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Archive 5 | ← | Archive 10 | Archive 11 | Archive 12 | Archive 13 | Archive 14 | Archive 15 |
While building new portals, I encountered the following aspects of the various navigation systems...
The titles for lists are competed for by 2 different kinds of lists: bullet lists and tables. You go to "List of x" expecting to see a bullet list, and instead there's a table. Our transclusion templates don't work with tables. And you can't make the list easily, because what do you call it?
I ran into a similar problem with "List of x topics" years ago, where outlines and indexes competed for that same title. The solution, which still hasn't been fully implemented, was to create 2 new departments: Outlines and Indexes, and then rename the lists to "Outline of x" or "Index of x articles" (or "Index of x-related articles"). That effort worked well except where the topics lists needed to be merged into existing outlines or indexes (very time consuming).
Tables are incredibly difficult to harvest links from.
The titles for base template names are competed for by at least 3 sets of templates: horizontal navigation templates, sidebar navigation templates, and wikiproect templates (via redirects to their WikiProject templates). The standard portal template uses the base name that matches the portal title, but often times, its the wrong template type that appears in the Topics section of portals, because navigation template titles are not standardized.
Many topics are missing categories, which makes their standard category links on portals (in the CatTree section, and at the bottom of the page) show up red. Many of these subjects have subcategory categories ready and waiting for a parent to be created.
Many topics that should have a navigation template, don't have one. This is especially noticeable when building batches of portals, like one for each of the actors who received the AFI Life Achievement Award. Some of them have navigation portals and the rest don't. The same thing applies to cites, counties, districts, and divisions.
Some sections of outlines are great for supporting portal sections, others aren't. Many of the links in some sections are mostly lists, which usually don't have leads that transclude well.
With the transclusion templates, you can't access the topics in the main part of an outline section without getting all the subsections' topics too. So, "Culture" includes "Religion" and "Sports", which you don't want in a portal's culture section if you plan to have portal sections on religion and sports. Same with economic and transportation.
Harvesting links from categories to build navigation templates is slow and tedious, and leaves you with a link set that must be updated later.
There are more, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. More later.
Ciao, — The Transhumanist 21:15, 9 September 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). Legobot ( talk) 04:31, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
Hi, Peter - I've got some extra time on my hands if you need either a GA or peer review, etc. on any of your diving-related articles. Atsme 📞 📧 03:06, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
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It's based mostly on the corresponding outline. The topics in the topics section came from the corresponding category, and populate the general articles section. The initial page was generated from template, and then the extra excerpt sections were added in by hand. (Just an FYI). — The Transhumanist 10:38, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Signatures. Legobot ( talk) 04:28, 17 September 2018 (UTC)
Hey...
If you have AWB laying around, please dust it off and crank it up! ;)
We have a growing backlog!
There are now 544 portals. Of those, 52 are of the new design.
Many of the new portals are orphaned or near orphaned, and need links pointing to them:
To make a list of corresponding templates, you can use AWB's make list feature to make a list of the pages in
Category:Single-page portals. Then you copy that list to a sandbox, and replace \nPortal:
with ]]\n* [[Template:
, using
WP:wikEd. That will give you a list of templates to work on. Then you set skip in AWB to skip the ones that already have the portal link.
To make a list of corresponding root articles, make a list of portal links, and then remove "Portal:" from the links.
To make a list of category links to process, make sure you use a leading colon (:) in the category links, like this: [[:Category:Blue Öyster Cult]]
.
All new and revamped portals can be found at Category:Single-page portals.
Thank you. — The Transhumanist 20:45, 17 September 2018 (UTC)
Hello Pbsouthwood, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!
The New Page Feed currently has 2700 unreviewed articles, up from just 500 at the start of July. For a while we were falling behind by an average of about 40 articles per day, but we have stabilised more recently. Please review some articles from the back of the queue if you can (Sort by: 'Oldest' at Special:NewPagesFeed), as we are very close to having articles older than one month.
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Don't blink. You might miss something.
As of a few days ago, portals had doubled in about a month and a half.
Also, there were 98 incompleted portals in Category:Portals under construction. Now there are just 43.
