Child Duckling

Welcome!

Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Some cookies to welcome you!

Welcome to Wikipedia, Child Duckling! Thank you for your contributions. I am AfroThundr3007730 and I have been editing Wikipedia for some time, so if you have any questions, feel free to leave me a message on my talk page. You can also check out Wikipedia:Questions or type {{help me}} at the bottom of this page. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

Also, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name using four tildes (~~~~); that will automatically produce your username and the date. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 01:21, 20 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Portals WikiProject update #019, 22 Sept 2018

Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Portals progress report

Don't blink. You might miss something.

As of a few days ago, portals had doubled in about a month and a half.

Also, there were 98 incompleted portals in Category:Portals under construction. Now there are just 43.

The WikiProject page has been thoroughly revised

The goals, plans, and task sections have all been updated.

Orphaned portals need a home...

Many new portals are still orphans, and need links pointing to them:

A portal link at the bottom of corresponding navigation footer template. E.g., Template:Machines for Portal:Machines. See examples of a portals link at the bottom of Template:Robotics and Template:Forestry.
A {{Portal}} box in the See also section of the corresponding root article for each portal. If there is no See also section, create one and place the portal template in that. (Rather than placing them in an external links section -- they're not external links).
A {{Portal}} template placed at the top of the category page corresponding to each portal.

All new and revamped portals can be found at Category:Single-page portals.

Portal:Contents/Portals

This is the main list of portals.

Nearly 2,000 of the new portals need to be listed here.

They can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.

Customized Portal Rating system is now in place

Portals now have a new rating system of their own designed specifically to support portal evaluation! We were trying to use the standard assessment system for articles, but that doesn't fit portals very well.

Many thanks to Evad37, Waggers, AfroThundr3007730, SMcCandlish, Tom, BrendonTheWizard, and Pbsouthwood for their work and input on this.

The new system can be found at the top of all portal talk pages, in the WikiProject portals box. Those with "???" ratings need to be assessed, which makes up most of the older portals.

Most of the new portals were started out with an initial "Low" level of importance when their talk pages were created. Those deserving higher importance should be promoted as you come across them.

Improving the new portals

The starting point for new portals included minimal parameters and content, in the form of default values in the template(s) used for their creation.

Embellishing embedded search strings

So, for the search strings in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections, this was the magic word {{PAGENAME}}, which represents the portal's name. Unfortunately, the resulting term is alway capitalized, which limits its effectiveness as a search string for anything but proper nouns. Results for those two sections can be improved, by replacing the "PAGENAME" magic word with multiple search strings, and search strings that begin with lower case letters. There is no inherent limit as to how many search parameters may be included. Lua search notation is used. The more general the subject, the more subtopic search terms you may want to include. For example, on Portal:Avengers (comics), {{PAGENAME}} turned up nothing. But, when more parameters were added, as in the wikicode below...

{{Transclude selected recent additions | {{PAGENAME}} | Iron Man | Spiderman | Antman | Hawkeye | The Hulk | Incredible Hulk | David Banner | Captain America | Scarlet Witch | Black Widow | Tony Stark | Nick Fury | Age of Ultron | Infinity War | months=36 | header={{Box-header colour|Did you know... }}|max=6}}

... that returned several results in the portal's DYK section.

Be sure you make the improvements to both the DYK section and the "In the news" section, as they both require the search strings.

Expanding the slideshow contents

The default starting selection for the image slideshow in most new portals is whatever images happen to be in the corresponding root article (via the PAGENAME magic word). You can improve image slideshows by adding more sourcepages and filenames as parameters in the "Selected images" section of portals.

See Template:Transclude files as random slideshow/doc for instructions.

More exciting things are to come...

Portals used to take about 6 hours or more to create. Now, for subjects that have particular navigation support, we've got that down to about one minute each, with even more content displayed than ever. True, that means the new portals pick you, rather than the other way around. Creating a specific portal that doesn't happen to have the requisite navigation support is still pretty time consuming. But, we are working on extending our reach beyond the low-hanging fruit.

And efforts are ongoing to keep shaving time off of the creation process. Eventually, we may get it down to seconds each.

In addition to improving automation, we're always looking for new features and improvements that we can add to portals, and there is plenty of potential to expand on the standard design so that new portals are even better right out of the starting gate. Additional designs are also possible.

