This essay is about portals[a] in the English language Wikipedia.

Who uses portals?

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[So] you personally don't use them or know anyone who uses them, I don't use them or know anyone who uses them, and nobody in this discussion seems to use them or know anyone who uses them."

User:WhatamIdoing[1]

As a reader of Wikipedia I've never used a Wikipedia portal page, nor have I ever seen anyone else who uses Wikipedia (e.g. at home or work) use a portal.

In my experience, most people access a Wikipedia article by googling for something and clicking on the link that appears. They may then click on a blue link to navigate to another article (if they realise what the blue font means; not all readers do[2]). Such people are unlikely to ever come across a link to a portal (or to understand what it is if they do come across such a link). Note: I am not suggesting that this is a "problem" to be solved by adding more prominent links to portals.

The purpose of portals

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The "official" purpose of portals is specified as:

  • "Portals serve as enhanced "Main Pages" for specific broad subjects. Portals are meant primarily for readers, while encouraging them to become editors of Wikipedia by providing links to project space."[3]

Note: Wikipedia:Main Page alternatives doesn't (as of May 2019) mention portals.

Some editors have suggested alternatives/refinements - e.g.:

  • "The idea of a Portal is to help readers and/or editors to manoeuvre their way through Wikipedia."[4]
  • "[The purpose of portals is] to provide an attractive overview of Wikipedia coverage of a broad topic area for the benefit of readers new to Wikipedia"[5]
  • "Portals are a way of guiding readers through a topic; in an engaging and tangible way."[6]
  • "They help to showcase our best or most interesting content on specific topics and draw readers in. Often portals are linked with projects and have lists of "things you can do" – a great way of encouraging readers to become editors."[7]
  • "[Consider] someone who maybe doesn't yet know much about (say) volleyball, but wishes to explore the sport through Wikipedia. Searching on "volleyball" will bring them to what is, rightly, a lengthy article going into detail about the rules and tactics. Only at the very end do they come to some navigational aids guiding them to aspects of the sport not covered in the article itself. A well-designed portal can benefit such a reader by bringing together different elements of Wikipedia's coverage in an attractive, compact package, from which they can branch out in any desired direction."[8]

Other editors appear to believe that portals are to assist editors:

  • "A centralized hub is important for the improvement of a topic."[9][b]

Other editors don't think the purpose of portals needs to be explained:

  • "the purpose of portals is to serve as portals. I don't know why there is a question as to what is the purpose of portals is in the first place, but if that's the question, then yes, the answer is really that simple."[10]

Problems caused by portals

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Note: There are several types of portals (e.g. portals built from subpages and "automatically-generated" single page portals); some of the problems listed below may apply mainly/exclusively to certain types of portals.

Presenting poor information to readers

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Obesity is a theory of geology which was developed to explain the observed evidence for large scale motions within the Earth's crust.

Text shown (as a FA) on a portal[11]

Some portals have been created by taking a copy of text from an article (sometimes without attribution) - e.g. copying part of the Foobar article to Portal:Foobar/Intro. However, there are likely to be fewer people maintaining the copied text than are maintaining the original text (which is reasonable as most readers will go to the article rather than to the portal). A portal may thus provide poor (compared with the corresponding article) information to readers - in particular:

  • The information on a portal page may be out of date (compared with the corresponding article) - e.g. telling readers that Obama was (still) the President of the USA months/years after that was no longer correct.[12]
  • Portals may contain uncited/unclear/biased information - e.g. ".... Despite the fears that many people have of nuclear energy, it is a very safe energy source.".[13]
  • Portals may be vandalised - e.g. edits to Portal:Geography/Featured biography/2. Note: Cluebot NG has not (as of December 2017) been trained to check edits to the Portal namespace, so vandalism has to be checked manually and lasts longer. Sometimes a vandal's first edit is to a portal[14][15] - possibly because the article they wanted to vandalise was protected they vandalised the linked portal instead. Even portal subpages are not immune from vandalism.[16]

Other problems directly affecting readers

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Other problems caused by portals include:

 
A portal page
 
A portal page
  • Portals have inconsistent formats.
  • Many portal pages are badly formatted (e.g. on small screens).
  • Many portal pages have redlinks or broken links (e.g. to Wikispecies).
  • Portals often present poorly worded material to the reader - e.g. "Do you have a question about Supermarket that you can't find the answer to?Consider asking it at the Wikipedia reference desk.".[17]
  • Portals can encourage users to make bad edits to articles.[18]

Waste of work and frustration

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In April 2018 there were approximately 1,485 portals (source?). Over the following months thousands of (mostly single-page) portals were created with the number of portals reaching close to 5,705 in February 2019[19]. Many portals were then deleted so by May 2019 there were 1,135 portals. In addition, many portals were converted into single page portals and then reverted and deleted subpages were recreated - a great waste of time and creative energy of good faith editors, generating conflicts and frustration among editors (example discussion).