The goals, plans, and task sections have all been updated.
Many new portals are still orphans, and need links pointing to them:
All new and revamped portals can be found at Category:Single-page portals.
This is the main list of portals.
Nearly 2,000 of the new portals need to be listed here.
They can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.
Portals now have a new rating system of their own designed specifically to support portal evaluation! We were trying to use the standard assessment system for articles, but that doesn't fit portals very well.
Many thanks to Evad37, Waggers, AfroThundr3007730, SMcCandlish, Tom, BrendonTheWizard, and Pbsouthwood for their work and input on this.
The new system can be found at the top of all portal talk pages, in the WikiProject portals box. Those with "???" ratings need to be assessed, which makes up most of the older portals.
Most of the new portals were started out with an initial "Low" level of importance when their talk pages were created. Those deserving higher importance should be promoted as you come across them.
The starting point for new portals included minimal parameters and content, in the form of default values in the template(s) used for their creation.
So, for the search strings in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections, this was the magic word {{PAGENAME}}
, which represents the portal's name. Unfortunately, the resulting term is alway capitalized, which limits its effectiveness as a search string for anything but proper nouns. Results for those two sections can be improved, by replacing the "PAGENAME" magic word with multiple search strings, and search strings that begin with lower case letters. There is no inherent limit as to how many search parameters may be included. Lua search notation is used. The more general the subject, the more subtopic search terms you may want to include. For example, on
Portal:Avengers (comics), {{PAGENAME}}
turned up nothing. But, when more parameters were added, as in the wikicode below...
{{Transclude selected recent additions | {{PAGENAME}} | Iron Man | Spiderman | Antman | Hawkeye | The Hulk | Incredible Hulk | David Banner | Captain America | Scarlet Witch | Black Widow | Tony Stark | Nick Fury | Age of Ultron | Infinity War | months=36 | header={{Box-header colour|Did you know... }}|max=6}}
... that returned several results in the portal's DYK section.
Be sure you make the improvements to both the DYK section and the "In the news" section, as they both require the search strings.
The default starting selection for the image slideshow in most new portals is whatever images happen to be in the corresponding root article (via the PAGENAME magic word). You can improve image slideshows by adding more sourcepages and filenames as parameters in the "Selected images" section of portals.
See Template:Transclude files as random slideshow/doc for instructions.
Portals used to take about 6 hours or more to create. Now, for subjects that have particular navigation support, we've got that down to about one minute each, with even more content displayed than ever. True, that means the new portals pick you, rather than the other way around. Creating a specific portal that doesn't happen to have the requisite navigation support is still pretty time consuming. But, we are working on extending our reach beyond the low-hanging fruit.
And efforts are ongoing to keep shaving time off of the creation process. Eventually, we may get it down to seconds each.
In addition to improving automation, we're always looking for new features and improvements that we can add to portals, and there is plenty of potential to expand on the standard design so that new portals are even better right out of the starting gate. Additional designs are also possible.
On the horizon, there are many more portals waiting to be created. And we can expect to see at least a few more section types emerge. I never expected slideshows, for example, especially not for excerpts. Who knows where innovation will take us next?
Keep up the great work everyone.
Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 07:09, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
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Short description problem. Maybe after the redirect? Xx236 ( talk) 11:01, 26 September 2018 (UTC)
#REDIRECT[[target]]
. If descriptions are to be used on redirects, perhaps the simple way forward is to ask the good
Galobtter to stick in some kind of if exist ... then in
User:Galobtter/Shortdesc helper.js.
Sam
Sailor
19:28, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
( ←) Peter, two things: (a) Looking at Category:Redirects with short description, why are so many pages categorized although they do not transclude a {{ short description}}? E.g. why is Acevedo (surname) a member of the hidden cat? (b) What purpose does {{ short description}} serve on Burn (stream) (please fix yourself), and North pole, and South pole? Sam Sailor 20:05, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
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News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2018).
