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Before we can answer questions such as "What should portals do?", we really need to know what they are already doing, so we can answer, "Should they continue doing that?"
Identifying the components and features of portals...
What are the various components of portals? — The Transhumanist 09:05, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
As you come across component and feature types, especially automated ones, please add them to the following list:
Main-page-for-the-subject features
Bridge-to-editing / bridge-to-editor-community features
Footers
(Feel free to add to the above list).
Wechseln zu: Navigation, Suche
@ Slambo, Waggers, Nihonjoe, and Bermicourt: Thank you for your input. It appears that portals serve five main functions or feature types, three of which go hand-in-hand with the Main page model:
A characteristic that the Main page has, that most portals lack, is that the Main page is fully dynamic. That is, its content is cycled out regularly with new content, with old content being archived. Portals fall into 3 categories of dynamics:
A fourth category of dynamics, which we haven't seen in awhile, is innovative portals - portals that expand the limits of what portals do, with new features and capabilities. Hopefully, we are entering a phase in which this category will re-emerge.
Please feel free to add your own observations and comments. — The Transhumanist 23:38, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
Before we get too deeply involved in fixing portals, is it worth those of us in favour of retaining and maintaining them to stop and review their intended purpose and audiences?
It seems wise to so ensure everyone is working off the 'same page' here. I suggest it might be helpful to reconsider the following:
Feel free to add more to the list - or continue below. Nick Moyes ( talk) 19:24, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
Portals are indexed and public facing. If Google et al ignores them it might be because they are not typically very useful to the reader. Google is very good at curating content. Legacypac ( talk) 13:40, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
Hello, I think that portals should allow readers to explore the millions of Wikipedia articles, helping them to find interesting topics, people, facts, etc.
As Kusma says, portals are meant to discover new things, not to find specific information. Portals should be surprising to the reader. The unexpected should be expected.
Portals are completely different way than lists, categories and outlines. For example, long lists of links won't encourage people to click them. Therefore, portals use article snippets, which provide enough information to capture the reader's interest.
Some portals put too much effort on encouraging people to edit articles. I think that should be the purpose of wikiprojects, not portals. -- NaBUru38 ( talk) 22:32, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes, Broter, RockMagnetist, Waggers, Bahnfrend, Emir of Wikipedia, and Pbsouthwood:
Good job you guys. It looks like the implementation of {{ Transclude lead excerpt}} is going well.
As an experiment, I tried it out on a portal base page start, Portal:Humanism, on the base page itself rather than a subpage, and ran into a couple unexpected results:
Once we've migrated the excerpting for the intro to the base page, that would make the 1500+ intro subpages obsolete.
I look forward to your replies. — The Transhumanist 09:34, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes, Broter, RockMagnetist, Waggers, Bahnfrend, Emir of Wikipedia, and Pbsouthwood: There are several kinds of subpages. Which types will we be able to migrate to the base page? Which ones will we not be able to migrate there? How many subpages will we need per portal after all the migration is done? I look forward to your replies. Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 22:29, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
@ The Transhumanist: I have created a Selected article section without a subpage at Portal:Humanism.-- Broter ( talk) 15:27, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes and Waggers: It would be great if you can make a template called {{ Transclude random file}}. This template should allow the depiction of files/images from an list and allow an editor to pick an image and the lead of the corresponding article.-- Broter ( talk) 17:08, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes and Waggers: We need now only templates to deal with the sections selected picture and Did you know in the Portal:Humanism. When this sections can be migrated to the main portal page, all sections are migrated.-- Broter ( talk) 05:56, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
It would also be great to have a template for the selected quote sections.-- Broter ( talk) 06:16, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
I just discovered that we can have JL-Bot copy some of these inaccessible page lists into a normal page where we can read them. For an example, see Wikipedia:WikiProject London Transport/Recognised content/bot list/FAbotlist. More details: User:JL-Bot/Project content. Certes ( talk) 11:27, 20 May 2018 (UTC)
Some portals would like to show an excerpt from a page chosen from a category. Is there any way for a module or template to list the members of a category? title:getContent() on a category page just returns the "This is a list of foos" blurb, not the actual members. mw.site.stats.pagesInCategory counts the pages but doesn't reveal the titles. getContent doesn't work on Special:RandomInCategory, and transcluding it just produces a link rather than the text. Surely we don't need to write a bot to periodically copy the category page to a standard page (which we can then read easily)? Certes ( talk) 01:32, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
{{Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Australia|namespace=0|limit=200}}
, and so is available in Lua via frame:preprocess()
. That's as far as I got in
Module:Sandbox/Evad37/randomInCat, but it should be possible to do some pattern-matching magic to extract a random title from the whatlinkshere list. -
Evad37 [
talk 04:39, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
no longer reveals the HTML behind special page transclusion, <ref> tags, and so on as it did in earlier versions of Scribunto.Galobtter ( pingó mió) 06:45, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
{{#categorytree:Countries in Africa|hideroot|namespaces=Main}}
. See
mw:Extension:CategoryTree. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 10:38, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
{{Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Australia|namespace=0|limit=200}}
in ExpandTemplates shows merely a single line:[[:Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Australia]]
{{#invoke:dump|dumphtml|1= {{#categorytree:Countries in Africa|hideroot|namespaces=Main}} }}
→ '"`UNIQ--item-9--QINU`"'
Extended content
|
---|
|
<categorytree hideroot=on namespaces=Main>Countries in Africa</categorytree>
. A third valid syntax is {{#tag:categorytree|Countries in Africa|hideroot=on|namespaces=Main}}
. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 11:27, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
I have made a couple of changes to
Module:Excerpt. This should pull in images from the infobox, whether specified as [[File:...]]
or as image=...|caption=...|alt=...
. Infoboxes vary widely in style, and some article will always have a nightmare template from hell that it's impossible to parse properly, but please report any problems. In the spirit of alpha software, this may break existing portals in that pages which use file=1 to get an image from the lead may find that an image from the infobox appears instead.
I am also a little concerned that these templates may automatically pick up non-free images which have a rationale only for the article, not for the portal. Does anyone have any comments on this matter? It also applies to images not in infoboxes, of course. Certes ( talk) 20:00, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:: The images are far too large. Please make them smaller.-- Broter ( talk) 20:06, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes: You should be able to check for non-free images by getting the wikitext of the file description page, and seeing if it contains a non-free content copyright tag. Or perhaps just look if any of the phrases "non-free", "fair use", or "rationale" are used in the file description wikitext. - Evad37 [ talk 16:45, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:: I have some problems now at the Portal:Community of Christ.-- Broter ( talk) 12:34, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
@
Certes: Quite a few infobox templates use syntax like |static_image_name = myfile.jpg
instead of |static_image = File:myfile.jpg
, and it seems if the "File:" is missing the image doesn't get picked up by
Module:Excerpt.
I'm not sure what the best solution to this is, or even if there is one. One suggestion might be to look for parameter names that contain "image" as well as parameter values that contain "File:" - but that would give us problems with parameters like |static_image_width =
and |image_caption =
.
Waggers
TALK 14:04, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
|
or
but after the preceding .
, strip spaces, lowercase, then compare against gif, jpg, jpeg, png, svg, tiff, xcf and any other image suffix we can think of.
Certes (
talk) 11:40, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:: The image in infoboxes are not shown for files with the name: PD_image . Look for example at the infobox from Thomas S. Monson.-- Broter ( talk) 16:17, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:: Is it possible to move the data from the Wikipedia:WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement/Latter Day Saint biography back into article space? The creator ARTEST4ECHO has left wikipedia.-- Broter ( talk) 20:17, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
<section begin=bio />copied bio goes here<section end=bio />
and replace the template in the list of members by {{#section:Thomas S. Monson|bio}}
. Disclaimer: I've not tried this; I'm just reading it from the help page.
Certes (
talk) 20:48, 15 May 2018 (UTC)@ Certes:: I tried your approach at Thomas S. Monson in the preview function and it failed. Furthermore I succeded in transforming the templates into article-space at Thomas S. Monson and three other LDS prophets and it still failed. At last I changed the image-name in the template from PD_image to image and it also failed. I would like to transform the other LDS Portals into one-page Portals but I am not able to do this because the images in the infoboxes are not shown.-- Broter ( talk) 17:52, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:: Now I succeded in having the images shown.-- Broter ( talk) 15:36, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
One of the problems with portals we can fix is that many of them have a static excerpt in their intro subpage. Those could be replaced with an automatically updating excerpt using selective transclusion.
Here's what we have so far...
This line will transclude the lead prose from the article Aviation:
{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''.+|s = {{#lsth:Aviation}}}}
That produces this (without the lines):
needs additional citations for verification. (March 2015)
Part of a series on |
Transport |
---|
Modes |
Topics |
![]() |
Aviation includes the activities surrounding mechanical flight and the aircraft industry. Aircraft includes fixed-wing and rotary-wing types, morphable wings, wing-less lifting bodies, as well as lighter-than-air craft such as hot air balloons and airships.
Aviation began in the 18th century with the development of the hot air balloon, an apparatus capable of atmospheric displacement through buoyancy. Some of the most significant advancements in aviation technology came with the controlled gliding flying of Otto Lilienthal in 1896; then a large step in significance came with the construction of the first powered airplane by the Wright brothers in the early 1900s. Since that time, aviation has been technologically revolutionized by the introduction of the jet which permitted a major form of transport throughout the world.
Adding and maintaining/improving a line like that in every Portal intro subpage would be labor intensive, and could be made easier by using a template instead.
Applying this line in a template called {{ Transclude lead excerpt}}, is currently the following erroneous code that doesn't work:
{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''{{{1}}}.+|s = {{#lsth:{{{1}}}}}}}
I don't know Lua. Perhaps you can help. — The Transhumanist 01:07, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
'''Aviation...
but the article incorrectly contains the wikitext '''[[Aviation...
Removing the errant wikilink should fix it. I think this implementation would work in most cases but it may break when the title contains parentheses or other characters special to the regex parser, and for articles such as
Elton John which begin with a name that differs from the article title.
