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I have become so weary, stressed and depressed over the seemingly implacable drive to delete portals that I have withdrawn from participating in MfD for the sake of my mental health, but responding to a recent ping I found that a new argument has emerged re portal DYKs. I've put some notes under Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:University of Houston but don't intend to pursue this further. Best of luck, Espresso Addict ( talk) 01:20, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
I would like to convert some abandoned portals to the Single-page layout. But first I'd like to know.
Single-page layout are dead? Is there still interested editors in this?
Why portals that I improved using Single-page layout tools like Portal:Martial arts and Portal:Human sexuality went summarily reverted to the old worst versions? Guilherme Burn ( talk) 17:08, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
Honestly, analyzing the discussions in the MFD, in WP:POG and the pageviews I think more and more that the format of "content portals" has no future, let's be honest, even main page portals are abandoned by wikiprojects, are redundant with articles and have low indices of views. The future may be in portals of utilities like Portal:Current events, Portal:Contents and Portal:Featured content. We can think of single page portals that instead of providing content provide utility, such as Portal:Did you know or Portal:Welcome (for beginners), etc. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 13:35, 26 June 2019 (UTC)
Comment 1 - Portal:Climbing was a newly created portal, virtually a single-page portal that presents good layout ideas. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 14:07, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
Comment 2 - I propose to merge Portal:Women's association football into Portal:Association football, if approved may be an opportunity to convert the second into a new single-page portal. You agree? Guilherme Burn ( talk) 14:07, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
With the recent exclusion of portals tagged with {{ featured portal}} I don't see sense in keeping the old featured portals with this template. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 19:57, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
There was a strong consensus for maintaining the template and its usefulness, but I believe this issue will still need to be revisited in the future. It would be best to move many pages and templates related to "featured portals" to "former featured portals" and remove the {{ historical}} template. We cannot maintain the status "featured portal" ad infinitum in the absence of constant review and possible delist. Yes, this leads to confusions for readers, for example the interwiki provided by wikidata which continues to tag with a star the old featured portals. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 01:25, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
Useful query, I think, to go beyond pageviews: quarry:query/38221. You can download the spreadsheet and divide the number of edits or editors by the number of years, or whatever.
It also helped me find some orphan subpages ( 1, 2, 3). Nemo 10:19, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
On 30 July 2019 (UTC), Portal:Vermont was deleted per the discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Vermont. Firstly, I entirely understand why the portal was deleted, particularly per it not having been updated and not having much content. Regarding page views, it's possible that the portal didn't receive many page views because there wasn't much content for readers to go back to see from time-to-time, but I digress.
Part of the nominator's deletion rationale stated, "this portal should be deleted without prejudice to re-creating a portal maintained by a volunteer..." (et al.). By inadvertently clicking on the "contribs" button of an !voter at the discussion, I noticed that shortly after the portal was deleted, the user has removed many portal links to the Vermont portal. When a portal is deleted, the portal links simply go blank on pages, so it's not particularly necessary for them to be quickly removed.
The topic itself (Vermont) meets WP:POG in terms of being broad enough in scope to qualify for a portal, so I find it concerning that many links to it have been quickly removed. If anyone were to re-create a new, updated, maintained Vermont portal, the removal of the links to it simply creates a bunch of unnecessary extra work that will need to be redone. Also, if the portal were to be recreated, and the links are not re-added, it could naturally lead to lesser page views, which could then lead to a vicious circle of it again qualifying for deletion per low page views.
Interested in other's thoughts about this matter. Should links for portals that meet WP:POG's broadness criteria remain in place when said portals are deleted? I think they should. Cheers, North America 1000 08:02, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
Or are you talking about the wikitext? — Kusma ( t· c) 10:23, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
The section above is yet another example of the duplicitous techniques used by the prolifically mendacious editor @ NA1K.
The discussion on this page was opened [1] by NA1K at 08:02, 31 July 2019.
Only 13 minutes later, at 08:22, NA1K opened [2] a similar discussion on my talk page.
Both discussions continued for several days, but at no point in either discussion did NA1K post a note in either discussion about the other one. And at no point in this discussion did NA1K even allude to the fact that I had given some counter-argument in reply. NA1K's summing-up comment of 07:58, 8 August 2019 is a classic example of NA1K's practice of mendacious omission. Written a week after my reply elsewhere to NA1K, it simply pretends that NA1K is unaware of the counter-arguments.
If NA1K's aim was to game the system by creating here on this page a fake consensus, by involving only NA1K's own cronies, then this was a great way to go about it. And given the length of NA1K's experience on Wikipedia, the failure to cross-notify is inexplicable in any good faith sense. An editor who wants to actually build a consensus will actively seek out those who might hold a different view and try to involve them in a centralised discussion; but I am sadly unsurprised that NA1K failed to do so. Such duplicity is simply a parallel to NA1K's serially-repeated mendacity at MFD, where NA1K repeatedly tries to manipulate consensus-formation by strategically misrepresenting the POG guidelines.
The reality is that removing backlinks is a routine part of any XFD close, and in most cases the closers use scripts to remove backlinks (e.g. WP:XFDC). Owing to the way that portal backlinks are nearly all formatted using templates, those tools do not extend to portals ... but that is a technical limitation, rather than any decision to retain backlinks to deleted portals.
Until late 2018, {{ Portal}} displayed all links, red or blue. A Nov 2018 request by me to make non-display of redlinks an optional mode was implemented by User:Dreamy Jazz as the default mode, but there was never any decision or discussion anywhere that it would be used as a way to permanently store backlinks to deleted portals.
By the time the portalspammer's mass-creation spree was brought to an end in Feb 2019, there were 5,705 portals. As of right now (04:13, 14 August 2019 (UTC)), Category:All portals contains 835 portals. There is simply no way that any but a handful of the 4,870 deleted portals will re-created. So it makes no sense to retain tens of thousands of backlinks to the thousands of portals which existed only as automated spam.
