Forum:Don't kill me for suggesting this, but...

It has come to my attention that the Good Articles project has more or less come to a standstill. For those of you who have no idea what Good Articles are, it's probably because you joined Halo Fanon very recently. But more to the point, I'll give a brief overview...

The Good Article panel was created by Grizzlei back in June of 2010, adapted from a similar system on Wikipedia and possibly sites listed under Wikia's network. As per her proposition, it was meant as a replacement of the Fanon of the Month project. The reason was simple; it wasn't fair to every user to have to fight over who got their article featured, ending with 1 happy writer and the rest waiting an entire month for their next opportunity. Having made good points over why a Good Article project would be more ideal, it was widely approved by the community and without further ado, set into motion.

It was an immediate success; 13 articles were approved as good articles in the first 2 months alone, and in total no less than 21 articles made up the good articles of 2010. This continued to be the case for the first 5 months of 2011, where the number of good articles in total racked up to 35. But after this point is where things begin to slow down.

Currently, there are 38 good articles on the list, only 3 more than it was 7 months ago. And it's been like that since the end of October, which showed the three newest articles being granted good article status by what looks like a decent effort by Grizzlei to revive the project. But it seems that by now, people have lost interest in making new nominations with that energy that existed a year ago.

So what's my suggestion? If you're thinking I want to shut down the good article project, then you've guessed wrong. Grizzlei is no less correct about its advantages over Fanon of the Month than she was when first making the proposition. But the recent conclusion of the Annual Halo Fanon Awards got me thinking. What does the Good Article project lack? One word: competition.

In the annual awards, users feel more accomplished when winning an award because the community picked them (and hopefully not because they like "stealing" awards from competing users out of spite). And they know that winning an award by choice of preference will allow the article to be recognized as something that stands out. With the Fanon of the Month it's no different. It's like a smaller form of the Annual Awards, except there's a shorter wait and the competition is less intense. Also, what makes Fanon of the Month good is that it's easy for the community to notice when a user worked hard on an article for that month, rather than trying to put something into it for an entire year. Because many users really do spend a lot of time on one article at a time for short periods of time, something we can't forget and something that may not be done justice by generalizing it to simply being "a good article".

I realize that I still haven't made my proposition, but I think most of you have figured it out by now. Keep the Good Article panel, by also bring back the Fanon of the Month project. There's really no reason we can't have both, and it's about time we got a bit more motivation into consistent writing on Halo Fanon.