Portal talk:Latin America

Created
I just created this portal. Feel free to contribute. --JuanMuslim 1m 05:09, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

List
I think it will be good to make a list of latin american countries, they haven't quick main-page access. Any comments? Anybodie opposes? -- Argentino 19:59, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, the current list looks pleasing to the eyes. -- S iva1979 Talk to me  18:53, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Improvements
Hi. I have searched through the lists of Wikipedia's featured content in order to find stuff that can be added to this portal. I have come up with the following:

Images (25)

Featured Articles
 * Cape Horn
 * Flag of Mexico
 * Portuguese language
 * Mário de Andrade
 * Salsa music
 * Mexicanos, al grito de guerra
 * Panama Canal
 * Chagas disease
 * Elfin-woods Warbler
 * Right whale
 * Cochineal
 * Vulgar Latin
 * Military career of Hugo Chávez
 * Cristero War
 * Che Guevara
 * Operation Auca
 * History of Puerto Rico
 * Military history of Puerto Rico
 * Fauna of Puerto Rico
 * Sylvanus Morley
 * Jaguar
 * 1933 Atlantic hurricane season

Tropical Storms (7)
 * Hurricane Nora (1997)
 * Hurricane Dennis
 * 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane
 * 2005 Atlantic hurricane season
 * Hurricane Claudette (2003)
 * Hurricane Irene (1999)
 * Hurricane Mitch

Lists (5) -- I think that these would be preferable content to show to the existing stuff. Any objections? Estrellador* 18:33, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Flag flying days in Mexico
 * List of Puerto Rican birds
 * List of Presidents of Venezuela
 * Battles of the Mexican-American War
 * List of South America tropical cyclones


 * I'm cool with it, though some articles don't seem that important or relevant, such as Vulgar Latin and Military career of Hugo Chávez. Famous artists (no pop singers!), historical events (the more global the better) and geographical articles are, in my oppinion, the best candidates for Featured articles. What's more, a lot of very good Latin America related articles could be promoted to FA, but aren't because nobody propose them. Same goes for the images. Mariano (t/c) 07:27, 30 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Great, but these seem to be the only articles/pictures/lists that we can call featured rather than selected at the moment. If you have any suggestions for articles/pictures/lists that should be promoted, I am happy to put them up as candidates. However, so far I don't think I have seen many, and in any case I think that probably the most important thing we can do to improve this portal is to improve the Latin America article to at least the level that it doesn't need a cleanup tag any longer. BTW, Vulgar Latin might not seem relevant at first glance, but since the definition of Latin America is that the countries in question speak a language descended from it, I thought it might be good. The Military career of Hugo Chávez article is just a subsection of the Hugo Chávez article that was broken out and is now featured. I can only mention what is featured - I only looked through the featured content lists; it is not my fault that Hugo Chávez is so well covered! :) Estrellador* 09:18, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

I see we have a new featured article on the Brazilian football player, Gilberto Silva. Is it the intention to have a new group of 31 featured articles displaying during 2007? We probably don't have enough featured articles and other content relevant to Latin America to do this in total. Since it looks like the decision has previously been made to stick only with featured content, should we copy the 2006 features to 2007 and replace them as new featured content becomes available? I would favour replacing some of the hurricane articles first, partly because we have several of them, and partly because they affect only a small area of the total of Latin America. We have almost two months to discuss this, but it would be good to start now.- gadfium 21:34, 2 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree totally. Maybe Gilberto Silva should replace one of them now. The lists, too, are not ideal, and in my opinion should also be replaced as and when possible. --Estrellador* 18:42, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

2006 FIFA World Cup
I was thinking - in the absence of an In the News section like other geography portals have, would it be a good idea to write in the immediate 2006 FIFA World Cup fixtures in a box? Should I link to the page instead? or is it not important enough in the greater scheme of things to be bothered with? Estrellador* 19:59, 1 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure I understand the idea, but the topic might not be so important to the portal. Mariano (t/c) 07:02, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Formatting
Sorry about the mess. If no-one comes by in the next couple of hours, I'll try and fix it, but right now I'm busy. Estrellador*

WikiReader History of Latin America
Hello. I have launched History of Latin America Wikireader. Comments, critics, suggestions and help are welcome.--Youssef 10:30, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Some more obscure pages
In order to find them more easily, here are some sections of the portal that are hard to find: This will be useful to me, anyway :-)Estrellador* 14:39, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Portal:Latin_America/Did_you_know/2006/Title - rotates the DYK title
 * Portal:Latin_America/box-header - changes the colour of the box tops
 * Portal:Latin America/box-header2 - changes the colour scheme of the Countries box

