User talk:Muffynz/Featured article contest draft

Feedback

(You seemed to still be after feedback, but I don't want to send Guppy tons of Great Big New Message Boxes Of Doom, so I'll drop it here instead.)

• I would indent the bit that's meant to be copy-pasted, to make it more obvious.
• Instead of telling people to PM or leave love notes on your talk page, give people links. In the case of the talk page, you know where that is. In the case of PMs, you'll want this link: http://forums.puzzlepirates.com/community/mvnforum/addmessage?MessageToList=Pianoman1125
• I'd suggest making liberal use of header tags. The problem with Q and A is that it kind of mushes together, and you either have to add tons of extra line breaks (which makes it look silly), or improvise with horizontal rules and header tags. (If you go with header tags, I'd also slap a tocright on it for readability.)
  • If nothing else, I'd indent sections meant to represent answers, so it's less visually blurred.

Good luck, in any event! :) --Ponytailguy 21:15, 7 June 2007 (PDT)

This is intended for the forums so the formatting will be re-coded accordingly. Indents was my idea for stretching things out a bit. :)--Muffynz 21:38, 7 June 2007 (PDT)

Ahoy! This is a great idea! Okay and I have a few suggestions...

1. I agree that the articles should be created in User space.
2. I think Joepirate will be okay with it until they get to creating the page
3. I think simplifying the creation of the page to submit a user's article would be best served with the use of a template.
4. The template would also allow all of the articles to get categorized for easy sorting and keeping track of the entries.
5. Maybe a little OM support (/me coughs Eurydice) for prizes would be great too!

-- Cedarwings ^(t/c) 21:18, 7 June 2007 (PDT)

Nice template. I actually have a mock up template somewhere I was going to use but I think I like yours better. I'll see if there's any tweaks or anything I would want. --Muffynz 21:38, 7 June 2007 (PDT)

Thanks, I kinda through it together so feel free to edit it. It would need some usage notes eventually too. I like the idea of a template so that people don't try and get fancy with the formatting. Just fill in the body of the article and the rest is pretty much there for them. -- Cedarwings ^(t/c) 21:42, 7 June 2007 (PDT)

Ok, I edited some things and worked with the template a bit. The new template with some modifications can be seen here. The category page can be seen here. The category page will now sort the entries by user name with the slight modification I made to Cedarwings' template. The draft has been re-written in points and the page construction has been placed under the user space.--Muffynz 21:26, 9 June 2007 (PDT)

It's looking pretty good to me. The only thing I'd question is the every 2 weeks thing. I'd prefer to have it be at least 3 weeks or just do it on a monthly basis to give people an easy to remember rolling "deadline" for both submissions and voting. --Guppymomma 21:00, 11 June 2007 (PDT)

A month sounds good to me. We could just designate the last full week of each month the voting week and try and aim for day 1 of each month to close voting and put the new article up. Did a little more cleaning up. Added usage notes to the template, clarified a few things in the announcement post, changed the category from "entry" to "entries" for pluralization of categories consistency sake, filed my article on Brigand Kings under User:Muffynz/featured article contest/Brigand Kings so we have a previously established example. I think for now, we'll leave the little picture completely out of it and one of the regular editors will just take care of adding a picture and a caption before it goes up. Don't want to make things too complicated. Anything else that we see might need some ironing out? I'd like to get the announcement post up in the forums shortly so that people can have 2 weeks at least to contemplate and submit entries before we try for July's article. Or is that rushing it do you think? --Muffynz 22:49, 11 June 2007 (PDT)

Submission

Well, if there are no objections, I'd love to go ahead and post this to the forums so we can get some entries before July. I figure they have a little over a week to write the new ones and then we can have 5 days to vote or so before July 1st. Any more comments or concerns on the formatting, wording, phrasing, or instructions? --Muffynz 20:33, 15 June 2007 (PDT)

I think it's fine. I asked Eury to do one last check, but I think the ocean exploded right after my request. Go for it. --Guppymomma 22:09, 15 June 2007 (PDT)

T'is up here. --Muffynz 23:35, 15 June 2007 (PDT)