Negative effects of portals on editors

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portals are by and large a waste of time and new users shouldn't be pulled into thinking that it's productive.

User:Bilorv in 2019[20]

Portals use (waste) editor resources that could be better spent improving/maintaining other parts of the encyclopedia. E.g:

  • Editors spend time creating / editing / maintaining / discussing[21] portals.
  • Portals cause watchlist and edit history noise on other (non-portal) pages (as links to portals are added/removed[22] or as other changes are made to articles to support portals[23]).
  • Portals add to the workload of deletion discussions at WP:MFD etc. Some portals have been repeatedly created (or part created and then abandoned) and deleted.[24]. As portals are not articles, but are (in theory) reader-facing it is sometimes unclear which policies/guidelines apply to portals; this can complicate discussions about portals. Even some discussions that don't explictly mention portals are actually about (unnecessary) infrastructure created to support portals.[25]

Portals cause (unnecessary) conflict between editors (and hence stress).[26]

A portal can cause the creation of many (sometimes hundreds) of supporting pages - e.g. sub-pages, templates and categories[27]. These pages often show up when doing maintenance activities [28][29] and mean more work when the portal is deleted (example MfD).[c] Some of the pages created to support portals (but not in the Portal namespace) have been incorrect.[30]

Sometimes editors are confused about the distinction between portals and wikiprojects - e.g. editors ask for help at a portal talk page instead of at the corresponding wikiproject talk page - and usually get no response (probably because so few active editors have the portal watchlisted).[31][d] This may be exacerbated because even those who create portals often muddle up portals and wikiprojects.[32]

Arguments about portals have led to at least one editor being indefinitely blocked[33] and at least one Wikipedia administrator being de-sysopped.[34]

Other problems

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Other problems caused by portals include:

the complexity and bureaucracy of Wikipedia as a whole has been growing out of control, and ... may be the major cause of burn-out among veteran editors

User:Jorge Stolfi[35]

  • Portals add to the complexity of Wikipedia (especially for editors) - for example:
    • They can complicate categorization.[36][37]
    • The use of the term "portal" to mean different things can be confusing.[38]
    • They add code to articles that editors may not be familiar with.[39]
    • Portals can result in more infrastructure being created e.g. userbox templates such as Template:User Portal:Israel and hence categories (e.g. Category:Portal user templates) and talk page messages about userboxes.[40] This is getting further and further from anything likely to benefit readers of the encyclopedia.
  • Portals often break the normal convention of separating reader-side stuff from editor-side stuff (e.g. when portals have things like a to-do list - often copying or duplicating a wikiproject to-do list or very out of date).[e]
  • There's clutter on other pages (including category pages and talk pages[41]) for links to portals. This sometimes includes redlinks.[42] Links to portals are sometimes put where they are inappropriate (e.g. on a disambiguation page).[43]
  • Portals seem to attract bad edits.[44]

Confusion between portals and wikiprojects

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Some examples of confusion between portals and wikiprojects are listed below.

  • Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Rhön is an example where the portal creator/maintainer appears to see the portal as a sort of blend of a portal and a wikiproject (there being no wikiproject for Rhön).  E.g. the portal (as of April 2019) has sections headed "New articles" (under "Tasks"), "Members" (displayed as "embers" when viewed on a small screen) and even "Events and Meetings" (empty). In the MFD the portal creator argues that portals "are a vital tool for maintaining and improving coverage of a topic" and expresses surprise when told that portals are intended to be a "main page" for a topic (and hence should be suitable for readers).
  • I do think that portals can offer some features that can not be easily included in the mainspace. A good example, the way I see it, is the Portal:Byzantine Empire/Weblinks section. A portal is not simply about giving an "enhanced overview" in width (a moderately good main article does that already) but also provide some depth and variety of assistance and, perhaps, serve as a point of reference not only for readers, but for editors involved in a topic as well (TODO lists, links for assistance and tools, etc), something like a mainspace WikiProject. [47]

Sometimes both a portal and the corresponding wikiproject have a to-do list regarding the topic, but whether anyone uses the portal to-do list is another matter - e.g.:

  • Portal:Arctic/WikiProjects/todo[f] was created in 2008 and (as of August 2019) had not been updated since (the only later edits were wikignoming of links). So, for example, Arctic Hare was listed as a stub, but that article has not been a stub since 2009.[g]  I.e. editors were not maintaining that to-do list. The portal to-do page appeared to duplicate the WikiProject's to-do list.[h]

Quotes

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Do portals help readers?

