![]() | This page 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. |
As part of some work I've been doing to clean up the Portal namespace, I've generated a nifty sortable list of all portals (including broken, incomplete, and redirected portals) at User:Zetawoof/PortalList. Zetawoof( ζ) 04:53, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
Hello all, I was working on the food and drink related portals and have come across or created several templates that are all used in creating portal pages. The thing is that while they are all related, they were never linked. So what I have done is link them all together under their "See also" sections. I have also improved the documentation a little because most info on usage was sparse at best.
These are them:
Main portal creation templates:
These templates are used to create the articles on the sub-pages:
-- Jeremy ( Blah blah...) 00:35, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
Done. I also made a simple list template to put on the see also pages so we will not have to change the see also section on dozens of pages every time another is added. {{ Portal template list}} -- Jeremy ( Blah blah...) 20:24, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
For anyone who is interested, Derek Andrews has created Template:No selected item which can be used as a warning for selecting items such as selected article and selected picture not being displayed the next month. Simply south is this a buffet? 21:55, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
I have found something a bit confusing regarding the placement of portals. In most cases the portal should go under the See also section however someone recently pointed out to me that the Biography portal says to put it above the categories so they placed said portal between the defaultsort and the categories. I think this is probably wrong but according to the letter of the law that is where its supposed to go. Could I get some clarification on this? -- Kumioko ( talk) 19:18, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
Biography Portal placement
1) Per the biography instructions at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Biography#Templates
Biography Portal - Add this to the bottom of a page, right before the categories listing, to show a standardized link to the Biography portal.
General portal placement
2) Per the Wikipedia Layout instructions under the See also section at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ALSO#.22See_also.22_section
"See also" is the best place to link a Portal with the {portal} template.
3) Per the Template:Portal instructions at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Portal
Location - Within articles, this template is meant to be placed at the bottom of the article in the "See also" section.
Which portal instructions do we follow? Jrcrin001 ( talk) 15:44, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
Could anybody help with adding the date parameter to the Template:Energy portal news? Beagel ( talk) 15:40, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
I'm curious what thoughts are on this. IMO, a well-developed portal, even if not being actively updated, still provides a useful launching pad for interested parties to find related articles. Such portals seem to generate a modest amount of hits per month and there is no need to delete or redirect them to the WikiProjects as has been proposed in several MFDs currently open and was carried out in a recently closed MFD. – xeno talk 14:34, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
Can someone who is experienced with handling new portals take a gander at Portal:Dragon Ball? Firstly, I'm not sure how to format it correctly, that and those red links need fixing. I guess I'm too tired now to resume, but I'd greated appreciate if anyone can help me. Lord Sesshomaru — Preceding undated comment added 04:06, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
I recently tried to add a portal in the edit box, but did not know the formatting code. I've looked at different Wiki user-editor articles, but can't seem to find anything on how to add a portal. Perhaps I haven't found the right article. If anyone has the time to help me, it would be appreciated.
Also, may I suggest adding a section to this page, re how to add a portal in the edit box. For example: "Go to the directory of portals. Pick the portal you want. Then go to the page to which you wish to add that portal. In the edit box, type the following: 'two open braces, the name of the portal, the word portal, two close braces.' " -- or whatever the exact formatting code should be. This would be a great help to new editors like me. Thank you all for all you do for Wikipedia and new editors. Eagle4000 ( talk) 16:00, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Most portals seem to be named after proper nouns or noun phrases, but those that aren't are completely inconsistent in capitalization. Viz.—
I propose, as with all Wikipedia articles (see WP:CAPS), that portals should always use lowercase after the first word, and not capitalize second and subsequent words, unless the title is a proper noun. — the Man in Question (in question) 05:08, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
Please comment Several weeks ago, while editing Taoism, I noticed {{ Taoism portal}}, which seemed redundant of {{ Portal}}, so I nominated it for deletion on those grounds and it was deleted per consensus. I happened across a similar template—{{ EnergyPortal}}—and nominated it for deletion as well. At this time, I discovered that there are 200 such templates all seemingly serving the same function as {{ Portal}} (except lacking several of its features, such as the requirement for alt text.) Is there some reason for hundreds of templates that apparently do the same thing as {{ Portal}}? Why do these exist? — Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 00:22, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
{{
Film portal}}
. Of those three options, the third seems to be by far the best to me. Coincidentally, I
proposed recently that {{
portal}}
should be changed, so that each portal could have its default image, and all the
Portal navflags would become useless.
Svick (
talk)
00:49, 18 March 2010 (UTC)I am in a desperate need of an auto-confirmed user to improve Portal:Star. -- Extra999 ( Contact me) 04:36, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps this is not the best place for these question but I will pose them here anyway. I will also link this to a couple other locations for additional input. I have had some issues with portals for some time know and this seems as good a time as any to begin addressing them. I personally think that the way we deal with portals in WP is a bit clunky and needs to be rethought/restructured.
Since they're all over the map, I'm attempting to standardize the subcategories of Category:Portals to lowercase-p "portals." About 20% of the categories are uppercase-p, and the rest are lowercase. Feel free to comment on Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2010_October_8#Uppercase_Portals if you have thoughts.-- Mike Selinker ( talk) 04:55, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
Portals boxes have become part of the internal marketing infrastructure for projects impacting non-user space, along with project banners and edit summaries. The latter two are less of a problem, because they don't appear on articles - but portal boxes are being pushed too hard, IMHO. A link to the US Marines portal, for example, is fine on the page of a unit within the marines, a commander or notable marine, a key raining facility or battle, maybe. But not on the page of everyone who was a marine. Similarly US Army portal doesn't belong on every US Civil War page. Anyone up to starting some guidelines?
Rich
Farmbrough,
14:37, 19 October 2010 (UTC).
There is something wrong with the layout of the Portal:Energy header. Also, text of all sections is centrefied instead of alignment to left. I appreciate if some more experienced editor in this field could fix it. Thank you. Beagel ( talk) 11:15, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
I disagree with placing portals in the See also area. They should accompany the text that highlights what the portal is all about. For example, in an article about France, an "agriculture" portal should be placed in the section dealing with French agriculture. Yours, GeorgeLouis ( talk) 07:01, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
That is a real bummer. GeorgeLouis ( talk) 13:29, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Well, I don't. I think it is silly. GeorgeLouis ( talk) 03:08, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
This is only loosely related to the above discussion, so it's under a separate header.
The main portals are only one click away from the main page, but they are not protected by any anti-vandalism bot and don't have enough watchers. Just this morning, I see that this offensive blanking lasted for 50 minutes, and this swearword lasted seven hours. I get the impression that I may be the only editor who systematically reviews the recent changes in this namespace - my apologies, of course, to anyone I've overlooked.
Compare this with the articles linked from the main page, watched over by ClueBot NG. Today's featured article has 45 watchers; so far it's been vandalised once, and that lasted 3 minutes.
I raised this at User_talk:ClueBot_Commons/Archives/2011/February#Portal_namespace, and was told that I'd be welcome to get the old Cluebot's pattern-matching code running in the Portal namespace. That's well outside my skill set!
But if portals are to be an effective "main page" for their topic areas, we need to take more care of them. -- John of Reading ( talk) 08:32, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
Portal:Cartoon Network is up for deletion at WP:MFD. Please comment here for any concerns. Thank you for time, regards. JJ98 ( Talk) 02:22, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
Nothing is more annoying than finding the link to the biography portal in every biography. It is just internal spam, no better than a Viagra spam message. However a link to the Nigerian Oil Minister's portal would be very helpful, I have lost touch with him after he cashed my check for $1,500 and I want to make sure he is ok. -- Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) ( talk) 06:16, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
Personally, I feel that there may be a "portal problem" driven by a feedback loop; portals get fewer viewers, so they get less attention from potential editors, which affects quality and extent (though I have every respect for those people who do lots of good work on portals; there just aren't as many of them), which could discourage wider linking to portals, which means they get fewer viewers...
I'm not sure that it's possible to break out of that feedback loop. Also, the wikipedia ecosystem has evolved over time, but for the last couple of years it's been a lot more complex (for lay readers) than an encyclopædia (or any website that the average person visits at lunchtime) and I feel that portals are one of several evolutionary lines which simply didn't thrive, whether due to external or internal factors. A bit like a
coelacanth. Other species - categories, wikiprojects, navboxes, taskforces, see-alsos &c - have outcompeted portals for various ecological niches, even though none of those species exactly recreates what portals do.
bobrayner (
talk)
16:28, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
Should the portal system be changed? If so, how? Guoguo12 --Talk-- 19:26, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
About a month ago, a user at the Idea Lab started a section entitled " Portals: is there any point?", in which he asked a question I believe the Wikipedia community should consider: "Do portals need to be rethought?" According to WP:Portal, portals serve as navigation aids, while also aiming to "promote content and encourage contribution". However, as Mr.Z-man observed in his reply (and I don't mean to put him on the spot), portals may not be fulfilling their job:
"I think portals are essentially a failed concept. At best, it was a good idea poorly executed. They require significant amounts of time to set up and they're very lightly used. They don't serve as an effective entry point since, except for the handful linked directly from the main page, you have to go to an article first to get a link to the portal and often the link is at the end of the article. Editing portals is much more difficult than articles. The portal pages themselves are typically giant messes of HTML, wikitables, and parser functions. With many it's not at all clear how to go about adding new content to the selected article/image features."