Similarly, it makes no sense to retain tens of thousands of backlinks to portals which have been deleted because for a decade they have languished without readers and with so little maintenance that many of them were simply abandoned junk. (It remains a shameful indictment of the general uselessness of the portals project that it made absolutely no effort to even systematically identify and tag these abandoned junk portals, and has instead left the cleanup to outsiders).
It is true that in the early day of the current portal cleanup process, most nominations were made "without prejudice" to re-creation. I myself initiated that in the two mass deletions of portalspam ( one, and two).
However, that was nearly 4 months ago, and much has changed since then. The crucial factor is scrutiny.
Back in March, the portalistas thought they were being very clever in gaming the system by the requiring to community to have a full MFD deletion discussion on each of the 4,200 portals, rather than speedy-deleting them. The portalistas were very well aware that the spam portals had been created a rate of more than one every 2 minutes, and that their pal the portalspammer had spewed out automated pseudo-portals just for the heck of it ... but they still insisted that the community devote huge multiples of that time scrutinising each piece of the spam.
It was fairly clear from the ongoing outrage from portalistas that when the community nonetheless worked its way through the whole spam mountain and deleted the lot, that wasn't what the portalistas had expected. Their attempt to game the system had failed.
But more than that, the attempt had backfired badly. By requiring so much scrutiny, the portalistas had ensured that there were now several editors well-versed in portal guidelines and skilled in examining portals. And those scrutineers had found that as well as the spam portals, there were also a lot of abandoned junk portals which failed POG.
So junk portals which were no longer automated, or had maybe never been automated, began to be MFded too. And as the discussions moved on, it became clear that POG was right to require a large number of maintainers. Scores of portals appeared at MFD with clear signs that they had been built in a spurt of enthusiasm, rebuilt or rebooted a few years later in a spurt of someone else's enthusiasm, and then rotted because they had not attracted enough maintainers to sustain the maintenance. It is very clear from MFDs in the last two months that the ability to retain a large set of maintainers is a crucial criterion of a portal being kept, and that we have clear evidence that most of the deleted portals failed that criterion.
So for all those MFDs where I proposed "that these pages be deleted without prejudice to recreating a curated portal not based on a single navbox, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time", its clear that nearly all would fail the community's current criteria place high emphasis on active maintenance.
The result of all these deletion was that by early July, there were well over 100,000 pages with links to non-existent portals, which were overwhelmingly to deleted portals. This cluttered article and category pages with redundant markup, and it also flooded the tracking categories, making it impossible to use them to identify mis-spellings etc which should be what's collected in Category:Portal templates with redlinked portals.
So I set about removing the backlinks, which a non-trivial task. I finally finished it on Tuesday 13th, having cleared up the deleted portals and finally got a clear run of hundreds of errors: mis-spellings, synonyms, foreign languages etc, which I have all fixed. All in all, I'd say that over the course of the whole run, I fixed about 2,000 broken links. Which I think is a useful pay-off.
I do understand that there is here a small clique of disgruntled editors who still bemoan the demise of abandoned junk portals, and want a return to the glory days when a single editor could run around creating lots of portals without regard to whether the topic meets the POG requirement of being likely to attract a large number of maintainers. And I do understand that for some of these drive-by portalistas, the task of spending a few minutes making a request at WP:BOTREQ for someone to make link to new portals from the relevant articles seems to be an intolerable burden.
But y'know what? It's now v clear that the community has had enough of drive-by portal makers, so I see no reason to assume that it would want to facilitate them by setting aside normal practice on backlinks.
If you disagree, then feel free to start an RFC in which you link to this post and to the discussion on my talk. But in the meantime, the forum-shopping exercise above is simply the uncritical groupthink of a cosy clique, and not any sort of consensus. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 04:13, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
Hello. I was studying how the portals are organized and I realized that the subpages of the Portal:Contents are performing the function they should be of other portals.
If it is worthy of analysis I complete the table.
This divides the attention of readers and editors which in my opinion is a problem. What is your opinion?
Guilherme Burn (
talk)
19:22, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
The existence of this redundancy is a strong argument for ENDOFPORTAL. If there can be a page Wikipedia:contents/topic/subtopic, why are there portals? I am a enthusiast of single-page layout, in my opinion portal subpages should be deleted. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 19:55, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
Portal:Germany/Anniversaries and its 378 sub-pages could easily be consolidated into a single page with links to sections. Setting up the skeleton page with substed transclusions would be less than an hour's work with skilled use of a decent programmer's text editor such as Notepad++ or Kate. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 22:11, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
The discussion deviated from the main focus, how to solve this redundancy? Guilherme Burn ( talk) 14:02, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
Portal:Northern Ireland would benefit from the following improvements:
The topic itself is rich, as Wikipedia has a great deal of content covering Northern Ireland. See Category:Northern Ireland for a general overview of topical coverage available. I have performed some work to improve the portal, but it would benefit from more. It would be nice if it had around 30 articles, 20 images, and more selected biographies, as a better start. This could lead to more readers utilizing the portal, as having a greater amount of diverse content may captivate readers to explore it more. Cheers, North America 1000 17:17, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
Bermicourt, please don't play smart-alec games which try to misrepresent me and deflect the point of substance. It's very clear that I was posing population size and geographic area as some measures for comparison with other deleted portals, rather than as absolute criteria (which I'd oppose).
It is quite extraordinary to see yet again the determination of portalistas to simply lie, lie and lie again in their mendacious determination to ignore POG. This time, it's not just NA1K; it several of the groupies coming out to lie in chorus.
In this case, there is very clear evidence that the portal has simply failed to attract either a large number of readers or a large numbers of maintainers. It is also clear that WP:NIR is at best dormant, and more likely defunct. POG says "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest)[1] to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal." A defunct WikiProject is no assistance.
I note that no editor above offers to commit themselves to long-term maintenance of the portal, and that no other maintainer has been identified.
