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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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
"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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
It would look something like
Earth Sciences & Meteorology
1941 Atlantic hurricane season · 1950 Atlantic hurricane season · 1983 Atlantic hurricane season · 1988 Atlantic hurricane season · 1994 Atlantic hurricane season · 1995 Pacific hurricane season · 1998 Pacific hurricane season · 2002 Atlantic hurricane season · 2003 Atlantic hurricane season · 2003 Pacific hurricane season · · · 2006 Pacific hurricane season · 2007 Atlantic hurricane season · Cerro Azul (Chile volcano) · · · · · · · · · · · · · Mono-Inyo Craters · Mount Cayley volcanic field · · · · · ·
·1928 Okeechobee hurricane · 1941 Florida hurricane · 1949 Ambato earthquake · · · 1997 Qayen earthquake · · · 2002 Bou'in-Zahra earthquake · 2005 Azores subtropical storm · · 2007–2008 Nazko earthquakes · · · · Cyclone Elita · · Effects of Hurricane Georges in Louisiana · Effects of Hurricane Isabel in Delaware · · Effects of Hurricane Isabel in North Carolina · Effects of Hurricane Ivan in the Lesser Antilles and South America · · · Hurricane Bret (1999) · Hurricane Carmen · Hurricane Claudette (2003) · Hurricane Daniel (2006) · Hurricane Danny (1997) · · · · Hurricane Erika (1997) · Hurricane Erika (2003) · Hurricane Esther (1961) · · · · Hurricane Guillermo (1997) · Hurricane Gustav (2002) · Hurricane Hazel · · · Hurricane Irene (1999) · Hurricane Irene (2005) · Hurricane Isabel · · · Hurricane John (1994) · Hurricane John (2006) · · · Hurricane Kiko (1989) · · · · · Hurricane Nate (2005) · Hurricane Nora (1997) · Hurricane Rick (2009) · Hurricane Vince (2005) · Meteorological history of Hurricane Dean · Meteorological history of Hurricane Gordon (1994) · Meteorological history of Hurricane Ivan · Meteorological history of Hurricane Jeanne · · · Subtropical Storm Andrea (2007) · Tropical Depression Ten (2005) · Tropical Depression Ten (2007) · Tropical Storm Alberto (2006) · · Tropical Storm Barry (2001) · · Tropical Storm Bill (2003) · Tropical Storm Bonnie (2004) · Tropical Storm Brenda (1960) · · Tropical Storm Edouard (2002) · Tropical Storm Erick (2007) · Tropical Storm Faxai (2007) · Tropical Storm Gabrielle (2007) · Tropical Storm Hanna (2002) · Tropical Storm Henri (2003) · Tropical Storm Hermine (1998) · Tropical Storm Keith (1988) · Tropical Storm Kiko (2007) · Tropical Storm Marco (1990) · Tropical Storm Marco (2008) · Tropical Storm Vamei · · Typhoon Pongsona · Typhoon Sudal · Typhoon Tip
·
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)
{{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
2009-1969=40
Krissakristine ( talk) 08:15, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
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)
We must be going through all the P's this week. ;-) Regards, RJH ( talk) 15:52, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
Should Mumia Abu-Jamal really be in History-bios category? Volunteer Marek ( talk) 09:54, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
That the random featured article link in the top left box is broken. ~ FerralMoonrender ( T • C) 14:05, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
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."
Are these two templates acceptable when used in FAs? Chaosdruid ( talk) 17:04, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 is an archive of past discussions. 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 | ← | Archive 12 | Archive 13 | Archive 14 | Archive 15 | Archive 16 | → | Archive 18 |
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
"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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
It would look something like
Earth Sciences & Meteorology
1941 Atlantic hurricane season · 1950 Atlantic hurricane season · 1983 Atlantic hurricane season · 1988 Atlantic hurricane season · 1994 Atlantic hurricane season · 1995 Pacific hurricane season · 1998 Pacific hurricane season · 2002 Atlantic hurricane season · 2003 Atlantic hurricane season · 2003 Pacific hurricane season · · · 2006 Pacific hurricane season · 2007 Atlantic hurricane season · Cerro Azul (Chile volcano) · · · · · · · · · · · · · Mono-Inyo Craters · Mount Cayley volcanic field · · · · · ·
·1928 Okeechobee hurricane · 1941 Florida hurricane · 1949 Ambato earthquake · · · 1997 Qayen earthquake · · · 2002 Bou'in-Zahra earthquake · 2005 Azores subtropical storm · · 2007–2008 Nazko earthquakes · · · · Cyclone Elita · · Effects of Hurricane Georges in Louisiana · Effects of Hurricane Isabel in Delaware · · Effects of Hurricane Isabel in North Carolina · Effects of Hurricane Ivan in the Lesser Antilles and South America · · · Hurricane Bret (1999) · Hurricane Carmen · Hurricane Claudette (2003) · Hurricane Daniel (2006) · Hurricane Danny (1997) · · · · Hurricane Erika (1997) · Hurricane Erika (2003) · Hurricane Esther (1961) · · · · Hurricane Guillermo (1997) · Hurricane Gustav (2002) · Hurricane Hazel · · · Hurricane Irene (1999) · Hurricane Irene (2005) · Hurricane Isabel · · · Hurricane John (1994) · Hurricane John (2006) · · · Hurricane Kiko (1989) · · · · · Hurricane Nate (2005) · Hurricane Nora (1997) · Hurricane Rick (2009) · Hurricane Vince (2005) · Meteorological history of Hurricane Dean · Meteorological history of Hurricane Gordon (1994) · Meteorological history of Hurricane Ivan · Meteorological history of Hurricane Jeanne · · · Subtropical Storm Andrea (2007) · Tropical Depression Ten (2005) · Tropical Depression Ten (2007) · Tropical Storm Alberto (2006) · · Tropical Storm Barry (2001) · · Tropical Storm Bill (2003) · Tropical Storm Bonnie (2004) · Tropical Storm Brenda (1960) · · Tropical Storm Edouard (2002) · Tropical Storm Erick (2007) · Tropical Storm Faxai (2007) · Tropical Storm Gabrielle (2007) · Tropical Storm Hanna (2002) · Tropical Storm Henri (2003) · Tropical Storm Hermine (1998) · Tropical Storm Keith (1988) · Tropical Storm Kiko (2007) · Tropical Storm Marco (1990) · Tropical Storm Marco (2008) · Tropical Storm Vamei · · Typhoon Pongsona · Typhoon Sudal · Typhoon Tip
·
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)
{{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
2009-1969=40
Krissakristine ( talk) 08:15, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
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)
We must be going through all the P's this week. ;-) Regards, RJH ( talk) 15:52, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
Should Mumia Abu-Jamal really be in History-bios category? Volunteer Marek ( talk) 09:54, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
That the random featured article link in the top left box is broken. ~ FerralMoonrender ( T • C) 14:05, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
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."
Are these two templates acceptable when used in FAs? Chaosdruid ( talk) 17:04, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)