The purpose of this RfC is to gauge Wikipedians' opinions on portals. Should the portal system be changed? If so, how? Guoguo12 --Talk-- 19:26, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
One thing I've been raising is the potential for using portals as a way of exploring content on Wikimedia projects in a way that doesn't necessarily fit into the structure of existing categories/templates/navboxes. See here and here. Being able to explore all the articles related to things like museums, radio programmes, events and so on may actually be an interesting place that portals could go in the future. With the British Museum example, imagine after someone gets home from the British Museum and they go onto the BM portal on WP and can explore hundreds of articles across a huge variety of subject areas, and also be able to read up on news, original sources, pictures/media, books and learning materials from all the other Wikimedia projects that cover the subjects covered by the exhibitions in the museum. It could cover all sorts of things: exhibitions at museums, issues being debated in the legislature of a country like the UK or US, ongoing wars like Iraq/Afghanistan and much more. The content wouldn't necessarily be encyclopedic in the same way stuff in article space is, and we'd probably have to draft some more policy - I'd suggest that a policy might allow for portals that collect resources together about non-commercial cultural, artistic, scientific institutions or mattters of generla public importance. The idea would be to help show the diversity of content available on Wikimedia sites to people who have just found themselves interested in that particular subject by dint of recent exposure (things roughly in the same ballpark as 'going to a museum'). Portals could literally be that: a portal from some real-world thing they have just experienced into Wikimedia content.
GLAM is a potential starting point for this: the GLAM collaborations in the UK have shown some really positive ways for Wikimedians to work with existing cultural institutions. Why not bring that into Portal space too? — Tom Morris ( talk) 01:54, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
I can't speak for all the portals but here are a couple number for some US related portals.
With that said I also like portals but not necessarily the way we display them on the articles in boxes. I do think having them on the article space is good though and demoting them to talk pages only is a sure way to start them down the road to elimination from non use. I think they are an excellent way of presenting content to our readers in an organized and visually attractive way but in order to work effectively they shouldn't be standalone entities as many are. They seem to work best when they are used within a package of WikiProject and Portal with active users supporting both. Examples of this are seen in the Military history project and its portals, US Roads and its portal and most recently in WikiProject United States and its portal as well as others. -- Kumioko ( talk) 02:52, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
I've been using Wikipedia for about 6 years now and have never used portals. In the early days, if I wanted information on a topic, I'd google it. Then, when I discovered the value of WP, I simply swapped search engines. Where I once googled, I now "woogle". My point here is that I (like many others, I suspect) find it far easier to find a topic simply by searching for it; and, if I can't find it that way, I look at a related topic. In that respect, those lovely decorated navboxes are extremely useful. In my eyes, they, along with the various List of... pages supersede portals.
Having said that, though, I can understand why portals were begun, especially if we consider them in light of the enduring influence of Dewey. However, a quick glance through All portals reveals their failings. If portals are supposed to classify articles, then I can not just see several glaring omissions but also more than a few inaccuracies. For example, I would have expected the religion portal's classification structure to more resemble List of religions and spiritual traditions. And I won't even bother arguing about the grouping of atheism with astrology.
It seems to me, then, that the tasks served by portals are being fulfilled in other ways. Consider:
Therefore, I propose the following:
LordVetinari ( talk) 03:26, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
I realize that the list of portals on the main page is intended to encompass all of the broad categories of knowledge. However, as others have said above, other portals need more exposure. Could we make that section more prominent and repurpose it as a kind of "Have you seen this topic area?" section? If we want to maintain the "basic areas of knowledge" focus, on some days we could have one broad portal (e.g. Portal:Geography), and then some subportals or related portals ( Portal:Africa, Portal:Asia, etc.) This would spread the love around and ensure that weaker portals get more attention and hopefully improvement. What do people think?-- Danaman5 ( talk) 04:51, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
What about a "featured portal of the month" section? / ƒETCH COMMS / 16:04, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
I think it's really worth thinking about the German model: WikiProjects are subpages of portals. E.g. the German version of WP:WikiProject Mathematics is located at de:Portal:Mathematik/Projekt. I have been an active member of our WikiProject Mathematics for a long time, but I am not sure if I have ever visited Portal:Mathematics. I think the same holds for most other project members. With a clear structure connecting the WikiProjects and the portals, the projects would feel responsible for the portals and the portals (which could reasonably be made to get more exposure as they would be generally in better shape) would draw in new experts as new editors and project members. Hans Adler 08:39, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
Here's an idea. When users log in to Wikipedia, they are greeted by a boring white page with icons from our sister projects and a link back to the page they were previously looking at. What if users could instead choose a portal as their "homepage" that would be displayed when they log in? Each day, they would have something interesting to look at and have a listing of important "on this day" events for a topic they already care about. This could make portals a more personalized version of the Main Page. Anyone else have an idea? - Mabeenot ( talk) 17:03, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
I was wondering if a Portal for mythical animals would be helpful. Portal:Mythology is too general to make a difference in this area. Pinguinus ( talk) 21:43, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
I am making a portal on Bolivia. I am going to need some help, as this is my first portal. I would also want to know if people would want the portal. ~~ EBE123~~ talk Contribs 19:56, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
Currently, it says to put portals in the "See also" section. If there is no other article in the "See also" section then the portal sits in the section below and the "See also" section appears to be empty. This is asethetically ugly, and seems inappropriate to have it that way if the section is empty. It seems like there needs to be a better way of handling the placement when the "See also" section is empty. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 23:35, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
Is there currently any kind of logo or symbol for portals? How about File:Swirl.png, or something? Rcsprinter Gimme a message 09:57, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
The Conservatism Portal is going to change the way portals are designed. It is a dual portal and during the month of February doubles as the Ronald Reagan portal. In the spirit of the German design, the portal is integrated with WikiProject Conservatism. See the Featured portal nomination here. – Lionel ( talk) 03:18, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
I recomendd to make the "USA sports portal" that contains the most famous american sports (american football,basketball,baseball,golf,tennis and motorsports),sport leagues (NFL,MLB,NBA,NHL,NCAA football,NASCAR) and sport providers (Fox Sports etc..),plus their events,matches,players etc.. Ok,who will make this portal? -- Wikidexel ( talk) 08:51, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
Right now, Portal:Iowa gets its news from the most recent entries to Wikinews:Category:Iowa, via the Wikinews Importer Bot. Lately, Wikinews hasn't had much to say about Iowa, which means that our most recent entry is " Texas governor Rick Perry to announce his presidential intentions," which is old news to say the least. Is there any other way to automatically generate news headlines/links for Portals other than relying on Wikinews? -- Philosopher Let us reason together. 09:29, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
At Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Wicca, someone raised this discussion:
The name "portal" suggests that readers will find the page first and use it as a gateway, but I've never seen a Wikipedia portal pop up in my search engine results. They are easy enough to locate via internal links, but in general even the best of them are not a priority to the community; the number of featured portals makes that clear. Who uses these pages?
I get that in theory, the intent is for a hub to navigate similar topics, but they aren't exactly easy to get to in the first place. As the user above pointed out, they don't turn up in search engines, so they're really not the easiest thing to find unless you're a somewhat experienced editor. In short, their use as navigation is moot. And it may just be personal preference, but I've been here nearly 6 years and never used a portal once. Considering the tiny size of the portal box at the bottom of the article, I always assumed they were an afterthought that had little to no purpose.
Also, literally every week, I see another portal get sent to MFD for one reason or another. Most often, these are portals that get started and never maintained — four years later, they show exactly the same selected article, selected picture, etc. They're just sitting there gathering dust because nobody is willing to maintain them, further debilitating their purpose as a navigational aid. I did a check of the 150 or so featured portals, and the first 20 or so I checked all had the air of staleness. Few to no updates in all of 2010, much less 2011.
So that's what we have here. A purported "navigational aid" which is difficult to access, and a purported presenter of information that often gathers dust and presents the same outdated information for years on end. My conclusion is that the Portal namespace is horribly broken and needs something. I would suggest deprecating the Portal namespace unless someone has a viable alternative for reconstruction. Ten Pound Hammer • ( What did I screw up now?) 20:18, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
“ | Although Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it is not bound by the same constraints as a paper encyclopedia or even most online encyclopedias. The length, depth, and breadth of articles in Wikipedia is virtually infinite. As Wikipedia grows, so will computing power, storage capacity, and bandwidth. While there is a practical limit to all these at any given time, Wikipedia is not likely to ever outgrow them. | ” |
The primary reason why categories receive less traffic would be because the reader has found the content they wanted, end of story, the traffic to portals is very likely to be the creators and those seeking a model for their own portal, often those focused on everything but the creation of proper content. The legitimate category has, after all, probably already been created, and finding citations for a list is difficult.
The "not paper" guideline addresses the creation of article content, the creation of portals is usually a silly self reference, redundant, or a pov fork. They are vaguely defined in purpose, an arbitrary compilation, and do not use references. Lists and categories require references and/or consensus, yet these types of non-article content are problematic enough. The solution according to those who can't be bothered with researching and developing proper encyclopaedic content will be to make them more obvious, 'they are over-looked, that is why the traffic is low'. They are time-wasting rubbish that skirt the policies, guidelines and focus needed for the creation of proper content. cygnis insignis 11:34, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
If an active WikiProject or other informal group is maintaining a useful navigation portal (that's a big "if") then I would much rather see a single prominent Portal link in the "See also" section of related articles than the plethora of NavBox and similar templates that encrust so many articles like lichens. If a lot of portals are useless or unencyclopedic then take them to MfD. ~ Ningauble ( talk) 15:21, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
If not deprecation, then what should be done with the Portals? Far more of them are dead and abandoned than functional. What we have now is a horribly broken system in need of repair. How should it be fixed? Ten Pound Hammer • ( What did I screw up now?) 23:59, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
Again, fix the problems through updates, deletion, mergers and increase visibility, don't eliminate the whole system. Imzadi 1979 → 00:14, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
I think the real focus needs to be getting these things visible. If someone needs to type "portal:" into a search engine, they are not going to do so unless they are expecting Wikipedia to have portals. That's why so many portals have so many fewer page hits than their main articles do. If portals aren't easily visible to the rest of the universe than they are not serving their intended purpose, period. No matter how much work goes into them, no matter how pretty they are, if they can only easily be found through tiny links on Wikipedia, the whole concept is broken. We need to figure out how to make them the pages that turn up first, or find some other way to make them the pages that people turn to most often, and by people I mean readers, not editors.--~ T P W 11:53, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
My question: Yes, portals are severely hidden IMO. No, depreciating the namespace would probably be a net loss. However, If we have information showing that readers rarely go to the talk page or even into the "See also" section (almost always at the bottom of the articles), why is it that the portal links are almost exclusively there? It would make a lot more sense in my mind to have the portal links either next to or inside the articles infobox. This might not be the only thing done, but would surely help those portal's page views a bit. Just my two cents -- Nolelover Talk· Contribs 13:19, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
Featuring portals: Also, we have these things called Featured Portals (156 at the last count) - why can't we go about actually featuring them on the Main Page? Perhaps highlighting one in the "Welcome to Wikipedia" box right at the top, once a week, say on every Friday. That would keep us going for at least 3 years, and might actually encourage editors/Projects to work on them regularly to have a shot at getting them listed. Just a thought. Zangar ( talk) 16:02, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
I can go with that. It was my observation that the portal namespace seemed horribly broken and outdated, simply based on the dozens I'd seen, but several people have proven that yes, there are still several active and maintained portals. I'm now changing my position — I would approve nearly anything that makes the Portal namespace more prominent and accessible. As an aside, I think the "featured portal" concept also needs an overhaul. Ten Pound Hammer • ( What did I screw up now?) 20:08, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
The portal system can be entered from the top of the Main Page. Last time I checked stats.grok.se, Main Page portals get about 4 times as many visits as the total of all subportals linked from those Main Page portals. It follows that most people who click a Main Page portal look around because they don't know what it is, don't find anything they want to click, and leave – or perhaps they vandalize while they're there, since most Main Page portal edits are vandalism or reversions. It isn't people using the Main Page as an entry to portals to find their subject. So if we made that entry more prominent, I predict the main effect would be to distract readers from finding the search box, Wikipedia's much more practical form of navigation. Art LaPella ( talk) 23:51, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
I really like the idea of finding some way to include portals on the Main Page, but as recently as two months ago that was not the consensus. I have a tough time imagining portals actually being useful to readers of this site if they can't easily find them via the Main Page, and have to know enough about Wikipedia to include "Portal:" in order to find them via internal or external search methods. If we don't want them on the Main Page, then what is the point?--~ T P W 19:07, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
{{
Sister project links}}
.
