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@ JLJ001 and AfroThundr3007730: I noticed you aren't registered for WP:AWB/ WP:JWB (AWB registration also applies to use of WP:JWB).
These are likely the most powerful tools available to Wikipedia editors. We need you up and running with these ASAP. If you use Windows, you'll be using AWB. JWB otherwise.
They are fun, you'll love 'em. :)
Requests are made at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/AutoWikiBrowser. — The Transhumanist 22:06, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
Users with under 250 non-automated mainspace edits or 500 total mainspace edits are rarely approved
@ JLJ001 and AfroThundr3007730: By the way, do you know JavaScript? — The Transhumanist 22:36, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
Relaying from WP:India Noticeboard.
The
Kartographer extension is now available.
May be useful on portals. Cesdeva (talk) 20:41, 29 May 2018 (UTC)
Note: The following notice was placed on over 1000 WikiProjects (with portals that fall under their subject)
The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.
Portals are being redesigned.
The new design features are being applied to existing portals.
At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{ Transclude lead excerpt}}.
The discussion about this can be found here.
Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.
On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.
Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.
So far, 84 editors have joined.
If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.
If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.
Thank you. — The Transhumanist 07:51, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes and Voceditenore:
It's not traffic volume that we are trying to improve, but user experience and support. Keep in mind that Wikipedia's navigation systems are not intended to compete with external search engines, but rather to complement them. I'm guessing that around 95 to 99 percent of searches on Wikipedia take you right to where you need to go. That system doesn't need replacement. But, when search proves inadequate for finding what you are looking for (like when you are not sure exactly what it is you are looking for), that's where our supplemental back up systems come in. They are extensions to the search system, to push finding effectiveness closer to 100%.
Because of this, comparative traffic is not a meaningful measure of the performance of the navigation departments. They will never come close to the traffic volumes that flow through search engines, which are the most effective tool type for basic searches. The thing we need to know is how well these systems perform when search engines do not. They are intended to catch the people who fall through the cracks when their search strings fail to match.
When a person is on a deadline, and they are at their wits' end on finding particular details, do the navigation systems help that person find what they need when search fails? If so, then they are well worth it. When a person wants a general overview of everything on Wikipedia about a subject, do they find our navigation systems pages more useful than the search results page? If so, then they are well worth it. When a user experiences Tip of the tongue phenomenon and can't think of the term they want to look up, do our navigation systems help them spot it? If so...
So, the main question is, would people rather have an encyclopedia with one way to find info (search) or would they want one that has search plus browsing-based systems to help in the rare cases that search can't quite cut it? It's the "plus" (quality, valuable service) that we focus on. Going the extra mile to provide the features users need when they need them. And now that we are building automated methods into this, the cost in editor resources shouldn't be that high. A portal that took days to build, now takes a little over an hour, and we're likely to get this down to under 10 minutes. We are also designing a low-maintenance model, and once a portal is built using it, the portal will essentially maintain itself.
I hope I've adequately explained why there is a need for these, and that the price is right. Cheers, — The Transhumanist 21:17, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
The above message mentions adding your name as a "portal maintainer" if you don't want automated updates to take over your active portal. Fair enough. So when I looked at the linked page, I see tons of maintainers! Great! Except... the first one I looked at, the PlayStation portal, has Effer as the maintainer... who hasn't edited more than once a year since 2013, and hasn't edited the portal since 2007. And who added their name to the maintainers list in 2006. If y'all are going to be using that list to make decisions on what portals are actively managed, you should maybe clear it out first. -- Pres N 16:27, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
Does anyone have any thoughts on the WikiAd I made for this WikiProject (for fun)? ID is 267 and is on commons as File:Qxz-ad267.gif. (I am using on my user page). Wpgbrown ( talk) 15:20, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
Does Wikipedia unknowingly present itself as a thesaurus when presenting an articles content... ...That Wikipedia knowledge is a noun, but as presented, is a verb relating one's state of being as Wikipedia knowledge... Should it be Wikipedia's work to present it's self through Socratic methods... ...Does Wikipedia need a Philosophy of Wikipedia Article... 45.49.226.155 ( talk) 19:00, 2 June 2018 (UTC)Arnold 45.49.226.155 ( talk) 19:00, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
I've created Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Components as another way to visualise the usual portal components, and the templates that are available to automate each component. - Evad37 [ talk 11:43, 3 June 2018 (UTC)
Hi Afro, I have 3 portal-related subpages, one of which is for my own housekeeping; the other two are English copies of German Wiki portal project pages which I translated because I felt they might be of use (albeit adapted) for our project. I've referred (and linked) to them a couple of times during discussions. But I wouldn't want to move them to mainspace without a consensus and appropriate tweaking. Their status is as follows:
Hope that helps. Your thoughts would be welcome. Bermicourt ( talk) 13:11, 4 June 2018 (UTC)
Why is there no portal for comedy within the arts portal? Surely they are one in the same. Stand-up comedy specifically aswell as humor in film could easily be discussed.
This project has too many talk pages with hair-splitting distinctions. It's confusing and unhelpful, especially since the Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals is an empty soft redirect to a confusing array of topical but overlapping pages.
I would like to suggest at least the following:
One of the surest ways for a wikiproject to gradually go moribund (sometimes quickly) is excessive decentralization and splitting of human resources. We've seen this many times, e.g. with unnecessary workgroups/taskforces being created then going moribund but people not watchlisting the main project page, so it becoming inactive eventually, too; and dozens (at least) of "/Assessment" and "/Peer review" process pages no one has used in years.
After the initial flurry of this project's activities to make various tech stuff possible and get design and policy stuff implemented – as soon as the traffic becomes manageable, if it isn't already – all the project talk pages should eventually become one, unless there's a continued good reason for some kind of split. It's important to remember that a wikiproject really doesn't consist of do anything other than direct editorial collaboration and communication, plus some support templates and stuff, so splintering into microtopics is antithetical to the goals.
