Portal talk:Organized Labour/Archive 3

Discussion

I think a daily article comes and goes so fast that a visitor to the portal may miss something interesting. When I set up the law portal rotation, we had a rotating article, picture, case, and bio, on a staggered rotation schedule, so every week one of those items would change. Worked great (and saved effort). bd2412 T 03:16, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm kind of warming up to this "every day" thing. I just put the ITUC article into the November 1 slot because that will be the one year aniversary for it. It can be changed, of course, but there are a lot of significant dates that could be filled that way.--Bookandcoffee 17:15, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

I've added a number of articles - including three (trade union, International Labour Organization, and Labour movement) that run once a month. No real importance to the date I picked for them, so feel free to modify.--Bookandcoffee 20:36, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

AOTD field

I added the AOTD field to the {{LabourProject}} tag to help keep track of which articles are used. They can be found at Category:Organized Labour Portal AOTD (although I still have to go through and add them all!) I also thought it would be reasonable to feature higher importance articles more than just one measley day a year, so I was planning on listing a few (like trade union) on a monthly basis - say on the 10^th of each month, or some such thing. Comments?--Bookandcoffee 18:31, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

• Is there a way to check that the repeating article doesn't step on a very important date? For example, I think it would be nice if the anniversary of the Haymarket Riot wasn't taken up by a generic article on the eight-hour-day. Perhaps there's a way of coding things so that "this article appears on the 4th of each month except May 4"? I don't think a simple guideline will work (many people may not check the guideline first, or may not follow it). I say this because anniversary dates are a great learning tool, and people can get excited about an anniversary date and spread the word about it when they might not if the article is just randomly appearing. - Tim1965 17:29, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

• • First off, great work on the "This Month" pages! Now the techie bit. The thing that actually makes a page show up in the portal on May 4th is a redirect at Portal:Organized_Labour/May/04/Selected_article. So, when there's a collision like you've described, you can go to the redirect pages and reshuffle them a little to meet your tastes. For example, if there's an open slot on May 6th, you could make a redirect to 8-hour-day on May 6th and change the May 4th redirect to Haymarket Riot. (It looks like somebody's already done this: I just glanced at Portal:Organized_Labour/May/04/Selected_article and it's already pointing towards Haymarket Riot.) Cheers. Haus^Talk 18:06, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

• • • You also might want to put a comment in the redirect page directly - something that lets other editors know there is a specific reason why that article is listed on that day. I just put a note on the Haymarket redirect, take a look and see if that's helpful. As for going the other way, I would agree with Haus and certainly just shuffle non-date-specific articles around to fit in the date dependent ones. --Bookandcoffee 19:13, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Definition and header

I think we might have to bang on the definition we use in the header. To make the process easier, I've split it out into a separate subpage with its own history/talk page/etc... I took a swing at paring the verbiage down a bit, feel free to modify as you see fit:

---

The purpose of organized labour is for workers to form "a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment".

This is primarily achieved by use of the technique of collective bargaining, where labour organizations negotiate wages and working conditions with employers. Closely related is the concept of industrial action, in which an organization will call strikes and resist lockouts. Another characteristic of labour organizations are the provision of benefits for members, such as unemployment insurance, health insurance, pensions, funeral expenses, job training, and legal services. Organizations also often carry out political campaigns, lobbying, and support political candidates or parties. Operating costs are covered by the payment of dues and fees by members, with the expectation that the money be spent to benefit the membership.

More about organized labour...

Cheers. Haus42 17:41, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Preparing for peer review...

I think we've tweaked and prodded and poked until we've put together a pretty nice portal. I'm getting an itch to submit the portal to the peer review process, but there are a few things we should probably fix up first. Here are the items that come to my mind:

1. Topics is weak
2. I'm still not thrilled with the header.
3. I think the featured pictures should be formatted more like the pictures in the featured quote. It'd be useful if we could figure out a way to standardize their sizes, too.
4. On just a brief glance, the "categories" and "tasks and projects" look ok, but there might be some lurking problems.
5. A couple of good reads through the portal guidelines would probably be useful.