fr:Modèle:Portail is the same as out {{
Portal bar}}
.
Rich
Farmbrough,
22:16, 11 December 2011 (UTC).Given the strong feelings expressed by so many editors against portals in general in the Main Page discussion, I wonder how this RfC might be more widely advertised. It stands to reason that regular participants on this page generally favor Portals, and the discussion here is unsurprisingly much more supportive of them than it was there. That says to me that this discussion is reaching a limited assortment of editors, and discussions that could impact the Main Page or an entire namespace deserve broad participation. How can we ensure that?--~ T P W 20:06, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
As this above discussion has become very long, I've started a discussion below just about increasing portal visibility on Wikipedia: Wikipedia talk: Portal - Ideas to increase portal visibility.— Northamerica1000 (talk) 04:40, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
At least in support of the Main Page Featured Portal drive, here is the collection of their introductions. In order for them to be less disruptive off-portal, I set (and sometimes added) the "TOC=yes" and "EDIT=yes" parameters. One "fix" I still found myself doing was up this section header to level 1 [now back to level 2 --
RichardF (
talk)
13:31, 8 December 2011 (UTC)] so that the TOC would indent the intros to subsections. I also smalled the font for this section to make it look more like the others. Another impact of this is any following sections here or on another page would need that type of fix to display properly. In case anyone can figure out/wants to add a section like this somewhere else, I placed the boxes in a subpage:
Wikipedia talk:Portal/Main Page portal intros -- RichardF ( talk) 16:25, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
I added
|SPAN={{{SPAN|}}}
to each of the Main Page portal box-headers, and
|SPAN=yes
to the subpage used for this section. Because the SPAN box-header parameter removes the h2 header code, that took care of the goofy TOC display issue from using a box-header on a non-portal page...finally! :-) -- RichardF ( talk) 20:07, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
The following are some ideas to increase portal visibility on Wikipedia, most of which are culled from the discussion above “Purpose of the Portal space.” As the above section became very long, the following is intended to summarize the main points specifically pertaining to increasing portal visibility on Wikipedia, and to encourage further discussion of this specific topic.— Northamerica1000 (talk) 04:35, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
Regarding my suggestion on using "universally-understood & generic diagrams", we can borrow what's being used in Wikipedia:Portal/Directory and fill in the rest. Here is what we could use:
|
|
Feel free to suggest other diagrams. OhanaUnited Talk page 06:08, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
{{
Portal}}
groups the same way as —Preceding
undated comment added tlx to keep stuff simple.
Rich
Farmbrough,
21:54, 11 December 2011 (UTC).{{
Infobox GB station}}
(which has one) and {{
Infobox London station}}
(which has two). --
Redrose64 (
talk)
16:41, 21 February 2012 (UTC)— automated, requires little maintenance, a “dual portal” integrated into Wikiproject Conservatism. "This is definitely the portal of the future. If every portal followed this design we could see newfound interest in portals." – (Summary from User:Lionelt's comment above.)
Explanation |
---|
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Some things are quite different on the German Wikipedia, and one of them is a different structure that gives more visibility to certain portals and also enables a more wholistic approach to article problems than the AfD/RM system with more editor participation. Here is an example: de:Portal:Mathematik. As you can see, the German mathematics portal has an article of the month, which is currently the Mandelbrot set. It was last update on 1 November. You can check the regularity of previous updates here. See our Portal:Mathematics for comparison. (Our version pulls the selected article from a database using some automatic mechanism.) How are the Germans able to do pull this off with a significantly lower number of native speakers, a dramatically lower number of second language speakers, and many experts who are native speakers of German preferring to edit here (like me)? I believe the answer lies in the tabs at the top of the portal: Overview, Quality Assurance, Project, Featured Articles, Good Articles. Overview is the portal in our sense. Quality Assurance is similar to our AfD/RM process, but organised by subject rather than desired outcome. It is hard for non-mathematians to gauge the notability of a mathematics topic, know which name works best, or have a useful opinion on merging. But they can see that an article has problems and submit it to the mathematics QA process. This process can result in deletion or renaming, but often also results in someone simply improving or rewriting the article. Quality Assurance also displays new articles categorised as being mathematical, AfD candidates, articles with maintenance tags etc. conveniently. (As you can see, QA is not a substitute for AfD/RM but an additional, low-drama option.) Project is the WikiProject. The last two tabs showcase the best articles on the topic. This structure creates a sense of collective ownership of a portal in the members of a WikiProject. The QA page also ensures a certain minimum level of activity in the project. Some of our WikiProjects naturally have this amount of activity, but for others it would be very helpful. |
Subject bars – Some examples below:
These are just a couple of examples. See the Template:Subject bar page for all options. Northamerica1000 (talk) 16:38, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
![]() | This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
Portal name | Status | Nominator |
---|---|---|
Portal:Biography
![]() |
![]() |
Aude |
Portal:Mathematics
![]() |
![]() |
Tompw |
Portal:Science
![]() |
![]() |
RichardF |
Portal:Arts
![]() |
![]() |
Cirt |
Portal:Geography
![]() |
![]() |
Cirt |
Portal:History
![]() |
![]() |
Resident Mario |
Portal:Society
![]() |
![]() |
Cirt |
Portal:Technology
![]() |
![]() |
Cirt and Sven Manguard |
Edit at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Main Page Featured Portal drive
Cheers, — Cirt ( talk) 08:27, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
Updated status = Portal:Arts on peer review at Wikipedia:Portal peer review/Arts/archive1. — Cirt ( talk) 07:06, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
Updated status = beginning Featured Portal drive at Portal:Society, feel free to help out, we can coordinate efforts at Portal talk:Society. Cheers, — Cirt ( talk) 23:56, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
If anyones interested Portal:United States is pretty close. Last I heard we just needed to finish updating some of the Anniversaries. -- Kumioko ( talk) 16:13, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
Update: Moved above table to subpage, at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Main Page Featured Portal drive. — Cirt ( talk) 19:35, 14 December 2011 (UTC)
Exceptional idea, I would like to participate in this. -- Extra 999 ( Contact me) 10:28, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
I have been improving the introuctory pages of portals, some you can see. What do you think, is this perfect or it needs to be changed. Can anyone help in this? -- Extra 999 ( Contact me) 10:50, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
More about...Stars: their formation, evolution, namings, structure and diversity
WikiProject Conservatism cordially invites you to celebrate Ronald Reagan Day. On February 6 The Conservatism Portal will commemorate Ronald Reagan Day with a format specially designed for the holiday. The Conservatism Portal has recently been promoted to Featured Portal. – Lionel ( talk) 03:19, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
I added that Portals should not be for maintenance categories. The basis for saying this is Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Merge. D O N D E groovily Talk to me 14:21, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
Need some advice. Wanted to ask about Portal:Current events/Sports. It's not a portal. It does not resemble a portal, or even its paretn Portal:Current events. It's just an unreferenced listing of sports statistics arguably more suitable for Wikinews than Wikipedia. What should be done with this, clearly it should be de-portalled but to where? Should it be deleted or is it salvageable? -- Falcadore ( talk) 22:08, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
Quoting that section:
That should cover only the categorization of portal categories in portals categories, such as cat
Children's literature portal in cat
Literature portals. It should not pertain outside the portals category tree. For example, the children's literature portal
Portal: Children's literature should be one of the Pages at the head of cat
Children's literature (after the main article
Children's literature).
And so it is.
But
Portal: Middle earth is not in cat
Middle-earth. --nor is its portal category there, but that's another matter.
--Neither the Children's literature nor the Middle-earth category displays its portal shortcut, but that's yet another matter.
Suggesting a maybe-straw man:
That precisely states what is intended, I believe, and it may be clear to readers who are very good with singulars and plurals.
