Wikipedia talk:Featured articles/Archive 14

This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:Featured articles. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 10

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Archive 12

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Countries

Is it me or the last country to be featured was in 2007? That is a bit scary. Nergaal (talk) 05:18, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Nope. As standards soar, wants to work on such massive, multifaceted articles plummets, basically to 0 (sorry for the late response). ResMar 03:03, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, but soaring standards end up driving people away. People care about subjects, but when every missing comma is treated as an oppose vote, people stop caring about improving core articles; what is left is that the percentage of obscure, limited interest subjects soars, making some illusioned that the process is still working normally, if not better than ever. Nergaal (talk) 04:21, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Under the reworded criterion 1(c), it's probably impossible to get a country through FAC. Within the size limits of a Wikipedia article, I can't see how it would be possible to have "thorough coverage of the relevant literature"; any country, even the most obscure, is going to be the topic of thousands of works. – iridescent 09:34, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Last year I spent some time in a fairly desultory sort of way looking for sources on Guyana last year, to see if I could get it to FAC. I was unable to find much -- all the Latin American histories ignore the non-Spanish-speaking (and non-Portuguese-speaking) countries, as far as I can see. Apparently it's usually covered in histories of the Caribbean, but so far I have not had much luck in finding significant coverage there either. I have a couple of photocopied books, and a couple of titles I haven't been able to get hold of, but not nearly enough to do a decent article. If anyone is interested in working on this, let me know .... Mike Christie (talk) 15:19, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Problem article

Grace Sherwood (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Hans Adler, Moonriddengirl, and I have looked through the old revisions and edit history, in particular this revision and this diff. We think that (a) on balance there was a copyright problem here; and (b) this copyright problem persists in the form of a derived work that is now, thanks to the FAC process itself, spread through at least three sections of the article (including the currently blanked one). Excising it completely would, I suspect, render the text nonsense. At the very least this has to go back through FAC. I really do not like being in this position. Uncle G (talk) 17:30, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Terminology: articles are promoted at FAC, demoted at FAR. I'm not sure what you mean by "thanks to the FA[C] process itself"? It sounds like you're saying FAC is responsible for the copyright problem. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:49, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
- No. It's responsible for the fact that the relevant content is now spread over three sections. The original text was one lump. It has since been added-to and interwoven, as the article was built. Uncle G (talk) 08:13, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Featured article review/Grace Sherwood/archive1 SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:53, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
- Bear in mind that the three of us have only looked at two sources so far. Other text in the article may also be the result of copying and pasting. We stopped when we were able to conclude that, on balance, there was a copyright problem in old revisions that still exists, in the form of a derived work, now. Simple removal of the text that we know already to be problematic would be bad enough. (And I'm not convinced that it couldn't be argued that the dependent sentences surrounding it, that rely upon it for context, wouldn't constitute derived works too.) The article would read as nonsense in places.
  The usual action in such situations is to revert to the last good, non-infringing, version of the article and start building afresh, precisely because in these situations untangling what is and isn't derived work is a legal quagmire that really Wikipedia editors alone aren't expert enough to do. In this case, that means going back to this revision of the article and re-building from that. You lose everything. As I said, I really do not like this unfortunate position of having to opine that pretty much the entirety of a featured article has to go because this edit is a foundational copyright violation that everything subsequent is a derived work of.
  There's worse, I'm afraid: Since this article has made the news, we cannot set a lax example to the community of how copyright problems are dealt with, here. Uncle G (talk) 08:13, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
I can't see any way round deleting most of the article. The copyvio was introduced during its five-fold expansion for DYK. Now we're intelligent mammals with opposable thumbs and all that, we could just take the chunk of text that was introduced here, work with it on a private text editor and repost was remains once the infringing material has been removed. Except we can't, because that would infringe the copyright of the original editor: only he can make that sort of an adjustment to put back some of what must be removed. So it's an all or nothing situation, sorry. Physchim62 (talk) 00:04, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Why is this discussion here instead of on the FAR? Why are people editing the article without deletions to history? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:10, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm surprised there's an FAR at all: surely this is a cut and dry case. It's not even WP:IAR, as copyright policy overrides any internal FA procedures, and the state of the article after applying copyright policies would not even be fit for DYK, let alone FA. Physchim62 (talk) 15:48, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Rlevse's articles

Hi folks. God only knows where I should ask these questions, but I'll try here.

In a Signpost discussion, SandyGeorgia wrote, "[M]any people are going through Rlevse's contribs and this is by no means 'a few bad edits' in one article." Is there a page with a discussion of Rlevse's edits beyond the Grace Sherwood incident? Also, where can I find a list of articles that Rlevse nominated for featured? I'd like to help find and fix any problems, if any of those articles fall within my area of knowledge. Thanks! —Kevin Myers 05:47, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

WP:WBFAN lists all featured articles by nomination. I'm not aware of any that need an urgent trip to WP:FAR, but if any of them are found to need review, it would be best to pace those, rather than submit multiple FARs at once, as this will allow others more time to work on them. I believe some sourcing issues are being cleaned up by others. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 09:23, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I had forgotten about that page. The title, "List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations", is slightly inaccurate, since it's actually a list of list of Wikipedians by successful featured article nominations. Missing are the failed nominations, a list few folks would probably want to have compiled. Such a list might be useful for identifying editors who have run into trouble at FAC and therefore need some extra help or scrutiny.

