Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Arthropods

The following is an archived discussion of a featured portal candidate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the portal's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured portal candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The portal was promoted by OhanaUnited 03:42, 11 April 2011 [1].

Portal:Arthropods

With over 80% of all described animal species, there can be little doubt that this portal has broad enough scope. I took over its maintainance in earnest after it had lain dormant for years, and I now feel it is of comparable quality to other featured portals. The one weakness may be the relative lack of recognised content – with so many taxa to write about, there has been a tendency towards breadth over depth. Throughout my work on the portal, I have tried to maintain a balance between the different taxonomic groups; for instance, every set of DYKs so far has two facts about crustaceans, two on insects and two from the other groups (arachnids, myriapods and trilobites). The major parts of the portal are on automatic rotation, with the following numbers of items to choose from:

Selected articles: 22, all GA or better. I have not included former FAs such as coconut crab and krill, but all the current GAs and FAs are included.
Selected pictures: 21, all featured images on en.wiki. This number could easily be expanded by several dozen, but at the expense of balance, and one would have to include pictures that illustrate less good articles; so far, they mostly appear in C or B class articles at the lowest.
Did you know?: 12 sets of 6 facts each, all from the standard DYK process, with one image for each set, half of which images also appeared on the front page.

Of the remaining parts, I have updated the Tasks you can do to link to regularly updated pages to prevent stagnation, restricted the Related WikiProjects to those which are still active, and restricted the Associated Wikimedia to those which currently contain content on arthropods, including the Wikispecies link first. Overall, I believe it fulfils all the criteria for featured status, but I would welcome any suggestions for how it could be improved. --Stemonitis (talk) 18:23, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Looks very good overall, have things like alt text have already been taken care of? Also, I think the portal would benefit from a list of recognized content, and maybe a list of arthropod-related topics, things that are common in other featured portals (e.g., Portal:Barack Obama, Portal:Architecture, Portal:Speculative fiction, Portal:Volcanoes). I understand the lack of a news/current events box, so I'm not too worried there :) /ƒETCH COMMS / 00:57, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

All the images in "Selected article" and "Selected image" have captions, and I have arranged for the alt-text to default to the caption for now. I will work on adding better alt-texts, and covering the remaining images, too, as well as providing a topic box, as you suggest. The recognised content would be more or less a list of the "Selected articles", but there's no harm in that, I don't think. --Stemonitis (talk) 07:07, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Update: Recognised content section is now present, albeit with the myriad featured pictures collapsed. I have also added a "topics" box, which seems quite large, but I think it needs to contain that number of items. I will work on the remaining alt-texts and captions over the coming days. --Stemonitis (talk) 08:08, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Update: All DYKs, selected articles and static pictures now have specific alt-texts, while the selected images still have the same alt-text as the caption for now. --Stemonitis (talk) 08:07, 6 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Done. --Stemonitis (talk) 19:18, 6 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support from me, then. Looks very nice, a job well done :) /ƒETCH COMMS / 20:39, 6 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A couple of minor comments (I won't !vote, but only so that I can close this nomination in due course if necessary, given the current low activity of the FP directors):
- On my screen, in the opening box, the word "Trilobitamorpha" runs straight into "Chelicerata" - can you borrow a bit of space from somewhere?
- "Sessile" in articles 1 and 4 is a dablink, as is "pedicel" in article 20 - I would fix them if I knew the best target...
- Does the "†" in the topic box mean anything? If so, it could do with an explanatory note at the top. I assume it means "extinct / fossils only", or something like that, but a note would be helpful.
- Perhaps consider adding a "What are WikiProjects?" link to the projects box.
Apart from that, I can't really find anything to say. Bencherlite ^Talk 10:44, 10 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the suggestions. The only one I haven't been able to fix directly is the abutting text in the opening images. It doesn't appear the way you described on my monitor, whether seen in Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer. If you have any idea what might be causing it, I will do my best to address it, but I can't yet see any problem. (How is the other text affected - "Kainops invius", "Eriophora transmarina", etc.?) --Stemonitis (talk) 11:49, 10 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably just a peraonal problem caused by a browser / screen size / text size alliance on my crappy work computer where I am forced to use IE; I mentioned it in case you or anyone else said "Oh yes, I've got the same problem", but don't worry about it. The other captions have space between them. Bencherlite ^Talk 11:57, 10 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

logs in from laptop with Firefox yes, fine on this combination of browser / screen size / text size. Bencherlite ^Talk 12:03, 10 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support you know something is good when I can only find two issues, and one is the color pick chosen for the background! The other is that the blurb on the bee in the SA section is missing its bolded link in the intro sentence. Otherwise the portal looks great to me.. Imzadi 1979 → 03:06, 25 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your support. I think I can explain the two issues you bring up. The colour was chosen arbitrarily, in order to contrast with the other portals I maintain (Portal:Crustaceans and Portal:Insects); I would not be averse to changing it. The missing bold link is for the article bees and toxic chemicals, a phrase which doesn't appear in our text, and shouldn't be boldface anyway, according to WP:BOLDTITLE. I even tried to find a way to include that phrase or a similar one, in order to link it, and couldn't fit it into elegant prose. If someone else can do so, that would be great. --Stemonitis (talk) 06:40, 25 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Both points have now been addressed. --Stemonitis (talk) 19:42, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support as per my above comments; there is some possibility that one of the FP directors will be along in the near future to close this and other discussions, so hopefully this support will enable promotion. Bencherlite ^Talk 08:57, 5 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.