Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 19:59, 11 March 2007

Archives: 1, 2

Featured topics

Is the featured topics page dead? Only I just nominated Arctic Monkeys, but noticed no activity on the page since April. smurrayinchester 21:02, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

The 'featured topics' page is indeed largely dormant, but not officially 'dead' in any sense. You could try contacting the prior participants and/or trying to revive it or just let people comment as they happen to wander by. --CBD 13:05, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm wondering if Misplaced Pages:Featured topics should be merged into Misplaced Pages:Featured portals. They serve largely the same purpose; the main difference being that featured topics extend a semi-featured status down to their member articles. --Arctic Gnome 19:08, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

The mainspace template is gone, so there is no longer any real semi-featured status. Since I wrote that last post I've clarified the purpose of FT on its page. --Arctic Gnome 19:51, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

I've now cleaned up the featured topic project a bit and differentiated it from featured portals; but topics could still use quite a bit of work. --Arctic Gnome 17:49, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, this page doesn't display much about featured topics yet. If the list of topics continues to grow we will probably add something like an icon and link for these... similar to how the random featured portal is displayed currently. --CBD 20:46, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Once there are at least 20 or so featured topics we'll look into changing the look of the page. I don't expect that will take too long; the FT page has gotten quite a bit more activity since I added a link to it on {{FCpages}}. --Arctic Gnome 21:03, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm looking into some boxes that we might use one day down the line here or in portals: Misplaced Pages:Featured topics/boxes. --Arctic Gnome 23:42, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

I like these, but we'll need to do something about the 'included pages' lists. Right now they can trail down a considerable distance, and as the topics get bigger that'll become even more of a problem. I'm thinking we might use wider boxes for the topics and a small font for the individual page links. However, it will depend alot on where the featured topics display ends up on the page. It would be nice if there were a page which defined the 'scope' of each featured topic and we could just link to that for these and the 'new featured content' list. Maybe set up Misplaced Pages:Featured content/Solar System and the like and in there list all pages which are included in the topic, pages which are related but not yet considered ready for inclusion, et cetera? Then it could be just one link to get to that and we could probably put the topics in as another box right next to portals... still leaving the articles box a little more width than it has on the Main page. --CBD 09:37, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to have the list of included articles if possible. The wider versions of the boxes on User:Tompw/templates can all be a standard size, even for really long lists if they used a smaller font. We could also keep the tall ones as an option for portals to use if it fits better with their page. --Arctic Gnome 15:30, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Random topic generator

I've made a random topic generator at Misplaced Pages:Featured content/Topics for whenever you folks think that the topics project is ready to be added to this page. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 19:15, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Featured Templates? Galleries?

Is there any thoughts of having featured templates or featured galleries? Please reply at my talk page. TonyTheTiger 22:41, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I'll put a link/notice on your talk page, but I'm going to reply here so that others can see the answer. The idea of 'featured templates' has been suggested before, but seems to me unlikely to happen because 'featured' status is meant to indicate that the material is something which shows people the benefits and strengths of Misplaced Pages. A well written and sourced article makes the case that Misplaced Pages is a good encyclopedia. A creative or effective template can be very important in helping to format or support that work, but isn't in and of itself something you could show to an 'outsider' to demonstrate the value of Misplaced Pages. There have been discussions of some sort of alternate program for 'recognition' of particularly valuable templates, but nothing which has gotten off the ground that I have seen. As to 'featured galleries'... I'm not sure what that would entail. We have featured pictures, but would the intent here to be showcasing collections of images which are particularly well selected / organized? Theoretically, I could see something like that if there were a group of pictures on an important theme... i.e. an individual photo of 9-11 might not qualify as a 'featured picture', but a well designed gallery of such which captured the event might be valuable. However, I haven't seen any previous discussion or efforts along those lines. --CBD 13:03, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

It should be noted that featured content serve as an additional motivation to improve our resources. Although featured templates might not be an important advertising component for outsiders it could serve as a motivational tool for editors. Many editors would increase their efforts at creating usful and creative templates that improve the efficiency of wikipedia as a resource if there were a featured template. We know that editors pursue WP:FA and WP:FP in a way that improves the quality of the encyclopedia. Better templates could better integrate the research.