Interface administrator changes
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Hey, I was asking about adding short description to episode redirects (such as Into the Ring) and heard you've added to redirects and wanted to get your input on this. Is this OK or will I start getting mass amount of messages on this? -- Gonnym ( talk) 17:10, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
My watchlist shows you adding a lot of short descriptions. Good, and thanks! However, have you used a phone to search for a topic using the Wikipedia app? For example, at Population genetics the description is:
Using a large phone, searching for "population gen" shows several suggestions including the above article. This is what the screen shows when searching:
With the phone tilted in landscape mode it shows:
I suppose a lot more would be visible with a large tablet but phones are claimed to be a major source of readers (and all of the description is shown after displaying the article). I am just dumping my thoughts without any good suggestions but you might consider omitting padding such as "Study of" and "within and between". Brevity with less precision might be better because the aim of the short description is help the reader find the right page. The description is not intended to give an accurate summary of the article. Johnuniq ( talk) 09:57, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
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The Barnstar of Diligence |
For adding a million Short Descriptions to all imaginable Evolution articles! Chiswick Chap ( talk) 05:41, 11 October 2018 (UTC) |
Whew, a lot has been happening.
A bit of defending of the portals has been needed. But, most activity recently has been directed upon maintenance and development of existing portals.
The majority of portals now use the new design, about 2400 of them, leaving around 1200 portals that still employ the old style.
Please inspect these portals, and report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.
Since the last issue of this newsletter, Nineteen portals were nominated for deletion. All posted by the same person.
Two portals were deleted.
One resolved as "no consensus".
Sixteen resolved as "keep".
Links to the archived discussions are provided below:
Many thanks to those who participated in the discussions.
To watch for future MfD's, keep in mind that the Portals WikiProject is supported by automatic alerts. You can see them at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Article alerts: portals for deletion at MfD
There was also some discussion of creation criteria for portals. The result was that one of the participants in the discussion reverted the portal guidelines to the old version, which has the minimum number of articles for a portal included in there: "about 20 articles", a guideline that was in place since 2009.
Many of the portals that existed prior to April 2018 do not have that many (being limited to however many subpages the portal creator created), and therefore, these portals need to be upgraded to the new design (which automatically provides many articles for display). Using the new design, exceeding 20 articles for display is very easy.
Efforts have been underway to place links to new portals (all 2200 of them created since April).
Your help is needed. It is easy to access the page mentioned in #1, #2, & #3 from the portals themselves.
AWBers could do these tasks even faster (that's how the category pages were done), except #4...
Item #4 above pretty much has to be done by hand. (If you can find a way to speed that up, I would be very impressed). The links needing placement can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.
There are still around 1200 old-style portals that have only undergone partial conversion to the new design concepts, still relying on subpages with copied/pasted excerpts that have been going stale for years, out of date (manually posted) news entries, etc.
The section currently being tackled on these is news. You can help by deleting any news section on the old-style portals that has news entries that are years old (that is the dead giveaway to a manual news section). Be sure not to delete the news sections of portals that have up-to-date news, or active maintainers. For maintainers, look at the portal's categories, and/or check the participants list at WP:WPPORT.
Eventually, conditional news sections (that appear only when news items are available for display) will be added using AWB to all portals without a news section.
News items (and even the news sections themselves) are automatically generated for portals that were created using the Basic portal start page. On those portals, there is a hidden comment at the top of the page (that you can see in the edit window), that says this:
<!-- This portal was created using subst:Basic portal start page -->
Presently, we are in the process of implementing the new design features, creating new portals with them, and installing them in existing portals.
But, what about development of new new design features?
We have a wish department.
Post your wishes at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Discussions about possible cool new features, and they might come true. Many have already, and for many of those, this is where they were posted.
A resource that has been elusive so far will be obtained eventually: categories. That is, the ability to pull category member links to populate a page.
Rather than populate portals directly with such links, it may be more beneficial to the encyclopedia to utilize them in navigation footers, because portals already have the ability to generate themselves based on those.
So, this would create a cascade effect: auto-gathering entries from categories, would enable the construction of new navigation footers, that would in turn support the development of new portals.
The cascade effect would also be felt by existing portals, as existing navigation footers could be expanded using the category harvesting methods, which would in turn expand the coverage of portals that access those navigation footers.
