About → Policies and guidelines → FA policies → FA criteria → Nominations for featured articles

This page is for the nomination and discussion of articles that may be potentially included in Memory Alpha's list of featured articles. A featured article is an especially well-written, informative, and comprehensive article that covers all available information on a subject. If you feel one of our articles meets this criteria, you may suggest it here in accordance with the nomination policy. For a list of articles previously nominated, see the archive.

To nominate an article, start a new discussion under "Nominations without objections" with a heading containing a link back to the article you want to suggest. Provide a two to three-paragraph summary of the article (usually the article's lead-in if possible) with an appropriate picture, this will be what is displayed on the main page if the nomination is successful, followed by a brief reason why you feel the article should be featured. If you are nominating an article that you have worked on, please note that the nomination is a self-nomination.

Sample format:

=== [[ARTICLE]] ===
[[File:<image>|thumb|<caption>]]
<summary>
----
<reasoning> - <signature>

Once this is done, a notice that the article has been nominated as a featured article candidate should be added to the article in question by inserting {{fac}} at the top of the page, above any other templates.

When you are commenting on a nomination, please take the time to read the entire article before you decide whether to Support or Oppose the nomination. Nominations with objections should be moved to the appropriate section until they are resolved.

When supporting or opposing an article, please use a bullet point (by adding a * before your comment) without any indent so these will be easy to find later. General comments should be indented as usual, and, as always, please sign your nominations and comments with "~~~~".

Nominations without objections

Nominations with objections

Galaxy class model

When it came time to design a new starship Enterprise for Star Trek: The Next Generation, history did not repeat itself. Where Matt Jefferies had to produce hundreds of sketches to come up with the design direction for the original Enterprise, the main design work for the exterior of the new Galaxy-class USS Enterprise-D studio model was already done before the production design process even called for the work to start.

In 1979, long before the new Star Trek series was announced, Andrew Probert, upon completion of his work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture painted an illustration of a future starship concept, strictly for his own enjoyment. "I actually did a little painting (8"×5.6") of a ship that would have been the Enterprise had I been able to take it fully in the direction I wanted to take it. That little painting became the basis for the Enterprise-D.", he recalled. Elaborating, he later added, "Having warp engines above the saucer always bothered me and I thought it made more sense to lower them closer to the ship's center of mass. And, while I was at it, I thought, along with the saucer's wide horizontal profile, the other main elements should also be wide and horizontal. So I sat down and said,... "what if..I could design this ship the way I thought it should look"?"

Incredibly detailed article; Sennim has created another article that just demands to be featured. - Archduk3 00:24, December 22, 2011 (UTC)

Just some comments for the moment (although I might choose to elevate them to proper opposition): I feel the article is very hard to read due to its use of inline-italics for quotes. Quotes formatted like this make up big parts of the article, and huge italicized paragraphs are just too hard to follow. There's also a different quote formatting in use, which is indented/block in normal font. I think the article needs to be copyedited so that all "bigger" quotes are formatted according to that second style, and only short sentence fragments remain as inline quotes. I'd like to read through the article after this has been changed and then decide on the actual content. However, two things that are immediately apparent are 1) no image at the article top (one should be moved there), and 2) the overall article length. I wonder if this isn't actually too long already, and should be split in two or more articles about subtopics. -- Cid Highwind 11:04, December 22, 2011 (UTC)

It is a bit long, IMO. --Defiant 12:30, December 22, 2011 (UTC)

I could see splitting this up into a few articles; one about the general history of the design, and articles about the construction of the various types of models. The general history article could then contain links to the latter articles. I think that if that was done, they could all be FA's.--31dot 12:40, December 22, 2011 (UTC)

I've done a pass at the quotes, and moved one of the images to the top (waiting on feedback before updating the blurb), but I once again feel that it needs to be pointed out that there is no size requirement or limitation for FAs. That said, I just don't see a way to break this article up without introducing more problems than the perceived one about the length, and it's not like we're going to start breaking up other long articles like James T. Kirk or Worf any time soon. - Archduk3 16:59, December 22, 2011 (UTC)

But every time you point out that there is no "size requirement/limitation", I point out that there still is a difference between being comprehensive and being so detailed that no one ever will read through the article in one run - or at least it feels as if I'm repeating myself here, too. I have, right now, just read up to the end of section 3 (of 10!) and it already feels as if I read at least two complete articles. -- Cid Highwind 17:34, December 22, 2011 (UTC)

Some more stuff (just sections 1-3):

1. This image is misplaced in the article, the text explaining it being at a lower position than the image itself. Perhaps needs a rearrangement of text if the new location clashed with other images.
2. According to the text, this image is supposed to show the "real colors" of the model - but there are three images, each one displaying different colors. Something like "(upper left)" (at least I guess that's the correct one) needs to be added.
3. In the six-foot model subsection "Use", there's a big block of text formatted as background note. What's the reason for this, and shouldn't the text just be formatted like the rest? It's a real-world article, after all.
4. Just preceding that bgnote, there's a quote in which someone states that a ball of tape was "this big", apparently showing something with his hands - there should be a note about the actual size shown.

