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The portals at Wikipedia are expected to serve as gateways for readers interested in specific subject areas for browsing the best Wikipedia has to offer in that area. In other words the portals are supposed to be extensions of the main page, but more focused in a specific topic area. Given the Wikipedia communities agree on the need of such gateways or extensions of main page the main page should not only link, but also prominently feature and promote a few portals which should be selected and organized in meaningful / systematic manner. Currently the main page does link a few portals, but there is room for improvement in the way they are organized.
I would like to propose a system of “Portal Tree” which would help decide which portals should be linked to main page and also serve the purpose of deciding which portals are needed and which are good to have.
The main page should link to portals which would offer to break-down Wikipedia into certain themes. Let’s call these portals linked from the main page as L0 Portals:
(of course the above list is an output of my initial brainstorming. Wikipedia community can discuss and decide what should be the ideal structure)
I would also recommend that each L0 Portal within a given theme should have some structural consistency.
Each L0 portal, should lead to sets of sub-portals - let's call them L1 Portals. L1 Portals will be a logical sub-division of an L0 portal. For example a Country Portal can be an L1 Portal to a Continent Portal.
L0 and L1 Portals should be designed in a way that they give a balanced representation of the topic covered. With that goal, they should be allowed to display contents (articles/lists) of up to B-Class and any media of relevance to the topic area. DYK and News items should ideally be sourced from main page. Until a L0/L1 Portal reaches a certain level of acceptance of quality, they may show a Notification message on top saying "This portal is currently undergoing update and may not give a balanced representation of the topic."
L1, and L0 portals will not be deleted on the ground of quality or page views.
In addition, if community wants, there can be additional "Featured Portals" (let's call LF) linked to L0 / L1 portals which would only focus on a narrow subject area where Wikipedia has highly developed content. LF Portals will only be used to feature FA / GA / FL rated contents.
Examples of LF Portals would be portals on Specific Cities, tournaments, specific non human species etc.
LF level portals can and should be deleted if they fail to maintain standard.
Please place your comments under in the comments section below. Arman ( Talk) 06:15, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
I have a couple of comments: firstly, we're probably wasting our time because portals are being deleted so fast they will cease to exist in a few months' time. Secondly, the idea of portals as extensions of main page is the reason they are being deleted. They are so poorly linked (POG only requires one mainspace link) and have such low page views that the deletionists are using that as a major reason to eliminate them. Page views would go up with more links, but they will probably never be 'read' more than high-level categories and that is fine, but only if the community accepts them as navigation aids. My final point is that, if portals survive the current holocaust, it will only be because they are accepted as project tools used by editors to view at a glance the coverage of a topic and then expand and improve the topic area. With one or two exceptions, the only portals that have survived total annihilation so far are those that I have moved to project space. No-one seems to be objecting to that... yet. So, yes, the portal system does need an overhaul, but I think it's now too late. Their almost total destruction is imminent. Bermicourt ( talk) 06:26, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
Portals are redundant. Interested in mathematics? Go to mathematics. There's your L0 portal. Categories and navboxes are all we need. Less is more. — UnladenSwallow ( talk) 17:42, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
Smokey Joe makes a good point: "clarity of purpose is a good idea." It's clear from the various comments that we all have different POVs on the purpose of portals and that, naturally, leads to different POVs on their utility. What is also true is that this lack of consensus has been a major factor in the perception that 'portals are redundant' which is another way of saying "I personally don't have a use for them". My practical experience is that portals have real utility, if well constructed and linked, as navigation and project tools, but too many editors have seen them purely as showcases having to compete somehow with articles. Bermicourt ( talk) 06:53, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
the perception that 'portals are redundant' which is another way of saying "I personally don't have a use for them"It's not about utility, it's about the consumption model. When people want to learn about something, they google it from the browser's address bar. Then they go to a news article, a YouTube video, the official website, or a Wikipedia article. If they choose to go to a Wikipedia article, they may occasionally dig deeper by following the links (including links in navboxes) until they satisfy their curiosity. No one ever thinks: "Oh, this topic I'm interested in is related to mathematics, so I'd better open the Mathematics portal and try to find it there." 99.9% of Wikipedia users don't even know portals exist.
if anyone wants to start a topic of this nature, then maybe as one good starting point, or maybe as one possible item to include, perhaps we might agree that at least there are some portals which are well-run and which prove the value of portals in general. this might be one possible starting point for establishing and illustrating some good practices for defining portals in general.
here is a HIGHLY incomplete list of some of these. can our group get some consensus that these are some of the portals that are considered valid and worthwhile? Is that one good starting point? By the way, the purpose of this list is just to agree on a few examples; this list is not intended to be complete in any way; i.e., this is not exhaustive, and I am not saying that all portals other than these should be deleted. Thanks!
Useful portals:
As an alternate approach, here is another format to present sets of portals systematically, i.e. portal bars, to highlight some portals that are of great importance. here is science portalbar, i.e. based on existing template:
some other possible portal bars, i.e. that I simply compiled on my own:
etc etc Sm8900 ( talk) 19:51, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
Hello to the members of this project. I noticed that the replacement of the Christmas portal with the Christianity one has led to the latter being a part of articles like Silent Night, Bloody Night, Robert L. May and Steam Railroading Institute which seems inappropriate. I guess the dilemma is that not every article about Christmas has to do with religion. I know portals have different guidelines than categories and I'm guessing it would be a major project to deal with this so whatever the members of this project decide will be fine but I did want to let you know about it. MarnetteD| Talk 05:10, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
Is there a system for finding and fixing cases where a WikiProject banner has a portal for the main WikiProject, and the same portal associated with one of its taskforces? For example,
this edit by
BrownHairedGirl (
talk ·
contribs) which resulted in {{
WikiProject Pakistan|Islamabad=yes}}
showing
Portal:Pakistan twice. I
fixed it, but how many other similar cases are there? --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk)
18:06, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
Template:Basic portal start page has been
nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at
the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page.
Certes (
talk)
16:22, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
I propose that every portal should fall under a single, specific WikiProject. If there is not either a single WikiProject for the topic of the portal, or a single WikiProject under which the portal would fall as a subtopic, then the portal should not exist. There should be no intersectional portals combining topic areas. An example of such a portal would be the recently deleted portal for "Television in Australia" (see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Television in Australia (2nd nomination)), or the current Portal:Football in Africa, Portal:Military history of Europe, Portal:Michigan highways, Portal:UK waterways, and Portal:Geography of Kenya. To the extent that these topics are important, they should already be covered in Portal:Association football, Portal:Kenya, Portal:United Kingdom, and the like. Similarly, to the extent that there is no Wikipedia:WikiProject Telephone, there should be no Portal:Telephones. bd2412 T 01:39, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
it makes huge sense that portals are supported and maintained by a WikiProject. However, a crude one-portal-per-project map doesn't work neatly, because some projects have very broad topics, such as WP:WikiProject North America. What we need is each portal to be actively supported by at least one active WikiProject. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 20:23, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
any portal must be actively supported by at least one active WikiProject, then I think you will have a good proposal to take to RFC. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 20:49, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
Observing the slow decline of portals, I remembered a maxim on Reddit that few people read beyond the headline of a newspaper article before commenting. Despite numerous complaints from other Redditors and critiques of behavior, the trend keeps happening: people just read the headline and comment (without even reading other comments). There is an element of human nature that is sadly unchangeable. I think it goes to show that many humans are either very busy, or very lazy, or a combination of both.