These requirement for readers, maintainers and a WikiProject are core points of POG, devised and worded long before I ever set eyes on POG. Yet once again, a discussion on this project page is being dominated by a bunch of editors who claim to be in favour of portals ... but who simply engage in tag-team lying in order to evade their own project's guidelines.
Have you no shame, any of you? -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 02:14, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
coming togetherhave demonstrated zero knowledge of the topic. It is utterly irresponsible to try to build a portal from a position of ignorance of the topic.
that viewis not shared by a clique of portalista editors who have a track record of simply ignoring the parts of POG which do not suit their agenda.
insinuating. I am directly asserting.
It would really help if editors here stopped giving pejorative labels to those who don't share there point of view as if there were only 2 positions: 'portalistas', 'portal lovers' or 'portaleers' who supposedly love all portals regardless of quality and 'anti-portaleers', portal haters' or whatever other epithet we wish to stick on them who hate all portals regardless of quality. Of course, these labels do enable us to take a simplistic worldview and proceed to rubbish anyone who disagrees with us, but they just ignore the truth and antagonises one another. The truth is that we're probably all somewhere on the spectrum and [almost] no-one is 100% pro- or anti-portals. I know it's more difficult, but it would be far better in the long run if we focussed on re-drafting the guidelines to achieve a consensus that would make assessment of portals far easier. Otherwise every time we discuss Portal:X the same tired old arguments are trotted out and the points of disagreement are the same. Except that it gets more and more vitriolic and polarised as we lose patience with one another. Please can we try a more orderly and mutually respectful approach? Bermicourt ( talk) 18:20, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
Nb. Regarding Portal:Northern Ireland, I initially avoided adding much content about The Troubles to it, because there's so much content about The Troubles, I didn't want the portal to become a "The Troubles" portal. More recently, I have added more content about The Troubles, while of course including other topical content to keep the portal balanced. For those interested, please feel free to further expand the portal. It is okay to improve Wikipedia's content for the encyclopedia's WP:READERS. North America 1000 13:52, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
The
Bogus file options lint errors page finds a number of portals with bogus file options, mostly left
and right
. Some of these lint errors are coded in parts of article pages randomly transcluded into the portals. Others are inserted by the portals themselves via templates that use the |fileargs=arg
parameter. It appears to me that this parameter inserts |arg
just before the closing bracket of a file wikilink, and this is almost certainly wrong, because the last parameter in an image wikilink is supposed to be the caption. I do not know the original purpose of |fileargs=arg
, but in many cases, it's messed up now. For example,
Portal:Liquor includes 3 fileargs=left
parameters. The second one is involved in a transclusion that might randomly transclude part of
Ketel One, where the fileargs=left
parameter changes
[[Image:Schiedam windmolen Nolet.jpg|right|thumb|The [[De Nolet|Nolet windmill]] at the distillery in [[Schiedam]]]]
to
[[Image:Schiedam windmolen Nolet.jpg|right|thumb|The [[De Nolet|Nolet windmill]] at the distillery in [[Schiedam]]|left]]
This is wrong, but before removing fileargs=left
and fileargs=right
from
Portal:Liquor and the many other portals that have these parameters, let's have some clarity on the purpose of the |fileargs=arg
parameter.
@
Certes: a search on
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals for fileargs
found
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Archive 4#Picture alignment?, where you discussed this parameter, so I think you know something about this. —
Anomalocaris (
talk)
16:40, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
P.S. Before posting here, I edited
fileargs=right
fileargs=left
fileargs=left
and as I was working on Portal:Liquor I realized it was time to have a discussion. — Anomalocaris ( talk) 16:47, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
|left
or |right
as a "Location", and says that other [than name, which must come first,] details are optional and can be placed in any order. Perhaps the problem is that
|fileargs=left
is being used on an image specification which already contains |right
, or vice versa, and the report is warning us that both right and left are present. If so then I can try enhancing
Module:Excerpt to strip out the overridden detail. This feature was requested by Arabic wiki, to position images around right-to-left text, and it had only basic testing on enwiki.
Certes (
talk)
17:15, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
fileargs
, but I understand now. The portal author wants a random transcluded image to appear in a certain place, either left or right. The problem is that the random transcluded image may already be coded with a Location, and the Location can be specified only once. If we want to allow fileargs=newLocation
in templates including {{
Transclude random excerpt}}
, {{
Transclude files as random slideshow}}
, and {{
Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}}
, then we need to (a) remove any existing Location
parameter and (b) insert the newLocation
parameter after the Name
(first) parameter and before the Caption
(optional last) parameter. You're right that options can be placed in any order, except that the optional Caption must be last. —
Anomalocaris (
talk)
18:36, 5 September 2019 (UTC)fileargs=right
to the three portals I edited before. —
Anomalocaris (
talk)
18:32, 6 September 2019 (UTC)It has been proposed again that the entire Portal: namespace be deleted. Discussion is at WP:VPPR#Proposal to delete Portal space. Certes ( talk) 00:13, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
Please comment at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Proposal_to_delete_Portal_space. A proposal is being made there to delete all portals entirely. thanks. -- Sm8900 ( talk) 17:21, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
Portal:Nanotechnology was recently deleted based on the mistaken assertion that the portal had been abandoned since 2012 and had no maintainer, with no notification given to me, the maintainer, that a deletion discussion was occurring. This now at deletion review at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2019 September 10. I invite everyone to participate in the review discussion. Antony–22 ( talk⁄ contribs) 21:10, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
it is generally considered civil to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributorsbut doesn't explicitly forbid disposing of portals quietly. I urge everyone who maintains a portal to ensure that its main page is on their watchlist, so that the mandatory MfD notice there will tip them off. Certes ( talk) 21:36, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
Not only are portal maintainers not always notified, but the relevant projects and article talk pages aren't always notified. Or they're only notified after the MfD has been on for some time which minimises the window for comment. Finally you would have thought that portal MfD's would automatically be notified here at the Portals project, but they're not... Still at the rate things are going, in a few months time there will be no portals left, so no need for this page anyway. Bermicourt ( talk) 09:57, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
The deletion review was successful at having the deletion discussion reopened for Portal:Nanotechnology at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Nanotechnology. Again, I invite everyone to participate. Antony–22 ( talk⁄ contribs) 03:00, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
I've made a template cache feature to help fix the slow page loads for portals per request from Armanaziz. It's used on heavy template calls, such as in the news sections and DYK retrival. See {{ Template cache}} for documentation if you want help implementing it I'm happy to help. -- Trialpears ( talk) 18:52, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
In April many portals that were automated just two months before were reverted to their manual versions as a result of a discussion on this page. I am a relative newcomer to the portal debate, but I've noticed recently some portals (e.g. Portal:Vietnam) that have come up for deletion have been saved from the brink by single-page automation. Is this evidence that opinion is turning in favor of automation? Should automation be the default position? Mark Schierbecker ( talk) 03:40, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
I have updated my query of English Wikipedia portals by age and number of edits, editors to include the average timestamp of the surviving revisions for all portals (or orphaned portal subpages...). If you download the table you can crunch the numbers and discover a few things which may or not be interesting.
