As one of the two administrators who could approve this for it to be a thing… I have some concerns. Brace yourselves. :P
The biggest reason that choosing the featured article has been a clandestine sekrit staff thing is to avoid drama and nepotism.
When I was doing this more regularly (IE, before I started letting it slide more, then assigned it to Zyn last month), the vast majority of the suggestions I got from members of staff were articles they'd written or articles their friends had written. Wholly independent of quality.
This is for the same reason that, for instance, Roget can basically write a piece of trash and he'll get literally a dozen people telling him it's gold. (I'm talking 'typographical error on almost every line' here; I have multiple examples in mind, with tales in particular, though with SCPs it's more a matter of straightforward mediocrity.) It's a form of indirect nepotism; the dozen people in question here weren't lying they just didn't know any better and Roget's a Group Leader. Roget's only the more obvious example, though. This sounds like a way to get Mediocre Shit Done By Your Friends featured.
[edit: to be clear, lots of Roget's stuff is very good, and I've featured one of his pieces myself; I'm just using him as a convenient obvious example, and also because I know he won't get pissed off at me for pointing out this particular recurring issue.]
Also people would often pick one article to champion for a feature slot and do whatever they could to make that happen, to the point where others would jump on the bandwagon to make the initial person happy. Prime recent example: Roget & Ghost's "Dr. Cog and the Plastic Fantastic", a mediocre tale with a great title. Not the most deserving of a feature slot, but by golly have I heard it suggested more than literally anything else in the past year, solely because Roget took a liking to it.
Not that every article featured has been a gold-star article, given that we inherently are picking from an under-appreciated pile and sometimes it turns out those are there for a reason. But at least there's been no possibility of vote-brigading.
Vote-brigading is honestly the first damn thing I expect to see happen, actually. And probably from whatever popular author is presently active/bored enough to try to promote their stuff… or, hell, just promote the vote itself, to their friends, without directly mentioning 'vote for me' or 'vote for a thing someone from this group wrote' or 'vote for the thing I like', or even intending that they do so (but some of them will anyway, that's just basic psychology).
It's also just because most staff have very little motive to read others' stuff and every motive to hawk their own stuff because that's the way to get it read. It got to be almost a joke at one point; I'd repeatedly request that people not suggest their own stuff, and suggest others' stuff instead, and they'd suggest their own stuff anyway. Staff would do this. Even after I specified that for their work to be considered they'd have to suggest at least an equal number of others' work.
And then there's the even bigger drama potential quality. I can think of many users who might freak out at various stages of this process if their work isn't considered for reasons of coincidence or random outside factors. Some of our best writers — many staff members included — have had extremely inappropriate reactions to their placement in our various contests relative to the work of others. If our freaking staff members can't stop themselves from freaking out inappropriately about a contest placement, how can we expect our general population of writers not to freak out if they're not highlighted in a mostly arbitrary popular vote, or if something mediocre by a popular author gets through? (Mostly arbitrary because 'who sees this' is gonna be pretty arbitrary. Unless you've got some specific suggestions as to how you're gonna promote this poll to get wide visibility outside a certain very small group of people.)
And… a note about the criteria. Thus far we've always had Secret Criteria along with public criteria. Why? Because it can control for drama. People can assume that they weren't featured because of secret criteria, as opposed to because staff don't like them or their work or whatever. The truth is, people are typically not featured either because of secret criteria or because of random chance, NOT because they or their work are disliked. (The only exception is if they've tried to 'brigade' for their own work to a really annoying extent.) Take away the secret criteria, though, and you leave just random chance, and people NEVER assume they weren't featured because of random chance. It's ALWAYS going to be about how staff doesn't like them or their work and/or they're terrible writers. Fuck, I can think of multiple members of staff who I like who would make this assumption, because they have done so in the past.
You can partially mitigate that by using secret criteria (along with public criteria) for determining the initial voting 'pool', but people will still have more opportunity to react badly to the community vote, especially in combination with the other factors I've mentioned.
How do you plan to deal with these issues?
(There's a quote from Tuomey about writers and dramatic nutjobs that's fairly appropriate here.)
I do think this sounds like a potentially fun idea, or I'd honestly just veto it right off the bat due to the incredibly high drama potential. Of course, it also has the appeal of being a process less likely to slip through the cracks… and it's no secret that no matter who's been running the show, the featured article/tale has been forgotten with regularity. (And I've been pretty bad at that in particular, I think.)
So… I'm not saying no, I just want to hear more.
Some notes:
- As the admin in charge of the featuring process, I (still) reserve the right to alter the qualifying criteria.
- Re: above — An important piece of missing criteria here is that we don't want to over-feature one author within a slot. Previously, we would feature at most one SCP and one tale per author per year. (This is especially important since the maximum number of slots per year is 24 for SCPs and 24 for Tales, and in practice it's usually half that. Presently, anyway.) We could cut this down to at most 6 months, I think, but we could also leave it the same.
- We do eventually plan to change the features to include two articles and two tales. These slots may rotate based on different criteria, if so. (For instance, under this paradigm, various criterions — like the +75 criterion — could be relaxed for one of the SCP/Tale slots, but not both.)
- Assuming we do this, input from social media is a cool idea.
- Assuming we do this, the poll looks good.
- Assuming we do this, we should make sure to keep a pool of about 50/50 'stuff staff picked out' and 'stuff other users suggested'. 50/50 isn't a hard ratio, just a suggestion that can change depending on how much we get. We also shouldn't just go with everything other users suggest; should be filtered through us first.
- Assuming we do this, there should still be times when staff just pick an article like we used to, at our discretion.
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