Wikipedia talk:Featured content

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This talk page is automatically archived by Werdnabot. Any sections older than 60 days are automatically archived to Wikipedia talk:Featured content/Archive 2. Sections without timestamps are not archived.

Contents

[edit] Featured topics

Is the featured topics page dead? Only I just nominated Arctic Monkeys, but noticed no activity on the page since April. smurrayinchester(User), (Talk) 21:02, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

The 'featured topics' page is indeed largely dormant, but not officially 'dead' in any sense. You could try contacting the prior participants and/or trying to revive it or just let people comment as they happen to wander by. --CBD 13:05, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm wondering if Wikipedia:Featured topics should be merged into Wikipedia:Featured portals. They serve largely the same purpose; the main difference being that featured topics extend a semi-featured status down to their member articles. --Arctic Gnome 19:08, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

The mainspace template is gone, so there is no longer any real semi-featured status. Since I wrote that last post I've clarified the purpose of FT on its page. --Arctic Gnome 19:51, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
I've now cleaned up the featured topic project a bit and differentiated it from featured portals; but topics could still use quite a bit of work. --Arctic Gnome 17:49, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, this page doesn't display much about featured topics yet. If the list of topics continues to grow we will probably add something like an icon and link for these... similar to how the random featured portal is displayed currently. --CBD 20:46, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
Once there are at least 20 or so featured topics we'll look into changing the look of the page. I don't expect that will take too long; the FT page has gotten quite a bit more activity since I added a link to it on {{FCpages}}. --Arctic Gnome 21:03, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
I'm looking into some boxes that we might use one day down the line here or in portals: Wikipedia:Featured topics/boxes. --Arctic Gnome 23:42, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I like these, but we'll need to do something about the 'included pages' lists. Right now they can trail down a considerable distance, and as the topics get bigger that'll become even more of a problem. I'm thinking we might use wider boxes for the topics and a small font for the individual page links. However, it will depend alot on where the featured topics display ends up on the page. It would be nice if there were a page which defined the 'scope' of each featured topic and we could just link to that for these and the 'new featured content' list. Maybe set up Wikipedia:Featured content/Solar System and the like and in there list all pages which are included in the topic, pages which are related but not yet considered ready for inclusion, et cetera? Then it could be just one link to get to that and we could probably put the topics in as another box right next to portals... still leaving the articles box a little more width than it has on the Main page. --CBD 09:37, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
I'd like to have the list of included articles if possible. The wider versions of the boxes on User:Tompw/templates can all be a standard size, even for really long lists if they used a smaller font. We could also keep the tall ones as an option for portals to use if it fits better with their page. --Arctic Gnome 15:30, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Random topic generator

I've made a random topic generator at Wikipedia:Featured content/Topics for whenever you folks think that the topics project is ready to be added to this page. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 19:15, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Missing many lists in random rotation

Unless I'm reading the code wrong on Wikipedia:Featured content/Lists, there seem to be only 110 lists in the random rotation out of 216 total featured lists. Why is this? --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 18:29, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Because the inclusion tags on each have to be set up by hand and I've only completed about half of them so far. See here for info. --CBD 17:21, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Topics and Sounds

I added random display for featured topics (8 currently) and sounds (2 currently) to the page. I put sounds at the top between articles and portals because it is a small section - and still leaves the featured articles with more space than they get when they are on the main page. The 'topics' section takes the full page width and thus went below the lists. There is no 'official' color for featured sounds yet so I used a grey scale to differentiate them from the others on this page. Feel free to suggest formatting / style changes. --CBD 00:55, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sound location

Sounds could fit underneath Portals? I tried to make it so, but my wikitable skills are inadequate... --Quiddity 02:27, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
I agree, I think sounds would fit nicely beside pictures and below portals, but I also don't know how to do it. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 02:49, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
The problem with putting sounds next to pictures is that the 'picture of the day' on the main page always covers the full screen width and is formatted with that in mind... some of the pictures (panoramas) actually won't fit if there is another section on the same row. Lists have the same problem... some of them have tables which cover the full width of the screen. Some of the featured topic boxes might be 'compressible', but I don't think that would work for the bigger topics. Ergo, the featured articles are really the only ones with 'spare room'... which is why portals went up there in the first place. Even with both portals and sounds the articles still get more space on this page than they do on the main page - so there aren't any formatting problems with them. --CBD 11:12, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
See Wikipedia_talk:Featured_content/Archive_1#Featured_picture_options for a previous discussion on the problems with trying to put featured portals (same width as sounds) next to the pictures and different options. Having sounds next to the pictures would be fine for screen resolutions higher than 800x600, and even for that on most images... but the wider images would have problems with the descriptive text being confined to a long column the width of the longest word in the description. --CBD 11:25, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
We mean, we want to put sounds below portals, but still next to articles. i.e. Using the whitepinkspace under portals. (there's a lot at 1024, less at larger) --Quiddity 11:40, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
Oh. Hrrrm... maybe. I think it may result in big gaps beneath the article sometimes, but we can give it a shot. --CBD 13:11, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
I put in the 'sounds below portals on same row as articles' change. As currently configured it sometimes causes a large blank space at the bottom of the featured article at high resolution. At low resolution the Portal + Sound sometimes aren't tall enough to match the size of the featured article and the bottom of the sound box doesn't line up with the bottom of the article box. There's probably a way of solving that, but I want to see what people think of the general layout. --CBD 00:49, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sound color

