Forum:Get rid of featured articles

I propose that featured articles are removed from the main page entirely. This is a very quick messy proposal so I apologise, I've been meaning to do this for a while and just want the forum post to exist finally.

Reasons for the proposed removal:

1. Despite everyone being able to add featured articles to the queue, not enough people care about featured articles to keep the queue updated, so we are constantly missing a featured article
2. There are not enough genuinely interesting articles in the spin-off namespaces to justify the featured article section existing. Even if we lowered the rotation time of the spin-off featured articles to an entire month I think this fact would still be true for Legends, Earth, and Story Mode, because those spin-offs will never get new content.
3. Adding this additional layer of responsibility onto all active editors for something that I haven't seen anyone express genuine joy over its existence is just not worth it in my opinion. It's something to stress about for a gain that isn't clear yet at least.

To replace it I would personally turn the "latest updates" section into a news section like what we had before assuming that is uncontroversial. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
18:09, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

I have never done anything with the featured articles so I don’t know exactly what goes on, but from what I’ve seen it does seem like a bunch of stress for something that really doesn’t add much to the main page. 👁 Image
 Support Removing the featured articles. 👁 Image
WillyBlue (talk | contribs) 18:17, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

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 Very strong support, the idea of having featured articles on the Minecraft Wiki just doesn't work, when compared to other encyclopedias like Wikipedia, and honestly is just a huge waste of space. Rert 19:12, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

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 Support removing featured articles for the reasons brought up by Harri and 👁 Image
 Support reintroducing the "latest news" section, which is something that people were interested in (source: the results of the survey done before the main page redesign) and which was removed for no reasons.--Capopanzo (talk | contribs) 19:25, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

Back when discussing the main page update on RuMCW, we came to a conclusion that having EnMCW-style featured articles would be too much of a burden (on top of spin-offs not being well-documented in general). We considered having a permanently expanded “last versions” block (in response to a common complaint from the survey) but could not figure out how to do it properly for the “main” main page (which has about a dozen edition subblocks), so we added a block for mods instead (obviously I am not suggesting EnMCW to do the same). — BabylonAS 19:31, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

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 Support, although we can just try to fix the problem before removing it altogether. We can slow the rotations, have a fallback FA system, etc. before completely removing them. I also wonder, should we survey our readers about if they care about FAs and stuff? -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  20:35, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

I notice this topic hasn't had activity in a week. Replying here to "bump" it. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  23:12, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

I strongly support having featured articles persist for at least two weeks, I don't know why that hasn't been implemented yet. MinecraftBedrockPlayer7 (talk) (contribs) 👁 Image
07:46, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Support completely agree with Harri. –LauraFi - talk 20:51, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

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 Weak oppose; I'd honestly rather try to figure out ways to fix it than to flat out remove it. Perhaps we can just remove the weekly/biweekly rotations, and pick articles out of relevance, for relevant amounts of time. Like right now with the copper update and the next drop, pick articles related to those, ignoring the completedness of the pages in question (obvious stubs shouldnt be used, but a simple "missing images" tag shouldnt discourage picking it). And around holidays pick articles related to those, like the Pretty Scary Update for Halloween, Pride 2023 Sale for June, etc. 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
21:07, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

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 Support removing it from spin-off namespaces, 👁 Image
 Weak oppose removing it from the main namespace. I think we can fix this by:

1. Clean MCT:FANOM. Instead of a suggestion/discussion page it's now just "put every well-made article on the wiki in it", with the only reasoning being something that's part of the article and has nothing to do with actual reasoning of why it should be a featured article.
2. Make better guidelines for MCT:FANOM to prevent it from becoming such a useless thing again. Limit users that are making too much nominations, one user should just make one nomination for one week, and only for a few weeks in the future.
3. Remove the featured article indicator/msgbox from historical FA's. It's literally useless, it has nothing to do with the content of the article nor it is official. And it creates a false separation between FA's and non-featured articles where both are equally good.
4. Random idea, but we could somewhat "merge" the purpose of a news section with FA by picking featured articles that are very recent/in the news (like Jockey before MoM).