PS: If someone says I should have posted this at
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks, I'm-a gonna
smack you. >;-)
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
17:58, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
I'd call that a "go". The "supports" have it. Three talk pages. — The Transhumanist 23:45, 4 July 2018 (UTC)
Done —
The Transhumanist
08:58, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
Is anyone interested in this? It was a major driver for portal improvement when it was active, and hits on former featured portals went through the floor when it was retired, which was extremely discouraging for maintainers. Espresso Addict ( talk) 01:28, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
I think that we should be looking at introducing more quality levels to assess portals – there's quite a gap between underdeveloped portals and fully developed, good-quality portals. Notwithstanding that there may be further technical developments, I propose the following class system for portals:
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples FPo
For Featured portals only, which have passed a formal review at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates. US roads, Germany B Portal is complete and without major issues; meets all of the Portal B-Class criteria ... C Portals is substantially complete; meets most but not all of the Portal B-Class criteria. ... Start Portals has significant room for improvement; fails most of the Portal B-Class criteria. ... Stub A portal that is under construction, severely underdeveloped, or otherwise does not serve its purpose as a portal. Readers would be better off viewing the topic's main article. Crawley Portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. — Portal B-Class criteria
Portals may be assessed as B-Class when they are complete and without major issues. Specifically, the portal is:
- Useful. Provides:
- an introduction to the topic or topics the portal covers, long enough to be useful but short enough as to not be distracting
- a variety of sample content sections (typically one or more sections for articles, one or more sections for images or other files, did you know? items, and in the news items)
- navigation to help users find their way to the most relevant Wikipedia material within a particular subject
- a bridge between reading and editing, by providing links to relevant areas in the Wikipedia community associated with the portal's subject
- Broad in coverage. Each selected content section has at least 20 items on random rotation, or is
manuallyupdated on at least a monthly basis (either manually or via automated means).- Up to date. Significant changes to article content are reflected in the portal content, either via transclusion or manual editing.
- Formatted appropriately. While an attractive and aesthetically pleasing design is desirable (and part of the featured portal criteria), all that is required for B-Class portals is that:
- content can be accessed on screens of any size, including mobile devices
- colour usage complies with the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility § Color guidelines
B-Class here is comparable to B-Class for articles, in that its for stuff that basically complete with no issues, and does not require much MOS compliance. There is also room for a GPo (Good Portal) class, which could have stricter requirements than B-Class (a new process might be easier to set up, rather than reviving the Featured Portal process). What do you all think? - Evad37 [ talk 05:10, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
{{
Guideline}}
, it likely will become one (and less controversially than some other MoS pages, because no one's working on it who isn't also in an "I care about the portals" frame of mind (i.e., there's not an "opposition camp"), and the goal of it is to explain how to apply the key parts of MoS to portals (and point out where some article-specific line items don't really logically apply to portals), not to invent new restrictive "rules" out of nowhere, nor to diverge sharply from MoS's central concerns. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
10:46, 17 June 2018 (UTC)Since portals are not articles, maybe we should go completely customized. Otherwise, A, B, C, etc. could be applied out of context, or be confusing. Maybe something like this, instead:
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples ??? Portal is complete and fully self-updating. Portal:U.S. roads ??? Portals is complete, but rotates through static or manually updated lists. ... ??? Portal is missing a key section, or one or more sections are underpopulated. ... ??? Portal has one or more empty sections. ... ??? Portal has formatting errors. ... ??? Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
As we are going for automation, quality should be built-in to the automation process. Featured status would become superfluous when the criteria are all met automatically by the software. Featured status would lose its meaning, and might acquire other connotations such as "not featured because editors have not gotten around to discussing it yet, or even to applying." I plan on making some awesome portals, but I won't be submitting any nominations -- I'd rather use the time to build new portals. If we upgrade all 1500 portals to a high-level of automated quality, how long would it take editors to assess them all to featured status? Assuming one approval every two days, it will take over 8 years. And that's without considering future portals that do not even exist yet. 3000 portals would take 16 years. Excellent portals will be sitting there waiting forever to get certified.
I'm also concerned that with the lack of editor labor, a featured portal department would distract editors from higher priority portal-related activities such as designing innovative new components that would ensure quality, and performing AWB runs to install those new components.
Another concern is that if a featured portal department has only an editor or two, or just the nominators, what purpose would it serve? I'm concerned that it will turn into another portal approval fiasco driven by personal bias. They rejected a proposal to create the Cannabis portal, for example. Though the bottle-necking problem is my main concern.
It might be nice to have some other top-rating, which all portals can attain without bottle-necking. Perhaps foregoing an approval process in favor of an assessment process would work for portals. Thoughts? — The Transhumanist 20:03, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
Quality is different to automation or maintenance status, which already shows up separately in the project banner (if the portal is marked with {{
Portal maintenance status}}). For example, a fully automated portal that has a one sentence introduction, two article excerpts on random rotation, and three pictures on random rotation would still be a low quality portal that's lacking content; while a fully manual portal with dozens of subpages, with someone keeping the whole thing up to date on a monthly basis, would be a higher quality portal. Completeness also is not quality, just one aspect of it. A portal may be complete, as in it has all the sections it's meant to have, but again if it doesn't have much content to go in those sections, then its not really a quality portal.
Regardless of what we call the classes, I think the criteria I wrote above – useful (i.e complete), broad in coverage, up to date, formatted appropriately – are what we should be trying to achieve. How one goes about it is a different matter, but thus far we've been reassuring everyone who asked that the new automation and selective transclusion techniques are not required, and "there's more than one way to produce a good portal".
GPo was just a thought bubble, we can leave it and other higher-quality class proposals to the side, and mark the featured FPo class as historical in the table. (Perhaps it or something similar can be revisited later on, if we can come up with a light-weight process.) –
Evad37 [
talk
01:15, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
Here's a refined version of the first proposal, taking into account the comments from above. A completely new set of class labels is used so there's no confusion with article classes, and I removed the row for Featured Portals (they can still be marked with that historical featured status elsewhere, but for our project banner they would be assessed according to the same standards as other portals). The criteria are now numbered and have a better introduction; added new criteria 2(b); criteria 4 is now based on the MOS (draft) guidelines; and there's some other more minor changes.
Portal quality criteria
Portals are assessed based on how well they serve their purpose as entry points into their respective topic areas. High quality portals are:
- Useful. Provides:
- (a) an introduction to the topic or topics the portal covers,
long enough to be useful but short enough as to not be distractingwhich follows the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section § Introductory text guidelines- (b) a variety of sample content
sectionsand navigational sections, as well as a bridge between reading and editing, per Wikipedia:Portal guidelines § What content to include(typically one or more sections for articles, one or more sections for images or other files, did you know? items, and in the news items)(c) navigation to help users find their way to the most relevant Wikipedia material within a particular subject(d) a bridge between reading and editing, by providing links to relevant areas in the Wikipedia community associated with the portal's subject- Broad in coverage.
