Wikipedia talk:Featured content/Archive 1

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Formatting

the left column (with featured articles, etc) is really thin for me, like 10% width of the screen, and i don't have low resolution.. i don't see how to fix it, though? Mlm42 22:57, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Hmmmm, I guess that's why someone changed the layout. I've tried every different skin in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, but I can't reproduce the problem. The page code sets it to 55% of the screen width and that's the way it displays for me. Do you have problems like this with other portals? Anything special about your browser or CSS setup? I've tried making some adjustments to the way the portal columns are configured to see if that helps. --CBDunkerson 12:54, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
actually, i think it's because the featured picture is so huge.. now the left column is wide enough, but since the picture can't fit, the entire column is getting pushed right down to the bottom. having the featured picture box at 600px doesn't leave much room for the other column. Mlm42 15:06, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
Ah. The problem is screen resolution. I use 1600x1200 and it looks fine. At lower resolutions some of the boxes are too big. I'll try to reshuffle things to work as well as possible at 800x600 - though that'll result in a less well organized page for the high resolution users. --CBDunkerson 15:19, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

feb 20

  1. i changed the year-variable for the templates to 2006.
  2. the POTD was way too large, so i shifted that box to the left column (it'll be even bigger after the mainpage redesign is in place. it'll probably need a full width box).
  3. i added the Template:Announcements/New featured pages box from the community portal; however it has a duplicated title because it's in the template. (I don't know what the easiest route to fixing that would be, probably just removing the title from the template and adding it seperately to the community portal?)
  4. and i changed the 2 main column widths from 65/34 to 60/39
hope that works for everyone. --Quiddity 03:08, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
  1. We have hundreds of old featured articles and pictures which people seldom look at. I think it is better for this page to showcase those than to be just another page displaying today's featured article/picture. I'd like to make it display different featured content on every page load, but have held off on that in hopes of a more efficient means of doing so being implemented in MediaWiki (the best I can come up with right now would probably take several seconds to evaluate each time).
  2. The display problems are all driven by screen resolution - for instance the changes you made cause overlaps that obscure information at 600x480 and excessive white space at 1600x1200. Somewhere in the middle they probably look great. I don't know if Wikipedia has a 'target screen resolution' or there are any statistics on what is common. I've been trying for something which is at least legible/decently laid out at both extremes. If we are going to give the picture more space we should use the version with the full description.
The recently featured list makes sense for inclusion on this page. --CBDunkerson 12:33, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
1. sounds good. i hadnt thought of that. maybe we could include in the box headers the date that the featured (content) was originally run on?
2. i think the minimum screen res anyone worries about designing for is 800x600 these days. Anyone running 600x480 will be thoroughly used to webpages looking awful, plus would likely be using a minimal skin for wikipedia if they sign in. I'd say: Don't try for aesthetics at 640x480, just try for usable. (I too, have been looking for common-use browser statistics, but have not found anything remotely reliable in recent years (all the stats gathering companies are trying to sell their data nowadays, and dont give it away for free))
lastly, the "Featured content info" box is now overlapping text at 1024x768. it needs to be in a full width box. --Quiddity 20:38, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
I made these changes. The 'info' looked ok at low resolution on my screen (it just put the table above the other links), but that may have been due to my local CSS settings. Full width box causes a bit more white space at high resolution, but no big deal. --CBDunkerson 22:00, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Date of Featured Content

Well, people kept changing the featured article and picture to today's date so I took the plunge and implemented constant updating. I tested it first and it seems like the large switch only takes an extra second or two to evaluate so I'm hoping it is considered a worthwhile tradeoff. Basically, the page updates regularly to display a featured article and picture from a 'randomly' selected date between November 1, 2004 (when 'Picture of the day' pages first started being set up) and February 23, 2006 (the current date when I made the change). That's 480 days - which will each be displayed for one minute three times per day (3 * 480 = 1,440 = 24 hours * 60 minutes). If people like / accept this I'll update the system at some point in the future to display featured content from additional days as they are added. The general goal is to 'leverage' all of the older 'featured content' which has been sitting around gathering dust... now any visit to this page will show some of that past information in a pseudo-random fashion. --CBDunkerson 00:09, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Good idea. --Go for it! 11:17, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

More important (to me) than the location. Why was the regularly updating content removed? What reason is there to just show today's featured content again? The whole point of this page was to showcase all of the old featured content. --CBDunkerson 13:09, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Concerning Featured Content Portal being moved to Wikipedia namespace...

Considering that the content of featured articles and such belong in the main namespace, as do lists of links to content in the main namespace, why have you moved the Featured Content Portal to the Wikipedia namespace? It seemed perfect as a Portal. It might be "featured" which is self-referential (being project-based), but it is also encyclopedic content. And since Portals include references to both project-based and encyclopedic material, it seemed like the perfect venue for this material. I'm curious as to what your reasons are, in case I agree with you. Though I've never seen actual articles nor article lists in the Wikipedia namespace before. --11:17, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

