![]() | This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
portal about
Australia.
Content dispute discussions should take place on the appropriate article's talk page. For discussions about general portal development, please see the
WikiProject Portals talk page.
Archives:
1If you are a regular maintainer of this portal, please add yourself to this list. |
![]() | The Australia Portal is a featured portal, which means it has been identified as one of the best portals on Wikipedia. If you see a way this portal can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, please feel free to contribute. | |||||||||
|
![]() | This portal does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | Automated portal content suggestions ( ) The following suggestions have been automatically generated as content that might be suitable for the portal, subject to review by a human editor. Please do not mindlessly copy items to the portal page without first checking that the suggestions are appropriate.
|
I've begun a discussion at Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board#Integration with Portal regarding integration between this Portal and WikiProject Australia. Lord Vetinari 11:11, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
The discussion is at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Proposal to delete Portal space. Voceditenore ( talk) 15:09, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals is back!
The project was rebooted and completely overhauled on April 17th, 2018.
Its goals are to revitalize the entire portal system, make building and maintaining portals easier, and design the portals of the future.
As of April 29th, membership is at 56 editors, and growing.
There are design initiatives for revitalizing the portals system as a whole, and for each component of portals.
Tools are provided for building and maintaining portals, including automated portals that update themselves in various ways.
And, if you are bored and would like something to occupy your mind, we have a wonderful task list.
From your friendly neighborhood Portals WikiProject. — The Transhumanist 03:24, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Portal:Darwin. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. UnitedStatesian ( talk) 11:34, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Portal:Newcastle. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. -- Tavix ( talk) 14:12, 27 June 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Portal:Norfolk Island. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. -- Tavix ( talk) 14:17, 27 June 2019 (UTC)
The portal has been expanded with the addition of a new Good article section. The article selections listed below were added. Additional expansion, updating and cleanup was also performed. If anyone is interested, please feel free to discuss these changes here. North America 1000 14:27, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
1 * Brumby 2 * Green-head ant 3 * Cyclone Glenda 4 * 2010 Gascoyne River flood 5 * Glebe (rugby league team) 6 * Angie Ballard 7 * Australian Crawl 8 * 2010 Claxton Shield 9 * Black Tears 10 * Fighter Squadron RAAF 11 * Jack Fingleton 12 * Anthony Field 13 * Green Lantern Coaster 14 * Stuart Clarence Graham 15 * Great Northern Highway 16 * Frog cake 17 * Albany Highway 18 * Jennifer Blow 19 * Ivor McIntyre 20 * Kelsey Wakefield
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Have collapsed the table as it was overwhelming the section on this page. Feel free to revert if preferred. -- Euryalus ( talk) 05:14, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
Seems worth extending this talkpage discussion as there's now a minor edit war under way. An editor boldly added a Good Article section to the portal, along with some minor technical changes. Another editor has reverted those changes on the grounds they were undiscussed beforehand. In the spirit of WP:BRDD, let's now have a discussion to decide the content for this page. In passing, please note that this is about content, unlike the ANI discussion which is about alleged editor conduct. Pinging @ Northamerica1000, BrownHairedGirl, and Kusma: as the three people so far involved, but of course anyone is welcome to offer a view. -- Euryalus ( talk) 05:14, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
complete fabrication. Apart from being gratuitously abusive, it denies the facts. I have set out my concerns in more detail in a lengthy section below. If you choose to reply there, I urge you to do so collegially. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 10:24, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
This portal is supposed to serve as a gateway to en.wp's coverage of Australia. Like nay other portrals, it was restructured and lots of new content was added without prior discussion or even notification to the editors who routinely build and maintain en.wp's coverage of Australia. The edit summaries used inadequately describe their effect, and the notes left after the effect do not explain many of the decisions made. So I am delighted to see a review discussion taking place, and I offer this explanation of why I decided that NA1K's changes were best reverted pending such a discussion.
Per WP:Portal, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". The list of articles is the core of any portal. It should be chosen on a transparent basis, and it should easily viewable and reviewable at any time by any reader or editor, as clickable links, without needing to edit the page or to search on the talk page. None of those apply to the portals restructured by NA1K.
I see three issues which need to be resolved with respect to this portal. Similar issues apply to the many other portals which NA1K has reworked:
NA1K chose without prior discussion or notice to add new sections to this portal ("Good article" and "Selected cuisine) in a no-supbage format which does not display a list of the articles anywhere on the face of the portal or on a linked sub-page. In other portals, existing sections were converted to that format; that conversion did not happen here.
