Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Featured log/August 2011

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 03:15, 26 August 2011 [1].

I introduce to you a portal dedicated to the highways of the Great Lakes state. The portal will automatically update the displayed content monthly like its parent portal, P:USRD. In this case, P:MISH has been scheduled to update through January 2013. (There are two selected article blurbs that haven't been added to the portal at the moment, Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive for August 2012 and Interstate 75 in Michigan for November 2012, that will be added once those respective articles are revised and sent through GAN in the near future.) All of the articles for the portal are Good Articles or Featured Articles, drawing from a pool of over 110 rated articles out of the 220 articles on highways in the state of Michigan. Should any subpage be missing, the portal's coding will load the previous month's selected article, selected picture and set of DYK hooks. Imzadi 1979 → 01:01, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment - Can an "In the news" section listing current events with Michigan highways possibly be added to the portal? Other than this, I am willing to support. Dough4872 02:00, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well, I considered that, but I don't know how often I could manually update it with non-routine announcements from MDOT. The department does have a Twitter feed and Facebook page with daily updates, but most of those are accident-related road closures, routine maintenance/construction updates and the public information sessions regarding routine maintenance/construction. Unlike P:USRD which covers all 50 states, DC and 5 territories to gain its content, there isn't going to be as frequent of updates in highway-related major changes to Michigan's roadways. Imzadi 1979 → 02:15, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • Support - The portal looks good to go. Dough4872 02:24, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Question The featured portal criteria say that a featured portal "covers a topic that is sufficiently broad and prominent to justify it as an entry point." Why are the highways of one US state "sufficiently broad and prominent" a topic to justify featuring? Bencherlite^Talk 21:30, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There are 9,716 miles (15,636 km) of state-maintained highways in Michigan that run through all 83 counties of the 11th largest state in the US, several providing access to four of the five Great Lakes. There are 220 non-list articles related to the state highway system and the related county-designated highways. The portal also includes notable county roads like County Road 492 (home of the first state highway centerline when it was part of M-15 in 1917), Brockway Mountain Drive (a renowned scenic drive built as a Depression-era work project) or the River Road National Scenic Byway. Most cities of the 8th largest state by population have state highway access. Of those 220 articles, 117 are listed as FAs or GAs. Imzadi 1979 → 21:55, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

So essentially the justification is the number and quality of the articles that the portal can display? I'm not sure that explains to me why Michigan highways are a broad and prominent topic; strikes me (despite all the hard work that clearly gone into getting those articles and this portal to their standards) that the topic is rather a niche one that will only appeal to a sub-set of people interested in American roads and a sub-set of people interested in Michigan. Bencherlite^Talk 22:22, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not really making a firm statement either way, but, it does have an associated WikiProject, at Wikipedia:WikiProject Michigan State Highways. — Cirt (talk) 08:50, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There seem to be enough GA/FAs in the topic area to sustain a portal, so it can't be that niche of a topic. Although, I have to agree that it's sort of awkward, but hey, no more different than Wikipedia having an FA on Gropecunt Lane rather than, say, education. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:48, 23 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Except the criteria aren't framed in terms of "is there a WikiProject behind the portal?" or "is there a lot of material that can go into the portal?" The criteria make nominators and reviewers consider whether the readers of Wikipedia are served by a sufficiently broad and prominent topic area, not whether FPo status should be the culmination of a WikiProject's work in generating GA/FA content. At the moment, I'm inclined to think that having plenty of GAs is no guarantee that the topic is either broad or prominent. But I'm still open to persuasion. Maybe it's just because we don't seem to have the same fascination in the UK about writing articles about roads... Bencherlite^Talk 00:55, 28 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the criteria could be modified to include alternative and yet equally applicable parameters, such as: "has an associated active WikiProject", and/or "has sufficient material for dynamic portal presentation" ? — Cirt (talk) 16:17, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not really a discussion suited to this page, but I wouldn't want the first alternative (active WikiProject) to be added: if there's an active project, it ought to be able to generate quality content, and if it isn't, why would it make the portal featurable? Does someone want to start a discussion on the talk page of WP:FPO? Bencherlite^Talk 11:14, 18 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Is Portal:Michigan Highways/Selected article/August 2012 and Portal:Michigan Highways/Selected article/November 2012 intentionally left blank? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 04:39, 8 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For the moment, yes. The articles (Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive and Interstate 75 in Michigan, respectively) that have been chosen for those months have not yet been improved to GA status. Once they are rewritten, their leads will be used for the blurbs for those months as I noted in the nomination statement above. If the subpages are not created in time, the portal coding will run the July 2012 and October 2012 selected article subpages for an additional month. (The content for May and June 2011 is actually stored in a May 2011 subpage. Since no June 2011 subpages were created, the portal re-ran the content for June. This was because the portal was created so late in May that I decided that it didn't need to change over a week or so after creation.) Imzadi 1979 → 04:51, 8 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

But there are no guarantees that either of these articles could reach GA status a year from now. Are you prepared to have something ready to fill both spots if one or both articles failed to reach GA by next August? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 20:02, 11 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No, there isn't a guarantee of that, but there are 117 FA/GA Michigan highway articles, so it's not like there aren't candidates between now and a year from now to take those places. I've been in a lull of sorts over the summer, but it's not impossible for either article to be updated and expanded as needed over the summer, and barring something like what happened with U.S. Route 223, it doesn't take more than a week at most on average to complete a GAN review on an article. Imzadi 1979 → 20:25, 11 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough. Just remember to fill those two red links with FA/GA next summer. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:41, 14 August 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.