Featured galleries would be the picture analogue to featured topics. TonyTheTiger 21:58, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Featured Portal

With this page linked to from the main nav bar, I think featuring the "War" portal is a bit much. How about a "Peace" portal? -- Macduff 15:05, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

They're randomly selected (on each page refresh) from the list of 44 Featured portals. If you create Portal:Peace and develop it to featured status it can be included :) —Quiddity 19:42, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

And from the realm of the weird... a good source for links and info on 'Peace' is... Portal:War. They've got a whole sub-category on it. :] --CBD 21:16, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Somebody complained that it was biased. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 21:43, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

I tried to resist the urge to just reply here with Ministry of Peace ;) —Quiddity 21:53, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Featured topics and FCpages

Someone has taken Featured Topics out of the {{FCpages}} template. I understand why people wouldn't want a new project grouped with the other ones, but I now have to wonder: how FT can let people know of its existence if there is not link to it on FA, FL, FP, and FPort? If no one has a way to find it, it will never grow. --Arctic Gnome 17:32, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

The 'topics' links were also removed from Template:Announcements/New featured pages and Misplaced Pages:Featured content/Info, all by the same user. I restored them on the /Info sub-page here because 'featured topics' (along with 'featured sounds') have always been included there... even when both of them were completely unused. The reason for that being pretty much what you refer to... advertising that these projects for other types of featured content exist. I can see keeping 'FCpages' limited to active projects, but since FT has been picking up lately I think it makes sense to include there as well. --CBD 18:00, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

I've added the rest of the references to FT back. Calabrese went around deleting all references after his additions were reverted. —Quiddity 19:31, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Color

I changed the featured topics color to #F2FFE6 (hue 90) to match the color scheme used in the rest of the top level pages, as summarized in the table at the top of Misplaced Pages talk:Colours. Hope that works for everyone.

It might be a good idea to change the "featured" header box standard color to something else that matches, instead of #FFF7E6. Possibly the blue (hue 210) as used in "Featured content procedures", and all the help pages? eg this diff. —Quiddity 19:16, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree that we should have different color schemes for each of the content types and then one overall which is used for {{FCpages}}, the top header on each 'featured' type page, Misplaced Pages:Featured content/Info, et cetera. I like the blue, but dunno if everyone on the sub-projects would want to switch over to that (from the current tan) for the headers of each page. --CBD 01:54, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

I've made the proposal at each of the subpages, and asked them to reply here. —Quiddity 21:42, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I like it :) If you have any questions, please contact me at my talk page. Ian Manka 21:52, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

• Support hue 210 - I agree that we should use hue 210. All of the projects use colours in 60 degree shifts on the table at the top of Wikipedia_talk:Colours. Using the last of those as the main FC colour just makes since, all five projects would match it. --Arctic Gnome 22:10, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
• Go Colts! Blue! ;-) Rfrisbie 00:40, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Done. If I missed or messed anything, let me know or fix it :) —Quiddity 21:04, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Should the tags on talk pages also be blue? I tried making {{featured}} blue in the sandbox and it looks okay. --Arctic Gnome 21:45, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

I think their talkpage location trumps their featured-content-relatedness. Otherwise long lists like at Talk:TGV would become distractingly colorful (because every subproject would want to color their box individually). It'd need to be proposed as part of a color-palette overhaul of everything at Misplaced Pages:Talk page templates at the least. Maybe in 2008 ;) —Quiddity 23:41, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Any way to know dates ahead of time?

Is there an easy way to find out when a particular article is going to appear here? It'd be nice to know when more traffic (and thus vandalism, etc.) can be expected so that FA authors/maintainers are prepared. --Spangineer (háblame) 01:37, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

See this month's archive (which is linked from the main page) or the main page overview: Today's featured article. If you have any questions, please contact me at my talk page. Ian Manka 02:01, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I meant on this page—for example, how could I have known ahead of time that the FA from August 14, 2006 was going to appear on Misplaced Pages:Featured content today? --Spangineer (háblame) 02:27, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Er, a new one is shown at random every time the page is purged, so there's nothing to know here. You can make new items appear continuously just by clicking the link. (Maybe it should be placed more prominently, incidentally? People might miss it in the intro.) Kirill Lokshin 03:09, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Heh.... well, sorry about that. I edited the intro slightly to make it more clear for people with short attention spans, but it was probably ok before too. --Spangineer (háblame) 04:49, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Featured list criteria - proposed amendment

