User blog:Capefeather/Featured article nominations - July 2010

Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth wins a whopping 79.15% of the vote, easily grabbing hold of the FA position right from the beginning of the poll. The next poll mostly features familiar faces that have previously been shafted in favour of vastly more popular articles. In addition, I will be talking about the issues involved with maintaining the current events section of the main page, as well as the FA system itself.

Hold the phone... A blog!?!?
You may have seen more developed news pages on other wikis. For example, the Final Fantasy Wiki has Shinra News, and Bulbapedia has Bulbanews. At this time, our current events space is very thin, so it's awkward to see a large single news post. So with this I aim to imitate the aforementioned news pages (well, Bulbapedia's more than the FF Wiki's) so that they don't take up too much space in the main page. The current events section will still have summarized points with links, of course.

Still, there's a greater problem with the news, which is the updates themselves. I often do not have the time to, for example, watch the Court Records forums for news and write about it in some form on this wiki. This is why I aim to write more wiki-related news, highlighting projects going on in the wiki instead of just covertly adding them to the to-do list. My hope right now is that other people will get involved in making the news page, though there doesn't seem to be much in the way of news at the moment.

The featured articles
Honestly, I was pretty certain of what the result would be back when I made the poll for May's FA. Nonetheless, I felt that the article deserved it, not because I wrote most of it but because it served as a great example of what the other game pages should have looked like, had they been built with care from the ground up. There's probably so much information out there on the development of the other games, slowly rotting and getting harder to find. In the late stages of AAI's news development I slacked quite a bit and then had to catch up. It's hard for one person to be consistently dedicated to an article about a slowly developing "story" because I have other commitments and interests to pursue.

I think that the next poll should be interesting. Three of the four choices have been on the poll before, shafted by the poll winners. Now, their competition is only each other and a gameplay article. The investigation article, while very informative, does have a few minor problems; it has no pictures, and it lacks control information for the Game Boy Advance and the iPhone OS. A hope with nominating articles is that it will bring them to the forefront and people will make the necessary "final adjustments" to them.

I hope that by giving some of my reasoning for selecting the articles that I did, others will be encouraged to participate in the nomination process. Matt Engarde gives a villain's perspective into (IMO) one of the best cases in the series, Farewell, My Turnabout; it might as well, since the article for the case itself is incomplete. Redd White is similar in this regard with respect to the DL-6 Incident; the latter articles has already been featured. The last article was difficult because there were so few, and yet so many, articles that I found eligible. I eventually went with Reunion, and Turnabout, which is a case article with quite a few images relevant to the case, which should be encouraged in all case articles.

Narrowing possible candidates down is still a rather quick process. I try to find considerably long and complete articles that haven't recently experienced a major update, and that are likely to be updated in due time in the event of new releases of games or other Ace Attorney media. This is why there haven't been any articles on Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth nominated other than the game article itself. The last condition has caused problems because the Ace Attorney games are released in Japan first, and articles on AAI were unfortunately not updated "in due time" considering this. I urge people who play the Japanese versions of future games (maybe the elusive Gyakuten Saiban 5?) to contribute more fully to this wiki. For the moment, rest assured AAI articles will probably make it to FA nomination polls in the coming months.

capefeather 21:51, May 1, 2010 (UTC)