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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-08-09/Features and admins

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Features and admins

The best of the week

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By Dabomb87 and Tony1
Featured picture Choice of the week: a 2-minute, 37-second video of Space Shuttle Atlantis as it begins the STS-132 mission, conveying its six-member crew toward the International Space Station (1,920×1,080; 4.7 Mbps). To play the full-size original (file-size 88.11 MB), click on the image rather than the arrow.

Nine articles were promoted to featured status:

  • Russian battleship Slava (nom), launched in 1903, played important roles in suppressing the Sveaborg Rebellion of Russian soldiers in 1906, rescuing survivors of the 1908 Messina earthquake, and resisting the German navy in World War I (Sturmvogel 66).
  • Wotton railway station (nom), the story of a station built in 1871 on a private horse-drawn tramway as part of the Duke of Buckingham's "increasingly harebrained scheme to provide a mass-transit service to an area populated almost exclusively by cows" (Iridescent).
  • Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (nom) is the third book in US writer Maya Angelou's six-volume autobiography, set from 1949 to 1955, which examines such themes as race, conflict, and motherhood (Christine).
    John E Brownlee, premier of the Canadian province of Alberta, 1926–30
  • Minnie Pwerle (nom) (1915–2006), an Indigenous Australian artist whose much-sought-after work was characterised by a "spontaneous" style, typified by bold and vibrant colour executed with great freedom (Hamiltonstone).
  • Shimer College (nom), a small, academically rigorous US college with an unusual history and curriculum (Nasty Housecat).
  • John Brownlee as Attorney-General of Alberta (nom), recounting Brownlee's major role as a conservative in the United Farmers government of the province of Alberta in western Canada (Steve Smith).
  • Pathways into Darkness (nom), a 1993 video game in which the player has to rescue the world from a godlike being (David Fuchs).
  • Transandinomys (nom), a genus of two long-whiskered, medium-sized rice rats from Central and South America (Ucucha).
  • Walter Bache (nom), a 19th-century English pianist and conductor who was a prominent student of Franz Liszt (Jonyungk).

Choice of the week. The Signpost asked featured article review delegate Dana boomer to select her best of the week. "I chose Walter Bache. Featured articles on classical music are rather few and far between, and I found this one to be a fascinating read. I’ve never studied the classical composers and artists, and so to learn more about them, and be routed to such articles as War of the Romantics, was quite fun."

Four featured articles were delisted:

Five lists were promoted:

Choice of the week. Staxringold has written 26 featured lists, mostly on the subject of baseball. Here is his pick: "Much as I might like to go with a baseball list, my choice has to be List of volcanoes in the Hawaiian – Emperor seamount chain. The nominators went through three FLCs, grinding out all the little details for this in-depth, very nice list covering the chain of volcanoes near the Hawaiian archipelago. Dynamic lists are never easy to pull off, and Mario and Awickert did a great job."

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director of the World Bank, and former Finance Minister of Nigeria
Nicholas Kratzer was a German mathematician and horologist who was appointed astronomer to King Henry VIII.

Ten images were promoted:

Choice of the week. We asked JovanCormac, a member of the Organising Committee for the Commons Picture of the Year, to choose his number-one for the week: "Picking this week's standout was an easy choice: This NASA film of Atlantis taking off is simply one of the best videos in our library. Shot in impeccable 1080i full HD quality, it shows details I'd never seen before from the liftoff. Even though from a technical viewpoint it's just as easy to include videos in articles as it is to embed pictures, in my opinion there is still not nearly enough video footage on Wikipedia; in particular, videos are often overlooked in the featuring process. The newly featured video gives me hope that this might improve in the future, confirms NASA's status as one of the foremost contributors of public domain material, and is a jewel in our slowly but steadily growing collection of commercial-quality encyclopedic footage." (top)

One featured picture was delisted:

Administrators

There were no promotions to adminship.


New featured picture: Chicago Theatre (right) and Page Brothers Building are National Register of Historic Places listings in the United States.
New featured picture: Mike Godwin, general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation
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Thanks Star. (can't think of anything else to say). ResMar 03:13, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • JovanCormac seems a very odd person to ask for his choice of the week at FPC- he's not involved with FPC in any way at the moment. There are plenty of FPC regulars who I have no doubt would be happy to share their thoughts and opinions. J Milburn (talk) 14:02, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
J Milburn, thanks for your comment. While we have and will continue to draw mostly on the expertise of our regular editors at the featured article, list and pictures processes, the idea of inviting a judge each week always included another purpose beyond this: to draw on interwiki colleagues, whether at Commons or other wikipedias. The goal is to strengthen our relationships with featured processes in those sister projects, and to benefit from the different perspectives they bring. I know that our Managing Editor, HaeB, has no problem with this, provided we choose carefully, and the organisers of the Commons's peak competition for featured pictures seem ideally positioned to be occasional judges; we are delighted that they are agreeing to act in this role, actually. With 52 editions a year, we have the potential to invite many editors of varied background. We are grateful for your own contribution a few weeks ago, and will seek to invite you again before many months elapse, hoping you will agree. Cheers. Tony (talk) 15:02, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with asking an outside party to comment on the weeks nominations, they don't always have to be FPC regulars, and as Tony says, theres 52 editions/year, we don't have anywhere near that many regulars at FPC, we'd exhaust those in maybe two or three months I suspect. — raekyT 16:28, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Kudos again to those involved from SP who put together what is, for me, the most inspiring section of my weekly read. It's always wonderful to be reminded of the exceptional quality of some of our content. --bodnotbod (talk) 20:14, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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