User blog:Gideoncrawle/Featured Quote Revival -- Opinions Wanted

In my 4000th Edit blog, I floated the idea to my fellow admins and other interested parties of reviving Featured Quote voting. Response was overwhelmingly positive, with a strong indication that we have a core of voters large enough to make it work, and Sprink appointed me as the keeper of the FQ page.

The FQ ballot originally had a number of rules that were different from the other monthly Features, mainly because there are so many memorable quotes—tens of thousands, probably—in the wiki’s library. I propose to retain most or all of these unique rules, and I would like to get people’s feedback on them.

The nominating/voting rules unique to Featured Quote were:


 * 1) Two voting cycles per month, instead of one.
 * 2) People can nominate quotes from other people’s stories, as well as from their own.
 * 3) Third-party nominations don’t require advance permission from the author, but authors have “veto power” over quote nominations from their own stories. In other words, an author who objects to a third party quote nomination from his or her own story may delete that nomination with no questions asked.
 * 4) If a quote is nominated by someone other than the story’s author, the author is allowed to vote for it.
 * 5) A user who nominates a quote from a story that is not his own (and that he’s not collabing on) is allowed to vote for it.

I know that TAU previously expressed reservations about the semimonthly cycle, because he believed that it was a major contributor the FQ’s downfall. I don’t agree, personally, but I would like to get other people’s opinions on that point.

Unless there is a consensus against it, I would like to retain the two-cycle setup because there are so many good quotes to choose from, and I think starting with two cycles and then cut back to one if necessary would be easier than starting with one and later trying to expand to two.

In FQ’s original run, the first cycle was open to quotes from any story, and the second cycle was open only to quotes from a single selected story. (The admins were going down the Featured Stories list in order for this.) It quickly became clear that the single-story limitation was too restrictive, and it was almost certainly a contributing factor in the downfall of the Featured Quote.

If we use the two-cycle system for FQ, my plan is that one cycle will usually be open to any story and the other cycle will usually have a theme, such as we currently do with Featured Character nominations. If we end up having only one cycle per month, the first couple would be open (to get FQ established) and later months would usually have themes. Another possible way to feature two quotes per month is to have the standard monthly voting cycle but feature the top two vote-getters for two weeks each.

Some ideas I have for themes are:


 * quotes from any past Featured Story winner
 * quotes from noncompetition stories (since competition stories tend to dominate the open ballots)
 * quotes from finished stories
 * quotes from in-progress stories
 * no comic quotes (since comic quotes tend to dominated the open ballots)
 * quotes from stories on the current month’s Featured Stories ballot
 * narrative or mostly-narrative passages
 * tear jerkers
 * quotes from other people’s stories
 * quotes from your favorite story

If anyone has other theme ideas, let me know in the comments.

There should probably be a length limit for nominees, due to the limited column width in the Community Corner, but I’m not sure what that limit should be. In FQ’s first run, the longest winner was 73 words (albeit with no paragraph breaks or speaker changes), and there was also a multi-speaker winner totaling 65 words. None of the other winners were much over 50 words.

Finally, the rules will stress that “Quote” needn’t be taken literally. Nominees could be dialogue, narrative extracts, or a mix.

The floor is now open for discussion.