Also, I think featured articles should have at least a bit of popularity instead of highlighting less-known things. While it is a good idea, it generally makes it a less useful section. For example, when Mangrove Swamp was up it actually prompted me to (successfully) improve the article but that's not the case with Bats (Woodsword Chronicles).
I think we should give it a chance to improve itself in the next few weeks with the improvements I suggested, if it stays bad then we can remove it afterward. MinecraftBedrockPlayer7 (talk) (contribs) 👁 Image
21:40, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

I agree with all of your ideas (especially the 1st and 3rd I fully support), except the 2nd one, the nomitation process shouldn't be too bureaucratic and users shouldn't be limited: from what I noticed, one of the issues with FAs is that people aren't bold enough (often waiting for an admin to select a new FA) and that the system is carried by a small number of editors. I think adding additional guidelines wouldn't help much. - Zamburger (talk) 16:35, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Agreed, but we could prompt users to use common sense and not flood the nominations page. MinecraftBedrockPlayer7 (talk) (contribs) 👁 Image
20:03, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

If we rework the guidelines, I think we should be more lax on certain maintenance templates. I have a few articles in mind, but because theyre "missing images" I cant nominate them. 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
20:33, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

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 Neutral, though I'm more interested in ideas around the news section and how we are going to make sure it doesn't end up being a list of novel releases. Dianliang233 (talk) 05:00, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

I think Mojang release enough content for the news section to not be just about novel releases. Looking at the recent releases (just the past 2 months), there's plenty that could have made for good entries in a news section:

• Events
  • The Copper Crown
  • The Copper Cape Quest
  • Minecraft LIVE – September 2025
• Collabs
  • New LEGO sets
  • Minecraft x ASSC
  • Minecraft x OppoSuits
• DLC
  • Friendly Fishing
  • Superman
• Books
  • Minecraft Annual 2026
  • Minecraft: One Last Quest
• Misc
  • Minecraft: Pixel Drift
  • Untitled A Minecraft Movie sequel announcement
  • Minecraft Experience extension

And this isn't an exhaustive list.

I personally find displaying these news more interesting than featuring random articles, so I fully 👁 Image
 Support replacing FAs with a news section. - Zamburger (talk) 16:20, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

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 Weak oppose, it's nice to have. The rollover period for the spinoff namespaces is too short though. There's not enough activity on the talk pages to have noms approved. Generally support what MinecraftBedrockPlayer7 said above.

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 Support removing the tags from the featured pages, those are pointless.  Nixinova  T ⁄ C  05:11, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

I've always opposed adding these tags to the features pages (edit: and I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone there), not sure why it was done anyway. | violine1101 ^(talk) 21:58, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

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 Comment, if we remove the indicator then we have no way of knowing if an article has been freatured before without searching through all the FA entries. We should still have a category for this at least if we're not gonna remove the FA system entirely. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  21:40, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

a) it's possible to add a category without also adding an indicator, and b) I don't see a lot of functional difference between a list of articles and a category. | violine1101 ^(talk) 22:02, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Good point, I was thinking just a category or list of articles. Or maybe something that prevents users from nominating FAs for being featured again... -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  22:03, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

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 Neutral I'd first like to see a concrete proposal for what should replace the featured articles box, both for main and spin-off namespaces. We already have lots of space for the latest updates (the first two tiles, and also "coming back to the game?"), so I'm not convinced that yet another block with information about updates would be needed or useful at all to readers. | violine1101 ^(talk) 22:01, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

That is a very good point. Myself I have no idea what to put there apart from news, so I'd like to see some others propose something. (Probably idiotic idea: what if we just reformatted the mainpage to account for the section removal? -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  22:05, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

No one has suggested "yet another block with information about updates". My suggestion was to bring back the news section, and additionally remove "latest updates" with its addition. We should all know what the news section would look like since we had one already, but Zamburger has given a list of what could be included above. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
23:40, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

Well, the news sections in the past were mainly about updates and novel releases, which I'm not convinced would be very useful for readers at all. Plus, from how I understand, you're suggesting removing the "latest updates" section (I assume you refer to "Coming back to the game", and not the two highlight boxes on top, right?). If so, then that's another section that'd need to be replaced with something else.