Is this directive sound? I doubt it. Cat Literature portals is bloated, partly because of non-compliance, as we suggest in the stated rationale. However, even if we eliminated the multiple listing of cat Twilight portal and others, those portals that appear in cat Literature portals only as members of cat Speculative fiction portals would remain overlooked among Oscar Wilde and other portal categories that are not speculative fiction. Essentially thus, Portal: Horror fiction is now "impossible" to find in cat Literature portals, because [a] it is named neither as a subcategory nor a page there and [b] numerous portal categories are named as subcats there (of which only Middle-earth and Twilight are also in the spec. fic. portals cat). -- P64 ( talk) 19:01, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
The Portals project page gives the ==See also== section as the standard place for portal links. This is fine provided the specific project for the article in question allows a See also section. In the case of medical articles, their WP:MEDMOS deprecates See also sections, leaving some uncertainty as to where portal links should go. There is an unresolved discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles#Position of portal links which basically comes to the conclusion that there are no other sections where a portal link should go. I have resorted to a portal bar below the navboxes as the only logical option left that I can identify, but it would be preferable if a consensus could be reached for a general policy, and this added to the project page to save time in future. Peter (Southwood) (talk): 07:51, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
Some portal links are spam. It's just the ego of people contaminating Wikipedia. I'm glad Extra999 didn't revert my edition, but one of you might [6]; pay atention to the "offensive" edit summary. A portal about an academic discipline might be useful, and also a portal about a country, but a portal about biographies should go in Wikibooks or something like that. 200.124.54.133 ( talk) 06:24, 9 August 2012 (UTC)
Should a See also section be added to an article just for portal links? If they aren't played in the SA section, then where? Many articles don't have See also sections, and some of them that do shouldn't because the non-portal links are already in the article. If no SA would it be references? ...William 13:43, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Is Portal:Sports featured? It appears on Featured portals, but its talk page says it's still a candidate, and it's missing the star in the corner. -- Ypnypn ( talk) 14:34, 26 May 2013 (UTC)
Hi there, I am wondering if everyone could take a look at the portal and tell me what is missing and if it could be a Featured Portal? Thank you so much in advance. Miss Bono [zootalk] 18:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
Hi, OhanaUnited. The modifications for the portal are done now, can you please review it? Thank you. Miss Bono [zootalk] 13:31, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
An RfC on including featured portals on the Main Page.
Please see Wikipedia:VPR#Today.27s_featured_portal.
— Cirt ( talk) 03:06, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
Is there a policy or guideline for capitalisation of portal names, for both the page name and display of that name on the portal page? I would have thought that portal names should follow the normal rules of MOS:CAPS and WP:TITLEFORMAT, ie sentence case. However, Portal:Australian roads uses title case in its banner. I disagree, and raised the matter at Portal talk:Australian roads#Capitalisation, where it was suggested that the matter should be discussed here for wider coverage.
Note that a point that has been raised (both at Portal:Australian roads and the related WT:WikiProject Australian Roads#Capitalisation of project name) is that MOS allows for proper names to be capitalised to match the proper name. However I assert that we get to choose the names, and that the names should be consistent with MOS, ie the name of the portal follows MOS and use sentence case. Mitch Ames ( talk) 06:37, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
Given that portals are:
I suggest that from the readers' perspective a portal page serves the same purpose as an article, and so we should seriously consider having MOS explicitly apply to portals as well as articles. Mitch Ames ( talk) 09:48, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
Just to clarify, there are actually three separate but related issues to discuss:
My positions are (1) Maybe they should be, but this would involve an awful lot of pages moves for what seems to be to be relatively little benefit; if it is to be done, then it should probably be a bot task; (2) see my comment above; (3) These shouldn't be used – {{ portal}} and similar templates use the form "Foobar portal", i.e. a lowercase p, so not a proper name - Evad37 [ talk 04:05, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
Hey guys. Just a heads up that I left my views at the village pump. To summarize, in my opinion the MOS should apply to portals, but it's not immediately obvious that portal titles are proper nouns. - Well-rested Talk 07:45, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
Hi, I couldn't see where to ask help questions, so will do it here in the hope that someone will help: why is the topics section a header type thing? Also, do articles in the DYK box have to actually have been in DYK on the main page? Thanks, Mat ty. 007 19:17, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
Hi, I have asked a question here about portals. Thanks, Mat ty. 007 19:00, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
I've been working with WikiProject status updates and there are guidelines for assessing whether a WikiProject is semi-active or inactive. But I don't see any assessment tool to use with Portals. So, if a Portal has served its purpose and contains dated information, can it be marked {{historical}} or put up for deletion at MfD?
I'm not interested in debating the merits of specific Portals, this is just an inquiry into what the correct procedure would be. Thanks! Liz Read! Talk! 14:50, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
Are we allowed to put references inside portals? I don't think so, but I've seen it so I was wondering. I thought references were supposed to only be on the main article. -- Kndimov ( talk) 02:32, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
I don't know if this is the place to ask this, but what would I have to do to get a portal namespace at scowiki? -- AmaryllisGardener talk 19:45, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
On the English Wikipedia you can make a stub, a bare minimum effort, and expect that stub to survive. Why can't this happen with a portal?
Consider the result of the portals: Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Portal:Mexico_City, User_talk:WhisperToMe#Mexico_city_portal: the nominator himself regretted the result b. Such a precedent would make it impossible for the vast majority of Wikipedians to start a portal! The person who decided to redirect argued that I should have a whole, complete portal ready on my userspace before releasing it. While that may be appealing for a lot of people, I have the school of thought that I should be able to start a "stub" article with the expectation of seeing it grow rather than be shot down. Many people who contribute to Wikipedia have limited time and resources, and they'll just quit in frustration if they see their incomplete efforts wiped away. Considering how portals are more difficult and time consuming to create than articles, the same standard should apply to portals: incomplete portals should survive Miscellany for deletion. WhisperToMe ( talk) 02:15, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
Most portals do not display well on narrow screens in the two-column format, as there isn't space.
Back in 2011, Brion VIBBER ( talk · contribs) added new CSS classes to MediaWiki:Common.css and edited Template:Box portal skeleton to make use of them. Portals that use these classes switch to single-column display when viewed on the mobile site. For example, compare this from the main site with this from the mobile site.
But most of the 1000+ existing portals were created from older versions of the "skeleton" and don't use these classes. I'd like to address this; I've developed an AWB script that can do most of the work. Please see my edits to Portal:AC/DC, Portal:24, Portal:Abkhazia, Portal:1950s and Portal:1920s.
A downside is that the classes only support splits that are 50/49, 60/39 or 70/29 [the other 1% is the gap between the columns]. The old default in the "skeleton" was 55/44, so the switch to the new classes will change the appearance of the portals slightly. Nevertheless I think this is worth doing.
Comments please? Since I'd like to do most of the work from my bot account, I will need to show some support for this task before submitting it for bot approval. -- John of Reading ( talk) 10:45, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
What's the difference between a WikiProject and a Portal? -- Mr. Guye ( talk) 01:25, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
The How to add portal links to articles section tells us that the portal template should be added to the See also section of articles. What if there is no such section? I propose to add to the instructions, that in such a case the External links section should be used, or - if also non-existent - the bottom of the article, above any footer templates (if present) and categories. Your opinions, please. Debresser ( talk) 08:44, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
Greetings, At the Teahouse I asked a question about the numbers of portals for an article here. Based on a response from Cullen328 and my observations (while doing article assessments) I am proposing two new sections inserted right after section How to add portal links to articles.
This is a first draft, and I am asking for editor comments, suggestions, improvements before posting the two sections into the Portal article. Regards, JoeHebda ( talk) 13:21, 19 June 2015 (UTC)
== Appropriate portal selection ==
Since there are over 1,000 portals, it is important to select one or more that relate to the article content and would be helpful to the reader. Remember that portals are optional; not every article requires a portal. It is usually a case where fewer, well chosen portals will improve the article.
First of all, look to see if the article's infobox or any of its navigation boxes already include portals (which should not be duplicated). For details, refer to MOS/Layout#See also section which states that As a general rule, the "See also" section should not repeat links that appear in the article's body or its navigation boxes.
For example: if the article is a biography of a notable political person from centuries past from Paris, good portal choices might be: {{Portal|Biography|History|Politics|Paris}} Another article's best portal choice could be just a single one, such as: {{Portal|Energy}}
== Removal of portals ==
Portals that were added as spam or vandalism should be removed immediately, noting the reason on the Edit Summary. The number of portals for an article is determined by consensus among interested editors. If the portal is a duplicate (as described above) or is not relevant to the article's content, it should be removed. Boldness might suggest deletion of a portal without discussion, but on a highly viewed article, early discussion towards consensus is always advisable.
Portal:East Frisia, a portal which is relevant to this topic, has been nominated for
deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:East Frisia. Editors are free to edit the content of
Portal:East Frisia during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. --
Bermicourt (
talk)
18:23, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Although I've had an account with Wikipedia for many years, I hadn't taken an interest in being an active participant until recently. I am currently struggling to understand some of the excentricities to Wikipedia, and some of the terms it uses are less clear than I would like. Can someone please confirm that the examples I give below, between a Portal and a Project are accurate? The Portal page currently reads: "Portals are pages intended to serve as "Main Pages" for specific topics or areas. A portal may be associated with one or more WikiProjects; unlike a WikiProject, however, it is meant for both readers and editors of Wikipedia, and should promote content and encourage contribution. Portals are created for encyclopedic topics only and not for article maintenance categories." Although that explanation assists with my understanding, I do not feel competent in spotting the differences beyond a shadow of a doubt. If I am to use that definition accurately, the takeaway from it is:
Do I have that right? There are a ton of articles on Wikipedia that go into detail about specifics of very minor things... cough...but I usually only get about a third of the way through skimming it before realizing I'm either not paying attention to the information I'm reading, or am simply too dim to understand it. A confirmation that I am understanding the general spirit of what Portals and Projects represent is more important to me then pouring over the details of the article itself. Granted, this article is relatively short and well written, but I believe that sometimes the shorter specification guidelines can be trickier to truly understand, due to the lack of examples provided in them. If there's a commonly sourced essay that better explains what it is I'm asking about, but wasn't able to find via Google, please provide the link. If no essay exists, I'd be happy to cook something up to fill the void, assuming I understand the differences sufficiently. Sawta ( talk) 21:24, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
![]() | This page 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. |
As part of some work I've been doing to clean up the Portal namespace, I've generated a nifty sortable list of all portals (including broken, incomplete, and redirected portals) at User:Zetawoof/PortalList. Zetawoof( ζ) 04:53, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
Hello all, I was working on the food and drink related portals and have come across or created several templates that are all used in creating portal pages. The thing is that while they are all related, they were never linked. So what I have done is link them all together under their "See also" sections. I have also improved the documentation a little because most info on usage was sparse at best.
