Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Failed log/June 2007

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[edit] Portal:Graffiti

I have done my utmost to ensure the standard of this portal is excellent, and that it is both informative and well designed. I have taken a lot of input (Portal:Graffiti has been though a review and applied all recommended changes. I've worked hard on her and would like to see her featured. Dfrg.msc 11:24, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

  • Support. As nominator. Dfrg.msc 11:24, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose for now. At first glance the portal looks great, but there are major problems that need to be addressed. In Mozilla Firefox, the images in the "Related portals" and "Selected picture" are too big and go beyond the portal box.. —dima/talk/ 23:52, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
    Comment -What? I'm using Mozilla Firefox 2 and the pictures are perfectly fine. I've spent a huge amount of time making it perfect, I wouldn't nominate it unless everything was good. How about you change the size, and see what it does. Dfrg.msc 05:48, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
    Comment - The portal needs to be perfectly fine in 800x600. Joe I 06:05, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
    Comment - The whole portal? Or just the picture? 800x600 breaks the picture. I really just don't want a thing like the display on different browsers subtracting from it. Cheers, Dfrg.msc 07:39, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
    The whole portal. We need to make sure everything is easily accessible to everyone. I would love to be able to showcase larger pics to. You could make the pic box 100%, such as Portal:Photography. Or you could bring it up at Wikipedia:Featured portal criteria, which needs to be updated anyways. Joe I 04:39, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
    Ok, I'll take it up there. Dfrg.msc 07:51, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
    Comment - as regards the "Related portals" images, I fixed that by reducing their size to max out at 70x70px, while converting the {{click}}'s to imagemap. That bit now doesn't overflow in the Acid2-compliant Safari, at least on my 1024x768 screen. Nihiltres(t.c.s) 00:57, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose: in the three-months or so since this portal was created, its selected content has not changed, and I seriously doubt that there is sufficient quality content to sustain it as a featured portal. Put simply, it's too narrow. And on a design point, there is much white space at the bottom of the selected content boxes where the nominations/archives/more links are.--cj | talk 02:59, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
    Comment If you look at the history of the content boxes, I am the sole contributer. It's too hard to maintain and update alone. That's why no updates have been made. Dfrg.msc 07:17, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
    Then you can't expect it to become a featured portal.--cj | talk 07:31, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Portal:Brazil

My English is bad, then I will be brief. The Brazil Portal is dedicated to the Federative Republic of Brazil, possesss excellent content and excellent appearance. It deserves to be one Featured portal. João Felipe C.S 18:44, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