This was a design choice; other models of single-page portal do display a list, e.g. Portal:Wind power. (Personally, I deeply dislike the excessively bulky way that one displays its list, but that is a formatting issue which could be easily fixed). It would also be only a modest programming task to modify other types of format so as to display a list.
Displaying the list of articles is important in two ways:
Editors need to decide how articles should be selected. At one extreme, any editor could be free to add whatever they like, possibly subject to a quality threshold. At the other extreme, there could be a strict formulaic system such as a quota by topic area (politics, sport, geography, culture) with a requirement for balance by geography, history and POV.
So far as I can see, the selection by NA1K of articles for the cuisine section amount to the first extreme: I see no stated criteria anywhere for the choice. If criteria were applied, they have not been disclosed; it is equally possible that the choice was simply a ILIKEIT set of NA1K's personal preferences.
Editors here may decide that ILIKEIT selections are fine, or that anyone may apply their own criteria. However, either approach seems to me to be a) wrong in principle for an encyclopedia, b) a recipe for instability, if editors argue over personal preferences; c) even if stable, excessively privileging whoever adds an article.
I note that NA1K added a section for GA-class articles. However, I see that NA1K added only 20 such articles, whereas I just used AWB to count
Category:GA-Class Australia articles+subcats, and found an impressive 750 GA-class articles (well done Australian editors!). There is no indication from NA1K of how or why they selected those 20 from the set of 750, and my attempts elsewhere to ask NA1K how they make such choices has elicited only meaningless word-soup responses. For example, at
WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ghana, when I challenged NA1K on what criteria had been used, their reply was simply vague and obfuscatory: I assessed these articles relative to their suitability for this portal
.
The addition of a cuisine section was an undiscussed unilateral addition by NA1K. Regardless of its content or quality, it stands out as the only topic area to be given its only section on the portal.
I can see no reason for this choice other that NA1K has a personal interest in cuisine. However, in any objective selection of sub-topics for Australia, I find it hard to see any basis for giving such prominence to cuisine. Food is only a level-2 vital article, and cuisine is a sub-topic of that. Australian cuisine comes low down in the category hierarchy for Australia: Category:Australia → Category:Australian society → Category:Food and drink in Australia → Category:Australian cuisine.
The choice of this topic area seems to me to give undue weight to one editor's personal interests, over more the broad topic areas such as history, geography, society, economy, environment, politics … and even to more significant sub-topics such as arts and culture, education, sport, military history, law, or crime.
Additionally, some of the article choices are bizarre. NA1K chose the heading "cuisine" rather than the broader "food and drink". The article Cuisine says a "A cuisine is a style of cooking characterized by distinctive ingredients, techniques and dishes, and usually associated with a specific culture or geographic region". So having chosen to make a section labelled as being about a style of cooking, why does it include Kangaroo meat, Australian wine, Beer in Australia, Kensington Pride and Vegemite? None of those are styles of cooking, and while vegemite is an icon Australian food, it is not a "style of cooking"; it's an ingredient.
If portals were simply magazines in which editors were encouraged to use to showcase their own interests, then this magazine-style choice would make sense. But I see nothing in WP:PORTAL to justify this widespread use of portals to promote one editors' personal interests at over objectively broader and more significant topics.
It is up to Australian editors to decide whether they want the portal on their country to be developed in this way. But I hope that as they make their decision, they will consider where this could lead. If it's OK for an editor to add a randomly-chosen third-level topic, then logically the door is open for any editor to add a section on their own pet sub-sub-topic: elections, cricket, snakes, cities, cars, immigration, whatever. Is that what editors really want? Or would they prefer the portal to develop according to the broad hierarchy of topics? -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 10:21, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
1. Brumby 2. Green-head ant 3. Cyclone Glenda 4. 2010 Gascoyne River flood 5. Glebe (rugby league team) 6. Angie Ballard 7. Australian Crawl 8. 2010 Claxton Shield 9. Black Tears 10. Fighter Squadron RAAF 11. Jack Fingleton 12. Anthony Field 13. Green Lantern Coaster 14. Stuart Clarence Graham 15. Great Northern Highway 16 Frog cake 17. Albany Highway 18. Jennifer Blow 19. Ivor McIntyre 20. Kelsey Wakefield
|list=
to get a list or |list=My custom header
to show other text. It might look better if the "Other articles" header and "[show]" link were closer and perhaps on the same line as "Read more..." but I think that needs a
CSS expert. I can recommend learning how to use templates but in this case the template is trivial; it just calls the
Lua module which does all the work.
