Bumper crop of admins; Obama featured portal marks our 150th

There has been a significant increase in the number of successful RfAs over the past month, which has seen 15 promotions, at least double the typical rate. The Signpost congratulates the five editors who were promoted over the past week.

• Michig (nom), from England, plays guitar and bass guitar when not editing Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, his content interests involve music-related articles—particularly alternative music, reggae and hip hop. His interests also lie in Caribbean- and IT-related articles. Michig has created more than 370 articles, with more than 20,000 edits over his five years with us, three-quarters of them in mainspace. His content work will be combined with administrative tasks such as reviewing and, if appropriate, deleting articles tagged for deletion.
• Mandsford (nom) lives and works in the United States. History is his specialty; many of the articles to which he has contributed—such as 1909 college football season—have had a strong historical element. This interest in history has led to his work on improving year and month articles, with a goal of presenting accurate and sourced information about the events that happened on each day of the 20th century. He counts among his best contributions his efforts to keep new editors here, and says that most of his admin work will lie "in determining the result of Articles for Deletion debates, and in participation in civility matters brought to the noticeboard or to Wikiquette".
• Dana boomer (nom), from the United States, has been at Wikipedia for two and a half years, specialising in equine articles; her leopard-spot Appaloosa gelding apparently calls the tune in real life. Her editing interests also cover history, astronomy, books, endurance sports, the outdoors, and labour unions. She has six FAs, two FLs, a featured portal, and 15 GAs to her name. Best of all, she is one of the two featured article review delegates, making a solid contribution to maintaining high standards among our best articles. She performs valuable work in sorting stubs, recovering red links, and contributing to our slowest deletion process.
• HelloAnnyong (nom), from New York, became active in early 2007 and has made more than 21,000 edits, at least half of them in article space. He continues to make a significant contribution in translating Japanese Wikipedia articles into articles on the English Wikipedia, and is active at WikiProject Japan. He is an expert in the PHP programming language. Annyong is a long-time member and the second-highest contributor to the dispute-settling WikiProject Third Opinion.
• Connormah (nom), from Edmonton in Western Canada, has a set of Good articles and several Did you knows to his name. He is a specialist in images, including signatures, and has been an active participant in the Counter-Vandalism Unit.

"This is our moment. This is our time", announced America's first African American president in his election night speech in Chicago almost two years ago. The Signpost takes pleasure in announcing that after a month of reviewer input and improvements at Featured portal candidates, the Barack Obama portal was promoted 1 September. This marks our 150th featured portal. It is a hub that links to:

• two featured articles,
• twelve good articles,
• one featured picture (right),
• six related portals,
• six WikiProjects,
• six categories;
• "Did you know" entries,
• "In the news" entries, and
• a vast array of topics.

The page features rotating selected article excerpts and quotations from the president. Users are invited to contribute to this field in the "Things to do" box at the portal's bottom right.

Three other portals were promoted on 1 September:

• The Volcanoes portal links to 24 featured artlcles, three featured lists, a gallery of 38 featured pictures, and 38 good articles. Among other resources, there are links to the Hawaii and Canada Workgroups. Selected quotes are updated regularly. "Is this volcano active?", said by a tourist in 2000 on Mount Etna, after being reprimanded for camping out at the base of a dangerous volcanic vent.
• The Speculative fiction portal deals with the "What if?" scenarios imagined by dreamers and thinkers worldwide. It brings together a wide array of genres, from webcomics to novels to films and television, and features "Did you know" and "On this day" sections.
• The US roads portal covers a huge and complex topic involving a hierarchy of interstate, numbered and state highways. It is regularly updated with selected pictures and articles, and presents recent news about construction, maintenance and events concerning US roads.