- (a) Each selected content section either has at least 20 items on random rotation, or is automatically updated on at least a monthly basis.
- (b) Content is representative of the entire topic or topics the portal covers, and not overly focused on specific aspects. Portals should present a worldwide view of the topic, unless the topic specifically relates to one or more countries or geographical areas.
- Up to date.
Significantchanges to article content are reflected in the portal content,eithervia transclusion or other automated meansor manual editing.- Formatted appropriately. Follows the (draft) guidelines at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Portals.
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples Complete Portal is complete and without major issues; meets all of the portal quality criteria ... Substantial Portal is substantially complete; meets most but not all of the portal quality criteria. ... Underdeveloped Portal has significant room for improvement; fails most of the portal quality criteria. ... Broken A portal that is under construction, severely underdeveloped, or otherwise does not serve its purpose as a portal. Readers would be better off viewing the topic's main article. ... Meta-portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
- Evad37 [ talk 14:41, 17 June 2018 (UTC) Updated 07:13, 20 June 2018 (UTC), see section below
[ec]
Do we put any upper limit to the size or complexity of a portal? If it crashes the server? Exceeds the transclusion limit? Takes too long to download? Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 10:10, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
Updated again, based on further feedback (see deletions and insertions)
<ins>
and <del>...</del>
tags. -
Evad37 [
talk
07:18, 30 June 2018 (UTC)Portal quality criteria
Portals are assessed based on how well they serve their purpose as entry points into their respective topic areas. High quality portals are:
- Useful. Provides:
- (a) an introduction to the topic or topics the portal covers, which follows the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section § Introductory text guidelines
- (b) a variety of sample content and navigational sections, as well as a bridge between reading and editing, per Wikipedia:Portal guidelines § What content to include
- Broad in coverage.
- (a) Each selected content section either has at least 20 items on random rotation, or is automatically updated on at least a monthly basis.
- (b) Content is representative of the entire topic or topics the portal covers, and not overly focused on specific aspects. Portals should present a worldwide view of the topic, unless the topic specifically relates to one or more countries or geographical areas.
- Up to date. Changes to article content are reflected in the portal content, via transclusion or other automated means.
- Formatted appropriately. Follows the (draft) guidelines at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Portals.
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples Complete Portal is complete and without major issues; meets all of the portal quality criteria ... Substantial Portal is substantially complete; meets most but not all of the portal quality criteria, and is not too far from meeting the exceptions. ... Underdeveloped Portal has significant room for improvement; fails many of the portal quality criteria, or fails any by a large margin ... Broken A portal that is abandoned, severely underdeveloped, or otherwise does not serve its purpose as a portal. Readers would be better off viewing the topic's main article. ... Meta-portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
On transcluding the lead from a B-class article: Check that it complies with core content policies and the content and sourcing guidelines, too, not just MoS (says "that MoS guy"). That's supposed to be done for B-class anyway, but something can migrate a long way from what it looked like when first assessed as B-class, and people are much less apt to watchlist a B-classer than an FA or a GA. Plus, articles are often slapped with a B-class assessment without the checklist that indicates they were examined for compliance with the criteria (In properly done wikiproject talk page banners, I think that prevents actual B-class categorization, but I'm not sure how universal that is). The main issue will likely be addition of unsourced claims, which are hard to detect in the lead, since the lead is citation-free except for controversial claims. I would suggest also treating (by default) A-class and PR-class as identical to B-class for this purpose, because A-class assessment and peer review have both pretty much died on the vine (quite some time ago). There are a handful of exceptions that could be made; I think WP:MILHIST still actively does this stuff, but very few topical wikiprojects are sufficiently "staffed" any longer.
Back-patting meta comment: I'm quite frankly really impressed and inspired by what's happening here. If you'd asked me a year ago if I thought portals should just be scrapped as a failed, dragged-out experiment, I would have said "yes". This planning and the progress toward making it all practical is exemplary of the wiki spirit, in particular of a happy service-to-readers puppy properly wagging its technological and editorial tail instead of
the other way around, and without
"drama". It's also one of the few examples I've seen in a long time of a new wikiproject actually doing something useful and fomenting constructive activity (instead of acting as a barrier to participation, and a canvassing/ownership farm for PoV pushers). Kudos all around.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
23:03, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
I don't think we want to be too focused on what the quality of the articles are, as long as the bits transcluded to the portal are good enough. Maybe having the content come from FA/A/GA articles would making passing of the criteria more likely, but it shouldn't be required. Unless we also want to have some higher rating than "Complete" like "Good Portal". Or perhaps "Excellent" to avoid association with Good Articles which have completely different criteria. - Evad37 [ talk 07:49, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
Some more specific responses:
- Evad37 [ talk 08:15, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
On transcluding the lead from a B-class article. There are not enough FA and GA to work without B-class, and in some cases C-class will do if the lead meets B-class criteria. If it doesn't, the article can be downgraded quite easily, based on failing the lead criteria, or alternatively, the lead can be improved so that both the article and portal are improved. Everyone wins. The point here is to get a way for portals to be updated periodically by bot runs, which can list articles by category and quality, and then use those lists to automatically rebuild the portal structure. Whatever looks like it may work should be considered, until we can see why it wouldn't work, and this months failure may work next year. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 11:06, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
|broken=
parameter, so that it can populate a tracking category for immediate attention. — AfroThundr (
u ·
t ·
c)
04:04, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples FPo
For Featured portals only, which have passed a formal review at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates. US roads, Germany B Portal is complete and without major issues; meets all of the Portal B-Class criteria ... C Portals is substantially complete; meets most but not all of the Portal B-Class criteria. ... ??? A portal that is under construction, severely underdeveloped, or otherwise does not serve its purpose as a portal. Readers would be better off viewing the topic's main article. Crawley Portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples FPo
For Featured portals only, which have passed a formal review at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates. US roads, Germany B Portal is complete and without major issues; meets all of the Portal B-Class criteria (or should it be A-class/GPo class?) ... C Portals is substantially complete; meets most but not all of the Portal B-Class criteria. ... Start A portal that is under construction, severely underdeveloped, or otherwise does not serve its purpose as a portal. Readers would be better off viewing the topic's main article. Editors are encouraged to further develop these portals, but abandoned start-class portals are at risk of being speedily deleted. Crawley Portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
On retrospect, it might be best to use positive or neutral descriptors, rather than ones that can be presented as criticisms such as "underdeveloped" and "broken". Any word that could be used as a synonym for "crap". Otherwise, we may be shooting ourselves in the feet. Imagine a new RfC that states "There are 899 underdeveloped portals and 162 broken ones, and therefore, we should get rid of portals." Besides that, we don't want a portal's rating to be the justification for a deletion discussion. "Delete this portal, because it is broken."