Countries
I have tried reformatting the countries and dependencies. With this formatting, you can now also click on any of the flags and they will take you to the country article. To make the flags with white color look okay, I have used an alternative background color. These are set in Portal:Latin America/box-header2. Feel free to try different colors. -Aude ( talk contribs ) 00:44, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Greetings
I placed this portal on the community portal page as it was proving too much effort for me to maintain by myself. If you would like to help, it is very easy to - most of the material is automated. However, the news and Did You Knows need regular updating, and just generally things need to be kept ticking over. If you can design a nice map of the languages spoken to put somewhere, that'd be great too. I will still be doing maintenance, but it will not be all the time. Thanks. --Estrellador* 21:23, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

List of countries
The listing of countries was forcing the page to display a horizontal scroll bar at a screen resolution of 1280x1024 or below. I think this is undesirable; ideally we should never have a screen width which needs to display a horizontal scroll bar, and probably the majority of internet users have a resolution of 1280 or less (my laptop has a maximum display of 1024x768, and this is still very common).

I've changed the list to use three rows, which means that I don't think any horizontal scroll bar will appear for most users unless the resolution is below 1024x768 pixels (a user's font size will also affect this, but we have no control over that).

The list of countries now takes up more vertical space, meaning that any selected content will not be seen without vertical scrolling by most users. Perhaps we should toss around ideas on alternative methods of showing the list of countries to improve this. The list of subportals also potentially has the same problem.

In Portal:Europe, the listing of countries is very compact, with no flags shown, and the font size is forced to be smaller than on most Wikipedia pages. The list of subportals shows a very small flag for each one (as this portal once did), but with the country names in full. In Portal:Africa there is a slightly larger flag for each country, but no attempt to sort the country names into columns. In Portal:Oceania (which I maintain, so I'm biased), there is no list of countries, but there is a "Daily article" which rotates around the 28 countries / states in the area, with some more general articles to fill out the end of the month. Portal:Asia lists countries and sub-portals below the selected article and selected picture. Portal:North America has a similarly formatted list of countries to Portal:Africa, but separates territories out into separate lists.

I rather like each continental portal having its own approach, so I'm certainly not suggesting this portal should simply adopt one of the other portal's styles.- gadfium 22:49, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

I've made a start of a Portal:EU-style countries page here and here, if anyone is interested in fleshing it out (it is quite time-consuming). --Estrellador* 20:55, 18 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Can anyone explain me why suriname is a latin american contry, i can understand why Trinidad and Tobago can be considered a Latin American country, i think is wrong but there is a spanish past, it has been erased from the inhabitants so in my oppinion Trinirad and Tobago shouldn't be considered part of Latin América. The main point is to understand why a country is considered a Latin one, and latin countries are those whose people has a very important heritage of the latin roman countries, which are Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Romaina. We can consider too Belgium, Switzerland and maybe Malta. --80.26.10.217 (talk) 15:01, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Featured content
We're about to run out of featured pictures. I see three pictures above which haven't appeared yet but which seem suitable: Image:Cleistocactus strausii2.jpg, Image:BeadedLizard-AHPExotics.jpg and Image:Egretta thula1.jpg. I'll add those to the queue this weekend if no one else does anything sooner. There are one or two images above such as the cockroach one where I don't see a connection to Latin America - they exist everywhere.
 * These three pictures have been added to the queue. This takes us up to the end of November.- gadfium 03:05, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

After those images, I'll have a look through to see if I can find any more which have been featured since the earlier search was done, and then I presume we'll have to start recycling them.- gadfium 03:54, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

We have a new featured list: List of top-division football clubs in CONMEBOL countries. Can anyone suggest a suitable picture to accompany the writeup for this in the portal feature?- gadfium 06:33, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Since we'll never have as many featured pictures as we will need for a weekly picture, why don't we pick the best dozen and make them monthly pictures for 2007? I realise that "best" is subjective, and they're all good pictures, but some are more specific to Latin America than others, and some look good only at higher resolution and so are less suitable for a portal page.- gadfium 18:11, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I haven't found any more suitable featured pictures, so what I suggest as an alternative to the monthly rotation I suggested above is a weekly rotation between the existing 26 pictures, which repeats twice a year. I can set this up with a bit of wikicode. As more featured pictures become available, we can discuss which of the existing pictures should be replaced. Any objections to me setting this up to begin in December? Any suggestions for the order of the pictures would be welcome. I was thinking of rearranging the order currently seen at Portal:Latin_America/Featured_picture/2006 so each week's picture is of a different theme from the previous one, i.e. one landscape doesn't follow another.- gadfium  03:05, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I have found some more featured pictures at the Commons.