Certes (
talk)
12:48, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
Certes writes Rather than showing the list by default I would suggest we [hide] it or put a subtle link to it like the V T E in some template headers. One slight issue is that we would show all potential pages even when some might get filtered out as redlinks or stubs; it would take too long to analyse every page rather than the one randomly selected.
What on earth is the point of hiding the list or linking to it? That's just driving readers to rely on the pointless module-generated excepts, which are redundant to the built-in previews shown on mouseover to all logged-out readers (i.e. the overwhelming majority). If anything should be hidden by default, it's the excerpts, which have been redundant for at least a year.
As to redlinks and stubs, the modules which process the lists are already identifying those, so they should treat them as errors and put the portals in an error tracking category. Identifying redlinks is a relatively cheap task; stub checking is more expensive, but could be done by a bot with cacheing of results.
And all of this applies to all portals using these templates, so per WP:MULTI it should be the subject of a well-advertised centralised discussion. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 16:09, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
Jennifer "Jenny" Blow (born 10 January 1991) is an Australian goalball player and is classified as a B3 competitor. Having only started playing the sport in 2009, she has several goalball scholarships. She plays for the New South Wales women's goalball team in the Australian national championships, where she has won three silver medals. As a member of the national team, she has competed in the 2010 World Championships, 2011 IBSA Goalball World Cup and the 2011 African-Oceania regional Paralympic qualifying competition. She represented Australia at the 2012 Summer Paralympics, 2016 Summer Paralympics and 2020 Summer Paralympics in goalball. ( Full article...)
1. Brumby 2. Green-head ant 3. Cyclone Glenda 4. 2010 Gascoyne River flood 5. Glebe (rugby league team) 6. Angie Ballard 7. Australian Crawl 8. 2010 Claxton Shield 9. Black Tears 10. Fighter Squadron RAAF 11. Jack Fingleton 12. Anthony Field 13. Green Lantern Coaster 14. Stuart Clarence Graham 15. Great Northern Highway 16 Frog cake 17. Albany Highway 18. Jennifer Blow 19. Ivor McIntyre 20. Kelsey Wakefield
WP:POG did set large numbers of readers and maintainers as the goal. This makes a welcome change from conduct of the prolific the prolific portal editor who repeatedly omitted that part of POG when referring to it.
In response to the post above about module generated excerpts, they are neither pointless
nor redundant
as
BHG, rather bizarrely, suggests. I strongly disagree with BHG's assertion. Properly used, they are far superior to the built-in wiki generated mouseover excerpts. The latter are convenient it is true, but they present a very limited extract of the mouse-over link and also lose the embedded wiki links contained therein. Module generated excerpts can be of custom size and display all the embedded links which present further user options for additional mouseover previews without further navigation. That is vastly superior in my opinion and I invite the reader to have a look at
User:Cactus.man/Sandbox/Transcluson_Demo for a comparison. No contest IMHO. --
Cactus.man
✍
14:24, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
So I am done rebuilding Portal:Canada and was going to do the same here.. as in same style format as all the sub pages are here already for me to do so. Will start this week on article selection first.-- Moxy 🍁 01:37, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
I agree with
Certes's suggestion that we seek consensus from a wider audience of editors who do not regularly contribute to portal discussions
. This is why I proposed RFCs.
I am appalled that even at this stage, Na1K:
There is currently no documented community consensus on which portals should exist, or how they should be constructed. Instead, NA1K is simply implementing unilateral changes, and when challenged relies the usual dwindling crew of portal fans to back the unilateralism.
NA1K's game is laid bare in their comment all the while portals continue to be nominated for deletion at MfD and deleted for not being maintained
. Rather than build a consensus on which topics have portals, how they should be constructed, and how articles should be selected, NA1K continues to try to
WP:GAME the system by unilaterally rebuilding portals on a vast range of topics in which they have no demonstrable expertise and have sought no WikiProject involvement, so that they can claim that this unilateral action is "maintenance". Essentially what NA1K is trying to do is to take the portals which have been abandoned by the topical WikiProjects, and turn them into pages stealthily structured and populated by NA1K alone.
I note again the contrast between portal MFDs (which are publicly notified and formally closed by an uninvolved admin) and these stealthy takeovers which are advertised nowhere other than on the portal talkpage, and not subject to any consensus either on the specific changes made or on the broader principles.