Some portals (even excluding portals created in 2018 or 2017) have most revisions in the same year as their creation year, suggesting they were not really worked on after creation: Finger_Lakes, Conservatism, Freedom_of_speech, Staffordshire, Human–computer_interaction, Studio_Ghibli, Mesozoic, Cretaceous, Alps, Hesse, Tuvalu, Brandenburg, Peak_District, Eifel, Lighthouses, Wetlands, Franconia, Amiga, North_Palatine_Uplands, Rivers, Evangelical_Christianity, Jakarta.
Some portals were worked on slightly longer, having their average edit age one year higher than their creation: Nursing, Rock_and_Roll, Philosophy_of_science, Numismatics, Belgium, Dogs, Scouting, Gibraltar, Television_in_Australia, Tennessee, Discworld, Motorsport, Music_of_Australia, Hawaii, English_football, Organized_Labour, Drink, Crustaceans, Primates, Horses, Fungi, English_law, North_Rhine-Westphalia, Battleships, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Bolivia, New_England, Cartoon_Network, Infrastructure, Women's_sport, Caribbean_Community, Sailing, Anglo-Saxon_England, Cartoon, European_military_history, Bollywood, Geography_of_Kenya, Sasanian_Empire, Women's_association_football, Paleozoic, Globalization, Soap_operas_and_telenovelas, Snakes, Rhön, Football_in_Africa, Mughal_Empire, Saarland, Holy_Roman_Empire, Baden-Württemberg, Frogs, Amphibians, Liquor, Latter_Day_Saint_movement, Bremen, 1930s, 1940s, Turkmenistan, German_Empire.
Some portals have an "average age" of 2014 or earlier, having been created less than 5 years earlier than their average age, and have collected edits from less than 50 editors (consider that even the most abandoned portal typically has at least 10-20 editors touching it for deletion notices and similar things): Nursing, Rock_and_Roll, Philosophy_of_science, Numismatics, Belgium, Dogs, Scouting, Gibraltar, Television_in_Australia, Tennessee, Discworld, Motorsport, Music_of_Australia, Hawaii, English_football, Organized_Labour, Drink, Crustaceans, Primates, Horses, Fungi, English_law, North_Rhine-Westphalia, Battleships, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Bolivia, New_England, Cartoon_Network, Infrastructure, Women's_sport, Caribbean_Community, Sailing, Anglo-Saxon_England, Cartoon, European_military_history, Bollywood, Geography_of_Kenya, Sasanian_Empire, Women's_association_football, Paleozoic, Globalization, Soap_operas_and_telenovelas, Snakes, Rhön, Football_in_Africa, Mughal_Empire, Saarland, Holy_Roman_Empire, Baden-Württemberg, Frogs, Amphibians, Liquor, Latter_Day_Saint_movement, Bremen, 1930s, 1940s, Turkmenistan, German_Empire.
Some of those portals only contain content which ages well, like Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. However, several of the UK counties portals have news older than ten years, while some have since replaced the news section with a link to the BCC: should that be done on all of them? Nemo 09:03, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
An article that you have been involved in editing— Portal:Sports—has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 12:14, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
It has been proposed that Portal:Contents its subpages and Portal:Featured content be moved to Wikipedia space. See Portal talk:Contents#Requested move 9 October 2019. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 17:20, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
A discussion is taking place as to whether Wikipedia:US State Portal Metrics is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.
The page will be discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:US State Portal Metrics until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the deletion notice from the top of the page. North America 1000 00:02, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
The VP RfC
closed with a clear consensus that the "Portal guidelines" are not, in fact, official guidelines.
WP:POG has now been tagged as an information page again.
Certes (
talk)
09:00, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
POG contained a lot of old nonsense, mostly supporting the abominable forest-of-content-forked sub-pages model of magazine portal, complete with its disgraceful support for the use of "Did you know" sections as unscrutinised trivia farms.
However, its requirements that portals need broad scope, lots of readers, multiple maintainers and a supporting WikiProject have been supported by consensus at over 850 MFDs in the last six months, so clearly have broad community support. So deletion of the abandoned junk will continue.
However, the de-guidelining means that there is now clearly no community consensus for any of ways in which portals have been built. It's time for portal fans to seek a broad community consensus for whatever role they want portals to fulfil in the future. Magazine? Navigational aid? Showcase? Playground for editors who like making pretty pages? The latter function is the old one which portals have successfully filled so far.
