User:Carcharoth/Featured article categories

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Some things are fairly hard to track within the current FA system. It would be convenient to have a single, dynamically generated list, of all former and current featured articles, indicating which ones have been on the main page and when, and which ones haven't. Currently, this is only done for featured articles (see Category:Featured articles that have not appeared on the main page and Category:Featured articles that have appeared on the main page). There are some advantages to doing this for former featured articles as well. Also, Category:Wikipedia former featured articles includes (under '#') the articles that have been demoted and re-promoted, though you have to count them manually (it would be better to have more categories: (1) Currently featured articles; (2) Currently former featured articles; and separate from these two and a subset, would be (3) Featured articles that were once former featured articles.

Other ways of gaining an overall pictures of the featured articles is splitting things up into smaller topic sections than currently done at

WP:FA
(this would be done in parallel to the existing system, which has its own advantages). One thing that I would like to be able to do (and may do in my userspace) is sort the FAs by time period, and to pick out the broader topics from the more specific ones (i.e. the style of articles, not just the topics). Some are not time period-specific, while others aim to cover a broad and wide history. Geographical spread would also be something to consider.

However, one problem is sheer numbers. It is difficult to do such overviews when the number of articles is nearly 3000.

Anniversaries

It is possible to go through the articles listed at Wikipedia:Featured articles that haven't been on the Main Page and pick out the primary anniversary dates for ones that have proper anniversaries. This list would need to be updated if the articles were used on the Main Page before such dates arrived. I also skipped some articles (such as those of animals and plants), though even some of those may conceivably have anniversaries.

not complete (continue from 'Geography and places' onwards)...