Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals

Requests for Admin assistance

• Delete subpage Portal:Slovenia/New article announcements, which has not recieved special attention since 2012. — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  23:07, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
• Comment – As this is a detailed page that has received a fair amount of edits, it may be better to tag the page atop with the {{historical}} template, which would serve to demonstrate the work that occurred to this aspect of the portal in the past, as well as to retain the page as a general historical reference. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 06:15, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
• Delete subpages of Portal:Sports/Selected picture, as they are no longer needed. The "Selected pictures" box for Portal:Sports is now generated by a single page: Portal:Sports/Selected picture. —⁠andrybak (talk) 14:29, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
  • Ditto for subpages of Portal:Fish/Selected picture. —⁠andrybak (talk) 21:33, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
• Subpages of Portal:Russia/Selected picture, from Portal:Russia/Selected picture/5 till Portal:Russia/Selected picture/25 – they were replaced using {{Portal pictures}} or removed as off-topic, see Special:Diff/989855590/989955952 and Special:Diff/989956373. Note that subpages one through four are still in use. —⁠andrybak (talk) 23:57, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

In the previous discussions in 2019 it was understood that the exclusion of subpages must be by MfD. I believe that this section "Requests for Admin assistance " should be removed from this talk page.Guilherme Burn (talk) 12:02, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Do you have a link to that consensus? My view is that it's legitimate to request assistance for technical changes, such as when replacing Portal:Foo/Articles/1 to /99 by a template in Portal:Foo which produces similar excerpts, but not as part of demolishing a portal (for example, after quietly replacing its main page by a redirect to a broader portal). Certes (talk) 13:11, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I don't have the link, I can search for discussions, but this is unnecessary. @Certes: you are a witness, like me, of the thousands of excluded subpages that were restored. I think it is better not to repeat the same mistake again, or we exclude via MfD or leave them in limbo for a while.(Or we propose a new criterion for speed deletions)Guilherme Burn (talk) 14:01, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Bug collection

This section is only for tracking bugs and feature requests, in the MediaWiki software itself, which affect portals. For general technical help with portals or portal-related templates, create a new section on this talk page.

 Do not report new bugs or feature requests in this section – only list them here after a Phabricator task has been created.

• T196722: Gallery slideshow controls take up more than one line on narrow displays
• T196723: Gallery slideshow flickers when changing images
• T194887: Mode slideshow of gallery tag is not working in phone screens
• T199126: Scribunto/Lua should have a built-in method for retrieving category members

Is this a bad idea?

I recently created Portal:Vital articles based on an idea. The most successful portal is Portal:Current events (see Massviews), the only portal that is not content-based. Per WP:PORT - "Portals are meant primarily for readers, while encouraging them to become editors of Wikipedia by providing links to project spaces" then why not create others portals about Wikiprojects that provide a different focus for readers rather than subsets of specific themes.?

 This idea was not well received by some editors, so I would like to know the opinion of this Wikiproject in Portal talk:Vital articles#This is a bad idea. Guilherme Burn (talk) 19:32, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Portal:Current events is successful because it's linked on every page in the sidebar (or wherever that's hidden in Vector 2022). We know that linking is a vital factor in portal success, because portals such as History and Science suffered a 90% drop in page views when they were unlinked from the main page. Certes (talk) 23:03, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

It's a matter of Chicken or the egg, Portal:Current events is successful because it's linked on every page or it's linked on every page because is successful in offering something useful to readers? Per WP:P "Portals are created for encyclopedic topics only and not for article maintenance categories. " this could be rethought. Content portals offer very poor content compared to the main article (example Portal:Insects, Insect). Portals such as Portal:Lists, Portal:Portals or Portal:Women in Red could offer differentiated content.Guilherme Burn (talk) 15:55, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Portal deletions

Portals are once again being nominated for deletion. It is not yet clear whether these are a few isolated examples of particularly poor portals, or the beginnings of a wider and more systematic trawl of the namespace. I'm sure we are all keen to avoid a repeat of the protracted and uncivil discussions in 2019 which led to an ArbCom case and caused long-term editors to leave Wikipedia. Can we find a more reasoned approach this time? Certes (talk) 12:23, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon: @Schierbecker: Please can you tell us your plans? Have you identified a small number of portals you consider particularly poor, or is this the start of another systematic nomination of the bulk of the namespace as attempted in 2019? Certes (talk) 19:57, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

