User talk:Greatedits1/Archive 2

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Archive 1

Archive 2

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #023, 25 Nov 2018

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)

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 07:35, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #024, 26 Dec 2018

Last issue, I mentioned there would be a flood, and so, here it is...

Portals status

We now have 4,620 portals.

And the race to pass 5,000 by year's end is on...

Can we make it?

The New Year, and the 5,001st portal, await.

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

Evad is back!

After disappearing in mid-thread, Evad37 has returned from a longer than expected wikibreak.

Be sure to welcome him back.

Improved cropping is coming to Portal image banner

User:FR30799386 is working on making {{Portal image banner}} even better by enabling it to chop the top off an image as well as the bottom.

Many pictures aren't suitable for banners because they are too tall. Therefor, User:FR30799386 added cropping to this template, so that an editor could specify part of a picture to be used rather than the whole thing.

Upgrade of flagship portals is underway

Work has begun on upgrading Wikipedia's flagship portals (those listed at the top of the Main page).

So far, Portal:Geography, Portal:History, and Portal:Technology have been revamped. Of course, you are welcome to improve them further.

Work continues on the other five. Feel free to join in on the fun.

Spotting missing portals that are redirects

In place of many missing portals, there is a redirect that leads to "the next best topic", such as a parent topic.

Most of these were created before we had the tools to easily create portals (they used to take 6 hours or more to create, because it was all done manually). Rather than leave a portal link red, some editors thought it was best that those titles led somewhere.

The subjects that have sufficient coverage should have their own portals rather than a redirect to some other subject.

Unfortunately, being blue like all other live links, redirects are harder to spot than redlinks.

To spot redirects easily, you can make them all appear green.

What's new in portal space?

Here are the new portals since the last issue:

Keep 'em coming!

And I'll see you next issue.

Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 08:08, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #025, 30 Dec 2018

We can now crop the tops of pics to make banners

Before, we could only cut off the bottom of pics.

User:FR30799386 has pulled it off, and made the upgrade to {{Portal image banner}}...

So, this:

Niagara falls, from the Canadian side

Becomes this:

Niagara falls, from the Canadian side

Here's the code for the above banner:

{{Portal image banner|File:American Falls from Canadian side in winter.jpg | [[Niagara falls]], from the Canadian side |maxheight=175px |overflow=Hidden|croptop=10}}

To see it employed in a portal, check out Portal:Niagara Falls.

About that end of the year goal...

We were racing against time to create 5,000 portals by the end of the year (just for the heck of it).

We made it. We've passed the 5,000 portals mark, with time to spare!

And the 5,000th portal is Portal:Major League Baseball, by Happypillsjr.

Congratulations!

What's next?

The 10,000th portal mark. But...

...there is plenty else to do in addition to building new portals:

The new portals need to be linked to from the encyclopedia.
On those portals about subjects that are not typically capitalized, the search parameters need to be refined/expanded, to maximize the chances of Did you know and In the news items being found and displayed.
A Recognized content section needs to be added to each portal that has a corresponding WikiProject.
Addition of a category on those portals that lack a subject category.
Implement the portal category system, adding the appropriate categories to each portal.
Upgrade, and complete (as per the tasks enumerated above), the old-style portals that are not regularly maintained, which have not been converted yet (about 1,100 of them).
Find and fix the remaining bugs in the underlying lua modules.
Build portal tools (scripts) to assist in the creation, development, and maintenance of portals.
Build a script to help build navbox footer templates, via the harvesting of categories, amongst other methods.
Update the portal building instructions.
Update the portal guideline.
Refine the programming of the portals to reduce their load time.
Design and develop the next generation of portals and portal components.

And whatever else you can dream up.

But most of all, have a...

Happy New Year!

Greatedits1, thank you for your contributions to the Portals Project, and have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year.

Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 12:16, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #026, 20 Jan 2019

Well, here's the first issue of the new year. Enjoy...

