Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-10-04/Features and admins

Features and admins

Milestone: 2,500th featured picture

The 2,500th featured picture, "Coconut octopus", a creature that has evolved to use coconut shells for protection and to carry them for later use. Below, how the featured-picture process has evolved.

Fifteen articles were promoted to featured status:

Featured article Choice of the week: the Saint-Gaudens double eagle, a $20 gold coin produced by the US Mint from 1907 to 1933.
Choice of the week. The Signpost asked Bishonen, who has many FA promotions to her name, to select the best of the week. The choice is from both last week plus the four new FAs from the week before:

"Abandoning with regret all sports, music albums, battleships, flora and fauna after a quickish read-through—I'm very sorry, but I'm just not equipped for giving opinions on those subjects—I dived into David Bowie, Lat, and Grace Sherwood with relish. Such intriguing subjects! Articles that do them full justice! Picking one of those three wouldn't be easy, I reflected, and then promptly stumbled over an irresistible and unlikely article, my choice for the week. Saint-Gaudens double eagle is about a twenty-dollar gold coin, first produced in 1907. Strictly for the numismatics otaku, is it not? No. The piece is a great read for anybody who enjoys human, historical and cultural eccentricity and battleground. It's very considerate of the ignorant reader, and I especially appreciate that, even though the subject is so American, it's perfectly transparent and accessible to the international reader. I can hardly wait for the third part of Wehwalt's numismatics trilogy."

A tower of grey ash erupts above a mountain
The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the largest eruption since 1912, was dwarfed by the earlier eruptions in FL Choice of the week, List of largest volcanic eruptions
Five lists were promoted:

Choice of the week. We asked FL nominator and reviewer Parutakupiu for his choice of the best (ignoring his own):


Ancient wiki fossil: "Epicyclic gear ratios" appears to have been the first FP nomination; its featured status survives to this day.
User:Fir0002's Tau Emerald dragonfly was the 1,000th FP.
User:Muhammad Mahdi Karim's tropical Rambutan fruit on white background, with the skin peeled away to reveal the edible flesh on the right, was the 2,000th FP.
On the occasion of the 2,500th featured picture, The Signpost asked FPC regular Makeemlighter about the earliest days of the process and how it has evolved. "The early history was quite confusing when I dug it up", he says. "The original process, called 'Brilliant pictures', was described as the visual equivalent to 'Brilliant prose', the forerunner of the featured article process. The oldest FPC archive is from the start of 2004, but Featured Pictures existed for about a year before that. As far as I can tell, the earliest Featured Pictures were Peppermint and Corsican mint plant and Potato plant, although they were subsequently delisted. Epicyclic gear ratios was the first image nominated through the process, and has survived an attempt to delist it."

In those days, Makeemlighter says the process was fairly casual – some of the nominations even lacked closing statements. It took more than a year after the first FPs were created for a template to be developed. Fair-use images, not permitted nowadays, were allowed for a while, and there seemed to be little of the modern formal emphasis on the notion of encyclopedic value. The process was different mechanically, too: "Images that received any objections would not be promoted unless that objection was dealt with and a 'nearly unanimous consensus' was reached. Today, the general rule is 2/3 support and an image passes", within a strictly applied nine-day period. By October 2004, there were more than 130 FPs. Tau Emerald in flight was the 1,000th FP, in December 2007. Rambutan white background was the 2000th FP, in September 2009 .

This week was uncommon at FPC in that only four images were promoted. They will be considered for Choice of the week along with next week's promotions. Medium-sized images can be seen by clicking on "nom":

One file was promoted: File:Pleasant_Moments_Piano_Roll.ogg nom, a 1916 recording of Pleasant moments (2 m, 56 s), a ragtime waltz recorded on a piano roll by Scott Joplin. Thought lost until discovered by User:PlayerRoll in 2006, it has been scanned and recorded on a grand piano as an MP3 file. Piano rolls—in which perforations were etched into a roll of stiff paper that could operate a pneumatic playing system on a piano—were one of the first forms of digital memory, and provided home entertainment to millions of people in the early 20th century.

Administrators

This week saw no new administrators.

New featured picture: the Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor is a single-seat, twin-engine fifth-generation fighter aircraft that uses stealth technology. It was designed primarily as an air superiority fighter, but has additional capabilities that include ground attack, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence roles.