The fact portals are placed at the bottom means that they cannot serve their supposed purpose, as their intended audience (in my view), the casual reader intending to see a short, easy to digest gateway into a topic won't see them; I would be very interested if the WMF is keeping track of how many people even scroll to the end of the article and what percentage do so.
I have read comments saying top-level articles like mathematics are better than portals, but many top-level articles are no longer short and easy to digest, and I don't see casual readers reading the whole thing to get the details of the subject, let alone go to the bottom of the page. I write many articles for scholars/people deeply interested in the subjects, but I think we as Wikipedians need to think with the casual reader, with an average level of education, in mind.
I strongly suspect that this human nature of not going to the bottom (for casual readers) is, in addition to the issues of displaying portals on mobile devices and Google now summarizing Wikipedia articles in its search engine, one factor on why portals with thousands of links are starved of readers. If portals are to survive, they should go to the top where readers first view the article, and if there are MoS restrictions that prevent that, either the restrictions go, or portals will be condemned to a slow decline for more years. WhisperToMe ( talk) 11:44, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
short, easy to digest gateway into a topicthat they be highlighted at the top of the page. But given the generally abysmal state of design, content, construction and maintenance of wiki-portals, that case clearly fails.
…so on average, only about one in 8,000 visitors to the main page follows a link to those portals.Wow. Now I'm even more convinced that portals have to go. These statistics show that users aren't using portals not because they're badly maintained—they simply don't want to click on these thematic links at the top. The search box is all they need. I guess most people think that these thematic links are some sort of article catalogs and decide (correctly) that it would be easier and faster to just type in what they need. So there's no need even for "L0" portals. — UnladenSwallow ( talk) 04:46, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
Subpage of a failed proposal, Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines/Categorizing brings a number of outdated information leading to WP: SMALLCAT, there is no need to create categories to include a single portal and its subpages. In a scenario of reduce portals and with the required categories already created I propose blank Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines/Categorizing and tag with {{ Historical}}. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 15:23, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
I regularly consult Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Popular portals and realize that even with the exclusions of over one thousand portals (some with over 1,000 monthly views) the global pageviews of the portal space have not decreased.
This may be an argument in favor of those who advocate fewer well-maintained portals.
Is there any tool that can quantify the evolution of pageviews more accurately?
I also realized that after upgrading the portals are more viewed, but still do not attract the attention of editors. Examples: Portal:Computer programming and Portal:Chess. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 15:28, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
![]() | A request for comment regarding the use of direct transclusion in portals and the newer portal transclusion templates is occurring at the Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) page, here. |
Has it ever been considered, separating portals from English Wikipedia? We've got Wikinews, Wiktionary & other sister 'pedias. Perhaps portals (which are mostly ignored, by a vast majority of the community) should be given there own home. GoodDay ( talk) 14:35, 28 November 2019 (UTC)
I believe that after the divorce of the content pages with the portal space the ideal would be for the portal space to have its own main page. I suggest the example of the page in German language Draft:Portal:Wikipedia by topic. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 18:18, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
Has anyone else noticed this? I've now seen it happen twice. Espresso Addict ( talk) 05:17, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
Please comment this MfD on {{ box-footer}} remains from the past. Hopefully it's now kosher to discuss technicalities that should not bother anyone. Nemo 08:30, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
For the benefit of anyone not watching the subpage, I've jotted down a few thoughts at /Tasks#January 2020. Certes ( talk) 14:03, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
Not sure where to place this query, but I notice that the words and link for Dubh Artach have mysteriously been swallowed from the Scottish islands portal transcluded excerpt. There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason for this in the article, and I am sure it was working at one point. Can anyone troubleshoot? Cheers, Espresso Addict ( talk) 02:05, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
Module:Excerpt has a new release to handle wikitables better. The change is intended for non-portal use and should have little effect on this project, but please report any problems. Certes ( talk) 12:55, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
Hi everyone. I suggest that any new portal maintainers leave a brief greeting here, or self-introduction, or whatever they may wish. just a suggestion. let us know the portal(s) you are watching. -- Sm8900 ( talk) 14:19, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
I've been discussing with Nemo bis whether portal intro sections should use Module:Excerpt transclusion from the main topic article. I don't think it is a great idea, for various reasons. I focus on country portals, as these are my main field of expertise (if any). Typical issues/non-issues I see with transclusion:
Overall, I think that bespoke portal introductions (for example made by summarising an article's lead section) can be far superior to automated ones, and replacing them by Template:Transclude lead excerpt is only an improvement in certain cases. For an example, here is Portal:Mexico with bespoke intro and Portal:Mexico with transclusion. Can we get to some sort of agreement that transclusion is not a magic bullet and that we shouldn't rely on it for everything? — Kusma ( t· c) 21:10, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
|showall=
to show all excerpts on the editor-facing subpage but only one in the reader-facing main portal, as done for
Portal:Speculative fiction/Selected biography.