There was some discussion on this at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Featured content. I agree that it is obviously a portal, but so is the Wikipedia:Community portal... which also links to things in article space. Doesn't really matter to me where it is located. I do think the browsebar should be included... as it is on the community portal. Attempts to 'de-portalify' this are pointless... by it's nature it will always be a portal. The only question is whether this belongs in Wikipedia space like the community portal or portal space like others. --CBDunkerson 12:42, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I see now how it fits in with the theme of the Featured content projects, all of which are in the Wikipedia namespace. Therefore, I agree with Cyberjunkie that it should remain in Wikipedia namespace, and I agree with you that it is a portal and should be renamed accordingly. --Go for it! 13:20, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
Suggestion: How about we move/rename/retitle it to "Wikipedia:Featured content showcase". That would be consistent with the other "featured" names, as well as hinting that it contains past&present features (which should be specifically(concisely) stated somewhere in the intro paragraph, to stop other editors "fixing" the date to the current features as I and others did). --Quiddity 21:19, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
Good point - I guess it seemed obvious to me since I had to work out how to build it, but someone just coming on to the page might not realize that it updates all the time. I added some text to explain that better. As to the name, 'Portal:Featured content', 'Wikipedia:Featured content', 'Wikipedia:Featured content portal', 'Wikipedia:Featured content showcase', et cetera... it is all the same to me. --CBDunkerson 22:48, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I think the "portal" title would carry incorrect implications. Whilst it is structured like a portal, it is not going to be "updated" regularly in the same way as the community portal or the history portal (etc) are.
I'll leave it another 24 hours for further feedback, and then boldly move it to "...showcase" if there are no objections. --Quiddity 23:03, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
I object. In my opinion, Wikipedia:Featured content is the most logical name. In addition to showcasing specific featured content, it serves as a means of introducing new users to the very concept (and could be expanded in that direction). There's no need to append anything to the title. —David Levy 00:47, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you (Quiddity) mean about 'incorrect implications' and 'not going to be updated'. It is updated regularly in much the same way as any other portal. It actually shares a section with the community portal (the 'recently featured' box) and thus gets exactly the same updates. It's a portal. Cj changed it to look less like the other portals and more like the Wikipedia:Featured articles project page, but it is still a portal because it has a 'showcase' in addition to links for 'what to do' and 'more info on the topic'. Maybe the issue is that people are trying to use this page for two different purposes: as a 'top level' project page for the Featured article, Featured picture, et cetera project pages AND as a showcase for all of wikipedia's featured content. Maybe it should be two pages. --CBDunkerson 13:41, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
Oh, i just meant that it won't have any of its parts individually human edited day to day, week to week. Once it is setup layout-wise, it is self-sustaining content-wise. Unlike the geography portal, which (theoretically) gets updates by people to the "did you know" and "current collaboration" and other sections, on an ongoing basis. Not drastically important by any means, i was just thinking out loud. Overall, i think it is absolutely fine as it is, and should not be split up or altered. --Quiddity 21:39, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Edit section?

why am i getting "edit" links throughout when it's coded for NOEDITSECTION ? --Quiddity 22:14, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Because those 'edit' links are in the actual code of the page. They're built into the portal box sections. --CBDunkerson 02:35, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
doh! --Quiddity 02:57, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Featured content discussion

(copied from hydnjo's talk)
Thanks, I'm glad you like the page. I responded to your question about when it was created at WP:HD#WP:???. Like most things it was a process rather than all at once. The 'main page redesign' project was looking for a way to link all the featured content to the Main Page and decided to use what I'd built at Portal:Featured content for that. Hence the name change and shortcut. --CBDunkerson 13:59, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

BTW - if you're interested in how it works (I was), there's a subpage (like a template) that selects which date to display based on the current hour and minute (see Wikipedia:Featured content/SetDate). You get a different result (different date) every minute, but if you look at it at the same minute within the day you get the same results every day (i.e. it's distinctly not random). -- Rick Block (talk) 19:02, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
True. However, the order of the dates displayed each minute is randomized and I update it every couple of weeks to include the latest 'of the day' materials... re-randomizing the order each time. So unless you hit the page at the same minute within a few days of each other it will usually display a different result for that minute. Not truly random, but giving the appearance of such in most cases. --CBDunkerson 11:06, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

(end of copy) (additional text copied from CBDunkerson's talk)

Hi Rick. No worries, I didn't take your comment as a 'knock'. I've explained elsewhere that it isn't truly random, but wanted to let you (and Hydnjo) know about the 'behind the scenes' re-shuffling which helps mitigate that. The 'choose' extension sounds like a perfect solution, but failing that a bot may be the way to go. Even just updating the random sequence once per day would prevent it from showing the same material at the same minute (unless that was randomly selected). I'd considered using {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} and/or {{NUMBEROFFILES}} as additional 'seeds' to increase the randomization, but they grow so fast that doing so would either require a huge switch or updates every couple of days... but a bot could theoretically handle that as well. Thanks for the comments. I'll look into these options. --CBDunkerson 17:03, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
Hey guys. Conrad, I dropped over (first) to tell you that I had copied that very interesting thread going on at my talk over to FC's talk and here I find that you and Rick have started without me. Thanks to you both for your comments, they helped a great deal in my understanding of how it all worked, my markup skills are minimal and I appreciated that. And Conrad, you have been quite clever in your use of the available tools in implementing your FC solution.
I also wanted to spill out some thoughts:
  1. This seems like a fairly high maintenance project for you (or anyone).
  2. Another complication is that FAs sometimes lose their featured status which would result in losing that day's featured picture as well so,
  3. Ideally there would be two lists and decouple FAs and FPs.
  4. Also, it would be nice to be able to "click here" for a refresh (like Random article) and,
  5. The choose feature seems like a good way to implement that as it seems that mediawiki is math challenged (no innate math functions).
  6. Once decoupled from the mainpage date you could then decide to include all 930 FAs rather than only those that have been on the mainpage.
  7. A bot could then be used to keep the lists current leaving you with, well... nothing to do  ;-)
hydnjo talk 03:45, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