  • Support as nominator - João Felipe C.S 18:48, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Question: Are there archives for the selected article and the selected picture? I can see that these rotate monthly, but I cannot look at earlier selections except by changing the URL manually. What is the process for choosing each article and picture?-gadfium 01:31, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
New templates had been created, the history of old templates can be seen here. João Felipe C.S 15:58, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Object - lacks NPOV and poorly updated. AlexCovarrubias 06:35, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
Alex, I'm disappointed with you. It would not have to pour its anger here. (My English is bad) João Felipe C.S 15:58, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Comment I've just been informed of this discussion, and I believe there are a couple of clarifications, and especially about my very recent edit to the Portal's main page. First, when Felipe started working on revamping the Portal's appearance, he inadvertedly created new templates for the established sections, copying and pasting the then-current content (on March 13 originally, if I'm not mistaken) of the existing pages. I explained to him that this should not be done, since the existing pages are usable and have an editing history of almost 2 years. He fixed the problems for the most part, but following gadfium's question, I noticed that the sections for Featured Image and Selected Picture were still linked to Felipe's new pages. I have now fixed this, transcluding again the previously existing pages. I recommend deletion of the new pages when applicable.
Now, as the Portal's founder and pretty much the only person involved on a regular basis with updating and maintaining it, I can clarify a few aspects about the Featured Article and Picture. When the Portal was created, in mid-2005, there were no articles or pictures pertaining to Brazil that had Featured status. So we had a "Selected" article and picture in their stead. Later on, a few articles on Brazilian topics reached Featured status. One of the first was the article currently listed. It was pointed out by Chick Bowen on the Portal's talk page and I linked it to the Portal, where we use FAs preferably. So far I've not become aware of any picture pertaining to Brazil that has reached a similar status, and, through a discussion on the Portal's talk page, myself and another user decided a while ago to use the section to convey the information that the capital of Brazil is Brasília (and not Rio de Janeiro, a common mistake abroad), and thus decided to use an image depicting the national capital. That was it. And there is no process for rotating articles and images, because first — and foremost —, there is only one person involved with the Portal regularly (me); and second, there is a very limited number of articles to be used. I made the decision to have the Mário de Andrade article, which is featured, stay on the Portal's main page. As for the picture, as long as there are no images with Featured status, and per that discussion I mentioned, we have the picture section topic-oriented (about Brasília), and the image there is supposed to be pertaining to it. I haven't rotated images because I didn't feel it was necessary and, more importantly, I didn't believe that the other images of Brasília available were at least as good as the one we have currently.
Currently, the only section of the Portal that is updated regularly (by me), is the "In the news" section. I try to use as a criterion the fact that the Portal is not a local news site, but rather open for the entire world to read. So I do not report every single piece of political news, or any piece of news that might be of interest to some local audience in Brazil, but not to a broader audience. As a result, there are sometimes spells during which there are fewer updates, such as right now — this will be over next week, as Pope Benedict XVI will be arriving in the country. So far, none of the other sections require constant updates, which was done deliberatly, since I anticipated, back when I created the Portal, that I might be the only one involved with it regularly.
It's been working to contention so far, since almost every person who has commented on the Portal (mostly Brazilian users who happened to read it) had only positive remarks. Is that enough to make it a Featured Portal? I'll let you all be judges of it. As the Portal's founder and maintainer, I will neither support nor oppose this nomination. I will, however, note that there is no POV going on in the Portal. There have been repeated attempts to slip POV into the "Did You Know" section (especially anti-USA POV), and I have barred them all. There is a zero-tolerance for POV on this Portal, and I fail to see what would be the basis for this claim. I have, however, noticed that AlexCovarrubias and João Felipe have been disagreeing on other topics recently, and I would rather that this did not spill into this discussion (or any other, for that matter). Redux 14:58, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Object, a featured portal must have regularly rotating material for selected article and picture, and as Redux has clarified, this is not the case for Portal:Brazil. I don't care particularly if the rotation is done by hand or automatically with a queue or how the updates are chosen; my question was mostly from curiosity.-gadfium 19:46, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
Comment Fair enough. Noticing, of course, that there are two significative obstacles for this Portal to meet those standards: 1) Not enough people involved with it (so far, I'm the only person who has been involved with the Portal regularly); 2) Concerning the FAs and Featured Images, there's not enough material on Brazil meeting the high standards for us to work with. Example: According to WikiProject Brazil, there are only 3 articles on Brazilian themes that hold the status of Featured currently. Obviously, if someone would care to set up the feature that would allow us to rotate between those automatically, that would be welcome, since a rotation done manually would be almost certain to fail, given, once again, the scarce number of people working on the Portal. Redux 05:59, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
A portal doesn't have to restrict itself to featured content. Some do, most don't. The important thing is not to call it "featured" if it isn't - and the Brazilian portal calls the articles and pictures "selected".-gadfium 06:44, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
Actually, the picture is "selected", but the article is "featured". We only use a "selected" picture (since we have that section topic-oriented, as I mentioned earlier) because there are no pictures pertaining to Brazil with Featured status (at least that I'm aware of). Whenever possible, however, we will use content from sources with Featured status, like we already do with the article section. Redux 17:27, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm aware of three featured pictures relating to Brazil or Brazilians. There was a fourth, but it was recently deleted from commons as not having a free licence (and I only discovered that a few days ago, as part of looking into this nomination). See Portal talk:Latin America#Featured pictures-order and selection for a survey of featured pictures done by Portal:Latin America. I agree that three pictures is too few to restrict the portal to these.-gadfium 20:28, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Portal:Israel

We have undertaken extensive work on the portal recently and feel that it now meets the FP criteria. Flymeoutofhere 16:30, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Comments A few things first,