What do you think needs to be done before we go to peer review? Cheers. Haus^Talk 01:08, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I tried to fix the image if you can look at being centered and having some 'ok' text here... but it fails to load on the main page. The image is still right justified and shows no text. :shakes fist at invisible formatting errors: I'll try to see whats up. I mostly stole the code from the communism portal, maybe I didn't copy correctly. Will see shortly. MrMacMan ^Talk 04:58, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

"Organised Labour Spelling"

It has come to my attetion that the title is a bit ironical, since the first word, "Organized", is spelled American English, and the second word, "Labour", is spelled with British English. So I suggest that this title be changed to "Organised Labour". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bleedingshoes (talk • contribs) 14:59, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

It's spelt in perfectly consistent Canadian English. Haus^Talk 03:14, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

A milestone for Organized Labour on the DYK list

We just hit 100 "Did You Knows?" today on the DYK sub-page of our Portal. As far as is recorded on the page, the first DYK was Bharatiya Khet Mazdoor Union, which made it onto Wikipedia's front page on April 11, 2006. Since then, WikiProject Organized Labour members and other contributors interested in trade union issues have contributed about one DYK a week to the front page of Wikipedia. Congratulations all around!! - Tim1965 (talk) 23:03, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Haymarket Affair

I intend on changing a redirect within the portal from the Haymarket Riot to Haymarket Affair, per a discussion currently held in the Haymarket Riot calling for an article title based on neutral documentation. "Affair" is the term most commonly used by neutral sources, and so will be the new article title. Thank you.--Cast (talk) 01:02, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

In-Media?

What's the purpose of the "In Media" section of the portal? It's barely populated. But even if it were populated, where would this information be displayed or show up in the portal? - Tim1965 (talk) 21:23, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

The idea was to highlight labor-related books/movies, etc... There's a version of the portal that still had it available here. I removed the feature around the same time that we took out "Featured Union" and for the same reason: there were fair use policy issues that we couldn't get around. Cheers. Haus^Talk 01:36, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

AOTD is complete

All dates on the "Article of the Day" section are now filled in. What are the next steps? Some of the articles are very small. Others might not be very significant, but are the only article for that day. Some important articles are definitely missing from AOTD recognition.

I also wonder how we'll deal with replacements. First of all is the issue of how to keep contributors changing AOTD, so that we get the best and most relevant articles in AOTD. The second is how to keep a watch for conflicts, in case someone makes an error.

I'm sure I'm missing some housekeeping things, too. - Tim1965 (talk) 18:44, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Archive

Hi folks. I archived some threads that seemed closed to me. If I archived something that you feel should still be here, please feel free to move it back here. Cheers. Haus^Talk 01:49, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Portal peer review

Portal:Organized Labour

This portal is nearing its first birthday and could probably benefit from some criticism from outside the group of frequent contributors. Here are some of the features:

• 366 rotating "Article of the Day" articles
• 12 heavily-populated "This Month in Labor History" features
• 50 random quotes
• 48 featured photos
• 105 DYK's from the front page

Thanks in advance! Haus^Talk 02:18, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

1.The background colour doesn't work with the default link colour and needs to be changed (the links are very hard to read on my LCD monitor, even if they look OK on a CRT). Try something lighter. --Msanford (talk) 01:58, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

 Done I think this was the result of some brittle html on the page -- code that rendered differently on diferent browsers. I scrapped and re-wrote all the formatting using a different approach. I'm curious: does a legibility issue remain? Haus^Talk 07:47, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

2.There should be prose introductory text at the top (see Portal:Math, IMHO one of the best portals on Wikipedia). --Msanford (talk) 01:58, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Very good point. Thanks for pointing this out. Haus^Talk 07:47, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

 Done It looks much less clunky to these eyes now. Haus^Talk 09:53, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

3.You should change the Selected Article to reference an excerpt, and not to include the entire article (see what Portal:Math has done with the excerpt of e versus the length of the entire article). This also means that the formatting of that section will improve on the portal page. --Msanford (talk) 01:58, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

