Randomized Featured Articles

[harshkhandeparkar]

From a thread on Slack:

RFC: Randomized Featured Articles

Since we do not have an easy way to update the list of featured articles regularly, imo it would be best to just display a random selection each time or perhaps update it each day. This way we also do not have to pick between different good articles. Points to discuss:

• Implementation: We can either use an extension or use the Batman bot (pywikibot) to manually update the front page. I think the bot would be the easier option unless there is a good, well maintained extension already available. Maybe we use whatever is used by Wikipedia's India Portal.
• Frequency: Should it be random for each page reload? (this will require an extension) Or should it be updated once a day for example, "Articles of the Day"?
• Approval Process: We need to streamline the process of adding articles to the list of good articles from which random ones will be picked. This can just be a simple wiki page that lists:
  • Guidelines/requirements for approval
  • How to get it approved (probably via slack)
• There already is a page for the above, we might just have to update it.

Current proposed solution: Using a Batman bot (pywikibot) cron job to rotate the featured articles from a list of articles. The list will be the table of articles on the existing Featured Articles page.

Progress

• [ ] Pywikibot implementation
• [ ] Update documentation (guidelines)