Wikipedia talk:Featured pictures visible

I just started a discussion thread on the future of this page at Wikipedia talk:Featured pictures - Gaz 12:12, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I removed Image:London_Eye_panorama_small.JPG by User:Fantasy for the following reasons: (i) I can find no record of consensus or even discussion on WP:FPC. (ii) The image does not appear on WP:FP. Also, (my personal gripes about the image) (iii) it's way, way too wide to be usefully displayed. (iv) It's incompetently stitched together. Looking at the full version, seams are not only clearly visible, they make me wonder whether it was even stitched together in the right order. grendel|khan 15:32, 2004 Sep 12 (UTC)

Gallery
I've made the first 3 sections into the gallery format. I am happy to do the whole page, but I didn't want to waste my time if people aren't happy with it. It is the format that Commons uses for it's featured pictures, and I think it will be quicker to load the page. Not to mention the page will be much shorter. Please comment here if you would like the whole page to be in the gallery format or not. -- Silversmith Hewwo 4 July 2005 14:13 (UTC)


 * FP visible is getting rather large, and hopefully will only continue to get bigger. But I don't think that switching to use a gallery layout is a good idea, as it then mostly duplicates Featured pictures thumbs. Also the thumbnail size is useful for locating an image you already know, but rather too small to browse Featured Pictures and see them clearly.
 * If we are to stay with the ~300px width we have at the moment, I image the only solution is to split the page by topic/section and setup a navigation bar to allow paging through the sections.
 * Any other ideas? -- Solipsist 4 July 2005 14:21 (UTC)


 * So at the moment we have 3 pages for FP's: Featured pictures which has links to each image, Featured pictures visible, which has a 300px format of each image, and Featured pictures thumbs which has a gallery format but doesn't break up the images, it just puts them in alphabetical order. I would prefer we did away with the thumb page and had the visible page in the gallery format but broken into the sections.  I find the thumbs large enough to get a good idea of what the image looks like.  I think it will be far less annoying and inconvenient to do the gallery format then to split up the page. IMO -- Silversmith  Hewwo 4 July 2005 14:47 (UTC)
 * Well actually Featured pictures thumbs is in the order of promotion. Personally I find it useful when managing the Pic of the Day, but there are other ways that could be handled.
 * In principle, there isn't too much harm in displaying featured pictures in a number of ways (these pages are only links to the images), but reducing the number of FP pages would make promoting images easier and the variety of formats can be confusing. -- Solipsist 7 July 2005 10:49 (UTC)
 * I'm a big fan of simplicity, and I agree, I don't think the featured pictures visible page is very helpful. If you want to see an image near the bottom of the page, pretty much regardless of the speed of your connection you're going to have to wait a bit for it to load.  Splitting the page into sections would increase the complexity of the promotion process, I think.  The order of promotion is apparent from the FPC archives, though I admit that that isn't as simple as the thumbs page.  I say make the rest of the featured pictures visible page look like the first three sections, and get rid of featured pictures thumbs. --Spangineer  (háblame)  July 9, 2005 00:17 (UTC)
 * I would say the least helpful page is "Feature pictures", but may be necessary for those on very slow connections. If I had to get rid of one of the pages I'd say get rid of that. I think the 300px thumbs are too large and this page should also be converted to &lt;gallery&gt;'s. The result would be "Featured pictures (list/text)", "Featured pictures (by category)" and "Featured pictures (by date)", with the last two being &lt;gallery&gt;'s. I find (as do others apparently) FP by date to be very useful for checking out all the new promotions. ed g2s  &bull;  talk  14:03, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

Gallery or split the page?
Well the last thread didn't reach a resolution but the page is still too big in my opinion, and at the moment we have three sections in gallery format and the rest not, so it does want sorting out and I'm volunteering to do it.

Before I start, lets hold a quick approval poll. I'll post this at WP:FPC as well to invite more opinions.

