I'm not sure what it was like in 2010 but currently, it is:
- Posts tagged featured (source, source).
- Posts tagged faq sorted by number of links in to that post (not duplicate links, just regular links) (experimentally verified).
The featured posts are placed at the top, followed by the most highly linked faq posts, and there is a limit of 10.
In addition, the featured tag is removed from posts after 30 days (that post refers to MSO, pre MSO/MSE split, but it applied to MSE and does seem to be the case here), so questions that were featured will not accumulate in this list.
The entire list can be generated with this query on any site that has such a list (MSE and MSO, for example), noting of course that SEDE is updated weekly so questions featured or added to the faq since the last data update won't appear in the query results.