Certes (
talk) 11:50, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
{{{1}}}
doesn't work, and putting \[\[
also doesn't work in the regex. As for things that break it, the template can be further refined over time to take more and more situations into account. I'd also like to see configurable features added, like the ability to specify number of paragraphs to transclude. Do you have any ideas on what a template like this could or should do? —
The Transhumanist 13:11, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes: Some leads are excessively long. Can you add a parameter to choose the number of paragraphs that the template transcludes? — The Transhumanist 03:27, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
{{
Transclude lead excerpt|Sydney|paragraphs=1,3-5}}
. —
Certes (
talk) 11:53, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
I have a few ideas for features that might be useful. They would complicate the code and result in changes to existing pages, so I'd like to see whether there's consensus before going ahead.
For 3. I thought of specifying "use image from infobox" separately, but {{ Transclude random excerpt}} has a single files= setting to govern the source and number of images for all articles. We probably want to display the first image, whether from the infobox or from the lead. Beware that this feature may not work seamlessly with every permutation of infobox parameters. Thoughts please? Certes ( talk) 19:56, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
It took a fair amount of hard work to get P:ACW up to featured status. A couple of editors and I have taken some satisfaction from the effort. Today I'm shocked to find a wholesale introduction of these intro transclusions with zero discussion outside of the project. I like the idea in theory but I'd rather maintain this portal myself. The ACW portal doesn't really need fixing, and if you continue you're likely to find others who feel the same way. Please fix the broken portals but I beg you not to establish a " Procrustean bed" which injures the range of a well designed well maintained one. I am interested in seeing how this work progresses. BusterD ( talk) 23:04, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
One thing that has been bothering me about my urge to install this system-wide right away, is that, that would be distributing a software product without beta testing it first. So, we should install these on say, 50 or so portals to begin with, and watch for problems. That way, bugs can be fixed before going to widespread implementation. We could add the pages it is installed on to a list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/List of pages with auto-excerpts, for easy tracking. Then we need users with various device types to look at them to see if they appear the same for everybody. Thoughts? — The Transhumanist 01:51, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
@ Broter: This section might give editors the impression that we're ready to go ahead today. I appreciate the desire to harness all this welcome new energy but should we delay slightly until we've done more testing, then give clearer guidance as to whether to use #ltsh or {{ Transclude lead excerpt}} depending on the test results? Certes ( talk) 14:25, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
Portal:Anime and manga has two main topics: Anime and Manga. Broter tried using two instances of the now template, but it made the intro far too long (see here), so I reverted the change. Can we make the template able to handle two main topics, using half of the space for each, or make a new template for the instances such as this where there are two main topics for a portal? ··· 日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 20:51, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:
thank you for your efforts in portals. i replaced some sub-pages in portals. can we add an alignment option to pictures for example Portal:Medicine after replacing intro subpage the image appears on the right rather than left. regards-- مصعب ( talk) 18:41, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
|fileargs=left
should do what you describe.
Certes (
talk) 12:35, 13 May 2018 (UTC)@ Certes: Great! Thanks-- مصعب ( talk) 13:31, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes: can you add right also to be used in languages like arabic?-- مصعب ( talk) 13:31, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
|fileargs=right
should already work, along with the other keywords listed in
WP:Extended image syntax#Brief syntax. If you can copy the latest
Module:Excerpt to ar.wiki, making any necessary internationalisation changes, then it should work there too.
Certes (
talk) 14:15, 13 May 2018 (UTC)@ Certes: Take a look at Portal:1980s. To migrate the lead to the base page, I tried transcluding the lead of the root article, and discovered it is just an ultra-obvious definition of the topic. The true lead migrated to 1980s#Overview in January 2017. What to do? — The Transhumanist 09:32, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes: On Portal:Albania, files=1 resulted in the sound bite appearing at the top center of the section. — The Transhumanist 10:14, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
I have now limited File: and Image: to known image types. Audio should no longer appear. Certes ( talk) 16:18, 20 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes: Instead of just getting pictures from the lead section, could the files argument select pictures from the whole article. So, files=5 would be the 5th file in the article. Is that possible? That would allow much more flexibility. — The Transhumanist 10:34, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes, Waggers, Samee, Ɱ, مصعب, and Dan Koehl: What I've been gearing up for is running AWB on all the portals (less the ones in the maintained-by-editors list), to migrate the lead excerpt there.
But, within the first handful that I tried, I ran into an exception on pretty much every page.
So, if you find any exceptions, start a thread like those above, and we'll see if we can work them out.
Once we've got enough of them worked out, maybe we'll be able to automate the installation/maintenance of the intros. Another option is to write a wizard script that prompts the user for each parameter, and allows him/her to preview the page before saving. That could then be extended to work for more sections, and then finally, an entire portal.
I look forward to your thoughts. — The Transhumanist 19:31, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Abyssal, Evad37, Bermicourt, and Nihonjoe: We are rapidly redesigning portals to not have subpages, especially intro subpages.
The edit button for the intro section opens the intro subpage into the editor. That's not appropriate once the intro is generated on the base page.
Note that the edit button in the box template is not turned off by the "NOEDITSECTION" magic word.
How can we turn off the edit button so that it does not appear? — The Transhumanist 19:43, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
:Hmmm. Not sure. But I have another question - see below.
|noedit=
parameter. Variants like {{
Box-header-round}} don't have that parameter, so would need to be edited to include it as an option. Or perhaps it would be better to merge all the variants into a single template? -
Evad37 [
talk 09:24, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
|noedit=
parameter. -
Evad37 [
talk 10:39, 18 May 2018 (UTC)If the aim is that portal introductions should always be the same as the lede of the main article, I can see a few problems, at least initially. In the past, if the lede was too short, I've beefed it up; if it was too long, I've been selective; if it was IMHO badly written, I've redrafted it, all with the aim of making the portal intro look and read well. So what is the aim now? Do we improve the lede to suit the portal intro or do we just accept the lede and risk the portal looking too long/short/rubbish? In other words which is the driver, the portal or the main article? Bermicourt ( talk) 22:09, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
Sometimes the issue isn't length of the lead, it's the content. I'm involved with several geographical portals with selected biography sections, and it's not always obvious in the article lead what the subject's connection is to the portal, so I've ended up adding a sentence or two ("X was born and raised in Y") so the link is clear. It's not a major issue though - if a reader doesn't see the link in the excerpt in the portal they might be enticed to click through to the article proper to read more, which is kind of the point. Waggers TALK 07:59, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Is there a way to pick a random article from a predefined set of categories? — The Transhumanist 07:30, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
{{
Transclude lead excerpt|Some article}}
. As it's a bit silly to have dozens of one-line pages, we could replace them by one page with dozens of lines. That would need a new option to {{
Random portal component}}. Alternatively, at the risk of reinventing a wheel, we could move the randomisation into {{
Transclude lead excerpt}}. The intros typically include an image. {{
Transclude lead excerpt}} could handle this with an image= parameter and perhaps a couple of other options to tweak its position and size. We also need to think about efficiency: we do NOT want the template to generate dozens of pages then pick one and discard the rest. An unimportant portal that we can mess about with would really help here!
Certes (
talk) 17:06, 25 April 2018 (UTC)@ Certes: Can a template be transcluded within Lua code? — The Transhumanist 23:02, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
I have now produced {{ Transclude random excerpt}}. Unlike {{ Transclude lead excerpt}}[a], it accepts any number of article titles and chooses one at random. {{ Transclude random excerpt/testcases}} shows it in action.
[a] This is a lie. The two templates behave identically, with the old one selecting randomly from a list with one element. However, they may diverge in future, so please use the old template to show a single page and the new one to show a random page.
— Certes ( talk) 14:45, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
On Portal:Trains, the selected article is generally not repeated; an article will appear in this box only once. To update it every week, I look through the categories of
featured and
good articles within WikiProject Trains to find an article that has not yet been shown as the selected article. There is a
nominations page, but there have been so few nominations over the 13 years the portal has been active as to effectively be no nominations. I use the |portalSAweek=
parameter on the {{
WikiProject Trains}} banner to specify when a particular article has appeared on the portal. Once an article is selected, I copy its lead section and edit it to a reasonable length on the appropriate portal subpage, then update the transclusion link subpage for the navigation links. Once a year I set up the upcoming year's individual selected article portal subpages with placeholder text.
Slambo
(Speak) 13:09, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
The "subportals" listed at Template:SEERelatedPortals all have lists of selected articles, biographies, pictures, etc. When the portal page loads, they use {{ rand}} to generate random numbers to pick a selected article, biography, picture etc. at random from the list. Portal:South East England itself goes a stage further, and selects one of those subportals at random, then selects from the chosen portal's list of selections. (The portal could also select itself, and has its own lists of selected content too). Waggers TALK 13:54, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
Hello, folks! The Template:Random portal component has been for over a decade. However, it's not always the best option to select snippets. In the Spanish-language Wikipedia I have used other selection methods.
For example, people appear on specific dates, for example their birth days or death dates. When there's no match, then a random person appears. On Portal:Auto racing, people also appear the day before and after their birthdays.
Also on Portal:Auto racing, there's sections for racetracks, races and competitions. They change in order every week (one of them used to change every two weeks). Moreover, each section changes on a different day of the week, and the latest section to have changed appears above of the older ones.
Those selection methods are hardcoded, but could be put in templates so anyone can use them. Feel free to ask any questions. Have fun! -- NaBUru38 ( talk) 23:19, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
Hello all, I've been working on upgrading Portal:Scotland, in line with the proposals being made here, to auto-update with random content in the "Selected XX" sections and using transclusions for the lead in the intro and Selected articles. It's pretty much complete I think and I've been working on populating the relevant sections with content on numbered subpages. I've run into a strange problem with some Selected articles. I've set up the "Selected XX" pages using Template:Numbered subpages which does the work of creating the Box plus header (I've used a custom footer for each box). Numbered article subpages use Template:Transclude random excerpt to generate the content which means it will stay fresh as articles change over time.