(end of copy)

Ok, moved everything here for consistency and so all can chime in. To address specific issues (which I have converted to a numbered list in Hydnjo's comments above);

  1. The maintenance actually isn't that bad. I've got an Excel spreadsheet with a list of all the dates since the first 'article of the day' and then columns indicating whether there is a valid article/picture for that day. Only the dates which have valid 'of the day' content for both items are included when I do updates. Mostly I just have to add the new dates and update any which have changed. Takes me a couple of minutes.
  2. I've got all the 'of the day' articles and pictures on my wathclist to keep an eye on this and similar issues like featured pictures being deleted after being found to be copyvios.
  3. Yes, separate lists would allow several more months of 'article of the day' material to be included and also free up individual days for both types. I held off on implementing this in the first place and have kept it to one list thus far because of the possibility of computational concerns. If it is generally agreed that the big 'time switch' is not a significant resource hog it would be easy enough to have two. However, some of the other options mentioned might be more efficient.
  4. There is a 'click here' at the end of the blurb about 'Featured content' at the top of the page. Also a small 'purge cache' link all the way at the bottom. The 'refresh' button also works of course.
  5. Math and string challenged. If there were a way to take the rightmost character of a string I'd be using right({{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}, 1) and the same for {{NUMBEROFFILES}}. Likewise, math functions could be used to perform a modulus divide on those two values to get the same results. That'd generate two essentially random numbers between 0 and 9 on every page load. The 'choose' extension, some other random number generator, math operations, or string operations... I'd take any of 'em. :]
  6. I've thought about using all featured content, and displaying a random 'featured list', but that actually could be a maintenance nightmare. There are no pre-existing formatted pages for the non 'of the day' materials. Thus I'd either have to display the entire featured article on this page, create formatted pages for every existing featured article, or edit all of the featured articles to put 'noinclude' tags around everything after the first few paragraphs (which might be a better way to do 'off the day' articles in general except well-meaning editors are likely to remove them). Then there are organizational issues with the pages not being in a date ordered list and even the possibility of page renames.
  7. Yes, having a bot do some of the work would help alot. I just haven't looked into bot operations on Wiki yet. Always too many things to do. :]

CBDunkerson 11:40, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Update

A new '#rand:' feature has been added to the MediaWiki software on a trial basis. If this gets removed we can revert to the old style, but in the mean-time I have made updates to take advantage of this new capability. The page now generates different random content on each page load rather than every sixty seconds. I also changed it to use different dates for the featured article and picture, allowing a larger list of both to be accessed. --CBDunkerson 22:05, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Proposal

I've proposed in a few recent discussions, and received a lot of support, for the following:

We improve the features of this page enough, so that we can nominate this page to be in the side-navigation-box, instead of the "Featured articles" link that appeared there very recently. (see by what process...?). --Quiddity 00:21, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

suggestions

I'm suggesting that:

  • we move the "new featured content" into a full column on the right. (basic idea demo (in broken-table-layout-style.. would need some other things tweaked for it to work))
  • we wikilink the "Featured content:" ToC-style header in the top-right box of all the 4 "featured" pages (done)
  • we shorten the intro text, and shrink the top-right box, so that more content is within the page-top (above the fold).

basically: tighten, simplify, and make more useful. thoughts? --Quiddity

I've found that people have very different ideas as to what constitutes 'useful layout'. This page actually used to have 'tighter' left and right columns, no 'upper right box', and a shorter intro. See this old version.
I agree with your suggestions, but the more heavily used a page is the more different opinions of how it should look there are. :]
Absolutely. As you said further up "Maybe the issue is that people are trying to use this page for two different purposes: as a 'top level' project page for the Featured article, Featured picture, et cetera project pages AND as a showcase for all of wikipedia's featured content."
Definitely, but i think we can embrace them both on one page. Getting people interested in one aspect will (hopefully) lead to the other (enjoying to creating).
Showcase fresh, and older, content at the top. Provide tools/overview at bottom.
(everything else sounds good. i'll go think some more. sadly i'm not adept at wikitables yet (tables! i spent years unlearning html tables mutter mutter webstandards mutter (i'll figure that all out later this summer... ;) ). --Quiddity 01:51, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
That said, I don't think anyone would object to the 'link to Featured content in the headers' idea so I'll make that change on the other pages. I think you should go ahead with the others and I support putting a link in the side-navigation-box (and the related main page change you suggested in the browsebar TFD discussion). Just expect there to be alot of tweaking of the design. On 'tightening' one idea was to use the more compact 'POTD-row' version of the pictures of the day... I think that would be an improvement, but those are a fairly recent invention and would have to be created for a few hundred older 'pictures of the day'. --CBDunkerson 00:45, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Followup - I created a Template:FCpages to do the nevigation links for all the 'featured' sub-pages - including the little arrow for the currently viewed page. This way when 'Featured topics' are rolled in (and note that TUF-KAT recently 'promoted' Saffron as a 'Featured topic') they can just be added to that template and appear on all the featured pages. Ditto for 'Featured sounds' eventually. --CBDunkerson 01:15, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
I'm still strongly behind these ideas. But i don't have time to lead them through as proposals myself. Plus HereToHelp is trying out his own ideas right now, and i don't want to interfere with that. I'll watch this page though, and if anyone else would care to push this forward, i'll strongly support. --Quiddity 10:17, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Alternate design

