Portal talk:Vital articles

This page is within the scope of WikiProject Vital Articles, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of vital articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and work together to increase the quality of Wikipedia's essential articles.Vital ArticlesWikipedia:WikiProject Vital ArticlesTemplate:WikiProject Vital ArticlesVital Articles articles

Portals

	This page is a portal. Portals are within the scope of WikiProject Portals, a collaborative effort to improve portals on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PortalsWikipedia:WikiProject PortalsTemplate:WikiProject PortalsPortals articles
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	See also: List of Portals
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Mainspace links

Are you planning on adding links to this portal in mainspace? While I'm not a fan of portals in general I believe that adding links here from potentially up to 50000 of our most important articles would be especially bad. --Trialpears (talk) 01:52, 20 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. I will initially only include it in level 1 articles. In general, I'll wait for feedback from Wikiproject and the community.Guilherme Burn (talk) 15:35, 20 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is a bad idea

This portal shouldn't be created, and if it is created, it shouldn't be linked. At Wikipedia_talk:Vital_articles#Proposal_for_a_VA_"top_icon", consensus is overwhelmingly against highlighting the Vital Article status. Whether an article is considered "vital" or not by an extremely small subset of editors should not be displayed in the mainspace for multiple reasons, most prominently fundamentally misunderstanding what the Vital Articles project is - it's intended to be an internal tool, not an external-facing one. Making it reader-facing makes picking which articles are "VAs" far more fraught and controversial. Adding portal links to every Vital Article is basically the same proposal that is being rejected at the moment. I respect it was made in good faith, but this Portal is not a good idea. SnowFire (talk) 18:13, 22 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Initially, I didn't follow the discussions on Wikipedia_talk:Vital_articles#Proposal_for_a_VA_"top_icon", my intention in creating this portal is more linked to the issues in the Postal space than to the issues in the subjective of Vital articles subset. Per WP:PORT – “Portals are meant primarily for readers, while encouraging them to become editors of Wikipedia by providing links to project spaces”, so it's totally different to mark articles with a subjective icon of importance than to show a link to an active Wikiproject, that's the job of portals, isn't it?

Secondly, as I said in Portal talk:Vital articles#Mainspace links, yes, this portal will be added to the mainspace, respecting the feedback from Wikiproject and the Community. I understand the fear of becoming SPAM, but if this happens it will be a point of discussion to be implemented in WP:PORT.Guilherme Burn (talk) 19:12, 22 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiprojects and Wikiproject rankings are not linked in the mainspace, though. They are on talk pages. Some Wikiprojects have an internal "importance" parameter - imagine if this was displayed on the main page. It'd be total flamebait - readers would not be happy seeing something they consider very important marked as "low" importance by Some Random Guy, and some will be unhappy at whatever "unworthy" topic snuck through as a VA. It would also amplify tensions in controversial areas like nationalism, ethnicity, and religion - if someone sees that the ethnicity they're from isn't a VA but the ethnicity their people traditionally fought is a VA, are they gonna be real happy?

I stand by what I said above: this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Vital Articles project is. The VA project is an internal tool and as such should never be reader-facing. The moment it's mad an external facing ranking is the moment that suddenly it's a needlessly controversial announcement from a tiny subset of Wikipedia editors as to what topics have value and what topics don't. SnowFire (talk) 20:03, 22 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've delinked the portal from mainspace articles per the consensus that VA is editor-facing not reader-facing. I'm not sure this portal should exist and would vote to delete it at an MfD, but it certainly shouldn't be linked from any mainspace articles without affirmative consensus, especially given the consensus at the topicon discussion. Levivich (talk) 22:35, 23 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that this portal is a bad idea, but that's because portals in general are a bad idea (this one is actually better than most). The vital articles project is absolutely reader-facing, in that it's linked from WP:Contents and features information that readers may find interesting. The design of the lists is currently very editor-centric (despite having long been tagged with {{Reader-facing page}}), reflecting editor-centric bias, but that's a bug rather than a feature. The consensus was not to add a topicon, and that should not be extrapolated to infer a consensus on other questions not directly posed in the discussion. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 00:23, 24 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]