Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-25356303-20180917175234

Hi all, Atvelonis here. So in a moot decision on February 6th, 2016 (text), we decided to change the way that we handled nominations for Comprehensive, Good, and Featured Articles on the wiki. Formerly, an editor would nominate an article that they believed met the requirements for a status, and then the community would either support or reject their proposal. This was all well and good, but a number of editors (myself included) became annoyed at the slow pace these nominations went at, and at the fact that some members of the community were not properly vetting nominated articles.

So we changed the system. Five active users were chosen as members of the so-called "Circle" to review status article nominations and skip the slow community vote entirely. And it worked! Well, it worked for a little while. Unfortunately, in the long run we've had many fewer status article nominations with this "streamlined" system than we had initially anticipated. This makes a lot of sense in hindsight. Placing the responsibility of reviewing these votes in the hands of only five editors, and further requiring them to discuss nominations in real time with one another, is ridiculously inefficient. I think there has also been a certain amount of confusion as to whether users are even allowed to nominate articles for statuses anymore. Clearly, we need to reevaluate the way we're doing things.

At this time, I would like to propose that we annul the moot decision from February 6th, 2016 and return to the old system using a public community vote. If an article meets the requirements laid out for CA/GA/FA, a user should write a nomination for said article on the appropriate nomination page, and the community should subsequently review the article, review the requirements, see if they match, and cast their votes. We do this for staff votes and for Member of the Month votes and pretty much everything else: status articles should be no different.

In the spirit of consensus-building, I would ask that you refrain from voting on this thread until we have cleared up any confusion and reach a revised agreement (if necessary). At that point, it will be appropriate to cast votes as a numeric record of the decision. Thanks. 