I'm working on a version in my sandbox. I resurrected and old color scheme and I'm in the process of tweaking it. I really like the gold-on-black, but the featured picture and lists section are presenting some hassles. Give it a few days.--HereToHelp 18:51, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Ok, a few things:
  • You are making a random 'featured portal' section. There was some discussion of making the other featured sections show random selections, but there are some issues with each. On the portals you are showing the intro section... which is usually a featured article on the subject of the portal. As a result what you are showing in the 'featured portal' box is really a second 'featured article'... with no direct link to the portal associated with it. At bare minimum the 'featured portal' box needs to link to the featured portal being showcased. Showing content from the portal is going to be very difficult due to space constraints and the only way to do it may be to write up separate pages for each portal.
That's what I wound up doing.--HereToHelp 02:36, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
  • For 'featured lists' on the other hand you are just showing a 'disclaimer' that there are too many lists to display. It would actually be possible to show a random featured list by putting 'onlyinclude' tags around the intro on each featured list page... that's usually a couple of paragraphs describing what the list is. However, we'd need 'buy in' to prevent people from removing the tags and having the whole list end up being transluded.
I've changed that now. I have a cycle of four featured lists running, and I plan to add more very soon.--HereToHelp 02:36, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
  • You removed the 'navigation box' in the upper right hand corner. That's something that was introduced for consistency with the other 'featured' pages. They all display that navigation box. It could be replaced with some other means of moving around through the featured content, but then whatever method that was would need to be implemented on all the other pages.
I'll add that in now.--HereToHelp 02:36, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
I think the color scheme was changed for consistency too, but there is some variation amongst the different 'featured' sections already so I don't think that's a problem. --CBDunkerson 20:36, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
I personally like the color scheme. Think of it as a Portal. That's what it started as, after all. I'm more or less done with the page itself, though I'll continue to make modifications to the templated in subpages (shorten them, work with the images, get them to work bettwer with the articles and images. It's easier to change the subpages that I only have 11 or 4 of!)--HereToHelp 02:36, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
On the portals and lists (before you fill out dozens of list pages), I'd suggest having a 'More' link or 'Go to the portal/list' or something like that at the bottom rather than working the link into the text. Mostly this just makes it easier to find the link by always having it in a consistent spot. Can also put links to the full list of featured portals / all portals (and same for lists) there to aid in navigation. --CBDunkerson 10:36, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

If anything, this page should formatted to appear like the featured content pages. There's no reason to return an ambiguity of whether it is a portal or not. Also, I dislike the return to black and gold - bad contrast.--cj | talk 03:03, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Obviously I like the 'portal' style, the black and gold coloring, the compact format, et cetera... otherwise I wouldn't have designed the page that way in the first place. That said, in it's new role as 'frontpage for the different featured content sections' I think it is very important to keep the appearance consistent enough with the others that they all seem to be the same style... navigation aids with the same top-level content in the same part of each page, comparable color schemes, et cetera. I think we all want to make this a very nice 'presentation' page, but like the Main page and the Community portal there are alot of different opinions on what works best. --CBDunkerson 10:26, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
That's the problem with this place: four users and five defferent opinions.--HereToHelp 18:31, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Ahh, people. The cause of, and solution to, all life's problems. No, wait, that's alcohol... --Quiddity 18:54, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

So let me go out on a limb: Let's get a wider audience. On one hand, it will give us more of those conflicting opinions, but we'll get more suggestions. Let's no annunce this everywhere (we don't want you-know-who sticking his nose in). How about Wikipedia:Esperanza? Sounds like their sort of thing.--HereToHelp 20:18, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

What if, to answer the consistency argument, we redid all of the featured pages? Either black and gold all around, are navy and gold, red and gold, green and gold? It would be easier because the other pages are static, at least more so than the showcase. Just an idea.--HereToHelp 20:21, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure about any of the WP:FC page designs.

  • In HereToHelp's, the colour scheme whilst pleasing in itself, is an extreme contrast to everything else i've seen in wikipedia, which i think is a bad thing for such a showcase page to have. (and i dislike the browsebar quite a lot. anywhere.)
  • The current WP:FC seems too spread out in length (7 rows, all in 1 column). Though basically it works, and the tan colours can easily be replaced. I'm slowly collecting info to add to Wikipedia:Colours to expand our recommended palette.
  • And in my idea, horizontal page scrollbars seem inevitable at 800x600, because:

I strongly believe it is necessary to have one of the commentary-POTD templates, not the textless one. POTD-row would work well, except that the thumbnails are always a lot smaller than in the other two, so it actually doesnt work well here. We can either induce scrollbars at 800x600 res (not an option, imo), or we stick with the current wide POTD template with a row to itself. (or we create a new! template just for this page. or rewrite all the archives of one of the 3 current templates. both make me twitch.)