There is a proposal to amend the Featured list criteria at Misplaced Pages talk:Featured list criteria#Proposal. The propsal is primarily intended to clarify certain matters. Comments would be apreciated. Tompw (talk) 14:34, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

TOCs transclusion

At Misplaced Pages: featured content/Lists, I encountered a list that had three sections within the <onlyinclude>, transcluding them and thus a TOC onto the page. I tried to insert __NOTOC__ but it seemed to mess up the transclusion. Somebody want to try and fix this? Thanks. --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 19:54, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Do you remember which list it was? They shouldn't have that many sections and I haven't been able to find one which does. Also, the FC page itself has a 'NOTOC' setting and thus would take care of this issue when the list is transcluded here. --CBD 01:14, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, I'm afraid it was lost once I edited it, but as I recall it had something to do with ducks, or some type of bird? --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 16:32, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Featured sounds

The featured sound project is trying to get off the ground with a nomination. Which, if they do remain active, will eventually mean we need a color scheme and eventually randomized sample type. Still a long way to go for that, but people might want to take a look over there. --CBD 21:57, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Commons Picture of the Year 2006 Competition

Interested in honouring the best of the best? Vote now in the Commons Picture of the Year competition 2006 Voting to select the finalists is open until 14th February.

The arrangements for the Commons Commons:Picture of the Year 2006 competition are now complete, and voting has opened today, Feb 1st. All Commons Commons:Featured Pictures promoted last year are automatically nominated. --MichaelMaggs 12:22, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Missing many lists in random rotation

Unless I'm reading the code wrong on Misplaced Pages:Featured content/Lists, there seem to be only 110 lists in the random rotation out of 216 total featured lists. Why is this? --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 18:29, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Because the inclusion tags on each have to be set up by hand and I've only completed about half of them so far. See here for info. --CBD 17:21, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Topics and Sounds

I added random display for featured topics (8 currently) and sounds (2 currently) to the page. I put sounds at the top between articles and portals because it is a small section - and still leaves the featured articles with more space than they get when they are on the main page. The 'topics' section takes the full page width and thus went below the lists. There is no 'official' color for featured sounds yet so I used a grey scale to differentiate them from the others on this page. Feel free to suggest formatting / style changes. --CBD 00:55, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Sound location

Sounds could fit underneath Portals? I tried to make it so, but my wikitable skills are inadequate... --Quiddity 02:27, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree, I think sounds would fit nicely beside pictures and below portals, but I also don't know how to do it. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 02:49, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

The problem with putting sounds next to pictures is that the 'picture of the day' on the main page always covers the full screen width and is formatted with that in mind... some of the pictures (panoramas) actually won't fit if there is another section on the same row. Lists have the same problem... some of them have tables which cover the full width of the screen. Some of the featured topic boxes might be 'compressible', but I don't think that would work for the bigger topics. Ergo, the featured articles are really the only ones with 'spare room'... which is why portals went up there in the first place. Even with both portals and sounds the articles still get more space on this page than they do on the main page - so there aren't any formatting problems with them. --CBD 11:12, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia_talk:Featured_content/Archive_1#Featured_picture_options for a previous discussion on the problems with trying to put featured portals (same width as sounds) next to the pictures and different options. Having sounds next to the pictures would be fine for screen resolutions higher than 800x600, and even for that on most images... but the wider images would have problems with the descriptive text being confined to a long column the width of the longest word in the description. --CBD 11:25, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

We mean, we want to put sounds below portals, but still next to articles. i.e. Using the whitepinkspace under portals. (there's a lot at 1024, less at larger) --Quiddity 11:40, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Oh. Hrrrm... maybe. I think it may result in big gaps beneath the article sometimes, but we can give it a shot. --CBD 13:11, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I put in the 'sounds below portals on same row as articles' change. As currently configured it sometimes causes a large blank space at the bottom of the featured article at high resolution. At low resolution the Portal + Sound sometimes aren't tall enough to match the size of the featured article and the bottom of the sound box doesn't line up with the bottom of the article box. There's probably a way of solving that, but I want to see what people think of the general layout. --CBD 00:49, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Sound color