I will set up four of these to continue the featured picture section of the portal until the end of the year, and then set up a weekly rotation of the best 26 as I suggested above.- gadfium 22:55, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Featured pictures-order and selection
These are the pictures I intend to set up as the permanent weekly rotation. There are 26, so they will repeat twice a year. I've tried to organise them so pictures with a similar theme or from the same country are separated.

The following are selected pictures which I haven't included in the rotation. All of them are very good pictures, but some weren't very specific to Latin America, and others were of the same subject as pictures above.

If there are any objections or suggestions, please let me know. I intend to put this in place in the last week of December.- gadfium 08:05, 7 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I've implemented the weekly-rotating list of 26 pictures, and made the daily-rotating lists of 31 articles and 31 quotes independent of the year. For some of the 26 pictures, there is no writeup as yet, but I'll make sure that's completed before the week of display comes around. I've commented out the "Did you know" section as it was not maintained.


 * The featured articles list should be updated as relevant new articles become featured. Gilberto Silva is already available, and I will replace Day 28, Right whales, with this article in the next few days, since right whales are not specific to Latin America. List of top-division football clubs in CONMEBOL countries is a featured list and can replace one of the hurricane articles, but I need a suggestion for an illustration for that list first.


 * Apart from these small matters left to tidy up, the portal is now in a state where the only maintenance it needs is the occasional updating of the news section. I'll continue to copy stories from Portal:Current events as I see them.- gadfium 03:34, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

The image writeups are now all done. I have not been copying news stories as I promised in the previous post, so the news column is now very out of date. Apart from this, the portal is in good shape for anyone who would like to pick it up again. My involvement with it is now complete.- gadfium 06:36, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

New featured content
Two new lists have been featured: These could replace a couple of the hurricane articles, perhaps on Days 10 and 31.
 * List of Cuban birds
 * List of birds of Belize


 * Image:Falkland Islands topographic map-en.svg has also been featured, but I think it would be too controversial to use as a Featured Picture on this portal, and we have a good selection of pictures already.- gadfium 19:29, 8 May 2007 (UTC)


 * List of birds of Nicaragua is now featured.- gadfium 20:06, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

What Latin America and not South America
All the other geog portals refer to the contienets, except this one. It over laps with North America as well. Latin America is a cultural construct and it does not seat here well with the other geograhically based portals. 143.167.42.90 12:44, 27 June 2007 (UTC) I agree with you, and I'll start a proposal on merging certain contents from Latin America to its geographical subdivs.interesting -- Andersmusician  VOTE  04:39, 25 October 2007 (UTC) Looking at the definition of Latin America ("Therefore, virtually all of the Western Hemisphere except the United States, Canada, and the non-Hispanophone countries of the Caribbean have tended to come under the heading of Latin America"), Suriname and Guyana don't fall in this category. They are part of South America, but not of Latin America. How can this be explained/fixed? Stretsh (talk) 21:40, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

FROM THE SOUTH WANTS TO HELP
Hi! my name is Maria Belen Rios and I am writing you for FROM THE SOUTH group from Toluca, Mexico. We are a group of 4 integrants: Andrea from Venezuela, Sofia from Colombia, Miguel from Peru and me, from Ecuador. That is why we chose to be called FROM THE SOUTH. We study at the Tecnologico de Monterrey Campus Toluca. We are working on a project for our Advanced B English class, which consists in developing an article for Wikipedia. We are very interested to contribute with this page and enrich it with ideas and specific knowledge about our countries or Latin America in general. We could talk about our different traditions, food, places, experiences and life. We are looking forward to help you. Please for any comment answer us to our group page so that our teacher could be able to keep track of our conversation at> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:School_and_university_projects/ITESM_Campus_Toluca/From_the_South Sincerely,Belen Rios 00:37, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

In the news
This is probably the most obvious part of the portal to suffer from the lack of updates. There have been no new stories added for over six months, and the older stories are more than a year old.

There are three possible solutions:
 * 1) Remove the "In the news" pane. This is the quickest and easiest solution.
 * 2) Use the Wikinews Importer Bot to automatically import material from wikinews:en:Portal:South America. This will take a little more work to set up, but I'm willing to do it, and will ensure that this portal is as up to date as wikinews is. The only problem is that this is news from South America only, not the whole of Latin America. We could also import material from wikinews:en:Portal:Central America as a second list, but I don't believe it's possible to merge the two lists.
 * 3) Find someone to maintain the page. Just copying relevant items from Portal:Current events every few days would great. I don't want to do this myself but I'm happy to give assistance to anyone wanting to get involved.

