Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates/Instructions

Hey man im josh

@Hey man im josh: Welcome to being an FLC delegate! This page has all of the instructions for how to promote/demote/manage nominations. Most of this you've probably picked up over time, but this is it all written out. Most of the work for the FL process is just managing the nominations queue, and occasionally answering questions on the talk page. Other than that, Giants2008 handles the scheduling of main page FLs, which includes both actually scheduling them and keeping an eye on Wikipedia:Today's featured list/Submissions. He also periodically updates the Wikipedia:Today's featured list/Statistics pages. I handle the Wikipedia:Featured list statistics page, and we all manage and tweak the WP:FL and WP:FFL lists. Feel free to help out with any or none of these; dealing with nominations is by for the majority of the work so it's the only thing that really needs doing.

The truth of FLC is that its an autocracy, and the only rule for promotion is that one of us must agree to do it; it's not actually a vote-counting exercise. How you decide if a list is ready for promotion is up to you, though we have a rough consensus for the process. It's an open secret that it usually takes 3 support votes plus a reference review, but that's just a rough consensus we've arrived at over the years. We'd also require an accessibility review (mostly me), and would like to require image reviews, but we have limited reviewers for those. As you and I have discussed before, the delegates have and will ignore pile-on support votes when that's an issue, I won't promote anything before 3 weeks by default as I want people to have time to see it, and I'll promote things with 2 support votes after doing a review myself if it's more than 2 months old and the 2 supports come from reviewers I trust to do a thorough job. I also often do source reviews myself prior to promotion, as again we have limited numbers of reviewers in that area. If you want to have different guidelines, that's up to you. As a rule, we don't promote our own lists, but feel free to ping the others if you think it's ready to go and you just can't do it yourself- or for anything, really.

As you can see in the instructions, the bot handles most of the promotion work. You just have to slap the template on the nomination and update the WT:FLC template and WP:FL. There are some ways for the bot to get messed up (usually the talk page template not linking correctly), but 99% of nominations have no issues there, and if it messes up you just fix the issue and it will get cleaned up the next day. Feel free to close as many or as few nominations as you want, on whatever cadence you want- Giants usually closes a few on Sundays, and I'll do blocs of closes once or twice a week or so. You can do blocs, one at a time, whatever. I've found that trying to aggressively keep the nomination queue to 2 months makes the whole process flow faster and smoother, even if that means archiving nominations as no consensus. Demotions are much lower volume, so for those we just close them ad-hoc on our best judgement for if a list just isn't going to get fixed.

I'll stop there; feel free to ask any questions whenever. Welcome aboard! --PresN 14:47, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

I'll definitely be giving the instructions a good read through several times and start off slowly. Thanks so much for all of this, I'll definitely be bugging with any questions or concerns that come up, but for now I'm just going to get myself used to process before I propose any changes. Hey man im josh (talk) 14:52, 1 July 2024 (UTC)