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Two newish features of the Wikimedia software (MediaWiki) mean that articles and navboxes offer much/all of the functionality which some portals set out to offer. Both features are provided by default to people who are not logged in to Wikipedia (i.e. ordinary readers) -

 
An example use of Page Previews
  • The Page Previews (a.k.a. Hovercards) feature means a user on a PC can (by moving the mouse cursor over a link) get a quick preview of a linked topic whilst reading a page. For logged in users this feature is disabled by default[48]; it can be turned on by going to User Preferences and then the Appearance tab.[49]
  • automatic imagery galleries: clicking on an image brings up an image gallery of all the images on that page. It's full-screen, so it's actually much better than a click-for-next image gallery on a portal.

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

The content of a portal

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The things appearing on a portal page are typically some of the following (listed approximately in the order in which they typically occur):

  • Links to Wikipedia:Contents/Portals.
  • Graphics - e.g. an image and/or colour scheme relevant to the topic.
  • A welcome message e.g. "Welcome to the Foobar Portal".
  • A copy/transclusion of the start of the article corresponding to the portal's topic (the portal's main article). This is done either by automatically copying the current lede of the article (e.g. using Template:Transclude lead excerpt) or by the portal creator having (possibly many years ago) copied part of the topic's main article (known, e.g. in MFD discussions, as a "forked subpage").
  • A copy/transclusion of a (randomly chosen) article from a set of articles that the portal creator (and in a few cases other editors) has chosen. The randomness means that a brief look at a portal may not reveal problems with the portal - e.g. that only one article is ever shown[50] or that some of the articles are not actually about the portal's topic[51]. As with the portal's main article, the excerpt is either an automatic copy of part of the current article (which may not mention the portal's topic[52]) or a forked subpage (which may be out of date[i]).
  • More (randomly chosen) articles shown under headings such as "Selected biography" or "Selected ship".
  • A (randomly[j] chosen) image from a set compiled by (usually) the portal creator. However, for readers[k] of Wikipedia a much better gallery of images for a topic can be obtained by clicking on an image in the topic's article. Advantages include that images are shown using more of the screen (which is especially important for the many readers using mobile devices with small screens), the set of images is likely to be better (less the choices of one editor, more up to date, can include fair-use images) and that this facility can be used on any page (not just articles that have a corresponding portal).
  • A (randomly chosen) selected quote.
  • A (randomly chosen) selected question.[53]
  • A "Did you know...?" (DYK) section. This attempts to be like the DYK section of Wikipedia's Main Page, but (without the scrutiny that proposed Main Page DYKs get) it can become a set of unreferenced (and sometimes inaccurate) trivia. These are sometimes referred to (e.g. in MFD discussions) as "fake DYKs".
  • An "In the news" section. This can be very misleading - for example, in 2019 Portal:Cycling's news still said "July 22: Chris Froome wins Tour de France" (6 years after the event).
  • A list of subcategories.
  • A "Featured content" section. This is usually an automatically-generated list of the best quality articles (FAs and GAs) that have been tagged by the portal's wikiproject. This can include articles that the wikiproject has tagged as being of low importance to them. The articles may not even mention the portal's topic[l]. Sometimes (e.g. in MFD discussions) editors mistakenly (or misleadingly) claim these lists are more relevant to the portal's topic than they are.[54][55]
  • Links to related portals.
  • A "Things you can do" list. This usually either transcludes a page from the relevant wikiproject or is a portal subpage that is rarely, if ever, updated.[m]
  • A transclusion of a template for the topic - usually/always the same template that's shown at the bottom of the portal's main article.
  • Links to wikiprojects.
  • A section titled "Associated Wikimedia".
  • Further links e.g. to subpages of the portal.

Conclusions / advice

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Most portals that have been created have been deleted. In such cases not only has the portal creator wasted their own time, but they've caused other editors to spend their time trying to improve/fix/delete the portal (time which could have been spent doing something else) with no net benefit to the encyclopedia.

