Forum:Featured Works

"A glorious utopia of fan-fiction writers and studious readers - celebrated and complimented and in turn, complimenting the vast majority of the article writers on Star Wars Fanon."

- Jedi Master 76 on the Featured Works

This is something that I've been thinking about for a couple months. The Star Wars Fanon Wiki counts among its members many writers, and the more talented and prolific of those are able to have some of their creations achieve the label of Featured Article, and have their work highlighted on the wiki's Main Page, receive accolades, enjoy punch and pie, and other nifty little perks. It's an honor, to be sure.

However, in the past year or so, the wiki has seen a rise in the number of quality fan-fiction works. And I'm not talking the laughable ones that have two paragraphs of text about Darth Awesome and how he had Epic Adventures. I'm talking novels of over 50,000 words. I'm talking short stories with more than 6,000 words. I'm talking real works. Believe it or not, there's plenty to choose from. Heritage, anyone? Knights of the Old Republic: Convict's Dawn. Force Exile I: Fugitive. A handful of partially-complete works like Star Wars: Episode I - The Chosen One, Star Wars: Knighthood, and Star Wars: The Lost Mantra. And don't feel bad if I left your work out&mdash;these were some of the ones that came to mind when I was writing this. The point is, the stuff is out there, and it's not getting any publicity despite its quality.

This has to do with an obvious limitation in the featured article system&mdash;it's not designed for fan-fiction. I've done the DL thing, and it just doesn't mesh. To put a novel or short story or novella into article format and make it an FA, is well, impossible, now that the bar on FAs has finally been upped. So, aside from the nebulous possibility of winning something in a Wiki Awards&mdash;so far a single award once a year&mdash;(and novels/fanfics only started to be recognized last year), there's no kind of recognition or status for these articles to achieve. And, having written a number of FAs on Wookieepedia, and several fanworks here, about a 150 KB FA is the work equivalent of a decent 60,000 word novel.

I'd like to change that. And not just because I write fanfic. If it was just me, I wouldn't propose something like this. I don't have the need to elevate myself on the internet by advertising what I write. I'm proposing it for the other hard-working authors out there who write a good story and hope that people randomly decide to read it instead of thinking "TL;DR". I'm proposing it so people from other fanfic communities, where narrative is the bread and butter, not the ubiquitous encyclopediac style seen on SWF, can see this wiki as a place to express their creativity. (Cough, TF.N cough.)

So, here's what I'm proposing. We make something new to go along with the FAs and GAs, because retooling those to work with narrative just won't work. Say, we call it a featured work. Now, to clarify, what exactly this means is:
 * 1) A featured work will have a new eras icon for the work in question.
 * 2) A featured work will have an author-selected excerpt from the work displayed on the Main Page for a month (since there aren't enough to go around for a week)
 * 3) A featured work will be recognized by the community as a quality work of prose.

To gain this status, here are the requirements:
 * 1) The work must be finished, unless it is a novel (> 50,000 words). Full completion on a novel is strongly recommended, but if it is not, then it should be at least roughly 3/4 finished and have no major edits pending. What defines sufficient completion for a mostly finished work will lie in the majority opinion of the review board defined below.
 * 2) The work must be of sufficient length as to merit featured work status. A general qualifier is 50,000 words for a novel and 5,000 words for a short story, at a minimum. If other categories of work are nominated, it will be at the discretion of the review board described below as to an appropriate length.
 * 3) The work must be of sufficient quality to merit featured work status and display on the Main Page. That said, a group of three (3) people will be appointed to examine the work overall and have various powers related to judgment calls on nominations as described above. This does not entail reading the whole thing&mdash;that's optional and/or recommended. This entails skimming over it and making sure there are no massive plot holes, gobs of ridiculousness, Mary Sues, inappropriate content, and/or utter stupidity. This is not as demanding a job as, say, the Council of Seers, but will require a decent amount of participation.
 * 4) It almost goes without saying that the Featured Work excerpt to be displayed on the Main Page must be of good taste, interesting, less than 300 words, and completely free of spelling and grammar errors. All of these considerations lie with the sole purview of the 3 people chosen to place in charge of this.
 * 5) It must receive at least (2/3) votes from the review board and, say, 5 votes from the community to become a featured work. The community vote number is somewhat negotiable. This is to encourage participation, without dragging out nominations forever. 2 out of 3 of these review board members can also remove a nomination if they believe it is of particularly low quality.
 * 6) A cover is preferred but not absolutely mandatory. Better to have no cover than a bad cover.


 * One last thing:


 * The idea of having photonovels as FWs has been brought to my attention&hellip;having never read or written a photonovel, I'm sort of neutral, but I put some thought into it, and come up with these ideas. A photonovel or fan comic would need to satisfy the last 4 requirements above.
 * 1) It would have to be finished if it has less than 100 separate images, or roughly 3/4 way complete if it has more.
 * 2) It must have a minimum of fifty separate images. I'm taking a ballpark guess at a reasonable number.

Now, all this said, I considered the idea of having a two-tier system, like FA and GA, but had a hard time justifying 2 new structures. That's too much, and there aren't that many fanfics. I've seen the pertinent categories, and didn't want to get carried away on this grand experiment.

Now, the voting. Here's what you're voting about:
 * To create the featured work system and its voting/quality requirements.
 * To place a different featured work excerpt on the Main Page for each month.
 * To create the review board organization (Sorry, I don't have a snappy name based on my fanon to put here). Oh, and vote on those people too.
 * Whether or not to include photonovels as Featured Works.
 * To necessitate a Main Page redesign to accommodate the featured work box. I've talked with Vic about this already and he has promised uber-l33tness of epic proportions. Or something like that. given us lies about a Main Page redesign. I've looked into that, and Drewton is revamping the Main Page in a shadowy lair as we speak.
 * To create a new eras icon to designate featured works. Suggestions welcome.
 * To create a page devoted to featured works and their nominations, along the lines of the FAN page.

This'll last until 16 October. If it looks like it'll be approved, I'll even make the FWN (Featured Work Nomination) page(s). Then, there'll be some nominations to get a queue going. If all goes according to plan, Featured Works will start appearing on the Main Page on 1 November.

Review board members

 * Don't nominate yourself.