OpenGeofiction
I sometimes see people nominating their own work in the wiki, which isn’t useful at all. The reason for a nomination - of course - is and always should be honest work. It is hard to follow every single picture or map detail. Thats why it isn’t a coincidence that a part of the nominations is connected to an earlier presentation in a user diary. What do you think about it? Do you have suggestions or do you feel comfortable with the current system?
Regards,
Bstn
Discussion
Comment from Leowezy on 7 January 2017 at 17:34
I agree with you, on the other hand I’m guilty of what you describe myself; for the Did you know? section I usually nominate one fact related to Kojo as well when I need to find new snippets for an upcoming main page update. One reason is that it’s simply faster than going through dozens of articles more to find a 5th interesting piece of information.
Call me hypocritical, I feel as though there isn’t too much of a problem when people nominate “themselves” for these side facts; they are hard to catch if you are not too familiar with the country they are about, and I think each and everyone one of us knows best what little interesting Trivia there is for our own projects.
When it comes to artworks or examples of mapping, I’ve always refrained from nominating myself, partly because there are few things that I could have provided, and mostly because I feel like these sections are also made to give a shout out to the mapper behind them; unlike the trivia section. So for myself, I have no problem nominating Kojolese related material for the did you know section, but I’d never nominate my own work for one of the other sections.
Whether we actually want to put that up as a rule on the respective wiki sites is something we should discuss here.
Comment from joschi81 on 7 January 2017 at 18:10
I see you point, Bstn, but I also agree with Leowezy. I think it should be allowed to nominate own stuff, but people who select the featured facts should have an eye on it, meaning that interesting facts someone proposed for something another user created should have (much) higher priority! Could this be a solution? If so, it could be the same principle for all featured sections.
However, I have another point that is important in my point of view: The featured map section should always feature a section of the OGF map, not a map someone created for the Wiki. Why? Because there are people who are more interested in mapping with the OGF world then creating maps as artwork for the Wiki. Maps that actually are images someone created for the Wiki should be part of the “Featured Image” section or there should alway be two maps: One “special” from the Wiki, one part of the OGF world map. Ok, I saw now that in most cases it really is an OGF map section that is featured, but I think we should use the “Featured map” section as a permanent link to the OGF map on the Wiki start page. What do you think?
I belong to those people who are much more interested in mapping than putting stuff into the Wiki. (But I see, we have many users seeing it the other way round.)
Comment from Luciano on 7 January 2017 at 22:45
When I first created the “new” Main Page (now a year old), I included rules for the nomination system that included “do not nominate your own work.” This seemed reasonable to me, but there was a huge amount of debate about it (both in diaries and in various private message threads) and finally I felt that the community feeling was in favor of allowing self-nominations.
Since I turned over the month-to-month admin of the Main Page and nominations to other users (Leowezy and Paxtar, currently), I leave any changes in this policy to their discretion. In fact, whoever is making selections has a lot of discretion - if they believe self-nominations are in poor taste, they can simply avoid posting those nominations, leaving them in the queue. I think that whoever is doing the Main Page updating deserves to have this decision-making power.
Comment from Leowezy on 8 January 2017 at 00:33
@joschi, I’ve noticed this in the past as well, however I think that if we decided to move all the images portraying maps to the picture of the month section, we need to beginn to nominate (even) smaller sections of OGF mapping for the map section; perhaps little street corners, or small city quarters at most, instead of whole cities or even countries. (That would make much more sense in my opinion, also because that way it could highlight “hidden bits” that people are unlikely to spot just by browsing through the world map)
@Lucianio, I appreciate the trust you put in Paxtar and me, and also snootily agree with you xD As far as I’m aware, there haven’t been any major controversial decisions in the past, and after all we are talking about the main page of a wiki of a small online community, not about the front page of an internationally sold newspaper.
Comment from Bstn on 8 January 2017 at 09:40
Thank you all for the fast answers! I’d suggest that we try to focus non nominated map section that occur in different lists on the wiki, as joschi suggested. We could for example make a “month of airports” (dumb example?), where random airports out of the List of airports are taken and presented, as the coordinates are already there in most cases. This would engage people to fill these lists (in order to have a small chance of getting their work presented) and is a fair system, because you don’t actually have to nominate your work.
A very nice list would be a “list of national parks” in my opinion, but it’s up to the admins.
Comment from isleño on 10 January 2017 at 23:57
I don’t really care who nominates the content, but I think it should always be of the highest quality. I myself have been guilty of making nominations that are less than stellar, just to keep up with the demand created by regularly changing the page. My advice would be to change the content much less frequently, so that Leowezy and Paxtar (or whoever is doing it) can pick the very best each time. The featured map should always feel complete and detailed, the featured article should always be well written and well illustrated, and the ‘did you know’ items should always be quirky and interesting, and should always link to high quality articles. That’s my 2¢ anyway.