Rlevse was undoubtedly such an editor. I opposed his nomination of Black Hawk War because of sourcing problems; I opposed his nomination of William Henry Harrison for the same reason, though it was eventually promoted. Another editor initially opposed the Grace Sherwood nomination because of sourcing problems, though these objections were later struck. Had the Grace Sherwood article been reviewed with the same scrutiny as the Black Hawk War nomination, it would have never made it to the Main Page. That's easy to say now, of course, but it still should be said. —Kevin Myers 10:32, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

I guess if you find an article with a few well-circumscribed issues that can be fixed fairly readily, then maybe just getting stuck into it and posting here for some help would be a start. If more systemic problems within the one article, then maybe nomming one at a time at FAR. It is hell when more than one article that one is interested in improving are listed at FAR :( Casliber (talk · contribs) 10:40, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

The patience-of-a-saint folks at WP:CCI are going through every page Rlevse ever made a significant change to and double-checking his additions against the sources. (So far, AFAIK, no issues other than the three problem pages previously raised have been found.) I'm sure they'd appreciate any assistance from anyone else willing to pitch in. – iridescent 11:18, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Wow, thanks. I thought that there might be a page like that somewhere. —Kevin Myers 13:47, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out, Kevin; Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/William Henry Harrison shows the problem of driveby supports and lack of scrutiny at FAC that we have long battled and are trying to correct. The title of WBFAN evolved over time and you are correct-- it should probably be "List of featured arcticles by nominator", and I strongly agree that we need that complementary list of archived noms. Would you be willing to ping in Rick Block and get his feedback? I sorta have my hands full ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:54, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Sure. I've never heard of Rick Block since I don't pay much attention to these things, and so I don't know why I'm pinging him! :-) But I will leave him a message to check out this thread. —Kevin Myers 14:10, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

He runs the bot that updates WBFAN. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:12, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

If you're looking for a list of FACs Rlevse submitted, this search seems like a reasonable start. Having a bot keep such a list for each FAC nominator would be possible, but I'm not sure I see the point given the searching capabilities. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:16, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

A list might enable us to better understand, at a glance, a given editor's track record at FAC. A list like WBFAN shows only the successes, not the failures. I realize, of course, that's this is exactly the point: we like to highlight our success stories and not embarrass anyone. But if we wanted the list to serve a purpose beyond bragging rights, we might want the list to reveal more. Are there editors who have repeatedly run into difficulties at FAC, who might require some extra help or scrutiny? Was Rlevse one of them? Who knows? —Kevin Myers 05:31, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

As you surmise, the point of the existing list is to provide some positive encouragement for taking articles through the FAC process (although one might wonder why anyone attaches any value to a virtual gold star). This "extra information" doesn't strike me as something that would be useful to, or even looked at by, very many people. It seems more like a report that somebody might occasionally run on demand than something we'd want constantly updated for all to see. Maybe a toolserver application might be a better approach than a bot. One of the reasons the existing bot works the way it does (it parses the archives and creates entries in by-year lists like WP:FA2010, and then uses these by-year lists as input for WP:WBFAN) is because the nominator(s) used to not be able to be reliably determined automatically. Since all FACs now have "Nominator(s):" lines, it's fairly simple to parse the nominating user(s) out of a FAC nomination file. Assuming the failed noms are archived by date somewhere, I don't think it would be difficult to write a toolserver tool to list everyone who's nominated an article over the last year or two and how many nominations they've made. Right at the moment I don't have time to do this. You might ask at WP:BOTREQ if anyone would like to give it a shot. I don't know if there's a separate request page for toolserver tools, but I think most of the toolsmiths would see a request at the botreq page. -- Rick Block (talk) 07:54, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply. If anyone likes this idea and wants to do more with it, the ball is yours. I'm a fish out of water in the world of bots and toolservers. —Kevin Myers 09:14, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to concur with Rick here, that it's not a good idea. While there have occasionally been people who take a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach to FAC, there aren't that many of them. Most people with a history of multiple unsuccessful FAC noms are people writing perfectly good articles, but in fields which require a higher-than-usual degree of specialist knowledge to review fully (specialized scientific, medical or engineering topics, articles with multiple foreign-language sources etc). A list by successful-unsuccessful ratio would give a very distorted picture, and probably further discourage people working in "unfashionable" areas. – iridescent 11:07, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

I didn't anticipate that people would argue that keeping FAC failure stats swept under the rug (so to speak) is a good thing. But your point is well taken if your assertion ("most people...") is accurate, although apparently there's no easy or objective way to verify this, which of course is my point. I'd prefer data over assertions, but I understand the reluctance to compile such data. —Kevin Myers 14:02, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

That data is kept-- in my gray matter. As I've stated elsewhere, I knew there were prose and sourcing concerns in previous FACs, which I why I have stated several times I assume responsibility for not paying enough attention to this case. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:15, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

FAs and automatic taxoboxes

There is an editor updating wikipedia taxoboxes to automatic taxoboxes. The editor will make multiple changes in the template at one time. The coding development is not going well, and I have had to revert a number of automatic taxoboxes in FAs to manual taxoboxes due to broken templates causing long lines of big red text to appear in the taxoboxes.