I've made a quick sandbox(User:Quiddity/sandbox) template of the "newest featured content" in a single column, for use in layout experiments. I have no current conclusions on this matter. --Quiddity 02:02, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I know that a "commentary" POTD is preferable, but I just culdn't get it to work. What if, for the newly featured stuff, we had spearate templates for the different columns, and you could have them separate or have them together, updated from one source? Also, I'm not supporting the browsebar, it was just there when I got the code from an old version. We can get rid of it; not a problem.
We seem to have two issues here: the layout of the page (single columns vs. two) and style (light gold and tan vs. black and gold). Let's take on one at a time. Furthermore, I'm also entangled in the CP redesign, one more thing to complicate matters. --HereToHelp 02:55, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Layout

If we use This edit's layout, (but move "featured lists" to under "featured portals"), with the single column "New featured content". it should work. (I cannot do a demo, because the random featured article and featured picture are embedded in a single template.) --Quiddity 03:08, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

This is still a portal design - let portals be portals and this be what it needs to be. I wouldn't support changing the respective featured content pages to box designs (unless, of course, it looked sufficiently better). To comment on Wikipedia formatting at-large, I do think that much greater attention should be paid to the 'common look and feel' principal of design. Such an approach is always advantageous for websites: the best have adopted it. --cj | talk 11:33, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
I wasn't suggesting changing the other pages' layouts, just WP:FC. --Quiddity 19:20, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Well, what if we did redo all of the featured-related pages in the sam style? Heck, we can pull out our trusty blue green and purple again (I may try my draft with them, in fact).--HereToHelp 19:32, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Or, what if we did them up like the Main Page (and what will soon be the Community Portal), like so?--HereToHelp 22:39, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Featured project

Do we need to have featured prject as well for wiki space? Shyam (T/C) 22:02, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Do you mean assigning 'featured' status to various Wikiprojects? If so then I think that is probably unlikely. While some Wikiprojects are certainly very well organized and important to Wikipedia they inherently aren't 'content' of the encyclopedia, but rather coordinated efforts towards developing that content. We assign 'featured' status to the finished product, but it might be worthwhile to have some sort of recognition for exceptional Wikiprojects. Possibly a 'project of the week' or something like that. --CBDunkerson 22:15, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Specifying it as a "project of the week" would limit it to one per week, though, which would make it more of a competition than a general recognition of quality. But I think some form of recognition would be helpful, both in terms of encouraging WikiProjects to become more effective and also giving them some extra advertising on a prominent page. Kirill Lokshin 22:31, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
The metric used to judge wikiprojects is the final product they generate - featured articles. Beyond that, no, the featured article designation is for main space articles alone. Raul654 23:02, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Obviously; but presumably having something like a "Showcase WikiProject" or "Selected WikiProject" or whatnot would not be entirely verboten? Kirill Lokshin 23:32, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
I do agree with Kirill Lokshin. If we can not have project as featured status, we can use another name to distingush well-formated and more important project to other projects. Response to Raul654: We have many projects, like copyright problems, untagged images etc. which are not associated to make articles to featured status. Response to CBDunkerson: Featured articles or any other featured contents are not finished products, still there is wide scope to make improve and provide information. If featured contents are finished products then why they are protected? Shyam (T/C) 05:40, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Urshyam, I meant 'finished product' in the sense of 'articles', 'pictures', 'lists', et cetera... these are the products generated by Wikiprojects. Obviously most of these can continue to be improved and thus are never 'finished' in that sense. --CBDunkerson 13:08, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm opposed. This sounds more like something for the Wikipedia:Community Portal.--cj | talk 05:45, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

The community portal might be a good place for some sort of 'Wikiproject recognition'. There are alot of active Wikiprojects that many people don't know about so some form of promotion might be worth-while. --CBDunkerson 13:08, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
That might work nicely; we'd still need some way of selecting them, though. Kirill Lokshin 15:36, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Something similar to COTW or AID?--cj | talk 09:44, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
That might work for picking a "project of the week". Whether the projects chosen would necessarily be "good" ones is questionable, but I suspect we wouldn't be able to pick those without a messy FAC-like process anyways. Kirill Lokshin 16:25, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Can we not have featured status for every namespace. As far as concerned, we have article, picture, portal, project, user, template and category namespaces. In which we have already feature status for first three of them. I am also against for featured list with article space. We should have different namespace for lists, like, simply list namespace. What may be the problems to have featured status for project, user and template? For featured topic, I would suggest category space to be featured rather than every article to be featured. Pour in your suggestions. Thank you, Shyam (T/C) 14:42, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