Certes (
talk)
01:00, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
I may be a bit impatient, but I often find the load times of some lua-heavy portals (say, the otherwise rather nice Portal:Canada and especially Portal:Canada/Indices) rather unbearable (and I sometimes get Wikimedia errors or timeouts). I just wanted to look at the Canada portal and had to use a different browser where I am not logged in and get cached content instead of having the page generated for me (which timed out for the indices page). For a similar reason, I just removed {{ portal suggestions}} from Portal talk:Germany: it slows down loading that page by several seconds, and we (the maintainers of Portal:Germany) know how to find that information or actually have special subpages that use lua transclusion. I think it would be useful to try to keep Lua runtime under a second or so (unless good reasons exist to exceed that). — Kusma ( t· c) 20:32, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
(Page length in bytes 13,483) are absolutely tiny compared to some articles. Do you have problems with say.... United States (Page length in bytes -413,442) that is 10x the size and at the transclusion template limit? Does Lua work the same for all? I ask because Portal:Canada loads much much faster then the article Canada does for me. I am eager to solve accessibility problem.... and make sure we put anything we can help come up with in the accessibility guideline.-- Moxy 🍁 22:47, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
This is Portal:Canada/Indices according to the HTML source:
NewPP limit report Parsed by mw1332 Cached time: 20200205062224 Cache expiry: 21600 Dynamic content: true Complications: [] CPU time usage: 8.632 seconds Real time usage: 9.292 seconds Preprocessor visited node count: 18291/1000000 Preprocessor generated node count: 0/1500000 Post‐expand include size: 1334998/2097152 bytes Template argument size: 497045/2097152 bytes Highest expansion depth: 16/40 Expensive parser function count: 15/500 Unstrip recursion depth: 0/20 Unstrip post‐expand size: 46930/5000000 bytes Number of Wikibase entities loaded: 0/400 Lua time usage: 7.381/10.000 seconds Lua memory usage: 22.05 MB/50 MB Lua Profile: Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::match 4700 ms 64.0% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::gsub 880 ms 12.0% ? 440 ms 6.0% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::getContent 320 ms 4.4% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::find 180 ms 2.5% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::sub 160 ms 2.2% recursiveClone <mwInit.lua:41> 140 ms 1.9% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::expandTemplate 100 ms 1.4% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::getExpandedArgument 80 ms 1.1% type 60 ms 0.8% [others] 280 ms 3.8%
versus Portal:Speculative fiction:
NewPP limit report Parsed by mw1261 Cached time: 20200205062452 Cache expiry: 2592000 Dynamic content: false Complications: [] CPU time usage: 1.164 seconds Real time usage: 1.763 seconds Preprocessor visited node count: 7418/1000000 Preprocessor generated node count: 0/1500000 Post‐expand include size: 688934/2097152 bytes Template argument size: 29543/2097152 bytes Highest expansion depth: 22/40 Expensive parser function count: 80/500 Unstrip recursion depth: 0/20 Unstrip post‐expand size: 1392/5000000 bytes Number of Wikibase entities loaded: 0/400 Lua time usage: 0.331/10.000 seconds Lua memory usage: 4.72 MB/50 MB
The "real time usage" is time the server takes to prepare the page. From my request until the page is loaded can easily take a lot longer. In any case, the Speculative fiction portal feels responsive, and the Canada portal feels sluggish. With its tabbed design, clicking on the tabs should give a much faster response. As it is, it works far better if you are not logged in. — Kusma ( t· c) 06:34, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
I would like to convert Portal:Geography to the single-page layout, to have a single-page model among the most accessed portals. But I fear that like other portals I converted, it will be summarily reversed. How are the discussions on portal automation going? I made some edits to Portal:Religion in that way. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 14:07, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
Transclusion templates now have a |list=
option to add a collapsed list of candidate articles. See
Portal:Liquor for an example of its use. There are concerns about its appearance on mobile, so the implementation may change.
Certes (
talk)
17:36, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
It would be interesting to implement a similar gallery for the image templates. I wanted to open a topic about this, but I need to mature the idea, basically today none of the ways to display images on portals is satisfactory. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 10:49, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
As part of the ongoing project, I've created the Portal:COVID-19 to be an overview - help improve it if you're interested! Kingsif ( talk) 15:23, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
Two more portals ( Portal:Coronavirus disease 2019, Portal:Pandemic) that will soon be abandoned and without readers. I believe that after all the discussion about narrow topic in portals, the ideal would be to update the Portal:Viruses to alert about these very important issues now, but which will soon be narrow. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 17:27, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
I'd like to say nice things here about the editors performing an enormous public service in creating and improving this impressive portal. Good work. I'd like to ask those interested (and those involved) to talk about what works here, what choices were successful and what we can learn from this unique situation. I'd like to see positives at this stage. (we can certainly learn from negative comments at some point, but it seems we've been over-focused on this for some time.) Is anyone else interested is learning how an impressive and enlightening tool is created and maintained? I sense an opportunity to learn something from pragmatic choices. BusterD ( talk) 22:48, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
When we were discussing portals on the Scottywong subpage we were coming at the subject in the abstract. Now that we are discussing a concrete new creation, I'm wondering, do we think any differently about this portal's purpose? I'm particularly interested in what the creators were thinking. BusterD ( talk) 18:44, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
Wouldn't it be interesting to join themes in portals for broader portals? For example:
I have already opened some individual discussions, but they were immediately seen as deletionism, and some editors prefer the maintenance of moribund and obsolete portals to trying something new. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 13:45, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
The discussion has been closed and archived to
Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive307
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I know, me proposing shutting down a WikiProject I'm in? What am I thinking? Well, I mainly joined to make sure things would go smoothly after that RfC to delete all portals - clearly it has not. As thus, I think a solution (among the others) would be to shut down the WikiProject responsible for many of the bad portal creations. Right now it appears all its doing is creating new portals, not maintaining or improving them - which is what a WikiProject is supposed to do. However, a less extreme solution would be to reform the project to actually maintain and improve the portals it creates, and creates portals sparingly. I'm fairly certain a task force making sure portals meet standards would be beneficial to the issue, and also making it clear that not everything needs a portal. I'm going for the latter option to reform - however, I'm going to leave the shutdown option up in the air in case people find good reason for it to be considered.
Hopefully this can help clarify this proposal somewhat - if none of these can be done reasonably (which I doubt they can't) the shutdown option should be considered. Kirbanzo ( userpage - talk - contribs) 23:01, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Survey on sub-proposal to shut down WikiProject Portals
Survey on sub-proposal to reform WikiProject Portals
Discussion on proposal to reform WikiProject Portals
|
I've added a couple of new parameters to {{
Transclude random subpage}}. Parameter |more=link text
allows adding a link to the index, similar to "More featured articles" on the
Main Page. Parameter |several=number
allows transcluding more than one subpage. Parameter |prefix=
prepends it before every transclusion. Usage of these new features can be seen at
Portal:Doctor Who. —
andrybak (
talk)
13:32, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
Portal:Scotland is broken in areas. The Selected article and Selected biography sections are only displaying images, and no text. This is occurring at all of the Selected items pages, which are accessible by using the tabs in the upper area of the portal. North America 1000 15:57, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by The Transhumanist ( talk • contribs) 2018-10-06T21:18:36 (UTC)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by The Transhumanist ( talk • contribs) 2018-11-13T15:04:01 (UTC)
Hi, I'm trying to revive/revitalize the Methodism work group. This portal absolutely falls within our Project and I'd like to help maintain it, but I know nothing about portals. If anyone's willing to help me learn I'm willing to help maintain. Jerod Lycett ( talk) 22:09, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
|showall=
within a noinclude tag.
Certes (
talk)
11:07, 9 February 2020 (UTC)Did you know...
