Portal talk:Solar System

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Featured article star The Solar System Portal is a featured portal, which means it has been identified as one of the best portals on Wikipedia. If you see a way this portal can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, please feel free to contribute.
Portal peer review Solar System has had a portal peer review by Wikipedia editors which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this portal.
WikiProject Space
Portal:Space
 Space Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Space.
Portal This article has been rated as portal-Class on the assessment scale.
Related projects:
WikiProject Solar System WikiProject Solar System
This talk page is for the Portal about Solar System. Ensure this portal's details are listed in the Portal directory.
For discussion about Portals generally, please see the WikiProject on Portals.
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Contents

[edit] My Opinion of How this Portal Should Work

I haven't worked on portals before, but when I saw a great featured article, Solar System, having a poor (under construction) portal, I decided to help give this portal a facelift. Now that it is usable (although there is still work to do), I think that the discussion should change to how this portal can continue to be usable and interesting. Therefore, I have posted my thoughts on how this portal should be maintained.

The selected article should change on the first of each month and go down the list headings in the Topics box (excluding the main Solar System article). This has already been partly done via the switch from Sun to Mercury, so I think that the others working on this portal agree with this point. There should be discussion on whether it cycles or new articles are chosen similar to images after the list is done (see next paragraph).

The selected image should similarly switch weekly as there are a lot of images out there. The image should be chosen on this talk page from Wikipedia's featured pictures on objects in the Solar System and there should be a few featured images waiting to be added at the right time so that lack of consensus doesn't ever make the image change late. There should be an archive of the old articles and pictures (I'll get to work on archives immediately after posting this).

People should go through new articles relating to the Solar System and take interesting facts and add them to the Did You Know section. It must be diverse to get people to go to articles of varying content. When it gets too large, someone should create an archive of the oldest facts and remove them. In fact, anything that has regular changing content should have an archive created so that people can look at old things, similarly to how Portal:Astronomy or even the main page has archives (archives would of course be subpages of this portal).

Boxes of primarily link content should go on the right (or the very bottom of the left if there's too many on the right). Meanwhile, boxes of primarily text content should go on the left (one or two could probably be added without compromising design). This kind of organization would make the portal better as even some well-done portals seem quite random in the way they sort their boxes.

We should tell projects where this portal could fit in about this portal and those that agree to help maintain this portal should be added in the "WikiProjects" box. This way, the portal gets added help and is made better while the people viewing this portal see the projects that help with this portal and might decide to join them. Hopefully several projects will help on this portal.

I personally think that this portal has a lot of potential and it would be a good compliment to a good featured topic. I will thus try to help regularly maintain this portal. I hope that everyone interested can agree on how to maintain this portal so it can one day be a featured portal to compliment the many related featured articles. — Pious7TalkContribs 19:07, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

  • I revised the statement a bit now that it's been a while since I posted this. — Pious7TalkContribs 16:01, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Portal peer review

[edit] Solar System

All constructive comments are welcome. I have worked on this portal that was previously heavily under construction because it is on a featured topic and a featured topic deserves a featured portal. — Pious7TalkContribs 01:17, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Hey, pretty good looking so far, just a few small things:

Joe I 03:42, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Featured portal candidacy

[edit] Portal:Solar System

I have finished addressing all of the comments at its peer review. I think Portal:Solar System should be featured because I put hard work in it to ensure that it is well-designed, good-looking, and unique. It meets all of the featured portal critera as I went through the list.

This portal showcases the best articles on the subject. All the planets and dwarf planets combine with the Sun forming a featured topic. This is showcased in the "Article of the Month" section. Once Earth finishes its FAC, the rest of the queue will be complete. Currently it only goes up to Venus because Earth's introduction might be rewritten and there is still plenty of time before the portal page gets to Earth. Most featured pictures on the subject are included in the "Picture of the Week" section. All featured articles on the subject are included in "Major Topics" and bolded to draw attention to them. Contribution is encouraged by an organized box titled "What You Can Do," which (even with the title) encourages participation more than on the average portal.

The Solar System portal is is useful, attractive, ergonomic, and well-maintained. This portal covers a broad topic (the Solar System) and provides many links to enable people to go exactly where they want. It encourages people to participate in the many space-related WikiProjects, not just the Solar System one. A plethora of images are used, especially with links in the right column, to make an ordinarily dull page look more interesting. It is organized layout means that boxes with links are on the right and bottom while the changing content people would read and check regularly is on the left. This logical organizational scheme increases its usability by allowing people to read down only one column if they're looking for something specific.

This portal is well-maintained in that it will not run out of images anytime soon (and when it does, there are more out there and it can cycle back to old images as wel) and "Article of the Month" will never run out because there are so many articles on the topic. It would take over 7 years to just go through those in the "Major Topics" box. I am willing to check up on this portal periodically to ensure that it doesn't run out of content to feature and stays up-to-date.

In addition to all of the above, the Solar System portal's content is designed to point the viewer into other locations. It does this using almost every method available to a portal. In summary, this portal is designed to be a central point for people to go to if they're interested in learning about the Solar System. — Pious7TalkContribs 02:06, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

  • A very good portal, I cant see anything wrong here. Hossen27 04:47, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Two things first:A nomination page/procedure should be added for articles and pics, and the small font for "Small bodies" in the topics, should be changed to match the other headings. Again, Portal:Space exploration and Portal:Space should be added. Question, the project, Wikipedia:WikiProject Solar System, shows only 43 total articles. How can this possibly be enough to support a portal? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Searchme (talk • contribs) 05:49, 1 May 2007 (UTC).
    • I fixed the font. The nomination page/procedure is currently not necessary at the moment - the article cycle should last for many months (currently it is going through the Solar System featured topic in order). Similarly, this relatively new portal is going through the featured images relating to the Solar System and there is no demand to start a proccess for image nominations until it is closer to running out in a few months. I added links to the portals. Wikipedia:WikiProject Solar System only shows 43 total articles because it covers only general articles - there are many articles on Wikipedia related to the Solar System not under that project. This is more of a problem of the WikiProject and not the portal (I do link to related WikiProjects in the appropriate box, not just the Solar System one). The space-related WikiProjects are curently being reorganized, hopefully that fixes problems with lack of coverage in some areas and too much overlapping coverage. — Pious7TalkContribs 20:50, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
      • I have gone through and added roughly 20 articles from the Solar System category to the WikiProject's coverage. I will add more from subcategories and this portal when I have the time. It would help if I were given a minimum number so I can stop after a certain point as there are probably a lot of articles that can qualify and it would take a lot of time. — Pious7TalkContribs 14:39, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Support - A really neat portal. --Vaishu2 08:49, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Support It is overall a nice portal. Good work. Joe I 04:11, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
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