Portal talk:South East England

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This talk page is for discussing improvements to the Portal about South East England; content disputes should take place on the appropriate article's talk page.

Please ensure this portal's details are listed in the Portal directory and its status is assessed.

For discussion about Portals generally, please see the WikiProject on Portals.

Welcome to the SE England portal! I created it but it doesn't belong to me, so be bold! Waggers 14:44, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Selected items

It's important that the selections are balanced and that the page is refreshed regularly. To that end, I've set up Portal talk:South East England/selections which will enable us to (a) track which articles, pictures, etc. have been selected, and (b) decide in advance which ones should be selected in the future. I think the guideline should be that discussion should take place here but final decisions added to the selections page.

To begin with, I've set a target of refreshing the portal on a fortnightly basis. We'll see how that goes and how much interest is generated - if lots of users want to be involved, we can make it more frequent. Waggers 14:44, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Change of plan. I've been reading up on how to get the pages to change dynamically, so I'm going to set them up to change every week. Waggers 13:49, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

I am not sure where you intended the nominated selections to go, but I think they should be on this page, its more visible. MortimerCat 21:29, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

My plan was for proposed selections to be discussed here and Portal talk:South East England/selections to act as a record of what selections have been made, so that we can ensure that there's a decent balance (ie. not favouring Oxfordshire over Kent, say, or male biographies over female ones). While there are just the two of us actively involved in the portal, I don't think we need to discuss selections much (I'm happy to trust your judgement) - just be bold and add to the list. At present, next week is cued up but the week after and beyond need some articles to be chosen. (By the way, apparently Wikipedia weeks start on Mondays for some reason). Waggers 10:09, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

I have created one selection so far Rudyard Kipling, although I am a bit worried that its lead article may be a bit long. I have some more names but they are all historical at the moment, so I will create a nomination section on this page. Mainly so I do not forget them, but it will also allow us to have a mix of historical and modern celebrity. MortimerCat 00:28, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

How about not including the year, just using the month. Once we have the 53 in place, we would replace the ones that have been seen recently. This has the advantage of always showing articles even if we both give up. MortimerCat 23:03, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I've been thinking along those lines for a while. The reason I've resisted is to do with ensuring freshness (ie. if an article's introduction is updated but the portal's version of it isn't, there'll be a disparity). But on reflection it's better to display an older version of an article than none at all, so I'll make the change. Waggers 12:21, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] On This Day

I'd like to add this feature but don't want it to be hopelessly incomplete. Dynamic updating is essential of course, so I'll create a box to point to "today's" page once we have a good number of pages to link to. Here is a list of all the "on this day" pages we have so far. Waggers 15:06, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

I've now made a full directory so that it's easier to spot missing items (red links): Portal:South East England/On This Day/Directory Waggers 13:45, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Selected Article/Picture/Celebrity nominations

I think its a good idea to list them here first. It allows someone else to verify their accuracy, and allows a good mixture in the final stage, rather that having consecutive weeks of similar articles.

This area is no longer used for nominations. See links on Portal front page

[edit] Celebrity

*Virginia Woolf Lived and died in Lewes, East Sussex

Provisional accept. - the actual article is Virginia Woolf. Be careful! Waggers 13:16, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

*Winston Churchill - Retired to Chartwell, Kent

Accept. He was born and raised at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, too, so definitely suitable. Be careful with your wikilinks though - the one you've used above is to the more famous Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. Waggers 13:16, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
I think I was tired - I meant Chartwell. MortimerCat 14:56, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Accept. It's easy to justify a selection if they're born in the region. Waggers 13:16, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

*Benjamin Disraeli - Lived at Hughenden Manor,Buckinghamshire ::Accept. Represented several constituencies in the South East (including Maidstone) so I think we can justify him as a selection. Waggers 13:16, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

  • Pam Ayres - Born Stanford in the Vale, was Berkshire, now Oxfordshire.
  • Derek Jarman - Lived in Dungeness, famous shingle garden cottage.
Accept all (as it's just you and me voting!). These all look like ideal candidates. Waggers 10:17, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article

Accept all Waggers 10:17, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Picture

Accept - all good, although a picture of the Radcliffe Camera was the first selected picture on the portal (used 19th-26th December 2006) so we should probably wait a bit before using it again. Waggers 10:22, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
It is easier to quickly list the ones I found here than enter them in the boxes. Plus, it gives a chance to vary them so we do not get Kent items for a month. We never know, someone else may come along too. I have noted that the first words should be wikilinked. MortimerCat 18:54, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
I have just bolded the titles on the unpublished picks. MortimerCat 20:46, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Random Featured articles.

On the Kent Portal we have just set up the featured articles and pictures to randomly choose from a list. It is much easier to organise plus not having to worry about getting the choices by a deadline. As a bonus, it uses the same directory structure that was setup on this Portal. Shall we? MortimerCat 18:37, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Sounds great. The only downside I can see is that the portal maintainers will need to ensure that all the featured article excerpts are reasonably up to date, but I don't see that as a major problem. Presumably this can give the portal the appearance of being updated every day rather than every week (when we have a suitably long list of featured article excepts), which would make things even more interesting for visitors. Yep, let's go for it! Waggers 10:32, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
You may have noticed we have random articles. Too tired to finish it tonight, will recommence tomorrow MortimerCat 01:27, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Awesome, thanks for your work on this. Waggers 10:59, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
No need for thanks. As you say at the top, it doesn't belong to you! Its a combined effort. MortimerCat 17:19, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Template:More about

I've just created the above template, which hopefully will come in handy. Waggers 11:09, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Plan

Thought I should share my long-term vision for this portal. What I'd like to see is a portal for each of the counties of South East England, all with a selected article, picture and biography (either randomly generated or changed manually, doesn't really matter). Then, all the content from this portal stripped out, with the selections from here each picking (at random) one of the subportals and grabbing the/a selected item from there. Thus maintaining the subportals would automatically maintain this parent portal. Any thoughts/objections etc? Waggers 09:27, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like a good plan to me. I intend to upgrade the East Sussex Portal very soon. MortimerCat 19:34, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Southampton Boat Show

New article - Southampton Boat Show --Montchav 12:13, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Related Portals map

Hi all, just to let you know I've created a map to display the related portals for the SEE area. See {{SEERelatedPortals}} and the Berkshire Portal to see how it looks as part of a portal. Ideally it would be nice to include this on all portals, but I thought I'd see what everyone thinks before making the changes! Many thanks, Seaserpent85 15:51, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

That's superb! I'll add it immediately to the SEE portal, and Hampshire and Oxfordshire. I'm not really involved in the others (at the moment) but MortimerCat has some involvement in those so hopefully he'll do the same. Waggers (talk) 13:19, 30 December 2007 (UTC)