Portal talk:Africa/Featured article/11

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[edit] Let me explain my edit for a minute

I've been trying to add a new featured article to the portal, also because the one that's up now about the Yom Kippur War isn't really about Africa at all. But as I tried to be bold, I quickly learned it's not as simple to just change something on this page. So I just reverted myself to keep away from confusion. Instructions on how to actually change something on this portal are also hard to come by, unfortunately. Maybe this is done on purpose but in this case the edit links above each section should be removed. Feer

I'm beginning to understand how this all works with the day-to-day rotation and all, but come next month (next 11th) I will probably have changed this page cf. my original intentions. I still do not feel the Yom Kippur War should be on the Africa portal. Considering this a truly "African article" is stretching things very far, especially when there are many good articles about African subjects that deserve more attention. More discussion about this is very welcome, of course. Feer 10:21, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Hi! I apologise for the lack of any written guidance for this portal. I'll work on that today and tomorrow and will, in the meantime, try to give you some background on its current state. From about October 2006 to May 2007, this portal was abandoned, with the same content presented on the main portal page for several months. I came across and decided to try to revive it in late May and one of the first things I did was to automate the rotation of articles and pictures displayed on the main portal page ... at least that way the content would not be the same day after day.

When doing so, I used only articles and pictures that are formally "featured articles" and "featured pictures", respectively. Unfortunately, I overestimated the number of Africa-related FAs and that's why I had to resort to using articles like the Yom Kippur War (which can be tied to Africa via the involvement of Egypt, even though the War is not really considered an Africa-related event).

For a full list of Africa-related featured articles, see Portal:Africa/Featured article or its talk page. There are only 29 such pages, which is two short of the 31 required for a smooth daily rotation. To add an article to the rotation, you can use one of the (currently two) empty slots: Portal:Africa/Featured article/30 and Portal:Africa/Featured article/31. Just overwrite the redirect. However, I noticed that Architecture of Africa is not a featured article, so it may not be appropriate to add it to the rotation and present it as such.

I constantly monitor the log of featured article promotions and will add any newly-featured Africa-related articles to the rotation; unfortunately, there has been no such article for about two months now. I have been neglecting the portal for a little while now and so will work on it today and tomorrow (including adding usage instructions to avoid any future confusion). Since this is a general discussion about the portal itself (and not just about this one article), would you object to continuing it at Portal talk:Africa/Featured article rather than here?

Cheers, Black Falcon ^(Talk) 18:04, 11 July 2007 (UTC)