On the horizon, there are many more portals waiting to be created. And we can expect to see at least a few more section types emerge. I never expected slideshows, for example, especially not for excerpts. Who knows where innovation will take us next?

Keep up the great work everyone.

Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 07:05, 23 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Portals WikiProject update #020, 12 Oct 2018

Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Whew, a lot has been happening.

A bit of defending of the portals has been needed. But, most activity recently has been directed upon maintenance and development of existing portals.

The majority of portals now use the new design, about 2400 of them, leaving around 1200 portals that still employ the old style.

Newest portals

Please inspect these portals, and report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

MfDs

Since the last issue of this newsletter, Nineteen portals were nominated for deletion. All posted by the same person.

Two portals were deleted.

One resolved as "no consensus".

Sixteen resolved as "keep".

Links to the archived discussions are provided below:

Many thanks to those who participated in the discussions.

To watch for future MfD's, keep in mind that the Portals WikiProject is supported by automatic alerts. You can see them at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Article alerts: portals for deletion at MfD

Creation criteria

There was also some discussion of creation criteria for portals. The result was that one of the participants in the discussion reverted the portal guidelines to the old version, which has the minimum number of articles for a portal included in there: "about 20 articles", a guideline that was in place since 2009.

Many of the portals that existed prior to April 2018 do not have that many (being limited to however many subpages the portal creator created), and therefore, these portals need to be upgraded to the new design (which automatically provides many articles for display). Using the new design, exceeding 20 articles for display is very easy.

Linking to the new portals

Efforts have been underway to place links to new portals (all 2200 of them created since April).

Link (portal button) from corresponding category pages. Done
Link from See also section on corresponding root articles. Partially implemented
Link from bottom of corresponding templates. Partially implemented
Link for each portal on Portal:Contents/Portals. Partially implemented

Your help is needed. It is easy to access the page mentioned in #1, #2, & #3 from the portals themselves.

AWBers could do these tasks even faster (that's how the category pages were done), except #4...

Item #4 above pretty much has to be done by hand. (If you can find a way to speed that up, I would be very impressed). The links needing placement can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.

The conversion effort: news sections

There are still around 1200 old-style portals that have only undergone partial conversion to the new design concepts, still relying on subpages with copied/pasted excerpts that have been going stale for years, out of date (manually posted) news entries, etc.

The section currently being tackled on these is news. You can help by deleting any news section on the old-style portals that has news entries that are years old (that is the dead giveaway to a manual news section). Be sure not to delete the news sections of portals that have up-to-date news, or active maintainers. For maintainers, look at the portal's categories, and/or check the participants list at WP:WPPORT.

Eventually, conditional news sections (that appear only when news items are available for display) will be added using AWB to all portals without a news section.

News items (and even the news sections themselves) are automatically generated for portals that were created using the Basic portal start page. On those portals, there is a hidden comment at the top of the page (that you can see in the edit window), that says this:

Design development

Presently, we are in the process of implementing the new design features, creating new portals with them, and installing them in existing portals.

But, what about development of new new design features?

We have a wish department.

Post your wishes at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Discussions about possible cool new features, and they might come true. Many have already, and for many of those, this is where they were posted.

Cascade effect

A resource that has been elusive so far will be obtained eventually: categories. That is, the ability to pull category member links to populate a page.

Rather than populate portals directly with such links, it may be more beneficial to the encyclopedia to utilize them in navigation footers, because portals already have the ability to generate themselves based on those.

So, this would create a cascade effect: auto-gathering entries from categories, would enable the construction of new navigation footers, that would in turn support the development of new portals.

The cascade effect would also be felt by existing portals, as existing navigation footers could be expanded using the category harvesting methods, which would in turn expand the coverage of portals that access those navigation footers.

You can help by providing leads about any potential category harvesting methods. Please report anything you know about harvesting categories at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

Looking into the future: the quantum portal?

One idea that has been floating around is the concept of a pageless portal. That is, a portal that isn't stored anywhere, instead being generated when you click on a menu item or button.

Many of the new portals were generated by a single click, and then saved via a second click.

Therefore, it seems likely that the portals of the future will employ the one-click concept.

Because of the need for customization by users, this concept would need to be augmented with a way to integrate user contributions. This could be done in at least two ways: posting an existing portal, autogenerating one from scratch if such does not yet exist, or have a special data page for user contributions that is folded into the auto-generated portal.

How soon? That is up to you. All that is needed are persons to implement it.

Until next time...