 Question: I wonder if there's room for a different philosophy as regards selected content. The portal manual of style states that exceptional content in the subject area should be highlighted. That's dandy. However mightn't it be useful to also highlight non-exceptional content that is topical? The idea being, of course, that the more eyes that land on an article, the more likely it is to be visited by wiki-gnomes, or even adopted. Haus^Talk 07:47, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I think you have a point that non-exceptional but relevant content be included; I was merely suggesting that it should be physically shorter. --Msanford (talk) 15:52, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

• As someone who worked heavily on the AOTD section, I wanted to mention that my philosophy was to find articles for the date in question. Thus, if it was June 1, the AOTD should be something that happened on June 1. Organized Labour has a real problem in that a very large proportion of labo(u)r related articles are stubs, and few new lab(u)r-related articles seem to be created by Project participants. I often struggled to find date-related content which was not a stub. Finding non-date-related content which was not a stub was a similar challenge. Additionally, a great deal of the labo(u)r-related content is America-centric, creating an additional problem. However, I would estimate that about a third of the ATOD articles are Stub or Start class articles. For example, see William Green, which is an AOTD. Unfortunately, I do not see that making these articles AOTD articles has helped to draw attention to them, and get contributors to improve them. - Tim1965 (talk) 02:22, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

4.I'm not qualified to judge the appropriateness of the image used at the top, but if you can find something that well represents the idea of organized labour, other than that clipart, that might be good. This is only because it seems generic to me, but I could always be wrong. If it's a recognized logo, you might consider adding a caption to that effect, mentioning it in the introduction, or adding a section explaining it. --Msanford (talk) 01:58, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Like (2), thanks for pointing this out. This had fallen into a blind spot! Haus^Talk 07:47, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

 Done I made a banner graphic consisting of a sepia-print collage of some representative public domain photos. Considering that I'm no artist, I don't think it looks bad. Any comments? Haus^Talk 09:53, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I noticed that there is an associated userbox with the "old" image, you may wish to have a look at that, it's hosted in User:UBX, I believe (sorry, can't find it easily). Msanford (talk) 15:48, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Erm, there's no article for today. _{WEBURIEDOURSECRETSINTHEPARK} ^talk 17:47, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for catching that! Fortunately, today is A.L. Lloyd's birthday. Haus^Talk 18:57, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Actually, there was an AOTD for February 29, but I don't think the code picked up the date to display that article. I know, because I filled out the February AOTD dates in January, and put something in for Feb. 29. - Tim1965 (talk) 02:22, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Looking good, Haus! I love the new colour scheme and banner graphic. --Msanford (talk) 15:52, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

You can add two more random quotes now.  :) I want to say: it was a struggle to get the Random Quotes and the Featured Photos sections up and running. For a long time, they languished with only a few entries. Very, very few images on Wikipedia Commons were categorized for labo(u)r, and I spent weeks tagging images. Hundreds of images still remain uncategorized, or poorly categorized. Quotes were also difficult to come by. However, since I was working on the AOTD section, I was able to stumble across many quotes and add them. (I don't want to sound like I'm trolling for compliments here... sorry.) Updating these sections over time may prove difficult, now that AOTD is done. I'd ask Project participants to help by keeping a watchful eye out for images and quotes. - Tim1965 (talk) 02:22, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Portal changes

File:Portal-organized-labour-screengrab.jpg

The portal changes are superb! LOVE the new graphic! However, the AOTD now extends clear across the page, instead of half the page. Is that intentional? Also, on my screen (set to 1024 x 768), I now have to scroll right to see the entire page. That can't be correct... (I am clueless when it comes to code, so all I can do is whine and complain. Sorry...). - Tim1965 (talk) 14:38, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback, Tim. Click the image to the left to see what it's supposed to look like. I wonder if changing the "em" measurements fix the problem. I'm too out of it to experiment tonight but changing "em" to "px" or removing them all together might be the solution.