Again, I'd like to see a concrete proposal for how the sections should look before I form an opinion. The editcopy exists and is a good place to propose changes like that. | violine1101 ^(talk) 23:38, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

I'm just throwing this out here because I doubt it'd get very much support, but Nookipedia has monthly featured fanart, and maybe we could do something similar but instead of fanart it'd be like a build or something 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
01:35, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Disagree 👁 Image
Dazzle 👁 Image
16:33, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Oppose, the main page is not for community creations. 👁 Image
HugEnder13(talk)👁 Image
16:52, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Oppose stronger than both users. The Minecraft Wiki is not the Portuguese Wiki (which has the Communidade namespace), that's why many people opposed making a Community namespace here. We do not put anything that's unofficial, unless we put a {{disclaimer}} template. Also, a wiki is a wiki, not social media. Our wiki is not an anarchy or a gallery. It's not a restaurant or a café either. BigEarsQuake 2 (talk) 17:28, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

I wasnt suggesting any of that, this is just a simple box on the front page. Besides I never said that I gave it my full support, I was just throwing the idea out there. 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
01:33, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Neutral per Violine1101. 👁 Image
Dazzle 👁 Image
15:47, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

Now i 👁 Image
 strongly support, per everyone who supported this idea. 👁 Image
Dazzle ^{[ talk | edits ]} 17:58, 13 December 2025 (UTC)

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 Strong support, featured articles make too many work on the wiki. Plus, featured articles take too many time to be selected ! 👁 Image
HugEnder13(talk)👁 Image
16:40, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

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 Support :( BigEarsQuake 2 (talk) 18:32, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

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 Support, I was neutral at first but a lot of the spin-off featured articles are minescule and the fact that spin-off articles are split from their Minecraft counterparts would make it hard to keep running or to combine into one. 👁 Image
GameCatastrophe (talk) 04:07, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Strong support Featured articles are mostly useless and also a lot of work. On the Brazilian wiki, for example, it's rare to find a featured article that isn't the standard one that's always displayed. The only problem is what to put in place of this section; a news section seems very useless (considering the recent updates sections, which make up the majority of the news).
  — Herobrine222376 ^{( Talk | Contributions | pt-br )} 11:20, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Neutral I’d say I’m against removing FAs entirely, but I think the issues here are reasonable. They’ve been problematic for a good while. For now I’d definitely go with the news section, but if we go through with this I’d like the FA pages preserved for reference. Realshow19 (talk) 01:56, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Oppose Removing it from the main page, from personal experience, it's been interesting seeing some topics that I didn't know about thanks to the featured article option, and adds some variety to discoverability of other topics.

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 Abstain Removing it from the spinoff pages, since I do not have much personal investment in those entries, but if lack of content is an issue then having a larger time frame could work instead. 👁 Image
404_11 (talk) 15:51, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

mostly expressing a 👁 Image
 Neutral opinion on their possible removal, if they get removed in favor of something else i won't miss them, but i don't really jive immediately jumping to a radical solution just because the minecraft wiki chose the most stressful way to implement featured articles.

there is no reason for the rollover speed to be 1 or 2 weeks only, we can easily extend the duration or only rotate whenever we want; this is one thing many game wikis do with their FAs.

there is also no reason to have every FA be a unique one each time; likewise with the above point, many game wikis simply cycle through a pre-established list of nominated articles.

TL;DR we are suffering a deliberate problem that other wikis have already solved
mariberry-hearn! (talk) 16:35, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

Well said. Realshow19 (talk) 18:08, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

Well said, I 👁 Image
 Agree — 👁 Image
Delycache ^{(Talk | Contributions)} 21:34, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Agree with changing the FA system, it’s a good idea 👁 Image
HugEnder13(talk)👁 Image
09:02, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

A preview of what the main page would look like without the featured article can be found here. 👁 Image
Dazzle 👁 Image
16:12, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Ok, really. Is there any other good argument against removing FAs? We can't really do it well. By now we just feature articles people might like to read rather than articles that are well written. So, are we going to change the system or remove them? It's pretty clear that one or the other must happen. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  18:52, 22 November 2025 (UTC)

