'know, like games having an "attract mode", to show themselves off to passerby). The main page article is automatically rotated on a fixed schedule (about once a month); recently-promoted articles get to jump the queue and appear right away.

The part of an article that appears on the main page is called a "blurb". Each featured article's blurb is located at a "Blurb" subpage (e.g. "Pagename/Blurb"). It's the job of staff members to create blurbs for featured articles, since they appear directly on the main page.

Featured articles not allowed on the main page for spoiler reasons go into Category:Hidden featured articles. They still require a blurb for the "list of FAs" page.

List of featured articles
Raw categories are perhaps not the best way to present the list of "all featured articles". So, these pages list every blurb.
 * Xeno Series Wiki:Featured articles/List
 * Xeno Series Wiki:Featured articles/Hidden list