Cheers. Haus^Talk 06:41, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Hurmmmm is right. I wonder if maybe it wasn't just that one article. Today's article fits perfectly. (Portal code does have a problem with some pages, I'm aware.) Nevertheless, I think you've done yeoman's work on this, and really turned in a spectacular job. That's not hyperbole; it's high praise, well earned. - Tim1965 (talk) 13:57, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

• Here we go again. The AOTD for March 1 spreads across the entire page, making the Portal 50% wider than it should be. - Tim1965 (talk) 02:42, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
• "sigh" It keeps happening. Yesterday, and today. I wonder if it is the Wiki banners across the top which force it too wide? - Tim1965 (talk) 12:55, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
• Finally making some headway on this. The problem seems to come from one or more of the items in this diff. I'll keep playing around with it to see if I can get a better handle on it. Cheers. Haus^Talk 15:30, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
• April 2's Canadian Labour Congress pushed the page twice as wide. (Those Canadians! Always causing trouble... :) ) I found that April 3's John L. Lewis had no {{end box}}, but I fixed that and now it doesn't screw up the page. - Tim1965 (talk) 13:17, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I removed the banner tag from Canadian Labour Congress, loaded it up in MSIE, purged the server cache, and it seems to have fixed the problem. It's looking more and more like the solution is to have pages that don't have banner templates like {{Primarysources}}. I'll leave it this way for a while to see if removing that banner fixed the problem for you as well. Cheers. Haus^Talk 13:41, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Picture o' th' Day

I'm curious if there is a way to insert resizing into the Picture of the Day code. The old, manual code allowed us to force the picture to a certain size. This was useful on the Portal, because it allowed us to keep the picture to a size which fit aesthetically with the rest of the subsections on the page. The AWB code doesn't do that....or does it? It'd be great if we could resize images. I fooled around a bit with the code, but couldn't get it to do what I wanted (much like my last date). - Tim1965 (talk) 13:33, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

You can use any formatting you want on the POTD. I just went through once to get them all more or less the same size. I you want, you can specify the size in the template like this: {{WP Organized Labour POD|size=100px|Bill haywood headshot.jpg|"Big [[Bill Haywood]]," a founding member and leader of the [[Industrial Workers of the World]].}}.

• Thanks! It was that "size=" code I needed. It's not required in the general "Image" code. - Tim1965 (talk) 00:44, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Featured Portal Candidate

The Labor Portal is now a candidate for Featured Portal status. Anybody who is interested is invited to put a watch on Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Organized Labour or follow along below:

Portal:Organized Labour

previous FPOC (13:41, 13 April 2008)

Decision to make

It seems that if we remove the "Article of the Day" and replace it with snippets from our GA/A-Class/FA articles, then we'll have a featured portal pretty soon. It also seems that if we keep the "Article of the Day", then the portal won't be featured. I'm very much on the fence about what to do -- does anybody else have any feelings? Haus^Talk 12:28, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

• Keep as is - Having the AOTD be a synopsis of the article creates stagnancy on the Portal. It requires a great deal of work to replace AOTDs with synopses. A synopsis is not updated when the article is updated. When an existing synopsis is replaced with a new one, the old synopsis is lost—whether the Project participants want it to be or not. Synopses do not show off the work of the Project contributors; they only show off the work of synopsis-writers. We have solved our problems (it seems) with AOTDs creating too-wide pages and their imagery interfering with the rest of the Portal page. In other words: Our Portal is dynamic, low-maintence, and depicts the actual work product of the Project rather than some blank, unWikified, boring synopsis. I vote for dynamism and low-maintenance over static-but-looks-good. (Bias acknkowledgement: I filled out most of the AOTD fields.) - Tim1965 (talk) 13:47, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
  • I totally understand and remain totally on the fence. I don't foresee making any drastic changes on the AOTD front in the near future. My gut feeling is that the portal has improved by going through the process, is plenty healthy in terms of traffic and might have better luck in the future. Cheers. Haus^Talk 02:28, 13 April 2008 (UTC)