Don't create a portal unless -

  1. You understand how portals are structured (e.g. you have already improved/maintained existing portals).
  2. You are knowledgeable about the topic of the proposed portal.
  3. You (and preferably other editors) intend to maintain the portal (e.g. checking the portal and making updates as necessary) for several years.[56]

See also

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Notes and references

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  1. ^ This essay is about "normal" portals (e.g. Portal:Science). The word "portal" has also been used in Wikipedia for several things that are not, for the purpose of this essay, considered to be a portal - e.g. Wikipedia:Community portal, Portal:Wikiatlas (MFD) and Portal:Current events (on some other Wikipedias the equivalent page is not stored in that Wikipedia's portal namespace - e.g. in the German language Wikipedia it's named "Wikipedia:Hauptseite/Aktuelles" i.e. "Wikipedia:Home/News").
  2. ^ Isn't that supposed to be what a wikiproject does?
  3. ^ "...when I began working at Portal MFDs I didn't immediately realize that they often have a plethora of subpages and thus didn't always delete them." - an admin at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals/Proposed decision in January 2020
  4. ^ The unclear distinction between portals and wikiprojects has long been recognized (e.g. "Wikiportals ... their exact goal and their difference from WikiProjects remains unclear." in a Signpost article in 2005). Wikipedia:Tip of the day/September 18 is about the distinction.
  5. ^ Another example is Portal:Science (Which is supposedly reader-facing) having (as of May 2019) a link to "Sub-pages of Portal:Science".
  6. ^ Deleted by this discussion
  7. ^ The to-do list also contained a redlink to a page that was deleted in 2009 (Wikipedia:Community Portal/Opentask/Stubs) and contained many "More..." links to general (not Arctic-specific) pages.
  8. ^ The WikiProject's to-do list also hasn't (as of January 2020) been updated since 2008.
  9. ^ and in many cases doesn't follow the WP:CWW rules
  10. ^ Or sometimes determined by the current month etc
  11. ^ or editors who are not logged in
  12. ^ E.g. articles appearing in list at a country's portal that make no mention of that country
  13. ^ This, like many other sections of portals, often has no "Edit" link so even if an editor realises that the list could be improved (e.g. because an article has now been created) it's not at all obvious how they can update the list.
  1. ^ User:WhatamIdoing replying to another editor at WP:ENDPORTALS
  2. ^ E.g. "Many readers do not seem to realise that the blue words are links,and expect items already linked in the text to be listed in "see also"." at Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Article_feedback.
  3. ^ Wikipedia:Portal#Purposes_of_portals as of May 2019
  4. ^ Wikipedia:Portal namespace (setting-up debate) (2005). Note: At the time there were about 25 "WikiPortals"[1]
  5. ^ User:Bhunacat10 at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals in May 2019
  6. ^ User:Cesdeva quoted at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-05-24/WikiProject report.
  7. ^ User:Waggers quoted at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-05-24/WikiProject report.
  8. ^ User:Bhunacat10 in June 2019 at Wikipedia_talk:Portal/Guidelines#Pageviews
  9. ^ User:Hecato in July 2019
  10. ^ An editor at User talk:Scottywong/Portal guideline workspace 13:15, 2 February 2020
  11. ^ Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Human Body
  12. ^ When Barack Obama was no longer president his article was updated that day (e.g. this edit one minute after Donald Trump became president). It was nearly 5 months before Portal:Barack Obama (MFD) was changed from "is president" to "was president" ([2] [3]). Another portal page about Obama (see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:African American) still said "current President" 2 years later.
  13. ^ Portal:Nuclear technology/Intro from 7 Feb 2019 to March 2019.
  14. ^ Example edits mentioned at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Discrimination
  15. ^ E.g. example
  16. ^ E.g. many of the edits to Portal:Physics/Intro are vandalism (or at least unconstructive) - example.
  17. ^ Portal:Supermarket from creation in Feb 2019.
  18. ^ E.g. here an editor removes a useful wikilink from an article because it was "causing a no, no for the portal".
  19. ^ Wikipedia:WikiProject_Portals/Newsletter_archive#Wikipedia:WikiProject_Portals_update_#029,_13_Feb_2019
  20. ^ Wikipedia talk:User access levels in April 2019
  21. ^ E.g this is dozens of edits and thousands of words discussing a close of a MfD of a portal.
  22. ^ This edit is an example of an editor removing a link to a portal.