Change! I still have no ideas about other ways wikis decorate their home pages. 👁 Image
BigEarsQuake 2 👁 Image
Talk to the Wind Fan! 👁 Image
18:57, 22 November 2025 (UTC)

Agreed. Myself, I think that:

• The nominations system should be changed to clarify that it's about good articles, not interesting article subjects.
• The rotation should be slowed to at most half the frequency we have now.
• A fallback system should be put in place

What do you think? -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  19:00, 22 November 2025 (UTC)

I'll let others decide. I'm not THE community. BigEarsQuake 2 👁 Image
Talk to the Wind Fan! 19:08, 22 November 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I'd say implement it right now, we shouldn't wait with this. Also remove all nominations with invalid reasoning. MinecraftBedrockPlayer7 (talk) (contribs) 👁 Image
23:01, 22 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Agreed, I still remember someone saying on the MC nominations page that your recent nomination was good since it highlihted not how the thing the article was about was interesting but how the article was of good quality. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  23:02, 22 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Suggestion Completely removing featured articles might be a bad idea. Based on the comments above and my own ideas, I suggest:

• Select only relevant and up-to-date articles: I've seen some articles related mainly to media being featured (perhaps a better place for this would be to create a new portal for media); I don't consider them useless, but irrelevant to be on the main page. Simply highlighting up-to-date articles that readers would be interested in (such as some little-known or new resource) might be better.
• Keep only one article page for each namespace: This system of creating hundreds of subpages for each week seems terribly useless and disorganized to me. Perhaps simply adding a parameter to the {{featured}} template with the article's start date would be enough. Keeping only one page (like MCW:Featured articles/Minecraft) with the code that will be included on the main page is sufficient.
• Rotate only when necessary: We don't need to change the featured article every week, or even every two weeks, but only occasionally when necessary. When a new article is featured, the single page would simply be edited and the article changed, without any additional system.

I think this would be enough to completely organize the featured articles. I hope you understand, because I don't speak English and I use automatic translation.
  — Herobrine222376 ^{( Talk | Contributions | pt-br )} 22:28, 22 November 2025 (UTC)

The only problem with editing one page rather than creating subpages means that regular editors would no longer be able to create the featured article, since the page would be protected due to being on the main page 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
02:17, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Support removing FAs and replacing them in all main pages with a news section about the whole franchise. While I don't support in keeping them, if the decision is made to keep them, we should cycle through established list of approved nominations instead of trying to feature new ones every week or two. 👁 Image
QwertyLilley ^[talk] 18:45, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

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 Support for a news system, the old wiki main page had a similar section. 👁 Image
HugEnder13(talk)👁 Image
19:33, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

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 Strong support, the quality of featured articles has been especially poor as of late, and no one seems to care enough to fix that. 👁 Image
Sightnado ^{t | c} 17:54, 13 December 2025 (UTC)

I 👁 Image
 Support removing featured articles and replacing with a "news" section, per previous comments. No-one is maintaining the featured articles, aside from one or two people, resulting in a lot of missing featured articles, as well as poor quality (e.g. here). –Mitsos ^{[ talk | edits ]} 18:01, 13 December 2025 (UTC)

Bumping this. We've missed several weeks of FAs and we're not doi8ng very well with them at all. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  15:45, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

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 Neutral It is nice and cool to have but at the same time, Like Harri said, There isn't enough people who care to help update that. 👁 Image
Redstone Engineer (Talk) 20:55, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

It's clear that we can't maintain FAs very well at all. We keep missing the deadline, selecting articles that arguably are not well-written, etc. Obviously something needs to happen. So I propose the following:

1. We implement a better fallback system to avoid placeholders; I have already done this but it hasn't been implemented
2. We temporarily disable FAs, replacing them on the main page with the next point
3. We survey readers to see what they think of FAs being removed, slowed down, changed, replaced, what else they might want to see FAs replaced with (we can also survey them on the wiki news section to kill two creepers with one arrow; more onb that can be found on the main page's talk page)
4. We slow the rotation
5. We remove FAs for spinoffspaces
6. We clarify the nominations system to make sure people know what to look for in a featured article, that is, quality rather than being about something cool, and that we don't need a million nominations.
7. Most importantly, we take action according to data we may get from surveying readers. Readers first, remember!