If an article is scheduled to go on the main page, it should have a fixed, not an automatic taxobox. See this also. --Kleopatra (talk) 18:36, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Proposal to change column formatting for footnotes

There is a proposal here to switch all articles with more then 20 footnotes away from {{reflist}} or {{reflist|2}}, towards a formatting method that allows for a variable number of columns depending on the reader's screen size. As this would likely affect a number of featured articles, I think a note here is warranted. Details can be found at the linked thread. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:10, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

One episode of the Simpsons a worthy candidate for 'featured article'? (6 Jan 2011)

Do featured articles not need to be a bit more notable and of general interest than this? 08:16, 6 January 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pawebster (talk • contribs) 08:16, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

There's no bar to being TFA except for being a featured article that hasn't been TFA before. Sceptre ^(talk) 09:47, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

But is this a law of the Medes and the Persians that cannot be changed? Surely some articles, however 'good' they may be on technical criteria are still not ideal as openers on the site's homepage? APW (talk) 07:25, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Nice classical reference - I approve :)

Anyway, I'm the one who chooses the featured articles that appear on the main page. And I'm willing to put almost any article there (a tiny handful of exceptions not withstanding) provided it has achieved featured status. So that's the rule until I decide otherwise. Raul654 (talk) 06:24, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

I am a bit shocked by your I'm-the-boss-so-that's-the-end-of-that reply. Isn't this what's getting Wikipedia a bad name? A closed shop of inner circle satraps (back to the Medes and Persians) who just bat newcomers' views aside. In this case, it seems that just one satrap can do more or less as he pleases with the face that Wikipedia shows the world day by day. APW (talk) 19:10, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

I didn't say that was the end of it. If someone presents a compelling argument for why my decision is wrong, I'll hear them out. You have not done that. So far, your argument simply amounts to I-don't-like-it. Someone else complained recently made a similar complaint about the same article you did. She claimed that Homer's Enemy was "too specific and would be of little appeal to the general public" -- A claim that is provably false.

On the flip-side, what you propose would discourage editors from trying to get technical/nichey articles up to FA status. Why should I do that without a compelling reason - particularly when nobody has suggested one? Raul654 (talk) 19:24, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

"The encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Except in this case, only one person can, namely yourself. However did that happen? Also: isn't it a bit feeble to claim that people would only want to create a really high standard article so that they could see it as Featured Article for 24 hours some day? Another point: will you include technically brilliant articles that are clearly unsuitable for children - perhaps ones with explicit details of various sexual practices? Or will you say that children shouldn't be looking at Wikipedia or that the articles are there anyway if they want to look for them? If so, the mere existence of the articles is not the same as pushing them forward on the front page. APW (talk) 09:57, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

"The encyclopedia that anyone can edit". - the encyclopedia is the article space, and you are perfectly free to edit it. The content that is selected for the main page is not considered to be part of the encyclopedia.

However did that happen? - because I suggested putting featured articles on the main page back in late 2003. When the change was implemented and we moved to a 4 pane main page layout circa February 2004, anyone could change it. And they did. Hourly. It was anarchy. I stepped in, unilaterally declared that it would change once per day, and started doing it myself. Nobody questioned me on it, and I have been doing it ever since. My role in that position was confirmed by vote about 6 months later.

isn't it a bit feeble to claim that people would only want to create a really high standard article so that they could see it as Featured Article for 24 hours some day? - getting one's work on the main page for a day is certainly added incentive.

will you include technically brilliant articles that are clearly unsuitable for children - perhaps ones with explicit details of various sexual practices? - This is a tricky question. I decide those on a case-by-case basis. I've put racy ones there before (ala Gropecunt lane), but I'm reluctant to put Jenna Jameson there.

Or will you say that children shouldn't be looking at Wikipedia or that the articles are there anyway if they want to look for them? - Children should be looking at Wikipedia. And if they go to the article on penis, it should surprise nobody if they see an image of a penis. Raul654 (talk) 15:49, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Ichabod: the glory has departed. Wikipedia is arthritic after only ten years. Your replies say it all. It now comes down to fiefdoms and traditions, proclaimed (not just by you) in rather dismissive and condescending tones. It's a crying shame, and you can't see it. I'll say no more. APW (talk) 22:44, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Featured Articles that have appeared on the Main Page more than once

I don't think that any featured article is supposed to appear on the Main Page more than once. Should there be a policy/rule against this occurrence? I asked this because the Kingdom Hearts article has already appeared on the main page on February 4, 2007 and may appear on the main page again on February 7, 2011. For February 7, they should have chosen a different FA instead of Kingdom Hearts. Jim856796 (talk) 03:03, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

The no-repeating thing is a rule I've imposed on myself. I reserve the right to wave it at any time.

But in this case, it was actually a mistake -- I meant to schedule Kingdom_Hearts_(video_game) (an article about the first video game of that name, which has not appeared on the main page), but when I wrote it up, the blurb linked to Kingdom_Hearts (which is about that video game series as a whole). I've fixed it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Raul654 (talk) 03:17, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm gonna go ahead and take back the comment I made and the section I have started about the Kingdom Hearts article. Jim856796 (talk) 07:44, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Featured articles and inline citations

In the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources#On_citing_every_sentence I make a claim that modern day FAs require that all sentences (barring obvious case) require an inline citation. Some editors disagree. Perhaps some FA writers and reviewers would like to chip in there? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:14, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Featured sounds needs YOU

Dear colleagues, there is a push to have two FSs per week appear on the main page (along with five more FPs, a fine idea IMO). This has lent a sense of urgency to the FSC process. We have three excellent contributors, Sven, Adam, and X!, taking charge of closing the noms, and more regular reviewers would be much appreciated. As at FAC, it is unnecessary to be able to review every aspect; reviewers can choose to review whatever aspect they like, and usually there's no recall by noms on your talk page, as often happens with FACs.

