Wikipedia talk:Featured content/Archive 1

message: Well, people kept changing the featured article and picture to today's date so I took the plunge and implemented constant updating. I tested it first and it seems like the large switch only takes an extra second or two to evaluate so I'm hoping it is considered a worthwhile tradeoff. Basically, the page updates regularly to display a featured article and picture from a 'randomly' selected date between November 1, 2004 (when 'Picture of the day' pages first started being set up) and February 23, 2006 (the current date when I made the change). That's 480 days - which will each be displayed for one minute three times per day (3 * 480 = 1,440 = 24 hours * 60 minutes). If people like / accept this I'll update the system at some point in the future to display featured content from additional days as they are added. The general goal is to 'leverage' all of the older 'featured content' which has been sitting around gathering dust... now any visit to this page will show some of that past information in a pseudo-random fashion. --CBDunkerson 00:09, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: More important (to me) than the location. Why was the regularly updating content removed? What reason is there to just show today's featured content again? The whole point of this page was to showcase all of the old featured content. --CBDunkerson 13:09, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Date of Featured Content 

message: why am i getting "edit" links throughout when it's coded for NOEDITSECTION ? --Quiddity 22:14, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Because those 'edit' links are in the actual code of the page. They're built into the portal box sections. --CBDunkerson 02:35, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: doh! --Quiddity 02:57, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edit section? 

message: A new '#rand:' feature has been added to the MediaWiki software on a trial basis. If this gets removed we can revert to the old style, but in the mean-time I have made updates to take advantage of this new capability. The page now generates different random content on each page load rather than every sixty seconds. I also changed it to use different dates for the featured article and picture, allowing a larger list of both to be accessed. --CBDunkerson 22:05, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Update 

message: I'm suggesting that:
*we move the "new featured content" into a full column on the right. (basic idea demo (in broken-table-layout-style.. would need some other things tweaked for it to work))
*we wikilink the "Featured content:" ToC-style header in the top-right box of all the 4 "featured" pages (done)
*we shorten the intro text, and shrink the top-right box, so that more content is within the page-top (above the fold).
basically: tighten, simplify, and make more useful. thoughts? --Quiddity
:I've found that people have very different ideas as to what constitutes 'useful layout'. This page actually used to have 'tighter' left and right columns, no 'upper right box', and a shorter intro. See this old version.
:I agree with your suggestions, but the more heavily used a page is the more different opinions of how it should look there are. :]
::Absolutely. As you said further up "Maybe the issue is that people are trying to use this page for two different purposes: as a 'top level' project page for the Featured article, Featured picture, et cetera project pages AND as a showcase for all of wikipedia's featured content."
::Definitely, but i think we can embrace them both on one page. Getting people interested in one aspect will (hopefully) lead to the other (enjoying to creating).
::Showcase fresh, and older, content at the top. Provide tools/overview at bottom.
::(everything else sounds good. i'll go think some more. sadly i'm not adept at wikitables yet (tables! i spent years unlearning html tables mutter mutter webstandards mutter (i'll figure that all out later this summer... ;) ). --Quiddity 01:51, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That said, I don't think anyone would object to the 'link to Featured content in the headers' idea so I'll make that change on the other pages. I think you should go ahead with the others and I support putting a link in the side-navigation-box (and the related main page change you suggested in the browsebar TFD discussion). Just expect there to be alot of tweaking of the design. On 'tightening' one idea was to use the more compact 'POTD-row' version of the pictures of the day... I think that would be an improvement, but those are a fairly recent invention and would have to be created for a few hundred older 'pictures of the day'. --CBDunkerson 00:45, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Followup - I created a Template:FCpages to do the nevigation links for all the 'featured' sub-pages - including the little arrow for the currently viewed page. This way when 'Featured topics' are rolled in (and note that TUF-KAT recently 'promoted' Saffron as a 'Featured topic') they can just be added to that template and appear on all the featured pages. Ditto for 'Featured sounds' eventually. --CBDunkerson 01:15, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm still strongly behind these ideas. But i don't have time to lead them through as proposals myself. Plus HereToHelp is trying out his own ideas right now, and i don't want to interfere with that. I'll watch this page though, and if anyone else would care to push this forward, i'll strongly support. --Quiddity 10:17, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: suggestions

