Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Featured log/May 2006

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[edit] Portal:History of science

The history of science portal has an attractive and efficient layout, a strong and growing WikiProject associated with it, and a queue of selected pictures and articles to last until August. The selected article is on auto-pilot, with a new article every two weeks. The selected picture is updated manually by me each week, and has a history of regular updates going back to January. The "selected scientist" and "selected inventor" content boxes are cribbed from Portal:Science and Portal:Technology, respectively; when the maintainers of those portals go too long between updates, I selected new article for that content as well. I've worked out all the formatting bugs I could find, and I think it looks darn spiffy (at least in Firefox, Opera, and IE, at resolutions from 800x600 up).--ragesoss 07:53, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

  • Support, excellent portal in every respect. As an idea for further improvement, you may want to consider a "Selected anniversaries" section, as this topic should lend itself quite well to that. Kirill Lokshin 13:16, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support: Nice layout, lots of interesting things to look at. Related portals (and there are several!) are easy to find. Maestlin 14:56, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Minor Object:
    1. The selected article is not directly editable.
    2. There are red links in the selected inventor
I would say that the colour scheme is a little bland, and that related portals might be better positioned above did you know, but I wouldn't make these objections. I also wonder whether Portal:Science history is a better name? And normally I'd oppose thumbnails, but I see you found the background colour afterall ;). Otherwise, it's all good - brilliant actually when you consider its shocking state before Ragesoss took it under his wing.--cj | talk 16:04, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
Because the article is biweekly, it is only directly editable for the first week; in the second week, it transcludes the first week's page. If the the content is subst'ed in, then 2nd week changes will not show up in the archive page. However, I will substitute in all the content for this and future weeks if you think that it is worth it. An alternate solution might be a noinclude note showing where to go to edit the article. The inventor links are fixed, and I will make sure none show up in future installments.--ragesoss 16:19, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
I like your idea about the related portals location; I've moved that box up. I would welcome some helping improving the color scheme; I'm not very good with colors, so I left the original ones. As for the name, "history of science" is much more common and what historians of science call their field of study.--ragesoss 16:28, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
I think it'd be best to have a non-included edit note to counter the lack of edit capacity. Okay on the name. One more thing I might point out is that there is inconsistency with the depictions in the portal - some are thumbnailed, some are not; and some have captions, some do not. I'd recommend one format throughout - the one use in the intro looks nice, and allow a caption without the drawbacks of thumbnails (ie, box in a box). With regards to colour: is there any colour of significance in scientific studies? Oh, and I support now.--cj | talk 16:50, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
No significant colors that I can think of (the rainbow is sort of emblematic). I wanted to used the format from the introduction everywhere, but it doesn't work well for caption longer than the image; you have to artificially specify line breaks, and they are too wide. I wish there was an option for a boxless thumb that still had a caption. I'll add those notes. Thanks!--ragesoss 16:58, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Support, but would like to see a way for users to nominate things like selected articles. Rlevse 14:28, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
Users are invited to do so on the portal talk page and the selected article talk page (as well as the selected picture talk page, for pictures). The associated WikiProject also has a plug for suggesting future content. I guess mentioning that first thing when someone follows the archive links would make it easier to find; I'll get right on that. Thanks!--ragesoss 14:49, 22 May 2006 (UTC)