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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-28/Features and admins - Wikipedia

  • ️Mon Mar 28 2011

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Features and admins

Featured list milestone

This week's "Features and admins" covers Saturday 19 – Friday 25 March

From the list of Moons of Saturn, promoted May 2010: a raw image from the Cassini space probe of the equatorial ridge on Saturn's moon Iapetus, taken September 2007 at a distance of just over 60,000 kilometres
From Order of battle at the Battle of Camperdown, promoted April 2010, a painting of the Battle of Camperdown (1797) by William Adolphus Knell, now on display at Edinburgh Castle

On 14 March, the English Wikipedia reached a milestone with the promotion of its 2,000th Featured list (FL). Featured lists are determined by the community to be the best and most useful stand-alone lists on Wikipedia. The featured list process was created in May 2005 by Filiocht, and the first featured list, List of North American birds, was promoted on 1 June 2005. The criteria against which nominations are judged focus on the list candidate's usefulness, completeness, accuracy, neutrality, style and prose, and have been changed to reflect the community's higher standards for content-forks and red links (see previous stories).

The 2,000th FL designation is shared by the six lists simultaneously promoted by director Dabomb87:

Harrias, nominator of List of international cricket centuries by David Gower, had this to say about one of his FLs being among those designated as the 2,000th FL: "It's nice to be a part of history, but to be honest, writing the (joint) 2,000th is merely a number: each one of the 1,999 (ish) FLs promoted previously are just as important as these six. I think the FL process is actually among the better ones for recognised content on Wikipedia! The reviewing team is quite small, but tends to be pretty friendly, especially once you've experienced the FLC process a few times."

On 20 February, Giants2008 was made the third featured list director. Giants2008 joined Wikipedia in March 2008; he has made 9,000 edits, is a primary contributor to nine featured lists, and has been an active reviewer at both featured lists and featured articles. We asked him for his thoughts on being director and on the FL process: "I've always felt that reviewing lists provided a nice change of pace from checking standard articles. The lists at FLC have a wide variety of styles, and I enjoy working with nominators to get the most out of them. FLC is also cordial as a whole, which makes interacting with nominators easy. When I accepted the position as FL director, the most important factor for me was that I enjoy the reviewing that comes with it. There's a lot of extra work that comes with being a director, but since I like it I'm willing to devote the time necessary to ensuring the next 2,000 FLs are the highest quality possible."

In another milestone, arrangements have been made for one featured list and two featured sounds to appear on the main page each week.

Ten other lists have been promoted to featured status in the past two weeks: Latin Grammy Award for Producer of the Year List of 1952 Winter Olympics medal winners, The Simpsons (season 13), Grammy Award for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, U.S. state reptiles, List of Oakland Athletics first-round draft picks, Venues of the 1994 Winter Olympics, Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (E–F), and List of Oakland Athletics managers.

One list was demoted:

New administrators

The Signpost welcomes two editors as our newest admins.

  • Fæ (nom), from the UK, can be found doing anti-vandalism work and CSDing and is heavily involved in GLAM collaborations, the Hoxne Hoard featured article, OTRS and Commons.
  • Valfontis (nom) brings more than five years' experience as a Wikipedian to the role. She is an active member of Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon, has worked for Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam, and is familiar with AfD and reporting vandals to AIV. Valfontis has helped to promote five articles to GA status, and one to FA.

At the time of publication there are two live RfAs: Neutralhomer and Salvio giuliano, both due to finish Saturday.

Early motorsports: from the 1906 French Grand Prix
Robert Oppenheimer (left) at the remains of the Trinity test in September 1945. The white canvas overshoes prevent fallout from sticking to the soles of their shoes

Ten articles were promoted to featured status:

  • 2009 World Series (nom), Major League Baseball's 105th championship series, in which several records were tied and broken. (Nominated by Staxringold)
  • Kennedy half dollar (nom), first issued only months after the assassination of US President Kennedy in 1963. Co-nominator Wehwalt says the double whammy of hoarding and rising silver prices meant that "the half dollar failed to circulate despite massive mintages, and effectively destroyed the half dollar as a coin used in trade. It has never recovered, and the coin is only struck today for collectors." (RHM22 and Wehwalt)
  • Sacagawea dollar (nom), which proved unpopular with Americans in commerce. "Nonetheless, it continues to be minted, now with a reverse that changes yearly", says nominator RHM22.
  • History of Sesame Street (nom), the American preschool educational television show, now a cultural icon. (Christine)
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer (nom), theoretical physicist best known for the Born–Oppenheimer approximation, the Oppenheimer–Phillips process, and the prediction of quantum tunnelling, neutron stars and black holes. He worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear weapons. (Hawkeye7)
  • Eastbourne manslaughter (nom), the death of a 15-year-old boy at the hands of a teacher. The case was important in the development of modern laws surrounding corporal punishment. (Nikkimaria)
  • 1906 French Grand Prix (nom), from the very early days of motorsports: on a dusty road outside Le Mans, drivers in huge, rickety cars fought, driving on temporary wooden-plank roads, being blinded by tar. "It was a miracle no one died", says co-nominator Apterygial, with AlexJ.
  • Planet Stories (nom), now one of the most sought-after pulp science-fiction magazines from the 1940s and 1950s. (Mike Christie)
  • Flow (video game) (nom), originally played millions of times as a free flash game and then successfully used to launch to prominence an American independent video game developer co-founded by two University of Southern California Interactive Media Division students. (PresN)
  • Suillus salmonicolor (nom), or "the slippery Jill", a widely distributed, slimy, and (somewhat) edible mushroom. (Sasata)

One featured article was delisted:

User:Alvesgaspar's photograph of a tabby cat

Twelve images were promoted

The Lion Tower in Tripoli, an important example of 15th-century Lebanese architecture, photographed shortly after 1900

. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":

New featured picture: of more than a little relevance to events over the past few weeks, a map of caesium-137 contamination in 1996, a decade after the Chernobyl crisis. Restriction orders are still in place for the production, transportation and consumption of food contaminated by Chernobyl fallout.

Engraved portrait of composer Richard Strauss by Ferdinand Schmutzer (1922); a performance of Strauss's Burleske was promoted to featured status.

Four sound files were promoted:

Information about new admins at the top is drawn from their user pages and RfA texts, and occasionally from what they tell us directly.

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