The Signpost

Featured content

Portal people on potent potables and portable potholes

The Signpost reflected on featured portals promoted in 2012.

This week, the Signpost's featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured portals, a small yet active part of the project. We interviewed FPOC directors Cirt and OhanaUnited.

Cirt

We've had a bunch of portals promoted to Featured Portal quality in 2012 among a diverse group of subjects, including: Animation, Arts, Conservatism, Indonesia, History, Maryland Roads, and New England. So far in 2013, we've promoted portals Bollywood, Cheshire, Massachusetts, and Society. I've personally worked on two of these: Arts and Society, as part of the Main Page Featured Portal drive. This is an effort to improve all portals linked from the top-right navigation of the Main Page to Featured quality. We've only got two more portals left to improve all the way up to Featured status in this quality improvement drive, Geography and Technology; the former is almost there and the latter is coming along nicely. It's been fun helping out with the quality improvement process of portals in the past year. Hopefully it won't take too much longer to complete the Main Page Featured Portal drive, and that will serve as a good model for future contributors to portals.

OhanaUnited
Being a small project is a double-edged sword. On one hand, we rarely (if ever) have to deal with vandals and other wiki-drama. On the other hand, our target audience is not as much as some article pages and therefore portals are less frequently maintained even though the articles showcased in the portal may be more up to date. Often there is a lot of inertia from the community and we have less capital to work with when the total number of votes matter a lot in a discussion. Just over a year ago, there were a number of good ideas presented to increase the visibility of portals. Including Cirt's idea of improving the portals listed on the main page to featured status, most of the ideas presented have received strong support and implemented. The one idea, championed by myself, would involve changing the standard bullet points on the main page to diagrams that reflect the portal. Even though it has already been implemented in German Wikipedia's home page (where the idea of portals originated), the effort involved in getting this implemented in English Wikipedia would be far too much. At this point, we're aiming for more participants in the featured portals candidate process.

Stephen Colbert, a supporter of elephant population growth
Buff-banded Rail
Young Woman Drawing, by Marie-Denise Villers
Space Shuttle Enterprise
Les dernières cartouches, from the new featured portal on society

Seven featured articles were promoted this week:

Four featured lists were promoted this week:

Eleven featured pictures were promoted this week:

Four featured portals were promoted this week:

Barrow Offshore Wind Farm

















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-02-04/Featured_content