Lebanon War (disambiguation)

Question about scope

Would this be an appropriate place to canvass opinions on whether a bunch of articles is applicable in scope (note: not quality) for a featured topic? Daniel 11:28, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Now it isn't, but it should be. I'll look into getting some more links to here and checking it more often. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 02:58, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

New criteria and FTRC

After we last changed the criteria for featured topics, we said that old topics would be grandfathered in until 2008. Now that the new year has arrived, some topics are up for FTRC, but there has been some controversy. Regular contributers may want to weigh in on the debates. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 21:51, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

What about irregular contributors? ;) --kingboyk (talk) 23:39, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

They can also give their two cents. The more the marrier. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 04:41, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Individual audit for quality

How exactly do I go about getting an audit for an article? Will ^(talk) 20:10, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

You can ask to have a peer review done. If you need it done because an article has too limited a subject matter for GA status, you just have to show that the information is, in fact too limited, and that what little information you have is referenced and well written. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 22:29, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Number of featured-class articles

There is a discussion going on at Wikipedia talk:Featured topic criteria#Number of featured-class articles about if we should change criterion 3(a) to specify more precisely the number of Featured class articles required in a topic. Please place all comments there. Zginder ^{(talk) (Contrib)} 02:28, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Developing Topics

I'm currently working on a Featured Topic regarding the ACC Championship Game, which has been held annually since 2005. Does 2008 ACC Championship Game need to be GA-class or better even though the game hasn't been played yet? JKBrooks85 (talk) 09:08, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Articles that cannot have enough content to write a GA about them, such as articles about events that have not yet taken place and media that has not yet been released, generally are exempt from the FA/FL/GA minimums. However, all information that is in the short article must be well written, NPOV, and referenced. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 13:30, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Updating

I know we have to go through a formal process to amend a topic and whatnot, but what if an article goes from GA to FA? For example, if Halo (series) is promoted to FA, then all the article in Wikipedia:Featured topics/Halo trilogy will be FA and it should get that little happy star in the corner. Can any editor make those changes? Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^(talk) 11:35, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I'm pretty sure the star cluster is an automatic thing that doesn't need discussion, so anyone can put it on, the only thing that needs a new nomination is adding/removing articles. --PresN (talk) 17:06, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

"Degrassi: The Next Generation, Seasons of "Picture

"Degrassi: The Next Generation, Seasons of" currently doesn't have a picture, the only FT with that deficiency. Does anyone know of a good free picture we can use? --PresN (talk) 04:40, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

The only free one is Image:Degrassiautos.jpg. It's not that good, blurry and dark. I've asked User:Diliff if he can do anything with it. -- ṃ•α•Ł•ṭ•ʰ•Ə•Щ• @ 05:02, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

May be we should add a photo requirement to the criteria for topics so this doesn't happen again. Zginder 2008-04-27T12:54Z (UTC)

I think that a photo can be found for any topic, so we probably don't have to make a specific requirement. For the Degrassi topic, I think our best bet would be to get a photo of whatever school is used for exterior shots in the show. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 17:43, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

See Degrassi: The Next Generation. Unfortunately this isn't possible, because the school is actually a set on the studio's backlog. The only free image is Image:Degrassiautos.jpg. I asked Diliff if he could do anything wizardry to clean up the image, but got no response. Right now, I think this is the only image we can use. Matthewedwards (talk · contribs · count · email) 21:05, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

"There are 3 articles in more than one topic."

What is the value of stating this? Skomorokh 18:45, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

To explain the discrepency between the number of articles that are infeatured topics, and the sum of the number of articles in each topic. Tompw (talk) (review) 19:05, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Automatically maintained

WP:WBFTN is now being automatically regenerated daily by user:Rick Bot. The way the bot works is:

1. It looks for newly promoted lists in the Wikipedia:Featured topic candidates/Featured log pages.
2. It determines the nominator based on the creator of the nomination page.
3. It adds newly promoted topics to the appropriate by-month section of the yearly summary list (e.g. Wikipedia:Featured topics promoted in 2008).
4. It reads the current WP:FT and WP:FFT lists.
5. It updates the by-year lists with featured/former status, also updating links to topic pages that have been renamed.
6. It updates WP:WBFTN from the contents of the by-year lists (and the current featured/former status).

