Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Latin America

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[edit] Portal:Latin America

I have worked on this portal over the past few weeks since I saw how neglected it was. I have added various sections and suchlike, and now feel that it meets featured standard. All featured content is changed manually on Saturday BST, and the news section is updated on most days. The portal has all the sections on the guidlines page except an On This Day feature - and that is for want of data. If you have any objections, I shall try and address them; however, I am self-taught on this portal with regard to syntax, so some of it might be tough. Thanks in particular to the Australia and New Zealand portals, as I stole some of their code. I am the only one who maintains the portal, but Mariano has given me feedback every so often. -Estrellador* 10:24, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

  • Very nice overall, but I can't really support a manually-updated portal with just a two-week history of updates. Kirill Lokshin 23:54, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Following your criticism, I have made the Featured Picture update automatically, and will get the FA, the FH and the DYN sections to update automatically too over the next couple of days. One small thing - how would I make the DYN title change from week to week to reflect the change in topic? Estrellador* 19:01, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
    Well, one way would be to create a subpage for the title that contains just a #switch statement. For example, you could create Portal:Latin America/DYN Title containing, say:
{{#switch:{{{1}}}
 |1=Art
 |2=History
 |3=Science
 ...
 |52=Art
 |#default=History
}}
Then, you could use {{Portal:Latin America/DYN Title|{{CURRENTWEEK}}}} to grab one of the titles ("Art", "History", "Science", etc.) based on the week number. There are probably other ways of doing this too, but this is what initially comes to mind. Kirill Lokshin 02:16, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
Thanks very much for that - it works very well. Estrellador* 14:38, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
  • Comments - The "Countries of Latin America" section looks a bit ugly, a better layout would be great. The second column is too short for including the text of the "Featured History", move it to the right or increase the witdth of the column. Generally, the layout should be better. Apart from that, the portal looks good and has plenty of good content to present. Afonso Silva 21:08, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
  • General response - I have tried to fix the countries section by removing the dashes between the TLAs. However, this created a formatting problem with that section, which despite a lot of effort, and a question on the wikiproject:portals talk page, hasn't been sorted. If you know how to, I would be extremely grateful.
  • It has now been most of two weeks, and there have been two updates to the content, one manual, the second automatic, so I believe that the objection that there have not been enough updates no longer holds. I have two weeks' worth of content still to show, also. As for the layout, I am not sure that changing the section boundaries would improve the look. I think there was just too much content in the Che Guevara section I put in. I will shorten that part in future to be more like the Vulgar Latin section the portal currently shows.-Estrellador* 08:57, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
    That seems fair. Aside from that, though, a few other things to fix:
  • The crazy formatting problem. I'll see if I can figure this one out.
  • Thanks very much for fixing that. -Estrellador* 18:48, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
  • The image in the "Featured picture" section isn't actually a featured picture; that box should be renamed to "Selected picture" if that may continue to be the case.
  • My bad, I thought it was featured. Stupid oversight; I'll only put up featured ones in future. -Estrellador* 18:48, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
  • The featured article blurb does't link to the actual article (the Mexico one, rather than the general national anthem one.
  • Again, an oversight. I think the featured articles in the next two weeks have not got this problem. -Estrellador* 18:48, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
Other than that, looks good. Kirill Lokshin 17:56, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
Okay, I think I fixed the formatting issues. Kirill Lokshin 18:17, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, did we lose {{portals}} at some point? Or has it been moved somewhere? Kirill Lokshin 00:58, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
It's there now. --Aude (talk contribs) 04:29, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
Okay, support from me then. Kirill Lokshin 04:55, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Support - An excellent portal, however I think that the colours are rather hard on the eyes and are distracting, causing you to look away from the text. Otherwise, a job very well done.WotGoPlunk 17:44, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
  • What colours would you prefer? They look alright on my monitor, but I tend to have it quite dim. -Estrellador* 18:48, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
The actual colour scheme is fine, but just maybe a little lighter colours.
  • Support. The portal is well-maintained and useful. As for the countries, I have tweaked with the formatting to space the flags out more evenly and make it so that clicking on the flags takes you to the articles. Did the same for the related portals. The background color of the "Countries" section can be changed in Portal:Latin America/box-header2. --Aude (talk contribs) 00:57, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
How did you manage to make the flags link to the articles? I searched around a bit and the best I could find was someone deliberately not divulging a "workaround". It looks a lot better now, by the way. Thank you. However, I prefer the background to be white, like the other sections, and so have changed it. -Estrellador* 10:34, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
The images use {{click}} to make it so that clicking on the image takes you to the article. This is done on a number of other portals, as well as the Main Page (the sister project links). Ideally, this could be done without the template, if/when Bug 539 is implemented. --Aude (talk contribs) 15:14, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

It looks good. One suggestion: no need for explanatory text in the Other portals box. Support--ragesoss 22:30, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

  • Support - I like the languages section Joe I 18:45, 11 July 2006 (UTC)