Wikipedia:Featured_sound_candidates Tony (talk) 07:59, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Biology

I have reverted changes by Headbomb introducing further sub-catgeories to the page; please read the latest talk archive, linked above-- there are many others similar, and the goal here is not to create a page like WP:GA, which is harder to maintain and browse. With the exception of Warfare and Biology, which were very long categories, we only split out biographies on longer categories. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:13, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

How in the world is a Plants/Fungi subsection (there is an animal one after all), or having a Videogames and video game series subsection harder to maintain? What is the goal of this page then if not to have something sanely browsable? If it's just to list features articles, we already have Category:Featured articles for that. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 18:31, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Investigating

This is a concern; I checked the tallies carefully as I was recategorizing, so this means there's a mistake somewhere, maybe. (And that is why we don't go willy nilly recategorizing all the time.) I'm going to begin reviewing for the mistake now, but if anyone can help, it's appreciated. I recategorized way back in October 2010, following the big discussion, so I may have to go that far back to check the tally. If Dr pda or Gimmetrow are reading, perhaps they can offer some script help? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:13, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Version before I started re-categorizing had Damageplan listed once. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:17, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Here, Gimme found a missing music article, which could explain why my tally was correct even though one article was duplicated. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:21, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

That seems to be my mistake, since Damageplan was listed twice in that version (and I worked section by section, checking each Category as I completed it). But that shows that the way I checked for accuracy was not complete. I'm going to ping Gimme to see if he can run a script or something to check my before and after work. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:23, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Script says there 3194 unique links on the page. Gimmetoo (talk) 23:42, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you so much, Gimme; I hope that was my only mistake. At least you caught the big one (one I dropped) way back then. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:54, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Merge Geology and geophysics and Meteorology into "Earth Sciences & Meteorology"

It would look something like

Earth Sciences & Meteorology

General

Events

Earth Sciences & Meteorology biographies

David A. Johnston

Which I think is infinitely more browsable, and groups the natural disasters together. WP:GEOLOGY and WP:WPTC notified. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 09:23, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

To someone like me, with a stronger interest in geological topics than meteorological ones, this seems much harder to browse. The "disasters" theme seems a pretty weak link, far outweighed by the differences between the topics. Meteorology already seems very large; how about splitting articles on tropical storms and seasons out from other general meteorology articles instead? --Avenue (talk) 11:58, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Agree with Avenue generally, but we split topics when they approach or pass 200; the only other split is for bios. See Wikipedia talk:Featured articles/Archive 13#Subsections for the very long sections.3F SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:01, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

As someone who has contributed ~20 of the listed FAs, I tend to also agree with Avenue. Geology and meteorology are miles apart (figuratively and literally – they occur about 50,000 feet away from each other), and it is quite difficult to navigate. Just my thoughts. Juliancolton (talk) 17:00, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

As someone who has contributed ~50 of the listed FA's, I also agree with Avenue. ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 17:48, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Theres one very earth(Wikipedia) shattering issue by combining the two the under represented Geologia would find itself lost within the Meteorologia dominance when it comes to being TFA, and that would have a tragic effect to the already limited variety of TFA's. Gnangarra 13:33, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
- As someone who has contibuted to GAs in both fields (volcanic ash in the Geology category 2-3 years back), I also believe geology event articles would get lost within the numerous storm articles. Thegreatdr (talk) 13:55, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Edit request from Krissakristine, 15 March 2011

{{edit semi-protected}} can i edit the birthyear of mariah carey. because the real birthyeAR of mariah carey is March 27,1969 source: http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20269269,00.html

hOW I KNOW THE BIRTHYEAR OF MIRAH CAREY? Note:click the link

    look the title of the article

Inside Mariah Carey's Romantic 40th Birthday Dinner BY TIFFANY MCGEE

Wednesday April 01, 2009 09:55 AM EDT

LOOK THE RELEASE DATE OF THE ARTICLE April 01,2009

LOOK THE RELEASE YEAR OF THE ARTICLE

2009-1969=40

Krissakristine (talk) 08:15, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Not done: Not the place for this... —GFOLEY FOUR— 21:14, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Featured article noticeboard

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates#Featured article noticeboard. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:28, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

New tool of potential use to reviewers

Please forgive the spam (I'm also posting about this to WT:DYK and WP:GA), but there's a new tool that I think reviewers may find useful in helping determine if copyright issues exist in articles: Duplication Detector. It compares an article with another page, including PDFs. It has little bells and whistles, such as permitting you to omit quotations or eliminate numbers. And it lists its output by priority. Mind you, it can't catch some close paraphrasing, since it relies on strings of duplicated text and the default setting of 2 words in tandem will generally need to be adjusted (I myself use 4 or 5, depending). Too, it can't eliminate uncreative content, such as job titles. Human evaluation is still need there.