"Underdeveloped" sounds very similar and is semantically related to one of the speedy deletion criteria for portals: WP:P2, underpopulated. We wouldn't want them to get confused.
"Broken" was initially intended to identify portals with formatting errors, signifying a broken page. Portals needing immediate attention, because they aren't rendering correctly on the page. Though "broken" sounds really bad. Perhaps "Needs immediate attention" could work, as long as its description is very clear and not broadly subjective. That sounds more like an alert than a criticism, and would therefore be more appropriate. Whatever this rating is called, its corresponding category could play a crucial role in portal maintenance, helping to ensure that the worst problems are treated urgently. This would be a category our vigilant WikiProject troubleshooters would watch closely.
Concerning descriptions, I believe "abandoned" is not a measure of a portal's quality, though it may be a contributing factor (especially for manually maintained portals). Who is or is not involved with a portal's maintenance should have nothing to do with the rating. An "abandoned" automated portal could remain relevant for years, with no editor interference, if done right.
Thoughts? — The Transhumanist 04:28, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
|attention=some reason
parameter on the project banner that adds both a category and a "requires immediate attention because: some reason" note. -
Evad37 [
talk
07:39, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
|manual=
parameter to list the dedicated maintainers.|maintainer=
parameter was added to {{
portal maintenance status}} earlier today by
Wpgbrown. We're all set on that front. — AfroThundr (
u ·
t ·
c)
21:02, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
|manual=
and |maintainer=
separate? That way "hands-off" maintainers of automated portals could still be listed. I think that tracking manual vs auto independently of listing maintainers might be a use case we should cover. @
Wpgbrown: Thoughts? — AfroThundr (
u ·
t ·
c)
19:17, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
|maintainer=
parameter of {{
Portal maintenance status}}. — AfroThundr (
u ·
t ·
c)
12:21, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
This version uses the terms that are less likely to be confused with article classes, and avoids the terms that may encourage deletion tagging. Colour coding looks reasonably appropriate. The criteria may require further tweaking, but I think they may be close enough to run with. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:31, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples FPo
For Featured portals, which have passed a formal review at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates. US roads, Germany Complete Portal is complete and without significant issues; meets all of the portal quality criteria ... Substantial Portal is substantially complete; meets all of the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines and most but not all of the portal quality criteria. ... Basic (or Start
or Sufficient)Portal has significant room for improvement; it meets the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines, but fails several of the portal quality criteria, or fails any by a large margin. It is is useful enough for Portalspace. This is the minimum requirement to be left unaltered. ... Incomplete
(or Underdeveloped)A portal that does not meet the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines, so is not yet a portal. It does not belong in portal-space, and should be draft-spaced or userfied if not fixed within a specified period (1 month?). If an attempt at a portal has no clear chance of meeting the portal guidelines based on the available articles it should be deleted until the topic has developed sufficiently ... Meta-portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles. Some or all of the portal guidelines may not apply. Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
So about the "Basic" class - I'm thinking "Start" best reflects the nature of that class, and "Sufficient" just doesn't work as well. If we want to avoid the standard names completely, we'd want to go with "Basic" though. As for the "Incomplete" class - another synonym would be "Draft", but like "Start", we probably want to move away from that. From the last two, I think "Incomplete" would be best, as "Underdeveloped" implies basic level functionality that just needs improvement. Besides the nit-picking over the names, the rest looks good to me. — AfroThundr ( u · t · c) 17:31, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
{{PAGENAME}}
, which doesn't work right when the page is named
Draft:Portal:Whatever.I don't have a strenuous objection to introduction of Robust as a portal equivalent of A class, but it's iffy. The A class is actually very disused and could probably be eliminated, like I managed to recently get rid of B+ class (for A, run them through GA if not already a GA, or through FA, and reduce the non-GA ones to B class by default and in the interim. There are even objections to A class continuing to exist because it's not subjected to any process other than a single wikiproject's "local consensus" yet is put above GA.) If we added Robust, it would imply and probably necessitate an assessment process that we don't have. Better to re-establish Featured Portal, then see if, later, we actually need a Robust/A class, about which I'll remain skeptical.
I'm opposed to introduction of even more subjective "side" ratings like "Innovative"; it's just orthogonal to the purpose of this scale. Maybe create some other kind of award/barnstar/whatever.We can have Featured right now, since some portals did receive it under the original assessment process and were not stripped of it by any process that deemed they'd fallen out of the requirements for it as established at the time. We just need a new process for issuing that assessment against.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
06:48, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
Alright people, I think this discussion has pretty much run its course. Below is what we've come up with, after taking the latest feedback into account:
Class | Criteria | Examples |
---|---|---|
Featured | For Featured portals, which had passed a formal review at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates before the process was retired. | US roads, Germany |
Complete | Portal is complete and without significant issues; meets all of the portal quality criteria | ... |
Substantial | Portal is substantially complete; meets all of the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines and most but not all of the portal quality criteria. | ... |
Basic | Portal has significant room for improvement; it meets the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines, but fails several of the portal quality criteria, or fails any by a large margin. It is is useful enough for Portalspace. This is the minimum requirement to be left unaltered. | ... |
Incomplete | A portal that does not meet the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines, so is not yet a portal. It does not belong in portal-space, and should be draft-spaced or userfied if not fixed within a specified period (1 month?). If an attempt at a portal has no clear chance of meeting the portal guidelines based on the available articles it should be deleted until the topic has developed sufficiently | ... |
Meta | Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles. Some or all of the portal guidelines may not apply. | Portal:Contents/Portals |
??? | Quality has not yet been assessed. | — |
If there are no further objections or concerns, this version will be implemented on our assessment page and in the project banner soon-ish. Keep in mind the scale is not set in stone, this being a wiki and all. I think we need to try it live at this point before anything else can be gained here. — AfroThundr ( u · t · c) 03:44, 24 August 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 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | → | Archive 10 |
![]() | This section is for all other general discussions. |
@ JLJ001 and AfroThundr3007730: I noticed you aren't registered for WP:AWB/ WP:JWB (AWB registration also applies to use of WP:JWB).