As for a colour for sounds, the other five topics have colours from the chart on Wikipedia_talk:Colours, which are all 60 degrees from each other. The only remaining colour is the shade of blue used at the top of each FC page. I don't know if sounds can share that colour or not. If it can't, then I guess a grey shade is our next best bet. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 02:56, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
Having both FC and FS in blue would be problematic on things like this page and the 'new featured content' section... where we show each featured type in its colors, but all on the FC blue background. --CBD 11:12, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
I quite like the grey, personally :) --Quiddity 11:42, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sound box

I think it's a little overly mysterious without the content of the recording or what article it's used in. Featured sounds aren't chosen just because they're nice to listen to, but, similarly to pictures, because of their encyclopedic value. It would be great if we could just fit in a one-line description (I'm not asking for anything big like the FP box).--Pharos 17:57, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
I added a description option in place of the 'download file' text. Makes the box a little taller, but not much so long as the description is short. --CBD 00:46, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New additions

I added two new links to the 'procedures' section of the page to aid in tracking things;

  1. Special:Recentchangeslinked/Wikipedia:Featured content/Pages - Shows all recent changes to templates which impact the display of Wikipedia:Featured content.
  2. Special:Recentchangeslinked/Wikipedia:Featured content/Updates - Shows all changes to the various 'featured' status pages and talk pages. Thus a good way to keep track of nominations, changes to criteria, general discussion, et cetera across all 'types' of featured content.

Essentially these are 'specific topic watchlists' which can be accessed from this page or linked elsewhere for easy access. --CBD 16:46, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Current Featured List

There should be a specific list designated as the current featured list. This current list should be given at least a line on the main page. Since currently only about a dozen lists are promoted per month a current list should have a reign of 3 days. Eventually the reigns should fall to 2 days and then a single day. The FL page should be restructured to reflect specific date assignments for FL status. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 17:13, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

There have been many efforts to get lists on the Main Page with no success. However, I do hope somebody will finally listen. They would get much more notice if placed on the main page; perhaps more people would strive to feature lists. In the past, though, the proposal has been to place two FLs a week -- one on Saturday, and one on Sunday, so as not to give them more "show time." There would be nothing wrong with adding in a section beneath "featured picture" on the weekends to showcase FLs and Featured Portals. (We'll have to wait a while until we get enough Topics and Sounds though.) --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 00:53, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
The FLs defiantly need more attention. Wikipedia is an amazing source for quick lists of historical items, like past heads of state, and also for sorted and ranked lists to show the best of any set. Of the top 100 most viewed pages on Wikipedia, ten of them are lists. Many lists, like my own pet article List of Canadian Parliaments is much more comprehensive than anything else I've seen online or in print. I understand why you wouldn't want to add a big extra FC box to the main page, but as Tony said, even one line would be nice. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 02:43, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
There actually is one featured list which has appeared on the Main page. Provinces of Thailand was the article of the day on May 8th, 2004. It was subsequently demoted from 'featured article' status and then eventually promoted to 'featured list'. Which shows how arbitrary the difference between 'article' and 'list' can be. --CBD 19:04, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
Fbv65edel said: "There have been many efforts to get lists on the Main Page with no success"
Were those attempts to get a whole seperate entry for FLs? or rather to use a FL as the featured-article-of-the-day? As CBD implies, FLs and FAs amount to the same thing, and should be treated equivalently. I'd be all for having a List as the featured article on any given day; but I'd be opposed to a whole new Mainpage section for FLs. --Quiddity 21:23, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
I believe the closest attempts have been to alternate with one of the currently existing boxes, such as featured picture, or DYK, or possibly adding in a separate box for the weekend only, below FP. However, alternating with the FA would work too, I suppose. I agree both are more or less the same. --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 01:49, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Featued Article selection

Given the 114 article backlogue at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests a procedure should be instituted to choose the WP:FA. By the way Wikipedia:Featured article statistics should include statistics about the number of non-FA FA-class status articles. I don't know what the current proportion of articles are. It is possible that going forward there could be multiple articles of the day (Bio/non-Bio) or (person/place/thing). Of course, this would require shorter main page text leads. However, that issue aside given a single article policy and the huge request pool a procedure needs to be instituted. I suggest that each article be nominated for 1 specific date each week or month. An article that does not win an election within 1 year should be given some sort of designation to signify that it was not chosen to be a main page article, but had FA-class status. Wikipedians could then popularly elect FAs. The voting policy could clearly be refined through experience, buth this would be a start. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 22:33, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