Twelve articles were promoted to featured status:

• Millennium Park (nom), part of the larger Grant Park, known as the "front lawn" of downtown Chicago (nominated by TonyTheTiger).
• Raid at Cabanatuan (nom), the dramatic story of how more than 500 Allied prisoners of war and civilians were rescued from a Japanese camp near Cabanatuan City in the Philippines in January 1945. One POW said during the trek back to American lines "I made the Death March from Bataan, so I can certainly make this one!" (Nehrams2020). (video at right)
• Blue-faced Honeyeater (nom), a generously sized member of the family of Honeyeaters, with a wingspan of 44 cm (17 in). Along with its eponymous blue face, it has distinctive olive, white and black plumage. It is common in northern and eastern Australia, and southern New Guinea (nominated by Casliber). (video at right)
• Liberty Bell (nom) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was made by the London firm of Lester and Pack and is one of the iconic symbols of American independence. It is likely that it was rung to mark the public reading of the American Declaration of Independence on July 8, 1776 (Wehwalt). (picture at right)
• William de Corbeil (nom) (c. 1070–1136), one of the more obscure but interesting archbishops of England. He spent most of his episcopate in a dispute with the archbishop of York over the primacy of Canterbury, but managed to build the tower at Rochester Castle and to supervise the finishing of Canterbury Cathedral (Ealdgyth, with input from Malleus Fatuorum).
• Capitol Loop (nom), which nominator Imzadi1979 says is the "highway that's not really a highway [but] a collection of streets in downtown Lansing, Michigan". The Capitol Loop was controversial from the start, with public arguments over reconstruction at the turn of the century; more recently, there have been issues surrounding its use by speedsters.
• Sherlock Holmes Baffled (nom), the first detective film ever made, although only 30 seconds long. The article includes a modified derivative of the 16 mm print held by the Library of Congress (Bob).
• Sarcoscypha coccinea (nom), the "scarlet elf cup", a small bright-red fungus that is widely distributed over much of the Northern Hemisphere (Sasata).
• The Judd School (nom), a grammar school in Tonbridge, Kent, England (Tom).
• Nikita Filatov (nom), a Russian professional ice hockey winger playing for the US-based Columbus Blue Jackets, and a former top-ranked European skater (Canada Hky).
• Ben Paschal (nom) (1895–1974), an American outfielder who played eight seasons in Major League Baseball from 1915 to 1929, mostly for the New York Yankees, one of the best "pinch hitters" in the game during the period (Secret).
• The Boys from Baghdad High (nom), the powerful and eye-opening British–Iraqi documentary television film in which four boys in their final year of an Iraqi high school were given video cameras and told to record their lives over the course of a year (Matthewedwards).

Choice of the week. The Signpost asked long-time FA nominator and reviewer Malleus Fatuorum to select the best of the week, disregarding his own nomination. "With eleven to choose from it was a difficult decision, but three articles stood out for me, for quite different reasons. My choice is Liberty Bell, a technically excellent and engagingly written account of, well, a bell, but an iconic one. Sherlock Holmes Baffled and The Judd School deserve honourable mentions though; Wikipedia needs more quality articles on early cinema, and a model to follow for high-quality school articles."

Four featured articles were delisted:

• Shotgun house (nom: sourcing)
• Indian Institutes of Technology (nom: prose, sourcing, inconsistent style)
• Lost (TV series) (nom: original research, sourcing and comprehensiveness)
• Gbe languages (nom: prose, sourcing and images)

Six lists were promoted:

• List of BC Lions head coaches (nom). Two coaches have led the Lions (a Canadian football team) to a Grey Cup championship, and three have been elected to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in the builders category (nominated by K. Annoyomous).
• List of 1932 Winter Olympics medal winners (nom). Irving Jaffee and John Shea won the most gold medals (two), all in speed skating (Courcelles and Geraldk)
• 2009 NCAA Men's Basketball All-Americans (nom), 2009 honorary college basketball teams composed of the best amateur players of a specific season for each team position. Blake Griffin, a unanimous selection, won most 2009 college basketball awards (TonyTheTiger).
• Glee (season 1) (nom), the first season of the musical comedy-drama television series about a high school glee club. It received praise for its "plain full-throttle, no-guilty-pleasure-rationalizations-necessary fun". (CycloneGU, Frickative)
• Hugo Award for Best Professional Magazine (nom), a defunct award given for professionally edited magazines related to science fiction or fantasy. Astounding Science-Fiction/Analog Science Fact & Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction both received the most awards (eight) (PresN).
• List of accolades received by An Education (nom). Carrie Mulligan won many awards for her performance in the lead role, including a BAFTA Award for Best Actress and an Alliance of Women Film Journalists award for Best Depiction Of Nudity, Sexuality, or Seduction (JuneGloom07).