The 'by namespace' idea is interesting organizationally, but I question that we really need 'featured users' or 'featured templates'. Again, to date the concept of 'featured' has been to identify content which we want to particularly emphasize to the general readers. I can see some sort of 'Wikiproject recognition' as a way of advertising and promoting Wikiprojects, but 'user' and 'template' areas would just be... 'contests' for personal aggrandizement. Granted, there is an element of that in all 'featured' work, but it should be subsidiary to identifying exceptional articles / pictures / lists / et cetera. --CBDunkerson 20:21, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
If an entire (but relatively small) Wikiproject was wholly made up of good / featured articles I would call it a 'featured project'. The amount of effort to create the rules and judge such merit effectively would be very difficult however. For this reason it is unviable. michael talk 02:19, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
I think, we need to have feautured users and featured templates as well. If we can have an image as featured content then why can not have featured template? I also think we need to have featured users according to their great and great contribution to wikipedia with user page should also be of good quality. They need not to be sysops. We need to create list namespace and featured topics should be moved to category namespace. Shyam (T/C) 05:51, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

What a silly idea. The idea of the featured processes is to promote Wikipedia's merits as an encyclopædia. Each of the featured processes deals with content. Templates and users are not content. And, quite frankly, to have a "featured user" would not only be absurd, but exceedingly tacky and ultimately disruptive – just as another current proposal. It would do nothing but promote egoism, something that already seriously compromises the constructive interaction of users.--cj | talk 06:09, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

If images are considered as content then why templates can not be considered as content? Okay, we can leave the idea about user namespace for now, if it is disruptive. But my intension is to have content in namespaces. Shyam (T/C) 06:30, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
If you're really serious about making a proposal, I really think this discussion should be transfered to the Wikipedia:Village Pump. This isn't the appropriate forum.--cj | talk 06:38, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
Proposal has been made on the village pump page, please make all the comments there. Shyam (T/C) 07:22, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Quite frankly, I can't see why a "featured" status is needed for every namespace. I am not entirely sure how a "featured user" or "featured template" could be selected, nor what it would mean. I also don't think we need a separate "list" namespace - lists are just articles with lists in them. -- ALoan (Talk) 02:34, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Sidebar redesign

It has been proposed that instead of featured articles, featured content would appear at the navigation box. Show support or opposition at the proposal page. --Howard the Duck 08:58, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Just to update, this looks to be a confirmed part of the redesign, based on zero complaints. --Quiddity 19:26, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
Cool. Always good to see that there are a few things which we all seem to agree on. :] --CBD 21:45, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Featured lists rework

Serious work needs to be done on the featured lists section of this page.

All other items are, as they should be, a summary of the content of the relevant page. Featured article section just has newest article and reference to FA page for more, same with featured picture, but featured list just has everything spilled out. It 1. takes too much space, 2. screws the page visual design, and 3. Suggest a disproportionate importance of lists compared to other featured items.

We need to change that section to either 1. have just the most recent lists, or 2. have just one list with a summary of what that list lists. In both cases, a link would then follow to the FL page. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.80.225.50 (talk • contribs) .

It would be possible to make the 'featured lists' section work just like the featured article... showing the header paragraph(s) of a single randomly selected featured list on each page view with a link to go to the full list article page. The problem, and reason I haven't done this to date, is that it would require either copying the header of each featured list to a new page or pages (as has been done with featured articles > articles of the day) OR putting 'includeonly' tags around the header section of each featured list. I think the latter would be a great improvement even for featured articles because it would allow changes to the article/list header to show up here automatically. However, any plan to do such would require wide community understanding and support or people will remove the tags in the course of normal editing. Setting them up as templates, {{FeaturedStart}} and {{FeaturedEnd}}, might help to make their usage clearer. Thoughts? --CBD 19:10, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Good solution. It'd be nice to clean up that section of this page. --Quiddity·(talk) 19:24, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
How about the way I did it on my userpage? --Howard the Duck 08:19, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
That's pretty much the idea except for ironing out how much of the list to display here. On some of them the header is long and would take up a sizable box by itself. On others the header is just a couple of sentences. Likewise the items in the list can be a single line each or a wide table cell. After scanning various lists I'm thinking the most consistent way might be to skip the header and instead include the first several entries of the list up to some pre-determined height for the display box. A format listing the list title at the top, several examples, and then a link to the full list at the bottom would always display the kind of info contained in the list... which is what makes it 'featured' / interesting. --CBD 11:43, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I like including the header, but the first few entries will be fine. --Howard the Duck 17:14, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
I put it in to randomly select one of three featured lists currently. Will add more if this test works out ok. --CBD 22:24, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
Looks really good. --Quiddity 01:33, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

image problem

(except the image in Nuclear power has that transparant background problem. See Image:Featured-list-image-problem-demo.png. Is there a bug listed for this? I can't remember where else it cropped up.) --Quiddity 01:33, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm guessing the 'transparent background problem' you refer to is the white border on the left and bottom of the image? Yeah, that's odd. Might be able to play with the colors to make that section white like the articles so the display would be consistent with them. We could also adjust it to just not include the image. I wasn't sure whether it and the table would both fit at lower resolutions anyway. --CBD 10:45, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
I took a screenshot using the mov-developer toolbar, displaying element information: Image:Featured-list-image-problem-demo2.png. I'm not sure what needs tweaking though: "thumb" or "tright" or both (in monobook/main.css or MediaWiki:Monobook.css). (The note in monobook.css, to "See #Framed_image_background_color", doesnt make sense either). I'll try to bring this up at the css talkpage tomorrow, if you don't figure it out before :) --Quiddity 19:22, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
Unfortunately, images/CSS/anything remotely 'style' related isn't really my thing. I usually leave the 'make it look pretty' stuff to other people. I'm guessing that the white border is amongst the various things that the 'thumb' designation does. Could probably be resolved by changing it to a table with the text aligned below the image (simulated thumb), but would then likely need to be adjusted for every 'thumb' image. --CBD 21:52, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Featured picture options