As for a colour for sounds, the other five topics have colours from the chart on Wikipedia_talk:Colours, which are all 60 degrees from each other. The only remaining colour is the shade of blue used at the top of each FC page. I don't know if sounds can share that colour or not. If it can't, then I guess a grey shade is our next best bet. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 02:56, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Having both FC and FS in blue would be problematic on things like this page and the 'new featured content' section... where we show each featured type in its colors, but all on the FC blue background. --CBD 11:12, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I quite like the grey, personally :) --Quiddity 11:42, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Sound box

I think it's a little overly mysterious without the content of the recording or what article it's used in. Featured sounds aren't chosen just because they're nice to listen to, but, similarly to pictures, because of their encyclopedic value. It would be great if we could just fit in a one-line description (I'm not asking for anything big like the FP box).--Pharos 17:57, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I added a description option in place of the 'download file' text. Makes the box a little taller, but not much so long as the description is short. --CBD 00:46, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

New additions

I added two new links to the 'procedures' section of the page to aid in tracking things;

1. Special:Recentchangeslinked/Wikipedia:Featured content/Pages - Shows all recent changes to templates which impact the display of Misplaced Pages:Featured content.
2. Special:Recentchangeslinked/Wikipedia:Featured content/Updates - Shows all changes to the various 'featured' status pages and talk pages. Thus a good way to keep track of nominations, changes to criteria, general discussion, et cetera across all 'types' of featured content.

Essentially these are 'specific topic watchlists' which can be accessed from this page or linked elsewhere for easy access. --CBD 16:46, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Current Featured List

There should be a specific list designated as the current featured list. This current list should be given at least a line on the main page. Since currently only about a dozen lists are promoted per month a current list should have a reign of 3 days. Eventually the reigns should fall to 2 days and then a single day. The FL page should be restructured to reflect specific date assignments for FL status. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 17:13, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Featued Article selection

Given the 114 article backlogue at Misplaced Pages:Today's featured article/requests a procedure should be instituted to choose the WP:FA. By the way Misplaced Pages:Featured article statistics should include statistics about the number of non-FA FA-class status articles. I don't know what the current proportion of articles are. It is possible that going forward there could be multiple articles of the day (Bio/non-Bio) or (person/place/thing). Of course, this would require shorter main page text leads. However, that issue aside given a single article policy and the huge request pool a procedure needs to be instituted. I suggest that each article be nominated for 1 specific date each week or month. An article that does not win an election within 1 year should be given some sort of designation to signify that it was not chosen to be a main page article, but had FA-class status. Wikipedians could then popularly elect FAs. The voting policy could clearly be refined through experience, buth this would be a start. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 22:33, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

P.S. I would propose an extremely short date justification like 25 or 30 words per nominee to explain why it should be elected for a specific date. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 22:54, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

After further thought, the above process would be too administratively involved. A better procedure would be to have 3 FA statuses. The current FAC status would be a status where articles are evaluated based on general policy guidelines for worthiness just as it is now. From there candidates either become FFACs or FANs. All FANs are eligible to be nominated for election to FA each month. Every wikipedian gets a vote (or possibly 2 or 3). From the first day of the month through the twentieth day of the month all FANs are voted upon. At the end of the month the top 30 or 31 candidates advance to FA status. For the next ten days in groups of 6 starting with the top six the first two days and the second six the next two days, etc. FAs choose their dates in the following months queue. The next 30 top finishers plus all those tied for thirtieth runner up retain their FAN for another month. All mid-month FANs retain their FAN status as well. The remaining nominees become FFANs. All FFANs are eligible to renominate themselves as FANs after one year, if they have retained FA class status and can get renomination support from the majority of those who supported their advancement from FAC to FAN.

Suppose we have 115 FANs nominated for FA. The top 30 votegetters would advance for April’s FA queue. Ties for thirtieth place would be broken based on support percentages in the FAC nomination procedure. Those articles finishing between 31 and 60 plus all those tied for 60th would carryover to the next month. All articles advancing to FAN status during the middle of the month would carryover as well. Right now this would clean up our queue. In the future when Misplaced Pages is much larger than it is now and more than 30 FACs achieve FA status per month, this will help us keep the number of articles being evaluated for daily FA to a reasonable level. In the future when 100 or more articles are achieving FA status per month, this will keep the process manageable. Furthermore, this will eliminate articles advanced in part due to sympathy for hard work and procedural persistence. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 07:55, 11 March 2007 (UTC)