Nominator errors here can be fixed by directly editing the appropriate by-year summary list (any co-noms will need to be fixed this way). Changes to these lists will be reflected here the next time the bot runs. Gary King and I have looked over the by-year summary lists and they are correct as far as we can tell. If anyone notices any problems, please let me know.

The bot adds comments at the bottom of the table at WP:WBFTN indicating FTs or FFTs it finds that don't have an entry in one of the by-year summary lists (and vice-versa). There currently seems to be no nomination record for Wikipedia:Featured topics/Characters of Halo. If someone could help out with the history for this one, that'd be great. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:30, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Categories of topics

I suggest that the video game FTs, as they are definitely not everyday-life-events either A) be moved to the "arts" section, or B) be moved to a new section called just for video games. I really support only the first suggestion; mostly because video games "don't happen" to everyone. —OverMyHead 14:51, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

If the everyday-life section can only include things that are universal, than the only things that could be in it would be things like eating and sleeping, in which case we might as well get rid of the whole section. The reason I included an everyday-life section is that it is part of the classification system used in other places in Wikipedia, such as Wikipedia:Good articles. I would like for Wikipedia to have some consistency in its categories, but if this system really doesn't work here we can discuss changing it. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 17:37, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

We already have 17 topics in the "everyday life" subcategory. They are all about Sports or Videogames. What about subdividing them into these two sections to get a better overview. Maybe we can open a new "everyday life" section if we get a topic which is not about Sports or Videogames (maybe about food and drink)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.227.201.164 (talk) 12:04, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I'll change the categorization to that used by WP:FA, it should serve our needs in this matter. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 15:33, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Can we get a bot?

Can we get a bot to make sure that only the articles that are in topics have their talk page marked as being in a topic. It could also let us know when a article gets demoted or promoted. Zginder 2008-05-23T20:24Z (UTC)

A bot to also link archived nomination discussions on the topic talk pages would be good. Since FA and FP have such histories linked, so should this. —OverMyHead 16:23, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

I can set up talk page archiving pretty easily, I get on that now. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 17:51, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Has there been a problem with articles being tagged as part of an FT when they really weren't? If so I haven't seen it. I agree that it would be nice to automatically tell if an article has been demoted. I'll go ask the people at bot requests what we can do about it. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 17:51, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

I think the easiest thing to do is make {{Articlehistory}} put articles in FTs into a category together and then have a script we can run that checks if every article in the category are linked on the main FT page. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 17:00, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Proposed rule change

I've proposed a rule change for featured topics here - rst20xx (talk) 17:58, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

...and now I've implemented it - rst20xx (talk) 22:34, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Overview topics

We have to decide whether we are going to allow overview topics that only include top-importance articles in its field rather than all articles. Three examples that have been made of such overview topis are:

1. a topic on the band Nine Inch Nails, which would include band members and a discography list, leaving the albums themselves for a future discography subtopic;
2. a topic on the major bodies of the Solar System, leaving articles on smaller objects to a future subtopic (such as one about a planet and its moons); and
3. a topic on a country, including only the top-importance articles like history of, politics of, and geography of, leaving the tens of thousands of other articles to subtopics.

I'd like to hear everyone's opinions on the matter. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 22:45, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

I'd support allowing them; it's effectively narrowing the topic choice without arbitrarily excluding any articles. Skomorokh 16:02, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm for them as well, though there's going to be some interesting arguements on the nomination pages about which articles are "important" or not. --PresN (talk) 16:10, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

I do not understand why we would not allow them. Do you have text to put in the criteria? Zginder 2008-07-26T22:12Z (UTC)

I too would allow them, though obviously I think we need to be careful as to how we define this to prevent future arguments. At the Nine Inch Nails nom, I argued down the lines of levels of notability, and would refer to my arguments there (which I'm too tired to repeat, sorry) for my own beliefs on the matter - rst20xx (talk) 09:44, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

We need an official definition to decide which articles are the key top-level articles in a topic so than we can avoid cherry-picking and gaps, some way to figure out if all notable parts are included but no non-notable ones. I'll put some thought into it between now and the next time I get to the Internet. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 17:16, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Featured processes to portals