So far, so good, but for some articles, the groupref links of any grouped references in the article lead get shown in the generated page (eg [N1], [N2] etc.) and a hideous Cite error: is displayed, along the lines of:
"Cite error: There are <ref group=XX> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a reflist|group=XX template (see the help page)".
Examples can be seen at Portal:Scotland/Selected articles/Graham Bell test and Portal:Scotland/Selected articles/Burns test. What's strange is that the source article does include the relevant Template: Reflist|group=XX and there is no Cite error. The subpage cite error can be eliminated by including the relevant Template: Reflist|group=XX in the numbered subpage wikitext, but this just generates the full group reflist at the bottom on the subpage which leads to unacceptable results (See Portal:Scotland/Selected articles/Graham Bell test fix.
Why are the groupref links in the article lead showing up, resulting in the cite error,and can it be fixed? What's even more confusing is that I set up a duplicate in my personal sandbox to work on a fix for the problem, and the groupref links still appear there, but the Cite error doesn't. Is that a namespace issue? (See User:Cactus.man/sandbox/portal/Selected articles/Graham Bell test and User:Cactus.man/sandbox/portal/Selected articles/Burns test). I'm afraid this is all "way above my paygrade" to resolve. Any and all help from the template ninja's who do such excellent work on here would be appreciated. Thanks Cactus.man ✍ 11:17, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
“ |
|
” |
There's a newsfeedeer bot called User:JJMC89 bot/Wikinews importer. — The Transhumanist 10:03, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
<!--
and -->
so it could be more easily resurrected in the future.
Nick Moyes (
talk) 15:29, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
Would there be a way to have the page automatically search google for recent news containing certain keywords? I know Google offers a system like that to email you a list of recent articles containing keywords; I use that myself. Or perhaps it could be linked to a reliable blog, or look for recent mentions/papers in a notable journal in the field, or a selection of journals? -- Nerd1a4i ( talk) 17:42, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
Portal:Current events got a lot of praise during the recent discussion at Village Pump and I think it would be much more useful as source of an automatic news feed for other portals than Wikinews. Please see my comment in the DYK section below on how that could work. — Kpalion (talk) 15:24, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes, Broter, RockMagnetist, Waggers, Bahnfrend, Emir of Wikipedia, and Pbsouthwood:
In an effort to remove the need for a categories subpage, I tried this in the category section of the base page:
<categorytree>{{PAGENAME}}</categorytree>
...and it just produces a blank category section. Is there a way to do this without having to manual type in the category? — The Transhumanist 20:04, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
@ The Transhumanist: I do not know another way than writing the name of the category in between.-- Broter ( talk) 20:44, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
{{subst:Text|<category|tree>}}{{subst:PAGENAME}}</categorytree>
. Note the bar between category and tree (anywhere within the tag will do) to fool the parser into not processing the category stuff until after it has substituted the page name. Of course, this turns into <categorytree>Humanism</categorytree>
as soon as you save the edit.
Certes (
talk) 22:59, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
{{#tag:categorytree|{{PAGENAME}}}}
, which preserves the {{PAGENAME}} magic word (
example) -
Evad37 [
talk 16:03, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
#tag
Lua? —
The Transhumanist 23:16, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
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- Zarasophos ( talk) 21:38, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
Hi
there doesn't seem to be anyone listed here with a particular interest in maintaining the Cricket portal (or have I missed it?), nor is anyone at WikiProject Cricket putting their hand up when I ask there, in fact they seem happy to let it go. But it was also suggested on the the WikiProject Cricket talk page that the portal is of interest here too, so I thought I'd ask... anyone interested? Andrewa ( talk) 03:46, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
This was proposed as something of a test case at the RfC, but it seems to be more of a basket case, and to argue that all portals are similarly unsupported seems ridiculous. Andrewa ( talk) 22:59, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
I've just had a quick look at Portal:Cricket, and I'm not convinced it's all that bad. It has 24 featured articles, and 10 featured lists, on random rotation, a dates section that updates daily, and some other sections that have been updated within the last month or so. It's true that it doesn't have a lot of photos, but that's a problem it shares with the article space - recent cricket photos that are suitably licensed for commons are not easy to come by. I'd actually regard Portal:Cricket as being one of the better portals when it comes to having plenty of content and being up-to-date. Bahnfrend ( talk) 02:49, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
What do I need to do to bring Portal:Cars into compliance with new guidelines/rules? thx L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 20:16, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
Portal:Cricket is out of date (stale excerpts, old news)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:Canada Roads to be moved to Portal:Canada roads. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 14:46, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:London Transport to be moved to Portal:London transport. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 23:00, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Note that I backed out the multi-RM case fix proposal and launched just this one first. Several users had objected that London Transport is a proper name, which can be true, but this portal is about London transport, not about London Transport. The current capitalization sends the wrong message in the context of our style of only using caps where they signal proper name. Dicklyon ( talk) 23:05, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:Canada Roads to be moved to Portal:Canada roads. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 01:46, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
This is another case where my attempt at the mulit-RM case fix attracted alternative names to confuse the issue. I expect some will prefer Canada road and some will prefer Canadian roads or Road of Canada; it's all good. Dicklyon ( talk) 02:57, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:UK Trams to be moved to Portal:UK trams. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 18:30, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:UK Waterways to be moved to Portal:UK waterways. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 18:30, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
Hi, I have rebuilt Portal:Cornwall in line with the recommendations, you may want to check it to see if I have made any mistakes in the code.
JLJ001 ( talk) 23:07, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
Relevant RfC Galobtter ( pingó mió) 14:25, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
Based on the volume of opposition to the proposal to delete portals, it looks highly unlikely that the portal system will be deleted or deprecated. — The Transhumanist 22:06, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
Article short descriptions may be useful for making category trees and lists of articles more informative if we can get the short description to display as an annotation by calling it from a template. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:13, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
There may be many ways to automate portal content changes/updates to make them more dynamic and attention holding, so that users who find them are encouraged to visit them more often. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:17, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
I consider one of the reasons portals are less often used than one might like is that they are virtually invisible to the casual reader. The portal link is banished to the end of the article where hardly anyone will see it. the MoS does not allow it to be anywhere that would be more likely to be seen, and then people who don't use them complain that few people use them, so they must be useless. Cause and effect? I hypothesise that portals would be used far more often if more people noticed their existence. If there was a link in the title area I would predict a tenfold increase. I also predict that this would be greeted with torches and pitchforks by the same people who complain that they are not visited much. So it goes. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:27, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
The 8 portals linked from the top of the maimspace get pretty low traffic compared to their respecive articles even with the best links in the project. Some portals are linked from tens of thousands of pages yet get low views. Trying to further increase visablity of something that few bother to read or edit is not the solution. Legacypac ( talk) 20:00, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
What if we substitute the existing bullet points on Main Page (which are super boring) for portals with small icons like the German Wikipedia homepage did? There's enough blank space to the right of "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" that we can re-work without changing the overall layout of our Main Page. I mentioned this many years ago but the traction to improve portal visibility this time around is much better. OhanaUnited Talk page 18:40, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
Trying to further increase visablity of something that few bother to read or edit is not the solution.It is definitely part of the solution! We need to recognise that Portals are "Topic Tasters", and that users search on one or maybe two keywords at most. So, we offer them search result options to choose from, don't we? The current default position is to provide them only with Article names to select from. If there's a related Portal (even one named on the Main Page) they are not informed of its existence. Type "Science" into the Search box and see what options drop down. If, after Science, a user were to see Science - topic overview they would have one additional optional route to select. The rest of the alphabetical results would follow it. But we don't give them that route, do we? We hide it from them. Completely and utterly. Even if a user is savvy enough to go to Advanced Search and include 'Portal' in the search criteria, they still don't get Portal:Science offered to them. Not in the first 2,000 search results, anyway. And would they know what a 'Portal' actually is? The omission of Portals from our Search algorithms, from our use of Hatnotes, our See Alsos and our DAB pages all render them virtually unfindable, and, as the deletionists can currently be heard asserting, unused and thus meriting mass deletion. This 'death by darkness' might have resulted in portal annihilation, but seems instead to have reawakened interest. We need to be clear as to the purpose of Portals in helping users find an alternative, visual and easy way in to a subject area, and this needs to be followed by a concerted effort to demonstrate the value of increasing their visibility across Wikipedia in order for their potential to be fulfilled. Is it because they are in a separate namespace that they aren't returned in Search results (even with the Portal tickbox selected)? Is it because cross namespace redirects remain controversial? We have hidden them; we have malnamed them, and we now accuse them of being abandoned and unvisited. Is that really a surprise? Once we appreciate that past policy and actions have put Portals there, and take steps to correct this, are they still likely to remain in the doldrums? Somehow I doubt it. I think most Portals would be appreciated and cared for by many more editors, and - most significantly of all - used by many more visitors. And we should seize the opportunity to address this major issue of invisibility right now. Nick Moyes ( talk) 09:48, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
Well Nick than support the removal of Portal mainspace and move the useful ones into mainspace. Few readers are looking for portals - its so outdated. Remember when AOL and other search engines were portals - but Google crushed them all with a nice clean search box. Legacypac ( talk) 09:56, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
It used to be, that the reason that the portal space was not included in search by default, was because search results got choked with portal subpages, rendering search results virtually useless. If I'm not mistaken, they fixed that problem. So, I don't know why portals are not included these days. But, I just did an advanced search with portal space clicked, and searched for "football". There were no portals in the first 500 results. What's up with that? So, simply adding the portal space to search may not be enough. — The Transhumanist 00:15, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
I just tried Chromium's translation feature. It's Google Translate built right into the browser, so that every page comes up translated. So you can browse French, Spanish, German, etc. websites in Engllish.
I tried Google Translate on the Wikipedias of those languages about a year ago and it wasn't that good. But now, the Google folks have outdone themselves.
So, I've been browsing the portals of the other Wikipedias.