These are likely the most powerful tools available to Wikipedia editors. We need you up and running with these ASAP. If you use Windows, you'll be using AWB. JWB otherwise.
They are fun, you'll love 'em. :)
Requests are made at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/AutoWikiBrowser. — The Transhumanist 22:06, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
Users with under 250 non-automated mainspace edits or 500 total mainspace edits are rarely approved
@ JLJ001 and AfroThundr3007730: By the way, do you know JavaScript? — The Transhumanist 22:36, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
Relaying from WP:India Noticeboard.
The
Kartographer extension is now available.
May be useful on portals. Cesdeva (talk) 20:41, 29 May 2018 (UTC)
Note: The following notice was placed on over 1000 WikiProjects (with portals that fall under their subject)
The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.
Portals are being redesigned.
The new design features are being applied to existing portals.
At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{ Transclude lead excerpt}}.
The discussion about this can be found here.
Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.
On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.
Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.
So far, 84 editors have joined.
If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.
If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.
Thank you. — The Transhumanist 07:51, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
@ Certes and Voceditenore:
It's not traffic volume that we are trying to improve, but user experience and support. Keep in mind that Wikipedia's navigation systems are not intended to compete with external search engines, but rather to complement them. I'm guessing that around 95 to 99 percent of searches on Wikipedia take you right to where you need to go. That system doesn't need replacement. But, when search proves inadequate for finding what you are looking for (like when you are not sure exactly what it is you are looking for), that's where our supplemental back up systems come in. They are extensions to the search system, to push finding effectiveness closer to 100%.
Because of this, comparative traffic is not a meaningful measure of the performance of the navigation departments. They will never come close to the traffic volumes that flow through search engines, which are the most effective tool type for basic searches. The thing we need to know is how well these systems perform when search engines do not. They are intended to catch the people who fall through the cracks when their search strings fail to match.
When a person is on a deadline, and they are at their wits' end on finding particular details, do the navigation systems help that person find what they need when search fails? If so, then they are well worth it. When a person wants a general overview of everything on Wikipedia about a subject, do they find our navigation systems pages more useful than the search results page? If so, then they are well worth it. When a user experiences Tip of the tongue phenomenon and can't think of the term they want to look up, do our navigation systems help them spot it? If so...
So, the main question is, would people rather have an encyclopedia with one way to find info (search) or would they want one that has search plus browsing-based systems to help in the rare cases that search can't quite cut it? It's the "plus" (quality, valuable service) that we focus on. Going the extra mile to provide the features users need when they need them. And now that we are building automated methods into this, the cost in editor resources shouldn't be that high. A portal that took days to build, now takes a little over an hour, and we're likely to get this down to under 10 minutes. We are also designing a low-maintenance model, and once a portal is built using it, the portal will essentially maintain itself.
I hope I've adequately explained why there is a need for these, and that the price is right. Cheers, — The Transhumanist 21:17, 30 May 2018 (UTC)
The above message mentions adding your name as a "portal maintainer" if you don't want automated updates to take over your active portal. Fair enough. So when I looked at the linked page, I see tons of maintainers! Great! Except... the first one I looked at, the PlayStation portal, has Effer as the maintainer... who hasn't edited more than once a year since 2013, and hasn't edited the portal since 2007. And who added their name to the maintainers list in 2006. If y'all are going to be using that list to make decisions on what portals are actively managed, you should maybe clear it out first. -- Pres N 16:27, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
Does anyone have any thoughts on the WikiAd I made for this WikiProject (for fun)? ID is 267 and is on commons as File:Qxz-ad267.gif. (I am using on my user page). Wpgbrown ( talk) 15:20, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
Does Wikipedia unknowingly present itself as a thesaurus when presenting an articles content... ...That Wikipedia knowledge is a noun, but as presented, is a verb relating one's state of being as Wikipedia knowledge... Should it be Wikipedia's work to present it's self through Socratic methods... ...Does Wikipedia need a Philosophy of Wikipedia Article... 45.49.226.155 ( talk) 19:00, 2 June 2018 (UTC)Arnold 45.49.226.155 ( talk) 19:00, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
I've created Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Components as another way to visualise the usual portal components, and the templates that are available to automate each component. - Evad37 [ talk 11:43, 3 June 2018 (UTC)
Hi Afro, I have 3 portal-related subpages, one of which is for my own housekeeping; the other two are English copies of German Wiki portal project pages which I translated because I felt they might be of use (albeit adapted) for our project. I've referred (and linked) to them a couple of times during discussions. But I wouldn't want to move them to mainspace without a consensus and appropriate tweaking. Their status is as follows:
Hope that helps. Your thoughts would be welcome. Bermicourt ( talk) 13:11, 4 June 2018 (UTC)
Why is there no portal for comedy within the arts portal? Surely they are one in the same. Stand-up comedy specifically aswell as humor in film could easily be discussed.
This project has too many talk pages with hair-splitting distinctions. It's confusing and unhelpful, especially since the Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals is an empty soft redirect to a confusing array of topical but overlapping pages.
I would like to suggest at least the following:
One of the surest ways for a wikiproject to gradually go moribund (sometimes quickly) is excessive decentralization and splitting of human resources. We've seen this many times, e.g. with unnecessary workgroups/taskforces being created then going moribund but people not watchlisting the main project page, so it becoming inactive eventually, too; and dozens (at least) of "/Assessment" and "/Peer review" process pages no one has used in years.
After the initial flurry of this project's activities to make various tech stuff possible and get design and policy stuff implemented – as soon as the traffic becomes manageable, if it isn't already – all the project talk pages should eventually become one, unless there's a continued good reason for some kind of split. It's important to remember that a wikiproject really doesn't consist of do anything other than direct editorial collaboration and communication, plus some support templates and stuff, so splintering into microtopics is antithetical to the goals.