message: If we use This edit's layout, (but move "featured lists" to under "featured portals"), with the single column "New featured content". it should work. (I cannot do a demo, because the random featured article and featured picture are embedded in a single template.) --Quiddity 03:08, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This is still a portal design - let portals be portals and this be what it needs to be. I wouldn't support changing the respective featured content pages to box designs (unless, of course, it looked sufficiently better). To comment on Wikipedia formatting at-large, I do think that much greater attention should be paid to the 'common look and feel' principal of design. Such an approach is always advantageous for websites: the best have adopted it. --cj | talk 11:33, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I wasn't suggesting changing the other pages' layouts, just WP:FC. --Quiddity 19:20, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, what if we did redo all of the featured-related pages in the sam style? Heck, we can pull out our trusty blue green and purple again (I may try my draft with them, in fact).--HereToHelp 19:32, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Or, what if we did them up like the Main Page (and what will soon be the Community Portal), like so?--HereToHelp 22:39, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Layout

message: Do we need to have featured prject as well for wiki space?  Shyam (T/C) 22:02, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you mean assigning 'featured' status to various Wikiprojects? If so then I think that is probably unlikely. While some Wikiprojects are certainly very well organized and important to Wikipedia they inherently aren't 'content' of the encyclopedia, but rather coordinated efforts towards developing that content. We assign 'featured' status to the finished product, but it might be worthwhile to have some sort of recognition for exceptional Wikiprojects. Possibly a 'project of the week' or something like that. --CBDunkerson 22:15, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Specifying it as a "project of the week" would limit it to one per week, though, which would make it more of a competition than a general recognition of quality.  But I think some form of recognition would be helpful, both in terms of encouraging WikiProjects to become more effective and also giving them some extra advertising on a prominent page. Kirill Lokshin 22:31, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The metric used to judge wikiprojects is the final product they generate - featured articles. Beyond that, no, the featured article designation is for main space articles alone. Raul654 23:02, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Obviously; but presumably having something like a "Showcase WikiProject" or "Selected WikiProject" or whatnot would not be entirely verboten? Kirill Lokshin 23:32, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I do agree with Kirill Lokshin. If we can not have project as featured status, we can use another name to distingush well-formated and more important project to other projects. Response to Raul654: We have many projects, like copyright problems, untagged images etc. which are not associated to make articles to featured status. Response to CBDunkerson: Featured articles or any other featured contents are not finished products, still there is wide scope to make improve and provide information. If featured contents are finished products then why they are protected?  Shyam (T/C) 05:40, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Urshyam, I meant 'finished product' in the sense of 'articles', 'pictures', 'lists', et cetera... these are the products generated by Wikiprojects. Obviously most of these can continue to be improved and thus are never 'finished' in that sense. --CBDunkerson 13:08, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

text: The community portal might be a good place for some sort of 'Wikiproject recognition'. There are alot of active Wikiprojects that many people don't know about so some form of promotion might be worth-while. --CBDunkerson 13:08, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That might work nicely; we'd still need some way of selecting them, though. Kirill Lokshin 15:36, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Something similar to COTW or AID?--cj | talk 09:44, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That might work for picking a "project of the week".  Whether the projects chosen would necessarily be "good" ones is questionable, but I suspect we wouldn't be able to pick those without a messy FAC-like process anyways. Kirill Lokshin 16:25, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

