![]() | 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 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 |
@ ToThAc: posted this comment at the BHG arbcom case:
As for me, the reason for my hiatus on portal editing (as per FoF #10) was to let this case run its course, though I don't know if it's the same for others.
Thank you @ ToThAc:, for the explanation or your reaction to BHG. Mine is similar, but probably more permanent...
It wasn't just that BHG was creating a toxic editng/discussion environment], but that other admins weren't stopping her ( who ya gonna call?). The portal project listed 16 admins at the time, and yet they did nothing, until she attacked one of them. Her behavior, combined with the admin community's reluctance to enforce the rules on a historically respected admin, created a toxic editing environment that lasted for many months.
An editor could have stood up to BHG and effectively pushed back in the deletion discussions and portal project talk pages, at the cost of a great deal of time, while enduring being smeared and other forms of abuse. Not worth it for pages that were temporary from early on -- pending zero-page portals. Once zero-page ("quantum") portals, or similar technology, is developed, it will render the single-page portal concept, and likely all other portals, obsolete. BHG wasted nearly a year of her time deleting pages that were going to be deleted in due course anyways.
Taking a step back to look at the scope of her involvement, it appears as if BHG made a strategic sacrifice: a fait-accompli-mass-portal-deletion via WP:POVRAILROAD and WP:BULLY in exchange for being (temporarily?) penalized by arbcom. And I say "as if", because who knows what her actual motive was for using unethical tactics like smear campaigning to drive away opposition in order to impose her own agenda more easily. She's smart, so she must have known that the way she was going about it was wrongful and against the rules, but she continued to do it anyways, which means very likely that she consciously accepted the risks/price. It looks like an entirely calculated fait accompli. Then again, she was acting mean, and perhaps at the core, she is. But it is hard to reason with bullies, as all they understand is force.
What were the costs to Wikipedia? BHG stopped a very talented programming team's development project. Note, that no new program components or major script developments have been made by the portal project since she began her anti-portal crusade. Note, by BHG's analysis of the inner workings of portals, you can see that she was treating the single-page portals as content pages rather than what they were in essence: scripts (programs) under development.
She basically attacked version 1.0 of a browsing interface and general content surveying tool, and stopped development in its tracks. If she hadn't, the development team would probably be up to version 4 or 5 by now. Now that BHG is out of the way, will the programming effort pick up where it left off? Probably not. At least, not by the portal project. I for one have moved on to the Web-at-large. The development environment out there in the big wide web turned out to be much more conducive to creativity than what WP became under BHG. With commitments made elsewhere, I will unlikely be free to work on WP anytime soon.
What about evolution? Where is the technology heading? To article pages themselves. That's where the bulk of the traffic is, and so, that's the best place for innovations on Wikipedia: where the most people will benefit from them. Articles are the only portals you need -- in that they can be enhanced via scripts (or universal gadgets or MediaWiki features/extensions) to provide everything portals have provided. And then some. With the benefit of traffic. While there are good arguments for developing prototypes in an out-of-the-way area like portal space, scripts applied directly to articles offer another route to adoption of portal-like features: user-by-user installation of scripts →→ promotion to gadgets →→ promotion to universal gadgets. If a gadget or universal gadget becomes popular enough, it may catch the attention of the developers of MediaWiki itself, and become a feature of the very program that displays English Wikipedia (and many other wikis).
A good place to start would be navigation footers that correspond to an article's title. In portals, they are the basis of content slideshows, which are great for surveying a subject's coverage quickly. Now, all that is needed is a toggle-activated slideshow that doesn't have to load all the slideshow excerpts all at once (that makes for a very painful wait on slow bandwidth connections). Then, a navigation footer becomes a slideshow at the push of a button. The beauty part is that the itinerary of the show is already included in the nav footer.
Good luck, everyone, and happy editing / program developing.
Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 14:15, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
I suggest to stop any consideration of "software development" in this area until the cleanup of the portal namespace is concluded (it would take probably 6 more months at the rate of MfD and portal rewriting seen until a couple months ago) and/or a very strong consensus on a new guideline for portals is achieved (this might take years). Nemo 12:40, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
The Transhumanist, no matter what you think of BHG, it is nor appropriate or acceptable to compare her to a terrorist, which is what you have done above, along with numerous other unnecessary personal comments. Please remove this material. EdChem ( talk) 13:36, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
As this subpage is supposed to be for design and ideas, I am asking: what is the purpose of Portals? Once that is decided, we can discuss how portals can be designed so as to meet that purpose, and whether to propose deletion for those that don't. I have seen seen three incompatible purposes presented. But, I'm not going to mention those here, in case someone can propose a purpose which is actually helpful, and can be met with the existing level of volunteer editors. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 00:42, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
As discussed above and here, there is consensus to reinstate the transclusion of excerpts into portals which was carried out during 2019 and reverted in October. Several editors have already reinstated the changes to the affected portals and have added article lists to most of them (example: Portal:Cuba; search for List of selected articles). I am adding lists to the few portals lacking them. I also propose to move the excerpts into subpages. This does not affect the portal's appearance to readers but does provide editors with a page where they can see all excerpts simultaneously, even if the one they just added does not appear randomly on the main portal (example: Maryland). Certes ( talk) 11:40, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
MediaWiki 1.35 released on 20 Feb has a bug ( T245553). In galleries, portrait-shaped images are not displayed but are replaced by their filename. This bug affects portal slideshows as well as galleries in articles. We hope that it will be fixed soon. Certes ( talk) 08:42, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
How would I set a portal icon for Portal:Coronavirus disease 2019, to show in portal bars and boxes? Kingsif ( talk) 18:00, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
Sophivorus has released a new version of Module:Excerpt. The main change is internal tidying to allow internationalization, which should have no visible effect. The release also includes a bug fix which restores captions to images in certain cases where they were being removed. Certes ( talk) 19:55, 4 April 2020 (UTC)
Sophivorus has released another new version of Module:Excerpt. The main change is to finish the internationalization, which should have no visible effect. The release also includes three new options. Details are in the template documentation such as Template:Transclude lead excerpt/doc#Miscellaneous options. Certes ( talk) 11:01, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
@ Guilherme Burn: Re this edit: many of these templates are transclude on 1000+ pages, and can be used on a main portal page as well as on subpages. I don't think there's a consensus that they are obsolete. Would it be better to leave them in the listing but to change the header? Certes ( talk) 13:43, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
Using WP:RECOG and {{ Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}} it is possible to automate "Selected article" section of a portal. Is the same possible for section "Selected pictures"? — andrybak ( talk) 16:56, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
New template {{ Portal POTD}} allows re-using subpages of Template:POTD. This is the content which has already been generated for the Today's featured picture section of the Main Page. Examples of how it could be used are at {{ Portal:Arts/Featured picture/POTD}} and {{ Portal:Sports/Selected picture/Layout/POTD}}. — andrybak ( talk) 19:36, 13 June 2020 (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 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 |
@ ToThAc: posted this comment at the BHG arbcom case:
As for me, the reason for my hiatus on portal editing (as per FoF #10) was to let this case run its course, though I don't know if it's the same for others.
Thank you @ ToThAc:, for the explanation or your reaction to BHG. Mine is similar, but probably more permanent...
It wasn't just that BHG was creating a toxic editng/discussion environment], but that other admins weren't stopping her ( who ya gonna call?). The portal project listed 16 admins at the time, and yet they did nothing, until she attacked one of them. Her behavior, combined with the admin community's reluctance to enforce the rules on a historically respected admin, created a toxic editing environment that lasted for many months.
An editor could have stood up to BHG and effectively pushed back in the deletion discussions and portal project talk pages, at the cost of a great deal of time, while enduring being smeared and other forms of abuse. Not worth it for pages that were temporary from early on -- pending zero-page portals. Once zero-page ("quantum") portals, or similar technology, is developed, it will render the single-page portal concept, and likely all other portals, obsolete. BHG wasted nearly a year of her time deleting pages that were going to be deleted in due course anyways.
Taking a step back to look at the scope of her involvement, it appears as if BHG made a strategic sacrifice: a fait-accompli-mass-portal-deletion via WP:POVRAILROAD and WP:BULLY in exchange for being (temporarily?) penalized by arbcom. And I say "as if", because who knows what her actual motive was for using unethical tactics like smear campaigning to drive away opposition in order to impose her own agenda more easily. She's smart, so she must have known that the way she was going about it was wrongful and against the rules, but she continued to do it anyways, which means very likely that she consciously accepted the risks/price. It looks like an entirely calculated fait accompli. Then again, she was acting mean, and perhaps at the core, she is. But it is hard to reason with bullies, as all they understand is force.
What were the costs to Wikipedia? BHG stopped a very talented programming team's development project. Note, that no new program components or major script developments have been made by the portal project since she began her anti-portal crusade. Note, by BHG's analysis of the inner workings of portals, you can see that she was treating the single-page portals as content pages rather than what they were in essence: scripts (programs) under development.