A proposal at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Namespace for featured content pages to move some pages (unsure which) of the featured processes to portal pages. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:58, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Topic Milestones

I added a "Topic Milestones" section to Template:Featuredtopictalk - a good example of it in use is here. It works much like the Milestones bit over at Template:ArticleHistory, but 1) there is no actionXoldid, 2) actionX can take FTC, FTA or FTR as arguments and 3) actionXresult is currently just text, as setting this up to work right would be damn complicated. I'd like to make it so that it doesn't linebreak the "Date" column but can't work out how. I'll roll it out across more Featured topic talks tomorrow - rst20xx (talk) 04:10, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

OK, I've rolled it out across the lot. That took ages! rst20xx (talk) 22:34, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Reaaranging categories

I made it so that Template:ArticleHistory puts articles in subcategories of Category:Wikipedia featured topics all articles if they are featured/good/main articles, so this way we can see quite easily if an article gets delisted, because assuming the currentstatus is updated in ArticleHistory it'll show up in the category itself, as opposed to a subcategory. There are currently 7 articles in the category, as can be seen here.

Also, I made it that Template:Featured topic box categorises featured topics in Category:Wikipedia featured topics itself, instead of having to add this category manually on the topic's page, and further if a topic has ftstar=yes then it goes in a subcategory saying so. I added a "mock" parameter to the template so that if someone makes a mockup using the template, it doesn't get miscategorised as a genuine featured article and spam the category. This should make it easier to check the number of fully featured topics, by looking at the subcategory, and has generally made the category cleaner. Though it isn't foolproof as transclusions of the template such as Portal:Featured content still get tagged - rst20xx (talk) 18:19, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm guessing this is due to your edits—Portal:Featured content now says we have 3 featured topics (because there are three subcategories in Category:Wikipedia featured topics main articles I believe). We should probably switch it over to {{FT number}} (also incorrect for the same reason), and set it up to use the same system as {{FA number}} and all the other counts. Pagrashtak 19:22, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

I updated the {{FT number}} logic to reflect the split directory structure above. --CBD 12:27, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Ahh okay, sorry about that, unexpected consequences! But it appears it's all in order now - rst20xx (talk) 12:41, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Well I realised that the way to get round the transclusions would be to do what I probably should have thought to do in the first place, and have the talkpages be the things that get categorised, not the topic pages themselves. So I removed the categorisations from Template:Featured topic box and added them to the Template:Featuredtopictalk. (There should be no reason to transclude talk pages, and hence this template should never get transcluded.) These changes meant I could also remove the "mock" parameter which I added earlier. I added "fullyfeatured" and "title" as parameters to Template:Featuredtopictalk, so that the fully featured topics would go in a subcategory and the topics would be sorted properly in the categories, respectively. I also made it so that former featured topics went in a seperate category by using the "currentstatus" parameter. And now the 3 categories (Category:Wikipedia featured topics, Category:Wikipedia former featured topics and Category:Wikipedia fully featured topics) are all completely clean of any spam, and their sizes should reflect the number of actual featured/fully featured/former featured topics there are - rst20xx (talk) 15:49, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

discography topics

There are two discography FT's (Powderfinger and Wilco) that do not include EPs and singles. Is that ok? Nergaal (talk) 01:20, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Look at the current nom. I think so

Protecting topic boxes

I think that it might be time to protect the FT boxes for each topic. Whenever the number of articles tagged as being part of a FT doesn't match the total number in boxes, it takes a long time to go through all the boxes to check whether an editor has added an article to a topic without a nomination. Even if people have the boxes on their watchlist, some edits can sneak through, and as we get more FTs, it's only going to get harder to watch them all. The big problem with this proposal is that if an article is promoted from GA to FA or is demoted, only a sysop will be able to update the icons on the topic. I think that this extra hassle will be worth it to keep our FTs in check. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 16:35, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

It might be a good idea, even if we do not, we might want to simi-pro them. Zginder 2008-08-27T21:11Z (UTC)

I thought of that, but any user that would be at the stage where they are trying to update FTs would already have got past the semi-pro barrier. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 21:23, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