You can help by providing leads about any potential category harvesting methods. Please report anything you know about harvesting categories at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.
One idea that has been floating around is the concept of a pageless portal. That is, a portal that isn't stored anywhere, instead being generated when you click on a menu item or button.
Many of the new portals were generated by a single click, and then saved via a second click.
Therefore, it seems likely that the portals of the future will employ the one-click concept.
Because of the need for customization by users, this concept would need to be augmented with a way to integrate user contributions. This could be done in at least two ways: posting an existing portal, autogenerating one from scratch if such does not yet exist, or have a special data page for user contributions that is folded into the auto-generated portal.
How soon? That is up to you. All that is needed are persons to implement it.
Keep up the good work on portals. They are improving daily. Thank you. — The Transhumanist 04:24, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
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Apologies for my unfamiliarity with that template. I was tired, and tired of vandalism, and mistakenly undid your edit (reverting vandalism does not require an edit summary).-- Quisqualis ( talk) 21:58, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
Hi Peter,
I originally became aware of "short descriptions" because of your work, and I know you've done a lot of work on them. I'm getting concerned that many short descriptions aren't short at all. As I understand it, the main purpose is as a quick disambiguator for mobile users; give them enough context to know if they want to click on an article.
Instead, many short descriptions (maybe semi-auto-generated?) seem to be approaching full definitions of the subject matter, even when that's way more than is needed to give basic context to a mobile user, and way more than the suggested soft limit of 40 characters. I've added the CSS so that I see them and they look very messy, and must look even much worse on mobile if the local ones ever go live (are they live?).
Since you add a large fraction of the ones I've seen, I think you could have a great impact in setting the de facto standard for people who don't read the background information of the project. Would you consider trying to keep to the 40-char limit when possible, and as close as possible when not? -- Trovatore ( talk) 17:07, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 5 | ← | Archive 10 | Archive 11 | Archive 12 | Archive 13 | Archive 14 | Archive 15 |
While building new portals, I encountered the following aspects of the various navigation systems...
The titles for lists are competed for by 2 different kinds of lists: bullet lists and tables. You go to "List of x" expecting to see a bullet list, and instead there's a table. Our transclusion templates don't work with tables. And you can't make the list easily, because what do you call it?
I ran into a similar problem with "List of x topics" years ago, where outlines and indexes competed for that same title. The solution, which still hasn't been fully implemented, was to create 2 new departments: Outlines and Indexes, and then rename the lists to "Outline of x" or "Index of x articles" (or "Index of x-related articles"). That effort worked well except where the topics lists needed to be merged into existing outlines or indexes (very time consuming).
Tables are incredibly difficult to harvest links from.
The titles for base template names are competed for by at least 3 sets of templates: horizontal navigation templates, sidebar navigation templates, and wikiproect templates (via redirects to their WikiProject templates). The standard portal template uses the base name that matches the portal title, but often times, its the wrong template type that appears in the Topics section of portals, because navigation template titles are not standardized.
Many topics are missing categories, which makes their standard category links on portals (in the CatTree section, and at the bottom of the page) show up red. Many of these subjects have subcategory categories ready and waiting for a parent to be created.
Many topics that should have a navigation template, don't have one. This is especially noticeable when building batches of portals, like one for each of the actors who received the AFI Life Achievement Award. Some of them have navigation portals and the rest don't. The same thing applies to cites, counties, districts, and divisions.
Some sections of outlines are great for supporting portal sections, others aren't. Many of the links in some sections are mostly lists, which usually don't have leads that transclude well.
With the transclusion templates, you can't access the topics in the main part of an outline section without getting all the subsections' topics too. So, "Culture" includes "Religion" and "Sports", which you don't want in a portal's culture section if you plan to have portal sections on religion and sports. Same with economic and transportation.
Harvesting links from categories to build navigation templates is slow and tedious, and leaves you with a link set that must be updated later.
There are more, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. More later.