Personally I think most, if not all, of these points would help, especially the bit about surveying readers. A fallback system would prevent placeholders 999 times out of 1000, preventing a lot of confusion. Temporarily disabling FAs gives us time to figure out what we need to do with the whole system. Surveying readers gives us a lot of data on what we can and should do to make the system better. Slowing the rotation would reduce the need for having a bunch of nominations. Removing the FAs from spinoffspaces would solve the issue of a finite amount of articles to feature. Clarifying the nominations system would make sure we select articles that should actually be featured. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  16:02, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

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 Strong support points 1, 3, 4, and 7 as proposer. 👁 Image
 moderate support points 5 and 6 as proposer. 👁 Image
 Weak support point 2; disabling FAs may not be necessary but could still help. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  16:02, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

If we keep FAs, I 100% support your first and fourth point.

Regarding conducting a survey, I think the only data that would be interesting to collect is whether they like that section (rotation or the way articles are chosen among editor wouldn't deeply matter for most of them; and qualitative data rather than quantitative would be a struggle in this context). We do already have this data:

Sections Options	News (%)	DYK (%)	FA (%)	Wiki news (%)
Very useful	41.9	36.2	26.2	20.2
Somewhat useful	28.8	30	28.9	31.6
Neutral	18.6	19.6	18.7	28.6
Somewhat unnecessary	7.3	8.7	10.1	11.2
Very unnecessary	3.5	5.6	16.7	8.4
General opinion (%)
Positive (useful)	70.7	66.1	55.1	51.8
Negative (unnecessary)	10.8	14.3	26.8	19.6

From the start, users claimed not to be completely on board with FAs, compared, for example, to the news section which did not make the cut (since you mention it). One can argue that the survey is around 8 months old, users' opinions may have changed since then, however although I cannot prove it I strongly suspect that the shift was in disfavor of FAs; I suspect FAs gained points due to novelty bias and would probably rank even lower today. (Side note: I find it quite crazy that readers had such a positive view of the news section when it clearly wasn't at its best potential, as mentioned above in that forum discussion; even more positive that for the DYK section.) So I'm not against conducting another survey, but I doubt it would tell us a lot.

About removing FAs on spinoff main pages, I do wonder: would that mean leaving the pages left with 3 sections? It's a minor nitpick, but I'm not sure I'd like the asymmetry it'd result in. If spinoff FAs are a struggle to maintain, they could perhaps function similarly to what's done on ZH (unless it has changed since I last saw that): it's a pre-selected pool of articles that rotates (with a long enough rotation cycle, and assuming the pool is big enough, you wouldn't notice it). - Zamburger (talk) 19:01, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

If I might ask, what do you mean by the pages left when removing spinoff FAs? I'm really not sure what kinds of pages (content pages with 3 sections on them?), and it's hard to infer what you mean. Could you clarify? -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  20:02, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

The namespace's main pages, I think 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
20:11, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, I realise I wasn't very clear on that point. I was referring to spinoff main pages (e.g., MCD:Wiki). If AFs are removed from these pages without being replaced by something else, only 3 bento boxes/sections/cells (I'm not sure what they're named there; basically the "About the game" or "Other media" boxes for example) would remain. That means one of them would have to become extra-wide to fill the extra space, which looks quite off to me (e.g., User:Dazzle/sandbox/2). - Zamburger (talk) 20:22, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

Ah, that's a fair point. And that would be the strength of the community survey: to find out what communities might want to replace it. However, as you noted above that may be unnecessary, though as you also noted the game news section was removed despite being the most popular, making it arguably the best option for a replacement. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  20:26, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

Though a news section wouldn't work well on spinoff main pages, as those spinoffs are all dead and barely receive any news. ^^' - Zamburger (talk) 10:15, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