Keep up the good work on portals. They are improving daily. Thank you. — The Transhumanist 04:17, 12 October 2018 (UTC)Reply

Portals WikiProject update #021, 24 Oct 2018

Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Portals have passed the 4,000 mark.

More new portals...

Here's a list of portals created since the last issue

List of new portals

Please inspect these portals, report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD, or develop them further (see below). Thank you.

What's next?

There is still lots to do...

There are many subject gaps that need to be filled. This can be done by creating new portals, or by adding Selected article sections to existing portals. To create a new portal, simply place {{subst:Basic portal start page}} on an empty portal page, and click "Preview". If the portal is complete, click "Save". After you try it, come share your experience and excitement at WT:WPPORTD.

Each new portal is just a starting point. Each portal of the new design can be further developed by:

refining the search parameters to improve the results displayed in the Did you know and In the news sections.
adding more specific Selected articles sections, like Selected biographies.
inserting a Recognized content section.
adding more pictures to the image slideshow.
placing a panoramic picture at the top of the intro section (especially for geographic portals).

Besides the new portals, there are still about 1200 portals of the old design that need to be converted to the new design.

Many portals need to be de-orphaned, by placing links to them (in the See also section of the corresponding root articles, at the bottom of the corresponding navigation footer templates, and on the corresponding category pages).

Many of the new portals still need to be listed at Portal:Contents/Portals.

Bugs keep popping up in portals. These need to be tracked down and reported at WT:WPPORTD.

Tools are needed to make developing and maintaining portals quicker and easier.

Dreaming up new features and capabilities. Innovation needs to continue, to design the portal of tomorrow, and the portal development-maintenance-system of the future. Automation!

So, if you find yourself with a little (or a lot) of free time, pick an area (or more) above and...

...dive in! — The Transhumanist 07:05, 25 October 2018 (UTC)Reply

Welcome to the team

Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Welcome to the Portals WikiProject. Thank you for joining!

I will try to bring you up to speed on portals, starting with some history...

The WikiProject was dormant for years, though editors still came along and created about 80 portals per year, until there were about 1500 of them. It typically took 6 hours or more to create a portal (some took considerably longer, with some editors putting in dozens of hours of work on a single portal), and even more to maintain them.

Unfortunately, only about 100 of the portals were being maintained, and the design for most portals was such that without maintenance, the rest of the portals grew stale and out-of-date. Some had news entries that hadn't been added to for 8 years (and still do), with the old news items still sitting there. The typical pattern was for an editor to create a portal, and then never be seen again. Since everything was done by hand, excerpts became stale, there was nobody to post new news entries, or to add new article excerpts, and so on.

Then, in April 2018, someone proposed to delete all of the portals, including the portal namespace itself. It was one of the largest and most contentious community discussions in Wikipedia history, with the battle spilling over to ANI, project space, and user talk pages. Initially, portals looked like they were doomed, but then as the wider community learned about the proposal, users came forward in droves to join the discussion. And the verdict was...

Keep!

It turned out that many readers found the portals useful, even though they were out-of-date.

During the stressful debate, a bunch of editors got together and revitalized the Portals WikiProject, taking on a total revamp of the portal system, including designing new automated components so that portals with those update themselves automagically. The newly reorganized WikiProject helped assure participants in the debate that the portals would no longer be neglected, and to offset the lack of regular maintainers, that they would be transformed so that they mostly maintained themselves.

The project quickly grew to about 100 participants, with so much activity that it needed 3 talk pages. A newsletter was also created, with delivery to participants' talk pages, which just published its 21st issue.

For subjects with particular support features in place (such as a robust navigation footer), portal creation time has been reduced to under a minute! It now takes more time to place links to a portal than it does to create the portal itself. Though portals can be further improved by putting in however much time is desired.

While it took 13 years for the first 1500 portals to be created, in the past 6 months portals have grown to over 4,000, with all of the new ones using the automated design, which is based on slideshows and selective transclusion of content directly from the main encyclopedia (which the old design didn't have). Meanwhile, the old-style portals that have no maintainers are slowly being converted to the new design. About 1400 of those have been partially converted, with about 300 being fully converted so far.

And now, on to current activities...