-- Cid Highwind 17:52, December 22, 2011 (UTC)

Section 4 (Two-foot model):

1. This image is described as showing "test-lighting" of the two-foot model - but it seems as if it actually is a comparison between two different models. Needs explanation.
2. This image is described as showing just the matte painting of the starbase interior - but it actually is a composite shot with the six-foot model already. Needs either a different image or a rewrite of the description - and in any case, should not be located in a section about the two-foot model if it shows the six-footer. -- Cid Highwind 18:12, December 22, 2011 (UTC)

• In section 5 ("Filming the six and two-foot models", subsection "stock footage"), there's a reference to Robert Legato making Image G "shoot a rock" - out of nowhere and unexplained. Not sure if "the rock" is supposed to be the stellar core fragment that destroyed the Tsiolkovsky or something else - there should either be an explanation, or that bit be trimmed off. Thinking about the whole section, I believe that would be a good candidate for removal from this article (either to the articles of the different effect companies, or to a completely new one like Galaxy class effect shots). I'll stop at that point for the time being, and oppose based on the problems listed so far. More later (or during the holidays :)). -- Cid Highwind 18:42, December 22, 2011 (UTC)

Some preliminary comments. First, I don't really like the lead-in to this article. I'd prefer a sentence that gives a better overview of the article as a whole. (More like Constitution class model)

Second - I'm a bit confused by the bit about "Cause and Effect". The text and the quote regarding what the effects people did don't seem to match up. Did they use firecrackers or timed charges to blow up the model? If it was both, this needs to be clarified.–Cleanse ^{( talk | contribs )} 00:04, December 23, 2011 (UTC)

@Cleanse: Preliminary pass at rewording the intro, feel free to make further changes.

@Cid: I wouldn't consider this article to be so large as to make it unreadable, as I've read it in one go just a few days ago. As I've said already, I see splitting the article to be a solution that's worse than the "problem" since most of information at the suggested split points overlaps greatly. That said, we should get this up to snuff, I've asked Sennim for help with some of the issues involving info I don't have, and then see if the article needs splitting, with temp pages and all that jazz. Anyway, here's some responses to the section 1-3 stuff:

1) I've moved the image down, but it's placement was correct before I introduced the blockquote format, there may be a few other images that need to simply be moved around the quotes as they are now.

2) You're guess is as good as mine on that, since my screen sucks. I've added the suggested text for now though.

3) As for the use of the bginfo template, I've read that to mean the info inside is a bit of a tangent to the rest of the section, though it could be formatted differently I guess. I'd rather give a change for Sennim to respond to that first though.

4) I'll get to checking the DVD shortly unless someone beats me to it. - Archduk3 03:21, December 23, 2011 (UTC)

More stuff:

1. There's a custom gallery in subsection #Build that should be turned into a proper one.
2. There are many "collage" type images, such as this one. Not all of them seem to be collages in their respective sources, and we have a guideline to not merge individual images where possible. So, all of these should be checked whether they can sensibly be split again.
3. Way down in the CGI-section, there's this statement: "As Digital Muse had only the four-foot model at their disposal as reference, their model was endowed with the original color scheme of the Galaxy class, light blue-gray with duck-egg blue highlights, instead of the color-scheme applied to the six-foot model at ILM." - yet in the section about the 6-footer, it states that "One [color] is a duck egg blue, and the other is kind of a sky blue" and in the section about the 4-footer, it states that "the base hull color was shifted to a lighter blue-, almost white-gray tone". So, there may be a mix up in the description of what color scheme exactly the CGI model has (and if it is indeed the 4-footer's color scheme, it can't be the "original one" because the 4-footer came later).

In regard to the split issue, I'm going to reply on User_talk:Sennim#Galaxy_class_model_FA_nomination, too - for the moment, I still think that a split should at least be attempted on a temp page - but if this isn't done, the very least that must happen is a better structuring of the page, so that all individual info can be found without reading everything from top to bottom - "accessibility" is an important factor for our articles, after all. -- Cid Highwind 11:07, December 23, 2011 (UTC)