Ciao, — The Transhumanist 21:15, 9 September 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). Legobot ( talk) 04:31, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
Hi, Peter - I've got some extra time on my hands if you need either a GA or peer review, etc. on any of your diving-related articles. Atsme 📞 📧 03:06, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Shortcut. Legobot ( talk) 04:30, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Ligand Pharmaceuticals. Legobot ( talk) 04:31, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
It's based mostly on the corresponding outline. The topics in the topics section came from the corresponding category, and populate the general articles section. The initial page was generated from template, and then the extra excerpt sections were added in by hand. (Just an FYI). — The Transhumanist 10:38, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Signatures. Legobot ( talk) 04:28, 17 September 2018 (UTC)
Hey...
If you have AWB laying around, please dust it off and crank it up! ;)
We have a growing backlog!
There are now 544 portals. Of those, 52 are of the new design.
Many of the new portals are orphaned or near orphaned, and need links pointing to them:
To make a list of corresponding templates, you can use AWB's make list feature to make a list of the pages in
Category:Single-page portals. Then you copy that list to a sandbox, and replace \nPortal:
with ]]\n* [[Template:
, using
WP:wikEd. That will give you a list of templates to work on. Then you set skip in AWB to skip the ones that already have the portal link.
To make a list of corresponding root articles, make a list of portal links, and then remove "Portal:" from the links.
To make a list of category links to process, make sure you use a leading colon (:) in the category links, like this: [[:Category:Blue Öyster Cult]]
.
All new and revamped portals can be found at Category:Single-page portals.
Thank you. — The Transhumanist 20:45, 17 September 2018 (UTC)
Hello Pbsouthwood, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!
The New Page Feed currently has 2700 unreviewed articles, up from just 500 at the start of July. For a while we were falling behind by an average of about 40 articles per day, but we have stabilised more recently. Please review some articles from the back of the queue if you can (Sort by: 'Oldest' at Special:NewPagesFeed), as we are very close to having articles older than one month.
List of other useful scripts for New Page Reviewing
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The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2018. Legobot ( talk) 04:31, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Taiwan stations). Legobot ( talk) 04:27, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
Don't blink. You might miss something.
As of a few days ago, portals had doubled in about a month and a half.
Also, there were 98 incompleted portals in Category:Portals under construction. Now there are just 43.
The goals, plans, and task sections have all been updated.
Many new portals are still orphans, and need links pointing to them:
All new and revamped portals can be found at Category:Single-page portals.
This is the main list of portals.
Nearly 2,000 of the new portals need to be listed here.
They can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.
Portals now have a new rating system of their own designed specifically to support portal evaluation! We were trying to use the standard assessment system for articles, but that doesn't fit portals very well.
Many thanks to Evad37, Waggers, AfroThundr3007730, SMcCandlish, Tom, BrendonTheWizard, and Pbsouthwood for their work and input on this.
The new system can be found at the top of all portal talk pages, in the WikiProject portals box. Those with "???" ratings need to be assessed, which makes up most of the older portals.
Most of the new portals were started out with an initial "Low" level of importance when their talk pages were created. Those deserving higher importance should be promoted as you come across them.
The starting point for new portals included minimal parameters and content, in the form of default values in the template(s) used for their creation.
So, for the search strings in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections, this was the magic word {{PAGENAME}}
, which represents the portal's name. Unfortunately, the resulting term is alway capitalized, which limits its effectiveness as a search string for anything but proper nouns. Results for those two sections can be improved, by replacing the "PAGENAME" magic word with multiple search strings, and search strings that begin with lower case letters. There is no inherent limit as to how many search parameters may be included. Lua search notation is used. The more general the subject, the more subtopic search terms you may want to include. For example, on
Portal:Avengers (comics), {{PAGENAME}}
turned up nothing. But, when more parameters were added, as in the wikicode below...
{{Transclude selected recent additions | {{PAGENAME}} | Iron Man | Spiderman | Antman | Hawkeye | The Hulk | Incredible Hulk | David Banner | Captain America | Scarlet Witch | Black Widow | Tony Stark | Nick Fury | Age of Ultron | Infinity War | months=36 | header={{Box-header colour|Did you know... }}|max=6}}
... that returned several results in the portal's DYK section.
Be sure you make the improvements to both the DYK section and the "In the news" section, as they both require the search strings.
