This is the Current Events Portal Reform Taskforce, dedicated to reforming the presentation format of the current events portal.
The growth of Wikipedia has put a strain on all its institutions, including the current events portal. With a greater amount of stories being put into the current events portal, the portal is becoming disorganized, and this may drive away viewers.
Whether we planned on this or not, Wikipedia is a news aggregator, of sorts. Our portal needs to reflect this status.
So far, the main proposal for reform is to add subheadings. My suggestion is categories for "Sport", "Arts and celebrity culture", "Science", "Business and economics", "Weather and environmental incidents", "Law and politics", and one for either "Armed conflict" or "Violent incidents", perhaps in reverse order. I would prefer unsorted events to go either at the top with no subheading, or at the bottom under "Other current events". Within each category, events should be sorted into groups for continent or country, particlarly if there are a lot of entries under one subheading. We need to have a model which works on most days, but still be flexible and deal with categories on a day-to-day basis, merging topics together on slower news days, and leaving all of the Law, politics and violence up the tope early on in the day before enough news items have come in to begin sorting. And one last small thing: I prefer capitalising only the letter of the first letter (eg "Violent incidents" rather than "Violent Incidents"); I believe this keeps the portal in line with WP:MoS for Wikipedia articles in general. Gregcaletta ( talk) 03:00, 9 July 2010 (UTC)
I think a the best way to deal with "major events" is just to keep the major events as close to the top of each category as possible, and then to put the category of the most major event at the top. In special circumstances, a separate category could be included, but I would not make it the norm. Gregcaletta ( talk) 05:08, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
Since the start of my efforts, I have been mainly focused on adding subheadings. My suggestions are mainly similar to those of Gregcaletta (hereafter referred to as "Greg", hope you don't mind, Gregcaletta!), but there are some subtle changes. Some of them are stylistic, some are more substantial.
Alright, well I do like the idea of organizing the current events, I'm just not too happy with some of the headings as they may lead to people warring over under which heading or just biasness. I would rather the Armed conflicts, Business and economy, weather (with global weather events like el nino or global warming under science), politics, and law all split between the continents (Americas, EU, Asia, AFR, OCE, ME, plus World for intercontinental events) in which the events are in. The other categories would be Science (science and tech) and Entertainment (art, culture, celebrities, and sports(b/c its not newsworthy everyday)) So,
All these categories should have at least one event, even on a slow news day. Also, if we decide not to use this, and use politics and law as headings, I think these two must be kept together as they are so closely related.
We should definitely use alphabetical order for the categories. The introduction of categories should not affect news notability requirements. Also, if possible, each new day's current events page should START with all of these categories, even if they are empty.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
A bunch of "made-up" categories have made it onto the board (everything from "fights" to "orography") which obviously need to be removed; their items should be merged into actual, useful categories (in this case, "Armed conflicts & attacks" and "Science & weather", respectively). However, a few recent subheaders at least deserve discussion. Anyone care to comment on these? Blue Crest ( talk) 22:20, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
I just combined the ideas above into one possible 8 cat selection. - Knowledgekid87 ( talk) 23:54, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
OK, we have a few proposals here, so I think we should go for the "genre" sorting that my proposal, along with most of the others, advocate. However, I still like Passionless's idea, so I think we should subcategrize the stories by region when there are, say, 3-4 or more stories from the same region. What do you guys think?
Alright, so we've had the new system up for awhile now, it's working well other than the constant changing of the titles, so I suggest we ask ( User:X!)to change it so that when his bot ( User:SoxBot) creates the page it creates our headings too. Could we all agree on the following titles,
And shall we have the heading(s)
Please leave a response, Passionless ( talk) 23:24, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
This is the Current Events Portal Reform Taskforce, dedicated to reforming the presentation format of the current events portal.
The growth of Wikipedia has put a strain on all its institutions, including the current events portal. With a greater amount of stories being put into the current events portal, the portal is becoming disorganized, and this may drive away viewers.
Whether we planned on this or not, Wikipedia is a news aggregator, of sorts. Our portal needs to reflect this status.
So far, the main proposal for reform is to add subheadings. My suggestion is categories for "Sport", "Arts and celebrity culture", "Science", "Business and economics", "Weather and environmental incidents", "Law and politics", and one for either "Armed conflict" or "Violent incidents", perhaps in reverse order. I would prefer unsorted events to go either at the top with no subheading, or at the bottom under "Other current events". Within each category, events should be sorted into groups for continent or country, particlarly if there are a lot of entries under one subheading. We need to have a model which works on most days, but still be flexible and deal with categories on a day-to-day basis, merging topics together on slower news days, and leaving all of the Law, politics and violence up the tope early on in the day before enough news items have come in to begin sorting. And one last small thing: I prefer capitalising only the letter of the first letter (eg "Violent incidents" rather than "Violent Incidents"); I believe this keeps the portal in line with WP:MoS for Wikipedia articles in general. Gregcaletta ( talk) 03:00, 9 July 2010 (UTC)
I think a the best way to deal with "major events" is just to keep the major events as close to the top of each category as possible, and then to put the category of the most major event at the top. In special circumstances, a separate category could be included, but I would not make it the norm. Gregcaletta ( talk) 05:08, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
Since the start of my efforts, I have been mainly focused on adding subheadings. My suggestions are mainly similar to those of Gregcaletta (hereafter referred to as "Greg", hope you don't mind, Gregcaletta!), but there are some subtle changes. Some of them are stylistic, some are more substantial.
Alright, well I do like the idea of organizing the current events, I'm just not too happy with some of the headings as they may lead to people warring over under which heading or just biasness. I would rather the Armed conflicts, Business and economy, weather (with global weather events like el nino or global warming under science), politics, and law all split between the continents (Americas, EU, Asia, AFR, OCE, ME, plus World for intercontinental events) in which the events are in. The other categories would be Science (science and tech) and Entertainment (art, culture, celebrities, and sports(b/c its not newsworthy everyday)) So,
All these categories should have at least one event, even on a slow news day. Also, if we decide not to use this, and use politics and law as headings, I think these two must be kept together as they are so closely related.
We should definitely use alphabetical order for the categories. The introduction of categories should not affect news notability requirements. Also, if possible, each new day's current events page should START with all of these categories, even if they are empty.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
A bunch of "made-up" categories have made it onto the board (everything from "fights" to "orography") which obviously need to be removed; their items should be merged into actual, useful categories (in this case, "Armed conflicts & attacks" and "Science & weather", respectively). However, a few recent subheaders at least deserve discussion. Anyone care to comment on these? Blue Crest ( talk) 22:20, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
I just combined the ideas above into one possible 8 cat selection. - Knowledgekid87 ( talk) 23:54, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
OK, we have a few proposals here, so I think we should go for the "genre" sorting that my proposal, along with most of the others, advocate. However, I still like Passionless's idea, so I think we should subcategrize the stories by region when there are, say, 3-4 or more stories from the same region. What do you guys think?
Alright, so we've had the new system up for awhile now, it's working well other than the constant changing of the titles, so I suggest we ask ( User:X!)to change it so that when his bot ( User:SoxBot) creates the page it creates our headings too. Could we all agree on the following titles,
And shall we have the heading(s)
Please leave a response, Passionless ( talk) 23:24, 27 September 2010 (UTC)