Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-02-07/500 featured articles

With a busy week adding 11 new articles, Wikipedia's featured article collection passed a milestone on Sunday, as it reached the level of 500 articles deemed "particularly well-written and complete."

The 500th featured article was about John Day, an English printer during the Elizabethan period. It was promoted to featured article status Sunday, along with Death Valley National Park and History of post-Soviet Russia. Other articles promoted earlier in the week included Graffiti, Commonwealth of Nations, Battle of Warsaw (1920), Robert Oppenheimer, X Window System, Big Bang, Evolution, and the Krag-Jørgensen rifle.

The Battle of Warsaw article managed to win support in spite of some concerns, spilling over from a related dispute on the Polish-Soviet War article, that it was slanted toward a Polish patriotic point of view. The Polish-Soviet War article had been protected for a period of time in January because of an edit war over these issues. To help resolve concerns regarding the Battle of Warsaw article, a quote comparing it to the Battle of Tours (on the basis that it halted Soviet expansion into Europe much like Charles Martel stopped Islam from conquering Western civilization) was moved to Wikiquote instead.

Unusually high success rate
The 11 new featured articles marked an unusually successful week in terms of achieving consensus to promote articles to featured status. Nearly as many nominations were promoted as failed last week (12 nominations failed), even though recently it has been typical that about two nominations fail for every one that succeeds.

Among the unsuccessful nominations was Page table, the last winner from the second edition of Danny's contest to seek recognition as a featured article. While both other winners, Turquoise and Battle of Alesia, had been successful, this nomination failed because of objections that it was hypertechnical and not readily understandable for an average reader.

Featured pictures
Only one image was designated as a new featured picture last week. It is shown here&mdash;although be warned: you may find it difficult to locate the subject of the picture when looking at the photograph.