Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Super Cyclonic Storm Gonu

Super Cyclonic Storm Gonu edit

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 10 Jun 2013 at 08:03:45 (UTC)

Original – Super Cyclonic Storm Gonu, a rare tropical cyclone over the Arabian Sea with near-perfect symmetry and a well-defined eye . The storm has the hallmark tightly wound arms that spiral around a well-defined, circular eye, surrounded by a clear wall of towering clouds that cast shadows on the surrounding clouds.

Reason: Intense Tropical Storms like Gonu are rare in the Arabian Sea, and this image shows a perfect symmetry of the storm with an eye showing the underlying ocean mass, a few aspects you would never expect in a storm formed over the North Indian Ocean basin. Plus, the most important image in the featured article Cyclone Gonu.
Articles in which this image appears: Cyclone Gonu, Tropical cyclones in the Arabian sea
FP category for this image: Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Natural phenomena/Weather
Creator: Good kitty

Support as nominator --Rishabh Tatiraju (talk) 08:03, 1 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Great centering, the eye of the storm is remarkably detailed and has been extremely well focused, clearly PD, image description is helpful, used in the FA's infobox (can't imagine a more useful place) and definitely has high EV there, massive size (6000x7800 pixels) that's far past our size minimum, and I don't see any additional problems (e.g. dust) with the image itself. Nyttend (talk) 00:28, 2 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Weak oppose. I just honestly think we have a lot of too-similar space-shot of hurricane images. And not so sure that the illustration of individual storm articles (as opposed to overall hurricane article) is so important. It is a nice image and an important storm though (maybe not Katrina/Andrew notable though). Think we would add more with diagrams (storm tracks), action shots, damage shots, etc. Also, unlike a species picture, it is pretty hard to tell one storm pic from a different storm pic (if in same region). Sorry...I am just explaining the contrarian view..TCO (talk) 21:35, 2 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't want this to seem pointed (like I think you said on another nom, I appreciate your work and the fact that these discussions happen) but the same argument could be made for species (has been made) or cars, camera lenses or people. While images of storms may look similar they are in no way interchangeable--each storm is a unique and discreet phenomenon. There's really no better way to illustrate what the storm looked like and where it was at the time. Picking and choosing certain storms (Katrina and Andrew, without getting into the Western-centric nature of that) isn't part of the criteria. The fact that we have an article for the storm (and a featured one at that) by default gives it sufficient EV. Similarly, no one would make the case that we should stop writing articles about the storms because "there's a lot of them". If it's a question of an overwhelming amount of hurricanes (or birds, politicians, mushrooms, what have you) appearing on the frontpage then that's an issue to be dealt with at Today's FP. A possible solution would be a point system like the one used at FA, but again that's a discussion for another place, though one certainly worth having. The solution isn't trying to curate the gallery at this phase by excluding images for reasons outside of the criteria. As a final, rather minor point, featuring a satellite image of the storm doesn't preclude us from showing other images of it at ground level or the destruction it caused. Diagrams such as storm tracks aren't generally considered featureable because they amount to stock images with minor alterations (for similar reasons we don't feature flags or the base map images that we often see in infoboxes) Cowtowner (talk) 22:13, 2 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I completely agree that a monoculture of storm images on the front page would be boring and hugely undesirable; that's why there's a separate project to curate what goes on there (normally howcheng is in charge of that aspect of it. But we operate on our own criteria here, and what your evaluation is based on isn't in them. I'll reiterate my point briefly using the birds as a comparison: the storms are actually different (we can't change one for the other) and while they make look indistinguishable to the layman to the trained eye they are different. To make a parallel case, these albatross [[1]] [[2]] look basically the same to me but are in fact different species. Whether we want both of them to appear on the MP is one thing, but they are different species and have independent EV of one another. We can't say that because we have featured one albatross we have feature them all. We should be judging images in relation to the criteria, not the existing content of the gallery. I agree with the basics of the point you're making, but that's not how the project is or should be run. Cowtowner (talk) 22:41, 2 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And, at this point, I suppose it only makes sense for me to support this. Cowtowner (talk) 22:14, 2 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not Promoted --Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 08:04, 10 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]