  23. ^ E.g. these edits were presumably to support a portal (but were then undone to support the portal).
  24. ^ E.g. (as of May 2019) Portal:Yemen has been (part) created and deleted 6 times - 2019 (CSD G4 and DRV), 2019 (XFD), 2009 (CSD G3), 2008 (CSD G10), 2007 (CSD A3), 2006 (as "no information").
  25. ^ For example, this RfD discussion is about a redirect created with the edit summary "redir (for channeling portal title, to populate portal sections)".
  26. ^ E.g. this edit refers to a "nasty email about this portal".
  27. ^ E.g. Category:Music_of_Canada_portal_templates (portal deleted by this discussion)
  28. ^ E.g. fixing pages that are in an incompatible combination of namespace and category.
  29. ^ E.g. portal sub pages show up at Special:ShortPages - e.g. see Portal_talk:Caribbean#Empty_Subpage.
  30. ^ E.g. see Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2019_April_11#Template:Palace_of_Versailles
  31. ^ E.g. Portal_talk:Caribbean#Barbados_Defence_Force_and_Military_of_Barbados. Sometimes notifications from another language Wikipedia have been placed on a portal talk page instead of on a wikiproject talk page - e.g. Portal_talk:California#California_Office_of_Environmental_Health_Hazard_Assessment.
  32. ^ E.g. Portal talk:Rhône-Alpes (MFD) said "Hello everybody, and welcome to the Rhône-Alpes Café! Feel free to let any comment you like about the Rhône-Alpes Wikiproject! Any idea, suggestion, or critic would be appreciated, as long as it will help the project to grow.". Incidentally, the next comment on that page was 9 years later (and that was a notice added to hundreds/thousands of portal talk pages).
  33. ^ Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive308#Block_review_note_-_Legacypac_blocked_by_Spartaz_for_personal_attacks_on_BrownHairedGirl
  34. ^ Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals#BrownHairedGirl_desysopped. Note: Some of the information on that page (e.g. FOF8) is misleading/incorrect.
  35. ^ User:Jorge Stolfi/DoW/Intro in 2009
  36. ^ This edit is an example of an article being placed in a portal category instead of in an article category.
  37. ^ example of a portal-related page in a talk namespace appearing in article categories
  38. ^ E.g. this document titled "Wikipedia Portal Usage" isn't about portals (i.e. pages in the Portal namespace).
  39. ^ E.g. this edit caused a Texas newspaper to appear in a list of "wanted portals" (which was later deleted).
  40. ^ E.g. the welcome message at User talk:Kirkrmm (an editor whose 3 edits to Wikipedia were nothing to do with a portal) saying "You might like to be aware of the opportunity to contribute to the energy portal. ... you might also like to paste one of these user boxes onto your user page ...".
  41. ^ E.g Talk:Pocket watch shows (as of 2019) a notice about Portal:Trains dating from 2005.
  42. ^ E.g. at Category:Singaporean_film_critics (since deleted) as of October 2017
  43. ^ E.g. this edit adds a portal link to a disambiguation page.
  44. ^ E.g. example where an editor's first/only (visible) edit is to mess up a portal category page.
  45. ^ E.g. a bot edit adding over 200k to a portal talk page, an editor adding 78k to a portal page
  46. ^ Edits such as these add thousands of kb to pages that few (if any) people will use.
  47. ^ User:Cplakidas at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Umayyad Caliphate in May 2019
  48. ^ Possibly as it may cause problens with certain gadgets and other customizations.
  49. ^ Information correct as of May 2019.
  50. ^ E.g. see Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#Portal:Philosophy_of_mind.
  51. ^ E.g. see Wikipedia:Miscellany for_ deletion/Portal:Java (programming language) (the portal was originally Portal:Java) and Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Palace of Versailles.
  52. ^ E.g. see discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Royal Air Force.
  53. ^ E.g. Portal:Biotechnology's 1st question (from 2006 to 2019) was How is called the Biotechnology branch applied to industrial processes? - Answer and 2nd question was What is shown in the picture on the right? (But the picture was deleted in 2010) - Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Biotechnology
  54. ^ E.g. "The Recognized content listed in the portal ... consists of WP:FA and WP:GA articles with a topical focus upon Vietnam" at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Vietnam.
  55. ^ "... an excellent way of getting an overview of the topic ..." at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_153#Threaded_Discussion_(Purpose_of_Portals).
  56. ^ Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Portal:Palace_of_Versailles shows an example where an editor created a portal, didn't check that what they had created made any sense and then moved on.