Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-03-19/Featured content

Featured content

Spot the bulldozer

A bucket-wheel excavator. See if you can spot bulldozer in this image. (Hint: The excavator is much bigger than you think.)
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 9 March 2014 to 15 March 2014.

Twelve articles were promoted to featured status this week.

The crew of the Japanese battleship Nagato, posing on and around the newly installed pagoda mast.
Daedongyeojido, Korean for "The Great Map of the East Land", is an 1861 map, created by a mix of Eastern and Western printing techniques, and a new featured picture.
The Garden of the Gods, one of the National Natural Landmarks in Colorado featured in a new list.
  • Three-cent nickel (nominated by Wehwalt) – To readers from America, the idea of a three-cent nickel—which was, indeed, American coinage—might seem strange, as "nickel" is now the name of the American five-cent piece. According to the nominator, the three-cent nickel was conceived during the American Civil War thanks to "public disgust with dirty paper money, an industrialist's desire to market his product, and a mysterious political deal we still don't know much about." The five-cent piece proved the most popular, and the three-cent coin was eventually forgotten.
  • The 2007 Appalachian State vs. Michigan football game (nominated by Toa Nidhiki05) was an American college football game played between the prestigious and historically successful University of Michigan and a small university from the second-tier subdivision of the game, Appalachian State. Despite the latter's two straight championships at that level, the nominator tells us that "they were not expected to even come close to beating the Wolverines." Furthermore, their victory "was immediately hailed as one of the biggest in college football history."
  • The Rainbow trout (nominated by Mike Cline) is a ray-finned fish from the salmonidae family. While its native habitat is in freshwater tributaries of the Pacific Ocean in Asia and North America, it has been introduced into waters around the world. While the fish can be considered an invasive species, it is also a major game fish.
  • 4 (Beyoncé album) (nominated by JennKR) was, as the name suggests, the fourth studio album put out by Beyoncé. Created after a year-long hiatus from music, Beyoncé was lauded for 4's "fusion of various genres" along with her own "strong vocal ability".
  • Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten! BWV 172 (nominated by Gerda Arendt), German for "Resound now, ye lyrics, ring out now, ye lyres!", is a church cantata composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. First performed on Pentecost Sunday of 1714, Erschallet, ihr Lieder is in six movements and scored for four vocal soloists, four-part choir, three trumpets, timpani, oboe, bassoon and a string orchestra of two violins, two violas, and basso continuo.
  • Bobby Peel (nominated by Sarastro1) was a cricketer from England who professionally played the game for fifteen years in the 1800s. He played his best season in 1896, but left the sport a year later after being suspended for drunkenness during a match.
  • Japanese battleship Nagato (nominated by Sturmvogel 66) was a Japanese warship with what the nominator called a "curious history" that was built during the First World War and served in the Second. Although Nagato was one of the few capital ships of Japan to survive that conflict, the ship did not last long—it was sunk by the United States in 1946 during atomic bomb testing.
  • Ezra Pound (nominated by Victoria, SlimVirgin, and Ceoil) was, in the words of one of the nominators, "a complicated man": he "helped develop the early careers of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, among others, but was charged with treason and spent 12 years in an asylum." Pound, who lived from 1885 to 1972, witnessed the carnage of First World War from England, the rise of Mussolini in Italy, and the inside of a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage after being charged with treason by the United States. He was also a major catalyst in the development of modernism and poetry's imagism.
  • The Great Eastern Highway (nominated by Evad37) is a 590 km (370 mi) road in Western Australia. The road's route was originally constructed with convict labor, and it served as the region's major road artery. Today, there are proposals to replace the road with a more northerly routing, but no money has been allocated by the federal government for the task.
  • Canadian drug charges and trial of Jimi Hendrix (nominated by GabeMc, Cullen328, and Doc9871) – In 1969, Canadian authorities arrested famed American rock musician Jimi Hendrix for possessing drugs in his bag as he passed through customs. Through a shrewd legal strategy that cast doubt over whether Hendrix was aware of the drugs, he was acquitted of the charges. Shockingly, the story was initially carried by only a few newspapers (all inside Toronto), despite the huge popularity of Hendrix, who was then at the height of his brief career. Hendrix's public relations manager has since revealed that he bribed a local member of the Associated Press to prevent it from hitting the news wire.
  • Pedro Afonso, Prince Imperial of Brazil (nominated by Lecen, Astynax, and Alex) was once the heir apparent to the throne of Brazil. Born in 1848, he was seen by the monarchy as "vital to the future viability of the monarchy", but he died of fever when he was less than two years old. He was the second son of Brazil's ruler, Pedro II, to die in three years. Afonso's death was a major cause of the later decline of Brazil's imperial system:
  • Ian Smith (nominated by Cliftonian) was Rhodesia's Prime Minister from 1964 to 1979. According to the nominator, his "15-year tenure played out like a Greek tragedy": "To some he was a visionary who understood problems outside observers did not, a hero whose Unilateral Declaration of Independence had saved Rhodesia from disaster. To most, however, he was an almost cartoonish figure of derision, a deluded, bigoted racist who had tried to stop the tide of history. The truth, as I hope this article shows, is somewhere between these two extremes."
Mariano Rivera is one of the winners of the Marvin Miller Man of the Year Award.

Fourteen lists were promoted to featured status this week.

Wells Cathedral, a new featured picture.

Six pictures were promoted to featured status this week.

The constellation Aquarius dominates this card from Urania's Mirror (1824), but Piscis Austrinus and the obsolete constellation Ballon Aerostatique poke in from the bottom. Each star is marked with a hole to be punched out, which lets the cards be held up to a light to show the constellation.