These are them:
Main portal creation templates:
These templates are used to create the articles on the sub-pages:
-- Jeremy ( Blah blah...) 00:35, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
Done. I also made a simple list template to put on the see also pages so we will not have to change the see also section on dozens of pages every time another is added. {{ Portal template list}} -- Jeremy ( Blah blah...) 20:24, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
For anyone who is interested, Derek Andrews has created Template:No selected item which can be used as a warning for selecting items such as selected article and selected picture not being displayed the next month. Simply south is this a buffet? 21:55, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
I have found something a bit confusing regarding the placement of portals. In most cases the portal should go under the See also section however someone recently pointed out to me that the Biography portal says to put it above the categories so they placed said portal between the defaultsort and the categories. I think this is probably wrong but according to the letter of the law that is where its supposed to go. Could I get some clarification on this? -- Kumioko ( talk) 19:18, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
Biography Portal placement
1) Per the biography instructions at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Biography#Templates
Biography Portal - Add this to the bottom of a page, right before the categories listing, to show a standardized link to the Biography portal.
General portal placement
2) Per the Wikipedia Layout instructions under the See also section at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ALSO#.22See_also.22_section
"See also" is the best place to link a Portal with the {portal} template.
3) Per the Template:Portal instructions at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Portal
Location - Within articles, this template is meant to be placed at the bottom of the article in the "See also" section.
Which portal instructions do we follow? Jrcrin001 ( talk) 15:44, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
Could anybody help with adding the date parameter to the Template:Energy portal news? Beagel ( talk) 15:40, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
I'm curious what thoughts are on this. IMO, a well-developed portal, even if not being actively updated, still provides a useful launching pad for interested parties to find related articles. Such portals seem to generate a modest amount of hits per month and there is no need to delete or redirect them to the WikiProjects as has been proposed in several MFDs currently open and was carried out in a recently closed MFD. – xeno talk 14:34, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
Can someone who is experienced with handling new portals take a gander at Portal:Dragon Ball? Firstly, I'm not sure how to format it correctly, that and those red links need fixing. I guess I'm too tired now to resume, but I'd greated appreciate if anyone can help me. Lord Sesshomaru — Preceding undated comment added 04:06, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
I recently tried to add a portal in the edit box, but did not know the formatting code. I've looked at different Wiki user-editor articles, but can't seem to find anything on how to add a portal. Perhaps I haven't found the right article. If anyone has the time to help me, it would be appreciated.
Also, may I suggest adding a section to this page, re how to add a portal in the edit box. For example: "Go to the directory of portals. Pick the portal you want. Then go to the page to which you wish to add that portal. In the edit box, type the following: 'two open braces, the name of the portal, the word portal, two close braces.' " -- or whatever the exact formatting code should be. This would be a great help to new editors like me. Thank you all for all you do for Wikipedia and new editors. Eagle4000 ( talk) 16:00, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Most portals seem to be named after proper nouns or noun phrases, but those that aren't are completely inconsistent in capitalization. Viz.—
I propose, as with all Wikipedia articles (see WP:CAPS), that portals should always use lowercase after the first word, and not capitalize second and subsequent words, unless the title is a proper noun. — the Man in Question (in question) 05:08, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
Please comment Several weeks ago, while editing Taoism, I noticed {{ Taoism portal}}, which seemed redundant of {{ Portal}}, so I nominated it for deletion on those grounds and it was deleted per consensus. I happened across a similar template—{{ EnergyPortal}}—and nominated it for deletion as well. At this time, I discovered that there are 200 such templates all seemingly serving the same function as {{ Portal}} (except lacking several of its features, such as the requirement for alt text.) Is there some reason for hundreds of templates that apparently do the same thing as {{ Portal}}? Why do these exist? — Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 00:22, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
{{
Film portal}}
. Of those three options, the third seems to be by far the best to me. Coincidentally, I
proposed recently that {{
portal}}
should be changed, so that each portal could have its default image, and all the
Portal navflags would become useless.
Svick (
talk)
00:49, 18 March 2010 (UTC)I am in a desperate need of an auto-confirmed user to improve Portal:Star. -- Extra999 ( Contact me) 04:36, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps this is not the best place for these question but I will pose them here anyway. I will also link this to a couple other locations for additional input. I have had some issues with portals for some time know and this seems as good a time as any to begin addressing them. I personally think that the way we deal with portals in WP is a bit clunky and needs to be rethought/restructured.
Since they're all over the map, I'm attempting to standardize the subcategories of Category:Portals to lowercase-p "portals." About 20% of the categories are uppercase-p, and the rest are lowercase. Feel free to comment on Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2010_October_8#Uppercase_Portals if you have thoughts.-- Mike Selinker ( talk) 04:55, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
Portals boxes have become part of the internal marketing infrastructure for projects impacting non-user space, along with project banners and edit summaries. The latter two are less of a problem, because they don't appear on articles - but portal boxes are being pushed too hard, IMHO. A link to the US Marines portal, for example, is fine on the page of a unit within the marines, a commander or notable marine, a key raining facility or battle, maybe. But not on the page of everyone who was a marine. Similarly US Army portal doesn't belong on every US Civil War page. Anyone up to starting some guidelines?
Rich
Farmbrough,
14:37, 19 October 2010 (UTC).
There is something wrong with the layout of the Portal:Energy header. Also, text of all sections is centrefied instead of alignment to left. I appreciate if some more experienced editor in this field could fix it. Thank you. Beagel ( talk) 11:15, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
I disagree with placing portals in the See also area. They should accompany the text that highlights what the portal is all about. For example, in an article about France, an "agriculture" portal should be placed in the section dealing with French agriculture. Yours, GeorgeLouis ( talk) 07:01, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
That is a real bummer. GeorgeLouis ( talk) 13:29, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Well, I don't. I think it is silly. GeorgeLouis ( talk) 03:08, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
This is only loosely related to the above discussion, so it's under a separate header.
The main portals are only one click away from the main page, but they are not protected by any anti-vandalism bot and don't have enough watchers. Just this morning, I see that this offensive blanking lasted for 50 minutes, and this swearword lasted seven hours. I get the impression that I may be the only editor who systematically reviews the recent changes in this namespace - my apologies, of course, to anyone I've overlooked.
Compare this with the articles linked from the main page, watched over by ClueBot NG. Today's featured article has 45 watchers; so far it's been vandalised once, and that lasted 3 minutes.
I raised this at User_talk:ClueBot_Commons/Archives/2011/February#Portal_namespace, and was told that I'd be welcome to get the old Cluebot's pattern-matching code running in the Portal namespace. That's well outside my skill set!
But if portals are to be an effective "main page" for their topic areas, we need to take more care of them. -- John of Reading ( talk) 08:32, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
Portal:Cartoon Network is up for deletion at WP:MFD. Please comment here for any concerns. Thank you for time, regards. JJ98 ( Talk) 02:22, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
Nothing is more annoying than finding the link to the biography portal in every biography. It is just internal spam, no better than a Viagra spam message. However a link to the Nigerian Oil Minister's portal would be very helpful, I have lost touch with him after he cashed my check for $1,500 and I want to make sure he is ok. -- Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) ( talk) 06:16, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
Personally, I feel that there may be a "portal problem" driven by a feedback loop; portals get fewer viewers, so they get less attention from potential editors, which affects quality and extent (though I have every respect for those people who do lots of good work on portals; there just aren't as many of them), which could discourage wider linking to portals, which means they get fewer viewers...
I'm not sure that it's possible to break out of that feedback loop. Also, the wikipedia ecosystem has evolved over time, but for the last couple of years it's been a lot more complex (for lay readers) than an encyclopædia (or any website that the average person visits at lunchtime) and I feel that portals are one of several evolutionary lines which simply didn't thrive, whether due to external or internal factors. A bit like a
coelacanth. Other species - categories, wikiprojects, navboxes, taskforces, see-alsos &c - have outcompeted portals for various ecological niches, even though none of those species exactly recreates what portals do.
bobrayner (
talk)
16:28, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
Should the portal system be changed? If so, how? Guoguo12 --Talk-- 19:26, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
About a month ago, a user at the Idea Lab started a section entitled " Portals: is there any point?", in which he asked a question I believe the Wikipedia community should consider: "Do portals need to be rethought?" According to WP:Portal, portals serve as navigation aids, while also aiming to "promote content and encourage contribution". However, as Mr.Z-man observed in his reply (and I don't mean to put him on the spot), portals may not be fulfilling their job:
"I think portals are essentially a failed concept. At best, it was a good idea poorly executed. They require significant amounts of time to set up and they're very lightly used. They don't serve as an effective entry point since, except for the handful linked directly from the main page, you have to go to an article first to get a link to the portal and often the link is at the end of the article. Editing portals is much more difficult than articles. The portal pages themselves are typically giant messes of HTML, wikitables, and parser functions. With many it's not at all clear how to go about adding new content to the selected article/image features."
The purpose of this RfC is to gauge Wikipedians' opinions on portals. Should the portal system be changed? If so, how? Guoguo12 --Talk-- 19:26, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
One thing I've been raising is the potential for using portals as a way of exploring content on Wikimedia projects in a way that doesn't necessarily fit into the structure of existing categories/templates/navboxes. See here and here. Being able to explore all the articles related to things like museums, radio programmes, events and so on may actually be an interesting place that portals could go in the future. With the British Museum example, imagine after someone gets home from the British Museum and they go onto the BM portal on WP and can explore hundreds of articles across a huge variety of subject areas, and also be able to read up on news, original sources, pictures/media, books and learning materials from all the other Wikimedia projects that cover the subjects covered by the exhibitions in the museum. It could cover all sorts of things: exhibitions at museums, issues being debated in the legislature of a country like the UK or US, ongoing wars like Iraq/Afghanistan and much more. The content wouldn't necessarily be encyclopedic in the same way stuff in article space is, and we'd probably have to draft some more policy - I'd suggest that a policy might allow for portals that collect resources together about non-commercial cultural, artistic, scientific institutions or mattters of generla public importance. The idea would be to help show the diversity of content available on Wikimedia sites to people who have just found themselves interested in that particular subject by dint of recent exposure (things roughly in the same ballpark as 'going to a museum'). Portals could literally be that: a portal from some real-world thing they have just experienced into Wikimedia content.
