Wikipedia:Portal peer review/Organized Labour/archive1

Portal:Organized Labour

This portal is nearing its first birthday and could probably benefit from some criticism from outside the group of frequent contributors. Here are some of the features:

366 rotating "Article of the Day" articles
12 heavily-populated "This Month in Labor History" features
50 random quotes
48 featured photos
105 DYK's from the front page

Thanks in advance! Haus^Talk 02:18, 22 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

1.The background colour doesn't work with the default link colour and needs to be changed (the links are very hard to read on my LCD monitor, even if they look OK on a CRT). Try something lighter. --Msanford (talk) 01:58, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done I think this was the result of some brittle html on the page -- code that rendered differently on diferent browsers. I scrapped and re-wrote all the formatting using a different approach. I'm curious: does a legibility issue remain? Haus^Talk 07:47, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

2.There should be prose introductory text at the top (see Portal:Math, IMHO one of the best portals on Wikipedia). --Msanford (talk) 01:58, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Very good point. Thanks for pointing this out. Haus^Talk 07:47, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done It looks much less clunky to these eyes now. Haus^Talk 09:53, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

3.You should change the Selected Article to reference an excerpt, and not to include the entire article (see what Portal:Math has done with the excerpt of e versus the length of the entire article). This also means that the formatting of that section will improve on the portal page. --Msanford (talk) 01:58, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Question: I wonder if there's room for a different philosophy as regards selected content. The portal manual of style states that exceptional content in the subject area should be highlighted. That's dandy. However mightn't it be useful to also highlight non-exceptional content that is topical? The idea being, of course, that the more eyes that land on an article, the more likely it is to be visited by wiki-gnomes, or even adopted. Haus^Talk 07:47, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think you have a point that non-exceptional but relevant content be included; I was merely suggesting that it should be physically shorter. --Msanford (talk) 15:52, 3 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As someone who worked heavily on the AOTD section, I wanted to mention that my philosophy was to find articles for the date in question. Thus, if it was June 1, the AOTD should be something that happened on June 1. Organized Labour has a real problem in that a very large proportion of labo(u)r related articles are stubs, and few new lab(u)r-related articles seem to be created by Project participants. I often struggled to find date-related content which was not a stub. Finding non-date-related content which was not a stub was a similar challenge. Additionally, a great deal of the labo(u)r-related content is America-centric, creating an additional problem. However, I would estimate that about a third of the ATOD articles are Stub or Start class articles. For example, see William Green, which is an AOTD. Unfortunately, I do not see that making these articles AOTD articles has helped to draw attention to them, and get contributors to improve them. - Tim1965 (talk) 02:22, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

4.I'm not qualified to judge the appropriateness of the image used at the top, but if you can find something that well represents the idea of organized labour, other than that clipart, that might be good. This is only because it seems generic to me, but I could always be wrong. If it's a recognized logo, you might consider adding a caption to that effect, mentioning it in the introduction, or adding a section explaining it. --Msanford (talk) 01:58, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Like (2), thanks for pointing this out. This had fallen into a blind spot! Haus^Talk 07:47, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done I made a banner graphic consisting of a sepia-print collage of some representative public domain photos. Considering that I'm no artist, I don't think it looks bad. Any comments? Haus^Talk 09:53, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed that there is an associated userbox with the "old" image, you may wish to have a look at that, it's hosted in User:UBX, I believe (sorry, can't find it easily). Msanford (talk) 15:48, 10 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Erm, there's no article for today. _{WEBURIEDOURSECRETSINTHEPARK} ^talk 17:47, 29 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for catching that! Fortunately, today is A.L. Lloyd's birthday. Haus^Talk 18:57, 29 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, there was an AOTD for February 29, but I don't think the code picked up the date to display that article. I know, because I filled out the February AOTD dates in January, and put something in for Feb. 29. - Tim1965 (talk) 02:22, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Looking good, Haus! I love the new colour scheme and banner graphic. --Msanford (talk) 15:52, 3 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You can add two more random quotes now. :) I want to say: it was a struggle to get the Random Quotes and the Featured Photos sections up and running. For a long time, they languished with only a few entries. Very, very few images on Wikipedia Commons were categorized for labo(u)r, and I spent weeks tagging images. Hundreds of images still remain uncategorized, or poorly categorized. Quotes were also difficult to come by. However, since I was working on the AOTD section, I was able to stumble across many quotes and add them. (I don't want to sound like I'm trolling for compliments here... sorry.) Updating these sections over time may prove difficult, now that AOTD is done. I'd ask Project participants to help by keeping a watchful eye out for images and quotes. - Tim1965 (talk) 02:22, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]