There is also a template that goes with it, {{dupdet}}, if you'd like to link to its findings. For an example of this in action on a real issue, {{dupdet|Andrei Silard|http://arh.pub.ro/mcristea/Silardcv.htm}} produces {{dupdet|Andrei Silard|http://arh.pub.ro/mcristea/Silardcv.htm}}. This example is not likely to be with us long (unless permission is provided). :) --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 12:22, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Good idea. Perhaps you could link to it on the "Other resources" section of Wikipedia:Copyright violations? Thanks. Regards, RJH (talk) 22:40, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

P's

We must be going through all the P's this week. ;-) Regards, RJH (talk) 15:52, 12 April 2011 (UTC)

Mumia

Should Mumia Abu-Jamal really be in History-bios category?Volunteer Marek (talk) 09:54, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Surely law?--Wehwalt (talk) 14:11, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

It could reasonable go in either, but Law is probably a better fit. Raul654 (talk) 14:11, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Screen real-estate in top-right-hand corner

I was reading the Blaise Pascal article recently, and as well as the featured article bronze star at top right, I also noticed another symbol linking to Portal:Mathematics. As the screen space in the top right corner has traditionally been reserved for the FA and GA symbols, I'm raising this matter here to see if anyone here knows about whether the presence of other symbols up there is commonplace or rare. The symbol (for Portal:Mathematics featured articles) is placed using this portal subpage (functioning as a template, created in April 2011 and currently in use on 40 articles). It has also been discussed here. at the talk page of Portal:Mathematics. The icon was also removed and then restored in May 2011. I'm notifying those two editors and leaving a note at the portal talk page discussion. Carcharoth (talk) 13:54, 25 June 2011 (UTC) Update: Removed and comment left (both by Sandy). Leaving this comment to avoid others thinking this hasn't been addressed. Carcharoth (talk) 22:48, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

More graphs

To follow up on the above, here is the same relationship for the FA articles in the "Warfare" category:

The equation for the regression line here is images=1.45+.0003*characters. The r-squared is .47 which quite a bit lower - but still strong - than the r-squared for the History articles. Basically, the relationship is not as strong though still significant (I can give you t-stats and all that but won't bother). The line indicates that "on average" there's about a one-and-a-half "free" image in each article, and then it's an extra image for every 3300 characters. So for example, an article of length 21500 characters would be expected to have about 8 images. For comparison, the History articles had about two-and-a-half "free" images, then it was one image for every 2500 characters.

I want to put in the disclaimer made above again, that in no way do I think that articles SHOULD fall exactly on the regression line and have "expected" number of images - the actual number of images may diverge from the average relationship for very good article-specific reasons. Rather I think that looking at the data can provide a useful rule of thumb about how many images to expect/include.

Eyeballing the data it may seem like the relationship is pretty strong for "small" FAs but gets loose for "big" articles. This is not in fact the case (one of the pitfalls of eyeballing data). Basically there's fewer "large" articles so it only looks weaker. But I've split the data into articles below and above 20k characters and the r-squares indicate that the relationship is in fact stronger for large articles (r-squares of .16 and .35, respectively). Here's the images:

.

Note that there's no change in slope of the estimate, just the intercept increases for big articles (essentially big articles have one more "free" image). Volunteer Marek (talk) 10:19, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I also looked at "length of lede vs. length of article" - to see if longer articles had longer ledes (they did, weakly), and "length of article vs. days since it's been promoted", to see if there's been any kind of trend overtime in the size of the articles that were being promoted (there wasn't). This was done for a sample of the Warfare FAs (I got lazy in data collection).

You can see a weak (r-sqr = .12) positive relationship between length of lede and length of the article itself (after the characters in the lede have been subtracted off) above. An average article has about 1.5k "free" characters in the lede, then an extra 100 characters in the lede for every 625 characters in the article itself, though there's lots of variance.

Here you can see that there's basically no relationship between how old an article is and how long it is. It is worthy of note however that there are some REALLY OLD FAs which haven't been reviewed.

If I have time I plan on adding some dummies to the above for sub-categories within the topic - there's a bunch of "WWII" articles, a bunch of "Napoleonic Wars", etc. and it might be interesting to see if there's a significant difference between these sub categories along these dimensions.Volunteer Marek (talk) 10:34, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Some graphs and statistics for History FAs that might be of interested

Because of some discussion over the number of images in an FA article, I quickly collected some data on article size and number of images to play with. Here's the scatter plot, with a line of best fit which illustrates this relationship:

As you can see, it's a pretty tight relationship with an r squared of .7 which is pretty damn high for a univariate regression with data that is not artificially related by construction. The t-stat for the slope, .0005, is around 16. The intercept, -2.64, t-stat is at around -2.42, which means there's about 98.3% chance that it's not just a random result. Basically what this says is that on average, you get one image, for every 2000 characters, after the first 5000 characters or so (5280 to be precise). This could be useful as a sort of a rule of thumb for deciding how many images should go into an article (not just FA) - "1 image for every 2000 characters". (To be exact, I also used Heteroscedasticity corrected standard errors since the variance might change there, particularly since within the History FAs there are obvious sub categories like "Chinese Dynasties", "Arctic Explorations", "Texas" etc)

Second a note on how I counted things. Character count was done with the DYK check tool (Shubinator's?). The number of images I just counted manually, including images in the infobox, as well as large tables.

