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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-06-13/Featured content

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Featured lists hit the main page

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By Tony1 and Dabomb87
Twin furies over the Atlantic, like galaxies in a handshake: Hurricanes Helene and Gordon (top, now the subject of a new featured article) dominated the ocean in mid-September 2006, but a persistent ridgeline of high pressure spared the US east coast from their effects. This NASA image shows the tightly wound central portions and well-defined cloud-filled eyes. An interactive display of extraordinarily high resolution is available here.


This week's "Featured content" covers Sunday 5 – Saturday 11 June


Featured lists on the main page

A smiling, dark-skinned man wearing a white suit jacket, a blue button-down shirt and dark pants
One of our newest featured lists is the next instalment of the all-time roster of the celebrated baseball team the Phillies. Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins began his career with the Phillies in 1965; this photograph was taken in 2009.
As if from a staged musical, women sell flowers in 1877 on the pavement in Covent Garden, London, the subject of a new featured article.
From the new featured article, the great American man of letters, Ernest Hemingway, in his Paris apartment two years before the publication of his first successful novel, The Sun Also Rises
One of a male–female pair of new featured pictures of a bird seen throughout much of southern and eastern Asia: a male Black-breasted Thrush
The brilliant photographer of the American West, Ansel Adams (1902–84), captured this compositionally striking image of a Native American church in 1942. Uploaded in very high resolution and restored by User:Kaldari, this is now a featured picture.
Chess prodigy Samuel Reshevsky shows grandmasters how to play in a 1920 Paris tournament, at the age of eight, in a new featured picture.

In the first structural change to the main page in some years, a featured list will now be included there once a week, on Mondays, starting today, 13 June. This is the outcome of an extended debate and a unanimous RfC in which 49 editors participated. The RfC was launched by WFC, who says the hope is that the Today's featured list process "will mature to a point where it's ready to take a daily spot [though] any future expansion would require a fresh proposal" at main-page talk. The featured list is in its own box under "Did you know" and "On this day", and above "Picture of the day". The blurb will be about 1000 characters in length, accompanied by a right-aligned image.

The backend for TFL has been developed by Edokter, with assistance from other editors, including main-page guru Raul654 and RexxS. Adam Cuerden put in a considerable amount of work on the design and coding before leaving Wikipedia. "We are very grateful", says WFC. "The template for submitting new suggestions, {{TFLcontent}}, has been designed for simplicity and efficiency. Detailed, user-friendly instructions are provided at the submissions page. But the real beauty is that the template is used all the way through the process. Once a blurb has been accepted, and if necessary copy-edited, the entire template can be copied and pasted into the pool of main page candidates, currently located here."

FL director The Rambling Man told The Signpost, "a long-held feeling that FLs should be represented on the main page really got going once the featured sounds crew made a serious bid to shake things up. We thought we'd head in on the crest of the revolutionary wave, but eventually it transpired that featured sounds requires more growth in editor input and its collection of promoted files. But featured lists has been pretty stable for a long time; we just needed to hold off until someone could adequately code the solution. That's now done, and that's where we are."

"Featured lists has matured as a process over the past three years. But I think the key to the main page bid has been not to run before we could walk: the very last thing we wanted to do was to head to main page, blow it, and suffer premature cancellation. It was going to be two days a week, but to be honest, one day a week for the next couple of months is amazing. I can't recall the last time the main page had a 'make over', but this will be the most recent one, no matter what, and we want it to succeed."

Dabomb87 says "initially it will be down to the FL directors to decide—that is, The Rambling Man, Giants2008, and me—perhaps a couple of weeks in advance so we can queue them up and ensure there are no major issues like deadlinks, dabs. We're following that model until we know things are running smoothly, and then we'll need to work out a more egalitarian method of selection. In this honeymoon period, the FL community will be thrilled to see its work finally acknowledged."

In our regular coverage, eight lists were promoted last week:


Six articles were promoted to featured status:

  • Hurricane Gordon (2006) (nom), completely rewritten by co-nominator Hurricanehink as part of a possible featured topic related to the 2006 season. Co-nominator Juliancolton says, "If you thought hurricanes are only for Florida, think again – individuals affected by Gordon may have well been eating fish and chips, drinking Guinness, or driving on the Autovía de los Pantanos." This photo-like image was acquired via NASA's Aqua satellite. (picture at top)
  • Covent Garden (nom), a district on the eastern fringes of London's West End, now a popular shopping and tourist site. The precinct is home to the Royal Opera House, also known as "Covent Garden". (SilkTork) (picture at right)
  • Guy Fawkes Night (nom), one of England's most enduring and unique spectacles, celebrated annually on or around 5 November. Initially it commemorated the deliverance of a Stuart king, but it wasn't long before it became embroiled in the religious turmoil between England's Protestant and Catholic religions. (Parrot of Doom)
  • Banksia paludosa (nom), commonly known as the marsh or swamp banksia, endemic to the mid-eastern regions of Australia, mostly close to the coast. (Nominated by Casliber)
  • Voalavo gymnocaudus (nom), a small rodent on the large island of Madagascar, off south-eastern Africa; the species was discovered only a little over a decade ago. (Ucucha)
  • The Sun Also Rises (nom), the first successful novel, written in 1926, by Nobel prize–winning American author Ernest Hemingway; in many ways it was a work that came to define a generation. (Truthkeeper88) (picture at right)


Five images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":


There are nine new featured sounds

New featured picture by User:JJ Harrison: sea-salt harvesting in Pak Thale, Phetchaburi, Thailand, an ancient practice in which salt is obtained by the evaporation of seawater.


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