Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Failed log/March 2007

Portal:Current events/Canada

'The votes for this nomination will have to be carefully voted upon. No current events portal has ever been nominated or made a featured portal to-date.'

This will be the first of its kind and I'm hoping it will set the standard for future current event portal candidates. What will the best Wikipedia has to offer for current events portals look like? I leave that up to you. I'm also hoping that by getting this portal through, it will open up the interest to maintain this portal and have other contributors.

Some interesting facts about current events portals:

1. The Portal:Current events is the most visited portal on the en.wikipedia. WikiCharts Top 10 Portals 02/07
2. The Portal:Current events was the 10th most visited namespace on the en.wikipedia last month (01/07) WikiCharts Top 10 Namespaces 01/07
3. The Portal:Current events is the 15th most viewed namespace this month (02/07) WikiCharts Top 15 02/07.
4. The Portal:Current events/Canada is the 35th most viewed portal WikiCharts Top 50 02/07, ahead of the Portal:Spain and Portal:Computer and video games.

• Nom and Support Mkdw^talk 08:44, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose Support. Mainly for styling:
  • Titles are not constant.
    • Given the current constraints, the titles are about as consistent as they can be. See comment below. Rfrisbie 02:33, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
      • Adjusted newly created Portal:Box-header parameter, title-font-size, in Portal:Current events/Canada/box-header to 11pt to match Portal:Current events/Canada/DateHeader2 font size. Rfrisbie 18:53, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Capitals/italics/underlines/bolding should not be used for emphasis.
    • Such emphases have been removed. Any remaining boldings are current events header style. Rfrisbie 02:33, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Plenty of WP:MSH violations (e.g. "Events by Month", "Lead Story").
    • Capitalizations have been wikified, including in current events and portal templates. Rfrisbie 02:33, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
  • "Related" - Pages? Portals? WikiProjects? It's also preferable to keep it 100% width.
    • Section retitled, exapnded to 100% width. Rfrisbie 02:33, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Bolding should be used on news entries' main event articles per the main page.
    • Not quite. Such bolding is used for "Headlines", not daily items. Daily items for this portal are bolded according to the current events daily section style. See Portal:Current events. Rfrisbie 02:33, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Quotes lack archives and nominations. Michaelas10 (Talk) 12:54, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
    • Added archive and nominations links. Rfrisbie 19:19, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

• Comment. This portal has the good fortune (?) of being the first FP candidate with two distinct de-facto design standards to live by – the basic design of Portal:Current events, as well as the box portal skeleton. I already added some parameters to a few current events templates to give this portal a ghost of a chance to have some sort of consistent style. If reviewers can be specific and arrive at consensus, I am more than willing to create additional parameters where needed to develop a consistent style. However, it must be recognized that the existing de-facto designs are inherently incompatible (e.g., header font sizes & colors) as they stand now. Something has to give. If this portal is modified to have an internally consistent style, then it will necessarily not comply with at least one of the models in some ways. Any such minor differences alone, IMHO, should not be used as the grounds for disqualifying this, or any other current events portal, from featured portal status. Rfrisbie 20:34, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
• Support, The portal is in GREAT shape compared to the other current events portals. I believe that some of the points above are invalid as things like the "Events by Month" is a template used on all articles such as February 2007 all the way to the Portal:Current events. WP:MSH is void in that case because of its designed usage. Langara College 00:19, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

• Comments, seeing first current event portal for FPO. I suppose current event portals should be requiring more maintenance. The portal does really lack of one news daily, which should not be the case for current event FPO. I strongly disagree with the current format. In addition to that, rather using {{Portal:Current events/Events by month}} the portal may contain e.g. transclusion of {{Portal:Canada current events/Events by year}} comprising 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Shyam ^(T/C) 21:39, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

The idea about the 2007 in Canada etc. etc. in the Events by month is a good idea. I've created {{Portal:Current events/Canada/Events by month}} as the alternative. Doing so also allowed me to make the title font colour maroon. No articles like January 2007 in Canada exist so I don't think we'd be able to include those for all of them. If they were they'd just be red links. The story a day is a problem and there just doesn't seem to be enough editors writing stories though WikiNews has tons of Canada stories. I'm looking into some sort of method of automatically importing those stories like the Canada Portal on WikiNews. The layout I feel is pretty standard and matches Portal:Current events - to which could be a featured portal itself. It's also the only current events portal that actually has daily news stories. Mkdw^talk 10:03, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

• Help Request, does anyone know of a way to automatically import pages from other Wikimedia site? http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Template:Canada/latest_news has a news feed of all the stories written on WikiNews and then compiles them in a list of titles. It would be great to get that same news feed on the Portal's main page. Or does anyone know how to write a program to do so? Mkdw^talk 21:33, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

• support I going to be light on this one, since its the first nom for a featured currend events portal, but its great for one. Canadianshoper 20:27, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

• Support One thing, the shortcut in the intro should not be there. Joe I 21:01, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I will look into finding a new place but I also see good reason to leave it in the Lead story section. The Lead story section acts like the Introduction section found in many other featured portals, and is where the shortcut box is put. See: Portal:vancouver, Portal:Chemistry, and Portal:Trains. Also there is no comparison to other current event portals as this commonly used feature in Wikipedia has not been used for them yet. Mkdw^talk 21:49, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

• Comment I don't think this 'portal' can be promoted. Like the Main Page is to mainspace, so Current events pages are to portalspace – they are an anomaly. They are not portals as currently defined or generally implemented on Wikipedia (this is not say the term 'portal' does not describe them, but insofar as portals on Wikipedia are concerned, they differ). They certainly do not meet the thrust of the criteria, and I've not seen anyone argue it does. It has merits aplenty from a design point of view, and certainly, it should be held up to other current events pages as an example to follow. But a featured portal it is not. --cj | talk 12:18, 9 March 2007 (UTC)