text: The 'by namespace' idea is interesting organizationally, but I question that we really need 'featured users' or 'featured templates'. Again, to date the concept of 'featured' has been to identify content which we want to particularly emphasize to the general readers. I can see some sort of 'Wikiproject recognition' as a way of advertising and promoting Wikiprojects, but 'user' and 'template' areas would just be... 'contests' for personal aggrandizement. Granted, there is an element of that in all 'featured' work, but it should be subsidiary to identifying exceptional articles / pictures / lists / et cetera. --CBDunkerson 20:21, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If an entire (but relatively small) Wikiproject was wholly made up of good / featured articles I would call it a 'featured project'. The amount of effort to create the rules and judge such merit effectively would be very difficult however. For this reason it is unviable. michael talk 02:19, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think, we need to have feautured users and featured templates as well. If we can have an image as featured content then why can not have featured template? I also think we need to have featured users according to their great and great contribution to wikipedia with user page should also be of good quality. They need not to be sysops. We need to create list namespace and featured topics should be moved to category namespace.  Shyam (T/C) 05:51, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

text: If images are considered as content then why templates can not be considered as content? Okay, we can leave the idea about user namespace for now, if it is disruptive. But my intension is to have content in namespaces.  Shyam (T/C) 06:30, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If you're really serious about making a proposal, I really think this discussion should be transfered to the Wikipedia:Village Pump. This isn't the appropriate forum.--cj | talk 06:38, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Proposal has been made on the village pump page, please make all the comments there.  Shyam (T/C) 07:22, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Featured project 

message: It has been proposed that instead of featured articles, featured content would appear at the navigation box. Show support or opposition at the proposal page. --Howard the Duck 08:58, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Just to update, this looks to be a confirmed part of the redesign, based on zero complaints. --Quiddity 19:26, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Cool. Always good to see that there are a few things which we all seem to agree on. :] --CBD 21:45, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Wikipedia talk:Village pump (proposals)/Sidebar redesign#Instead of "Featured articles" why not "featured content"?|Sidebar redesign]] 

message: Serious work needs to be done on the featured lists section of this page.
All other items are, as they should be, a summary of the content of the relevant page. Featured article section just has newest article and reference to FA page for more, same with featured picture, but featured list just has everything spilled out. It 1. takes too much space, 2. screws the page visual design, and 3. Suggest a disproportionate importance of lists compared to other featured items.
We need to change that section to either 1. have just the most recent lists, or 2. have just one list with a summary of what that list lists. In both cases, a link would then follow to the FL page. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.80.225.50 (talk • contribs) .
:It would be possible to make the 'featured lists' section work just like the featured article... showing the header paragraph(s) of a single randomly selected featured list on each page view with a link to go to the full list article page. The problem, and reason I haven't done this to date, is that it would require either copying the header of each featured list to a new page or pages (as has been done with featured articles > articles of the day) OR putting 'includeonly' tags around the header section of each featured list. I think the latter would be a great improvement even for featured articles because it would allow changes to the article/list header to show up here automatically. However, any plan to do such would require wide community understanding and support or people will remove the tags in the course of normal editing. Setting them up as templates,  and , might help to make their usage clearer. Thoughts? --CBD 19:10, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Good solution. It'd be nice to clean up that section of this page. --Quiddity·(talk) 19:24, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: How about the way I did it on my userpage? --Howard the Duck 08:19, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That's pretty much the idea except for ironing out how much of the list to display here. On some of them the header is long and would take up a sizable box by itself. On others the header is just a couple of sentences. Likewise the items in the list can be a single line each or a wide table cell. After scanning various lists I'm thinking the most consistent way might be to skip the header and instead include the first several entries of the list up to some pre-determined height for the display box. A format listing the list title at the top, several examples, and then a link to the full list at the bottom would always display the kind of info contained in the list... which is what makes it 'featured' / interesting. --CBD 11:43, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I like including the header, but the first few entries will be fine. --Howard the Duck 17:14, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I put it in to randomly select one of three featured lists currently. Will add more if this test works out ok. --CBD 22:24, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks really good. --Quiddity 01:33, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm guessing the 'transparent background problem' you refer to is the white border on the left and bottom of the image? Yeah, that's odd. Might be able to play with the colors to make that section white like the articles so the display would be consistent with them. We could also adjust it to just not include the image. I wasn't sure whether it and the table would both fit at lower resolutions anyway. --CBD 10:45, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I took a screenshot using the mov-developer toolbar, displaying element information: :Image:Featured-list-image-problem-demo2.png. I'm not sure what needs tweaking though: "thumb" or "tright" or both (in monobook/main.css or MediaWiki:Monobook.css). (The note in monobook.css, to "See #Framed_image_background_color", doesnt make sense either). I'll try to bring this up at the css talkpage tomorrow, if you don't figure it out before :) --Quiddity 19:22, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Unfortunately, images/CSS/anything remotely 'style' related isn't really my thing. I usually leave the 'make it look pretty' stuff to other people. I'm guessing that the white border is amongst the various things that the 'thumb' designation does. Could probably be resolved by changing it to a table with the text aligned below the image (simulated thumb), but would then likely need to be adjusted for every 'thumb' image. --CBD 21:52, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Featured lists rework 