She basically attacked version 1.0 of a browsing interface and general content surveying tool, and stopped development in its tracks. If she hadn't, the development team would probably be up to version 4 or 5 by now. Now that BHG is out of the way, will the programming effort pick up where it left off? Probably not. At least, not by the portal project. I for one have moved on to the Web-at-large. The development environment out there in the big wide web turned out to be much more conducive to creativity than what WP became under BHG. With commitments made elsewhere, I will unlikely be free to work on WP anytime soon.
What about evolution? Where is the technology heading? To article pages themselves. That's where the bulk of the traffic is, and so, that's the best place for innovations on Wikipedia: where the most people will benefit from them. Articles are the only portals you need -- in that they can be enhanced via scripts (or universal gadgets or MediaWiki features/extensions) to provide everything portals have provided. And then some. With the benefit of traffic. While there are good arguments for developing prototypes in an out-of-the-way area like portal space, scripts applied directly to articles offer another route to adoption of portal-like features: user-by-user installation of scripts →→ promotion to gadgets →→ promotion to universal gadgets. If a gadget or universal gadget becomes popular enough, it may catch the attention of the developers of MediaWiki itself, and become a feature of the very program that displays English Wikipedia (and many other wikis).
A good place to start would be navigation footers that correspond to an article's title. In portals, they are the basis of content slideshows, which are great for surveying a subject's coverage quickly. Now, all that is needed is a toggle-activated slideshow that doesn't have to load all the slideshow excerpts all at once (that makes for a very painful wait on slow bandwidth connections). Then, a navigation footer becomes a slideshow at the push of a button. The beauty part is that the itinerary of the show is already included in the nav footer.
Good luck, everyone, and happy editing / program developing.
Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 14:15, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
I suggest to stop any consideration of "software development" in this area until the cleanup of the portal namespace is concluded (it would take probably 6 more months at the rate of MfD and portal rewriting seen until a couple months ago) and/or a very strong consensus on a new guideline for portals is achieved (this might take years). Nemo 12:40, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
The Transhumanist, no matter what you think of BHG, it is nor appropriate or acceptable to compare her to a terrorist, which is what you have done above, along with numerous other unnecessary personal comments. Please remove this material. EdChem ( talk) 13:36, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
As this subpage is supposed to be for design and ideas, I am asking: what is the purpose of Portals? Once that is decided, we can discuss how portals can be designed so as to meet that purpose, and whether to propose deletion for those that don't. I have seen seen three incompatible purposes presented. But, I'm not going to mention those here, in case someone can propose a purpose which is actually helpful, and can be met with the existing level of volunteer editors. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 00:42, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
As discussed above and here, there is consensus to reinstate the transclusion of excerpts into portals which was carried out during 2019 and reverted in October. Several editors have already reinstated the changes to the affected portals and have added article lists to most of them (example: Portal:Cuba; search for List of selected articles). I am adding lists to the few portals lacking them. I also propose to move the excerpts into subpages. This does not affect the portal's appearance to readers but does provide editors with a page where they can see all excerpts simultaneously, even if the one they just added does not appear randomly on the main portal (example: Maryland). Certes ( talk) 11:40, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
MediaWiki 1.35 released on 20 Feb has a bug ( T245553). In galleries, portrait-shaped images are not displayed but are replaced by their filename. This bug affects portal slideshows as well as galleries in articles. We hope that it will be fixed soon. Certes ( talk) 08:42, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
How would I set a portal icon for Portal:Coronavirus disease 2019, to show in portal bars and boxes? Kingsif ( talk) 18:00, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
Sophivorus has released a new version of Module:Excerpt. The main change is internal tidying to allow internationalization, which should have no visible effect. The release also includes a bug fix which restores captions to images in certain cases where they were being removed. Certes ( talk) 19:55, 4 April 2020 (UTC)
Sophivorus has released another new version of Module:Excerpt. The main change is to finish the internationalization, which should have no visible effect. The release also includes three new options. Details are in the template documentation such as Template:Transclude lead excerpt/doc#Miscellaneous options. Certes ( talk) 11:01, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
@ Guilherme Burn: Re this edit: many of these templates are transclude on 1000+ pages, and can be used on a main portal page as well as on subpages. I don't think there's a consensus that they are obsolete. Would it be better to leave them in the listing but to change the header? Certes ( talk) 13:43, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
Using WP:RECOG and {{ Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}} it is possible to automate "Selected article" section of a portal. Is the same possible for section "Selected pictures"? — andrybak ( talk) 16:56, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
New template {{ Portal POTD}} allows re-using subpages of Template:POTD. This is the content which has already been generated for the Today's featured picture section of the Main Page. Examples of how it could be used are at {{ Portal:Arts/Featured picture/POTD}} and {{ Portal:Sports/Selected picture/Layout/POTD}}. — andrybak ( talk) 19:36, 13 June 2020 (UTC)