True. But, not to force it on anyone, the survey was not conducted with the spinoff namespaces as those came into play upon the redesign. Like you said, a survey may be helpful as the old one is potentially out of date... -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  14:46, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Personally I would have made one news section for the entire franchise and then placing it on all main pages. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
18:19, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Oh yeah, phasing out FAs in favor of a single franchise news section for all main pages is my 1st choice as well. I mentioned different news sections for spin-offs only because the proposal suggests keeping FAs on the Minecraft main page but not on the spin-offs main pages, and having franchise news sections on spin-offs main pages but not on the Minecraft one would be odd. - Zamburger (talk) 20:09, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

The discussion stalled and nothing came out of it (neither keeping FAs but improving them nor a concrete replacement plan), and time only confirmed the points mentioned by Harri against FAs. I appreciate Nerdyguy2000's proposal as an attempt to save this feature, but no one seems to have been interested in trying to do so. Since then, @Sightnado has created a news section template (3 months ago) which has been used in the editcopy and maintained. I believe this is the way to go and I propose implementing it.

Why a news section in the first place?

I already shared the main page survey results in that forum topic, but I'll share it again because it is a fairly strong argument in favor of the news section and against FAs. I'll also repeat myself to comment that table:

From the start, users claimed not to be completely on board with FAs, compared, for example, to the news section [...]. One can argue that the survey is around 8 months old, users' opinions may have changed since then, however although I cannot prove it, I strongly suspect that the shift was in disfavor of FAs; I suspect FAs gained points due to novelty bias and would probably rank even lower today.

Despite the news section being in a rough state pre-main page redesign, there was a demand to keep it, it was still positively perceived, so it was IMO a misstep to get rid of it, especially in favor of a feature that was less positively perceived. It is also worth mentioning that, surprisingly, nowhere else Minecraft news are well compiled (minecraft.net/articles itself is bloated with random uninteresting articles and does not cover every pieces of news), thus the wiki could fill that niche (which is not off-topic for a wiki, as it fits our objective of documenting the franchise and is something that game wikis often do).

I understand that one might be reluctant since the previous news section, before the main page redesign, was indeed not perfect (a simple list of update and novel releases half of the time, thus quickly became uninteresting). Though I believe that there is more than enough Minecraft franchise content released each month (or even week sometimes) for a news section not to become a simple list of book and update releases. I already gave in this forum topic several categories of pieces of news that would fit: events (event servers or community events), collaborations, DLCs, books, and other miscellaneous releases (e.g. albums, announcements); the already existing template does that well.

Furthermore, all of this type of content is covered by the wiki, meaning our news entries could directly link to our own articles (e.g., linking to Very Cool when that collaboration was announced, to Pixel Drift when it released, or to Zombie Horse Cape when the event occurred). Thus, that section won't only be about news, but also about highlighting a more niche part of the wiki (i.e. we keep that "link to niche articles" vibe FAs have).

Implementation

Again, the news section template already used in the editcopy does the job well:

• The section would replace FAs on all main pages.
• It would display the five most recent news items.
• Since it would be transcluded on the main page, users with director rights would need to keep the actual template in sync with an editcopy that anyone could modify (which I fully acknowledge is a major downside).
• During the short lifespan of the template, there were disagreements over what qualified as "news". I think it's better not to attempt an exhaustive list of acceptable news items, and instead exclude specific types over time if needed.
  • In particular, snapshot and preview-related content could be excluded for example, as these are already covered by both the highlight section and the latest versions section.
• Every entries should link to a relevant page, that way the relevant page acts as a bridge to the source of the news (to avoid what happens with some DYK entries).

Most of my message is about defending the idea, but hopefully the second part should give a more concrete starting point. - Zamburger (talk) 19:20, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

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 Strong support I think that a news section would be more helpful and esister to maintain. Inserting news seems easier that finding well written articles, and a general list of recent events seems more useful to readers. D62 21:21, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

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 Support, thanks for hopefully saving this, I never found the motivation. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
21:39, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

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 Strong Support. BDJP ^(t|c) 21:57, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

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 Support. –LauraFi - talk 21:59, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

As much as I love the idea of FAs, I 👁 Image
 support this as a replacement 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
22:09, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

👁 Image
 Support Liyz7928 (talk) 22:10, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

👁 Image
 Support 👁 Image
Sightnado ^{t | c} 23:23, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

👁 Image
 Support Dianliang233 (talk) 12:22, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