Basically, NA1K is trying to appoint themself as the portalmeister of a large swathe of portal space, and to do so without any community-backed guidelines. If portals have future, that should not be as the playground for one editor to build the whole namespace however they like. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 02:16, 4 November 2019 (UTC)
Editors may wish to read a previous discussion (long page; loads slowly) at ANI. Although that forum normally avoids content debates, it discusses changes to portals including this one. Certes ( talk) 13:50, 4 November 2019 (UTC)
Lets change formats /////Articles from Wikipedia:WikiProject Australia/Featured and good content ......we have a whole bunch...what do people think are the top 25 or so? Lets save bios for there own section-- Moxy 🍁 21:20, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
{{Transclude random excerpt |1=Banff National Park |2=Australian Defence Force |3=Black Friday (1945) |4=Hamersley, Western Australia |5=Military history of Australia during World War II |6=Red-bellied black snake |7= Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia |8=Shrine of Remembrance |9=Attack on Sydney Harbour |10= Victoria Cross for Australia |11=Australian raven |12=Australian Air Corps |13=Australian green tree frog |14=Short-beaked echidna |15=
etc...
to block progress.
I hadn't been involved in this particular portal discussion, because it seems that discussions about specific portals are being scattered all over, maybe among our hundreds of portals. I am still a little puzzled that User:BrownHairedGirl seems to be trying to hold up changes to portals, whether by User:Northamerica1000 or anyone else, arguing that they are being done sneakily and without consensus. It appears to me that the portals were developed without consensus in the first place. I am disappointed by the conduct of both BHG and NA1k. NA1k is indeed, as BHG points out, running around frantically and making poorly thought-out changes to portals without discussion. BHG seems to be running around in a similar fashion and reverting these changes. I thought, perhaps naively, that there might be a truce. I don't see why BHG is reverting the changes. Most of the existing portals are in such bad shape that any change is probably a small improvement. Robert McClenon ( talk) 20:17, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
BHG seems to want one or more RFCs on portals. My question is: Will these be one portal per RFC, which could be dozens of RFCs taking the place of dozens of MFDs, or would there be a few RFCs on portals in general? I am not optimistic about any RFCs about portals in general, because even the most basic RFC, such as whether to ratify the long-standing, never-ratified Portal Guidelines, gets weird input from the portal platoon, who evidently don't want to have guidelines about portals, because they simply want portals for a mystical reason. Robert McClenon ( talk) 20:17, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
the article choices I added were well thought out... but there is no explanation at all of how they were thought out. It is extraordinary that NA1K is unwilling or unable to acknowledge even the most obvious follies, such as adding Beer in Australia to a section which they chose to label "cuisine" (MW defines "cuisine" as "manner of preparing food : style of cooking: also : the food prepared").
Good article section was a logical starting pointomits any attempt to explain what logic was applied.
OK I did not get any input above about selection so I just did all the work ...pls see somewhat new portal Portal:Australia and it's new sub pages listing selections and more content... Portal:Australia/Content Portal:Australia/Wikiproject and Portal:Australia/Anniversaries.-- Moxy 🍁 21:06, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
Per discussion in 2019 on this talk page, the Featured article and Featured biography sections have been updated to include lists of all articles used within these sections ( diff, diff). North America 1000 19:53, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
Recently 13,000 black and white photos of the History Trust of South Australia have been uploaded onto Wikimedia Commons, and some of them have already been categorized:
These photos provide an excellent opportunity for writing or expanding articles, e.g. about the following topics:
I am looking forward to seeing, how these photos will be used by categorising and cropping them — as well as adding them to new or existing articles. -- NearEMPTiness ( talk) 07:03, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
I have refreshed the portal with the addition of more FA-class and FL-class articles today, to include and further expand with diverse content about Australian people, nature, geography and environment, sports, transportation, military history, and other aspects. The following articles listed below were added today ( diff, diff). Questions or concerns? Feel free to discuss on this talk page if desired. North America 1000 02:28, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
Blackrock (film), John Treloar (museum administrator), Australian boobook, Bill Kibby, Warner Bros. Movie World, Thomas White (Australian politician), List of birds of Tasmania, Vultee Vengeance in Australian service, Grevillea juniperina, Danie Mellor, Nothomyrmecia, Waterfall Gully, South Australia, Cyclone Joy, Great Eastern Highway, Don Tallon, Yagan, York Park, Silverchair, Sam Loxton, Barry Sheene Medal, Yarralumla, Australian Capital Territory, Death of Ms Dhu, Daisy Jugadai Napaltjarri, Canberra, Lester Brain, Faith Leech, Australia at the Winter Olympics
![]() | This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
portal about
Australia.