message: (except the image in Nuclear power has that transparant background problem. See :Image:Featured-list-image-problem-demo.png. Is there a bug listed for this? I can't remember where else it cropped up.) --Quiddity 01:33, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm guessing the 'transparent background problem' you refer to is the white border on the left and bottom of the image? Yeah, that's odd. Might be able to play with the colors to make that section white like the articles so the display would be consistent with them. We could also adjust it to just not include the image. I wasn't sure whether it and the table would both fit at lower resolutions anyway. --CBD 10:45, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I took a screenshot using the mov-developer toolbar, displaying element information: :Image:Featured-list-image-problem-demo2.png. I'm not sure what needs tweaking though: "thumb" or "tright" or both (in monobook/main.css or MediaWiki:Monobook.css). (The note in monobook.css, to "See #Framed_image_background_color", doesnt make sense either). I'll try to bring this up at the css talkpage tomorrow, if you don't figure it out before :) --Quiddity 19:22, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Unfortunately, images/CSS/anything remotely 'style' related isn't really my thing. I usually leave the 'make it look pretty' stuff to other people. I'm guessing that the white border is amongst the various things that the 'thumb' designation does. Could probably be resolved by changing it to a table with the text aligned below the image (simulated thumb), but would then likely need to be adjusted for every 'thumb' image. --CBD 21:52, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: image problem

message: I have been thinking about adjusting the featured picture display and wanted to get some feedback. Currently each of the top three sections (article, picture, & list) takes up the full width of the page. There isn't really any way around that with the lists, but there are ways that the featured article and featured picture could be put side by side. What do people think of the following options;
#Leave it the way it is - lots of blank space on either side of featured picture and can only use 'picture of the day' entries from November 2004 forward.
#Switch to using 'POTD row' format with picture and descriptive text taking up right 40% of top section beside article. May be a bit 'scrunched' and would reduce the usable 'picture of the day' pool to only those from March 2006 forward.
#Switch to using just the picture with no descriptive text. This would be less scrunched and allow use of all featured pictures (even those which have never been used for 'picture of the day'), but would lose the text describing what the picture is / who took it / et cetera.
So, positive and negatives to each of them. If we just want to display the pictures then I think '3' is the clear favorite, but if we want to describe them also then there are benefits to both '1' and '2'. --CBD 22:37, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Re: option #2, might the 'POTD column' format be another option? eg Wikipedia:POTD column/March 12, 2006 vs Wikipedia:POTD row/March 12, 2006 vs Wikipedia:POTD/March 12, 2006. --Quiddity 02:05, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, either the row or column format could be used. They both start around the same time and have no 'fixed border' around the image and description. Would just be a matter of which 'fit' better. --CBD 10:38, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