Check this out: the Portal:Creatures on the German Wikipedia has a feature/service where you can send them a picture of an animal, and they'll identify the species for you.
If you find yourself with some spare time, consider browsing foreign language portals in English (with Chrome, or Chromium), and post anything interesting that you find out below. Thank you. — The Transhumanist 06:29, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
Portal:Limited recognition has been created by an editor that is arguing hard that we have no right to discuss shutting down half built abandoned portals because of the portal RFC. It seems hypocritical to argue that an RFC shuts down specific deletion but not creation. Anyway this new portal is badly named. "Limited recognition" what exactly? If countries, it's debatable if the topics it touches are countries. The poet featured there is long since dead so he is hardly limited recognition. Given there are pretty much no guidelines on what is a good portal topic and according to this editor, pretty much no applicable criteria for deleting any portal, why is a new portal being created with such a poorly defined topic? Legacypac ( talk) 05:26, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
Limited recognition countries is a poorly understood contentious area. Allowing a Portal on it with few watchers and no real rules about what is ok and not ok is inviting a big problem. States with limited recognition and similar articles already suffer from a range of POV pushers, uninformed editors, and round and round in circle debates. Legacypac ( talk) 05:50, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
I think it is a very bad idea for a portal. I also think that creating a new portal while arguing loudly that MfDs of broken portals should be speedy closed because of the MfD is suspect behaviour. The portal enthusiasts need to come up with guidelines on what makes an appropriate topic and present these guidelines to an RFC or such guidelines will ne created outside this group an impossed via a vote. Legacypac ( talk) 15:52, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
Notwithstanding the loud protests and offensive attempts to procedurally close the MfDs there is nothing wrong with seeking deletion of the worst most abandoned portals at anytime. Better draft up spme guidelines for Portal deletion you can live with - because currently the Wikiproject portal group is building a wonderful case that the fanatically oppose removing any piece of junk in portal space and when that evidence is put to a RFC its not going to go well for Portals overall. Legacypac ( talk) 01:25, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
I have put WPP:Portals on my list of watched pages and as I feel more steady on my laptops keyboard, I welcome the challenge of tending your annual growth. Please allow me some time to address the urgent needs of two topics and monitor a third. I know that working on something as core as a portal could prove to be the most beneficial place for me to sharpen my encyclopedic tone. Not jumping in and joining you today, but you caught my eye and I will be back. Thank you. Mrphilip ( talk) 07:54, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
Could someone please add a section—preferably at the top of the article—which explains how to use the "transclusion" templates? I would like to participate in this project, but I am a word- and grammar-type gnome, not a techy, so I'm at a loss at present on how I can help. Or is this a case of "if you have to ask, you shouldn't be here"? Thanks for any help. — Dilidor ( talk) 16:31, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the invitation! I will do my best to help and to contribute to WikiProject Portals in any way I feel necessary and relevant. But first, I must know the answers to my questions if my contributions are to be informed and educated. Before asking them, let me just say in an unrelated note that I am super excited about portals so far and have only looked (today at least) at the 1920s portal. The portal had good information on the subject, which is part of what we want, but I am pretty sure that the featured article and biography of the day sections made it look too complicated. I don't like saying that because I like those sections but from the standpoint of a user of Wikipedia who is not an editor (which of course I was at some point or other), tell me if I'm wrong but I think the sheer number of links and amount of information might overwhelm me into looking somewhere else.
Also, I think there should be some less abstract titles. For example, like I said earlier, the 1920s portal may not be abstract in itself but it refers to a period in history that spans 10 years and Wikipedia covers many topics that may have happened in 1920 but have nothing to do with what you're looking for. I know that sounds like I'm advising against something that might still be useful to some users (and I agree, don't remove the abstract article links) but I think the portals should have an organized system of sub-portals or sub-categories that have a maximum capacity so that there is less confusion in navigation. I think I might be blathering on without getting to the point so I'll just leave what I have until I can gather my wits. Please tell me what you think about what I've said so far.
-- OdysseusTroy ( talk) 13:50, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
See this diff. Wpgbrown ( talk) 21:03, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
There is a lot of WP:OWN suggested here. Exercise caution. Legacypac ( talk) 09:23, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
Hi!
In addition to working on some portals here, I'd like to link or improve links between project portals, e.g., linking w:Portal:Astronomy with s:Portal:Astronomy, v:Portal:Astronomy and d:Portal:Astronomy! Suggestions? -- Marshallsumter ( talk) 15:26, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
Does this wikiproject have a shortcut? Like for example WP:IND and WP:INDIA redirect to Wikipedia:Wikiproject India. Cesdeva (talk) 21:27, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
Hi, In the Rfc, some very good points about portal improvement were made, such as the 'viewership' issues. Some solutions to this are found in other wikis, where e.g. in the French Wikipedia, Portal bars have a better design (which incites the Wikipedians to its use on normal pages) and links to Portals, which have a certain relation with the page subject. (an Italian painter gets a portal bar with the portals Italy, Art (or painting if it exists) and whatever linked with his main domain of work.
Thus, portals must be promoted using portal bars, which are better adapted, and which will be more visible by the page viewers, who could then read the corresponding portals.
-- Railfan01 ( talk) 07:17, 12 May 2018 (UTC)
{{
Portal bar}}
here, used on 67,000 articles, although ours is somewhat less prominent than the larger-font French one. Compare the end of
Algeria with that of
fr:Algérie.Having noticed that bare images in portals are sometimes linked, I decided to make a template that encloses images and makes them appear more clickable to readers.
The template has yet to be applied in a live portal so it may need tweaking; be cautious about its application if you decide to use it. It appeared stable during development however. Feedback welcome. Kind regards, Cesdeva (talk) 16:22, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
Libraries have a long history of creating Research Guides to bring attention to the major resources in a given topic. With varying success. Apparently, there's been a bit of research concerning the effectiveness of Research Guides... The article I'm providing a link to was just referenced in the CircPlus listserv, and while perhaps not directly relevant, it does link to a body of research on the topic, some of which may prove of interest. Keytag It: An Exploration of a Creative and Customizable Research Guide Promotion JohnBobMead ( talk) 13:39, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
There is a set of portals I am unsure about, I don't even know why they were made, all things considered.
The specific portals I have an issue with are:
To fully understand this, note that there is an overall portal for the United Kingdom. There is then a portal for each home nation, so Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England. Then, just for England, there are portals for each county, and two of the larger cities ( London and Bristol) big enough to be treated as counties. Some counties are missing, so there is scope for some new portals. But essentially there are three "layers" of portals, each with articles that fit.
However there are these four "regions" that basically don't fit, there's no content specific to a region like that which would not be better suited for either the county portal or the England portal. The portals are awkwardly named, plus linking to South East England is not ideal since only articles on the counties in it would logically regard that regional distinction as relevant.
The portal on Stamford is the oddity. It's an interesting situation, basically someone made a portal for a single town with a population of 21,000. I think this is probably too narrow a scope, and I fear it is simply cloning Portal:Lincolnshire for the most part. It even features Lincolnshire as it's selected article.
Meanwhile I feel there should be county level portals for Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland (Shires in Scotland). Along with new portals for the missing counties of England.
Thoughts?
JLJ001 ( talk) 22:37, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
I received an invitation to this project, presumably because I had expressed support for keeping portals in the recent RFC. I am very concerned that this project seemingly intends to ultimately replace every portal a model based on article transclusion. That may be OK for some currently substandard, incomplete, or neglected portals, although I have very serious reservations about that approach in general. However, I'd like to emphasise this WikiProject does not own portal space and has no mandate whatsoever to imposes a particular model on all portals. I am one of the editors at Portal:Opera and was very involved in its content creation. It is a Featured Portal and uses the portal sub-pages model. It works wonderfully well. It's extremely easy to maintain and expand. It is also an integral part of Wikiproject Opera's activities. I would appreciate some assurances that WikiProject Portals will not attempt to override currently well-functioning, well-maintained portals. Voceditenore ( talk) 16:09, 19 May 2018 (UTC)
There's more than one way to produce a good portal. The templates are just one tool on offer; I hope there will be no pressure to use them where editors are happy to maintain the pages in other ways. Certes (talk) 23:32, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
Seconding what Voceditenore wrote. Having worked extensively in reviewing featured portals before the process was dumped, I'm very concerned that what is going on here is completely not what, historically, good-quality portals were assumed to be. Espresso Addict ( talk) 23:38, 23 May 2018 (UTC)
How does one search for portals, while excluding all subpages and redirects, so only base portals appear? external tools are fine. JLJ001 ( talk) 22:02, 19 May 2018 (UTC)
The following long-standing content from the Community bulletin board is now more appropriate here. I have replaced it with a plug for this WikiProject : Noyster (talk), 09:47, 20 May 2018 (UTC)
Would it be possible to adjust the Lua module to allow a template such as Template:Portal lead title to be used, without it being stripped out? JLJ001 ( talk) 16:56, 20 May 2018 (UTC)
A pig is ...), we can link that with a change to the module without changing all the articles
Sir Elton Hercules John CBE is...), the template won't work, but we could still amend the module to replace the first bold text (regardless of content) by a link to the article title.
I think perhaps it's about time we put our heads together to get some portal-specific policy and guidelines drafted. Moving forward, we ultimately need consensus on the acceptable standards for portals.
I think we should start a sub-page at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Discussion on policy, or a similar target, to have this hopefully extensive discussion.
What does everyone think? Cesdeva (talk) 19:50, 20 May 2018 (UTC)
Does anyone know of a way to get an image to occupy a specified percentage of the box width? It would be nice to be able to display selected images at about 80% box width, but box width varies with screen width. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 09:43, 21 May 2018 (UTC)
ntly used! Bermicourt ( talk) 14:37, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | → | Archive 10 |
Before we can answer questions such as "What should portals do?", we really need to know what they are already doing, so we can answer, "Should they continue doing that?"
Identifying the components and features of portals...
