The featured listprocess this week reached a milestone of two hundred and fifty featured lists with the promotion of List of The Batman episodes on Wednesday.[1] After being introduced in May 2005 (see archived story), the featured list process led the way for the creation of featured topics and portals, both of which were proposed later that year.
Based on the
List of North American birds was promoted with four supporting comments, after several objections citing the lack of articles for every bird had been addressed. Very active during its first six weeks of operation, twenty-three lists were nominated; thirteen of which were successful by the end of June. The majority of the lists that failed did so either because of a lack of references, an insufficient lead, or a lack of free images. July of 2005 saw twenty lists promoted, a total that has been matched only by December
of last year. Nearly seventy lists had been promoted by the end of 2005.
A featured content portal was created in January of 2006; it has since been added to the navigation section of the sidebar. Initially, a list of all the featured lists was placed under a header of "featured lists". On 11 September, CBDunkerson began transcluding a portion of a randomly selected featured list using <onlyinclude> and <includeonly> tags; this is how the list section of the portal can be seen today.
After earlier discussion
in variousplaces, further discussion began earlier this month as to whether featured lists should be included on the Main Page. At its onset, some editors did not believe there were enough featured lists to make such an endeavour sustainable. Several editors then suggested a rotation, whereby one list is displayed per week, but different sections are displayed to keep the content fresh. On 21 April, Ed proposed a WikiProject
aimed at Wikipedia's lists. He said, "This project will encourage editors to write more lists. Lists are quite scarce now, and they're definitely needed to make Wikipedia as complete as possible."
Discussion also began in early April concerning
subpage
of Wikipedia's guidelines on fair use that pertains exclusively to lists was created. The page describes several advantages and disadvantages of non-free content in lists, although it was tagged as historical in January 2007.
On Thursday, 26 April, Lists WikiProject was created after a proposal by Ed. The final goal is to make all lists conform to the featured list criteria. A dozen editors have already agreed to assist in the effort.
Unlike the featured article process, there is no "featured list" director. Filiocht, ALoan and Rune.welsh have all taken a major hand in the promotion process; Tompw currently promotes or fails the vast majority of candidates. He was also a major contributor to the featured topic of Canadian elections, which currently contains fourteen featured lists.
^Two lists have been promoted since Wednesday, and four lists formerly held featured status but were demoted. This brings the total number of lists that have held featured status to 256.
The number of featured lists has steadily risen since June 2005.
Discuss this story
"On Thursday, April 26, Lists WikiProject was created after a proposal by Ed. The project will introduce a template on the talk page of all Wikipedia lists, giving an assessment and importance rating. The scale will be based on that for Wikipedia 1.0, with ratings from 'stub' to 'FA' class."
This has changed now (it was actually changed on the first day), and the aim is to expand the ratings of existing project banners to actually rate their lists, instead of just "list class". -- Ned Scott 06:34, 2 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]