Any comments? I see the portal gets about 120 views a day, so I think it still has potential.- gadfium 00:47, 7 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Since no one seems sufficiently interested to comment, I've taken the quickest solution and removed the pane.- gadfium 19:55, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Current events subportals MfD
A discussion about most of the Current events subportals has been opened at Miscellany for deletion. You are invited to participate in discussing the fate of these subportals. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:37, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Colors
Why the heck were these colors chosen for the portal? Aren't they a little... ummm... horrible?! Is there a particular reason? Can it be changed!? ~ RayLast  « Talk! » 15:13, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
 * The colours were there before I got involved in the portal. If you want to change them, have a look at Portal:Latin America/box-header. You should look through Web colors before making changes, as not all systems can display all possible colours. I think using anything in the "X11 colours" section is safe enough.- gadfium 19:11, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Mosè Giacomo Bertoni‎ or Moisés Santiago Bertoni
Hi Portal:Latin America and Portal:Switzerland I have a question on the naming of Mosè Giacomo Bertoni‎ or Moisés Santiago Bertoni. He lived in Switzerland from 1857 til 1884 and in South America the rest of his life (1929). So what is the right name for the artile and which one will become the redirect?--Stone (talk) 10:02, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

St. Pierre et Miquelon
I had to do something about St. Pierre et Miquelon. The French territory is off the coast of Newfoundland and just doesn't belong in Latin America. It's pretty far north and clearly part of North America, so I've deleted from the listing of Latin American countries and territories. Obviously, somebody disagrees or it wouldn't have been here. So my argument: this is a geographical portal; thus, the location matters. To take a place that's in the middle of North America and put it geographically in Latin America... well, it just doesn't fly. Goeverywhere (talk) 02:09, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh, and this is a very good reason to have a GEOGRAPHICAL portal called "South America," to avoid confusion with any broader (and thereby confusing geographical) definitions of "Latin America." Goeverywhere (talk) 02:15, 28 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree that it's rather anomalous to include St Pierre et Miquelon, and have no objection to your removing it. See Latin America for some idea of how widely the definition of what constitutes Latin America can vary.


 * A portal devoted to South America instead of Latin America would fit more neatly with geographical portals. However, no one appears to be keen to maintain this portal, and I have no reason to believe a portal on South America would be any different.- gadfium 02:35, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Indian Reservation
Are there indian reservation in South America except Brasil? Or something like indian reservation? Indian territory? Where I get information about them?--Kaiyr (talk) 08:23, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Notice from the Portals WikiProject
WikiProject Portals is back!

The project was rebooted and completely overhauled on April 17th, 2018. Its goals are to revitalize the entire portal system, make building and maintaining portals easier, support the ongoing improvement of portals and the editors dedicated to this, and design the portals of the future.

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From your friendly neighborhood Portals WikiProject. Hope to see you there. Sincerely,    &mdash; The Transhumanist   07:35, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Map "Spanish speakers in the Americas"
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spanish_speakers_in_the_Americas_(orthographic_projection).svg I think this map needs to be improved. The percentages in the U.S. states (and probably also in the Canadian provinces) do not represent the share of the Spanish-speaking population, but the share of Hispanics and Latinos. Is there anyone on this portal who is familiar with map editing? --Ora Unu (talk) 20:52, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Because no one answered after a while, I probably have to write to the people personally.--Ora Unu (talk) 13:32, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Portal updated, which was reverted
This portal was updated and expanded, which was subsequently reverted by another user in the following edit: diff. The improvements included:
 * Overhauled portal with modernized wiki markup using transclusion from articles to display content, which provides readers with current, up-to-date information.
 * Article content from various portal subpages was moved directly into the portal using transclusions.
 * A new Recognized content section was added, which displayed Featured-class and Good-class articles.
 * New content was added to all article sections of the portal.
 * Additional updates, cleanup and layout changes had been performed.
 * The articles added can be readily viewed in this version of the portal, and then selecting the Edit link (here). Then scroll down. North America1000 03:37, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Additional articles for the portal can be considered from those available in the table listed below.


 * Hopefully there is a reply to the revert.. Was there offensive articles added, was there a weight problem with the changes? - are just a few reasons but I dont see that as a problem here.-- Moxy 🍁 04:07, 13 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Nb. The updated version of the portal (permanent link) was restored on 27 January 2020 (UTC), as per this edit that was performed by another user. North America1000 22:06, 30 January 2020 (UTC)