GLAM is a potential starting point for this: the GLAM collaborations in the UK have shown some really positive ways for Wikimedians to work with existing cultural institutions. Why not bring that into Portal space too? — Tom Morris ( talk) 01:54, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
I can't speak for all the portals but here are a couple number for some US related portals.
With that said I also like portals but not necessarily the way we display them on the articles in boxes. I do think having them on the article space is good though and demoting them to talk pages only is a sure way to start them down the road to elimination from non use. I think they are an excellent way of presenting content to our readers in an organized and visually attractive way but in order to work effectively they shouldn't be standalone entities as many are. They seem to work best when they are used within a package of WikiProject and Portal with active users supporting both. Examples of this are seen in the Military history project and its portals, US Roads and its portal and most recently in WikiProject United States and its portal as well as others. -- Kumioko ( talk) 02:52, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
I've been using Wikipedia for about 6 years now and have never used portals. In the early days, if I wanted information on a topic, I'd google it. Then, when I discovered the value of WP, I simply swapped search engines. Where I once googled, I now "woogle". My point here is that I (like many others, I suspect) find it far easier to find a topic simply by searching for it; and, if I can't find it that way, I look at a related topic. In that respect, those lovely decorated navboxes are extremely useful. In my eyes, they, along with the various List of... pages supersede portals.
Having said that, though, I can understand why portals were begun, especially if we consider them in light of the enduring influence of Dewey. However, a quick glance through All portals reveals their failings. If portals are supposed to classify articles, then I can not just see several glaring omissions but also more than a few inaccuracies. For example, I would have expected the religion portal's classification structure to more resemble List of religions and spiritual traditions. And I won't even bother arguing about the grouping of atheism with astrology.
It seems to me, then, that the tasks served by portals are being fulfilled in other ways. Consider:
Therefore, I propose the following:
LordVetinari ( talk) 03:26, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
I realize that the list of portals on the main page is intended to encompass all of the broad categories of knowledge. However, as others have said above, other portals need more exposure. Could we make that section more prominent and repurpose it as a kind of "Have you seen this topic area?" section? If we want to maintain the "basic areas of knowledge" focus, on some days we could have one broad portal (e.g. Portal:Geography), and then some subportals or related portals ( Portal:Africa, Portal:Asia, etc.) This would spread the love around and ensure that weaker portals get more attention and hopefully improvement. What do people think?-- Danaman5 ( talk) 04:51, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
What about a "featured portal of the month" section? / ƒETCH COMMS / 16:04, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
I think it's really worth thinking about the German model: WikiProjects are subpages of portals. E.g. the German version of WP:WikiProject Mathematics is located at de:Portal:Mathematik/Projekt. I have been an active member of our WikiProject Mathematics for a long time, but I am not sure if I have ever visited Portal:Mathematics. I think the same holds for most other project members. With a clear structure connecting the WikiProjects and the portals, the projects would feel responsible for the portals and the portals (which could reasonably be made to get more exposure as they would be generally in better shape) would draw in new experts as new editors and project members. Hans Adler 08:39, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
Here's an idea. When users log in to Wikipedia, they are greeted by a boring white page with icons from our sister projects and a link back to the page they were previously looking at. What if users could instead choose a portal as their "homepage" that would be displayed when they log in? Each day, they would have something interesting to look at and have a listing of important "on this day" events for a topic they already care about. This could make portals a more personalized version of the Main Page. Anyone else have an idea? - Mabeenot ( talk) 17:03, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
I was wondering if a Portal for mythical animals would be helpful. Portal:Mythology is too general to make a difference in this area. Pinguinus ( talk) 21:43, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
I am making a portal on Bolivia. I am going to need some help, as this is my first portal. I would also want to know if people would want the portal. ~~ EBE123~~ talk Contribs 19:56, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
Currently, it says to put portals in the "See also" section. If there is no other article in the "See also" section then the portal sits in the section below and the "See also" section appears to be empty. This is asethetically ugly, and seems inappropriate to have it that way if the section is empty. It seems like there needs to be a better way of handling the placement when the "See also" section is empty. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 23:35, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
Is there currently any kind of logo or symbol for portals? How about File:Swirl.png, or something? Rcsprinter Gimme a message 09:57, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
The Conservatism Portal is going to change the way portals are designed. It is a dual portal and during the month of February doubles as the Ronald Reagan portal. In the spirit of the German design, the portal is integrated with WikiProject Conservatism. See the Featured portal nomination here. – Lionel ( talk) 03:18, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
I recomendd to make the "USA sports portal" that contains the most famous american sports (american football,basketball,baseball,golf,tennis and motorsports),sport leagues (NFL,MLB,NBA,NHL,NCAA football,NASCAR) and sport providers (Fox Sports etc..),plus their events,matches,players etc.. Ok,who will make this portal? -- Wikidexel ( talk) 08:51, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
Right now, Portal:Iowa gets its news from the most recent entries to Wikinews:Category:Iowa, via the Wikinews Importer Bot. Lately, Wikinews hasn't had much to say about Iowa, which means that our most recent entry is " Texas governor Rick Perry to announce his presidential intentions," which is old news to say the least. Is there any other way to automatically generate news headlines/links for Portals other than relying on Wikinews? -- Philosopher Let us reason together. 09:29, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
At Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Wicca, someone raised this discussion:
The name "portal" suggests that readers will find the page first and use it as a gateway, but I've never seen a Wikipedia portal pop up in my search engine results. They are easy enough to locate via internal links, but in general even the best of them are not a priority to the community; the number of featured portals makes that clear. Who uses these pages?
I get that in theory, the intent is for a hub to navigate similar topics, but they aren't exactly easy to get to in the first place. As the user above pointed out, they don't turn up in search engines, so they're really not the easiest thing to find unless you're a somewhat experienced editor. In short, their use as navigation is moot. And it may just be personal preference, but I've been here nearly 6 years and never used a portal once. Considering the tiny size of the portal box at the bottom of the article, I always assumed they were an afterthought that had little to no purpose.
Also, literally every week, I see another portal get sent to MFD for one reason or another. Most often, these are portals that get started and never maintained — four years later, they show exactly the same selected article, selected picture, etc. They're just sitting there gathering dust because nobody is willing to maintain them, further debilitating their purpose as a navigational aid. I did a check of the 150 or so featured portals, and the first 20 or so I checked all had the air of staleness. Few to no updates in all of 2010, much less 2011.
So that's what we have here. A purported "navigational aid" which is difficult to access, and a purported presenter of information that often gathers dust and presents the same outdated information for years on end. My conclusion is that the Portal namespace is horribly broken and needs something. I would suggest deprecating the Portal namespace unless someone has a viable alternative for reconstruction. Ten Pound Hammer • ( What did I screw up now?) 20:18, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
“ | Although Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it is not bound by the same constraints as a paper encyclopedia or even most online encyclopedias. The length, depth, and breadth of articles in Wikipedia is virtually infinite. As Wikipedia grows, so will computing power, storage capacity, and bandwidth. While there is a practical limit to all these at any given time, Wikipedia is not likely to ever outgrow them. | ” |
The primary reason why categories receive less traffic would be because the reader has found the content they wanted, end of story, the traffic to portals is very likely to be the creators and those seeking a model for their own portal, often those focused on everything but the creation of proper content. The legitimate category has, after all, probably already been created, and finding citations for a list is difficult.
The "not paper" guideline addresses the creation of article content, the creation of portals is usually a silly self reference, redundant, or a pov fork. They are vaguely defined in purpose, an arbitrary compilation, and do not use references. Lists and categories require references and/or consensus, yet these types of non-article content are problematic enough. The solution according to those who can't be bothered with researching and developing proper encyclopaedic content will be to make them more obvious, 'they are over-looked, that is why the traffic is low'. They are time-wasting rubbish that skirt the policies, guidelines and focus needed for the creation of proper content. cygnis insignis 11:34, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
If an active WikiProject or other informal group is maintaining a useful navigation portal (that's a big "if") then I would much rather see a single prominent Portal link in the "See also" section of related articles than the plethora of NavBox and similar templates that encrust so many articles like lichens. If a lot of portals are useless or unencyclopedic then take them to MfD. ~ Ningauble ( talk) 15:21, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
If not deprecation, then what should be done with the Portals? Far more of them are dead and abandoned than functional. What we have now is a horribly broken system in need of repair. How should it be fixed? Ten Pound Hammer • ( What did I screw up now?) 23:59, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
Again, fix the problems through updates, deletion, mergers and increase visibility, don't eliminate the whole system. Imzadi 1979 → 00:14, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
I think the real focus needs to be getting these things visible. If someone needs to type "portal:" into a search engine, they are not going to do so unless they are expecting Wikipedia to have portals. That's why so many portals have so many fewer page hits than their main articles do. If portals aren't easily visible to the rest of the universe than they are not serving their intended purpose, period. No matter how much work goes into them, no matter how pretty they are, if they can only easily be found through tiny links on Wikipedia, the whole concept is broken. We need to figure out how to make them the pages that turn up first, or find some other way to make them the pages that people turn to most often, and by people I mean readers, not editors.--~ T P W 11:53, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
My question: Yes, portals are severely hidden IMO. No, depreciating the namespace would probably be a net loss. However, If we have information showing that readers rarely go to the talk page or even into the "See also" section (almost always at the bottom of the articles), why is it that the portal links are almost exclusively there? It would make a lot more sense in my mind to have the portal links either next to or inside the articles infobox. This might not be the only thing done, but would surely help those portal's page views a bit. Just my two cents -- Nolelover Talk· Contribs 13:19, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
Featuring portals: Also, we have these things called Featured Portals (156 at the last count) - why can't we go about actually featuring them on the Main Page? Perhaps highlighting one in the "Welcome to Wikipedia" box right at the top, once a week, say on every Friday. That would keep us going for at least 3 years, and might actually encourage editors/Projects to work on them regularly to have a shot at getting them listed. Just a thought. Zangar ( talk) 16:02, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
I can go with that. It was my observation that the portal namespace seemed horribly broken and outdated, simply based on the dozens I'd seen, but several people have proven that yes, there are still several active and maintained portals. I'm now changing my position — I would approve nearly anything that makes the Portal namespace more prominent and accessible. As an aside, I think the "featured portal" concept also needs an overhaul. Ten Pound Hammer • ( What did I screw up now?) 20:08, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
The portal system can be entered from the top of the Main Page. Last time I checked stats.grok.se, Main Page portals get about 4 times as many visits as the total of all subportals linked from those Main Page portals. It follows that most people who click a Main Page portal look around because they don't know what it is, don't find anything they want to click, and leave – or perhaps they vandalize while they're there, since most Main Page portal edits are vandalism or reversions. It isn't people using the Main Page as an entry to portals to find their subject. So if we made that entry more prominent, I predict the main effect would be to distract readers from finding the search box, Wikipedia's much more practical form of navigation. Art LaPella ( talk) 23:51, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
I really like the idea of finding some way to include portals on the Main Page, but as recently as two months ago that was not the consensus. I have a tough time imagining portals actually being useful to readers of this site if they can't easily find them via the Main Page, and have to know enough about Wikipedia to include "Portal:" in order to find them via internal or external search methods. If we don't want them on the Main Page, then what is the point?--~ T P W 19:07, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
{{
Sister project links}}
.