After the GT thing goes through, and the cats have been reorganised, I might be able to write a template to do this. It would require an equivalent to PAGESINCATEGORY, except it'll test if a given page is in a given category, instead of counting the size of a given category. Only problem is I don't know if such a function exists :/ An alternative is to set up a bot-managed Daily log of status changes for all articles tagged as being FTC articles, under the theory that if people add an article when they shouldn't, then they'll probably also add the fact it's part of an FTC to the article's talk page, and then it'll show up in the log. This'll probably work about half the time, as obviously not everyone will tag the talk page - rst20xx (talk) 01:54, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

I suspect that those who don't know enough to nominate an article also don't know enough to change the talk page. I bot might be able to work with the "what links here" of topic boxes, but I can't think of how that would work. Hopefully we can work something out, but would people mind if I be bold enough to block the boxes until then? --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 02:27, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't. Maybe you can set up an easy-to-find talk page so people can notify you of any status changes. And also, maybe you don't need to block the topic boxes of non-sequential topics - rst20xx (talk) 17:02, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Good topics implementation plan

Following on from the prior straw poll, I've written a fully detailed, unambiguous plan as to how I would implement good topics, and all that remains is to sort out some of the finer points of it. Please feel free to contribute to the discussion here - rst20xx (talk) 01:16, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Proposed move of the "discography" topics to "albums"

As far as I can tell, the way the topics came to be under the current "discography" name is that:

1. "Powderfinger albums" was nominated and promoted
2. "Wilco discography" was nominated, but while the page name may be "Wilco discography", the header says "Wilco albums". Hence, most of the voters would have seen "Wilco albums" only, but when it was promoted, it was promoted as "Wilco discography"
3. "Powderfinger albums" was renamed "Powderfinger discography" to bring it in line with "Wilco discography", and citing "Wilco discography" as precedent.

While I think that the ultimate scope of the two "discography" topics is the whole discography of the respective bands - be it albums, EPs, singles or anything else - at the moment they both cover just albums. And time and time again, we see a debate about whether this is cherry picking. I feel that if we rename the topics back to "albums", this would knock out half the argument. And then we can always rename them back to "discography" or something else (e.g. "albums and EPs") if they ever expand beyond just the albums - rst20xx (talk) 17:17, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

I support that. We can probably just call that a caretaking technicality and avoid having to do sup noms for them. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 17:20, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

That's effectively how it was done in the first place, so if anyone kicks up a fuss, we could in fact be cheeky and say that the pre-moves place would be albums... rst20xx (talk) 00:15, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I support this as a compromise measure, and in light of this, would like to thank the above two individuals for taking everyone's opinions into account. LuciferMorgan (talk) 12:02, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Another name standardisation - "series" to "titles"

Would anyone have a problem with moving the video game topics with "series" in the title to "titles" so that they all match? --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 01:35, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I would have a problem—Organization XIII is a part of the Kingdom Hearts series, but it is not a Kingdom Hearts title. Pagrashtak 02:16, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, looking over them, it's called "titles" where just the video game articles are involved, and "series" where other articles (such as Organization XIII) are involved - makes sense to me. Having said that, I now realise that the Super Smash Bros topic is under "series", when it should be under "titles", so I would support the moving of that - rst20xx (talk) 02:24, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Very good points, I agree with you both. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 02:59, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Sooo... can we get the Super Smash Bros topic renamed? rst20xx (talk) 17:13, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, rename it. Gary King (talk) 00:42, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Note that I'm currently creating the categories for good topics, and now whoever does the rename will have to rename them, too :/ rst20xx (talk) 01:32, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Questions about the Good Topics Implementation

Please address any questions you have about how exactly good topics are implemented here - rst20xx (talk) 02:32, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

FT star calculations

Ok, there have been a lot of changes with FT recently, and I'm not sure I'm caught up on them all. If I read {{Featured topic box}} correctly, a featured topic comprising four featured articles and one B-class article (from a recent FAR, for instance) would have the "fully featured" star incorrectly applied—what used to be handled with the ftstar parameter. Is this correct?

Issue two: the {{TopicTransclude}} method results in blank spaces in the FT listing where the Good Topics are located. Pagrashtak 03:56, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Gonna answer over at the good topics questions page linked above - rst20xx (talk) 14:41, 11 September 2008 (UTC)