What are the various components of portals? — The Transhumanist 09:05, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
As you come across component and feature types, especially automated ones, please add them to the following list:
Main-page-for-the-subject features
Bridge-to-editing / bridge-to-editor-community features
Footers
(Feel free to add to the above list).
Wechseln zu: Navigation, Suche
@ Slambo, Waggers, Nihonjoe, and Bermicourt: Thank you for your input. It appears that portals serve five main functions or feature types, three of which go hand-in-hand with the Main page model:
A characteristic that the Main page has, that most portals lack, is that the Main page is fully dynamic. That is, its content is cycled out regularly with new content, with old content being archived. Portals fall into 3 categories of dynamics:
A fourth category of dynamics, which we haven't seen in awhile, is innovative portals - portals that expand the limits of what portals do, with new features and capabilities. Hopefully, we are entering a phase in which this category will re-emerge.
Please feel free to add your own observations and comments. — The Transhumanist 23:38, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
Before we get too deeply involved in fixing portals, is it worth those of us in favour of retaining and maintaining them to stop and review their intended purpose and audiences?
It seems wise to so ensure everyone is working off the 'same page' here. I suggest it might be helpful to reconsider the following:
Feel free to add more to the list - or continue below. Nick Moyes ( talk) 19:24, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
Portals are indexed and public facing. If Google et al ignores them it might be because they are not typically very useful to the reader. Google is very good at curating content. Legacypac ( talk) 13:40, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
Hello, I think that portals should allow readers to explore the millions of Wikipedia articles, helping them to find interesting topics, people, facts, etc.
As Kusma says, portals are meant to discover new things, not to find specific information. Portals should be surprising to the reader. The unexpected should be expected.
Portals are completely different way than lists, categories and outlines. For example, long lists of links won't encourage people to click them. Therefore, portals use article snippets, which provide enough information to capture the reader's interest.
Some portals put too much effort on encouraging people to edit articles. I think that should be the purpose of wikiprojects, not portals. -- NaBUru38 ( talk) 22:32, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes, Broter, RockMagnetist, Waggers, Bahnfrend, Emir of Wikipedia, and Pbsouthwood:
Good job you guys. It looks like the implementation of {{ Transclude lead excerpt}} is going well.
As an experiment, I tried it out on a portal base page start, Portal:Humanism, on the base page itself rather than a subpage, and ran into a couple unexpected results:
Once we've migrated the excerpting for the intro to the base page, that would make the 1500+ intro subpages obsolete.
I look forward to your replies. — The Transhumanist 09:34, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes, Broter, RockMagnetist, Waggers, Bahnfrend, Emir of Wikipedia, and Pbsouthwood: There are several kinds of subpages. Which types will we be able to migrate to the base page? Which ones will we not be able to migrate there? How many subpages will we need per portal after all the migration is done? I look forward to your replies. Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 22:29, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
@ The Transhumanist: I have created a Selected article section without a subpage at Portal:Humanism.-- Broter ( talk) 15:27, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes and Waggers: It would be great if you can make a template called {{ Transclude random file}}. This template should allow the depiction of files/images from an list and allow an editor to pick an image and the lead of the corresponding article.-- Broter ( talk) 17:08, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes and Waggers: We need now only templates to deal with the sections selected picture and Did you know in the Portal:Humanism. When this sections can be migrated to the main portal page, all sections are migrated.-- Broter ( talk) 05:56, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
It would also be great to have a template for the selected quote sections.-- Broter ( talk) 06:16, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
I just discovered that we can have JL-Bot copy some of these inaccessible page lists into a normal page where we can read them. For an example, see Wikipedia:WikiProject London Transport/Recognised content/bot list/FAbotlist. More details: User:JL-Bot/Project content. Certes ( talk) 11:27, 20 May 2018 (UTC)
Some portals would like to show an excerpt from a page chosen from a category. Is there any way for a module or template to list the members of a category? title:getContent() on a category page just returns the "This is a list of foos" blurb, not the actual members. mw.site.stats.pagesInCategory counts the pages but doesn't reveal the titles. getContent doesn't work on Special:RandomInCategory, and transcluding it just produces a link rather than the text. Surely we don't need to write a bot to periodically copy the category page to a standard page (which we can then read easily)? Certes ( talk) 01:32, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
{{Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Australia|namespace=0|limit=200}}
, and so is available in Lua via frame:preprocess()
. That's as far as I got in
Module:Sandbox/Evad37/randomInCat, but it should be possible to do some pattern-matching magic to extract a random title from the whatlinkshere list. -
Evad37 [
talk 04:39, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
no longer reveals the HTML behind special page transclusion, <ref> tags, and so on as it did in earlier versions of Scribunto.Galobtter ( pingó mió) 06:45, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
{{#categorytree:Countries in Africa|hideroot|namespaces=Main}}
. See
mw:Extension:CategoryTree. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 10:38, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
{{Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Australia|namespace=0|limit=200}}
in ExpandTemplates shows merely a single line:[[:Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Australia]]
{{#invoke:dump|dumphtml|1= {{#categorytree:Countries in Africa|hideroot|namespaces=Main}} }}
→ '"`UNIQ--item-9--QINU`"'
Extended content
|
---|
|
<categorytree hideroot=on namespaces=Main>Countries in Africa</categorytree>
. A third valid syntax is {{#tag:categorytree|Countries in Africa|hideroot=on|namespaces=Main}}
. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 11:27, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
I have made a couple of changes to
Module:Excerpt. This should pull in images from the infobox, whether specified as [[File:...]]
or as image=...|caption=...|alt=...
. Infoboxes vary widely in style, and some article will always have a nightmare template from hell that it's impossible to parse properly, but please report any problems. In the spirit of alpha software, this may break existing portals in that pages which use file=1 to get an image from the lead may find that an image from the infobox appears instead.
I am also a little concerned that these templates may automatically pick up non-free images which have a rationale only for the article, not for the portal. Does anyone have any comments on this matter? It also applies to images not in infoboxes, of course. Certes ( talk) 20:00, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:: The images are far too large. Please make them smaller.-- Broter ( talk) 20:06, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes: You should be able to check for non-free images by getting the wikitext of the file description page, and seeing if it contains a non-free content copyright tag. Or perhaps just look if any of the phrases "non-free", "fair use", or "rationale" are used in the file description wikitext. - Evad37 [ talk 16:45, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:: I have some problems now at the Portal:Community of Christ.-- Broter ( talk) 12:34, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
@
Certes: Quite a few infobox templates use syntax like |static_image_name = myfile.jpg
instead of |static_image = File:myfile.jpg
, and it seems if the "File:" is missing the image doesn't get picked up by
Module:Excerpt.
I'm not sure what the best solution to this is, or even if there is one. One suggestion might be to look for parameter names that contain "image" as well as parameter values that contain "File:" - but that would give us problems with parameters like |static_image_width =
and |image_caption =
.
Waggers
TALK 14:04, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
|
or
but after the preceding .
, strip spaces, lowercase, then compare against gif, jpg, jpeg, png, svg, tiff, xcf and any other image suffix we can think of.
Certes (
talk) 11:40, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:: The image in infoboxes are not shown for files with the name: PD_image . Look for example at the infobox from Thomas S. Monson.-- Broter ( talk) 16:17, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:: Is it possible to move the data from the Wikipedia:WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement/Latter Day Saint biography back into article space? The creator ARTEST4ECHO has left wikipedia.-- Broter ( talk) 20:17, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
<section begin=bio />copied bio goes here<section end=bio />
and replace the template in the list of members by {{#section:Thomas S. Monson|bio}}
. Disclaimer: I've not tried this; I'm just reading it from the help page.
Certes (
talk) 20:48, 15 May 2018 (UTC)@ Certes:: I tried your approach at Thomas S. Monson in the preview function and it failed. Furthermore I succeded in transforming the templates into article-space at Thomas S. Monson and three other LDS prophets and it still failed. At last I changed the image-name in the template from PD_image to image and it also failed. I would like to transform the other LDS Portals into one-page Portals but I am not able to do this because the images in the infoboxes are not shown.-- Broter ( talk) 17:52, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:: Now I succeded in having the images shown.-- Broter ( talk) 15:36, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
One of the problems with portals we can fix is that many of them have a static excerpt in their intro subpage. Those could be replaced with an automatically updating excerpt using selective transclusion.
Here's what we have so far...
This line will transclude the lead prose from the article Aviation:
{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''.+|s = {{#lsth:Aviation}}}}
That produces this (without the lines):
needs additional citations for verification. (March 2015)
Part of a series on |
Transport |
---|
Modes |
Topics |
![]() |
Aviation includes the activities surrounding mechanical flight and the aircraft industry. Aircraft includes fixed-wing and rotary-wing types, morphable wings, wing-less lifting bodies, as well as lighter-than-air craft such as hot air balloons and airships.
Aviation began in the 18th century with the development of the hot air balloon, an apparatus capable of atmospheric displacement through buoyancy. Some of the most significant advancements in aviation technology came with the controlled gliding flying of Otto Lilienthal in 1896; then a large step in significance came with the construction of the first powered airplane by the Wright brothers in the early 1900s. Since that time, aviation has been technologically revolutionized by the introduction of the jet which permitted a major form of transport throughout the world.
Adding and maintaining/improving a line like that in every Portal intro subpage would be labor intensive, and could be made easier by using a template instead.
Applying this line in a template called {{ Transclude lead excerpt}}, is currently the following erroneous code that doesn't work:
{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''{{{1}}}.+|s = {{#lsth:{{{1}}}}}}}
I don't know Lua. Perhaps you can help. — The Transhumanist 01:07, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
'''Aviation...
but the article incorrectly contains the wikitext '''[[Aviation...
Removing the errant wikilink should fix it. I think this implementation would work in most cases but it may break when the title contains parentheses or other characters special to the regex parser, and for articles such as
Elton John which begin with a name that differs from the article title.
