Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Sports


 * 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 14:42, 1 May 2013‎.

Portal:Sports
 Informed all 59 active sports related WikiProjects 

Alright, so what I've done is broken Portal:Sports and games into Portal:Sports and Portal:Games because the previous format didn't really work, and it I was going to rebuild a major portal from scratch, it had better damned work. So this is the first of the two. It has:


 * 23 Selected articles, all FAs or GAs
 * 22 Selected biographies, all FAs or GAs
 * 20 Selected teams (like biographies, but for teams), all FAs or GAs
 * 32 Selected pictures, all FPs either on English Wikipedia, Commons, or (in most cases) both
 * 23 sets of five DKYs
 * 12 sets of selected anniversaries (one per month)
 * The standard suite of portal items (related content, categories, associated Wikimedia, things you can do)

My selection methodology is heavily based off of "not too much of one sport, not too much of one country". While I could add more teams to the selected teams, for example, the overwhelming majority of the ones I haven't tapped yet are association football related, and I would rather not have it seem like it's just a portal for association football and baseball (which has a few untapped biographies and a few untapped pictures).

I gave it a peer review, and added in a section. Having worked with Portal:Massachusetts recently, I think I'm a bit more experienced with the process. My sections are, while not 200 words a piece, shorter than last time, and I think all of the proportions are good. I know that this isn't going to happen, but if at all possible I'd like to be able to get any feedback ASAP, because I've got a very narrow slot (March 9th and some of the 10th) in which I am going to have several hours of editing time, and after that I'm not sure when I'm going to have another opening.  S ven M anguard  Wha?  18:26, 4 March 2013 (UTC)


 * This Portal looks good, and Sven has clearly spent a lot of time on it. I have a few suggestions and comments:
 * Initial impressions
 * The faint sky-blue outer background colouring does not have a top-border (above the lead section), but there is a left- and right-border of a deeper blue. This makes the page look strange, at least to this reader, and probably needs to be fixed.
 * If sport is already plural (except in North America), why is this portal named Sports? This seems particularly strange given that the mainspace article is called Sport.
 * Selected articles
 * Portal:Sports/Selected article/24 and onwards are not created. This isn't a problem (20 is probably enough), but 24–28 have had their pages created but no content added. The article overviews should either exist or not exist, in my view; it might confuse a contributor who tries to add some selected articles in the future. Update: By Sven's request here, I've deleted the unused selected article subpages.
 * Your selected articles are of good quality and the selection is properly balanced (not too many games from any one continent, although if pressed I'd say North America gets a few too many).
 * Other selections
 * Pictures have appropriate credits. All selections contain a good balance between the popular sports on different continents, making this Portal admirably pan-national.
 * It occurs to me that a parser function could very easily be designed for the DYK section, making the DYK subpages obsolete and meaning we could use the "From WP:DYK" section as the basis for the Portal's content. However, the DYK page as structured is packed with content and will certainly do the job.
 * Portal:Sports/Selected anniversaries may need more content. Five entries a month is not terribly many, though it is adequate for such a minor component of the Portal.
 * General
 * The portal is not self-referencial, has a very clear focus on Wikipedia content of all types, is attractive and useful. Great work! AGK  [•] 10:07, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the review. It's difficult to describe how frustrating it was to have had no one review this for so long, so I really do appreciate it. I've fixed the top border issue. As to your other concerns: Please let me know your thoughts on these matters and whether or not you support this portal's promotion.  S ven M anguard  Wha?  16:22, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
 * The reason it's called sports is twofold: First, it's a holdover from when the portal was called Portal:Sports and Games (the two were split), and second, as an American, it never would have occurred to me to name it Portal:Sport, because in American English Sport is not a plural. Theoretically it could be changed, however the logistics of moving a portal are immensely complicated, as I found out when I broke Portal:Sports and Games in two. Since I've rewritten all of the content in this portal essentially from scratch, the entire portal is in American English right now, so it might just be easier to modify the lead from Sport (Sports in North America) to Sports (Sport outside North America).
 * I don't like the idea of the parser function for DYK because I selected the entries for diversity of sport (it's how I could fit in Lacrosse and some other sports with lower coverage levels) and also for length of prompt (for left column right column balance).
 * Selected anniversaries is incredibly difficult to populate. I don't have a book of dates to work with and surprisingly there aren't any really good websites to draw from. The only easy way to make it longer would be to include athlete birthdays, which I avoided because I don't think birthdays are as important as other types of anniversaries.
 * I'm really glad that you notices the diversity in region. I tried to pull as many countries and as many sports in as possible, and included women's sports when I could. The reason that it's slightly North America heavy is that there is a disproportionate amount of FA/GA content from North American, and I can only mitigate that so much through the selection process.


 * That's all very reasonable. Thanks very much for your prompt response, and again for your efforts in improving the portal. With your follow up, I cannot say I've found any way in which this portal falls short of the FPO requirements, so I am firmly in support. AGK  [•] 19:27, 13 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Comment: Looks pretty good, there's only a few things I'd recommend:
 * 1) Might be nice to have 5 rotating images for the intro sect, like at Portal:Iceland/Intro.
 * 2) Did you know and In this month &mdash; these are better off balanced up top in the 50 percent columns sections.
 * 3) Categories &mdash; reformat categories to 2 columns, like at Portal:Society.
 * 4) Things you can do &mdash; reformat this sect, with icon on left side and standardized links, like at Portal:Dogs.
 * 5) Selected quote - Would be nice to add this sect to the portal, with 10 or 20 selected quotes, like at Portal:Theatre.
 * That's about all I can think of for now, but those improvements would really do nicely for this portal. &mdash; Cirt (talk) 16:15, 21 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the review. I will respond to each point in the order you raised them.
 * 1) I chose to have one image rather than a rotation because I wanted to make sure that I could represent as many sports in the lead image as possible. I purpose built that collage for the lead for this reason. I could build more collages of the same size, but I'm not sure if I could come up with four more of them, and I really don't want to have something that only represents one sport in that section. I will give this some thought over the next few days.
 * 2) I originally had them in the columns, but the "Did you know..." section tended to come out longer than the "In this month" section, but not consistently enough that I could just add one more item to "In this month" and fix it. Sometimes it was several lines longer, sometimes just one. By doing them horizontally, I circumvented that problem. I also think that once I add in the quotes, having the three sections stacked like that will look quite nice.
 * 3) Is there something wrong with three columns? With that many categories, I bumped it from two to three so that the section wouldn't dominate the page.
 * 4) Will do shortly.
 * 5) Will do shortly.
 * Thanks again. I'll ping you once I've done everything.  S ven M anguard   Wha?  20:04, 21 April 2013 (UTC)
 * I've done the last two, and explained the first three. What are your thoughts?  S ven M anguard   Wha?  18:40, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Much better! I'd suggest adding ten more quotes, and then reformat categories to 2 columns, like at Portal:Society. After that, it's pretty much done, IMHO. &mdash; Cirt (talk) 19:34, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Done and done.  S ven M anguard   Wha?  15:17, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Good enough for me. :) Categories still shows up in only one column in some browsers. That's why it's better to format it like at Portal:Society. But that's a personal preference on the part of the nominator, IMHO. &mdash; Cirt (talk) 16:02, 26 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Support. Portal looks excellent. Thanks for being so responsive to my recommendations. :) &mdash; Cirt (talk) 16:02, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Close as promoted. OhanaUnitedTalk page 14:42, 1 May 2013‎ (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.