Choice of the week. We asked regular FL nominator Another Believer for his choice of the best: "Of these six newly promoted lists, Glee (season 1) is my favorite. Not only does it illustrate the featured list criteria wonderfully, but it borders qualifying as a featured article because it contains so much relevant information. The fact that I have enjoyed several episodes of the show certainly doesn't hurt either."

One featured list was delisted:

• List of mergers and acquisitions by Red Hat (nom: consensus was that the article was an unnecessary content fork)

Thirteen images were promoted. Medium-sized displays of the pictures can be viewed by clicking on "nom".

• Meleager et Atalanta (nom), a scan of Meleager (far left, with the bow) and Atalanta (just to the right of her, with the boar spear) fight the Calydonian Boar in this 1773 engraving based on a painting by Giulio Romano (created by Giulio Romano and Franc[is?] Loving).
• Only the navy can stop this (nom), a 1917 World War I recruitment poster for the US Navy by William Allen Rogers.
• Aerial View of Meteor Crater (nom), the crater of more than a mile (1.6 km) in diameter that is left from a meteorite strike on Earth some 50,000 years ago (created by NASA, upload by Originalwana).
• Tagged monarch butterfly (nom), a monarch butterfly shortly after tagging at the Cape May Bird Observatory. Tracking information is used to study the migration patterns of monarchs, including how far and where they fly (created by Derek Ramsey).
• Attack on the Malakoff (nom), a lithograph by William Simpson, an on-the-spot journalist at the time, depicting a scene from the Battle of Malakoff, one of the defining moments of the Crimean War (1854–55). Reviewer Maedin said "The sweep up the hill to the bravely erected flag and the dramatic sky does it for me."
• The Fields Medal (nom), regarded as one of the top honours a mathematician can receive (created by Stefan Zachow).
• Calcoris affinis (nom), a member of the "true bug" order of insects that share a common arrangement of sucking mouthparts (created by Darius Bauzys). (Choice of the week: picture below)
• Black Tusk 4 (nom), the core of an extinct stratovolcano overlooking Whistler in Western Canada. The unusual formation developed about 1.2 million years ago when the loose cinder around it eroded, leaving only the hard lava core. (created by Andysonic777).
• Olive baboons social grooming (nom), an adult Olive Baboon grooms an infant at the Ngorongoro conservation Area in Tanzania. The original was edited after reviewers' concerns about depth of field (created by Muhammad Mahdi Karim). (picture at right)
• A bad hoss (nom), a 1904 lithograph by Charles Marion Russell, which nominator Adam Cuerden suggested may have had a role in codifying the cowboy image. (picture at right)
• Lager Nordhausen (nom), Rows of bodies of dead inmates fill the yard of Lager Nordhausen, a Gestapo concentration camp. This photo shows fewer than half of the bodies of the several hundred inmates who died of starvation or were shot by the Gestapo. Germany (created by James E Myers).
• Bombardment of Barcelona (nom), an aerial shot showing the explosions of Italian airforce bombs on Barcelona in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War (created by the Italian airforce).
• Tibia insulaechorab (nom), commonly known as the "Arabian Tibia", is a large species of true conch (created by Hans Hillewaert).

Choice of the week. IdLoveOne, a regular reviewer and nominator at featured picture candidates, told The Signpost, "If you're looking at the picture below and thinking "This insect seems familiar. Where have I seen it before?" it might be because it's in the same order of insects as the stink bug! However, it's not such a bug, but a Calocoris affinis, or grass bug. The order it's in is pretty diverse, including the herbivorous pests in the genus Miridae, the insectivorous genus Geocoris and the interesting family Gerridae which is sometimes called the "Jesus bug" because of its ability to move on top of water.

That's your science lesson for the day. Returning to the photo at hand, as a non-entomophobe, I find it to have great eye-appeal, and I'm sure some entomophiles will enjoy using it as a pleasant wallpaper. A triple-green image of a field scabious plant with those bold-edged sepals and the light green and brown bud orbs nested between them, an almost perfectly matching green bug that, in a way only a bug could, nearly defies a human's understanding of gravity before an almost dreamy and halo-like green background. This is my Choice of the week.

       

The Signpost · written by many · served by Sinepost V0.9 · 🄯 CC-BY-SA 4.0