P.S. I would propose an extremely short date justification like 25 or 30 words per nominee to explain why it should be elected for a specific date. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 22:54, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

After further thought, the above process would be too administratively involved. A better procedure would be to have 3 FA statuses. The current FAC status would be a status where articles are evaluated based on general policy guidelines for worthiness just as it is now. From there candidates either become FFACs or FANs. All FANs are eligible to be nominated for election to FA each month. Every wikipedian gets a vote (or possibly 2 or 3). From the first day of the month through the twentieth day of the month all FANs are voted upon. At the end of the month the top 30 or 31 candidates advance to FA status. For the next ten days in groups of 6 starting with the top six the first two days and the second six the next two days, etc. FAs choose their dates in the following months queue. The next 30 top finishers plus all those tied for thirtieth runner up retain their FAN for another month. All mid-month FANs retain their FAN status as well. The remaining nominees become FFANs. All FFANs are eligible to renominate themselves as FANs after one year, if they have retained FA class status and can get renomination support from the majority of those who supported their advancement from FAC to FAN.

Suppose we have 115 FANs nominated for FA. The top 30 votegetters would advance for April’s FA queue. Ties for thirtieth place would be broken based on support percentages in the FAC nomination procedure. Those articles finishing between 31 and 60 plus all those tied for 60th would carryover to the next month. All articles advancing to FAN status during the middle of the month would carryover as well. Right now this would clean up our queue. In the future when Wikipedia is much larger than it is now and more than 30 FACs achieve FA status per month, this will help us keep the number of articles being evaluated for daily FA to a reasonable level. In the future when 100 or more articles are achieving FA status per month, this will keep the process manageable. Furthermore, this will eliminate articles advanced in part due to sympathy for hard work and procedural persistence. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 07:55, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestion. It's been discussed before and rejected. We won't be voting on the main page FAs. We won't be featuring multiple ones in the same day. The system works pretty well as is, and we don't be changing it. Raul654 20:00, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
Can you point me to some discussion on voting on the main page. When you say it works pretty well are you aware that things that have worked in the past may not continue to work as wikipedia grows? Do you mean the system works the way you want it to work or the way the majority of wikipedians want it to work? Are you oppossed to a democratic consideration of the procedures? TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 20:37, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
Isn't broken; don't fix it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:04, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
Look at the chart at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/amendment proposal and see if you understand the problem I am attempting to institute a policy to fix. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 17:28, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, Tony, but your proposal has got to be one of the most confusing things I've ever read. I'm not convinced that the current procedure is broken, but any proposals to change it need to be a lot simpler if they are to have any hope of gaining support. — Brian (talk) 00:35, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
Reread my revised proposal at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/amendment proposal and see if you understand it. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 17:28, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
Hi Tony. I did some research after looking over this page. In the 108 days December 1, 2006 there have been around 200 articles promoted. As such, the non TFA pool is growing about 0.85 net per day. This essentially maps into what you are saying about the wait times for articles to appear on the Main page increasing. As a result, you are suggesting that it would be fairer to let the community decide which pages appear on the Main page and have some, fairly involved, procedures for making that work. I think this has two significant problems - first, any community based procedure is going to require alot more complexity and bureaucracy than we have for this now and result in alot more disputes. Second, people are generally happy with the job Raul does and thus unlikely to be receptive to change.
The root problem seems to be that articles are promoted at a rate (1.85 per day) greater than they are displayed (1 per day). This also ties in to the issue discussed above about featured lists not being on the Main page... adding them into the mix would delay articles even more. As featured sounds, portals, and topics become more established I'd expect to see them vying for Main page space too... all of which runs counter to the fact that people want to keep the Main page constrained in size. To deal with this I'd suggest something like a smaller scale version of what we do on the Featured content page. In the same 108 days only 83 pictures have been promoted... growth of less than one per day. Which is why many pictures have appeared on the Main page two or even three times. It might make sense to instead occasionally (maybe on weekends) switch the 'featured picture' section with a 'rotating featured content' area that would show one of a small group of; one featured article from the backlog, one featured list, one featured sound, et cetera. Links across the bottom could go to each of these specific types of featured content or the user could reload the page to display a different one (rotating every ten seconds or so). This would help to clear out the backlog of non-Main page featured articles and thus decrease the wait time. Having content for this rotating section chosen based on strict seniority could guarantee that the content which has been waiting longest finally gets displayed. If the people who maintain an article wanted to hold out for it to be TFA rather than in the rotating section they could do that, but I suspect alot of people would be happy having it on the Main page 'part time'. Could even stack three or four articles in there on a given day.
Whatever procedures for choosing content are used the underlying problem of featured content growing faster than it can be displayed remains. The only solutions would be to slow down our promotion of featured content (which is counter to the goal of building a quality encyclopedia) or speed up the rate at which we prominently display that content. --CBD 00:22, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
The fact that TFA pool is growing at about .85 articles/day understates my concern. I am concerned that the rate of .85/day is growing. The 1st 2 months of last year saw 75 new FAs, two years ago 61 new FAs, this year 101. .85/day is not as much a problem as the acceleration of the growth is. In two years we have gone from 1 new FA/ day to almost 2. In two more years we will probably be producing 3.5-4 new FAs a day.
There are 2 solutions to getting FLs on the main page. 1.) Putting them on the main page allowing for repeats. 2.) Work them in with other featured content on a rotating basis (4 days of FP, 2 days of FL, 1 day of other FC per week). Eventually, each type of FC could move to a no repeats policy once its promotion pace is sufficient.
Your 2 solutions of slowing down FA promotion or speeding up rate at which content is displayed (possibly 3 or 4 a day like DYK) ignores the possibility I pose of selectively choosing from FX for FXOTD. That is my proposal. Note that each of the other solutions really just delays things to a later point in time. I believe my system will handle promotion rates at 10 times the current rates. Yes even 18.5 FAs per day (500+/month) could be handled by my solution. I don't think changing to bihourly TFAs would be a solution and I don't think being 10 times as strict with FA promotion would be a solution. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 19:06, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
I must not be understanding your proposal then. How would it allow ten times as much content to be displayed on the Main page? What do you mean by "selectively choosing from FX for FXOTD"? My best guess is that you are saying we'd put a bunch of links to different content featured for the day... which is essentially what I was saying except that I suggested that in addition to the links the results of one section be displayed on every page view, but rotating every few seconds so someone could refresh to cycle through all the featured sections for the day, --CBD 23:35, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
I am not saying that my proposal would allow 10x as much content on the front page. It would allow for just and equitable treatment of 10x the current volume of FA promotions. If we sped up including them on the main page we would have to rotate every 2 or 3 hours to accomodate 10x current volume of FA promotions. If we slowed promotions we would have to make FAC procedure 10x as strict so that only 1/10 as many succeed. However, voting in the top 30 works whether there are 100 or 1000 candidates. I did not understand your suggestion to mean rotating page views. That is interesting. I think one feature of my suggestion is getting people use to skimming 50 words instead of 200-250. It may eventually allow for two 100 word main page sections (FA and FL, for example). I am not sure about a rotating view because it would only work for the images. Rotating the text could be bothersome. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 21:09, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Aside: CBD, I'm traveling and on a slow dialup, so I can't recheck your numbers, but I suspect a flaw in your analysis. Not all articles that are promoted request to be on the mainpage. You would need to look at promotion rate vs. request for mainpage rate. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:10, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Featured Picture March 21, 2007