  • Hebrew in box titles - I understand that this is the Israel portal, but being in the english wiki, I'm not sure how appropriate the dual languages are. It's kinda confusing.
OK Done Flymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Intro - Israel should be linked in the first sentence.
DoneFlymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Article - Pic is to big for 800x600 screen resolution. The article name should be bolded and linked in first sentance.
DoneFlymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Pic - Pic is to big for 800x600 screen resolution. A photo credit is needed underneath the pic. If you're going to bold an article title, it should be linked as well.
DoneFlymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
A photo credit is needed underneath the pic. Joe I 17:28, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Done Flymeoutofhere 09:29, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
It should be moved outside the thumb caption. Joe I 19:39, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Done Flymeoutofhere 08:07, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
I changed the current pic, all others should follow that. Joe I 18:08, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Archive - Should show articles and pics the way they appeared on the main portal page, with summaries and descriptions.
DoneFlymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
  • History - The article title should be bolded. Is this box supposed to be static? Seems like you could find a few seperate ones to rotate.
I think I've done?Flymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Done Flymeoutofhere 09:29, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Culture - Same as history.
Think I've done?Flymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
The question for these two is if you plan to leave them as is. If so, the use of space is kinda wasted, you should just use a link to point to the articles. I would suggest making these rotating boxes with smaller summaries on a number of different articles. Joe I 17:28, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Done Flymeoutofhere 09:29, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
I noticed you changed the articles, so, are these now rotated boxs? If they are, archives are needed along with selection of a few more articles to show future rotationabillty(I love making up words). Joe I 19:39, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Yes, they are rotated - I created an archive Portal:Israel/History Archive and Portal:Israel/Culture Archive for the culture articles. I have added a couple of extras as examples which will be used, and will add more over time Flymeoutofhere 08:07, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
The labeling on the Culture box should follow the history one. Use "archive" instead of "past featured".
  • News - needs an archive
Am working on Flymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Have produced Portal:Current events/Israel as an archive Flymeoutofhere 12:43, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
A proper archive is needed, such as the ones for the article and pics. Joe I 17:28, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Done-see Portal:Israel/News Archive Flymeoutofhere 09:29, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
  • DYK - Proper DYK layout, ... before and ? after
DoneFlymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Quote - {{cquote}} has room for the name, it should be used
Done Flymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
An archive needs to be created for this as well. Joe I 17:28, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Done-See Portal:Israel/Quotes Archive Flymeoutofhere 09:29, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Projects - the noticeboard is not a project
Am working on Flymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Done Flymeoutofhere 12:51, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
  • A related portals box is needed
Am working on Flymeoutofhere 10:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Done Flymeoutofhere 12:51, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Joe I 21:08, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

I feel I have resolved all aforementioned issues. Flymeoutofhere 12:52, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

  • Topics - Sorry, I missed it, but you need a topics box as well. Please see any featured portal for example. Joe I 17:28, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Am working on Flymeoutofhere 09:29, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Done Flymeoutofhere 10:53, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
  • I think I have resolved all of the above issues. Flymeoutofhere 08:07, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Support You made quick work of it. Good job. Joe I 18:08, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Support. Good fixes on a great portal. Mazal tov on the good work Flymeoutofhere! --יהושועEric 22:02, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Support as nominator Flymeoutofhere 13:51, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Support. Looks great! —dima/talk/ 15:58, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
After a week with no objections do we pass it? --יהושועEric 15:05, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
No. Featured portal candidates are generally left open to discussion for 3-4 weeks. And, in general, I handle closings.--cj | talk 15:43, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose I've gone ahead and made several changes to the portal to correct things which might otherwise have led me to oppose. I hope my changes are agreeable. However, I still have a few concerns about some elements which I'll leave to the maintainers of the portal to fix. Firstly, there seems to me to be a bias in the Did you know? section – it's predominately focused on facts ranking Israel, which is really quite aside from the purpose of DYK: to highlight new articles. Secondly, I'm concerned about how frequently the portal's content will be rotated, especially considering it is attempting to sustain three separate selected article sections (which is slightly over-the-top, IMV). I'd like to see automatic rotation of some sort (either randomised or dated roll-over) introduced to make updates less haphazard.--cj | talk 15:36, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
Does anyone have the expertise to have the content change automatically by date? I am happy to setup the content if someone knows how to do the Wiki code. Let me know what I can do to help. --יהושועEric 21:35, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
I was going to say the same--Flymeoutofhere 07:53, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
You should be able to use this: {{/box-header|''Selected article''|{{FULLPAGENAME}}/Selected article/{{CURRENTWEEK}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}|}} {{{{FULLPAGENAME}}/Selected article/{{CURRENTWEEK}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}}} {{/box-footer|}} substituting week for month if you desire. I don't know much about this way, as I never have used it. I find the fully randomized much easier(you don't have to keep up with dates): Template:Random portal component. Joe I 04:53, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Oppose - As Cyberjunkie touched on up there, the portal has a bias & ranking tendancy in the DYK section, but I'm also seeing a couple of POV issues across the portal, one being the DYK & another example being the In the News section where it says "For days, rockets have continued to be fired into Southern Israel, particularly aimed at the city of Sderot from Gaza..." - this section nor its archive gives no mention of Israel's attacks on its neighbours. Overall, the portal seems to be selling the country with peacock words rather than explaining it (EG, "its population is incredibly diverse", "ranked it 50th out of 168 countries in freedom of the press, the highest of any country" (again with the ranking), "Israel has a technologically advanced economy as well as a vibrant cultural life" (peacock wording & no citation), "country is widely regarded as the most open in the region" (according to who?), "Israel was ranked 23rd out of 177 countries in the 2005 United Nations Human Development Index, the highest ranking in the Middle East and 3rd highest in all of Asia" (rankings again)) This along with the question of updatability has lead me to oppose. Sorry, Spawn Man 12:01, 5 June 2007 (UTC)