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No recent news |
I'm trying to recreate the Black Lives Matter portal, which was deleted because it was based on a single navbox. The consensus from said MfD explicitly stated "No prejudice against creating properly curated portals that satisfy WP:POG" (note that WP:POG has been deprecated since then). I believe the topic warrants a portal because it is a broad enough topic, and because Portal:Coronavirus disease 2019 was created under similar circumstances (a portal created as part of a WikiProject covering a developing current event). An admin (the user Pharos) provided me with a copy of the deleted portal in my userspace (which I linked to in the section header). The specific advice I would like to ask is: what steps should be taken to move away from the single navbox design and towards a properly curated portal that won't be deleted? DraconicDark ( talk) 02:51, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
There are many portals with borders provided by codes like {| width="100%" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="8" style="background:white; border-style:solid; border-width:1px; border-color:black;"
I always remove these borders because they displaying the portals incorrectly on smartphones. But some users consider it a good esthetic detail on the portals.(example
Portal:Technology @
Northamerica1000:) Low visualization of portals on smartphones is a problem, wouldn't it be better to remove these borders from all portals?
Guilherme Burn (
talk)
14:46, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
The question I wanted to discuss is not the problem itself, but ... isn't it better to just remove that border from all portals? It's just an esthetic detail. So, the portals would look more like the Main page, which does not have this border. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 12:29, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
Portal templates have been changed to use the new Module:Excerpt/portals, which is merged from the existing modules. Module:Excerpt has since received changes to assist its use in other namespaces. These changes should not affect portals. Certes ( talk) 13:31, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
I have fixed the few portals which had Lua timeout errors by reducing the size of those large page pools which were taking too long to select from.
The only remaining problem is on Portal:San Francisco Bay Area, which has too many expensive function calls. If there are no objections, I propose to fix this by replacing Module:Random portal component by its sandbox. This will populate categories such as Random portal component with 26–30 available subpages much more efficiently but may give slightly different results. It will also produce a page even when the first page randomly chosen is missing from the pool, and should generally speed up rendering of this style of portal. Certes ( talk) 15:26, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
I have noticed that many portals are woefully lacking links to them in main namespace articles, such as in article See also sections. Check out Category:Portals needing placement of incoming links for some of them. If articles lack portal links, them many WP:READERS will not know about the portals' existence. Regarding this matter, the egg needs to come before the chicken. Readers need links to see what's available on Wikipedia. Assistance in adding links to portals would be appreciated. North America 1000 13:48, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
Something bad is happening with the template at Portal talk:Andorra — Martin ( MSGJ · talk) 21:47, 25 October 2020 (UTC)
A bot is proposed to purge pages. This may become useful for refreshing portals which have regularly changing content, such as an "on this day" anniversary section, or simply to turn over content selected randomly from lists. Certes ( talk) 11:05, 28 October 2020 (UTC)
There are three discussion pages at the WikiProject Portals:
I personally find it difficult to navigate. This separation seems unnecessary. Having to choose between seven different subsections on where to start a discussion is an unnecessary overhead when starting a new discussion. Should we merge these three pages with their seven subsections into a single page with no subsections? If needed, the discussions which require admin attention could get its own template, similar to {{ Request edit}} and/or {{ Admin help}}. Bugs could be placed on its own subpage Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Bugs and transcluded to the top of this page, similar to what template {{ todo}} does. — andrybak ( talk) 14:37, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
Done, discussion pages have been merged.
Header of this talk page has been simplified. —
andrybak (
talk)
13:16, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
Recognised content is currently being systematically removed from portal talk pages. It is unclear what effects this will have on the corresponding portals. Certes ( talk) 16:46, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
{{User:JL-Bot/Recognized content}}
was added en masse to Portal talk pages by
The Transhumanist back in 2018 or so.Portal talk:
namespace is for discussion, while
WP:RECOG is not discussion-related. It should in the #[[Portal:
, either directly on the root of the portal, or in a subpage]]For the record, the list of affected pages is
I'm still investigating which of the associated portals already have a /Recognized content subpage, and which are displaying recognized content on their mainpage. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 17:21, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
The list of those without something on the main page, AFAICT, is
And a list of those without some type of recognized content on their main page, but not one maintained by JL-Bot
Extended content
|
---|
Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 18:08, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
Note that whatever solution/implementation/messaging regarding recognized content list should likely apply to all portals without recognized content lists, not just the ones I listed above. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 18:18, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
A mass message to portals explaining (all of them) how to set this up properly or customize their existing listings would likely be the ideal solution. I can craft one. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 17:55, 8 November 2020 (UTC)
New template {{
Portal pictures}}, backed by
Module:Portal pictures has been created. This template greatly simplifies the process of maintaining a "Selected pictures" box on a portal. Firstly, the main focus of this template is usage of already prepared subpages of
Template:POTD. Secondly, the template uses a "single page approach"—only a single page needs to be touched to add a new selected picture to the list, i.e. the template {{
Portal pictures}} does not need manual updates of the |max=
parameter, which is usually needed for numbered subpages approach.
An example of using this template can be seen on the Portal:Sports. All selected picture subpages from Portal:Sports/Selected picture/1 to Portal:Sports/Selected picture/40 were merged into a single-page list at Portal:Sports/Selected picture. Then the subpage was transcluded on the main page of the portal. Example of adding a new picture after the conversion: Special:Diff/986398178.
Any feedback is welcome. — andrybak ( talk) 16:09, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
A number of templates used by portals produce a "Read more..." link at the end of an excerpt, for example {{ Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}}. I suggest switching all these templates to the text "Full article..." to make it similar to the TFA section on the Main Page. Historical side note: the text of the link in the TFA section changed a lot at the end of 2012. In a span of a month in went from the original "more..." to "Read the full article", to Read the full article... (with ellipsis), and finally to Full article...), which was eventually converted into the Template:TFAFULL ( first usage). — andrybak ( talk) 12:05, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
"Read more..." is used all over outside the templates—tracking down every usage can be done with an insource query: [13]. These can be updated with WP:AWB or WP:JWB. — andrybak ( talk) 19:44, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
|more=
in the excerpt template or an explicit "Read more..." in {{
Box-footer}} but not both.
Certes (
talk)
15:27, 6 November 2020 (UTC)|more=
except for France which has custom wording.
Certes (
talk)
15:19, 7 November 2020 (UTC)insource:/more *= *\(/
[14]. —
andrybak (
talk)
13:44, 26 November 2020 (UTC)
It looks like the update to this has broken the showall option -- See for example Portal:Scottish islands/Biography, which I'm sure used to show all the selections, but now only shows one. Espresso Addict ( talk) 17:52, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Remember that whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, carriage returns, and line feeds) are not automatically stripped from the start and end of unnamed parameters.
