Wikipedia:Featured portal criteria

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Featured content:

Featured portal tools: (process is now historical)

A featured portal exemplifies our very best work on portals; it showcases the best of Wikipedia's content in an area and encourages contributions to that area. It complies with the current guidelines, and has has the following attributes.

It is:
- (a) Useful. It covers a topic that is sufficiently broad and prominent to justify it as an entry point. Because portals promote the best of Wikipedia's content, a featured portal is selective in what it displays. It showcases only high-quality content that is preferably already featured.
- (b) Attractive. It displays Wikipedia's content in an aesthetically pleasing way. The colours are coherent and complementary, and do not detract from the content. Featured portals have no formatting issues. Red links are limited in number and restricted to aspects that encourage contribution. Article and biography summaries should not significantly exceed 200 words in length.
- (c) Ergonomic. It is coherently constructed to display Wikipedia's content logically and effectively in ways that enhance usefulness and attractiveness. This display is the primary aim; encouraging contribution is secondary. Colour combinations comply with accessibility guidelines.
- (d) Dynamic. A featured portal should be dynamic and regularly/frequently update the selections of content displayed within subsections. It is structured to display the broad scope of different aspects of Wikipedia's content in the topic. Featured portals may be designed to reduce the required frequency of manual updating; however, they may be designed to have a higher turnover of content displayed, using structures to ensure regular or frequent updates (e.g., Randomly-rotating-content, date specified content or WikiProjects). Featured portals that require maintenance and are not updated for three or more months are summarily demoted.
It adheres to the standards in the Manual of Style and the relevant WikiProject guidelines; this includes conventions on naming, spelling, and style (see Portal and Portal guidelines).
It has images where appropriate, with concise captions, linked credits, and acceptable copyright status (see Wikipedia:Non-free content).
It is not self-referential: it does not speak of itself beyond (if at all) a welcome note or instructions to operate a feature. Aspects of portals that encourage contribution may be self-referential.
It should include links to other Wikimedia Foundation projects where applicable. For all portals that have their central focus subject as a specific group of lifeforms, excluding humans, there should be a link to the Wikispecies project.

See also