PS: If someone says I should have posted this at
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks, I'm-a gonna
smack you. >;-)
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
17:58, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
I'd call that a "go". The "supports" have it. Three talk pages. — The Transhumanist 23:45, 4 July 2018 (UTC)
Done —
The Transhumanist
08:58, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
Is anyone interested in this? It was a major driver for portal improvement when it was active, and hits on former featured portals went through the floor when it was retired, which was extremely discouraging for maintainers. Espresso Addict ( talk) 01:28, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
I think that we should be looking at introducing more quality levels to assess portals – there's quite a gap between underdeveloped portals and fully developed, good-quality portals. Notwithstanding that there may be further technical developments, I propose the following class system for portals:
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples FPo
For Featured portals only, which have passed a formal review at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates. US roads, Germany B Portal is complete and without major issues; meets all of the Portal B-Class criteria ... C Portals is substantially complete; meets most but not all of the Portal B-Class criteria. ... Start Portals has significant room for improvement; fails most of the Portal B-Class criteria. ... Stub A portal that is under construction, severely underdeveloped, or otherwise does not serve its purpose as a portal. Readers would be better off viewing the topic's main article. Crawley Portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. — Portal B-Class criteria
Portals may be assessed as B-Class when they are complete and without major issues. Specifically, the portal is:
- Useful. Provides:
- an introduction to the topic or topics the portal covers, long enough to be useful but short enough as to not be distracting
- a variety of sample content sections (typically one or more sections for articles, one or more sections for images or other files, did you know? items, and in the news items)
- navigation to help users find their way to the most relevant Wikipedia material within a particular subject
- a bridge between reading and editing, by providing links to relevant areas in the Wikipedia community associated with the portal's subject
- Broad in coverage. Each selected content section has at least 20 items on random rotation, or is
manuallyupdated on at least a monthly basis (either manually or via automated means).- Up to date. Significant changes to article content are reflected in the portal content, either via transclusion or manual editing.
- Formatted appropriately. While an attractive and aesthetically pleasing design is desirable (and part of the featured portal criteria), all that is required for B-Class portals is that:
- content can be accessed on screens of any size, including mobile devices
- colour usage complies with the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility § Color guidelines
B-Class here is comparable to B-Class for articles, in that its for stuff that basically complete with no issues, and does not require much MOS compliance. There is also room for a GPo (Good Portal) class, which could have stricter requirements than B-Class (a new process might be easier to set up, rather than reviving the Featured Portal process). What do you all think? - Evad37 [ talk 05:10, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
{{
Guideline}}
, it likely will become one (and less controversially than some other MoS pages, because no one's working on it who isn't also in an "I care about the portals" frame of mind (i.e., there's not an "opposition camp"), and the goal of it is to explain how to apply the key parts of MoS to portals (and point out where some article-specific line items don't really logically apply to portals), not to invent new restrictive "rules" out of nowhere, nor to diverge sharply from MoS's central concerns. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
10:46, 17 June 2018 (UTC)Since portals are not articles, maybe we should go completely customized. Otherwise, A, B, C, etc. could be applied out of context, or be confusing. Maybe something like this, instead:
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples ??? Portal is complete and fully self-updating. Portal:U.S. roads ??? Portals is complete, but rotates through static or manually updated lists. ... ??? Portal is missing a key section, or one or more sections are underpopulated. ... ??? Portal has one or more empty sections. ... ??? Portal has formatting errors. ... ??? Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
As we are going for automation, quality should be built-in to the automation process. Featured status would become superfluous when the criteria are all met automatically by the software. Featured status would lose its meaning, and might acquire other connotations such as "not featured because editors have not gotten around to discussing it yet, or even to applying." I plan on making some awesome portals, but I won't be submitting any nominations -- I'd rather use the time to build new portals. If we upgrade all 1500 portals to a high-level of automated quality, how long would it take editors to assess them all to featured status? Assuming one approval every two days, it will take over 8 years. And that's without considering future portals that do not even exist yet. 3000 portals would take 16 years. Excellent portals will be sitting there waiting forever to get certified.
I'm also concerned that with the lack of editor labor, a featured portal department would distract editors from higher priority portal-related activities such as designing innovative new components that would ensure quality, and performing AWB runs to install those new components.
Another concern is that if a featured portal department has only an editor or two, or just the nominators, what purpose would it serve? I'm concerned that it will turn into another portal approval fiasco driven by personal bias. They rejected a proposal to create the Cannabis portal, for example. Though the bottle-necking problem is my main concern.
It might be nice to have some other top-rating, which all portals can attain without bottle-necking. Perhaps foregoing an approval process in favor of an assessment process would work for portals. Thoughts? — The Transhumanist 20:03, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
Quality is different to automation or maintenance status, which already shows up separately in the project banner (if the portal is marked with {{
Portal maintenance status}}). For example, a fully automated portal that has a one sentence introduction, two article excerpts on random rotation, and three pictures on random rotation would still be a low quality portal that's lacking content; while a fully manual portal with dozens of subpages, with someone keeping the whole thing up to date on a monthly basis, would be a higher quality portal. Completeness also is not quality, just one aspect of it. A portal may be complete, as in it has all the sections it's meant to have, but again if it doesn't have much content to go in those sections, then its not really a quality portal.
Regardless of what we call the classes, I think the criteria I wrote above – useful (i.e complete), broad in coverage, up to date, formatted appropriately – are what we should be trying to achieve. How one goes about it is a different matter, but thus far we've been reassuring everyone who asked that the new automation and selective transclusion techniques are not required, and "there's more than one way to produce a good portal".
GPo was just a thought bubble, we can leave it and other higher-quality class proposals to the side, and mark the featured FPo class as historical in the table. (Perhaps it or something similar can be revisited later on, if we can come up with a light-weight process.) –
Evad37 [
talk
01:15, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
Here's a refined version of the first proposal, taking into account the comments from above. A completely new set of class labels is used so there's no confusion with article classes, and I removed the row for Featured Portals (they can still be marked with that historical featured status elsewhere, but for our project banner they would be assessed according to the same standards as other portals). The criteria are now numbered and have a better introduction; added new criteria 2(b); criteria 4 is now based on the MOS (draft) guidelines; and there's some other more minor changes.
Portal quality criteria
Portals are assessed based on how well they serve their purpose as entry points into their respective topic areas. High quality portals are:
- Useful. Provides:
- (a) an introduction to the topic or topics the portal covers,
long enough to be useful but short enough as to not be distractingwhich follows the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section § Introductory text guidelines- (b) a variety of sample content
sectionsand navigational sections, as well as a bridge between reading and editing, per Wikipedia:Portal guidelines § What content to include(typically one or more sections for articles, one or more sections for images or other files, did you know? items, and in the news items)(c) navigation to help users find their way to the most relevant Wikipedia material within a particular subject(d) a bridge between reading and editing, by providing links to relevant areas in the Wikipedia community associated with the portal's subject- Broad in coverage.