New participants

A hearty welcome to new arrivals to the portals department:

Harvesting categories tool prototype

DannyS712 has created a user script prototype, User:DannyS712/Cat links, that can pull members from a category, a functionality we've been after since the project's revamp last Spring. Now, it's a matter of applying this technique to scripts that will place the items where needed, such as with a section starter script and/or portal builder script.

New portals since last issue

What else is going on

There have been some discussions at Wikipedia talk:Portal guidelines.

DreamyJazz is working on a bot to place links to portals on root articles, category pages, and navigation footer templates.

Portal bugs are getting dealt with soon after they are reported.

Lots of wikignome activity (using Hotcat, etc.).

Keep up the good work. — The Transhumanist 09:08, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #027, 28 Jan 2019

Portal styles

For a visually intensive portal, see Portal:Hummingbirds.

If you find any other portals that stand out, please send me the links so I can include them in the next issue. Thank you.

Conversion continues

There are about 1100 portals left in the old style, with subpages and static excerpts. As those are very labor intensive to maintain (because their maintenance is manual), all those except the ones with active maintainers (about 100) are slated for upgrade = approximately 1000. We started with 1500, and so over a quarter of them have been processed so far. That's good, but at this rate, conversion will take another 3 years. So, some automation (AWB?) is in order. We just need to keep at it, and push down on the gas pedal a bit harder.

You can find the old-style portals with an insource search of "box portal skeleton".

Flagship portals: the portals on the Main Page

Speaking of upgrades...

The following portals are listed in the header at the top of Wikipedia's Main Page, and get far more traffic than all other portals:

Of those, all but one have been revamped to an automated self-updating single-page design.

The remaining one, Portal:Mathematics has manual maintainers, and has been partially upgraded.

As these are our flagship fleet, they need to be kept in top-notch condition.

Check 'em out, and improve them if you can.

And be sure they are on your watchlist.

New portals since last issue

Keep 'em coming!

Deorphanizing the new portals

As you know, thousands of the new portals are orphans, that is, having no links to them from article space. For all practical purposes, that means they are not part of the encyclopedia yet, and readers will be unlikely to find them.

What is needed are links to these portals from the See also sections of the corresponding root articles.

Dreamy Jazz to the rescue...

Dreamy Jazz has created a bot to place the corresponding category link to the end of each portal (if it is missing), and place a link to each portal in the See also section of the corresponding root articles.

That bot, named User:Dreamy Jazz Bot, is currently in its trial period performing the above described edits!

To take a look at the edits it has made so far, see Special:Contributions/Dreamy_Jazz_Bot.

It shouldn't be long before the bot is processing the entire set of new portals.

Good news indeed.

Way to go, Dreamy Jazz!

And, that's a wrap

That's all I have to report this time around.

No doubt there will be more to tell soon.

Until then, — The Transhumanist 13:12, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #028, 04 Feb 2019

Here's a quicky status report:

Old-style portals: 1,018

Single-page portals: 4,367

Total portals: 5,385

But of course, there has been more going on than just that...

Dreamy Jazz Bot is up and running!

Dreamy Jazz Bot has been approved and is now up and running.

What it does is places missing links to orphaned portals. It places a link in the See also section of the corresponding root article, and it puts one at the top of the corresponding category page.

We have thousands of new portals that have yet to be added to the encyclopedia proper, just waiting to go live.

When they do go live, over the coming days or weeks, due to Dreamy Jazz Bot, it will be like an explosion of new portals on the scene. We should expect an increase in awareness and interest in the portals project. Perhaps even new participants.

Get ready...

Get set...

Go!

Another sockpuppet infiltrator has been discovered

User:Emoteplump, a recent contributor to the portals project, was discovered to be a sockpuppet account of an indefinitely blocked user.

When that happens, admins endeavor to eradicate everything the editor contributed. This aftermath has left a wake of destruction throughout the portals department, again.