text: I put POTD row in with portals next to it for now. Having the article and picture next to each other was just implausible for the 800x600 folks. It worked for about 50% of the images, but the wider ones caused the featured article section to get completely mangled. Even the current setup has problems with some of the very wide pictures like Wikipedia:POTD row/April 26, 2006... that's 700px wide, which at 800x600 means that anything on the same row other than the sidebar is not going to work. We could switch to the condensed version (Wikipedia:POTD) without the text, remove the wide images from the selection list, or leave it as is and have 800x600 look messy for the really wide images - basically the text gets scrunched down to just a few words per line and trails off down the page that way. Fortunately the text on featured pictures is short, but even so it can scroll down a full page. --CBD 12:27, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I decided to just move the portal up to the top next to the article. Works much better. The picture now uses exactly the same template and available width as on the main page and the article has more width available here than it does on the main page. Everything looks fine at 800x600 and pretty good at higher resolutions. The bottom of the article and portal boxes doesn't line up perfectly in most cases, but it is only a little off - even that could be fixed by doing the box markup directly rather than relying on Portal:Box-header. --CBD 12:53, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Featured picture options 

message: Just for completeness I took the 'featured portal of the week / month' concept from Portal:Browse and made that into a random display as well. Has about half the featured portals currently (those which are bolded on the Wikipedia:Featured portals page) and I'll look around for suitable images to set the remaining ones up with. --CBD 21:55, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I centered the text, but couldn't determine how to center the image. --Quiddity 02:27, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Portals too 

message: Should the 'edit' links over each section be removed? I'm thinking of switching the page away from using Portal:Box-header so that we can line up the bottoms of the featured article and featured portal boxes and wonder if I should still manually build in edit links after that. These have been handy for updating the sub-sections or fixing situations where the image attached to a featured article has been deleted, but should we be concerned about possible vandalism as traffic here increases? This being linked to the Main Page was one thing, but it being linked from every page in the sidebar is going to be a much bigger deal. I think I was reading Wikipedia for a year before I even discovered the main page existed. The vandalism issue is particularly tricky in this case because a vandal could edit one of the old featured article entries that randomly appeared for them and then it would be 'gone' until the same item got randomly pulled up for another user later. I have most of these pages watchlisted, but it's alot to keep an eye on and I don't check every day. --CBD 10:49, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yup, also the page should probably be permanently semi-protected, like Wikipedia:Featured articles is now. --Quiddity 21:04, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edit links? 

message: How about matching the individual featured content pages with the basic color palettes in each section on this page to tie them together? I'll volunteer to that if there's support, or at least no big objections. Rfrisbietalk 21:26, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I adjusted the individual page color palettes to match those here. I also adjusted the layouts here and there to make them a bit more consistent. Rfrisbietalk 18:30, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The individual page intros in the header shades looked a bit strong to me, so I switched them to the intro accent shade here. The remaining colors stayed the same. The current arrangement uses color tie-ins across all "featured" pages by having intros with the same shade. The "type" of featured content has color tie-ins from this page to each type page by using the same hue for the main backgrounds and accent sections.  The style of color palettes used are presented at Wikipedia talk:Colours. Rfrisbietalk 21:03, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Fine with me. The picture background is purple since that comes in from the transcluded template - which is set up that way for the Main Page. We used light green on the article so that too would be consistent with the Main Page. The other featured types aren't shown on the Main Page and were originally set to be consistent with the 'featured' pages on each, but they were later changed to individual colors which you have now changed the 'featured pages' to follow. It's a subtle thing, but I think the color consistency across pages/templates is a good idea. --CBD 13:48, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

text: Looks good :) --Quiddity 17:48, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't see a reason to do this. I personally prefer the variety with the various projects having their own colors. It gets a little boring seeing the same colors on every page. ♠ SG →Talk 11:31, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I like variety too.  I also like using color as a navigation aide.  I agree the types of featured pages could use more tie-ins, but I recommend they use the hues at the Main Page when present, here, and Wikipedia talk:Colours.  Using pictures as an example, tie-in shades would be for Hue 270, e.g., H:270 S:15 V:75, H:270 S:15 V:95, H:270 S:10 V:100, and H:270 S:4 V:100. Rfrisbietalk 14:34, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Featured content color palette tie-ins