The default starting selection for the image slideshow in most new portals is whatever images happen to be in the corresponding root article (via the PAGENAME magic word). You can improve image slideshows by adding more sourcepages and filenames as parameters in the "Selected images" section of portals.
See Template:Transclude files as random slideshow/doc for instructions.
Portals used to take about 6 hours or more to create. Now, for subjects that have particular navigation support, we've got that down to about one minute each, with even more content displayed than ever. True, that means the new portals pick you, rather than the other way around. Creating a specific portal that doesn't happen to have the requisite navigation support is still pretty time consuming. But, we are working on extending our reach beyond the low-hanging fruit.
And efforts are ongoing to keep shaving time off of the creation process. Eventually, we may get it down to seconds each.
In addition to improving automation, we're always looking for new features and improvements that we can add to portals, and there is plenty of potential to expand on the standard design so that new portals are even better right out of the starting gate. Additional designs are also possible.
On the horizon, there are many more portals waiting to be created. And we can expect to see at least a few more section types emerge. I never expected slideshows, for example, especially not for excerpts. Who knows where innovation will take us next?
Keep up the great work everyone.
Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 07:09, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Split and merge. Legobot ( talk) 04:32, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). Legobot ( talk) 04:30, 26 September 2018 (UTC)
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The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Ligand Pharmaceuticals. Legobot ( talk) 04:28, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
Short description problem. Maybe after the redirect? Xx236 ( talk) 11:01, 26 September 2018 (UTC)
#REDIRECT[[target]]
. If descriptions are to be used on redirects, perhaps the simple way forward is to ask the good
Galobtter to stick in some kind of if exist ... then in
User:Galobtter/Shortdesc helper.js.
Sam
Sailor
19:28, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
( ←) Peter, two things: (a) Looking at Category:Redirects with short description, why are so many pages categorized although they do not transclude a {{ short description}}? E.g. why is Acevedo (surname) a member of the hidden cat? (b) What purpose does {{ short description}} serve on Burn (stream) (please fix yourself), and North pole, and South pole? Sam Sailor 20:05, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
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News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2018).
Interface administrator changes
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Hey, I was asking about adding short description to episode redirects (such as Into the Ring) and heard you've added to redirects and wanted to get your input on this. Is this OK or will I start getting mass amount of messages on this? -- Gonnym ( talk) 17:10, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
My watchlist shows you adding a lot of short descriptions. Good, and thanks! However, have you used a phone to search for a topic using the Wikipedia app? For example, at Population genetics the description is:
Using a large phone, searching for "population gen" shows several suggestions including the above article. This is what the screen shows when searching:
With the phone tilted in landscape mode it shows:
I suppose a lot more would be visible with a large tablet but phones are claimed to be a major source of readers (and all of the description is shown after displaying the article). I am just dumping my thoughts without any good suggestions but you might consider omitting padding such as "Study of" and "within and between". Brevity with less precision might be better because the aim of the short description is help the reader find the right page. The description is not intended to give an accurate summary of the article. Johnuniq ( talk) 09:57, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
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The Barnstar of Diligence |
For adding a million Short Descriptions to all imaginable Evolution articles! Chiswick Chap ( talk) 05:41, 11 October 2018 (UTC) |
Whew, a lot has been happening.
A bit of defending of the portals has been needed. But, most activity recently has been directed upon maintenance and development of existing portals.
The majority of portals now use the new design, about 2400 of them, leaving around 1200 portals that still employ the old style.
Please inspect these portals, and report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.
Since the last issue of this newsletter, Nineteen portals were nominated for deletion. All posted by the same person.
Two portals were deleted.
One resolved as "no consensus".
Sixteen resolved as "keep".
Links to the archived discussions are provided below:
Many thanks to those who participated in the discussions.
To watch for future MfD's, keep in mind that the Portals WikiProject is supported by automatic alerts. You can see them at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Article alerts: portals for deletion at MfD
There was also some discussion of creation criteria for portals. The result was that one of the participants in the discussion reverted the portal guidelines to the old version, which has the minimum number of articles for a portal included in there: "about 20 articles", a guideline that was in place since 2009.