If a consensus can be reached on the actual purpose of portals, then a discussion can start on how to serve that purpose in a way which readers might actually use, instead of shunning all but a tiny number of portals as has been the case for the last decade. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 19:18, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 10 | Archive 11 | Archive 12 | Archive 13 | Archive 14 | Archive 15 |
I have become so weary, stressed and depressed over the seemingly implacable drive to delete portals that I have withdrawn from participating in MfD for the sake of my mental health, but responding to a recent ping I found that a new argument has emerged re portal DYKs. I've put some notes under Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:University of Houston but don't intend to pursue this further. Best of luck, Espresso Addict ( talk) 01:20, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
I would like to convert some abandoned portals to the Single-page layout. But first I'd like to know.
Single-page layout are dead? Is there still interested editors in this?
Why portals that I improved using Single-page layout tools like Portal:Martial arts and Portal:Human sexuality went summarily reverted to the old worst versions? Guilherme Burn ( talk) 17:08, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
Honestly, analyzing the discussions in the MFD, in WP:POG and the pageviews I think more and more that the format of "content portals" has no future, let's be honest, even main page portals are abandoned by wikiprojects, are redundant with articles and have low indices of views. The future may be in portals of utilities like Portal:Current events, Portal:Contents and Portal:Featured content. We can think of single page portals that instead of providing content provide utility, such as Portal:Did you know or Portal:Welcome (for beginners), etc. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 13:35, 26 June 2019 (UTC)
Comment 1 - Portal:Climbing was a newly created portal, virtually a single-page portal that presents good layout ideas. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 14:07, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
Comment 2 - I propose to merge Portal:Women's association football into Portal:Association football, if approved may be an opportunity to convert the second into a new single-page portal. You agree? Guilherme Burn ( talk) 14:07, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
With the recent exclusion of portals tagged with {{ featured portal}} I don't see sense in keeping the old featured portals with this template. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 19:57, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
There was a strong consensus for maintaining the template and its usefulness, but I believe this issue will still need to be revisited in the future. It would be best to move many pages and templates related to "featured portals" to "former featured portals" and remove the {{ historical}} template. We cannot maintain the status "featured portal" ad infinitum in the absence of constant review and possible delist. Yes, this leads to confusions for readers, for example the interwiki provided by wikidata which continues to tag with a star the old featured portals. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 01:25, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
Useful query, I think, to go beyond pageviews: quarry:query/38221. You can download the spreadsheet and divide the number of edits or editors by the number of years, or whatever.
It also helped me find some orphan subpages ( 1, 2, 3). Nemo 10:19, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
On 30 July 2019 (UTC), Portal:Vermont was deleted per the discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Vermont. Firstly, I entirely understand why the portal was deleted, particularly per it not having been updated and not having much content. Regarding page views, it's possible that the portal didn't receive many page views because there wasn't much content for readers to go back to see from time-to-time, but I digress.
Part of the nominator's deletion rationale stated, "this portal should be deleted without prejudice to re-creating a portal maintained by a volunteer..." (et al.). By inadvertently clicking on the "contribs" button of an !voter at the discussion, I noticed that shortly after the portal was deleted, the user has removed many portal links to the Vermont portal. When a portal is deleted, the portal links simply go blank on pages, so it's not particularly necessary for them to be quickly removed.
The topic itself (Vermont) meets WP:POG in terms of being broad enough in scope to qualify for a portal, so I find it concerning that many links to it have been quickly removed. If anyone were to re-create a new, updated, maintained Vermont portal, the removal of the links to it simply creates a bunch of unnecessary extra work that will need to be redone. Also, if the portal were to be recreated, and the links are not re-added, it could naturally lead to lesser page views, which could then lead to a vicious circle of it again qualifying for deletion per low page views.
Interested in other's thoughts about this matter. Should links for portals that meet WP:POG's broadness criteria remain in place when said portals are deleted? I think they should. Cheers, North America 1000 08:02, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
Or are you talking about the wikitext? — Kusma ( t· c) 10:23, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
The section above is yet another example of the duplicitous techniques used by the prolifically mendacious editor @ NA1K.
The discussion on this page was opened [1] by NA1K at 08:02, 31 July 2019.
Only 13 minutes later, at 08:22, NA1K opened [2] a similar discussion on my talk page.
Both discussions continued for several days, but at no point in either discussion did NA1K post a note in either discussion about the other one. And at no point in this discussion did NA1K even allude to the fact that I had given some counter-argument in reply. NA1K's summing-up comment of 07:58, 8 August 2019 is a classic example of NA1K's practice of mendacious omission. Written a week after my reply elsewhere to NA1K, it simply pretends that NA1K is unaware of the counter-arguments.
If NA1K's aim was to game the system by creating here on this page a fake consensus, by involving only NA1K's own cronies, then this was a great way to go about it. And given the length of NA1K's experience on Wikipedia, the failure to cross-notify is inexplicable in any good faith sense. An editor who wants to actually build a consensus will actively seek out those who might hold a different view and try to involve them in a centralised discussion; but I am sadly unsurprised that NA1K failed to do so. Such duplicity is simply a parallel to NA1K's serially-repeated mendacity at MFD, where NA1K repeatedly tries to manipulate consensus-formation by strategically misrepresenting the POG guidelines.
The reality is that removing backlinks is a routine part of any XFD close, and in most cases the closers use scripts to remove backlinks (e.g. WP:XFDC). Owing to the way that portal backlinks are nearly all formatted using templates, those tools do not extend to portals ... but that is a technical limitation, rather than any decision to retain backlinks to deleted portals.
Until late 2018, {{ Portal}} displayed all links, red or blue. A Nov 2018 request by me to make non-display of redlinks an optional mode was implemented by User:Dreamy Jazz as the default mode, but there was never any decision or discussion anywhere that it would be used as a way to permanently store backlinks to deleted portals.
By the time the portalspammer's mass-creation spree was brought to an end in Feb 2019, there were 5,705 portals. As of right now (04:13, 14 August 2019 (UTC)), Category:All portals contains 835 portals. There is simply no way that any but a handful of the 4,870 deleted portals will re-created. So it makes no sense to retain tens of thousands of backlinks to the thousands of portals which existed only as automated spam.