![]() | 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 12 | Archive 13 | Archive 14 | Archive 15 |
The portals at Wikipedia are expected to serve as gateways for readers interested in specific subject areas for browsing the best Wikipedia has to offer in that area. In other words the portals are supposed to be extensions of the main page, but more focused in a specific topic area. Given the Wikipedia communities agree on the need of such gateways or extensions of main page the main page should not only link, but also prominently feature and promote a few portals which should be selected and organized in meaningful / systematic manner. Currently the main page does link a few portals, but there is room for improvement in the way they are organized.
I would like to propose a system of “Portal Tree” which would help decide which portals should be linked to main page and also serve the purpose of deciding which portals are needed and which are good to have.
The main page should link to portals which would offer to break-down Wikipedia into certain themes. Let’s call these portals linked from the main page as L0 Portals:
(of course the above list is an output of my initial brainstorming. Wikipedia community can discuss and decide what should be the ideal structure)
I would also recommend that each L0 Portal within a given theme should have some structural consistency.
Each L0 portal, should lead to sets of sub-portals - let's call them L1 Portals. L1 Portals will be a logical sub-division of an L0 portal. For example a Country Portal can be an L1 Portal to a Continent Portal.
L0 and L1 Portals should be designed in a way that they give a balanced representation of the topic covered. With that goal, they should be allowed to display contents (articles/lists) of up to B-Class and any media of relevance to the topic area. DYK and News items should ideally be sourced from main page. Until a L0/L1 Portal reaches a certain level of acceptance of quality, they may show a Notification message on top saying "This portal is currently undergoing update and may not give a balanced representation of the topic."
L1, and L0 portals will not be deleted on the ground of quality or page views.
In addition, if community wants, there can be additional "Featured Portals" (let's call LF) linked to L0 / L1 portals which would only focus on a narrow subject area where Wikipedia has highly developed content. LF Portals will only be used to feature FA / GA / FL rated contents.
Examples of LF Portals would be portals on Specific Cities, tournaments, specific non human species etc.
LF level portals can and should be deleted if they fail to maintain standard.
Please place your comments under in the comments section below. Arman ( Talk) 06:15, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
I have a couple of comments: firstly, we're probably wasting our time because portals are being deleted so fast they will cease to exist in a few months' time. Secondly, the idea of portals as extensions of main page is the reason they are being deleted. They are so poorly linked (POG only requires one mainspace link) and have such low page views that the deletionists are using that as a major reason to eliminate them. Page views would go up with more links, but they will probably never be 'read' more than high-level categories and that is fine, but only if the community accepts them as navigation aids. My final point is that, if portals survive the current holocaust, it will only be because they are accepted as project tools used by editors to view at a glance the coverage of a topic and then expand and improve the topic area. With one or two exceptions, the only portals that have survived total annihilation so far are those that I have moved to project space. No-one seems to be objecting to that... yet. So, yes, the portal system does need an overhaul, but I think it's now too late. Their almost total destruction is imminent. Bermicourt ( talk) 06:26, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
Portals are redundant. Interested in mathematics? Go to mathematics. There's your L0 portal. Categories and navboxes are all we need. Less is more. — UnladenSwallow ( talk) 17:42, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
Smokey Joe makes a good point: "clarity of purpose is a good idea." It's clear from the various comments that we all have different POVs on the purpose of portals and that, naturally, leads to different POVs on their utility. What is also true is that this lack of consensus has been a major factor in the perception that 'portals are redundant' which is another way of saying "I personally don't have a use for them". My practical experience is that portals have real utility, if well constructed and linked, as navigation and project tools, but too many editors have seen them purely as showcases having to compete somehow with articles. Bermicourt ( talk) 06:53, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
the perception that 'portals are redundant' which is another way of saying "I personally don't have a use for them"It's not about utility, it's about the consumption model. When people want to learn about something, they google it from the browser's address bar. Then they go to a news article, a YouTube video, the official website, or a Wikipedia article. If they choose to go to a Wikipedia article, they may occasionally dig deeper by following the links (including links in navboxes) until they satisfy their curiosity. No one ever thinks: "Oh, this topic I'm interested in is related to mathematics, so I'd better open the Mathematics portal and try to find it there." 99.9% of Wikipedia users don't even know portals exist.
if anyone wants to start a topic of this nature, then maybe as one good starting point, or maybe as one possible item to include, perhaps we might agree that at least there are some portals which are well-run and which prove the value of portals in general. this might be one possible starting point for establishing and illustrating some good practices for defining portals in general.
here is a HIGHLY incomplete list of some of these. can our group get some consensus that these are some of the portals that are considered valid and worthwhile? Is that one good starting point? By the way, the purpose of this list is just to agree on a few examples; this list is not intended to be complete in any way; i.e., this is not exhaustive, and I am not saying that all portals other than these should be deleted. Thanks!
Useful portals:
As an alternate approach, here is another format to present sets of portals systematically, i.e. portal bars, to highlight some portals that are of great importance. here is science portalbar, i.e. based on existing template:
some other possible portal bars, i.e. that I simply compiled on my own:
etc etc Sm8900 ( talk) 19:51, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
Hello to the members of this project. I noticed that the replacement of the Christmas portal with the Christianity one has led to the latter being a part of articles like Silent Night, Bloody Night, Robert L. May and Steam Railroading Institute which seems inappropriate. I guess the dilemma is that not every article about Christmas has to do with religion. I know portals have different guidelines than categories and I'm guessing it would be a major project to deal with this so whatever the members of this project decide will be fine but I did want to let you know about it. MarnetteD| Talk 05:10, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
Is there a system for finding and fixing cases where a WikiProject banner has a portal for the main WikiProject, and the same portal associated with one of its taskforces? For example,
this edit by
BrownHairedGirl (
talk ·
contribs) which resulted in {{
WikiProject Pakistan|Islamabad=yes}}
showing
Portal:Pakistan twice. I
fixed it, but how many other similar cases are there? --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk)
18:06, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
Template:Basic portal start page has been
nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at
the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page.
Certes (
talk)
16:22, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
I propose that every portal should fall under a single, specific WikiProject. If there is not either a single WikiProject for the topic of the portal, or a single WikiProject under which the portal would fall as a subtopic, then the portal should not exist. There should be no intersectional portals combining topic areas. An example of such a portal would be the recently deleted portal for "Television in Australia" (see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Television in Australia (2nd nomination)), or the current Portal:Football in Africa, Portal:Military history of Europe, Portal:Michigan highways, Portal:UK waterways, and Portal:Geography of Kenya. To the extent that these topics are important, they should already be covered in Portal:Association football, Portal:Kenya, Portal:United Kingdom, and the like. Similarly, to the extent that there is no Wikipedia:WikiProject Telephone, there should be no Portal:Telephones. bd2412 T 01:39, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
it makes huge sense that portals are supported and maintained by a WikiProject. However, a crude one-portal-per-project map doesn't work neatly, because some projects have very broad topics, such as WP:WikiProject North America. What we need is each portal to be actively supported by at least one active WikiProject. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 20:23, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
any portal must be actively supported by at least one active WikiProject, then I think you will have a good proposal to take to RFC. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 20:49, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
Observing the slow decline of portals, I remembered a maxim on Reddit that few people read beyond the headline of a newspaper article before commenting. Despite numerous complaints from other Redditors and critiques of behavior, the trend keeps happening: people just read the headline and comment (without even reading other comments). There is an element of human nature that is sadly unchangeable. I think it goes to show that many humans are either very busy, or very lazy, or a combination of both.