Third, note that there is one obvious outlier, which is Inner German border with a whopping 51 images. At the other end, there's Fredonian Rebellion, which has only one image though it is by no means the shortest FA in the group. Obviously the relationship shown above is not some kind of iron law and individual articles can and should diverge from it for idiosyncratic reasons. For some articles it may be harder to obtain free images than for others (I think that's why the Vietnam related FAs tend to be low on images), while some historical subjects - the geography or art heavy ones - will have lots (which is probably why the Chinese dynasty articles have lots).

Also, I took a look at a distribution of article sizes in this category. The data appears to be log-normally distributed, which makes lots of sense given that you can't have articles with negative number of characters. Basically if you log the article size and plot'em, you get the familiar normal distribution bell curve (well, almost). I'm including two graphs of this below.

Overall this means that there's a lot of internal consistency among the articles which are in the History section of the FAs, whether this is intentional or by accident.Volunteer Marek (talk) 02:36, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Add: I won't bother posting the graphs, but I also split the sample into articles with more than 20k characters and those with less than that. For the "less than 20k characters", the intercept is pretty much zero and the slope is .00032. So for roughly for articles below 20k chars, you get one image for every 3300 characters. For the "more than 20k characters", the intercept is -3.25 and the slope is .0005 (almost). So for articles above 20k chars, you get one image for every 2000 characters, not counting the first 7000 characters.

If there was a quicker way to gather data I would also be interested in looking at other FA categories. Is there at least a bot out there which can spit out a list of article titles and character counts?Volunteer Marek (talk) 03:04, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

User:Dr pda/Featured article statistics has some of the relevant data, and perhaps Dr pda will also have tips for getting the data up to date. Thanks for compiling and analyzing these data. Ucucha 03:19, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, that's useful in terms of thinking about how to proceed. The main problem is that it gives article size in terms of kBs, which (I assume) includes images, which would introduce an artificial upward bias in the image/article size relationship. I will ask the good Doctor if he can help however, thanks.Volunteer Marek (talk) 00:59, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

It's actually readable prose, not article size; see the top of the page. Ucucha 01:03, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

I think images make our articles much more palatable and have a big benefit for readers who are not going to "slog" through from one end to the other or who know less about the subject. I have found that a big issue with images is the text-wrapping and the conflicts of section headers. However, I find doing images centered often takes us out of this "text wrap box". The idea that an article should just be a wall of text with a few decorational pictures (and am often concerned that we do not harshly enough judge articles with poor quality or lacking images...also that we underuse graphs and diagrams, which can be very powerful for conveying info). For the centering trick, see "Painted turtle", "Fluorine", or "Manhattan Project". P.s. thank you for the analysis.TCO (reviews needed) 14:57, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Please note...

That the random featured article link in the top left box is broken. ~ FerralMoonrender (T • C) 14:05, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Shouldn't you notify erwin85?--Wehwalt (talk) 14:19, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that! I've submitted a bug report yesterday right here: https://jira.toolserver.org/browse/ERWIN-22 Joe Seemiller (talk) 20:47, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Note: erwin85 fixed the bug and it's working now. Joe Seemiller (talk) 22:56, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Citations

Hi

I have two queries about template usage in criterion 2c:

"consistent citations: where required by criterion 1c, consistently formatted inline citations using either footnotes (<ref>Smith 2007, p. 1.</ref>) or Harvard referencing (Smith 2007, p. 1)—see citing sources for suggestions on formatting references; for articles with footnotes, the meta:cite format is recommended. The use of citation templates is not required."

I have been using the {{rp|1}} template for page numbers (Template:Rp). This gives the result as^[1]:1 and^[1]:24.
I have been using the {{#tag:ref|Note text.<ref>Ref for the text.</ref>|group="nb"}} for footnotes, giving^{[nb 1]}.

Are these two templates acceptable when used in FAs? Chaosdruid (talk) 17:04, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

I think the general rule is that as long as it's clear where the information came from and you keep the format consistent, exactly how you format citations is up to you. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:55, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

I am thinking about switching over to doing them manually. Maybe something close to what the cite templates do (which seem roughly but not perfectly AP style). I really don't like the lags for cite templates when working on a page. Also, someone loading a big page like painted turtle (out in RL) the first time is looking at a several second wait. I think SV was right on that. Gadget even backed her up. Of course, I need to write an FA first. Well...the first step of rabit stew recipe, ya know. Plus I really hate how hard it is to use the cite toolbar thingie (micro font, layout of entries poor), plus doing it manual keeps you more in touch with the actual output.TCO (reviews needed) 19:05, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

I love ldr and want to start doing that as well. wikitext is an abortion in edit window mode with all the markup text inline.TCO (reviews needed) 19:05, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

I agree with HJ on that point: you could write an entire article and follow APA or MLA or any specific style guide's citation format, and so long as you did so consistently, you'd be fine. You could use the citation templates here if you wanted, and if you did so consistently, you'd be fine. One thing to note about the templates is that they generate metadata in the HTML code that a reader's browser interprets. That metadata allows browsers or browser plugins to interpret the citation so it knows that the author names, publication titles, etc are. That would allow a browser to reformat or interpret the data in various ways. As for TCO's flippant comment about wikicoding: it's a far cry better than hand encoding in pure HTML, and I'm frankly sick of TCO using any discussion thread to attack wikicoding. If you don't like it so much, stop working on a wiki. Imzadi 1979 → 19:30, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification.