Similarly, it makes no sense to retain tens of thousands of backlinks to portals which have been deleted because for a decade they have languished without readers and with so little maintenance that many of them were simply abandoned junk. (It remains a shameful indictment of the general uselessness of the portals project that it made absolutely no effort to even systematically identify and tag these abandoned junk portals, and has instead left the cleanup to outsiders).
It is true that in the early day of the current portal cleanup process, most nominations were made "without prejudice" to re-creation. I myself initiated that in the two mass deletions of portalspam ( one, and two).
However, that was nearly 4 months ago, and much has changed since then. The crucial factor is scrutiny.
Back in March, the portalistas thought they were being very clever in gaming the system by the requiring to community to have a full MFD deletion discussion on each of the 4,200 portals, rather than speedy-deleting them. The portalistas were very well aware that the spam portals had been created a rate of more than one every 2 minutes, and that their pal the portalspammer had spewed out automated pseudo-portals just for the heck of it ... but they still insisted that the community devote huge multiples of that time scrutinising each piece of the spam.
It was fairly clear from the ongoing outrage from portalistas that when the community nonetheless worked its way through the whole spam mountain and deleted the lot, that wasn't what the portalistas had expected. Their attempt to game the system had failed.
But more than that, the attempt had backfired badly. By requiring so much scrutiny, the portalistas had ensured that there were now several editors well-versed in portal guidelines and skilled in examining portals. And those scrutineers had found that as well as the spam portals, there were also a lot of abandoned junk portals which failed POG.
So junk portals which were no longer automated, or had maybe never been automated, began to be MFded too. And as the discussions moved on, it became clear that POG was right to require a large number of maintainers. Scores of portals appeared at MFD with clear signs that they had been built in a spurt of enthusiasm, rebuilt or rebooted a few years later in a spurt of someone else's enthusiasm, and then rotted because they had not attracted enough maintainers to sustain the maintenance. It is very clear from MFDs in the last two months that the ability to retain a large set of maintainers is a crucial criterion of a portal being kept, and that we have clear evidence that most of the deleted portals failed that criterion.
So for all those MFDs where I proposed "that these pages be deleted without prejudice to recreating a curated portal not based on a single navbox, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time", its clear that nearly all would fail the community's current criteria place high emphasis on active maintenance.
The result of all these deletion was that by early July, there were well over 100,000 pages with links to non-existent portals, which were overwhelmingly to deleted portals. This cluttered article and category pages with redundant markup, and it also flooded the tracking categories, making it impossible to use them to identify mis-spellings etc which should be what's collected in Category:Portal templates with redlinked portals.
So I set about removing the backlinks, which a non-trivial task. I finally finished it on Tuesday 13th, having cleared up the deleted portals and finally got a clear run of hundreds of errors: mis-spellings, synonyms, foreign languages etc, which I have all fixed. All in all, I'd say that over the course of the whole run, I fixed about 2,000 broken links. Which I think is a useful pay-off.
I do understand that there is here a small clique of disgruntled editors who still bemoan the demise of abandoned junk portals, and want a return to the glory days when a single editor could run around creating lots of portals without regard to whether the topic meets the POG requirement of being likely to attract a large number of maintainers. And I do understand that for some of these drive-by portalistas, the task of spending a few minutes making a request at WP:BOTREQ for someone to make link to new portals from the relevant articles seems to be an intolerable burden.
But y'know what? It's now v clear that the community has had enough of drive-by portal makers, so I see no reason to assume that it would want to facilitate them by setting aside normal practice on backlinks.
If you disagree, then feel free to start an RFC in which you link to this post and to the discussion on my talk. But in the meantime, the forum-shopping exercise above is simply the uncritical groupthink of a cosy clique, and not any sort of consensus. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 04:13, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
Hello. I was studying how the portals are organized and I realized that the subpages of the Portal:Contents are performing the function they should be of other portals.
If it is worthy of analysis I complete the table.
This divides the attention of readers and editors which in my opinion is a problem. What is your opinion?
Guilherme Burn (
talk)
19:22, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
The existence of this redundancy is a strong argument for ENDOFPORTAL. If there can be a page Wikipedia:contents/topic/subtopic, why are there portals? I am a enthusiast of single-page layout, in my opinion portal subpages should be deleted. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 19:55, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
Portal:Germany/Anniversaries and its 378 sub-pages could easily be consolidated into a single page with links to sections. Setting up the skeleton page with substed transclusions would be less than an hour's work with skilled use of a decent programmer's text editor such as Notepad++ or Kate. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 22:11, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
The discussion deviated from the main focus, how to solve this redundancy? Guilherme Burn ( talk) 14:02, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
Portal:Northern Ireland would benefit from the following improvements:
The topic itself is rich, as Wikipedia has a great deal of content covering Northern Ireland. See Category:Northern Ireland for a general overview of topical coverage available. I have performed some work to improve the portal, but it would benefit from more. It would be nice if it had around 30 articles, 20 images, and more selected biographies, as a better start. This could lead to more readers utilizing the portal, as having a greater amount of diverse content may captivate readers to explore it more. Cheers, North America 1000 17:17, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
Bermicourt, please don't play smart-alec games which try to misrepresent me and deflect the point of substance. It's very clear that I was posing population size and geographic area as some measures for comparison with other deleted portals, rather than as absolute criteria (which I'd oppose).
It is quite extraordinary to see yet again the determination of portalistas to simply lie, lie and lie again in their mendacious determination to ignore POG. This time, it's not just NA1K; it several of the groupies coming out to lie in chorus.
In this case, there is very clear evidence that the portal has simply failed to attract either a large number of readers or a large numbers of maintainers. It is also clear that WP:NIR is at best dormant, and more likely defunct. POG says "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest)[1] to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal." A defunct WikiProject is no assistance.
I note that no editor above offers to commit themselves to long-term maintenance of the portal, and that no other maintainer has been identified.