- (a) Each selected content section either has at least 20 items on random rotation, or is automatically updated on at least a monthly basis.
- (b) Content is representative of the entire topic or topics the portal covers, and not overly focused on specific aspects. Portals should present a worldwide view of the topic, unless the topic specifically relates to one or more countries or geographical areas.
- Up to date.
Significantchanges to article content are reflected in the portal content,eithervia transclusion or other automated meansor manual editing.- Formatted appropriately. Follows the (draft) guidelines at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Portals.
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples Complete Portal is complete and without major issues; meets all of the portal quality criteria ... Substantial Portal is substantially complete; meets most but not all of the portal quality criteria. ... Underdeveloped Portal has significant room for improvement; fails most of the portal quality criteria. ... Broken A portal that is under construction, severely underdeveloped, or otherwise does not serve its purpose as a portal. Readers would be better off viewing the topic's main article. ... Meta-portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
- Evad37 [ talk 14:41, 17 June 2018 (UTC) Updated 07:13, 20 June 2018 (UTC), see section below
[ec]
Do we put any upper limit to the size or complexity of a portal? If it crashes the server? Exceeds the transclusion limit? Takes too long to download? Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 10:10, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
Updated again, based on further feedback (see deletions and insertions)
<ins>
and <del>...</del>
tags. -
Evad37 [
talk
07:18, 30 June 2018 (UTC)Portal quality criteria
Portals are assessed based on how well they serve their purpose as entry points into their respective topic areas. High quality portals are:
- Useful. Provides:
- (a) an introduction to the topic or topics the portal covers, which follows the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section § Introductory text guidelines
- (b) a variety of sample content and navigational sections, as well as a bridge between reading and editing, per Wikipedia:Portal guidelines § What content to include
- Broad in coverage.
- (a) Each selected content section either has at least 20 items on random rotation, or is automatically updated on at least a monthly basis.
- (b) Content is representative of the entire topic or topics the portal covers, and not overly focused on specific aspects. Portals should present a worldwide view of the topic, unless the topic specifically relates to one or more countries or geographical areas.
- Up to date. Changes to article content are reflected in the portal content, via transclusion or other automated means.
- Formatted appropriately. Follows the (draft) guidelines at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Portals.
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples Complete Portal is complete and without major issues; meets all of the portal quality criteria ... Substantial Portal is substantially complete; meets most but not all of the portal quality criteria, and is not too far from meeting the exceptions. ... Underdeveloped Portal has significant room for improvement; fails many of the portal quality criteria, or fails any by a large margin ... Broken A portal that is abandoned, severely underdeveloped, or otherwise does not serve its purpose as a portal. Readers would be better off viewing the topic's main article. ... Meta-portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
On transcluding the lead from a B-class article: Check that it complies with core content policies and the content and sourcing guidelines, too, not just MoS (says "that MoS guy"). That's supposed to be done for B-class anyway, but something can migrate a long way from what it looked like when first assessed as B-class, and people are much less apt to watchlist a B-classer than an FA or a GA. Plus, articles are often slapped with a B-class assessment without the checklist that indicates they were examined for compliance with the criteria (In properly done wikiproject talk page banners, I think that prevents actual B-class categorization, but I'm not sure how universal that is). The main issue will likely be addition of unsourced claims, which are hard to detect in the lead, since the lead is citation-free except for controversial claims. I would suggest also treating (by default) A-class and PR-class as identical to B-class for this purpose, because A-class assessment and peer review have both pretty much died on the vine (quite some time ago). There are a handful of exceptions that could be made; I think WP:MILHIST still actively does this stuff, but very few topical wikiprojects are sufficiently "staffed" any longer.
Back-patting meta comment: I'm quite frankly really impressed and inspired by what's happening here. If you'd asked me a year ago if I thought portals should just be scrapped as a failed, dragged-out experiment, I would have said "yes". This planning and the progress toward making it all practical is exemplary of the wiki spirit, in particular of a happy service-to-readers puppy properly wagging its technological and editorial tail instead of
the other way around, and without
"drama". It's also one of the few examples I've seen in a long time of a new wikiproject actually doing something useful and fomenting constructive activity (instead of acting as a barrier to participation, and a canvassing/ownership farm for PoV pushers). Kudos all around.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
23:03, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
I don't think we want to be too focused on what the quality of the articles are, as long as the bits transcluded to the portal are good enough. Maybe having the content come from FA/A/GA articles would making passing of the criteria more likely, but it shouldn't be required. Unless we also want to have some higher rating than "Complete" like "Good Portal". Or perhaps "Excellent" to avoid association with Good Articles which have completely different criteria. - Evad37 [ talk 07:49, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
Some more specific responses:
- Evad37 [ talk 08:15, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
On transcluding the lead from a B-class article. There are not enough FA and GA to work without B-class, and in some cases C-class will do if the lead meets B-class criteria. If it doesn't, the article can be downgraded quite easily, based on failing the lead criteria, or alternatively, the lead can be improved so that both the article and portal are improved. Everyone wins. The point here is to get a way for portals to be updated periodically by bot runs, which can list articles by category and quality, and then use those lists to automatically rebuild the portal structure. Whatever looks like it may work should be considered, until we can see why it wouldn't work, and this months failure may work next year. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 11:06, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
|broken=
parameter, so that it can populate a tracking category for immediate attention. — AfroThundr (
u ·
t ·
c)
04:04, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples FPo
For Featured portals only, which have passed a formal review at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates. US roads, Germany B Portal is complete and without major issues; meets all of the Portal B-Class criteria ... C Portals is substantially complete; meets most but not all of the Portal B-Class criteria. ... ??? A portal that is under construction, severely underdeveloped, or otherwise does not serve its purpose as a portal. Readers would be better off viewing the topic's main article. Crawley Portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples FPo
For Featured portals only, which have passed a formal review at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates. US roads, Germany B Portal is complete and without major issues; meets all of the Portal B-Class criteria (or should it be A-class/GPo class?) ... C Portals is substantially complete; meets most but not all of the Portal B-Class criteria. ... Start A portal that is under construction, severely underdeveloped, or otherwise does not serve its purpose as a portal. Readers would be better off viewing the topic's main article. Editors are encouraged to further develop these portals, but abandoned start-class portals are at risk of being speedily deleted. Crawley Portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
On retrospect, it might be best to use positive or neutral descriptors, rather than ones that can be presented as criticisms such as "underdeveloped" and "broken". Any word that could be used as a synonym for "crap". Otherwise, we may be shooting ourselves in the feet. Imagine a new RfC that states "There are 899 underdeveloped portals and 162 broken ones, and therefore, we should get rid of portals." Besides that, we don't want a portal's rating to be the justification for a deletion discussion. "Delete this portal, because it is broken."
