Wikipedia:Tip of the day/March 30, 2008

Working on the Main Page

Being the gateway to the encyclopedia - the Main Page is Wikipedia's most frequently visited page. The main page is always protected and can only be edited by admins. But, most of the content on the main page is piped in each day from various departments, via templates. The volunteers in these departments work year round to prepare the content on the Main page to be viewed by the World each day.

The main page support departments are:
 * Today's featured article – prepares excerpts from featured articles, to be displayed on the main page.
 * Did you know – prepares and selects "hooks" to new articles or articles that have been expanded by a factor of five.
 * In the news – participants nominate blurbs from Portal:Current events, and decide which of these get displayed on the main page. Admins post the blurbs as soon as they are approved.
 * Selected anniversaries – prepares the pages that get displayed in the "On this day" section of the main page.
 * Picture of the day – copies and formats featured pictures into the POTD scheduling queue, and writes the captions that accompany the pictures.

Anybody can help prep the pages that feed into the main page's templates (up until the day they are displayed on the Main page), by proofreading and correcting them, and we encourage you to do so.

The scheduled queues of pages to be displayed by each department on the main page can be found at:
 * Today's featured article queue: follow this link (which looks like this: )
 * Did you know queue: Template:Did you know/Queue
 * In the news doesn't have a queue. Instead, items to be included are decided on by participants (you) at In the news/Candidates. News items that achieve consensus are posted by admins.
 * Selected anniversaries queue: Selected anniversaries/All
 * Picture of the day queue for the main page: the subpages of Template:POTD protected (their titles are dates). Only the current date is actually protected. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3APrefixIndex&prefix=POTD+protected&namespace=10 

Important: Be sure to follow the instructions posted at each department.

Read more: Editing the main page

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