The following portals which have been speedy deleted, are in the process of being re-created. Please feel free to help to turn these blue again:

And the corresponding talk pages:

New portals since the last issue

Keep up the great work

Until next time, — The Transhumanist 09:00, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #029, 13 Feb 2019

Where we are at:

Single-page portals: 4,704

Total portals: 5,705

The Ref desks survived the proposal to shut them down

You might be familiar with the Ref desks, by their link on every new portal. They are a place you can go to ask volunteers almost any knowledge-related question, and have been a feature of Wikipedia since August of 2005 (or perhaps earlier). They were linked to from portals in an effort to improve their visibility, and to provide a bridge from the encyclopedia proper to project space (the Wikipedia community).

Well, somebody proposed that we get rid of them, and the community decided that that was not going to happen. Thank you for defending the Ref desks!

Here's a link to the dramatic discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Indefinitely_semiprotecting_the_refdesk#Proposal_II:_Shut_down_the_Ref_Desks

The cleanup after sockpuppet Emoteplump continues...

The wake of disruption left by Emoteplump and the admins who reverted many (but not all) of his/her edits is still undergoing cleanup. We could use all the help we can get on this task...

Almost all of the speedy deleted portals have been rebuilt from scratch.

For the portals he/she restarted (many of which were done mistakenly, overwriting restarts and further development that had already been done), and/or tagged as the maintainer, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Emoteplump&oldid=881568794#Additional_Portals_under_my_watch

10,000 portals, here we come...

We're at 5,705 portals and counting.

New portals since issue #28

Prior to 2018, for the previous 14 years, portal creation was at about 80 portals per year on average. We did over 3 times that in just the past 9 days. At this rate, we'll hit the 10,000 portal mark in 5 months. But, I'm sure we can do it sooner than that.

What's next for portal pages?

There are 5 drives for portal development:

Create new portals
Expand existing portals, such as with new sections like Recognized content
Convert or restart old-style portals into automated single-page portals
Link to new portals from the encyclopedia
Pageless portals

Let's take a closer look at these...

1: Creating new portals

Portal creation, for subjects that happen to have the necessary support structures already in place, is down to about a minute per portal. The creation part, which is automated, takes about 10 seconds. The other 50 seconds is taken up by manual activities, such as finding candidate subjects, inspecting generated portals, and selecting the portal creation template to be used according to the resources available. Tools are under development to automate these activities as much as possible, to pare portal creation time down even more. Ten seconds each is the goal.

Eventually, we are going to run out of navigation templates to base portals off of. Though there are still thousands to go. But, when they do run out, we'll need an easy way to create more. A nav footer creation script.

Meanwhile, other resources are being explored and developed, such as categories, and methods to harvest the links they contain.

2: Expanding existing portals

The portal collection is growing, not only by the addition of new portals, but by further developing the ones we already have, by...

Improving and/or adding search parameters to better power the Did you know and In the news sections.
Adding more selected content sections, like Selected biographies.
Adding and maintaining Recognized content sections, via JL-Bot.
Adding pictures to the image slideshow.
Adding panoramic pics.
Categorizing portals.

More features will be added as we dream them up and design them. So, don't be shy, make a wish.

3: Converting old portals

By far the hardest and most time-consuming task we have been working on is updating the old portals, the very reason we revamped this WikiProject in the first place.

There are two approaches here:

A) Restart a portal from scratch, using our automated tools. For basic no-frills portals, that works find. But, for more elaborate portals, as that tends to lose content and features, the following approach is being tried...

B) Upgrade a portal section by section, so little to nothing is lost in the process.

4: Linking to new portals

Or "portal deorphanization"...

Dreamy Jazz Bot is purring along.

And a tool in the form of a script is under development for linking to portals at the time they are created, or shortly thereafter.

5...

See below...

New WikiProject for the post-saved-portal phase of operations...

Saved portals, are portals with a saved page.