fr:Modèle:Portail is the same as out {{
Portal bar}}
.
Rich
Farmbrough,
22:16, 11 December 2011 (UTC).Given the strong feelings expressed by so many editors against portals in general in the Main Page discussion, I wonder how this RfC might be more widely advertised. It stands to reason that regular participants on this page generally favor Portals, and the discussion here is unsurprisingly much more supportive of them than it was there. That says to me that this discussion is reaching a limited assortment of editors, and discussions that could impact the Main Page or an entire namespace deserve broad participation. How can we ensure that?--~ T P W 20:06, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
As this above discussion has become very long, I've started a discussion below just about increasing portal visibility on Wikipedia: Wikipedia talk: Portal - Ideas to increase portal visibility.— Northamerica1000 (talk) 04:40, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
At least in support of the Main Page Featured Portal drive, here is the collection of their introductions. In order for them to be less disruptive off-portal, I set (and sometimes added) the "TOC=yes" and "EDIT=yes" parameters. One "fix" I still found myself doing was up this section header to level 1 [now back to level 2 --
RichardF (
talk)
13:31, 8 December 2011 (UTC)] so that the TOC would indent the intros to subsections. I also smalled the font for this section to make it look more like the others. Another impact of this is any following sections here or on another page would need that type of fix to display properly. In case anyone can figure out/wants to add a section like this somewhere else, I placed the boxes in a subpage:
Wikipedia talk:Portal/Main Page portal intros -- RichardF ( talk) 16:25, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
I added
|SPAN={{{SPAN|}}}
to each of the Main Page portal box-headers, and
|SPAN=yes
to the subpage used for this section. Because the SPAN box-header parameter removes the h2 header code, that took care of the goofy TOC display issue from using a box-header on a non-portal page...finally! :-) -- RichardF ( talk) 20:07, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
The following are some ideas to increase portal visibility on Wikipedia, most of which are culled from the discussion above “Purpose of the Portal space.” As the above section became very long, the following is intended to summarize the main points specifically pertaining to increasing portal visibility on Wikipedia, and to encourage further discussion of this specific topic.— Northamerica1000 (talk) 04:35, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
Regarding my suggestion on using "universally-understood & generic diagrams", we can borrow what's being used in Wikipedia:Portal/Directory and fill in the rest. Here is what we could use:
|
|
Feel free to suggest other diagrams. OhanaUnited Talk page 06:08, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
{{
Portal}}
groups the same way as —Preceding
undated comment added tlx to keep stuff simple.
Rich
Farmbrough,
21:54, 11 December 2011 (UTC).{{
Infobox GB station}}
(which has one) and {{
Infobox London station}}
(which has two). --
Redrose64 (
talk)
16:41, 21 February 2012 (UTC)— automated, requires little maintenance, a “dual portal” integrated into Wikiproject Conservatism. "This is definitely the portal of the future. If every portal followed this design we could see newfound interest in portals." – (Summary from User:Lionelt's comment above.)
Explanation |
---|
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Some things are quite different on the German Wikipedia, and one of them is a different structure that gives more visibility to certain portals and also enables a more wholistic approach to article problems than the AfD/RM system with more editor participation. Here is an example: de:Portal:Mathematik. As you can see, the German mathematics portal has an article of the month, which is currently the Mandelbrot set. It was last update on 1 November. You can check the regularity of previous updates here. See our Portal:Mathematics for comparison. (Our version pulls the selected article from a database using some automatic mechanism.) How are the Germans able to do pull this off with a significantly lower number of native speakers, a dramatically lower number of second language speakers, and many experts who are native speakers of German preferring to edit here (like me)? I believe the answer lies in the tabs at the top of the portal: Overview, Quality Assurance, Project, Featured Articles, Good Articles. Overview is the portal in our sense. Quality Assurance is similar to our AfD/RM process, but organised by subject rather than desired outcome. It is hard for non-mathematians to gauge the notability of a mathematics topic, know which name works best, or have a useful opinion on merging. But they can see that an article has problems and submit it to the mathematics QA process. This process can result in deletion or renaming, but often also results in someone simply improving or rewriting the article. Quality Assurance also displays new articles categorised as being mathematical, AfD candidates, articles with maintenance tags etc. conveniently. (As you can see, QA is not a substitute for AfD/RM but an additional, low-drama option.) Project is the WikiProject. The last two tabs showcase the best articles on the topic. This structure creates a sense of collective ownership of a portal in the members of a WikiProject. The QA page also ensures a certain minimum level of activity in the project. Some of our WikiProjects naturally have this amount of activity, but for others it would be very helpful. |
Subject bars – Some examples below:
These are just a couple of examples. See the Template:Subject bar page for all options. Northamerica1000 (talk) 16:38, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
![]() | This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
Portal name | Status | Nominator |
---|---|---|
Portal:Biography
![]() |
![]() |
Aude |
Portal:Mathematics
![]() |
![]() |
Tompw |
Portal:Science
![]() |
![]() |
RichardF |
Portal:Arts
![]() |
![]() |
Cirt |
Portal:Geography
![]() |
![]() |
Cirt |
Portal:History
![]() |
![]() |
Resident Mario |
Portal:Society
![]() |
![]() |
Cirt |
Portal:Technology
![]() |
![]() |
Cirt and Sven Manguard |
Edit at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Main Page Featured Portal drive
Cheers, — Cirt ( talk) 08:27, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
Updated status = Portal:Arts on peer review at Wikipedia:Portal peer review/Arts/archive1. — Cirt ( talk) 07:06, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
Updated status = beginning Featured Portal drive at Portal:Society, feel free to help out, we can coordinate efforts at Portal talk:Society. Cheers, — Cirt ( talk) 23:56, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
If anyones interested Portal:United States is pretty close. Last I heard we just needed to finish updating some of the Anniversaries. -- Kumioko ( talk) 16:13, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
Update: Moved above table to subpage, at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Main Page Featured Portal drive. — Cirt ( talk) 19:35, 14 December 2011 (UTC)
Exceptional idea, I would like to participate in this. -- Extra 999 ( Contact me) 10:28, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
I have been improving the introuctory pages of portals, some you can see. What do you think, is this perfect or it needs to be changed. Can anyone help in this? -- Extra 999 ( Contact me) 10:50, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
More about...Stars: their formation, evolution, namings, structure and diversity
WikiProject Conservatism cordially invites you to celebrate Ronald Reagan Day. On February 6 The Conservatism Portal will commemorate Ronald Reagan Day with a format specially designed for the holiday. The Conservatism Portal has recently been promoted to Featured Portal. – Lionel ( talk) 03:19, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
I added that Portals should not be for maintenance categories. The basis for saying this is Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Merge. D O N D E groovily Talk to me 14:21, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
Need some advice. Wanted to ask about Portal:Current events/Sports. It's not a portal. It does not resemble a portal, or even its paretn Portal:Current events. It's just an unreferenced listing of sports statistics arguably more suitable for Wikinews than Wikipedia. What should be done with this, clearly it should be de-portalled but to where? Should it be deleted or is it salvageable? -- Falcadore ( talk) 22:08, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
Quoting that section:
That should cover only the categorization of portal categories in portals categories, such as cat
Children's literature portal in cat
Literature portals. It should not pertain outside the portals category tree. For example, the children's literature portal
Portal: Children's literature should be one of the Pages at the head of cat
Children's literature (after the main article
Children's literature).
And so it is.
But
Portal: Middle earth is not in cat
Middle-earth. --nor is its portal category there, but that's another matter.
--Neither the Children's literature nor the Middle-earth category displays its portal shortcut, but that's yet another matter.
Suggesting a maybe-straw man:
That precisely states what is intended, I believe, and it may be clear to readers who are very good with singulars and plurals.