My friend used to hand code html, but in the time it took him to produce one website I had produced around 10 (using HotDog and then Dreamweaver). More importantly, the ones I had done used flash and javascript and looked 10 times better. Currently we use Joomla, much better and quicker for us in most cases. Chaosdruid (talk) 21:19, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Doubt on "Featured"

Hello All! I know this might sound a bit odd, especially after these many years. Maybe it was addressed before too. But i couldn’t find it anywhere. Hence i put forth my thoughts on the term used in Wikipedia as “Featured Articles”. All the editors (except new-comers) & few curious readers know what exactly a Featured Article means. To put in less diplomatic words, a Featured Article on Wikipedia means one of the best articles that Wikipedia has to offer. (Please correct me if i am on completely wrong side of the world.) So, a featured article is something that covers almost all things that can be in that article, it has notable references which means that the things written in them are almost true, it is well written in the language used, it is presented in an appreciative manner & easily understandable AND the article in itself is worthy to be FEATURED. Now this last point does actually stand as the last point in the criteria of “featuring” any article. That is because the article is already wikified, has been on Wikipedia for long & is not something that doesn’t belong to the non-encyclopedia category. Means, it’s not obviously the List of milk products sold in the grocery store next to Michael Jackson’s home. But as i mentioned earlier, this is what all editors & few curious readers know.
But what about the new readers? Do they all understand what exactly does a Featured Article mean? Do they understand that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s article being a featured article doesn’t mean that she is a very best of the actresses of her era & her particular film industry? Do people understand that the star marked on the right corner is just for the article and not the thing that is represented in the article? Do they understand this all? I doubt they do. For example if a person from China who is completely new to Hollywood sees that Kristen Dunst has a star mark on her page and the most academy-award-nominated actress Meryl Streep doesn’t have any stars, isn’t there a chance that he might feel that Kristen Dunst is a better actress than Meryl Streep? Or even further more, he might even think that Wikipedia rates her more on that level as compared to her other co-actresses. Because ‘featured’ is an adjective and using it for a particular article makes people obviously compare things of that category. Some American might hence think that Madhuri Dixit is not as good an actress (even if she is talked by many Indians) than what Preity Zinta is. I agree that majority of people might not think so. But how many readers go through the Criteria for Featured Articles? (Frankly speaking i myself haven’t been through it. So there are very good chances that what i am saying this can be all wrong.) The wiktionary defines “featured” as “displayed with special treatment” & “Having features of a particular kind”. Are we editors denying this tiny chance that we might be prejudicing minds of readers? & further to that we publish one Featured Article everyday on our homepage. Now…i don’t say that the home page publishing should stop. But cant this problem be solved? Maybe by being more specific of what the term “Featured” stands here. Or even maybe replacing this term with something that clearly says that the article is just well written?
As said many time, i might be completely wrong with this. But i would like to read views from you all about this. Thank you for reading this long babbling. -Animeshkulkarni (talk) 13:08, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I agree with you. Before I created my account, I had thought that Featured Articles were merely a certain article that had been picked as one to show on the main page that day. "Featured" is a bit of a misleading term. I've decided to take a look at what the some of the other language Wikipedias call their best articles:

Simple English: Very good articles
Arabic: ويكيبيديا:مقالات مختارة (Selected Articles)
Afrikaans: Voorbladartikel (Front Page Articles)
Danish: Fremragende artikler (Excellent Articles)
German: Exzellente Artikel (Excellent Articles)
Esperanto: Artikolo de la semajno (Article of the Week)
French: Articles de qualité (Quality Articles)
Italian: Vetrina (Featured)
Russian: Избранные статьи (Featured Articles)
Spanish: Artículos destacados (Featured Articles)
Chinese: 正文 (Google Translate went berserk on this one; it translates that as "Text" and the main header of the page as "Wikipedia Generous Body of the Ring". I doubt that's what the Chinese actually call their best content...)

In any case, it appears that the names vary greatly from language to language. Personally, I would prefer that the name be something else - but can anyone think of a better adjective? (In answer to your first comments: I don't believe that naming articles "Featured" necessarily promotes their topics. Wikipedia's policy is neutrality, and readers only need to look at the article to see that we are not promoting its subject.) Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 16:01, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Well anybody who wonders what the star means is going to click on it, which leads to a page explaining exactly what it's all about, so I don't think ambiguity is really a problem. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:29, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Re-Promoted?