Certes (
talk) 11:50, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
{{{1}}}
doesn't work, and putting \[\[
also doesn't work in the regex. As for things that break it, the template can be further refined over time to take more and more situations into account. I'd also like to see configurable features added, like the ability to specify number of paragraphs to transclude. Do you have any ideas on what a template like this could or should do? —
The Transhumanist 13:11, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes: Some leads are excessively long. Can you add a parameter to choose the number of paragraphs that the template transcludes? — The Transhumanist 03:27, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
{{
Transclude lead excerpt|Sydney|paragraphs=1,3-5}}
. —
Certes (
talk) 11:53, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
I have a few ideas for features that might be useful. They would complicate the code and result in changes to existing pages, so I'd like to see whether there's consensus before going ahead.
For 3. I thought of specifying "use image from infobox" separately, but {{ Transclude random excerpt}} has a single files= setting to govern the source and number of images for all articles. We probably want to display the first image, whether from the infobox or from the lead. Beware that this feature may not work seamlessly with every permutation of infobox parameters. Thoughts please? Certes ( talk) 19:56, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
It took a fair amount of hard work to get P:ACW up to featured status. A couple of editors and I have taken some satisfaction from the effort. Today I'm shocked to find a wholesale introduction of these intro transclusions with zero discussion outside of the project. I like the idea in theory but I'd rather maintain this portal myself. The ACW portal doesn't really need fixing, and if you continue you're likely to find others who feel the same way. Please fix the broken portals but I beg you not to establish a " Procrustean bed" which injures the range of a well designed well maintained one. I am interested in seeing how this work progresses. BusterD ( talk) 23:04, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
One thing that has been bothering me about my urge to install this system-wide right away, is that, that would be distributing a software product without beta testing it first. So, we should install these on say, 50 or so portals to begin with, and watch for problems. That way, bugs can be fixed before going to widespread implementation. We could add the pages it is installed on to a list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/List of pages with auto-excerpts, for easy tracking. Then we need users with various device types to look at them to see if they appear the same for everybody. Thoughts? — The Transhumanist 01:51, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
@ Broter: This section might give editors the impression that we're ready to go ahead today. I appreciate the desire to harness all this welcome new energy but should we delay slightly until we've done more testing, then give clearer guidance as to whether to use #ltsh or {{ Transclude lead excerpt}} depending on the test results? Certes ( talk) 14:25, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
Portal:Anime and manga has two main topics: Anime and Manga. Broter tried using two instances of the now template, but it made the intro far too long (see here), so I reverted the change. Can we make the template able to handle two main topics, using half of the space for each, or make a new template for the instances such as this where there are two main topics for a portal? ··· 日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 20:51, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes:
thank you for your efforts in portals. i replaced some sub-pages in portals. can we add an alignment option to pictures for example Portal:Medicine after replacing intro subpage the image appears on the right rather than left. regards-- مصعب ( talk) 18:41, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
|fileargs=left
should do what you describe.
Certes (
talk) 12:35, 13 May 2018 (UTC)@ Certes: Great! Thanks-- مصعب ( talk) 13:31, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes: can you add right also to be used in languages like arabic?-- مصعب ( talk) 13:31, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
|fileargs=right
should already work, along with the other keywords listed in
WP:Extended image syntax#Brief syntax. If you can copy the latest
Module:Excerpt to ar.wiki, making any necessary internationalisation changes, then it should work there too.
Certes (
talk) 14:15, 13 May 2018 (UTC)@ Certes: Take a look at Portal:1980s. To migrate the lead to the base page, I tried transcluding the lead of the root article, and discovered it is just an ultra-obvious definition of the topic. The true lead migrated to 1980s#Overview in January 2017. What to do? — The Transhumanist 09:32, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes: On Portal:Albania, files=1 resulted in the sound bite appearing at the top center of the section. — The Transhumanist 10:14, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
I have now limited File: and Image: to known image types. Audio should no longer appear. Certes ( talk) 16:18, 20 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes: Instead of just getting pictures from the lead section, could the files argument select pictures from the whole article. So, files=5 would be the 5th file in the article. Is that possible? That would allow much more flexibility. — The Transhumanist 10:34, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes, Waggers, Samee, Ɱ, مصعب, and Dan Koehl: What I've been gearing up for is running AWB on all the portals (less the ones in the maintained-by-editors list), to migrate the lead excerpt there.
But, within the first handful that I tried, I ran into an exception on pretty much every page.
So, if you find any exceptions, start a thread like those above, and we'll see if we can work them out.
Once we've got enough of them worked out, maybe we'll be able to automate the installation/maintenance of the intros. Another option is to write a wizard script that prompts the user for each parameter, and allows him/her to preview the page before saving. That could then be extended to work for more sections, and then finally, an entire portal.
I look forward to your thoughts. — The Transhumanist 19:31, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Abyssal, Evad37, Bermicourt, and Nihonjoe: We are rapidly redesigning portals to not have subpages, especially intro subpages.
The edit button for the intro section opens the intro subpage into the editor. That's not appropriate once the intro is generated on the base page.
Note that the edit button in the box template is not turned off by the "NOEDITSECTION" magic word.
How can we turn off the edit button so that it does not appear? — The Transhumanist 19:43, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
:Hmmm. Not sure. But I have another question - see below.
|noedit=
parameter. Variants like {{
Box-header-round}} don't have that parameter, so would need to be edited to include it as an option. Or perhaps it would be better to merge all the variants into a single template? -
Evad37 [
talk 09:24, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
|noedit=
parameter. -
Evad37 [
talk 10:39, 18 May 2018 (UTC)If the aim is that portal introductions should always be the same as the lede of the main article, I can see a few problems, at least initially. In the past, if the lede was too short, I've beefed it up; if it was too long, I've been selective; if it was IMHO badly written, I've redrafted it, all with the aim of making the portal intro look and read well. So what is the aim now? Do we improve the lede to suit the portal intro or do we just accept the lede and risk the portal looking too long/short/rubbish? In other words which is the driver, the portal or the main article? Bermicourt ( talk) 22:09, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
Sometimes the issue isn't length of the lead, it's the content. I'm involved with several geographical portals with selected biography sections, and it's not always obvious in the article lead what the subject's connection is to the portal, so I've ended up adding a sentence or two ("X was born and raised in Y") so the link is clear. It's not a major issue though - if a reader doesn't see the link in the excerpt in the portal they might be enticed to click through to the article proper to read more, which is kind of the point. Waggers TALK 07:59, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Is there a way to pick a random article from a predefined set of categories? — The Transhumanist 07:30, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
{{
Transclude lead excerpt|Some article}}
. As it's a bit silly to have dozens of one-line pages, we could replace them by one page with dozens of lines. That would need a new option to {{
Random portal component}}. Alternatively, at the risk of reinventing a wheel, we could move the randomisation into {{
Transclude lead excerpt}}. The intros typically include an image. {{
Transclude lead excerpt}} could handle this with an image= parameter and perhaps a couple of other options to tweak its position and size. We also need to think about efficiency: we do NOT want the template to generate dozens of pages then pick one and discard the rest. An unimportant portal that we can mess about with would really help here!
Certes (
talk) 17:06, 25 April 2018 (UTC)@ Certes: Can a template be transcluded within Lua code? — The Transhumanist 23:02, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
I have now produced {{ Transclude random excerpt}}. Unlike {{ Transclude lead excerpt}}[a], it accepts any number of article titles and chooses one at random. {{ Transclude random excerpt/testcases}} shows it in action.
[a] This is a lie. The two templates behave identically, with the old one selecting randomly from a list with one element. However, they may diverge in future, so please use the old template to show a single page and the new one to show a random page.
— Certes ( talk) 14:45, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
On Portal:Trains, the selected article is generally not repeated; an article will appear in this box only once. To update it every week, I look through the categories of
featured and
good articles within WikiProject Trains to find an article that has not yet been shown as the selected article. There is a
nominations page, but there have been so few nominations over the 13 years the portal has been active as to effectively be no nominations. I use the |portalSAweek=
parameter on the {{
WikiProject Trains}} banner to specify when a particular article has appeared on the portal. Once an article is selected, I copy its lead section and edit it to a reasonable length on the appropriate portal subpage, then update the transclusion link subpage for the navigation links. Once a year I set up the upcoming year's individual selected article portal subpages with placeholder text.
Slambo
(Speak) 13:09, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
The "subportals" listed at Template:SEERelatedPortals all have lists of selected articles, biographies, pictures, etc. When the portal page loads, they use {{ rand}} to generate random numbers to pick a selected article, biography, picture etc. at random from the list. Portal:South East England itself goes a stage further, and selects one of those subportals at random, then selects from the chosen portal's list of selections. (The portal could also select itself, and has its own lists of selected content too). Waggers TALK 13:54, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
Hello, folks! The Template:Random portal component has been for over a decade. However, it's not always the best option to select snippets. In the Spanish-language Wikipedia I have used other selection methods.
For example, people appear on specific dates, for example their birth days or death dates. When there's no match, then a random person appears. On Portal:Auto racing, people also appear the day before and after their birthdays.
Also on Portal:Auto racing, there's sections for racetracks, races and competitions. They change in order every week (one of them used to change every two weeks). Moreover, each section changes on a different day of the week, and the latest section to have changed appears above of the older ones.
Those selection methods are hardcoded, but could be put in templates so anyone can use them. Feel free to ask any questions. Have fun! -- NaBUru38 ( talk) 23:19, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
Hello all, I've been working on upgrading Portal:Scotland, in line with the proposals being made here, to auto-update with random content in the "Selected XX" sections and using transclusions for the lead in the intro and Selected articles. It's pretty much complete I think and I've been working on populating the relevant sections with content on numbered subpages. I've run into a strange problem with some Selected articles. I've set up the "Selected XX" pages using Template:Numbered subpages which does the work of creating the Box plus header (I've used a custom footer for each box). Numbered article subpages use Template:Transclude random excerpt to generate the content which means it will stay fresh as articles change over time.
