Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Featured content/archive2

The following is an archived discussion of a featured portal candidate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the portal's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured portal candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The portal was not promoted by Cirt 12:07, 3 October 2014 (UTC) [1].[reply]

Portal:Featured content[edit]

This was previously nominated in 2006, see Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Featured content/Archive 1

This is one of the most-visited pages on Wikipedia, and the third link in the left-hand column of every single Wikipedia page. As such, we need to get this one right.

And I think that, after some recent work, it is largely right, but going through a featured portal process will help polish off any rough edges.

So, let's review the criteria:

Useful? I'd say yes, and so, presumably, do its ten to twenty thousand visitors a day. Indeed, this is more functional than most portals, as it's integrated into Wikipedia itself (left hand column, third link).
Attractive? I think it is, if there's anything that can be improved, I gladly will.
Ergonomic? I think it's very easy to use, and very user friendly.
Well-maintained? All featured content processes feed into Template:Announcements/New featured content, one of its major sections, and this has been being handled perfectly for years. It also uses content from The Signpost, which has likewise been running regularly for years to provide detailed description of the recent featured content, and that's been running for years as well.

So, let's make any additional changes that will make this amongst the best of Wikipedia's portals, not merely one of the three most visible.

As an aside: forgive me if the format of this nomination is a bit funny: The instructions simply do not work as written, as explained at Wikipedia_talk:Featured_portal_candidates#Instructions_do_not_work - Template:FPOC uses an #ifexist to... well, fail to load the initial template, as the page it tries to preload is a relink, and... well, let's save that discussion for WT:FPOC.

Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 14:52, 28 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose: the old version of the portal gave a selection of existing featured content - articles, lists, portals, topics, pictures. The trouble was that nobody maintained it and it ended up looking awful, as I said a long time ago before boldly doing something about it. Now the portal looks good with the Signpost commentary, but it's basically just "Portal:Most recently featured content": bare lists at the bottom of the most recent FAs, FLs, FPs, etc, and at the top a brief introduction to the material that was adjudged as bronze-star-worthy in the previous week. So unless the portal provides direct access to a much wider range of featured content, as it used to, I don't think it's featurable in its own right. Even then, I wonder whether it's too self-referential and ought to be in Wikipedia space rather than Portal space. That seemed to be one decision that came out of the last nomination, although it was later reversed. But anyway...

Obviously, this would be much harder work to set up and maintain than simply transcluding the relevant page from the Signpost and the charts at template:Announcements/New featured content. A wide range of blurbs for articles and lists would be needed (not simply transcluding blurbs from the TFA and TFL archives, since these will go out of date but shouldn't be reworked for this portal's purposes as they are archive pages in their own right); and similarly for pictures. But that's what a portal of featured content should be - not mainly a snapshot of last week's promotions through the eyes of the Signpost. Bencherlite ^Talk 15:26, 28 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What if we just used the more recent TFA, TFL, and POTD on the portal? If we had it use, say, the most recent two months' worth, they shouldn't be out of date. For POTD, we could probably use the last year. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 15:30, 28 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, I don't know. It effectively then just duplicates the "archive" links on the main page. For TFAs, at least, the mix would be very unrepresentative of our FAs overall - we have only one FA yet to run on the main page in the following topic areas: awards, decorations and vexillology; chemistry; engineering and technology; geology; food; language and linguistics; mathematics; and philosophy and psychology. Any automatic selection of the last 30 or 60 days of TFAs would have lots of articles about warfare, music, literature, TV/films and other such topics, but to all intents and purposes nothing about science (apart from articles about animals/plants and an occasional constellation). I don't think that's very balanced. Also, even a selection based on two months of TFLs would only give you about ~17 blurbs, which isn't a wide range from the FL selection. But let's see what others think... if and when anybody else stumbles across this forgotten corner of Wikipedia featured content reviewing! Bencherlite ^Talk 20:39, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would, however, presume that articles in those categories are underrepresented in the total list of FAs as well? Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 23:20, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You can see the size of the various subject categories by looking at WP:FA. A portal showcasing WP's featured content should give a good variety of material from across all the FA categories, not be dependent on whatever happens to have got through TFA in the last month or two. June 2014, for example, will include two D-Day related TFAs for date relevancy, but I don't think that a portal showcasing featured content should follow suit automatically. Nor should such a portal necessarily showcase content in proportion to the numbers of articles in each FA category: we have, I think, 15 articles about the 1948 Australian cricket tour of England, and only 17 articles each in the topics of computing and food/drink, but I wouldn't want a selection of portal blurbs to have as many 1948 cricket entries as computing or food/drink. Bencherlite ^Talk 23:51, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

But the TFA process is specifically designed to have variety, if too similar of an article appeared recently, that's a strike agaisnt it appearing too soon. Given you're in charge of it, if you put 15 articles about the 19488 cricket tour up in two months, I'm blaming you. 00:09, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

You misunderstand me twice, I think, which is probably my fault for editing too late at night! (1) I do my best at TFA to produce variety, but I can only work with the articles that have yet to appear on the main page. A portal showcasing featured content should draw from all the FA topics, regardless of whether the article appeared on the main page last week or X years ago or indeed has yet to appear. It won't do that if it just mechanically reproduces my most recent selections - such a portal would virtually never have articles from chemistry, engineering, medicine, education, food, computing, mathematics, language (etc etc), which wouldn't be good enough. (2) My point about 15 cricket articles from the 1948 tour was addressing what I thought you were getting at when you said that the articles in the categories I mentioned were presumably also underrepresented in the total list of FAs. Yes, that's true - we have fewer computing/chemistry/engineering etc FAs generally compared to music/warfare/TV and film/hurricane FAs. What I thought you might be getting at therefore was that, if some FA categories are just simply underrepresented regardless of the question of main page appearance, then it would be easier to go just by recent main appearance because the end result (in terms of the selection presented to the reader) would be little different. If that is what you meant, I disagree, because the underrepresentation of certain categories shouldn't matter to a portal selecting a wide range of content – the selection shouldn't be as simple as saying "12% of our FAs are on warfare, so 12% of the portal should be about warfare, but only 0.4% of our FAs are on computing, so only 0.4% of the portal should be about computing". (These are actual figures, by the way.) I just don't think there's a shortcut to what I'd want from this portal to say it merited its own bronze star, namely a full range of content. I just don't think that a portal highlighting featured content can just present the most recent promotions via charts and the Signpost, or simply (additionally or alternatively) run off the back of, and effectively duplicate, the most recent TFA/TFL archives. It needs choices to be made about what articles to select from across the whole pool of FAs (and the same goes for FLs) rather than rely on accidents of scheduling from a much smaller pool. Bencherlite ^Talk 00:37, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

[Unindent] If I may, a compromise: Some articles are going to change too rapidly for them to easily be used in a portal meant to last a long time. Some articles are far more stable. So how about a hybrid: Articles are (50/50 chance) selected from a pool of pre-selected articles OR recent TFAs? This has the advantage of keeping content fresh, while still including a variety. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 01:09, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That might work, but I'd prefer to see it in operation before coming to a concluded view. Bencherlite ^Talk 21:57, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.