Content dispute discussions should take place on the appropriate article's talk page. For discussions about general portal development, please see the
WikiProject Portals talk page.
Archives:
1If you are a regular maintainer of this portal, please add yourself to this list. |
![]() | The Australia Portal is a featured portal, which means it has been identified as one of the best portals on Wikipedia. If you see a way this portal can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, please feel free to contribute. | |||||||||
|
![]() | This portal does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | Automated portal content suggestions ( ) The following suggestions have been automatically generated as content that might be suitable for the portal, subject to review by a human editor. Please do not mindlessly copy items to the portal page without first checking that the suggestions are appropriate.
|
I've begun a discussion at Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board#Integration with Portal regarding integration between this Portal and WikiProject Australia. Lord Vetinari 11:11, 28 June 2011 (UTC)
The discussion is at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Proposal to delete Portal space. Voceditenore ( talk) 15:09, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals is back!
The project was rebooted and completely overhauled on April 17th, 2018.
Its goals are to revitalize the entire portal system, make building and maintaining portals easier, and design the portals of the future.
As of April 29th, membership is at 56 editors, and growing.
There are design initiatives for revitalizing the portals system as a whole, and for each component of portals.
Tools are provided for building and maintaining portals, including automated portals that update themselves in various ways.
And, if you are bored and would like something to occupy your mind, we have a wonderful task list.
From your friendly neighborhood Portals WikiProject. — The Transhumanist 03:24, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Portal:Darwin. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. UnitedStatesian ( talk) 11:34, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Portal:Newcastle. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. -- Tavix ( talk) 14:12, 27 June 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Portal:Norfolk Island. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. -- Tavix ( talk) 14:17, 27 June 2019 (UTC)
The portal has been expanded with the addition of a new Good article section. The article selections listed below were added. Additional expansion, updating and cleanup was also performed. If anyone is interested, please feel free to discuss these changes here. North America 1000 14:27, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
1 * Brumby 2 * Green-head ant 3 * Cyclone Glenda 4 * 2010 Gascoyne River flood 5 * Glebe (rugby league team) 6 * Angie Ballard 7 * Australian Crawl 8 * 2010 Claxton Shield 9 * Black Tears 10 * Fighter Squadron RAAF 11 * Jack Fingleton 12 * Anthony Field 13 * Green Lantern Coaster 14 * Stuart Clarence Graham 15 * Great Northern Highway 16 * Frog cake 17 * Albany Highway 18 * Jennifer Blow 19 * Ivor McIntyre 20 * Kelsey Wakefield
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Have collapsed the table as it was overwhelming the section on this page. Feel free to revert if preferred. -- Euryalus ( talk) 05:14, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
Seems worth extending this talkpage discussion as there's now a minor edit war under way. An editor boldly added a Good Article section to the portal, along with some minor technical changes. Another editor has reverted those changes on the grounds they were undiscussed beforehand. In the spirit of WP:BRDD, let's now have a discussion to decide the content for this page. In passing, please note that this is about content, unlike the ANI discussion which is about alleged editor conduct. Pinging @ Northamerica1000, BrownHairedGirl, and Kusma: as the three people so far involved, but of course anyone is welcome to offer a view. -- Euryalus ( talk) 05:14, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
complete fabrication. Apart from being gratuitously abusive, it denies the facts. I have set out my concerns in more detail in a lengthy section below. If you choose to reply there, I urge you to do so collegially. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 10:24, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
This portal is supposed to serve as a gateway to en.wp's coverage of Australia. Like nay other portrals, it was restructured and lots of new content was added without prior discussion or even notification to the editors who routinely build and maintain en.wp's coverage of Australia. The edit summaries used inadequately describe their effect, and the notes left after the effect do not explain many of the decisions made. So I am delighted to see a review discussion taking place, and I offer this explanation of why I decided that NA1K's changes were best reverted pending such a discussion.
Per WP:Portal, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". The list of articles is the core of any portal. It should be chosen on a transparent basis, and it should easily viewable and reviewable at any time by any reader or editor, as clickable links, without needing to edit the page or to search on the talk page. None of those apply to the portals restructured by NA1K.
I see three issues which need to be resolved with respect to this portal. Similar issues apply to the many other portals which NA1K has reworked:
NA1K chose without prior discussion or notice to add new sections to this portal ("Good article" and "Selected cuisine) in a no-supbage format which does not display a list of the articles anywhere on the face of the portal or on a linked sub-page. In other portals, existing sections were converted to that format; that conversion did not happen here.
