Portal talk:Scouting

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The Scouting Portal is a featured portal, which means it has been identified as one of the best portals on Wikipedia. If you see a way this portal can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, please feel free to contribute.

PortalScouting is part of the Scouting WikiProject, an effort to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Scouting and Guiding on the Wikipedia. This includes but is not limited to boy and girl organizations, WAGGGS and WOSM organizations as well as those not so affiliated, country and region-specific topics, and anything else related to Scouting. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

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Contents 1 Comments 2 Firefox 3 Featured Portal Status 4 DYK/FA 5 Webelos 6 Scouting by country clearly bias to America

[edit] Comments

Well done. A great job. --Bduke 21:08, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Outstanding job! One small comment, the "Current collaboration" section and the "Associated Wikimedia" section at the bottom are not centered. Otherwise, fantastic! --Naha|^(talk) 22:03, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

"Associated Wikimedia" looks centered on my browser. I can't get the collab box to center. If anyone can, have at it. I think it's margin setting built into their portal template.Rlevse 22:28, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Hehe, the Current collaboration looks centered now anyway. The Wikimedia stuff must be a browser thing because it still looks "left aligned" on my screen. I'm using IE6 for reference. --Naha|^(talk) 22:45, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I just got "Associated Wikimedia" to center on my screen, and saved the changes. Hopefully I didn't make it look funky in anyone else's browser. *croses fingers* --Naha|^(talk) 22:52, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

No change on my browser, also IE6, it was centered all the time...Rlevse 03:13, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Firefox

A few of us have noticed that the Firefox browser does not always display things the way IE does. There does not appear much we can do about this. Rlevse 15:43, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Featured Portal Status

Not sure who submitted us, if it was one of our regulars, they were not logged in. At any rate, I just read through Wikipedia:What is a featured portal? and took note of #6: It should not be self-referential. This means that a featured portal should not speak of itself beyond (if at all) a welcome note. Aspects of portals that encourage content may be self-referential.

I'm not saying that the "Things you can do" section of our portal shouldn't be there. I think it is very helpful, and might get us more contributors. However, I think, or at least I'm assuming, that section is what they are taking about when they say "Aspects of portals that encourage content may be self-referential." Just wanted to mention that. Aside from that, I think our portal totally rocks and meets all the other criteria with flying colors! --Naha|^(talk) 16:52, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I submitted it. I was logged in but it must have timed out or something. Many of the portals that are Featured Portals have a TO-DO box. Rlevse 17:09, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Ahh ok, just wanted to point it out before someone voting against us did hehe, but ifmany Featured Portals already have it, great! --Naha|^(talk) 17:12, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Looks like congratulations are in order. Well done! --Bduke 06:31, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] DYK/FA

Just a note, but maybe remove the notice of what Scouting articles are FAs (or maybe link to Portal:Scouting/FA or something) and include DYKs of your own. The portal shouldn't just be a compilation of main page information, it should get more specialized. Staxringold 13:51, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Good point, but we do already have our own DYKs in the lower left. Rlevse 16:37, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Then how about adding a second DYK to your DYK template, and just switching the two? That way the unique content is up front, while the more technical list of distinguished articles is lower? Staxringold 16:50, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

I removed the FA/DYK box. They are already listed on the project page. I may move the location of the Scout-DYK box. Rlevse 21:48, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

• I think we should have the box back on this page. --evrik 15:03, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
  • That makes the portal self-referential, which is not allowed by wiki FP portal rules. Rlevse 15:40, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Webelos

I noticed that Webelos was a redirect for Cub Scouts (Boy Scouts of America). I can understand the motivation, but for certain words or phrases (like Webelos) I think the version I just created is possibly an improvement. A short article allows someone who is simply curious about what "Webelos" means to get that answer quickly, while providing plenty of links to the much larger articles that really put the term in context.

Just wanted to explain why I did what I did. Thanks. 66.167.138.194 08:58, 26 May 2006 (UTC).