So far, so good, but for some articles, the groupref links of any grouped references in the article lead get shown in the generated page (eg [N1], [N2] etc.) and a hideous Cite error: is displayed, along the lines of:
"Cite error: There are <ref group=XX> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a reflist|group=XX template (see the help page)".
Examples can be seen at Portal:Scotland/Selected articles/Graham Bell test and Portal:Scotland/Selected articles/Burns test. What's strange is that the source article does include the relevant Template: Reflist|group=XX and there is no Cite error. The subpage cite error can be eliminated by including the relevant Template: Reflist|group=XX in the numbered subpage wikitext, but this just generates the full group reflist at the bottom on the subpage which leads to unacceptable results (See Portal:Scotland/Selected articles/Graham Bell test fix.
Why are the groupref links in the article lead showing up, resulting in the cite error,and can it be fixed? What's even more confusing is that I set up a duplicate in my personal sandbox to work on a fix for the problem, and the groupref links still appear there, but the Cite error doesn't. Is that a namespace issue? (See User:Cactus.man/sandbox/portal/Selected articles/Graham Bell test and User:Cactus.man/sandbox/portal/Selected articles/Burns test). I'm afraid this is all "way above my paygrade" to resolve. Any and all help from the template ninja's who do such excellent work on here would be appreciated. Thanks Cactus.man ✍ 11:17, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
“ |
|
” |
There's a newsfeedeer bot called User:JJMC89 bot/Wikinews importer. — The Transhumanist 10:03, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
<!--
and -->
so it could be more easily resurrected in the future.
Nick Moyes (
talk) 15:29, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
Would there be a way to have the page automatically search google for recent news containing certain keywords? I know Google offers a system like that to email you a list of recent articles containing keywords; I use that myself. Or perhaps it could be linked to a reliable blog, or look for recent mentions/papers in a notable journal in the field, or a selection of journals? -- Nerd1a4i ( talk) 17:42, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
Portal:Current events got a lot of praise during the recent discussion at Village Pump and I think it would be much more useful as source of an automatic news feed for other portals than Wikinews. Please see my comment in the DYK section below on how that could work. — Kpalion (talk) 15:24, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes, Broter, RockMagnetist, Waggers, Bahnfrend, Emir of Wikipedia, and Pbsouthwood:
In an effort to remove the need for a categories subpage, I tried this in the category section of the base page:
<categorytree>{{PAGENAME}}</categorytree>
...and it just produces a blank category section. Is there a way to do this without having to manual type in the category? — The Transhumanist 20:04, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
@ The Transhumanist: I do not know another way than writing the name of the category in between.-- Broter ( talk) 20:44, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
{{subst:Text|<category|tree>}}{{subst:PAGENAME}}</categorytree>
. Note the bar between category and tree (anywhere within the tag will do) to fool the parser into not processing the category stuff until after it has substituted the page name. Of course, this turns into <categorytree>Humanism</categorytree>
as soon as you save the edit.
Certes (
talk) 22:59, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
{{#tag:categorytree|{{PAGENAME}}}}
, which preserves the {{PAGENAME}} magic word (
example) -
Evad37 [
talk 16:03, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
#tag
Lua? —
The Transhumanist 23:16, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
![]() | The Signpost - Call for interviews Your Project will be featured in the The Signpost's next issue's WikiProject Report! For that, we are looking for several active participants, preferrably those with an overall grasps of what's happening with and around the project, to take part in an interview. There will be several questions regarding the project and an opportunity for further comment from the participants. Simply leave a positive reply to this message if you want to take part! |
- Zarasophos ( talk) 21:38, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
Hi
there doesn't seem to be anyone listed here with a particular interest in maintaining the Cricket portal (or have I missed it?), nor is anyone at WikiProject Cricket putting their hand up when I ask there, in fact they seem happy to let it go. But it was also suggested on the the WikiProject Cricket talk page that the portal is of interest here too, so I thought I'd ask... anyone interested? Andrewa ( talk) 03:46, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
This was proposed as something of a test case at the RfC, but it seems to be more of a basket case, and to argue that all portals are similarly unsupported seems ridiculous. Andrewa ( talk) 22:59, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
I've just had a quick look at Portal:Cricket, and I'm not convinced it's all that bad. It has 24 featured articles, and 10 featured lists, on random rotation, a dates section that updates daily, and some other sections that have been updated within the last month or so. It's true that it doesn't have a lot of photos, but that's a problem it shares with the article space - recent cricket photos that are suitably licensed for commons are not easy to come by. I'd actually regard Portal:Cricket as being one of the better portals when it comes to having plenty of content and being up-to-date. Bahnfrend ( talk) 02:49, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
What do I need to do to bring Portal:Cars into compliance with new guidelines/rules? thx L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 20:16, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
Portal:Cricket is out of date (stale excerpts, old news)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:Canada Roads to be moved to Portal:Canada roads. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 14:46, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:London Transport to be moved to Portal:London transport. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 23:00, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
Note that I backed out the multi-RM case fix proposal and launched just this one first. Several users had objected that London Transport is a proper name, which can be true, but this portal is about London transport, not about London Transport. The current capitalization sends the wrong message in the context of our style of only using caps where they signal proper name. Dicklyon ( talk) 23:05, 16 May 2018 (UTC)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:Canada Roads to be moved to Portal:Canada roads. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 01:46, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
This is another case where my attempt at the mulit-RM case fix attracted alternative names to confuse the issue. I expect some will prefer Canada road and some will prefer Canadian roads or Road of Canada; it's all good. Dicklyon ( talk) 02:57, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:UK Trams to be moved to Portal:UK trams. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 18:30, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:UK Waterways to be moved to Portal:UK waterways. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 18:30, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
Hi, I have rebuilt Portal:Cornwall in line with the recommendations, you may want to check it to see if I have made any mistakes in the code.
JLJ001 ( talk) 23:07, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
Relevant RfC Galobtter ( pingó mió) 14:25, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
Based on the volume of opposition to the proposal to delete portals, it looks highly unlikely that the portal system will be deleted or deprecated. — The Transhumanist 22:06, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
Article short descriptions may be useful for making category trees and lists of articles more informative if we can get the short description to display as an annotation by calling it from a template. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:13, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
There may be many ways to automate portal content changes/updates to make them more dynamic and attention holding, so that users who find them are encouraged to visit them more often. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:17, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
I consider one of the reasons portals are less often used than one might like is that they are virtually invisible to the casual reader. The portal link is banished to the end of the article where hardly anyone will see it. the MoS does not allow it to be anywhere that would be more likely to be seen, and then people who don't use them complain that few people use them, so they must be useless. Cause and effect? I hypothesise that portals would be used far more often if more people noticed their existence. If there was a link in the title area I would predict a tenfold increase. I also predict that this would be greeted with torches and pitchforks by the same people who complain that they are not visited much. So it goes. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:27, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
The 8 portals linked from the top of the maimspace get pretty low traffic compared to their respecive articles even with the best links in the project. Some portals are linked from tens of thousands of pages yet get low views. Trying to further increase visablity of something that few bother to read or edit is not the solution. Legacypac ( talk) 20:00, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
What if we substitute the existing bullet points on Main Page (which are super boring) for portals with small icons like the German Wikipedia homepage did? There's enough blank space to the right of "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" that we can re-work without changing the overall layout of our Main Page. I mentioned this many years ago but the traction to improve portal visibility this time around is much better. OhanaUnited Talk page 18:40, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
Trying to further increase visablity of something that few bother to read or edit is not the solution.It is definitely part of the solution! We need to recognise that Portals are "Topic Tasters", and that users search on one or maybe two keywords at most. So, we offer them search result options to choose from, don't we? The current default position is to provide them only with Article names to select from. If there's a related Portal (even one named on the Main Page) they are not informed of its existence. Type "Science" into the Search box and see what options drop down. If, after Science, a user were to see Science - topic overview they would have one additional optional route to select. The rest of the alphabetical results would follow it. But we don't give them that route, do we? We hide it from them. Completely and utterly. Even if a user is savvy enough to go to Advanced Search and include 'Portal' in the search criteria, they still don't get Portal:Science offered to them. Not in the first 2,000 search results, anyway. And would they know what a 'Portal' actually is? The omission of Portals from our Search algorithms, from our use of Hatnotes, our See Alsos and our DAB pages all render them virtually unfindable, and, as the deletionists can currently be heard asserting, unused and thus meriting mass deletion. This 'death by darkness' might have resulted in portal annihilation, but seems instead to have reawakened interest. We need to be clear as to the purpose of Portals in helping users find an alternative, visual and easy way in to a subject area, and this needs to be followed by a concerted effort to demonstrate the value of increasing their visibility across Wikipedia in order for their potential to be fulfilled. Is it because they are in a separate namespace that they aren't returned in Search results (even with the Portal tickbox selected)? Is it because cross namespace redirects remain controversial? We have hidden them; we have malnamed them, and we now accuse them of being abandoned and unvisited. Is that really a surprise? Once we appreciate that past policy and actions have put Portals there, and take steps to correct this, are they still likely to remain in the doldrums? Somehow I doubt it. I think most Portals would be appreciated and cared for by many more editors, and - most significantly of all - used by many more visitors. And we should seize the opportunity to address this major issue of invisibility right now. Nick Moyes ( talk) 09:48, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
Well Nick than support the removal of Portal mainspace and move the useful ones into mainspace. Few readers are looking for portals - its so outdated. Remember when AOL and other search engines were portals - but Google crushed them all with a nice clean search box. Legacypac ( talk) 09:56, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
It used to be, that the reason that the portal space was not included in search by default, was because search results got choked with portal subpages, rendering search results virtually useless. If I'm not mistaken, they fixed that problem. So, I don't know why portals are not included these days. But, I just did an advanced search with portal space clicked, and searched for "football". There were no portals in the first 500 results. What's up with that? So, simply adding the portal space to search may not be enough. — The Transhumanist 00:15, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
I just tried Chromium's translation feature. It's Google Translate built right into the browser, so that every page comes up translated. So you can browse French, Spanish, German, etc. websites in Engllish.