This was a design choice; other models of single-page portal do display a list, e.g. Portal:Wind power. (Personally, I deeply dislike the excessively bulky way that one displays its list, but that is a formatting issue which could be easily fixed). It would also be only a modest programming task to modify other types of format so as to display a list.
Displaying the list of articles is important in two ways:
Editors need to decide how articles should be selected. At one extreme, any editor could be free to add whatever they like, possibly subject to a quality threshold. At the other extreme, there could be a strict formulaic system such as a quota by topic area (politics, sport, geography, culture) with a requirement for balance by geography, history and POV.
So far as I can see, the selection by NA1K of articles for the cuisine section amount to the first extreme: I see no stated criteria anywhere for the choice. If criteria were applied, they have not been disclosed; it is equally possible that the choice was simply a ILIKEIT set of NA1K's personal preferences.
Editors here may decide that ILIKEIT selections are fine, or that anyone may apply their own criteria. However, either approach seems to me to be a) wrong in principle for an encyclopedia, b) a recipe for instability, if editors argue over personal preferences; c) even if stable, excessively privileging whoever adds an article.
I note that NA1K added a section for GA-class articles. However, I see that NA1K added only 20 such articles, whereas I just used AWB to count
Category:GA-Class Australia articles+subcats, and found an impressive 750 GA-class articles (well done Australian editors!). There is no indication from NA1K of how or why they selected those 20 from the set of 750, and my attempts elsewhere to ask NA1K how they make such choices has elicited only meaningless word-soup responses. For example, at
WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ghana, when I challenged NA1K on what criteria had been used, their reply was simply vague and obfuscatory: I assessed these articles relative to their suitability for this portal
.
The addition of a cuisine section was an undiscussed unilateral addition by NA1K. Regardless of its content or quality, it stands out as the only topic area to be given its only section on the portal.
I can see no reason for this choice other that NA1K has a personal interest in cuisine. However, in any objective selection of sub-topics for Australia, I find it hard to see any basis for giving such prominence to cuisine. Food is only a level-2 vital article, and cuisine is a sub-topic of that. Australian cuisine comes low down in the category hierarchy for Australia: Category:Australia → Category:Australian society → Category:Food and drink in Australia → Category:Australian cuisine.
The choice of this topic area seems to me to give undue weight to one editor's personal interests, over more the broad topic areas such as history, geography, society, economy, environment, politics … and even to more significant sub-topics such as arts and culture, education, sport, military history, law, or crime.
Additionally, some of the article choices are bizarre. NA1K chose the heading "cuisine" rather than the broader "food and drink". The article Cuisine says a "A cuisine is a style of cooking characterized by distinctive ingredients, techniques and dishes, and usually associated with a specific culture or geographic region". So having chosen to make a section labelled as being about a style of cooking, why does it include Kangaroo meat, Australian wine, Beer in Australia, Kensington Pride and Vegemite? None of those are styles of cooking, and while vegemite is an icon Australian food, it is not a "style of cooking"; it's an ingredient.
If portals were simply magazines in which editors were encouraged to use to showcase their own interests, then this magazine-style choice would make sense. But I see nothing in WP:PORTAL to justify this widespread use of portals to promote one editors' personal interests at over objectively broader and more significant topics.
It is up to Australian editors to decide whether they want the portal on their country to be developed in this way. But I hope that as they make their decision, they will consider where this could lead. If it's OK for an editor to add a randomly-chosen third-level topic, then logically the door is open for any editor to add a section on their own pet sub-sub-topic: elections, cricket, snakes, cities, cars, immigration, whatever. Is that what editors really want? Or would they prefer the portal to develop according to the broad hierarchy of topics? -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 10:21, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
1. Brumby 2. Green-head ant 3. Cyclone Glenda 4. 2010 Gascoyne River flood 5. Glebe (rugby league team) 6. Angie Ballard 7. Australian Crawl 8. 2010 Claxton Shield 9. Black Tears 10. Fighter Squadron RAAF 11. Jack Fingleton 12. Anthony Field 13. Green Lantern Coaster 14. Stuart Clarence Graham 15. Great Northern Highway 16 Frog cake 17. Albany Highway 18. Jennifer Blow 19. Ivor McIntyre 20. Kelsey Wakefield
|list=
to get a list or |list=My custom header
to show other text. It might look better if the "Other articles" header and "[show]" link were closer and perhaps on the same line as "Read more..." but I think that needs a
CSS expert. I can recommend learning how to use templates but in this case the template is trivial; it just calls the
Lua module which does all the work.
