Featured content

About featured content

What is featured content?

Featured content is content which is considered, for a variety of reasons, to present Wikiversity at its best to the general public. Featured content may show exemplary course design, a novel, usable and fully functioning approach to wiki-based education, or educational resources which have simply reached a high state of completion or had very large amounts of work done on them.

See also: the Picture of the Day system

How is featured content displayed to the public?

There are a number of ways featured content is used.

1. Featured content on Wikiversity is regularly rotated in the "today's featured project" on the main page.
2. A wider range of material from this page, including content which is proposed-for but not-yet featured, is included in a special pseudo-random-page system accessed from the left-hand navigation panel on every page of Wikiversity - see Random project.
3. Many portals also have featured content. This page can be used for finding resources which are suitable for featuring on specific portals. Portals tend to set the bar for featured content somewhat lower, so portals may also feature content not listed here.

An important difference between featured content on Wikiversity and featured content on much larger projects is that on Wikiversity, featured content is rotated. On very large projects, featured content is selected by special interest groups several weeks or months in advance, and is always new. On Wikiversity, to save time, and as a result of the lower level of content production, featured content is rotated on a daily basis. Featured content therefore reappears on the main page at regular intervals.

Who selects featured content?

Selecting and maintaining a featured content system requires a time-consuming long-term commitment and a wide knowledge of Wikiversity content. Few people have ever been prepared to invest time in this. On larger projects, featured content is usually selected by democratic vote. However democratic systems only work when there is a large enough body of well-informed participants in a featured content project. The Wikiversity system is unfortunately rather autocratic at the current time, but any user can propose content (just add it below) and comment on other suggestions. Please inform yourself widely about featured content before commenting if you can.

There is no formal system of criteria at the current time, but you can discuss proposals for criteria on the talk page. On the whole, it would be desirable if featured content could represent as many different subjects and educational levels as possible.