Idea: exemplary pages

We all know that there's a lot of poorly-written trope and work pages out there, and from my own experience I know that new editors can assume that they're the right way to do things if they're what they see first. So I've been wondering if it might be worth making an effort to the staff highlight those pages that are done well, with clear descriptions, well-written examples, and the like. I think it would do some good to have positive examples for editors beyond the general advice on How To Write An Example and that sort of thing.

What do people think? Good idea, bad idea, sounds nice in theory but impractical to actually do?

I know this has been tossed around before, and it has merit, but the major problem is that it requires that the article be actively curated to maintain its 'quality' status. It would be all too easy to set the tag and then forget about it.

Hmm. I agree why that would be a problem. But I can also see the positive benefit of having "ideal" pages for the purpose of teaching new tropers good editing styles in the context of a real page.

Perhaps instead of having "distinguished" pages that are live, they're separated from the live page and locked. This way they would only have to be curated once, then it wouldn't really matter if they were forgotten. There could be an index of these pages that has a distinguished page (or two) from each page type (Trope, Trivia, Ymmv, Work, CMOA, etc.)

edited 4th Jan '15 10:12:22 PM by pokedude10

What if we went the Wikipedia route and had an "Article of the Day/Week/Month/Year/Whatever?" That would probably cut down on the degree to which a selected page would need to be specially curated, unless currently-showcased pages were targeted for vandalism.

Was gonna suggest this if someone already hadn't. Whatever page would index prior featured articles could include, potentially, a link to both the article and the Web Archive's saved version of that article (since we don't archive full pages of revisions like Wikipedia does).

And perhaps the pages could be locked for the day they're showcased in order to keep them on display in that way.

edited 9th Jan '15 12:10:34 AM by Odd1

That's a good idea, but I feel like showcasing an article would obviously bring a lot of attention to it, which would encourage edits. (I say that as a good thing.)

...Although, I can also see tens or even hundreds of tropers colliding over edit locks, which could be a disaster. Locking it for the day might be best if we tried this.

I recall a projects thread where the pages with the top ten inbounds were posted, and tropers would check those pages out, repairing them to wiki standards because they were the pages that people outside of the wiki were reading. Not sure where that went, though.

That's a pretty interesting idea.

The thread is still around, in one of the projects fora I think.