"Underdeveloped" sounds very similar and is semantically related to one of the speedy deletion criteria for portals: WP:P2, underpopulated. We wouldn't want them to get confused.
"Broken" was initially intended to identify portals with formatting errors, signifying a broken page. Portals needing immediate attention, because they aren't rendering correctly on the page. Though "broken" sounds really bad. Perhaps "Needs immediate attention" could work, as long as its description is very clear and not broadly subjective. That sounds more like an alert than a criticism, and would therefore be more appropriate. Whatever this rating is called, its corresponding category could play a crucial role in portal maintenance, helping to ensure that the worst problems are treated urgently. This would be a category our vigilant WikiProject troubleshooters would watch closely.
Concerning descriptions, I believe "abandoned" is not a measure of a portal's quality, though it may be a contributing factor (especially for manually maintained portals). Who is or is not involved with a portal's maintenance should have nothing to do with the rating. An "abandoned" automated portal could remain relevant for years, with no editor interference, if done right.
Thoughts? — The Transhumanist 04:28, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
|attention=some reason
parameter on the project banner that adds both a category and a "requires immediate attention because: some reason" note. -
Evad37 [
talk
07:39, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
|manual=
parameter to list the dedicated maintainers.|maintainer=
parameter was added to {{
portal maintenance status}} earlier today by
Wpgbrown. We're all set on that front. — AfroThundr (
u ·
t ·
c)
21:02, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
|manual=
and |maintainer=
separate? That way "hands-off" maintainers of automated portals could still be listed. I think that tracking manual vs auto independently of listing maintainers might be a use case we should cover. @
Wpgbrown: Thoughts? — AfroThundr (
u ·
t ·
c)
19:17, 1 July 2018 (UTC)
|maintainer=
parameter of {{
Portal maintenance status}}. — AfroThundr (
u ·
t ·
c)
12:21, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
This version uses the terms that are less likely to be confused with article classes, and avoids the terms that may encourage deletion tagging. Colour coding looks reasonably appropriate. The criteria may require further tweaking, but I think they may be close enough to run with. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:31, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
WikiProject Portals quality scheme Class Criteria Examples FPo
For Featured portals, which have passed a formal review at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates. US roads, Germany Complete Portal is complete and without significant issues; meets all of the portal quality criteria ... Substantial Portal is substantially complete; meets all of the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines and most but not all of the portal quality criteria. ... Basic (or Start
or Sufficient)Portal has significant room for improvement; it meets the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines, but fails several of the portal quality criteria, or fails any by a large margin. It is is useful enough for Portalspace. This is the minimum requirement to be left unaltered. ... Incomplete
(or Underdeveloped)A portal that does not meet the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines, so is not yet a portal. It does not belong in portal-space, and should be draft-spaced or userfied if not fixed within a specified period (1 month?). If an attempt at a portal has no clear chance of meeting the portal guidelines based on the available articles it should be deleted until the topic has developed sufficiently ... Meta-portal Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles. Some or all of the portal guidelines may not apply. Portal:Contents/Portals ??? Quality has not yet been assessed. —
So about the "Basic" class - I'm thinking "Start" best reflects the nature of that class, and "Sufficient" just doesn't work as well. If we want to avoid the standard names completely, we'd want to go with "Basic" though. As for the "Incomplete" class - another synonym would be "Draft", but like "Start", we probably want to move away from that. From the last two, I think "Incomplete" would be best, as "Underdeveloped" implies basic level functionality that just needs improvement. Besides the nit-picking over the names, the rest looks good to me. — AfroThundr ( u · t · c) 17:31, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
{{PAGENAME}}
, which doesn't work right when the page is named
Draft:Portal:Whatever.I don't have a strenuous objection to introduction of Robust as a portal equivalent of A class, but it's iffy. The A class is actually very disused and could probably be eliminated, like I managed to recently get rid of B+ class (for A, run them through GA if not already a GA, or through FA, and reduce the non-GA ones to B class by default and in the interim. There are even objections to A class continuing to exist because it's not subjected to any process other than a single wikiproject's "local consensus" yet is put above GA.) If we added Robust, it would imply and probably necessitate an assessment process that we don't have. Better to re-establish Featured Portal, then see if, later, we actually need a Robust/A class, about which I'll remain skeptical.
I'm opposed to introduction of even more subjective "side" ratings like "Innovative"; it's just orthogonal to the purpose of this scale. Maybe create some other kind of award/barnstar/whatever.We can have Featured right now, since some portals did receive it under the original assessment process and were not stripped of it by any process that deemed they'd fallen out of the requirements for it as established at the time. We just need a new process for issuing that assessment against.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
06:48, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
Alright people, I think this discussion has pretty much run its course. Below is what we've come up with, after taking the latest feedback into account:
Class | Criteria | Examples |
---|---|---|
Featured | For Featured portals, which had passed a formal review at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates before the process was retired. | US roads, Germany |
Complete | Portal is complete and without significant issues; meets all of the portal quality criteria | ... |
Substantial | Portal is substantially complete; meets all of the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines and most but not all of the portal quality criteria. | ... |
Basic | Portal has significant room for improvement; it meets the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines, but fails several of the portal quality criteria, or fails any by a large margin. It is is useful enough for Portalspace. This is the minimum requirement to be left unaltered. | ... |
Incomplete | A portal that does not meet the Wikipedia:Portal guidelines, so is not yet a portal. It does not belong in portal-space, and should be draft-spaced or userfied if not fixed within a specified period (1 month?). If an attempt at a portal has no clear chance of meeting the portal guidelines based on the available articles it should be deleted until the topic has developed sufficiently | ... |
Meta | Meta-level portals that focus on areas of Wikipedia other than articles. Some or all of the portal guidelines may not apply. | Portal:Contents/Portals |
??? | Quality has not yet been assessed. | — |
If there are no further objections or concerns, this version will be implemented on our assessment page and in the project banner soon-ish. Keep in mind the scale is not set in stone, this being a wiki and all. I think we need to try it live at this point before anything else can be gained here. — AfroThundr ( u · t · c) 03:44, 24 August 2018 (UTC)