I can't speak for Robert McClenon. I am operating independently. I've no desire for a repeat of the BHG (Better Homes and Gardens) issue. I won't initiate any sort of WP:ENDPORTALS discussion, though part of me wonders if there would be less hurt feelings on the part of portal creators if they were deleted en masse rather than singled out? Schierbecker (talk) 20:08, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

User:Certes - First, I am acting independently. Second, neither I nor BrownHairedGirl nor any other critic of portals started what happened in 2019, and it didn't start in 2019, but in 2018. After an RFC to end or deprecate portals was defeated, a portal platoon developed a script for the mass creation of portals, and created thousands of portals. This went largely initially unnoticed, because the creation of portals either went only through New Page Patrol, and no one reviewer might have noticed the mass creation, or didn't go through New Page Patrol. (I don't know whether Portal namespace was one of the namespaces that was checked off by NPP in 2018 and early 2019.) A little later, some of us became aware that thousands of portals had been spammed into existence, and then also became aware that many of the existing portals were also of poor condition. Some of them were mass-deleted by bulk MFDs, and, as Certes refers to, many of them were deleted by individual MFDs.

Third, I recognize that civility is the fourth pillar of Wikipedia and intend to treat editors who disagree with me with courtesy and respect. The arbitration case did not deal with content issues, because ArbCom does not decide content issues, but was mainly about incivility and personal attacks.

Fourth, I still don't know what the advocates of portals consider to be the purpose or purposes of portals.

Fifth, there isn't a portal guideline. It was discovered in 2019 that the page that had been used as a portal guideline for about 13 years had never been approved. I started an RFC to ratify it as a guideline, but most of the advocates of portals !voted against approving it, and we don't have a portal guideline. Maybe either the advocates of portals don't want to be limited by a guideline, or they can't explain why they like portals, perhaps because they consider portals to be mystical.

Sixth, I am only planning to nominate portals that are poorly utilized and poorly maintained. I am not planning a systematic nomination of the bulk of the namespace as attempted in 2019, but I will note that the bulk of the namespace in 2019 needed nominating for deletion because it had been mass-created using a script. I am not planning a systematic examination of the namespace, and will only do a systematic examination of the namespace if I find that it is in as bad condition as it was in 2019.

Robert McClenon (talk) 05:17, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. The mass-created portals largely went away in two bulk MfDs, which I supported. If any are left then either they're exceptionally good or they have been overlooked and should be deleted now. Other than that aberration, the 2019 exercise also deleted almost 1000 longstanding portals, reducing the number from about 1500 before the mass creation to 500, a number which has remained stable until now. Although XfD can be inexact, we presumably kept the best third of what existed. I understand that a significant minority of editors would like to remove the entire namespace, but we've had that discussion a few times now and found no consensus to do so. If anyone feels that hundreds more portals should be deleted, they should do by repeating the 2018 RfC. XfD exists to deal with small numbers of exceptionally poor pages. Abusing it to purge a namespace which has already been pruned back very severely would be a disruptive act and against the spirit of Wikipedia's established processes. Certes (talk) 10:25, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

I have a question for portal enthusiasts. Does the current version of WP:P seem realistic at the moment? Another question, is this Wikiproject interested in updating WP:P (needs to be updated since 2019) in the sense of letting go of what didn't work and investing in what does? The portals have failed in their three original purposes, Main Page for subtopics, Aiding navigation, Providing bridges between reading and editing However, the community has kept the space, in my opinion because the portals are still useful for a reason, they function as a "magazine cover" for a subtopic and that's "fun" in a nutshell. That's why I always vote delete on most MFDs, the portals should be simple (something like KISS principle), fun and universal (like a magazine cover that gets you interested in the content), but what I find are truncated portals about narrow topics that want to compete with the mainspace content. Per WP:TNT too, fix portals with automation, it's a lot of work, it's quicker to create one. A portal can be created in minutes, updating it involves conflict with editors attached to the old model.Guilherme Burn (talk) 00:06, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Image cropping

{{Easy CSS image crop}} is being tested. It may be particularly useful for displaying a panorama at the top of a portal, where the source has the desired skyline in a narrow strip across a landscape image of conventional aspect ratio. Certes (talk) 12:23, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

It's largely ready to go, just be warned that if you're cropping large parts of an image, the viewer still has to load all the material cropped, so if you're zooming in too much, maybe make a crop instead. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.8% of all FPs.} 10:44, 4 February 2024 (UTC)