Many of the portals that existed prior to April 2018 do not have that many (being limited to however many subpages the portal creator created), and therefore, these portals need to be upgraded to the new design (which automatically provides many articles for display). Using the new design, exceeding 20 articles for display is very easy.
Efforts have been underway to place links to new portals (all 2200 of them created since April).
Your help is needed. It is easy to access the page mentioned in #1, #2, & #3 from the portals themselves.
AWBers could do these tasks even faster (that's how the category pages were done), except #4...
Item #4 above pretty much has to be done by hand. (If you can find a way to speed that up, I would be very impressed). The links needing placement can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.
There are still around 1200 old-style portals that have only undergone partial conversion to the new design concepts, still relying on subpages with copied/pasted excerpts that have been going stale for years, out of date (manually posted) news entries, etc.
The section currently being tackled on these is news. You can help by deleting any news section on the old-style portals that has news entries that are years old (that is the dead giveaway to a manual news section). Be sure not to delete the news sections of portals that have up-to-date news, or active maintainers. For maintainers, look at the portal's categories, and/or check the participants list at WP:WPPORT.
Eventually, conditional news sections (that appear only when news items are available for display) will be added using AWB to all portals without a news section.
News items (and even the news sections themselves) are automatically generated for portals that were created using the Basic portal start page. On those portals, there is a hidden comment at the top of the page (that you can see in the edit window), that says this:
<!-- This portal was created using subst:Basic portal start page -->
Presently, we are in the process of implementing the new design features, creating new portals with them, and installing them in existing portals.
But, what about development of new new design features?
We have a wish department.
Post your wishes at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Discussions about possible cool new features, and they might come true. Many have already, and for many of those, this is where they were posted.
A resource that has been elusive so far will be obtained eventually: categories. That is, the ability to pull category member links to populate a page.
Rather than populate portals directly with such links, it may be more beneficial to the encyclopedia to utilize them in navigation footers, because portals already have the ability to generate themselves based on those.
So, this would create a cascade effect: auto-gathering entries from categories, would enable the construction of new navigation footers, that would in turn support the development of new portals.
The cascade effect would also be felt by existing portals, as existing navigation footers could be expanded using the category harvesting methods, which would in turn expand the coverage of portals that access those navigation footers.
You can help by providing leads about any potential category harvesting methods. Please report anything you know about harvesting categories at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.
One idea that has been floating around is the concept of a pageless portal. That is, a portal that isn't stored anywhere, instead being generated when you click on a menu item or button.
Many of the new portals were generated by a single click, and then saved via a second click.
Therefore, it seems likely that the portals of the future will employ the one-click concept.
Because of the need for customization by users, this concept would need to be augmented with a way to integrate user contributions. This could be done in at least two ways: posting an existing portal, autogenerating one from scratch if such does not yet exist, or have a special data page for user contributions that is folded into the auto-generated portal.
How soon? That is up to you. All that is needed are persons to implement it.
Keep up the good work on portals. They are improving daily. Thank you. — The Transhumanist 04:24, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
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Apologies for my unfamiliarity with that template. I was tired, and tired of vandalism, and mistakenly undid your edit (reverting vandalism does not require an edit summary).-- Quisqualis ( talk) 21:58, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
Hi Peter,
I originally became aware of "short descriptions" because of your work, and I know you've done a lot of work on them. I'm getting concerned that many short descriptions aren't short at all. As I understand it, the main purpose is as a quick disambiguator for mobile users; give them enough context to know if they want to click on an article.
Instead, many short descriptions (maybe semi-auto-generated?) seem to be approaching full definitions of the subject matter, even when that's way more than is needed to give basic context to a mobile user, and way more than the suggested soft limit of 40 characters. I've added the CSS so that I see them and they look very messy, and must look even much worse on mobile if the local ones ever go live (are they live?).
Since you add a large fraction of the ones I've seen, I think you could have a great impact in setting the de facto standard for people who don't read the background information of the project. Would you consider trying to keep to the 40-char limit when possible, and as close as possible when not? -- Trovatore ( talk) 17:07, 20 October 2018 (UTC)