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Features and admins

The best of the week

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By Tony1 and Dabomb87
Featured picture Choice of the week by Noodle snacks, a master of timing (five of his wildlife photographs were promoted this week). Here, a Dusky Woodswallow is poised to feed open-mouthed chicks. The image was taken on 6 December at Mortimer Bay in Tasmania, the island state to the south of the Australian continent.


The sanctuary in the Poplar and Montgomery Building, from the featured article Choice of the week, Temple Israel (Memphis, Tennessee)—"a beautifully constructed slice of American history", according to the judge.
Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters performs at London's O2 Arena in 2008.
The Lactarius volemus, or "weeping milk cap" mushroom: the profuse whitish latex may become brownish upon exposure to air, and stains tissues brown.
Thirteen articles were promoted to featured status:


Choice of the week. The Signpost asked FA nominator and reviewer Mike Christie to select the best of the week.

"I spent a couple of very enjoyable hours reading this week's crop and trying to pick out the best, though sometimes the comparisons are impossibly difficult. How could I compare Lactarius volemus, a thoroughly researched and well-written article on a fungus, with Shale oil extraction, a survey of numerous industrial techniques that must have been ferociously difficult to assemble, or with Roger Waters, a detailed biography of one of Pink Floyd's founders? In the end I saw two as especially noteworthy. José Paranhos, Viscount of Rio Branco is part of a series of featured articles on 19th-century Brazilian history that are being written by Lecen and Astynax. It's not likely to be a well-known topic to most of Wikipedia's English-speaking readers, and the nominators have done a fine job of telling the story of Rio Branco's life while unobtrusively providing the necessary historical background.

My other selection is Temple Israel (Memphis, Tennessee), which traces the history of a Jewish congregation in Memphis for over 150 years. The nominator, Jayjg, has done a remarkable job of assembling a detailed history of every period in the congregation's life. The article does not neglect the congregation's relationship with the wider world: the American Civil War, William Jennings Bryan's campaign against evolution, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Civil Rights era all make appearances in the story. The result is a beautifully constructed slice of American history, and it's my pick for best of the week."


Two featured articles were delisted:

In the past two weeks, sixteen lists were promoted:

Two featured lists have been delisted in December thus far:

SMS Erzherzog Ferdinand Max in 1914, from the new featured topic Battleships of Austria-Hungary
Six topics were promoted:
  • Pará class monitors, with seven good articles (nominator Sturmvogel 66). River monitors were heavily armoured, and normally mounted the largest guns of the riverine warships.
  • Battleships of Austria-Hungary, with 19 articles (nominator Parsecboy, Buggie111 and White Shadows). The navy of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a major force in European geopolitics until World War I had built a series of battleships between the early 1900s and 1917, partly to defend its Adriatic coastline.
  • Courageous class battlecruiser and aircraft carrier, with one featured article and four good articles. These three ships were built as battlecruisers during World War I and were converted to aircraft carriers in the 1920s. Two of the ships were sunk early in World War II, but the last one survived the war, only to be scrapped in 1948. (Sturmvogel 66)
  • Battlecruisers of the Royal Navy, with two featured articles and 21 good articles (Sturmvogel 66).
  • Nirvana studio albums, with two featured articles and two good articles. Nirvana is an alternative rock group based in Aberdeen, Washington. The group has produced three studio albums, 20d singles, three live albums, two extended plays, three compilation albums, and two box sets (CrowzRSA)
  • Reign in Blood, with two featured articles and two good articles. Reign in Blood is the third studio album and the major label debut by the American thrash metal band Slayer. It was released on 7 October 1986.

One featured topic, StarCraft titles, was delisted.