With ref to the above discussion, what do people want to see? ~ Veledan • Talk 09:36, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) Translate the whole page to gallery format. That would give us two thumbs pages: WP:FPT which show FPs in order of promotion, and WP:FPV which would show them all on one page, and categorised
 * 2) Leave the pictures at their larger sizes but split the sections into faster-loading /subpages
 * 3) Old format: convert the sections that are already galleries back to larger pics, and leave the whole page as is

Opinions

 * I'd prefer #2, with a weaker vote for #1. I'm not in favour of #3 because the page is just getting too unwieldy and the situation will only get worse. ~ Veledan • Talk 09:26, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I also prefer #2, but I suggest putting the images into gallery format as well. (In other words, follow the example laid out at Featured pictures, which works well.) The current page takes forever to load; and, on days when the servers are slow, often I find it impossible to load the entire page. So I'm very strongly in favor of reducing the size into manageable pieces somehow. bcasterline t 02:34, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree, something needs to be done. Along the lines up #2, maybe we should split it into Wikipedia created images and non-Wikipedia created images? --PS2pcGAMER (talk) 02:54, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Why not break them up topically as is done at Commons? I think that's probably the most intuitive, and cutting it into two pieces still leaves it pretty big. (And growing.) bcasterline t 03:57, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I thought about that and certainly wouldn't be opposed to that. I just think that the distinction between Wikipedian work and PD work is big.  However, the average person probably wouldn't care who created the image, so your method would be better. --PS2pcGAMER (talk) 04:13, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Could we do both, perhaps? The front page could just show each header with recent thumbs like on the commons page, but the /subpages you get when you click to see the full set of pics for any heading could still be divided into two sections, with 'Created by wikipedian' above 'Found by' ~ Veledan • Talk 11:22, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Wouldn't that make it even more tedious to promote pictures (whatever happened to our bot)? We wouldn't be able to transclude that way...BrokenSegue 03:14, 16 May 2006 (UTC)


 * The bot is working (on all my machines, at least) and could be adjusted to accommodate any of the above. It hasn't been issued for general release because PS2 has had problems with it, but I can't replicate them :-( . RaveDave was going to test it for me too but I haven't heard anything from him yet. If you can help me test it (especially if you have used pywikipediabot before), please let me know. Anyway, I don't think this suggestion would make promotion much more tedious even without the bot - it would only involve one more edit, and in return for that you wouldn't have to edit the current massive FPV page which is a pain to preview ~ Veledan • Talk 15:36, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Lay off the promoting for a day and i'll test it out :) -Ravedave 17:43, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Oops sorry :-) ~ Veledan • Talk 19:19, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
 * And BrokenSegue, I meant that each /subpage could have two section headers on it, not that we should use sub-sub sections, sorry ~ Veledan • Talk 20:56, 17 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't know how possible it is, but an idea that occurred to me is that we could leave it in the current format but have two page listings. The first (and default) view would be merely text-linked to the images, and there could be another link to a page displaying them as thumbnails for those that would prefer to view it that way. It doesn't exactly solve the issue of an unwieldly, large list but it does solve the issue of extremely large page downloads that presumably put load on the servers as the images are resized for thumbnails (or are they cached on the server?). Otherwise, I'd prefer #2 as well. Diliff  | (Talk)   (Contribs) 09:58, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Sorry Diliff I don't quite understand. We already have WP:FP which is text links &mdash; do you mean something else? The images are cached, but the simple bandwidth required by WP:FPV must be putting the servers under strain, judging by the fact that the page won't even load fully when the wiki is busy ~ Veledan • Talk 15:36, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

I think the pages need to be split. Even on broadband that page takes suprisingly long to load, I can't imagine what it would be like for dialup users. --Mad Max 01:57, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

So...?
So what's the verdict here? There hasn't been any discussion in a long time and nothing seems to be getting done on the page. Personally, I think we should go with something like Commons:Featured pictures, using the galleries and putting the different topics on different sub-pages. If there are no objections within a week or so, I'll start moving these.  howch e  ng   {chat} 18:40, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
 * I proposed at Wikipedia talk:Featured pictures the COM:FPC-style FP list could serve as a merger of this page and WP:FP. If anyone has comments on the idea, please discuss there to keep all the discussion threads together. Thanks.  howch e  ng   {chat} 06:43, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
 * As there were no objections, I finished refactoring WP:FP so now, this page serves no real purpose. Thus, I changed it to redirect to WP:FP.  howch e  ng   {chat} 22:01, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

RSS feed
- Another question: Would it be possible to set up an RSS feed of wikipedia featured pictures?
 * Not without changes to the software.  howch e  ng   {chat} 18:50, 2 October 2006 (UTC)