These requirement for readers, maintainers and a WikiProject are core points of POG, devised and worded long before I ever set eyes on POG. Yet once again, a discussion on this project page is being dominated by a bunch of editors who claim to be in favour of portals ... but who simply engage in tag-team lying in order to evade their own project's guidelines.
Have you no shame, any of you? -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 02:14, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
coming togetherhave demonstrated zero knowledge of the topic. It is utterly irresponsible to try to build a portal from a position of ignorance of the topic.
that viewis not shared by a clique of portalista editors who have a track record of simply ignoring the parts of POG which do not suit their agenda.
insinuating. I am directly asserting.
It would really help if editors here stopped giving pejorative labels to those who don't share there point of view as if there were only 2 positions: 'portalistas', 'portal lovers' or 'portaleers' who supposedly love all portals regardless of quality and 'anti-portaleers', portal haters' or whatever other epithet we wish to stick on them who hate all portals regardless of quality. Of course, these labels do enable us to take a simplistic worldview and proceed to rubbish anyone who disagrees with us, but they just ignore the truth and antagonises one another. The truth is that we're probably all somewhere on the spectrum and [almost] no-one is 100% pro- or anti-portals. I know it's more difficult, but it would be far better in the long run if we focussed on re-drafting the guidelines to achieve a consensus that would make assessment of portals far easier. Otherwise every time we discuss Portal:X the same tired old arguments are trotted out and the points of disagreement are the same. Except that it gets more and more vitriolic and polarised as we lose patience with one another. Please can we try a more orderly and mutually respectful approach? Bermicourt ( talk) 18:20, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
Nb. Regarding Portal:Northern Ireland, I initially avoided adding much content about The Troubles to it, because there's so much content about The Troubles, I didn't want the portal to become a "The Troubles" portal. More recently, I have added more content about The Troubles, while of course including other topical content to keep the portal balanced. For those interested, please feel free to further expand the portal. It is okay to improve Wikipedia's content for the encyclopedia's WP:READERS. North America 1000 13:52, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
The
Bogus file options lint errors page finds a number of portals with bogus file options, mostly left
and right
. Some of these lint errors are coded in parts of article pages randomly transcluded into the portals. Others are inserted by the portals themselves via templates that use the |fileargs=arg
parameter. It appears to me that this parameter inserts |arg
just before the closing bracket of a file wikilink, and this is almost certainly wrong, because the last parameter in an image wikilink is supposed to be the caption. I do not know the original purpose of |fileargs=arg
, but in many cases, it's messed up now. For example,
Portal:Liquor includes 3 fileargs=left
parameters. The second one is involved in a transclusion that might randomly transclude part of
Ketel One, where the fileargs=left
parameter changes
[[Image:Schiedam windmolen Nolet.jpg|right|thumb|The [[De Nolet|Nolet windmill]] at the distillery in [[Schiedam]]]]
to
[[Image:Schiedam windmolen Nolet.jpg|right|thumb|The [[De Nolet|Nolet windmill]] at the distillery in [[Schiedam]]|left]]
This is wrong, but before removing fileargs=left
and fileargs=right
from
Portal:Liquor and the many other portals that have these parameters, let's have some clarity on the purpose of the |fileargs=arg
parameter.
@
Certes: a search on
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals for fileargs
found
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Archive 4#Picture alignment?, where you discussed this parameter, so I think you know something about this. —
Anomalocaris (
talk)
16:40, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
P.S. Before posting here, I edited
fileargs=right
fileargs=left
fileargs=left
and as I was working on Portal:Liquor I realized it was time to have a discussion. — Anomalocaris ( talk) 16:47, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
|left
or |right
as a "Location", and says that other [than name, which must come first,] details are optional and can be placed in any order. Perhaps the problem is that
|fileargs=left
is being used on an image specification which already contains |right
, or vice versa, and the report is warning us that both right and left are present. If so then I can try enhancing
Module:Excerpt to strip out the overridden detail. This feature was requested by Arabic wiki, to position images around right-to-left text, and it had only basic testing on enwiki.
Certes (
talk)
17:15, 5 September 2019 (UTC)
fileargs
, but I understand now. The portal author wants a random transcluded image to appear in a certain place, either left or right. The problem is that the random transcluded image may already be coded with a Location, and the Location can be specified only once. If we want to allow fileargs=newLocation
in templates including {{
Transclude random excerpt}}
, {{
Transclude files as random slideshow}}
, and {{
Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}}
, then we need to (a) remove any existing Location
parameter and (b) insert the newLocation
parameter after the Name
(first) parameter and before the Caption
(optional last) parameter. You're right that options can be placed in any order, except that the optional Caption must be last. —
Anomalocaris (
talk)
18:36, 5 September 2019 (UTC)fileargs=right
to the three portals I edited before. —
Anomalocaris (
talk)
18:32, 6 September 2019 (UTC)It has been proposed again that the entire Portal: namespace be deleted. Discussion is at WP:VPPR#Proposal to delete Portal space. Certes ( talk) 00:13, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
Please comment at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Proposal_to_delete_Portal_space. A proposal is being made there to delete all portals entirely. thanks. -- Sm8900 ( talk) 17:21, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
Portal:Nanotechnology was recently deleted based on the mistaken assertion that the portal had been abandoned since 2012 and had no maintainer, with no notification given to me, the maintainer, that a deletion discussion was occurring. This now at deletion review at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2019 September 10. I invite everyone to participate in the review discussion. Antony–22 ( talk⁄ contribs) 21:10, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
it is generally considered civil to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributorsbut doesn't explicitly forbid disposing of portals quietly. I urge everyone who maintains a portal to ensure that its main page is on their watchlist, so that the mandatory MfD notice there will tip them off. Certes ( talk) 21:36, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
Not only are portal maintainers not always notified, but the relevant projects and article talk pages aren't always notified. Or they're only notified after the MfD has been on for some time which minimises the window for comment. Finally you would have thought that portal MfD's would automatically be notified here at the Portals project, but they're not... Still at the rate things are going, in a few months time there will be no portals left, so no need for this page anyway. Bermicourt ( talk) 09:57, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
The deletion review was successful at having the deletion discussion reopened for Portal:Nanotechnology at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Nanotechnology. Again, I invite everyone to participate. Antony–22 ( talk⁄ contribs) 03:00, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
I've made a template cache feature to help fix the slow page loads for portals per request from Armanaziz. It's used on heavy template calls, such as in the news sections and DYK retrival. See {{ Template cache}} for documentation if you want help implementing it I'm happy to help. -- Trialpears ( talk) 18:52, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
In April many portals that were automated just two months before were reverted to their manual versions as a result of a discussion on this page. I am a relative newcomer to the portal debate, but I've noticed recently some portals (e.g. Portal:Vietnam) that have come up for deletion have been saved from the brink by single-page automation. Is this evidence that opinion is turning in favor of automation? Should automation be the default position? Mark Schierbecker ( talk) 03:40, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
I have updated my query of English Wikipedia portals by age and number of edits, editors to include the average timestamp of the surviving revisions for all portals (or orphaned portal subpages...). If you download the table you can crunch the numbers and discover a few things which may or not be interesting.