The fact portals are placed at the bottom means that they cannot serve their supposed purpose, as their intended audience (in my view), the casual reader intending to see a short, easy to digest gateway into a topic won't see them; I would be very interested if the WMF is keeping track of how many people even scroll to the end of the article and what percentage do so.
I have read comments saying top-level articles like mathematics are better than portals, but many top-level articles are no longer short and easy to digest, and I don't see casual readers reading the whole thing to get the details of the subject, let alone go to the bottom of the page. I write many articles for scholars/people deeply interested in the subjects, but I think we as Wikipedians need to think with the casual reader, with an average level of education, in mind.
I strongly suspect that this human nature of not going to the bottom (for casual readers) is, in addition to the issues of displaying portals on mobile devices and Google now summarizing Wikipedia articles in its search engine, one factor on why portals with thousands of links are starved of readers. If portals are to survive, they should go to the top where readers first view the article, and if there are MoS restrictions that prevent that, either the restrictions go, or portals will be condemned to a slow decline for more years. WhisperToMe ( talk) 11:44, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
short, easy to digest gateway into a topicthat they be highlighted at the top of the page. But given the generally abysmal state of design, content, construction and maintenance of wiki-portals, that case clearly fails.
…so on average, only about one in 8,000 visitors to the main page follows a link to those portals.Wow. Now I'm even more convinced that portals have to go. These statistics show that users aren't using portals not because they're badly maintained—they simply don't want to click on these thematic links at the top. The search box is all they need. I guess most people think that these thematic links are some sort of article catalogs and decide (correctly) that it would be easier and faster to just type in what they need. So there's no need even for "L0" portals. — UnladenSwallow ( talk) 04:46, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
Subpage of a failed proposal, Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines/Categorizing brings a number of outdated information leading to WP: SMALLCAT, there is no need to create categories to include a single portal and its subpages. In a scenario of reduce portals and with the required categories already created I propose blank Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines/Categorizing and tag with {{ Historical}}. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 15:23, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
I regularly consult Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Popular portals and realize that even with the exclusions of over one thousand portals (some with over 1,000 monthly views) the global pageviews of the portal space have not decreased.
This may be an argument in favor of those who advocate fewer well-maintained portals.
Is there any tool that can quantify the evolution of pageviews more accurately?
I also realized that after upgrading the portals are more viewed, but still do not attract the attention of editors. Examples: Portal:Computer programming and Portal:Chess. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 15:28, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
![]() | A request for comment regarding the use of direct transclusion in portals and the newer portal transclusion templates is occurring at the Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) page, here. |
Has it ever been considered, separating portals from English Wikipedia? We've got Wikinews, Wiktionary & other sister 'pedias. Perhaps portals (which are mostly ignored, by a vast majority of the community) should be given there own home. GoodDay ( talk) 14:35, 28 November 2019 (UTC)
I believe that after the divorce of the content pages with the portal space the ideal would be for the portal space to have its own main page. I suggest the example of the page in German language Draft:Portal:Wikipedia by topic. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 18:18, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
Has anyone else noticed this? I've now seen it happen twice. Espresso Addict ( talk) 05:17, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
Please comment this MfD on {{ box-footer}} remains from the past. Hopefully it's now kosher to discuss technicalities that should not bother anyone. Nemo 08:30, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
For the benefit of anyone not watching the subpage, I've jotted down a few thoughts at /Tasks#January 2020. Certes ( talk) 14:03, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
Not sure where to place this query, but I notice that the words and link for Dubh Artach have mysteriously been swallowed from the Scottish islands portal transcluded excerpt. There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason for this in the article, and I am sure it was working at one point. Can anyone troubleshoot? Cheers, Espresso Addict ( talk) 02:05, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
Module:Excerpt has a new release to handle wikitables better. The change is intended for non-portal use and should have little effect on this project, but please report any problems. Certes ( talk) 12:55, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
Hi everyone. I suggest that any new portal maintainers leave a brief greeting here, or self-introduction, or whatever they may wish. just a suggestion. let us know the portal(s) you are watching. -- Sm8900 ( talk) 14:19, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
I've been discussing with Nemo bis whether portal intro sections should use Module:Excerpt transclusion from the main topic article. I don't think it is a great idea, for various reasons. I focus on country portals, as these are my main field of expertise (if any). Typical issues/non-issues I see with transclusion:
Overall, I think that bespoke portal introductions (for example made by summarising an article's lead section) can be far superior to automated ones, and replacing them by Template:Transclude lead excerpt is only an improvement in certain cases. For an example, here is Portal:Mexico with bespoke intro and Portal:Mexico with transclusion. Can we get to some sort of agreement that transclusion is not a magic bullet and that we shouldn't rely on it for everything? — Kusma ( t· c) 21:10, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
|showall=
to show all excerpts on the editor-facing subpage but only one in the reader-facing main portal, as done for
Portal:Speculative fiction/Selected biography.
