Wikipedia:Selected Articles on the Main Page
The current events section on the Main Page has several purposes, all of which (we hope) support the central purpose of Wikipedia--making a great encyclopedia. The section links to entries of timely interest that are (and this is crucial) nonetheless encyclopedia articles, not news articles.
Wikipedia is not an online newspaper; but many Wikipedians are motivated to create and edit entries of timely interest, and because Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, it does a much better job with entries of timely interest (or recent events of historical import) than a dead-tree encyclopedia.
(A historical note: the section began with the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack entries put up within minutes of the attacks. The entries led to a massive infusion of interest in the project.)
criteria for inclusion on Main Page
The most important rule is to use good judgment. If an event of collosal and staggering importance happens, even if a great entry hasn't been written on it, then it would be reasonable to add a link. Most of the time, the following informal but rigorous criteria should help take care of the section.
These criteria are informal and malleable. They do not represent, as of the current writing (October 2002), a formal consensus on how to handle the section. They are little more than an attempt to organize current practice into some degree of objective standards. (See talk to get the back story.)
Current informal criteria for what gets put in the Current events section on the Main Page:
- All links appearing in section should first be included on Current events page
- All links appearing in section should go to non-stub entries (greater than 500 chars)
- No more than three or four entries per line, for a total of no more than about 10 entries
types of entries that are included
The links are separated into three categories:
- Ongoing events: these entries, which must be ongoing issues or events, should match (most of) three criteria:
- be listed on Background articles for ongoing events, with links to related articles
- be listed up top of Current events page
- be the category of events that have happened within the last week
- In the news: these should be the three or four most recent full entries linked to from the Current events timeline. For example, given
- astronomy: There is further evidence for the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy. The object Sagittarius A has now been identified as the black hole at the galactic center by a team led by Rainer Schödel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, who observed the behavior of the star S2 which is near Sagittarius A.
- U.S. officials announce the existence of a clandestine North Korea nuclear weapons program, admitted to by North Korean officials.
- Politics of the Netherlands: the first Balkenende cabinet resigns. Because of the constant internal fighting in the new party LPF, the other two governing parties, CDA and VVD decided that continuing the coalition was impossible. It seems almost certain that there will be new elections, possibly as early as December.
- the In the news links would be Sagittarius A, North Korea nuclear weapons program, and first Balkenende cabinet, as long as those entries are written to some reasonable degree
- Recent deaths: simply, recent celebrity deaths within the last week or so