• I understand your rationale, but the problem is that recently we unified the Cub rank articles so people wouldn't have to bounce all over everywhere to find things. We'll see what shakes out. I saw you had many edits on Scouting articles. Thanks for your interest in Scouting. Rlevse 10:10, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

The "bouncing around" issue can be frustrating. But what I often also find frustrating is when auxiliary terms redirect me into a well-developed but too-broad article. For example, feature film used to be a redirect for film. I remember seeing an interview with a well-known director and hearing him talk about directing "features"; when I looked it up on wikipedia, I ended up googling for the term instead because although the film article had some details about feature films in it, it was a small part of a much broader article that was too much to dig into. If you compare the two articles now, IMHO you've got the best of both worlds — an intro to the specific topic of "feature film" and only a click away, a 30KB article with history, specifics on independent filmmaking and animation, etc. With the more general article a single click away, it's almost analogous to a Wikipedia:soft redirect. 66.167.138.167 (f.k.a. 66.167.138.194 (talk • contribs)) 02:47, 27 May 2006 (UTC).

• Every article should stand on its own- that was the problem with the old articles. Once you take Webelos out of the context of the Cub Scout program you loose a lot. Currently the only rank that has a separate article is Eagle Scout. Can Webelos be developed to that point? --Gadget850 ( Ed) 10:30, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

When a topic requuires a fairly long article in order to be stand alone (like film, mentioned above), auxiliary terms related to the topic get buried. Conversely, when you flesh out the articles on the auxiliary terms for a subject, you end up with maintenance problems, trying to keep improvements to the context in one article in sync with the other articles. In the case of Webelos for example, events have led to variations in custom within the U.S., yet those Webelos-specific events have to be interspersed with the broader history of cub scouting and boy scouting. And a certain amount of context from scouting at the int'l level could be required to make an article stand on its own. As to analogies with the Eagle Scout article...I for one don't have the background knowledge to flesh it out to the degree you suggest. And from one perspective anyway, I don't think Webelos warrants the attention that Eagle Scout does. This is because Eagle Scout is a higher-profile topic within Scouting, and because it seems to me that the general public's awareness of the basics about Webelos is much lower. Someone coming to Wikipedia for information about Eagle Scouts has a good chance of starting out with some basic context, while there's a decent chance that that same person might not even recognize "Webelos" as a scouting term. 66.167.138.167 (f.k.a. 66.167.138.194 (talk • contribs)) 02:47, 27 May 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Scouting by country clearly bias to America

Long cut short: It's all 'Scouting in country' but then there's 'Boy scouts of America', why not 'Scouting in the USA' or whatever? I am pretty certain there's another country, an asian one, and their scouts are 'Boy scouts of..' why aren't they given this alphabetical advantage to boost their image? I for one believe in fairness Boy scouts of America/Girl, should be subcategories of 'Scouting in the USA'. Let's take for example, The Boy Scouts Association of Zimbabwe, ok for a start it doesn't have a category, but if it did I'm pretty certain it would be Scouting in Zimbabwe, Scouting in Africa, or something to that effect. Where is equality chaps? If anything the Scouting in the United Kingdom should take number one priority, purely because the UK was the founding country of scouting. It may not be the biggest, but it was the pioneer. Other than that it holds no power or special privvys/higher status over any other country, and therefor shouldn't receive anymore recognition.

I believe this is an argument for everyone that visits this portal. Discuss. --Dom0803 23:09, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you - the problem stems from the number of contributors from each region - the BSA is heavily represented here, and so there was a lot of BSA articles and not a lot of others... although this is growing as we get more people involved from around the world. Anyway - I agree that we should not give precedence to any single organisation within Scouting... Horus Kol 11:01, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Valid point guys. Back in January when the Scouting project and portal were created, there was no "Scouting in the United States" category and there was no overall coherent design to Scouting articles, just about 6 or so editors who regularly edited them. A month or two ago I was working on category structure and made a "Scouting in the United States" category for this very reason, but never thought to come back here to match it up, which I've now done. I agree we need more non-US editors (US editors are 80% or so of project members); but what we need even more than that are more editors who are familiar with Girl Guides/Scouts, as we only have 1-2 of them that are really active whereas we have lots of active Boy Scout editors. Rlevse 11:35, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Glad to see the changes that took place. Certainly makes it a lot more fair. It's obvious that it's because the majority of editors are North American that a lot of articles will be biased towards the USA. It does however take away from the professionalism. I think also that females are less enthusiastic about the internet in general, letalone editing wikipedia, so trying to get some discerned enthusiasts that are female could be a tough job. --Dom0803 14:27, 4 September 2006 (UTC)