Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Biological warfare


 * 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 Cirt 20:56, 16 April 2010.

Portal:Biological warfare
Self-nomination. See archived peer review. I believe the portal meets the standards for Featured Portal status. Thank you for your time, Cirt (talk) 20:27, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Support I find nothing wanting. Well Done! TomStar81 (Talk) 18:04, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

A few thoughts from a brief look around...
 * Comments from J Milburn
 * Selected articles... Are death and animal testing really worth including? Yeah, they are both issues that arise, but they're not really articles about biological warfare that the others are.
 * Again, there seem to be some rather vague articles on the SBA section- things like fungus and bacteria
 * strains is a dablink on SBA2
 * protect a dablink on SP4
 * plague is a dablink on SP15
 * Equine Encephalitis in the topics is a dab link
 * Osho, plague dablinks on DYK
 * Look at the DYK nomination section- something up there.
 * The majority of the Wikimedia links, although they look pretty, actually point to nothing.
 * No source is cited for File:BWC Participation.svg

Bit of a grim topic, nautrally, but this is well done. I particularly like the "in this month" section. J Milburn (talk) 16:32, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Responses to comments from J Milburn
 * 1) Done. Removed those pages. Cirt (talk) 16:51, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 2) Done. Removed those pages. Cirt (talk) 16:51, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 3) Done. Fixed the dab link. Cirt (talk) 16:51, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 4) Done. Fixed the dab link. Cirt (talk) 16:51, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 5) Done. Fixed the dab link. Cirt (talk) 16:51, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 6) Done. Fixed the tab links. Cirt (talk) 16:51, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 7) Done. Fixed the DYK nomination section. Cirt (talk) 16:51, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 8) Done. Where there is not a specific page, the search function is used. This brings up relevant items of interest, and when a specific page becomes available, the search function defaults to bring the user there. Cirt (talk) 16:51, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 9) Done. Removed this. Cirt (talk) 16:51, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for making those changes. Looking again, a couple more things are jumping out-
 * The featured content section is a little spartan- perhaps, rather than linking to lists of related featured content, you could just list good and featured content that is directly tied to biological warfare- something more like I've done on Portal:Cumbria. Also, I'm not sure it needs the whole page width- it could be cut to half the size, and placed below "in this month"? The page currently seems a little right-side heavy.
 * Wikiprojects should be WikiProjects
 * The selected quotes seem a little US-heavy- I applaud the fact you've found lots of historical quotes, but some more international ones would also be good.
 * Seems to be inconsistent sizing on the related portals icons- the war one, for instance, is much too small.
 * Seems to be a little too much whitespace below the intro- perhaps you could try smallifying the image, moving the caption to below it, and swapping the "more about Biological warfare" (which has a random capital letter anyway) to the "(more...)" that is used on the main page.
 * This is a personal preference, but I like a bigger "Show new selections", as I feel that one is a little inconspicuous.
 * Personally, I'd say more of the likes of File:SalmonellaNIAID.jpg and less of the likes of File:M114 bomblet.jpg should be selected pictures. Pictures of germs, flies, fungi and whatnot would offer a little variety.
 * On the Japanese war crimes blurb, could it perhaps be made clearer who the image subject is? Some kind of (pictured), as we use on the main page?
 * A better picture for dogs in warfare would be nice- there are lots of decent photos in the article currently. That said, it's another of the less relevant articles, I would say... Along with cell biology and DNA. This may be a little dumbed-down, but I've done something similar in Portal:Sharks- perhaps you could include some selected articles on fiction (films, books etc) that use a theme of biological warfare as selected articles? Again, would create a little variety while staying very much on-topic. For instance, the Resident Evil series of games, films (probably books, visual novels...) includes a major biological warfare theme. There are plenty of others; I'll help you think of some if you like the idea.
 * Not wild about the criminal justice portal link- is there nothing more appropriate? One on disease or microorganisms or something?

Hopefully you'll be able to get something useful from these ideas... J Milburn (talk) 17:51, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Responses to additional comments from J Milburn
 * No, I think the links provided are just fine. The featured content is only one click away for the reader. Cirt (talk) 19:18, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) Fixed. Cirt (talk) 19:18, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 2) It took a lot of time and research to add those quotes, and source every single one of them. Feel free to add more if you like, of course. Cirt (talk) 19:18, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 3) The sizing looks fine to me. Cirt (talk) 19:18, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 4) I think the intro sizing is fine. It draws attention to the material. Cirt (talk) 19:18, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 5) I like the current style of "show new selections". Cirt (talk) 19:18, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 6) I made sure to gather a variety of images. Feel free to please add more if you so desire. Cirt (talk) 19:18, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 7) There is already a roll over caption for this. Cirt (talk) 19:18, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 8) Removed these. Cirt (talk) 19:18, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * 9) Criminal justice is directly related to the investigation of the subject matter. Cirt (talk) 19:18, 8 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm happy to support at this time. I don't feel the portal is perfect, but I certainly think it's excellent. Very pretty (if pretty is the right word...) and care has been taken. A good subject for a portal. J Milburn (talk) 20:06, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Cirt (talk) 20:07, 22 February 2010 (UTC)


 * This is extraordinarily trivial, but it looks like Portal:Biological warfare/Related portals makes me click on a specific coordinate on the imagemaps in order to reach the linked portal and some of them are missing rollover captions on my Firefox browser. Is there anything wrong with using the default parameter and if not, I created a tweaked version at User:Jh12/Draft9 Thanks, --Jh12 (talk) 08:30, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Done. Fixed it, using suggestions from userspace draft, as recommended. Thank you, Cirt (talk) 21:17, 25 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Support Looks good. In terms of future maintenance, definitely get a replacement 10th selected article as soon as possible. I didn't find any good candidates from MilHist, but you can also add Category:A-Class military history articles for potential article sources --Jh12 (talk) 17:33, 26 February 2010 (UTC).
 * Nod, okay, definitely will do. :) Cirt (talk) 21:40, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

may be busy with some other things going on at the moment. As it appears that there is support, and without objection for promotion, I will close this discussion in one week. -- Cirt (talk) 02:56, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Support - this portal is well-made and I can't see anything I would complain about. (After working on Portal:Battleships I have a much higher appreciation for those who develop portals of this quality) -MBK004 04:08, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Support looks nice overall.  fetch  comms  ☛ 19:45, 4 April 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.