Is this directive sound? I doubt it. Cat Literature portals is bloated, partly because of non-compliance, as we suggest in the stated rationale. However, even if we eliminated the multiple listing of cat Twilight portal and others, those portals that appear in cat Literature portals only as members of cat Speculative fiction portals would remain overlooked among Oscar Wilde and other portal categories that are not speculative fiction. Essentially thus, Portal: Horror fiction is now "impossible" to find in cat Literature portals, because [a] it is named neither as a subcategory nor a page there and [b] numerous portal categories are named as subcats there (of which only Middle-earth and Twilight are also in the spec. fic. portals cat). -- P64 ( talk) 19:01, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
The Portals project page gives the ==See also== section as the standard place for portal links. This is fine provided the specific project for the article in question allows a See also section. In the case of medical articles, their WP:MEDMOS deprecates See also sections, leaving some uncertainty as to where portal links should go. There is an unresolved discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles#Position of portal links which basically comes to the conclusion that there are no other sections where a portal link should go. I have resorted to a portal bar below the navboxes as the only logical option left that I can identify, but it would be preferable if a consensus could be reached for a general policy, and this added to the project page to save time in future. Peter (Southwood) (talk): 07:51, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
Some portal links are spam. It's just the ego of people contaminating Wikipedia. I'm glad Extra999 didn't revert my edition, but one of you might [6]; pay atention to the "offensive" edit summary. A portal about an academic discipline might be useful, and also a portal about a country, but a portal about biographies should go in Wikibooks or something like that. 200.124.54.133 ( talk) 06:24, 9 August 2012 (UTC)
Should a See also section be added to an article just for portal links? If they aren't played in the SA section, then where? Many articles don't have See also sections, and some of them that do shouldn't because the non-portal links are already in the article. If no SA would it be references? ...William 13:43, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Is Portal:Sports featured? It appears on Featured portals, but its talk page says it's still a candidate, and it's missing the star in the corner. -- Ypnypn ( talk) 14:34, 26 May 2013 (UTC)
Hi there, I am wondering if everyone could take a look at the portal and tell me what is missing and if it could be a Featured Portal? Thank you so much in advance. Miss Bono [zootalk] 18:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
Hi, OhanaUnited. The modifications for the portal are done now, can you please review it? Thank you. Miss Bono [zootalk] 13:31, 13 September 2013 (UTC)
An RfC on including featured portals on the Main Page.
Please see Wikipedia:VPR#Today.27s_featured_portal.
— Cirt ( talk) 03:06, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
Is there a policy or guideline for capitalisation of portal names, for both the page name and display of that name on the portal page? I would have thought that portal names should follow the normal rules of MOS:CAPS and WP:TITLEFORMAT, ie sentence case. However, Portal:Australian roads uses title case in its banner. I disagree, and raised the matter at Portal talk:Australian roads#Capitalisation, where it was suggested that the matter should be discussed here for wider coverage.
Note that a point that has been raised (both at Portal:Australian roads and the related WT:WikiProject Australian Roads#Capitalisation of project name) is that MOS allows for proper names to be capitalised to match the proper name. However I assert that we get to choose the names, and that the names should be consistent with MOS, ie the name of the portal follows MOS and use sentence case. Mitch Ames ( talk) 06:37, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
Given that portals are:
I suggest that from the readers' perspective a portal page serves the same purpose as an article, and so we should seriously consider having MOS explicitly apply to portals as well as articles. Mitch Ames ( talk) 09:48, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
Just to clarify, there are actually three separate but related issues to discuss:
My positions are (1) Maybe they should be, but this would involve an awful lot of pages moves for what seems to be to be relatively little benefit; if it is to be done, then it should probably be a bot task; (2) see my comment above; (3) These shouldn't be used – {{ portal}} and similar templates use the form "Foobar portal", i.e. a lowercase p, so not a proper name - Evad37 [ talk 04:05, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
Hey guys. Just a heads up that I left my views at the village pump. To summarize, in my opinion the MOS should apply to portals, but it's not immediately obvious that portal titles are proper nouns. - Well-rested Talk 07:45, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
Hi, I couldn't see where to ask help questions, so will do it here in the hope that someone will help: why is the topics section a header type thing? Also, do articles in the DYK box have to actually have been in DYK on the main page? Thanks, Mat ty. 007 19:17, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
Hi, I have asked a question here about portals. Thanks, Mat ty. 007 19:00, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
I've been working with WikiProject status updates and there are guidelines for assessing whether a WikiProject is semi-active or inactive. But I don't see any assessment tool to use with Portals. So, if a Portal has served its purpose and contains dated information, can it be marked {{historical}} or put up for deletion at MfD?
I'm not interested in debating the merits of specific Portals, this is just an inquiry into what the correct procedure would be. Thanks! Liz Read! Talk! 14:50, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
Are we allowed to put references inside portals? I don't think so, but I've seen it so I was wondering. I thought references were supposed to only be on the main article. -- Kndimov ( talk) 02:32, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
I don't know if this is the place to ask this, but what would I have to do to get a portal namespace at scowiki? -- AmaryllisGardener talk 19:45, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
On the English Wikipedia you can make a stub, a bare minimum effort, and expect that stub to survive. Why can't this happen with a portal?
Consider the result of the portals: Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Portal:Mexico_City, User_talk:WhisperToMe#Mexico_city_portal: the nominator himself regretted the result b. Such a precedent would make it impossible for the vast majority of Wikipedians to start a portal! The person who decided to redirect argued that I should have a whole, complete portal ready on my userspace before releasing it. While that may be appealing for a lot of people, I have the school of thought that I should be able to start a "stub" article with the expectation of seeing it grow rather than be shot down. Many people who contribute to Wikipedia have limited time and resources, and they'll just quit in frustration if they see their incomplete efforts wiped away. Considering how portals are more difficult and time consuming to create than articles, the same standard should apply to portals: incomplete portals should survive Miscellany for deletion. WhisperToMe ( talk) 02:15, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
Most portals do not display well on narrow screens in the two-column format, as there isn't space.
Back in 2011, Brion VIBBER ( talk · contribs) added new CSS classes to MediaWiki:Common.css and edited Template:Box portal skeleton to make use of them. Portals that use these classes switch to single-column display when viewed on the mobile site. For example, compare this from the main site with this from the mobile site.
But most of the 1000+ existing portals were created from older versions of the "skeleton" and don't use these classes. I'd like to address this; I've developed an AWB script that can do most of the work. Please see my edits to Portal:AC/DC, Portal:24, Portal:Abkhazia, Portal:1950s and Portal:1920s.
A downside is that the classes only support splits that are 50/49, 60/39 or 70/29 [the other 1% is the gap between the columns]. The old default in the "skeleton" was 55/44, so the switch to the new classes will change the appearance of the portals slightly. Nevertheless I think this is worth doing.
Comments please? Since I'd like to do most of the work from my bot account, I will need to show some support for this task before submitting it for bot approval. -- John of Reading ( talk) 10:45, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
What's the difference between a WikiProject and a Portal? -- Mr. Guye ( talk) 01:25, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
The How to add portal links to articles section tells us that the portal template should be added to the See also section of articles. What if there is no such section? I propose to add to the instructions, that in such a case the External links section should be used, or - if also non-existent - the bottom of the article, above any footer templates (if present) and categories. Your opinions, please. Debresser ( talk) 08:44, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
Greetings, At the Teahouse I asked a question about the numbers of portals for an article here. Based on a response from Cullen328 and my observations (while doing article assessments) I am proposing two new sections inserted right after section How to add portal links to articles.
This is a first draft, and I am asking for editor comments, suggestions, improvements before posting the two sections into the Portal article. Regards, JoeHebda ( talk) 13:21, 19 June 2015 (UTC)
== Appropriate portal selection ==
Since there are over 1,000 portals, it is important to select one or more that relate to the article content and would be helpful to the reader. Remember that portals are optional; not every article requires a portal. It is usually a case where fewer, well chosen portals will improve the article.
First of all, look to see if the article's infobox or any of its navigation boxes already include portals (which should not be duplicated). For details, refer to MOS/Layout#See also section which states that As a general rule, the "See also" section should not repeat links that appear in the article's body or its navigation boxes.
For example: if the article is a biography of a notable political person from centuries past from Paris, good portal choices might be: {{Portal|Biography|History|Politics|Paris}} Another article's best portal choice could be just a single one, such as: {{Portal|Energy}}
== Removal of portals ==
Portals that were added as spam or vandalism should be removed immediately, noting the reason on the Edit Summary. The number of portals for an article is determined by consensus among interested editors. If the portal is a duplicate (as described above) or is not relevant to the article's content, it should be removed. Boldness might suggest deletion of a portal without discussion, but on a highly viewed article, early discussion towards consensus is always advisable.
Portal:East Frisia, a portal which is relevant to this topic, has been nominated for
deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:East Frisia. Editors are free to edit the content of
Portal:East Frisia during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. --
Bermicourt (
talk)
18:23, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Although I've had an account with Wikipedia for many years, I hadn't taken an interest in being an active participant until recently. I am currently struggling to understand some of the excentricities to Wikipedia, and some of the terms it uses are less clear than I would like. Can someone please confirm that the examples I give below, between a Portal and a Project are accurate? The Portal page currently reads: "Portals are pages intended to serve as "Main Pages" for specific topics or areas. A portal may be associated with one or more WikiProjects; unlike a WikiProject, however, it is meant for both readers and editors of Wikipedia, and should promote content and encourage contribution. Portals are created for encyclopedic topics only and not for article maintenance categories." Although that explanation assists with my understanding, I do not feel competent in spotting the differences beyond a shadow of a doubt. If I am to use that definition accurately, the takeaway from it is:
Do I have that right? There are a ton of articles on Wikipedia that go into detail about specifics of very minor things... cough...but I usually only get about a third of the way through skimming it before realizing I'm either not paying attention to the information I'm reading, or am simply too dim to understand it. A confirmation that I am understanding the general spirit of what Portals and Projects represent is more important to me then pouring over the details of the article itself. Granted, this article is relatively short and well written, but I believe that sometimes the shorter specification guidelines can be trickier to truly understand, due to the lack of examples provided in them. If there's a commonly sourced essay that better explains what it is I'm asking about, but wasn't able to find via Google, please provide the link. If no essay exists, I'd be happy to cook something up to fill the void, assuming I understand the differences sufficiently. Sawta ( talk) 21:24, 18 January 2017 (UTC)