I have been thinking about adjusting the featured picture display and wanted to get some feedback. Currently each of the top three sections (article, picture, & list) takes up the full width of the page. There isn't really any way around that with the lists, but there are ways that the featured article and featured picture could be put side by side. What do people think of the following options;

  1. Leave it the way it is - lots of blank space on either side of featured picture and can only use 'picture of the day' entries from November 2004 forward.
  2. Switch to using 'POTD row' format with picture and descriptive text taking up right 40% of top section beside article. May be a bit 'scrunched' and would reduce the usable 'picture of the day' pool to only those from March 2006 forward.
  3. Switch to using just the picture with no descriptive text. This would be less scrunched and allow use of all featured pictures (even those which have never been used for 'picture of the day'), but would lose the text describing what the picture is / who took it / et cetera.

So, positive and negatives to each of them. If we just want to display the pictures then I think '3' is the clear favorite, but if we want to describe them also then there are benefits to both '1' and '2'. --CBD 22:37, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Re: option #2, might the 'POTD column' format be another option? eg Wikipedia:POTD column/March 12, 2006 vs Wikipedia:POTD row/March 12, 2006 vs Wikipedia:POTD/March 12, 2006. --Quiddity 02:05, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
Yes, either the row or column format could be used. They both start around the same time and have no 'fixed border' around the image and description. Would just be a matter of which 'fit' better. --CBD 10:38, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
I put POTD row in with portals next to it for now. Having the article and picture next to each other was just implausible for the 800x600 folks. It worked for about 50% of the images, but the wider ones caused the featured article section to get completely mangled. Even the current setup has problems with some of the very wide pictures like Wikipedia:POTD row/April 26, 2006... that's 700px wide, which at 800x600 means that anything on the same row other than the sidebar is not going to work. We could switch to the condensed version (Wikipedia:POTD) without the text, remove the wide images from the selection list, or leave it as is and have 800x600 look messy for the really wide images - basically the text gets scrunched down to just a few words per line and trails off down the page that way. Fortunately the text on featured pictures is short, but even so it can scroll down a full page. --CBD 12:27, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
I decided to just move the portal up to the top next to the article. Works much better. The picture now uses exactly the same template and available width as on the main page and the article has more width available here than it does on the main page. Everything looks fine at 800x600 and pretty good at higher resolutions. The bottom of the article and portal boxes doesn't line up perfectly in most cases, but it is only a little off - even that could be fixed by doing the box markup directly rather than relying on Portal:Box-header. --CBD 12:53, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Portals too

Just for completeness I took the 'featured portal of the week / month' concept from Portal:Browse and made that into a random display as well. Has about half the featured portals currently (those which are bolded on the Wikipedia:Featured portals page) and I'll look around for suitable images to set the remaining ones up with. --CBD 21:55, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

I centered the text, but couldn't determine how to center the image. --Quiddity 02:27, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

2 problems with page design

1. The featured portal (At either 800x600 or 1024x768) is not merged properly into the same FCP, but rather takes it's own height, resulting in a distorted page with lots of empty blank space.

2. At 800x600, the whole page does not fit horizontally and requires horizontal scrolling. It has been decided in the past that Wikipedia must be usable at 800x600 without horizontal scrolling required. 142.33.66.38 21:23, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