It's not showing up on my browser, but the actual picture works (Image:Tetrahedral_group_2.svg), and I have no idea to see if it's a problem on the page - thought I should point it out. If that image is broken, how would I go about fixing it. Ta ...adam... 18:30, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

The most likely cause would be some kind of ad-blocker. Wikipedia assigns independent names to the resized images cached on each page. The precise name varies by the size and positioning of the image and every so often those names actually include the string 'ad'... which alot of ad-blockers assume to be an advertisement and suppress. Sometimes changing the size of the image by just a couple of pixels corrects the problem, but the best bet is to shut down your ad-blocker or get it to ignore content on Wikipedia pages. --CBD 23:27, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This may seem like a ridiculous concept, but...

Featured disambiguation pages? It was my assumption that the ultimate, final and unreachable ideal goal of Wikipedia is to improve all content to good/featured status?--h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 21:08, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Featured redirects? Featured shortcuts? There are some things which inherently don't have enough 'substance' to them to 'feature'. Yes, we eventually want all our disambiguation pages to conform to certain style guidelines... but when they do does that mean we should tell visitors, 'Hey, look at this! It has links in a bulleted list and everything!'. By their very nature disambiguation pages are meant to be minimalistic... navigation aids with no more info than is needed to differentiate between different uses of the term. Making good disambiguation pages is a great help to the project, but if it is done right the finished product is not 'featureable'. Only a bad disambiguation page would have enough 'bells and whistles' to impress visitors. --CBD 10:45, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fair use images in Featured Lists

There is a discussion taking place at Wikipedia talk:Featured list criteria#Fair Use images about the permitted level of usage of Fair Use images in Featured Lists. Your input would be welcomed. Tompw (talk) 23:00, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia's triple crown

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../f/e/a/Wikipedia_talk%7EFeatured_content_18ca.html"