Certes (
talk)
12:48, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
Certes writes Rather than showing the list by default I would suggest we [hide] it or put a subtle link to it like the V T E in some template headers. One slight issue is that we would show all potential pages even when some might get filtered out as redlinks or stubs; it would take too long to analyse every page rather than the one randomly selected.
What on earth is the point of hiding the list or linking to it? That's just driving readers to rely on the pointless module-generated excepts, which are redundant to the built-in previews shown on mouseover to all logged-out readers (i.e. the overwhelming majority). If anything should be hidden by default, it's the excerpts, which have been redundant for at least a year.
As to redlinks and stubs, the modules which process the lists are already identifying those, so they should treat them as errors and put the portals in an error tracking category. Identifying redlinks is a relatively cheap task; stub checking is more expensive, but could be done by a bot with cacheing of results.
And all of this applies to all portals using these templates, so per WP:MULTI it should be the subject of a well-advertised centralised discussion. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 16:09, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
Jennifer "Jenny" Blow (born 10 January 1991) is an Australian goalball player and is classified as a B3 competitor. Having only started playing the sport in 2009, she has several goalball scholarships. She plays for the New South Wales women's goalball team in the Australian national championships, where she has won three silver medals. As a member of the national team, she has competed in the 2010 World Championships, 2011 IBSA Goalball World Cup and the 2011 African-Oceania regional Paralympic qualifying competition. She represented Australia at the 2012 Summer Paralympics, 2016 Summer Paralympics and 2020 Summer Paralympics in goalball. ( Full article...)
1. Brumby 2. Green-head ant 3. Cyclone Glenda 4. 2010 Gascoyne River flood 5. Glebe (rugby league team) 6. Angie Ballard 7. Australian Crawl 8. 2010 Claxton Shield 9. Black Tears 10. Fighter Squadron RAAF 11. Jack Fingleton 12. Anthony Field 13. Green Lantern Coaster 14. Stuart Clarence Graham 15. Great Northern Highway 16 Frog cake 17. Albany Highway 18. Jennifer Blow 19. Ivor McIntyre 20. Kelsey Wakefield
WP:POG did set large numbers of readers and maintainers as the goal. This makes a welcome change from conduct of the prolific the prolific portal editor who repeatedly omitted that part of POG when referring to it.
In response to the post above about module generated excerpts, they are neither pointless
nor redundant
as
BHG, rather bizarrely, suggests. I strongly disagree with BHG's assertion. Properly used, they are far superior to the built-in wiki generated mouseover excerpts. The latter are convenient it is true, but they present a very limited extract of the mouse-over link and also lose the embedded wiki links contained therein. Module generated excerpts can be of custom size and display all the embedded links which present further user options for additional mouseover previews without further navigation. That is vastly superior in my opinion and I invite the reader to have a look at
User:Cactus.man/Sandbox/Transcluson_Demo for a comparison. No contest IMHO. --
Cactus.man
✍
14:24, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
So I am done rebuilding Portal:Canada and was going to do the same here.. as in same style format as all the sub pages are here already for me to do so. Will start this week on article selection first.-- Moxy 🍁 01:37, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
I agree with
Certes's suggestion that we seek consensus from a wider audience of editors who do not regularly contribute to portal discussions
. This is why I proposed RFCs.
I am appalled that even at this stage, Na1K:
There is currently no documented community consensus on which portals should exist, or how they should be constructed. Instead, NA1K is simply implementing unilateral changes, and when challenged relies the usual dwindling crew of portal fans to back the unilateralism.
NA1K's game is laid bare in their comment all the while portals continue to be nominated for deletion at MfD and deleted for not being maintained
. Rather than build a consensus on which topics have portals, how they should be constructed, and how articles should be selected, NA1K continues to try to
WP:GAME the system by unilaterally rebuilding portals on a vast range of topics in which they have no demonstrable expertise and have sought no WikiProject involvement, so that they can claim that this unilateral action is "maintenance". Essentially what NA1K is trying to do is to take the portals which have been abandoned by the topical WikiProjects, and turn them into pages stealthily structured and populated by NA1K alone.
I note again the contrast between portal MFDs (which are publicly notified and formally closed by an uninvolved admin) and these stealthy takeovers which are advertised nowhere other than on the portal talkpage, and not subject to any consensus either on the specific changes made or on the broader principles.