Some portals (even excluding portals created in 2018 or 2017) have most revisions in the same year as their creation year, suggesting they were not really worked on after creation: Finger_Lakes, Conservatism, Freedom_of_speech, Staffordshire, Human–computer_interaction, Studio_Ghibli, Mesozoic, Cretaceous, Alps, Hesse, Tuvalu, Brandenburg, Peak_District, Eifel, Lighthouses, Wetlands, Franconia, Amiga, North_Palatine_Uplands, Rivers, Evangelical_Christianity, Jakarta.
Some portals were worked on slightly longer, having their average edit age one year higher than their creation: Nursing, Rock_and_Roll, Philosophy_of_science, Numismatics, Belgium, Dogs, Scouting, Gibraltar, Television_in_Australia, Tennessee, Discworld, Motorsport, Music_of_Australia, Hawaii, English_football, Organized_Labour, Drink, Crustaceans, Primates, Horses, Fungi, English_law, North_Rhine-Westphalia, Battleships, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Bolivia, New_England, Cartoon_Network, Infrastructure, Women's_sport, Caribbean_Community, Sailing, Anglo-Saxon_England, Cartoon, European_military_history, Bollywood, Geography_of_Kenya, Sasanian_Empire, Women's_association_football, Paleozoic, Globalization, Soap_operas_and_telenovelas, Snakes, Rhön, Football_in_Africa, Mughal_Empire, Saarland, Holy_Roman_Empire, Baden-Württemberg, Frogs, Amphibians, Liquor, Latter_Day_Saint_movement, Bremen, 1930s, 1940s, Turkmenistan, German_Empire.
Some portals have an "average age" of 2014 or earlier, having been created less than 5 years earlier than their average age, and have collected edits from less than 50 editors (consider that even the most abandoned portal typically has at least 10-20 editors touching it for deletion notices and similar things): Nursing, Rock_and_Roll, Philosophy_of_science, Numismatics, Belgium, Dogs, Scouting, Gibraltar, Television_in_Australia, Tennessee, Discworld, Motorsport, Music_of_Australia, Hawaii, English_football, Organized_Labour, Drink, Crustaceans, Primates, Horses, Fungi, English_law, North_Rhine-Westphalia, Battleships, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Bolivia, New_England, Cartoon_Network, Infrastructure, Women's_sport, Caribbean_Community, Sailing, Anglo-Saxon_England, Cartoon, European_military_history, Bollywood, Geography_of_Kenya, Sasanian_Empire, Women's_association_football, Paleozoic, Globalization, Soap_operas_and_telenovelas, Snakes, Rhön, Football_in_Africa, Mughal_Empire, Saarland, Holy_Roman_Empire, Baden-Württemberg, Frogs, Amphibians, Liquor, Latter_Day_Saint_movement, Bremen, 1930s, 1940s, Turkmenistan, German_Empire.
Some of those portals only contain content which ages well, like Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. However, several of the UK counties portals have news older than ten years, while some have since replaced the news section with a link to the BCC: should that be done on all of them? Nemo 09:03, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
An article that you have been involved in editing— Portal:Sports—has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 12:14, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
It has been proposed that Portal:Contents its subpages and Portal:Featured content be moved to Wikipedia space. See Portal talk:Contents#Requested move 9 October 2019. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 17:20, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
A discussion is taking place as to whether Wikipedia:US State Portal Metrics is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.
The page will be discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:US State Portal Metrics until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the deletion notice from the top of the page. North America 1000 00:02, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
The VP RfC
closed with a clear consensus that the "Portal guidelines" are not, in fact, official guidelines.
WP:POG has now been tagged as an information page again.
Certes (
talk)
09:00, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
POG contained a lot of old nonsense, mostly supporting the abominable forest-of-content-forked sub-pages model of magazine portal, complete with its disgraceful support for the use of "Did you know" sections as unscrutinised trivia farms.
However, its requirements that portals need broad scope, lots of readers, multiple maintainers and a supporting WikiProject have been supported by consensus at over 850 MFDs in the last six months, so clearly have broad community support. So deletion of the abandoned junk will continue.
However, the de-guidelining means that there is now clearly no community consensus for any of ways in which portals have been built. It's time for portal fans to seek a broad community consensus for whatever role they want portals to fulfil in the future. Magazine? Navigational aid? Showcase? Playground for editors who like making pretty pages? The latter function is the old one which portals have successfully filled so far.
If a consensus can be reached on the actual purpose of portals, then a discussion can start on how to serve that purpose in a way which readers might actually use, instead of shunning all but a tiny number of portals as has been the case for the last decade. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 19:18, 26 September 2019 (UTC)