In another thread, there was mention of possibly paying authors of Featured Articles.

Clue me in, as I'm honestly unaware...

When someone sets out to "bring an article to Featured status", how do they go about doing that, and how does ONE PERSON take credit for it? Do they work on improving the article in Main Space over the course of days or weeks, all while other editors are pitching in, but the "consensus" is that one person was the primary motive force for improvement?

Or, do FA candidates get worked on "privately" in someone's User Space until they deem them "ready for pasting" over the Main Space article and triumphantly declaring, "Behold, what I have accomplished is indeed good!"

If the latter, what's to stop some trollish editor from just pwning the FA-wannabe's User Space edits and trying to take credit for the work? Don't laugh, that this would "never happen". JzG stole the content for Arch Coal and tried to claim it was all his own work, and he wasn't even reprimanded for it.

Greg

Both writing in mainspace, and doing the whole thing in userspace, are equally valid, and both are rather common (I do the mainspace one).

For many articles, it really doesn't matter as few people care enough to get involved if you're doing good work on it. For sort of controversial articles, it's usually pretty clear who's the driving force behind it, so to speak, when it comes to taking credit.

For very controversial articles... I don't know. I'm not that enthusiastic to waste a good deal of my time finding out.

The process is you write an article. Most of the FAs seem to be around 2700-2800+ words in length or longer. I guess the traditional way to do it from reading is to stick it in peer review, which is a lower level check sometimes, and you fix stuff, improve things, take it through another peer review, maybe the Good Article process--basically, lots of checks and reviews, a full editorial process. Each time the article gets better and stronger hopefully. Finally you stick it on the Featured Article Candidate page and keep improving till it passes. For making them, here are examples...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Giano/The_Winter_Palace

Giano rewrote that entire stub into that behemoth in his user space. When I did these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greencards (up for FA now)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beecher%27s_Handmade_Cheese (up for FA next)

I did them all on the live page. When I redo Pike Place Market I'm probably doing it in my user space (haven't decided) because it might be easier since its so long already. If anyone tries to "steal" the nomination for the cheese article they're more than welcome to try, but I'm still taking credit and adding a star to my page if it gets FA since I'll still be working on it and I've done 166 of 180 edits so far on it (92.2%). It's pretty obvious most of it is me. Probably be in the 190-210 neighborhood at the rate I'm going before it's ready. On [[The Greencards]] I'm 196 of 306 edits (64%, and probably 99% of the content additions).

JzG doing that delete thing to [[Arch Coal]] to obscure your GFDL contributions was an unfortunate and shitty action that Jimmy did fix. Stealing an "FA" is a little different than lifting someone's wallet, though, and more akin to stealing someone's house in scale (with the words GREGORY KOHS painted on the front of the house in question, to boot). I don't even know how you could steal a Featured Article and I've been thinking about it since you first posted this...

Unless they Oversighted all my contributions to both of these articles, blocked me to prevent my protesting, and violated copyright by reposting all my contributions and research as their own, AND somehow got it through FA review without someone pointing out that "You just stole everything Rootology wrote, abused Oversight, AND blocked him to prevent his protesting," I can't see it happening or even being a plausible scenario. It would be like John Smith (a black man) winning a political office, my knocking him into a ditch, and showing up for his first day of work saying, as a white man, "I'm John Smith. Hi!" and expecting no one to notice or say anything.

Was this post just to highlight some kind of odd warning about people violating GFDL, or just more "Wikipedia is a revenge platform" stuff over Guy shoving something up your Arch Coal mine after you got blocked? Keep in mind, that mess sat idle since 1. You don't exactly endear yourself to people over there to make them want to help you (sorry, just being honest), 2. When all that happened WP didn't really consider WR--if that shit happened today, and got advertised here, it would be overturned and fixed in minutes or hours, 3. At the time, [[Arch Coal]] really was pretty obscure in the grand WP knowledge scheme of things.

Today, you'd have multiple people rushing to fix it and call out the bad behavior. If nothing else ever comes of WR, the fact that it can be used to highlight bullshit for a swift fix will be it's best thing. It's becoming WMF Headline News sometimes, it feels like.

As for the "one person" thing, it's probably totally doable. Pick something ultra obscure, like Rongorongo,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

Write a killer article in your userspace, and then FA it.

The 4 FAs I had were all done in live article space - I rewrote them from the ground up, put them through the typical processes, and I had a small group of people to turn to for peer review stuff.

The final result was a team effort the way a final published book is - the wording may be significantly different due to editorial/style changes, but the beef is based in the legwork done along the way.

I'm sure the live editing thing wouldn't work on a high profile article, but I never got around to trying to bring a high-profile article to FA. R.E.M.'s page was one for my list, and someone (perhaps a team) did one in userspace and moved it in with success.

Now, JzG screwed you, but there wasn't money involved, either. Guaranteed, if there was financial motive, it'd be a very easy check.

Someone tried to do this to Giano's work, and was subsequently eaten by Bishzilla. Trying to find the thread now.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gia...xploding_Houses but it was slightly different to what you described.

I want to thank Jeff and especially Neil for taking the time to outline the FA process for me. Very educational. And, I agree, I've not been my own best friend, in terms of trying to get Wikipediots to see hypocrisy and deceit when it rears its ugly head. But, really, was January 2008 really that "long ago", a bygone era when criticisms from WR were ignored as trolling? Things are THAT much different now, only 10 months later?

Oh, and... as for Jimbo rectifying the situation of JzG's plagiarism and declaration that the content was all his own... Note Jimbo's edit summary when he restored the true provenance of the article:



Could he be more of a sniveling little twerp, in reluctant restoration of justice, which just happened to go against the Guy who would (about 5 week later) fiddle with Rachel Marsden's article on behalf of Doubletree Jimbo?

Sorry, but I don't care how pugnacious I can be, my confrontational air shouldn't blind Wikipediots to the disgraceful things that happen amidst their ranks. But, I guess it does.

Again, sincere thanks for your thoughtful responses.



Is a banned editor allowed to submit userspace activity to the FA process?

I don't know if they're allowed as such, but if you wrote a really good article on your talk page I would have no problems moving it to mainspace and taking it to FAC for you. Of course some people would cry that you're "making a point", which always makes me laugh, as they all conveniently forget that the actual policy is called "disrupting Wikipedia to make a point", and I think writing an FA falls firmly outside that category.

I sometimes switch between the two depending on how much work needs to be done. If an article requires a lot of work and/or a lot of source material is available, I do it in userspace. If there isn't much source material, or it doesn't require that amount of work, or it's a new work with source material gradually being released, I do it in mainspace. Method 1, Method 2 (history)). (260 of those 1500 edits are mine, and about 98% of the text was written by me).

As far as credit goes, it varies depending on who you ask. FAC credits the nominator (who should be a significant contributor), Durova asks for ten sources when awarding triple crowns, and I personally am a bit more flexible. I credit major copyeditors (by this, I mean at least this much copyediting, but I'm not going to seek credit for thart article) and people who write at least two or three paragraphs of quality prose. Again, my rules are flexible.

Normally, only one person will take the credit because they wrote most of the article's text. Sometimes (I have two FAs and GAs that are "co-written") it will be two, and on rare occasions, an entire group. It's often the top contributor(s), but not always.