Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article

Date formats

Greetings of the season from New Zealand, or Meri Kirihimete as we tend to say here.

You may recall the report at Errors a couple of days ago about date formats of the Tomb of Antipope John XXIII article. Here's a copy of it:

“ We should use DMY date format rather than MDY, to match the format of the article featured. GiantSnowman 08:33, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

But that article uses mdy format!? Schwede66 09:03, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

It doesn't anymore - MDY is not the Italian format, I have changed to DMY. All the related articles are already DMY. GiantSnowman 09:26, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

Whilst I really don't like messing with FAs, the date format change in the target article hasn't been challenged, hence I've implemented the change here as well. Schwede66 23:12, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

”

Today, we have the same situation, with the 1964 Brinks Hotel bombing being in mdy format when it should be dmy. I've posted about it on the article's talk page as a justification for changing it to dmy. As yet, I haven't touched what is on the main page. Two queries:

• In this specific case, is it ok to tweak the date format in the TFA?
• More importantly, should the schedulers as part of the normal process check whether the date format is possibly in need of updating?

As always, your good work is much appreciated. Schwede66 01:28, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

No and no. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:02, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Per Nikkimaria. Gog the Mild (talk) 09:00, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

I think people interested in the date format of FAs should speak up at FAC and leave TFA alone. And I agree that this is not work that the TFA schedulers should be doing. —Kusma (talk) 10:31, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

It doesn't anymore - MDY is not the Italian format, I have changed to DMY. reminds me of Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 193#MOS on date format by country and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers/Archive 162#DATETIES vs. DATEVAR/DATERET, where that argument was rejected (and the MOS was updated to clarify "English-speaking country" in both places). Sad to see GiantSnowman is still pushing it anyway. Anomie⚔ 14:32, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

TFA blurbs without Template:TFAFULL

We've had a few of these recently: Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 9, 2025, Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 21, 2024, Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 12, 2024, and Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 21, 2023. Each time this happens I have to update the Template:TFA title subpage and Template:TFA title/data.json manually. What should we do to fix this?

• Go back to the consensus from Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/Archive 11#Featured topics, We haven't had a double-featured-topic at TFA in years, and if we do, it seems unnecessary to me to link the nested topic ... if people click on the larger topic, they'll see the nested one on that page., and stop trying to link both topics?
  • e.g. Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 13, 2021 listed only the larger topic.
• Update {{TFAFULL}} to take a second topic, and document that if we ever need more than two then the template should be extended accordingly instead of people omitting the template?
  • There are a few pages currently passing a third parameter to {{TFAFULL}} we may want to clean up: Wikipedia:Today's featured article/April 1, 2020 and nine archive pages (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9).
• Have the bot complain here instead of at User talk:AnomieBOT, so you all can do the manual updating?
• Something else?

Thanks. Anomie⚔ 13:48, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

• • I think my first choice would be to have just the larger topic, with changing the bot to pick up more than one as the second choice. - SchroCat (talk) 05:04, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
    • The bot ignores the FTs entirely, but it needs {{TFAFULL}}'s first parameter to know what the TFA actually is. That's a lot more reliable than the former approach of trying to figure out what wikitext someone used to bold the title link (<b> or '''? Mixed with <i> or ''? In which order?), which is what it used to have to do. Anomie⚔ 12:28, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
      • In that case, I'd certainly lean towards us just listing the 'parent' topic, although my fellow @TFA coordinators may think differently. - SchroCat (talk) 12:37, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
        • If I were ever to do such a thing, that is also how I would handle it. Gog the Mild (talk) 12:54, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

          I have the impression that a year or so ago I scheduled an article part of two featured topics and modified things manually so both would show, but I can't seem to find it. Wehwalt (talk) 17:49, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

          Is this case from 12 December 2023 of any interest? Schwede66 09:16, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

          It did have to be done manually, and Template:TFA title/December 12, 2023 can't list both (but Template:TFA title/data.json can). But I'm more concerned with the "two Featured Topics" cases that have been happening more often and are easier to avoid. Anomie⚔ 14:33, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Overindexing certain music artists

There appear to be certain communities of fans of music (and other) artists who push articles relating to their chosen artists into TFA. There's one artist in particular with five appearances in the last year. While I laud their efforts in getting their object of affection into featured article status, and acknowledge this is a rare honor, some balance is necessary. Omnifalcon (talk) 23:50, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

User:Omnifalcon, have a look at the section above on Alexander McQueen, and see if you're bringing anything new to the discussion on TFAs. Stephen 00:40, 10 January 2025 (UTC)