I think there should be some indicator of the 42 Featured Articles which have been re-promoted. Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 16:03, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

They are already mentioned at Wikipedia:Former featured articles#Former featured articles that have been re-promoted. I don't see any reason to highlight them at WP:FA as well. Dabomb87 (talk) 16:06, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

There is nothing wrong with distinguishing them in both locations. Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 23:55, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

On the page of promoted articles, why should articles that have been promoted from a demoted state be distinguished from those that have been promoted "fresh"? I don't think many militaries distinguish people in the same rank that way. A general who was demoted and then repromoted to general would be listed with other generals without further note. In a list of demoted generals, however, a note for re-promoted generals makes some sense. Gimmetoo (talk) 02:02, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Okay; you're right. That was a stupid idea. Interchangeable|talk to me|what I've changed 19:37, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Dweller is an utter berk

Could Gimmebot post a snapshot to the diff of the promoted article when it updates talk pages? Then, if the article degenerates somewhat, it's easy for editors to see what the peer-reviewed content looked like. Even better if there's another single click option to see what's changed since that diff. Thanks --Dweller (talk) 15:50, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

It already does, with the |oldidn= parameter in Template:ArticleHistory. Ucucha (talk) 15:59, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

You know, it's good for the soul to be reminded on a frequent basis that you're an utter berk. Thanks and apologies for wasting your time. <smacks head with blunt objects> --Dweller (talk) 16:09, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Now, don't overdo it :) Ucucha (talk) 16:14, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

RFC on identifiers

There is an RFC on the addition of identifier links to citations by bots. Please comment. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:06, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

former featured article template

Firstly, please forgive me if not is not the right place. I have seen the addition of the template Template:former featured article (it adds a FA star with a cross, as we do with current FAs, sans the cross). This is not, as far as I can see, an established practice. While I'll not go over any pros and cons here, it should be at least discussed or nipped in a bud now. I'm mostly posting it to bring it to the attention of people more familiar with the ins and outs of the FA system. Яehevkor ✉ 17:57, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Seems to have been dealt with now, thank you. Яehevkor ✉ 11:11, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Dashes convention

I suggest that every FA article be made to conform to the dashes conventions using a script. See User:GregU/dashes.js for such a script. I have been running the script on FA pages on the main page, but it would be best if this script was run well before an article appears on the main page. --DThomsen8 (talk) 12:40, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I note there has been no reply here. Is this because no-one has bothered to reply yet, or is it because FA writers in general don't like suggestions that they 'conform' to a 'convention'? Is writing done by humans or scripts? Do other encyclopedias have their articles copyedited by humans or scripts? That last is not a rhetorical question. I'm genuinely interested in whether in professional editing environments (book, journal and magazine publishing) there are such things as scripts being operated to ensure conformity to such things? Carcharoth (talk) 15:41, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Today the Featured Article was bolded by a 'bot, UcuchaBot, in pursuit of a standard on the names of articles. As for your question about professional editing, I am far from expert, but I suspect that there are standard processes for paper manuscripts to become digital manuscripts, and those are subjected to spell and grammar checking, among other things. Now some professionally edited mass magazines have begun to accept electronic documents as submissions, as has been announced by Analog Science Fact and Fiction in an editorial and on their web site. --DThomsen8 (talk) 00:55, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Featured articles and categories

Has anyone ever considered adding the GA and FA icons to articles in categories? It seems to me it would be a very useful method of guiding browsers to better quality articles and increasing their exposure. Gatoclass (talk) 13:13, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Why a bronze star?

Is there a reason why the English Wikipedia (as well as some other language editions) use a bronze star as the symbol for featured articles instead of the gold star that some other language editions of Wikipedia use? Rreagan007 (talk) 16:33, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Do you mean why does {{Featured article}} use

instead of

or possibly

? -- Rick Block (talk) 17:17, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I mean. Rreagan007 (talk) 17:44, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Most likely because at some point the consensus was that it looked better. I agree; to me the gold that some languages have looks somehow childish. Ucucha (talk) 23:14, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

9/11

How many years are we going to have a 9/11 related feature article on Sept 11? The first 5 years it was cute, now its simply predictable, and a few more years of this we will be moving towards boring (or maybe plain old wierd)

to put it differently- if WP does this for a 1000 years aren't we going to run out of 9/11 related articles? Is anyone planning on drawing the line anywhere? Are we going to do this for one of the tsunami's, with death tolls and socio-political effects hundred of times greater than 9/11? I want to see a tsunami-related FA every March 11 for the next DECADE, does that sound normal to everyone?66.220.113.98 (talk) 05:38, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

This year is the tenth anniversary of 9/11, so that seems a good reason to have a 9/11-related today's featured article. Last year we did not (WP:Today's featured article/September 11, 2010, and quite probably next year we won't either. Ucucha (talk) 11:13, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

I have to agree with the original writer. Im pretty sure everyone remembers today is the 10th anniversary, because thats what the entire internet is doing today. Thats what basically every TV station n the US is doing (Im slight exaggerating to make a point, just so its clear...But only sort of.) I have no problem with these being featured articles...But wikipedia is not a newspaper. We have the "In the news" and "On this day" sections on the main page too. There are many hypothetical disputes too, which will not be given voice really.

Again, knowing I am saying the following to make a point is important: Does the featured articel being about american airlines flight 11 suggest that no one else mattered then? Or no one else matters today? I recall there being several events of notable tragedy. If its okay to put the article where it is, when it is, then I am certain we can find a whole lot of important anniversaries to take up the Featured Article slot for the next decade without repeating. But thats what the "in the news" and "On this day" sections are for. 74.132.249.206 (talk) 18:50, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Upon further consideration, I cant participate in this discussion. My apologies. I think my point remains valid, but I was directly affected by the events in question, and can in no way discuss this from a neutral position. I'm leaving the comment up though. 74.132.249.206 (talk) 19:12, 11 September 2011 (UTC)