Certes (
talk)
01:00, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
I may be a bit impatient, but I often find the load times of some lua-heavy portals (say, the otherwise rather nice Portal:Canada and especially Portal:Canada/Indices) rather unbearable (and I sometimes get Wikimedia errors or timeouts). I just wanted to look at the Canada portal and had to use a different browser where I am not logged in and get cached content instead of having the page generated for me (which timed out for the indices page). For a similar reason, I just removed {{ portal suggestions}} from Portal talk:Germany: it slows down loading that page by several seconds, and we (the maintainers of Portal:Germany) know how to find that information or actually have special subpages that use lua transclusion. I think it would be useful to try to keep Lua runtime under a second or so (unless good reasons exist to exceed that). — Kusma ( t· c) 20:32, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
(Page length in bytes 13,483) are absolutely tiny compared to some articles. Do you have problems with say.... United States (Page length in bytes -413,442) that is 10x the size and at the transclusion template limit? Does Lua work the same for all? I ask because Portal:Canada loads much much faster then the article Canada does for me. I am eager to solve accessibility problem.... and make sure we put anything we can help come up with in the accessibility guideline.-- Moxy 🍁 22:47, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
This is Portal:Canada/Indices according to the HTML source:
NewPP limit report Parsed by mw1332 Cached time: 20200205062224 Cache expiry: 21600 Dynamic content: true Complications: [] CPU time usage: 8.632 seconds Real time usage: 9.292 seconds Preprocessor visited node count: 18291/1000000 Preprocessor generated node count: 0/1500000 Post‐expand include size: 1334998/2097152 bytes Template argument size: 497045/2097152 bytes Highest expansion depth: 16/40 Expensive parser function count: 15/500 Unstrip recursion depth: 0/20 Unstrip post‐expand size: 46930/5000000 bytes Number of Wikibase entities loaded: 0/400 Lua time usage: 7.381/10.000 seconds Lua memory usage: 22.05 MB/50 MB Lua Profile: Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::match 4700 ms 64.0% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::gsub 880 ms 12.0% ? 440 ms 6.0% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::getContent 320 ms 4.4% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::find 180 ms 2.5% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::sub 160 ms 2.2% recursiveClone <mwInit.lua:41> 140 ms 1.9% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::expandTemplate 100 ms 1.4% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::getExpandedArgument 80 ms 1.1% type 60 ms 0.8% [others] 280 ms 3.8%
versus Portal:Speculative fiction:
NewPP limit report Parsed by mw1261 Cached time: 20200205062452 Cache expiry: 2592000 Dynamic content: false Complications: [] CPU time usage: 1.164 seconds Real time usage: 1.763 seconds Preprocessor visited node count: 7418/1000000 Preprocessor generated node count: 0/1500000 Post‐expand include size: 688934/2097152 bytes Template argument size: 29543/2097152 bytes Highest expansion depth: 22/40 Expensive parser function count: 80/500 Unstrip recursion depth: 0/20 Unstrip post‐expand size: 1392/5000000 bytes Number of Wikibase entities loaded: 0/400 Lua time usage: 0.331/10.000 seconds Lua memory usage: 4.72 MB/50 MB
The "real time usage" is time the server takes to prepare the page. From my request until the page is loaded can easily take a lot longer. In any case, the Speculative fiction portal feels responsive, and the Canada portal feels sluggish. With its tabbed design, clicking on the tabs should give a much faster response. As it is, it works far better if you are not logged in. — Kusma ( t· c) 06:34, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
I would like to convert Portal:Geography to the single-page layout, to have a single-page model among the most accessed portals. But I fear that like other portals I converted, it will be summarily reversed. How are the discussions on portal automation going? I made some edits to Portal:Religion in that way. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 14:07, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
Transclusion templates now have a |list=
option to add a collapsed list of candidate articles. See
Portal:Liquor for an example of its use. There are concerns about its appearance on mobile, so the implementation may change.
Certes (
talk)
17:36, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
It would be interesting to implement a similar gallery for the image templates. I wanted to open a topic about this, but I need to mature the idea, basically today none of the ways to display images on portals is satisfactory. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 10:49, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
As part of the ongoing project, I've created the Portal:COVID-19 to be an overview - help improve it if you're interested! Kingsif ( talk) 15:23, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
Two more portals ( Portal:Coronavirus disease 2019, Portal:Pandemic) that will soon be abandoned and without readers. I believe that after all the discussion about narrow topic in portals, the ideal would be to update the Portal:Viruses to alert about these very important issues now, but which will soon be narrow. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 17:27, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
I'd like to say nice things here about the editors performing an enormous public service in creating and improving this impressive portal. Good work. I'd like to ask those interested (and those involved) to talk about what works here, what choices were successful and what we can learn from this unique situation. I'd like to see positives at this stage. (we can certainly learn from negative comments at some point, but it seems we've been over-focused on this for some time.) Is anyone else interested is learning how an impressive and enlightening tool is created and maintained? I sense an opportunity to learn something from pragmatic choices. BusterD ( talk) 22:48, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
When we were discussing portals on the Scottywong subpage we were coming at the subject in the abstract. Now that we are discussing a concrete new creation, I'm wondering, do we think any differently about this portal's purpose? I'm particularly interested in what the creators were thinking. BusterD ( talk) 18:44, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
Wouldn't it be interesting to join themes in portals for broader portals? For example:
I have already opened some individual discussions, but they were immediately seen as deletionism, and some editors prefer the maintenance of moribund and obsolete portals to trying something new. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 13:45, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
The discussion has been closed and archived to
Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive307
| ||
---|---|---|
I know, me proposing shutting down a WikiProject I'm in? What am I thinking? Well, I mainly joined to make sure things would go smoothly after that RfC to delete all portals - clearly it has not. As thus, I think a solution (among the others) would be to shut down the WikiProject responsible for many of the bad portal creations. Right now it appears all its doing is creating new portals, not maintaining or improving them - which is what a WikiProject is supposed to do. However, a less extreme solution would be to reform the project to actually maintain and improve the portals it creates, and creates portals sparingly. I'm fairly certain a task force making sure portals meet standards would be beneficial to the issue, and also making it clear that not everything needs a portal. I'm going for the latter option to reform - however, I'm going to leave the shutdown option up in the air in case people find good reason for it to be considered.
Hopefully this can help clarify this proposal somewhat - if none of these can be done reasonably (which I doubt they can't) the shutdown option should be considered. Kirbanzo ( userpage - talk - contribs) 23:01, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Survey on sub-proposal to shut down WikiProject Portals
Survey on sub-proposal to reform WikiProject Portals
Discussion on proposal to reform WikiProject Portals
|
I've added a couple of new parameters to {{
Transclude random subpage}}. Parameter |more=link text
allows adding a link to the index, similar to "More featured articles" on the
Main Page. Parameter |several=number
allows transcluding more than one subpage. Parameter |prefix=
prepends it before every transclusion. Usage of these new features can be seen at
Portal:Doctor Who. —
andrybak (
talk)
13:32, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
Portal:Scotland is broken in areas. The Selected article and Selected biography sections are only displaying images, and no text. This is occurring at all of the Selected items pages, which are accessible by using the tabs in the upper area of the portal. North America 1000 15:57, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by The Transhumanist ( talk • contribs) 2018-10-06T21:18:36 (UTC)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by The Transhumanist ( talk • contribs) 2018-11-13T15:04:01 (UTC)
Hi, I'm trying to revive/revitalize the Methodism work group. This portal absolutely falls within our Project and I'd like to help maintain it, but I know nothing about portals. If anyone's willing to help me learn I'm willing to help maintain. Jerod Lycett ( talk) 22:09, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
|showall=
within a noinclude tag.