Basically, NA1K is trying to appoint themself as the portalmeister of a large swathe of portal space, and to do so without any community-backed guidelines. If portals have future, that should not be as the playground for one editor to build the whole namespace however they like. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 02:16, 4 November 2019 (UTC)
Editors may wish to read a previous discussion (long page; loads slowly) at ANI. Although that forum normally avoids content debates, it discusses changes to portals including this one. Certes ( talk) 13:50, 4 November 2019 (UTC)
Lets change formats /////Articles from Wikipedia:WikiProject Australia/Featured and good content ......we have a whole bunch...what do people think are the top 25 or so? Lets save bios for there own section-- Moxy 🍁 21:20, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
{{Transclude random excerpt |1=Banff National Park |2=Australian Defence Force |3=Black Friday (1945) |4=Hamersley, Western Australia |5=Military history of Australia during World War II |6=Red-bellied black snake |7= Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia |8=Shrine of Remembrance |9=Attack on Sydney Harbour |10= Victoria Cross for Australia |11=Australian raven |12=Australian Air Corps |13=Australian green tree frog |14=Short-beaked echidna |15=
etc...
to block progress.
I hadn't been involved in this particular portal discussion, because it seems that discussions about specific portals are being scattered all over, maybe among our hundreds of portals. I am still a little puzzled that User:BrownHairedGirl seems to be trying to hold up changes to portals, whether by User:Northamerica1000 or anyone else, arguing that they are being done sneakily and without consensus. It appears to me that the portals were developed without consensus in the first place. I am disappointed by the conduct of both BHG and NA1k. NA1k is indeed, as BHG points out, running around frantically and making poorly thought-out changes to portals without discussion. BHG seems to be running around in a similar fashion and reverting these changes. I thought, perhaps naively, that there might be a truce. I don't see why BHG is reverting the changes. Most of the existing portals are in such bad shape that any change is probably a small improvement. Robert McClenon ( talk) 20:17, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
BHG seems to want one or more RFCs on portals. My question is: Will these be one portal per RFC, which could be dozens of RFCs taking the place of dozens of MFDs, or would there be a few RFCs on portals in general? I am not optimistic about any RFCs about portals in general, because even the most basic RFC, such as whether to ratify the long-standing, never-ratified Portal Guidelines, gets weird input from the portal platoon, who evidently don't want to have guidelines about portals, because they simply want portals for a mystical reason. Robert McClenon ( talk) 20:17, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
the article choices I added were well thought out... but there is no explanation at all of how they were thought out. It is extraordinary that NA1K is unwilling or unable to acknowledge even the most obvious follies, such as adding Beer in Australia to a section which they chose to label "cuisine" (MW defines "cuisine" as "manner of preparing food : style of cooking: also : the food prepared").
Good article section was a logical starting pointomits any attempt to explain what logic was applied.
OK I did not get any input above about selection so I just did all the work ...pls see somewhat new portal Portal:Australia and it's new sub pages listing selections and more content... Portal:Australia/Content Portal:Australia/Wikiproject and Portal:Australia/Anniversaries.-- Moxy 🍁 21:06, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
Per discussion in 2019 on this talk page, the Featured article and Featured biography sections have been updated to include lists of all articles used within these sections ( diff, diff). North America 1000 19:53, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
Recently 13,000 black and white photos of the History Trust of South Australia have been uploaded onto Wikimedia Commons, and some of them have already been categorized:
These photos provide an excellent opportunity for writing or expanding articles, e.g. about the following topics:
I am looking forward to seeing, how these photos will be used by categorising and cropping them — as well as adding them to new or existing articles. -- NearEMPTiness ( talk) 07:03, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
I have refreshed the portal with the addition of more FA-class and FL-class articles today, to include and further expand with diverse content about Australian people, nature, geography and environment, sports, transportation, military history, and other aspects. The following articles listed below were added today ( diff, diff). Questions or concerns? Feel free to discuss on this talk page if desired. North America 1000 02:28, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
Blackrock (film), John Treloar (museum administrator), Australian boobook, Bill Kibby, Warner Bros. Movie World, Thomas White (Australian politician), List of birds of Tasmania, Vultee Vengeance in Australian service, Grevillea juniperina, Danie Mellor, Nothomyrmecia, Waterfall Gully, South Australia, Cyclone Joy, Great Eastern Highway, Don Tallon, Yagan, York Park, Silverchair, Sam Loxton, Barry Sheene Medal, Yarralumla, Australian Capital Territory, Death of Ms Dhu, Daisy Jugadai Napaltjarri, Canberra, Lester Brain, Faith Leech, Australia at the Winter Olympics