I tried Google Translate on the Wikipedias of those languages about a year ago and it wasn't that good. But now, the Google folks have outdone themselves.
So, I've been browsing the portals of the other Wikipedias.
Check this out: the Portal:Creatures on the German Wikipedia has a feature/service where you can send them a picture of an animal, and they'll identify the species for you.
If you find yourself with some spare time, consider browsing foreign language portals in English (with Chrome, or Chromium), and post anything interesting that you find out below. Thank you. — The Transhumanist 06:29, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
Portal:Limited recognition has been created by an editor that is arguing hard that we have no right to discuss shutting down half built abandoned portals because of the portal RFC. It seems hypocritical to argue that an RFC shuts down specific deletion but not creation. Anyway this new portal is badly named. "Limited recognition" what exactly? If countries, it's debatable if the topics it touches are countries. The poet featured there is long since dead so he is hardly limited recognition. Given there are pretty much no guidelines on what is a good portal topic and according to this editor, pretty much no applicable criteria for deleting any portal, why is a new portal being created with such a poorly defined topic? Legacypac ( talk) 05:26, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
Limited recognition countries is a poorly understood contentious area. Allowing a Portal on it with few watchers and no real rules about what is ok and not ok is inviting a big problem. States with limited recognition and similar articles already suffer from a range of POV pushers, uninformed editors, and round and round in circle debates. Legacypac ( talk) 05:50, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
I think it is a very bad idea for a portal. I also think that creating a new portal while arguing loudly that MfDs of broken portals should be speedy closed because of the MfD is suspect behaviour. The portal enthusiasts need to come up with guidelines on what makes an appropriate topic and present these guidelines to an RFC or such guidelines will ne created outside this group an impossed via a vote. Legacypac ( talk) 15:52, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
Notwithstanding the loud protests and offensive attempts to procedurally close the MfDs there is nothing wrong with seeking deletion of the worst most abandoned portals at anytime. Better draft up spme guidelines for Portal deletion you can live with - because currently the Wikiproject portal group is building a wonderful case that the fanatically oppose removing any piece of junk in portal space and when that evidence is put to a RFC its not going to go well for Portals overall. Legacypac ( talk) 01:25, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
I have put WPP:Portals on my list of watched pages and as I feel more steady on my laptops keyboard, I welcome the challenge of tending your annual growth. Please allow me some time to address the urgent needs of two topics and monitor a third. I know that working on something as core as a portal could prove to be the most beneficial place for me to sharpen my encyclopedic tone. Not jumping in and joining you today, but you caught my eye and I will be back. Thank you. Mrphilip ( talk) 07:54, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
Could someone please add a section—preferably at the top of the article—which explains how to use the "transclusion" templates? I would like to participate in this project, but I am a word- and grammar-type gnome, not a techy, so I'm at a loss at present on how I can help. Or is this a case of "if you have to ask, you shouldn't be here"? Thanks for any help. — Dilidor ( talk) 16:31, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the invitation! I will do my best to help and to contribute to WikiProject Portals in any way I feel necessary and relevant. But first, I must know the answers to my questions if my contributions are to be informed and educated. Before asking them, let me just say in an unrelated note that I am super excited about portals so far and have only looked (today at least) at the 1920s portal. The portal had good information on the subject, which is part of what we want, but I am pretty sure that the featured article and biography of the day sections made it look too complicated. I don't like saying that because I like those sections but from the standpoint of a user of Wikipedia who is not an editor (which of course I was at some point or other), tell me if I'm wrong but I think the sheer number of links and amount of information might overwhelm me into looking somewhere else.
Also, I think there should be some less abstract titles. For example, like I said earlier, the 1920s portal may not be abstract in itself but it refers to a period in history that spans 10 years and Wikipedia covers many topics that may have happened in 1920 but have nothing to do with what you're looking for. I know that sounds like I'm advising against something that might still be useful to some users (and I agree, don't remove the abstract article links) but I think the portals should have an organized system of sub-portals or sub-categories that have a maximum capacity so that there is less confusion in navigation. I think I might be blathering on without getting to the point so I'll just leave what I have until I can gather my wits. Please tell me what you think about what I've said so far.
-- OdysseusTroy ( talk) 13:50, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
See this diff. Wpgbrown ( talk) 21:03, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
There is a lot of WP:OWN suggested here. Exercise caution. Legacypac ( talk) 09:23, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
Hi!
In addition to working on some portals here, I'd like to link or improve links between project portals, e.g., linking w:Portal:Astronomy with s:Portal:Astronomy, v:Portal:Astronomy and d:Portal:Astronomy! Suggestions? -- Marshallsumter ( talk) 15:26, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
Does this wikiproject have a shortcut? Like for example WP:IND and WP:INDIA redirect to Wikipedia:Wikiproject India. Cesdeva (talk) 21:27, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
Hi, In the Rfc, some very good points about portal improvement were made, such as the 'viewership' issues. Some solutions to this are found in other wikis, where e.g. in the French Wikipedia, Portal bars have a better design (which incites the Wikipedians to its use on normal pages) and links to Portals, which have a certain relation with the page subject. (an Italian painter gets a portal bar with the portals Italy, Art (or painting if it exists) and whatever linked with his main domain of work.
Thus, portals must be promoted using portal bars, which are better adapted, and which will be more visible by the page viewers, who could then read the corresponding portals.
-- Railfan01 ( talk) 07:17, 12 May 2018 (UTC)
{{
Portal bar}}
here, used on 67,000 articles, although ours is somewhat less prominent than the larger-font French one. Compare the end of
Algeria with that of
fr:Algérie.Having noticed that bare images in portals are sometimes linked, I decided to make a template that encloses images and makes them appear more clickable to readers.
The template has yet to be applied in a live portal so it may need tweaking; be cautious about its application if you decide to use it. It appeared stable during development however. Feedback welcome. Kind regards, Cesdeva (talk) 16:22, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
Libraries have a long history of creating Research Guides to bring attention to the major resources in a given topic. With varying success. Apparently, there's been a bit of research concerning the effectiveness of Research Guides... The article I'm providing a link to was just referenced in the CircPlus listserv, and while perhaps not directly relevant, it does link to a body of research on the topic, some of which may prove of interest. Keytag It: An Exploration of a Creative and Customizable Research Guide Promotion JohnBobMead ( talk) 13:39, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
There is a set of portals I am unsure about, I don't even know why they were made, all things considered.
The specific portals I have an issue with are:
To fully understand this, note that there is an overall portal for the United Kingdom. There is then a portal for each home nation, so Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England. Then, just for England, there are portals for each county, and two of the larger cities ( London and Bristol) big enough to be treated as counties. Some counties are missing, so there is scope for some new portals. But essentially there are three "layers" of portals, each with articles that fit.
However there are these four "regions" that basically don't fit, there's no content specific to a region like that which would not be better suited for either the county portal or the England portal. The portals are awkwardly named, plus linking to South East England is not ideal since only articles on the counties in it would logically regard that regional distinction as relevant.
The portal on Stamford is the oddity. It's an interesting situation, basically someone made a portal for a single town with a population of 21,000. I think this is probably too narrow a scope, and I fear it is simply cloning Portal:Lincolnshire for the most part. It even features Lincolnshire as it's selected article.
Meanwhile I feel there should be county level portals for Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland (Shires in Scotland). Along with new portals for the missing counties of England.
Thoughts?
JLJ001 ( talk) 22:37, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
I received an invitation to this project, presumably because I had expressed support for keeping portals in the recent RFC. I am very concerned that this project seemingly intends to ultimately replace every portal a model based on article transclusion. That may be OK for some currently substandard, incomplete, or neglected portals, although I have very serious reservations about that approach in general. However, I'd like to emphasise this WikiProject does not own portal space and has no mandate whatsoever to imposes a particular model on all portals. I am one of the editors at Portal:Opera and was very involved in its content creation. It is a Featured Portal and uses the portal sub-pages model. It works wonderfully well. It's extremely easy to maintain and expand. It is also an integral part of Wikiproject Opera's activities. I would appreciate some assurances that WikiProject Portals will not attempt to override currently well-functioning, well-maintained portals. Voceditenore ( talk) 16:09, 19 May 2018 (UTC)
There's more than one way to produce a good portal. The templates are just one tool on offer; I hope there will be no pressure to use them where editors are happy to maintain the pages in other ways. Certes (talk) 23:32, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
Seconding what Voceditenore wrote. Having worked extensively in reviewing featured portals before the process was dumped, I'm very concerned that what is going on here is completely not what, historically, good-quality portals were assumed to be. Espresso Addict ( talk) 23:38, 23 May 2018 (UTC)
How does one search for portals, while excluding all subpages and redirects, so only base portals appear? external tools are fine. JLJ001 ( talk) 22:02, 19 May 2018 (UTC)
The following long-standing content from the Community bulletin board is now more appropriate here. I have replaced it with a plug for this WikiProject : Noyster (talk), 09:47, 20 May 2018 (UTC)
Would it be possible to adjust the Lua module to allow a template such as Template:Portal lead title to be used, without it being stripped out? JLJ001 ( talk) 16:56, 20 May 2018 (UTC)
A pig is ...), we can link that with a change to the module without changing all the articles
Sir Elton Hercules John CBE is...), the template won't work, but we could still amend the module to replace the first bold text (regardless of content) by a link to the article title.
I think perhaps it's about time we put our heads together to get some portal-specific policy and guidelines drafted. Moving forward, we ultimately need consensus on the acceptable standards for portals.
I think we should start a sub-page at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Discussion on policy, or a similar target, to have this hopefully extensive discussion.
What does everyone think? Cesdeva (talk) 19:50, 20 May 2018 (UTC)
Does anyone know of a way to get an image to occupy a specified percentage of the box width? It would be nice to be able to display selected images at about 80% box width, but box width varies with screen width. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 09:43, 21 May 2018 (UTC)
ntly used! Bermicourt ( talk) 14:37, 13 May 2018 (UTC)