Portal talk:Minnesota

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Featured portal The Minnesota Portal is a featured portal, which means it has been identified as one of the best portals on Wikipedia. If you see a way this portal can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, please feel free to contribute.
WikiProject Minnesota This article is within the scope of WikiProject Minnesota, which aims to improve all articles related to Minnesota.
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Low This article is on a subject of Low-importance within Minnesota articles.

Archive: To Do

Contents

[edit] Updating selected biographies

This has not been updated since December when it was created. I copied a system from the Music Portal in suggesting a new featured biography every month, Portal:Minnesota/Selected biographies/Suggest, links to archives and suggest on portal page. (I updated for April already with Hubert Humphrey. Whatcha think? Cricket02 07:33, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Edit" parameters?

I have tried and tried to figure it out but to no avail. Can someone figure out how to add the little "edit" parameter to the top/left side of each of the sections? i.e. Portal:Texas for example. Would be much easier to navigate and update the boxes. Cricket02 12:52, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

  • Hi, Cricket02. Your question was almost a year ago but in case anyone else wondered, it's in Portal:Box-header which is inside Portal:Minnesota/box-header. The "view" and "edit" links are there under "editpage" and "viewpage". It is as easy as filling in an infobox but took me at least two days to realize that. Cheers. -Susanlesch (talk) 16:27, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] References

Hi. SmackBot can now add references sections automatically but to me it looked strange on a portal so this feature has been excluded for this portal (I don't know about other portals). Hope this is ok. Some of the text may now have citations in a superscript that can't be accessed from the front page. It's easy to add these sections back in by hand. -Susanlesch 14:44, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Scenic/ Photographs

For a list of scenic Minnesota spots, see Portal:Minnesota/wip-scenic. It was intended to be a list of places, pictures of which could be rotated onto the portal. Kablammo 17:18, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Portal:Minnesota/FPQ is a source of images. Perhaps Portal:Minnesota/wip-scenic should be merged into it, or the latter page should be converted to a talk page for the former image page, at Portal talk:Minnesota/FPQ. That would put the discussion of scenic images at a discussion page for the image queue. Kablammo 19:08, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

That would be fine. Also feel free to change the portal picture when you want to. I don't think anyone besides me has ever changed it. Also, I'm not set on the queue. I just put some pictures there in case someone wanted some to choose from. I saw that you added a nice waterfall. Go ahead and put it in now if you want to.--Appraiser 06:09, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Kablammo, would you like to include the scenic spots list now? I like "Scenic Minnesota", "Attractions", a calendar, on the page, or on a tab. And a few more questions for you all. Do you think the tabs help to make the page more legible, or did you prefer one long page? What is missing, what could come out? Thanks for putting up with a barrage of edits this week. -Susanlesch (talk) 19:37, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
After watching the randomizer that the portal people recommend, the combination of "Scenic Minnesota", "Selected community" and "Selected picture" is a nearly totally rural impression. Not meaning to be people-centric but if there are no objections today I am going to make "Selected picture" urban, and move the scenic photos to "Scenic Minnesota". -Susanlesch (talk) 20:58, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
Susan: Thanks for the note-- I see I've been ignoring this page! You're doing a great job on the portal. As I recall, the queue was started by User:Atomaton and I added some suggestions on scenic locations, more as a wish list than anything. I don't have strong feelings on how images are selected. Just as a thought, one possibility would be to have one random image for People and one for Places. I'll let you and the image contributors decide that one. Kablammo (talk) 21:13, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
I also think you've done a splendid job with it. I like the tabs and the rotating picture queues. One queue for people and one for places makes sense. Scenic pictures can be urban as well as rural.--Appraiser (talk) 21:23, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
So I could move all the "Selected picture"s to "Scenic Minnesota", and fill the "Selected picture" pages with people. Sounds like a good idea. About 30 more communities to add as well and then maybe I can move along. -Susanlesch (talk) 22:58, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
While it is true we have a lot of photos on List of people from Minnesota, they are really poor quality in many cases, and in some cases higher quality for a person who I'd wonder why they would be featured. I think they will bring down the quality of the portal. Plus other than politicians we only have two or three women's photos and will need those for selected biography, so the people will all be men. Other thoughts? -02:08, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
Time's up, I am moving on. 43 selected pictures, 44 selected communities, 5 sets of three DYKs. (All under protest because they are copy/paste random content that will someday need manual updating, but that is how the portal people want featured portals at this time--I think it might be monkey-business). I added a couple groups of more than one "people" from commons:People of Minnesota. That idea works fine. Thank you. -Susanlesch (talk) 05:02, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Tabs and px

If the tab layout stays, some kind of Wikipedia:Conditional tables (deprecated) can highlight the current page. I don't have enough expertise to learn parser functions at this time so the Portal:Minnesota/tab-header is in place only on the home page. That means that each tab in the Portal namespace will need to be changed manually if the tabs change. Apologies for half-baked sketch but it should be okay for now until we have some idea what is needed as there are only 3-4 of them. -Susanlesch (talk) 20:03, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

  • Does anyone mind if this portal uses px? Thinking out loud. If no objections in the next couple days I will try to remember to switch the selected biography, history and selected article images to px. I don't think the selected picture can go as high as 400 in the present two columns. This request also stems from the fact SVG requires px and that the default thumbs next to their maps are small for selected community. Or, in other words, if SVG is present px size expresses relative importance? The alternative is default everywhere I guess. -Susanlesch (talk) 23:54, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Tabs are fixed thanks to someone who solved it at the Village Pump. -Susanlesch (talk) 13:27, 14 February 2008 (UTC)