If there was a past decision against horizontal scrolling at 800x600 it has long ceased to be actual practice. At 800x600 the Main Page and every one of the featured lists currently used here require horizontal scrolling. Thus, the only way to avoid horizontal scrolling at 800x600 would be to exclude featured lists from this page and display all of the other elements (even the little navigation box at the upper right) one atop the other rather than side by side. Rather than that, which would exclude valuable info and look ridiculous at resolutions used by the vast majority of people, I think current practice is to make it look reasonable (fix improper merges) at 800x600 and try to keep the required horizontal scrolling to a minimum. The page is currently 'in transition' as we are looking at options to change the 'featured picture' display (see above), but once that gets sorted out we will tweak the page to work as well as possible at various resolutions (as it did prior to the recent featured lists / portals alterations). --CBD 11:09, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
As a permanent 800x600 user, I assure you that the main page is never, ever, requires horizontal scrolling at 800x600. Furthermore, no articles requires that, unless there's an image on an article which by itself is over 800x600. Furthermore, neither the FL page itself, not most featured lists, do not require scrolling at 800x600. The only reason that the FC or other lists pages needs scrolling is because of poor coding in either transcluding the FL page onto this one, or in specifying the width of table blocks in lists. In theory you can make a table work on a 100x100 res, and definitely at 800x600 (even with all images there, because we don't use images nearly that big), but people who are using 1024x768+ are too lazy to make sure their work looks proper on other resolutions. Elvarg 17:14, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
That seemed wrong to me because I wasn't "too lazy" and did change my resolution (from 1600x1200... who uses that HUGE 1024x768 any more? :])... but I just realized that I was actually looking at the main page and lists in 640x480. I guess we have officially banished those people to 'horizontal scrolling hell', but not the 8x6ers. --CBD 11:10, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
Windows XP (maybe some older versions too) won't allow 640x480 at all, unless overridden by custom gfx card settings. So that's not really an issue. 800x600 is alive and well though. Right now, when certain lists are on this page it looks fine, but other lists require scrolling. I think it is because when a list is transcended onto this page it always has a few less pixels of space, due to some pixels used by this page itself. Therefore, those lists who are strictly at 800 width already will not fit, but those at, say, 790, will. We need to make a few pixels of width buffer for pages which are transcended, especially when using fixed-width pages such as lists with tables.
There ARE a couple of pixels 'lost' in the buffer set by the table markup, but that isn't really the problem. At most it would cause a tiny band of '5 pixel wide' blank space. The bigger issue is the sidebar (which eats up around 150 pixels I'd estimate) and the fact that some of the featured pictures are just bigger than 650 pixels. Take a look at Wikipedia:POTD row/April 26, 2006 in 800x600 for instance. That is what was transcluded onto the Main Page (losing additional space for the same sort of table buffer issues) on April 26th... even before transclusion it doesn't fit without scrolling. The handful of pixels of table buffer are insignificant next to the fact that the image is just too big. So our only real options are to exclude these wide images from display here (though they were used on the Main Page - with scrolling required) or live with the horizontal scroll on those. Because there isn't any change which can be made to get it to fit. Sidebar + image > 800 pixels... and we can't get rid of the sidebar. --CBD 11:04, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
Overly-wide panorama pics should be fine, as there are very few of them. We're trying to accomodate 8x6ers, not cater to them, on this page at least.
I'm more concerned about the purple background in potd-row; Can that be fixed easily? If not, let's give the whole box the purple background, so that it looks purposeful :) --Quiddity 18:22, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
I couldn't see a way to change it so I copied in the purple box from the main page... Wikipedia:Featured pictures actually uses a grey color scale, but I think we are stuck with purple if using POTD-row. After that I used blue for the portals as that is consistent with both Wikipedia:Featured portals and Portal:Browse. The articles should technically be the tan color used on Wikipedia:Featured articles, but we've been using that for the header section so I used main page green for the articles. The remaining items I left in the tan scale (consistent with Wikipedia:Featured lists) for now. In the process I fixed the article/portal alignment and went ahead and got rid of the edit links (see below) for now. Please feel free to come up with different ideas for this. I think the general layout of the page works and now we're just looking at colors and minor spacing and the like. --CBD 21:59, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Edit links?

Should the 'edit' links over each section be removed? I'm thinking of switching the page away from using Portal:Box-header so that we can line up the bottoms of the featured article and featured portal boxes and wonder if I should still manually build in edit links after that. These have been handy for updating the sub-sections or fixing situations where the image attached to a featured article has been deleted, but should we be concerned about possible vandalism as traffic here increases? This being linked to the Main Page was one thing, but it being linked from every page in the sidebar is going to be a much bigger deal. I think I was reading Wikipedia for a year before I even discovered the main page existed. The vandalism issue is particularly tricky in this case because a vandal could edit one of the old featured article entries that randomly appeared for them and then it would be 'gone' until the same item got randomly pulled up for another user later. I have most of these pages watchlisted, but it's alot to keep an eye on and I don't check every day. --CBD 10:49, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Yup, also the page should probably be permanently semi-protected, like Wikipedia:Featured articles is now. --Quiddity 21:04, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Featured content color palette tie-ins

How about matching the individual featured content pages with the basic color palettes in each section on this page to tie them together? I'll volunteer to that if there's support, or at least no big objections. Rfrisbietalk 21:26, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

I adjusted the individual page color palettes to match those here. I also adjusted the layouts here and there to make them a bit more consistent. Rfrisbietalk 18:30, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
The individual page intros in the header shades looked a bit strong to me, so I switched them to the intro accent shade here. The remaining colors stayed the same. The current arrangement uses color tie-ins across all "featured" pages by having intros with the same shade. The "type" of featured content has color tie-ins from this page to each type page by using the same hue for the main backgrounds and accent sections. The style of color palettes used are presented at Wikipedia talk:Colours. Rfrisbietalk 21:03, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
Fine with me. The picture background is purple since that comes in from the transcluded template - which is set up that way for the Main Page. We used light green on the article so that too would be consistent with the Main Page. The other featured types aren't shown on the Main Page and were originally set to be consistent with the 'featured' pages on each, but they were later changed to individual colors which you have now changed the 'featured pages' to follow. It's a subtle thing, but I think the color consistency across pages/templates is a good idea. --CBD 13:48, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
Looks good :) --Quiddity 17:48, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
I don't see a reason to do this. I personally prefer the variety with the various projects having their own colors. It gets a little boring seeing the same colors on every page. ♠ SG →Talk 11:31, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
I like variety too. I also like using color as a navigation aide. I agree the types of featured pages could use more tie-ins, but I recommend they use the hues at the Main Page when present, here, and Wikipedia talk:Colours. Using pictures as an example, tie-in shades would be for Hue 270, e.g., H:270 S:15 V:75, H:270 S:15 V:95, H:270 S:10 V:100, and H:270 S:4 V:100. Rfrisbietalk 14:34, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

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