The WikiProject is active in 5 areas:

Creating new portals – see the instructions at Template:Basic portal start page.
Developing and maintaining existing portals – things like adding pictures to a portal's image slideshow, refining a portal's internal search parameters, adding new components as they are developed, placing links to portals, etc. See WP:WPPORT.
Administration – maintaining instruction pages, etc.
Converting old portals – adding automated components, or restarting the portals from scratch, so that they self-update.
Design – innovation continues with current components being improved, and new components being dreamed up. Work is also underway on the development of userscripts to aid users in developing and maintaining portals. See WT:WPPORTD and WP:WPPORTD.

WikiProject features

The WikiProject has some resources to make working on portals easier. There is a newsletter, to keep participants informed on current events and tasks relating to portals. The main task list is maintained at WP:WPPORT. There is also an automatic alerts section on the WikiProject's main page so that deletion nominations of portals do not go unnoticed. The project has its own rating system, tailored specifically to portals -- you can see it at the top of every portal's talk page. And there is a wish list of desired new features at WT:WPPORTD -- feel free to post your ideas on improving portal design there. Templates for automating portal design are listed on the Template:Portal templates navbox.

Jump right in!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

And remember...

Have fun!

Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 22:32, 28 October 2018 (UTC)Reply

Portals WikiProject update #022, 11 Nov 2018

Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Welcome AmericanAir88

Give a hearty welcome to AmericanAir88, who has adopted working on portals as one of his main purposes on Wikipedia. So far, he has created the following portals:

Way to go!

Where's Evad?

Evad disappeared from Wikipedia on October 18.

He has been, and will continue to be, sorely missed.

Hopefully, he is okay, on a Caribbean cruise or something.

The conversion continues

Portals of the old design, are slowly but surely being converted to the new single-page design.

One factor that has slowed things down is that for many sections, the section header call and section contents call are integrated into a template and buried in a lua module, locking them in on each portal. They have been that way for years.

This means that these sections can't be directly edited like the other sections on the same portal. So, search/replaces affect all the sections except those. So, upgrading headers on these portals, for example, misses the integrated sections and inadvertently results in 2 different header colors.

Before we can continue with the upgrade of these portals, the headers and section contents calls need to be restored to each portal, so that those can be edited in concert with the other sections on the portal, and worked on independently of each other.

This is underway, with a solution implemented on about 1/4 of the affected portals so far. Around 300 of them. The remaining 900 should be done within a couple weeks or so.

Going wide...

We now have banner-shaped pictures included in the introduction sections of 180 portals. The rarity of such pictures has made it difficult to find suitably narrow images for display across the tops of portals.

We have a solution for this, courtesy of FR30799386...

Most pictures are not banner-shaped. But, you can still use them as banners. Here's how:

{{Portal image banner|File:Blueberries .jpg |maxheight=120px |overflow=Hidden }}

Using both maxheight=120px and overflow=Hidden produces this:

Project's status

There are now 4,140 portals, with more being created almost daily. Prior to this project's reboot, portals were created at about the rate of 80 per year. Since April of this year, we've created about 2,600 new portals, or 32.5 years' worth at the old rate.

Of those new portals, about 3/4 of them need links leading to them. Almost all of them are linked to from the category system, but they still need links in article see also sections, at the bottom of navigation templates, and on the main portals list at Portal:Contents/Portals.

Of the 1500 portals created before the reboot, about 300 have been completely converted to the new design so far. About 1100 more have been partially converted, with intros, image slideshows, and associated wikimedia sections getting the most attention.

Discussion has resumed on the portal guidelines.

Until next issue...

See ya round the portal system! — The Transhumanist 11:41, 11 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #023, 25 Nov 2018

Latest comment: 5 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

There are now 4,180 portals.

Will we break 5,000 by the end of the year?

I know we can. But, that is up to you!

( New portals are created with {{subst:Basic portal start page}} or {{subst:bpsp}} )

Happy Holidays

Hello everyone! Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice (if it's occurring in your area of the world), and thanks for your work in maintaining, improving, and expanding portals. Cheers, — The Transhumanist 06:51, 26 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings}} to send this message

Jingling along

The following portals have been created since the last issue:

Keep 'em coming!

By the way, the above list was generated using this Petscan query. It can be easily modified by changing the date. The data page (under the Output tab) also has options for receiving the data in CSV or tabbed format, which some operating systems automatically load into a spreadsheet program for ease of use, such as copying and pasting the desired column (like page names).

In closing

We'll keep it short this issue.

Expect a flood next time. Or the one after that.

Cheerio, — The Transhumanist 07:30, 26 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

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