Certes (
talk)
11:07, 9 February 2020 (UTC)Did you know...
|
---|
No recent news |
I'm trying to recreate the Black Lives Matter portal, which was deleted because it was based on a single navbox. The consensus from said MfD explicitly stated "No prejudice against creating properly curated portals that satisfy WP:POG" (note that WP:POG has been deprecated since then). I believe the topic warrants a portal because it is a broad enough topic, and because Portal:Coronavirus disease 2019 was created under similar circumstances (a portal created as part of a WikiProject covering a developing current event). An admin (the user Pharos) provided me with a copy of the deleted portal in my userspace (which I linked to in the section header). The specific advice I would like to ask is: what steps should be taken to move away from the single navbox design and towards a properly curated portal that won't be deleted? DraconicDark ( talk) 02:51, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
There are many portals with borders provided by codes like {| width="100%" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="8" style="background:white; border-style:solid; border-width:1px; border-color:black;"
I always remove these borders because they displaying the portals incorrectly on smartphones. But some users consider it a good esthetic detail on the portals.(example
Portal:Technology @
Northamerica1000:) Low visualization of portals on smartphones is a problem, wouldn't it be better to remove these borders from all portals?
Guilherme Burn (
talk)
14:46, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
The question I wanted to discuss is not the problem itself, but ... isn't it better to just remove that border from all portals? It's just an esthetic detail. So, the portals would look more like the Main page, which does not have this border. Guilherme Burn ( talk) 12:29, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
Portal templates have been changed to use the new Module:Excerpt/portals, which is merged from the existing modules. Module:Excerpt has since received changes to assist its use in other namespaces. These changes should not affect portals. Certes ( talk) 13:31, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
I have fixed the few portals which had Lua timeout errors by reducing the size of those large page pools which were taking too long to select from.
The only remaining problem is on Portal:San Francisco Bay Area, which has too many expensive function calls. If there are no objections, I propose to fix this by replacing Module:Random portal component by its sandbox. This will populate categories such as Random portal component with 26–30 available subpages much more efficiently but may give slightly different results. It will also produce a page even when the first page randomly chosen is missing from the pool, and should generally speed up rendering of this style of portal. Certes ( talk) 15:26, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
I have noticed that many portals are woefully lacking links to them in main namespace articles, such as in article See also sections. Check out Category:Portals needing placement of incoming links for some of them. If articles lack portal links, them many WP:READERS will not know about the portals' existence. Regarding this matter, the egg needs to come before the chicken. Readers need links to see what's available on Wikipedia. Assistance in adding links to portals would be appreciated. North America 1000 13:48, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
Something bad is happening with the template at Portal talk:Andorra — Martin ( MSGJ · talk) 21:47, 25 October 2020 (UTC)
A bot is proposed to purge pages. This may become useful for refreshing portals which have regularly changing content, such as an "on this day" anniversary section, or simply to turn over content selected randomly from lists. Certes ( talk) 11:05, 28 October 2020 (UTC)
There are three discussion pages at the WikiProject Portals:
I personally find it difficult to navigate. This separation seems unnecessary. Having to choose between seven different subsections on where to start a discussion is an unnecessary overhead when starting a new discussion. Should we merge these three pages with their seven subsections into a single page with no subsections? If needed, the discussions which require admin attention could get its own template, similar to {{ Request edit}} and/or {{ Admin help}}. Bugs could be placed on its own subpage Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Bugs and transcluded to the top of this page, similar to what template {{ todo}} does. — andrybak ( talk) 14:37, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
Done, discussion pages have been merged.
Header of this talk page has been simplified. —
andrybak (
talk)
13:16, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
Recognised content is currently being systematically removed from portal talk pages. It is unclear what effects this will have on the corresponding portals. Certes ( talk) 16:46, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
{{User:JL-Bot/Recognized content}}
was added en masse to Portal talk pages by
The Transhumanist back in 2018 or so.Portal talk:
namespace is for discussion, while
WP:RECOG is not discussion-related. It should in the #[[Portal:
, either directly on the root of the portal, or in a subpage]]For the record, the list of affected pages is
I'm still investigating which of the associated portals already have a /Recognized content subpage, and which are displaying recognized content on their mainpage. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 17:21, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
The list of those without something on the main page, AFAICT, is
And a list of those without some type of recognized content on their main page, but not one maintained by JL-Bot
Extended content
|
---|
Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 18:08, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
Note that whatever solution/implementation/messaging regarding recognized content list should likely apply to all portals without recognized content lists, not just the ones I listed above. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 18:18, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
A mass message to portals explaining (all of them) how to set this up properly or customize their existing listings would likely be the ideal solution. I can craft one. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 17:55, 8 November 2020 (UTC)
New template {{
Portal pictures}}, backed by
Module:Portal pictures has been created. This template greatly simplifies the process of maintaining a "Selected pictures" box on a portal. Firstly, the main focus of this template is usage of already prepared subpages of
Template:POTD. Secondly, the template uses a "single page approach"—only a single page needs to be touched to add a new selected picture to the list, i.e. the template {{
Portal pictures}} does not need manual updates of the |max=
parameter, which is usually needed for numbered subpages approach.
An example of using this template can be seen on the Portal:Sports. All selected picture subpages from Portal:Sports/Selected picture/1 to Portal:Sports/Selected picture/40 were merged into a single-page list at Portal:Sports/Selected picture. Then the subpage was transcluded on the main page of the portal. Example of adding a new picture after the conversion: Special:Diff/986398178.
Any feedback is welcome. — andrybak ( talk) 16:09, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
A number of templates used by portals produce a "Read more..." link at the end of an excerpt, for example {{ Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}}. I suggest switching all these templates to the text "Full article..." to make it similar to the TFA section on the Main Page. Historical side note: the text of the link in the TFA section changed a lot at the end of 2012. In a span of a month in went from the original "more..." to "Read the full article", to Read the full article... (with ellipsis), and finally to Full article...), which was eventually converted into the Template:TFAFULL ( first usage). — andrybak ( talk) 12:05, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
"Read more..." is used all over outside the templates—tracking down every usage can be done with an insource query: [13]. These can be updated with WP:AWB or WP:JWB. — andrybak ( talk) 19:44, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
|more=
in the excerpt template or an explicit "Read more..." in {{
Box-footer}} but not both.
Certes (
talk)
15:27, 6 November 2020 (UTC)|more=
except for France which has custom wording.
Certes (
talk)
15:19, 7 November 2020 (UTC)insource:/more *= *\(/
[14]. —
andrybak (
talk)
13:44, 26 November 2020 (UTC)
It looks like the update to this has broken the showall option -- See for example Portal:Scottish islands/Biography, which I'm sure used to show all the selections, but now only shows one. Espresso Addict ( talk) 17:52, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Remember that whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, carriage returns, and line feeds) are not automatically stripped from the start and end of unnamed parameters.