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What is a portal? edit
Portals are a special kind of page on Wikipedia that serve as an alternative entry point to a subject's coverage, and provide bridges to the Wikipedia editor community to promote involvement in Wikipedia's development and operations pertaining to that subject.
Portals are modeled loosely after Wikipedia's Main Page, and go beyond that design with new features and innovations.
Features of portals edit
The main features of portals are...
New portals take up a single page. Some portals of the older designs may have over a hundred subpages. Single-page portals are much easier to build and maintain, as they use a great deal of automation.
In the new design, excerpts are presented via "selective transclusion" which is the same technology used to display templates, except that only the sections specified are presented. That is, it is a way to transclude part of a page rather than the whole thing. We use it to present article sections, such as the lead of an article. This method also allows selection of specific paragraphs and images from within the specified section. Previously, excerpts were copied and pasted manually, stored one per subpage (this proved to be highly inefficient and hard to maintain). With transclusions, excerpts always stay as up-to-date as the articles they are extracted from.
The newest portals provide slideshows, of both content and images. You can help by adding images to this portal's image slideshow.
Also included are conditional "Did you know..." and News sections, that only appear when content is available. These are driven by search parameters (if you improve the search terms, you improve the results). They accept any number of search parameters, so adding search terms is a big help.
Some portals have a "Selected biographies" section. If there isn't one, please feel free to add it. They generally go in the right column, below the news section.
Categories are shown for the subject, in the form of an expandable category tree.
The "Need help" section provides a link to Wikipedia's Reference Desk department.
Another conditional section, called "Get involved", only appears if there is a corresponding WikiProject for the Portal's subject, for which it provides a link to.
The Associated Wikimedia" section provides links to the subject on Wikipedia's various sister projects.
Some portals have additional features as well.
Please feel free to develop the portal further.
Thank you.
New developments are on the way edit
The WikiProject Portals is in the process of improving existing features and developing new ones. It's a virtual lab for creating new and interesting wikipage components. We need developers and testers. We also collaborate on portal development and maintenance. We even have a WikiGnome squad and an AWB group for tackling repetitive tasks. If you are interested, check out ongoing discussions at WT:WPPORT and WT:WPPORTD.
WikiProject participants receive WikiProject updates and task requests on their talk page. If you'd like to partipate or keep abreast of portal developments, feel free to join the project.
Hope to see you there. And remember, have fun!