Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Brazil/archive1

Portal:Brazil

My English is bad, then I will be brief. The Brazil Portal is dedicated to the Federative Republic of Brazil, possesss excellent content and excellent appearance. It deserves to be one Featured portal. João Felipe C.S 18:44, 3 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Support as nominator - João Felipe C.S 18:48, 3 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Question: Are there archives for the selected article and the selected picture? I can see that these rotate monthly, but I cannot look at earlier selections except by changing the URL manually. What is the process for choosing each article and picture?-gadfium 01:31, 4 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

New templates had been created, the history of old templates can be seen here. João Felipe C.S 15:58, 4 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Object - lacks NPOV and poorly updated. AlexCovarrubias 06:35, 4 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Alex, I'm disappointed with you. It would not have to pour its anger here. (My English is bad) João Felipe C.S 15:58, 4 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I've just been informed of this discussion, and I believe there are a couple of clarifications, and especially about my very recent edit to the Portal's main page. First, when Felipe started working on revamping the Portal's appearance, he inadvertedly created new templates for the established sections, copying and pasting the then-current content (on March 13 originally, if I'm not mistaken) of the existing pages. I explained to him that this should not be done, since the existing pages are usable and have an editing history of almost 2 years. He fixed the problems for the most part, but following gadfium's question, I noticed that the sections for Featured Image and Selected Picture were still linked to Felipe's new pages. I have now fixed this, transcluding again the previously existing pages. I recommend deletion of the new pages when applicable.
Now, as the Portal's founder and pretty much the only person involved on a regular basis with updating and maintaining it, I can clarify a few aspects about the Featured Article and Picture. When the Portal was created, in mid-2005, there were no articles or pictures pertaining to Brazil that had Featured status. So we had a "Selected" article and picture in their stead. Later on, a few articles on Brazilian topics reached Featured status. One of the first was the article currently listed. It was pointed out by Chick Bowen on the Portal's talk page and I linked it to the Portal, where we use FAs preferably. So far I've not become aware of any picture pertaining to Brazil that has reached a similar status, and, through a discussion on the Portal's talk page, myself and another user decided a while ago to use the section to convey the information that the capital of Brazil is Brasília (and not Rio de Janeiro, a common mistake abroad), and thus decided to use an image depicting the national capital. That was it. And there is no process for rotating articles and images, because first — and foremost —, there is only one person involved with the Portal regularly (me); and second, there is a very limited number of articles to be used. I made the decision to have the Mário de Andrade article, which is featured, stay on the Portal's main page. As for the picture, as long as there are no images with Featured status, and per that discussion I mentioned, we have the picture section topic-oriented (about Brasília), and the image there is supposed to be pertaining to it. I haven't rotated images because I didn't feel it was necessary and, more importantly, I didn't believe that the other images of Brasília available were at least as good as the one we have currently.
Currently, the only section of the Portal that is updated regularly (by me), is the "In the news" section. I try to use as a criterion the fact that the Portal is not a local news site, but rather open for the entire world to read. So I do not report every single piece of political news, or any piece of news that might be of interest to some local audience in Brazil, but not to a broader audience. As a result, there are sometimes spells during which there are fewer updates, such as right now — this will be over next week, as Pope Benedict XVI will be arriving in the country. So far, none of the other sections require constant updates, which was done deliberatly, since I anticipated, back when I created the Portal, that I might be the only one involved with it regularly.
It's been working to contention so far, since almost every person who has commented on the Portal (mostly Brazilian users who happened to read it) had only positive remarks. Is that enough to make it a Featured Portal? I'll let you all be judges of it. As the Portal's founder and maintainer, I will neither support nor oppose this nomination. I will, however, note that there is no POV going on in the Portal. There have been repeated attempts to slip POV into the "Did You Know" section (especially anti-USA POV), and I have barred them all. There is a zero-tolerance for POV on this Portal, and I fail to see what would be the basis for this claim. I have, however, noticed that AlexCovarrubias and João Felipe have been disagreeing on other topics recently, and I would rather that this did not spill into this discussion (or any other, for that matter). Redux 14:58, 5 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Object, a featured portal must have regularly rotating material for selected article and picture, and as Redux has clarified, this is not the case for Portal:Brazil. I don't care particularly if the rotation is done by hand or automatically with a queue or how the updates are chosen; my question was mostly from curiosity.-gadfium 19:46, 5 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Fair enough. Noticing, of course, that there are two significative obstacles for this Portal to meet those standards: 1) Not enough people involved with it (so far, I'm the only person who has been involved with the Portal regularly); 2) Concerning the FAs and Featured Images, there's not enough material on Brazil meeting the high standards for us to work with. Example: According to WikiProject Brazil, there are only 3 articles on Brazilian themes that hold the status of Featured currently. Obviously, if someone would care to set up the feature that would allow us to rotate between those automatically, that would be welcome, since a rotation done manually would be almost certain to fail, given, once again, the scarce number of people working on the Portal. Redux 05:59, 6 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A portal doesn't have to restrict itself to featured content. Some do, most don't. The important thing is not to call it "featured" if it isn't - and the Brazilian portal calls the articles and pictures "selected".-gadfium 06:44, 6 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, the picture is "selected", but the article is "featured". We only use a "selected" picture (since we have that section topic-oriented, as I mentioned earlier) because there are no pictures pertaining to Brazil with Featured status (at least that I'm aware of). Whenever possible, however, we will use content from sources with Featured status, like we already do with the article section. Redux 17:27, 7 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm aware of three featured pictures relating to Brazil or Brazilians. There was a fourth, but it was recently deleted from commons as not having a free licence (and I only discovered that a few days ago, as part of looking into this nomination). See Portal talk:Latin America#Featured pictures-order and selection for a survey of featured pictures done by Portal:Latin America. I agree that three pictures is too few to restrict the portal to these.-gadfium 20:28, 7 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]