Cab Calloway, the iconic American jazz singer, photographed by William Gottlieb in 1947. The sheet music shows some of his trademark slang words such as "hep".
Cute or what? Bennett's Wallaby; this individual shows remarkable facial and bodily symmetry.
Twelve images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
  • Little Penguins exiting burrow (nom), "This is just amazing. The timing is great even with the amount of setup it must have taken. No umbrellas though?", said reviewer Dschwen, to which nominator Noodle snacks) replied: "A bit windy methinks", and that he'd have crushed a dozen burrows trying to set it up.
  • Bennett's Wallaby (nom), almost a fashion-shot taken by Noodle snacks on Bruny Island, off Tasmania. The marsupial pouch is visible just above and between the legs. (picture at right)
  • Dusky Woodswallow with chicks (nom), as though frozen in time, about to feed open-mouthed chicks, shot at Mortimer Bay, Tasmania by Noodle snacks. (picture at top)
  • Cab Calloway (nom), early 20th-century jazz icon Cab Calloway in song. The image was created by William Paul Gottlieb (1917–2006) an American photographer and newspaper columnist best-known for his classic photographs of the leading performers of the "Golden Age" of American jazz in the 1930s and 1940s. (picture at right)
  • Junior at Darlington (nom), the drama of a car-racing pit stop at Darlington Raceway in 2008 (created by United States National Guard, brightness edited by Purpy Pupple).
  • Sarychev Peak (nom), erupting on 12 June 2009 on Matua, an uninhabited volcanic island in the Kuril Islands chain north of Japan. The name of the island means “hellmouth” in the Ainu language (created by NASA).
  • Galeries Lafayette (nom), a ten-storey department store on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. The picture was constructed from 51 images in three separate exposures by Blieusong.
  • G. D. Falksen (nom) (link to article, an American writer and essayist who is particularly known for his work within the steampunk genre (created by Tyrus Flynn).
  • Fan-tailed Cuckoo (nom) (link to article), a Tasmanian bird. Creator Noodle snacks said "Another first-time observation for me. I've certainly heard them before though. I was lucky to get this photo."
  • Red-capped Plover (nom), created by Noodle snacks, who said he had crawled about 500 m on his belly during the course of the day when he got this shot. "Heat haze became a very significant problem during the middle of the day (I couldn't get a sharp shot until some cloud cover came for a while)."
  • Japanese military paraphernalia (nom), "cold" weapons and other military artefacts, ca.1892–95, from a hand-coloured glass slide (created by T. Enami (1859–1929), a Meiji period photographer).
  • Topographic map of Florida (nom), created by Sting-fr (Eric Gaba), a French Wikimedian living in Brazil who is well-known for the quality of his cartography. He commented: "The projection is an Albers equal-area and the linear scale along the meridians is not constant like it could be in a polyconic projection for example. That's why, in a search of precision, I indicate the horizontal linear scale variation between the top and the bottom of the map." Reviewer Alvesgaspar, also a cartographer, said "this one looks very good indeed. Attention was given to the detail and the result is both aesthetically attractive and clear. Congratulations!"

Choice of the week. Snowmanradio, a reviewer and nominator at featured picture candidates, told The Signpost:

"There is a very wide range of new featured pictures this week, including several bird photographs. It was very difficult to select one; however, my favourite is the Dusky Woodswallow about to feed chicks in a nest. I wondered how long the photographer patiently watched the nest and how he managed to focus the moment on the sensor of his digital camera. I think the photograph from space of the Sarychev Volcano erupting, the photo-stitched interior of Galeries Lafayette store, the map of Florida, and the pit stop at Darlington are technically amazing, each with a good image description explaining the who, what, where, and when of the image."

Three sound files were promoted to featured status.

Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959
  • Eisenhower speech, October 9, 1954 (nom). President Eisenhower travelled the US in 1954 to campaign for Republican Congressional candidates. During his tour, he delivered 40 speeches, often stating the need for "a vast new highway program". This clip includes such remarks, which he made in Cadillac Square, Detroit some three years before the creation of the Interstate Highway System.
Remarks in Cadillac Square, Detroit, Michigan
  • File:Maple Leaf Rag - played by Scott Joplin 1916 sample.ogg (nom). A recording made by Scott Joplin in 1916 of his most famous rag, the Maple Leaf Rag. The recording was made on a piano roll in June 1916 less than a year before the composer's death from syphilis. The performance demonstrates the extent to which his physical deterioration from the disease affected his ability to play the piano smoothly. The roll was scanned into a MIDI file by a collector in New Zealand, then converted into a Piano soundfile by Major Bloodnok using Cubase.
Maple Leaf Rag - played by Scott Joplin 1916
Handel - messiah - 44 hallelujah.ogg
Also mentioned by the featured picture judge: Dale Earnhardt, Jr. as his team completes a pit stop during the 2008 Dodge Challenger 500 at Darlington Raceway on May 10, 2008
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Wow so much features I have never seen. Congrats.-- ♫Greatorangepumpkin♫ T 09:26, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Especially when you consider how (relatively) fallow last week's offering was. There's a huge amount of good stuff here. I wonder what caused the let-up last week – or accordingly got people so riled up for this week? Seegoon (talk) 13:54, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Well, these articles usually take months to push to FA from the time that someone decides to do so. So exactly which week an article is promoted in has little to do with which week the primary editors started to really push it towards FA. So it's like saying, why did 5 waves come by in this minute, but only 2 waves in the previous minute. -- Ssilvers (talk) 23:35, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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