While I personally don't mind replacing featured articles with news, so far I've not seen any serious attempt to refute mariberry-hearn's points in favor of tweaking the featured articles system instead of removing it completely, which in my opinion have some validity. — BabylonAS 13:00, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

The featured article section is by far the section people consider the most unnecessary; replacing it with something that people consider more important and that is easier to maintain only makes sense. 👁 Image
Sightnado ^{t | c} 15:08, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Nerdyguy2000 did make a concret proposal on how to improve FAs in this thread. Though, apart from me, no one replied to his proposal, which I interpreted as a lack of interest in improving them. - Zamburger (talk) 20:08, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Indeed, there appears to be so little interest in the featured article system that even any attempts to improve the system end up largely ignored; I doubt there to be a path forward for featured articles that does not leave them unacceptably derelict. 👁 Image
Sightnado ^{t | c} 23:32, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

I agree that we should try to improve FAs before we ditch them altogether. -- 👁 Image
Delycache ^{(Talk | Contributions)} 20:16, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Considering featured articles were already not favoured very well by poll participants, having them rotate significantly more slowly (this is a big part of making them easier to maintain) just makes it much more likely that people won't care for the feature. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
20:25, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

👁 Image
 Strong support per D62. 👁 Image
Bepis19 👁 Image
16:08, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

👁 Image
 Support. Despite a few suggestions being brought up in the past months, there has been no board interest nor concrete attempts in keeping/improving FAs, so no point in keeping them in my opinion. --Capopanzo (talk | contribs) 00:03, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

👁 Image
 Support implementing a news section. I think the current way it is implemented can still be improved, I'll maybe cook up a few design tweaks for it. However, if it is there I also don't think we need "coming back to the game?". Ideally there'd be a link with "... older news" that you can click on to get on a page with all the past news, to catch up. (I suppose chronology of events could work for that, but that page is bad currently) | violine1101 ^(talk) 11:46, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

I like the styling you gave to it (aside from the images, which I find a bit distracting, maybe sprites would be a better middle ground to keep some kind of soft visual indicator?).

I also considered adding a "See older news" button: what I had in mind was an archive system similar to the one used for FAs (which is a part of FA I quite like). I ended up not including it in the proposal because I thought it might maybe make the template harder/less intuitive to maintain. I hadn't thought about linking it to Chronology of events, and I think that's actually a great idea (a little digression regarding improving this page, I've only mentioned it a few times on Discord and never formally proposed it/worked on it, but I think a good first step to improve that page would be to split it by year to have something similar to Wikipedia year pages). - Zamburger (talk) 20:54, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback :) I agree that the images are probably more trouble than they're worth.

I've now set up the news entry system such that it's no longer necessary to sync up news in multiple places. Take a look at it here: News. The green/red icons indicate whether an entry is visible on the main page; the main page itself doesn't show these icons. | violine1101 ^(talk) 02:35, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

I'd definitely like if we used sprites when possible, I much prefer some visual indicator with news sections to make it more than just a section of plain text. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
02:48, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

I'm wondering though, which sprites would the news entries use? Should we use a kinda related sprite, like for example 👁 ItemSprite book.png: Sprite image for book in Minecraft
for book releases? Or do you have something else in mind? | violine1101 ^(talk) 02:51, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

That would be practical, but I think it would be more fun if we used a sprite that has to do with that specific entry, with a fallback "type" sprite to be used when necessary. For example, user right changes' fallback sprite could be their respective sprite used in the gadget 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
02:56, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

I think we could simply have a sprite that feels related. I wouldn't force it too hard, like "LEGO Minecraft: Craft Your Quest", no need to force a sprite for that, just don't have a sprite there. Book releases could have a book sprite though yes, that's a good example. If a DLC or skin pack releases we should hopefully have a sprite for those we can use. "Chicken jockey card added to Dungeons Arcade" can have a chicken jockey sprite, etc. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
02:57, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

I've added a few simple sprites, let me know what you think! | violine1101 ^(talk) 03:58, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

I like them! But they definitely need the thingy that makes them not blurry (I cant remember what it is called hehe) 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
04:38, 2 March 2026 (UTC)