The Signpost

Features and admins

Bumper crop of admins; Obama featured portal marks our 150th

A pahoehoe fountain with a characteristic ropey surface spews from cooling magma during a volcanic event in Hawaiʻi in 1983; see the new Portal:Volcanoes below.

Administrators

There has been a significant increase in the number of successful RfAs over the past month, which has seen 15 promotions, at least double the typical rate. The Signpost congratulates the five editors who were promoted over the past week.

Barack Obama, the subject of Wikipedia's newly promoted 150th featured portal
"This is our moment. This is our time", announced America's first African American president in his election night speech in Chicago almost two years ago. The Signpost takes pleasure in announcing that after a month of reviewer input and improvements at Featured portal candidates, the Barack Obama portal was promoted 1 September. This marks our 150th featured portal. It is a hub that links to:

The page features rotating selected article excerpts and quotations from the president. Users are invited to contribute to this field in the "Things to do" box at the portal's bottom right.

Three other portals were promoted on 1 September:

The Liberty Bell, icon of American independence and the subject of the featured article Choice of the week
Allied POWs march to the American lines after the Raid at Cabanatuan rescue mission in January 1945 (17 s)
A Blue-faced Honeyeater minds its own business in northern Australia (47 s)

Twelve articles were promoted to featured status:

Choice of the week. The Signpost asked long-time FA nominator and reviewer Malleus Fatuorum to select the best of the week, disregarding his own nomination. "With eleven to choose from it was a difficult decision, but three articles stood out for me, for quite different reasons. My choice is Liberty Bell, a technically excellent and engagingly written account of, well, a bell, but an iconic one. Sherlock Holmes Baffled and The Judd School deserve honourable mentions though; Wikipedia needs more quality articles on early cinema, and a model to follow for high-quality school articles."

Four featured articles were delisted:

A man and woman standing on an ice rink in figure skates and wearing matching sweaters
Sonja Henie of Norway and Karl Schäfer of Austria, the gold medal winners in ladies' and men's singles figure skating during the 1932 Olympic Games
Six lists were promoted:

Choice of the week. We asked regular FL nominator Another Believer for his choice of the best: "Of these six newly promoted lists, Glee (season 1) is my favorite. Not only does it illustrate the featured list criteria wonderfully, but it borders qualifying as a featured article because it contains so much relevant information. The fact that I have enjoyed several episodes of the show certainly doesn't hurt either."

One featured list was delisted:

Olive baboons engage in social grooming, a behaviour that may have been a precursor of human verbal language. This is our second simian shot in two weeks, but they are good.
Charles Marion Russell's 1904 lithograph A bad hoss, possibly an important document in the American myth of the cowboy
Thirteen images were promoted. Medium-sized displays of the pictures can be viewed by clicking on "nom".

Choice of the week. IdLoveOne, a regular reviewer and nominator at featured picture candidates, told The Signpost, "If you're looking at the picture below and thinking "This insect seems familiar. Where have I seen it before?" it might be because it's in the same order of insects as the stink bug! However, it's not such a bug, but a Calocoris affinis, or grass bug. The order it's in is pretty diverse, including the herbivorous pests in the genus Miridae, the insectivorous genus Geocoris and the interesting family Gerridae which is sometimes called the "Jesus bug" because of its ability to move on top of water.

That's your science lesson for the day. Returning to the photo at hand, as a non-entomophobe, I find it to have great eye-appeal, and I'm sure some entomophiles will enjoy using it as a pleasant wallpaper. A triple-green image of a field scabious plant with those bold-edged sepals and the light green and brown bud orbs nested between them, an almost perfectly matching green bug that, in a way only a bug could, nearly defies a human's understanding of gravity before an almost dreamy and halo-like green background. This is my Choice of the week.

Calocoris affinis, the featured picture Choice of the week



















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-09-06/Features_and_admins