What is the next stage in the evolutionary progression?

Quantum portals.

What are quantum portals?

Portals that come into existence when you click on the portal button, and which disappear when you leave the page.

Or, as Pbsouthwood put it:

...portals that exist only as a probability function (algorithm) until you collapse the wave form by observing through the portal button (run the script), and disappear again after use...

Introducing...

Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals (see it's talk page).

Keep on keepin' on

...'til next time, — The Transhumanist 10:22, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #030, 17 Mar 2019

Previous issue:

Single-page portals: 4,704

Total portals: 5,705

This issue:

Single-page portals: 4,562

Total portals: 5,578

The collection of portals has shrunk

All Portals closed at WP:MfD during 2019

Grouped Nominations total 127 Portals:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/US County Portals Deleted 64 portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Districts of India Portals Deleted 30 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods Deleted 23 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Allen Park, Michigan Deleted 6 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cryptocurrency Deleted 2 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:North Pole Deleted 2 Portals

Individual Nominations:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Circles Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Fruits Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:E (mathematical constant) Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Burger King Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cotingas Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Prostitution in Canada Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Agoura Hills, California Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Urinary system Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:You Am I Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cannabis (2nd nomination) Reverted to non-Automated version
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Intermodal containers Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adventure travel Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adam Ant Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benito Juárez, Mexico City Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Spaghetti Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Wikiatlas Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Greek alphabet Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Accounting Deleted G7
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Lents, Portland, Oregon Deleted P2
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ankaran Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Jiu-jitsu Deleted G8
Portal:University of Nebraska Speedy Deleted P1/A10 exactly the same as Portal:University of Nebraska–Lincoln also created by the TTH

Related WikiProject:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals Demoted

(Attribution: Copied from Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Portal MfD Results)

WikiProject Quantum portals

This was a spin-off from WikiProject Portals, for the purpose of developing zero-page portals (portals generated on-the-screen at the push of a button, with no stored pages).

It has been merged back into WikiProject Portals. In the MfD the vote was "demote". See Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals.

Hiatus on mass creation of Portals

At WP:VPR, mass creation of Portals using semi-automated tools has been put on hold until clearer community consensus is established.

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Hiatus on mass creation of Portals.

The Transhumanist banned from creating new portals for 3 months

See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Proposal 1: Interim Topic-Ban on New Portals.

Until next issue...

Keep on keepin' on. — The Transhumanist 09:41, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #031, 01 May 2019

Back to the drawing board

Implementation of the new portal design has been culled back almost completely, and the cull is still ongoing. The cull has also affected portals that existed before the development of the automated design.

Some of the reasons for the purge are:

Portals receive insufficient traffic, making it a waste of editor resources to maintain them, especially for narrow-scope or "micro" portals
The default {{bpsp}} portals are redundant with the corresponding articles, being based primarily on the corresponding navigation footer displayed on each of those articles, and therefore not worth separate pages to do so
They were mass created

Most of the deletions have been made without prejudice to recreation of curated portals, so that approval does not need to be sought at Deletion Review in those cases.

In addition to new portals being deleted, most of the portals that were converted to an automated design have been reverted.

Which puts us back to portals with manually selected content, that need to be maintained by hand, for the most part, for the time being, and back facing some of the same problems we had when we were at this crossroads before:

Manually maintained portals are not scalable (they are labor intensive, and there aren't very many editors available to maintain them)
The builders/maintainers tend to eventually abandon them
Untended handcrafted portals go stale and fall into disrepair over time

These and other concepts require further discussion. See you at WT:POG.

However, after the purge/reversion is completed, some of the single-page portals might be left, due to having acceptable characteristics (their design varied some). If so, then those could possibly be used as a model to convert and/or build more, after the discussions on portal creation and design guidelines have reached a community consensus on what is and is not acceptable for a portal.

See you at WT:POG.

Curation

A major theme in the deletion discussions was the need for portals to be curated, that is, each one having a dedicated maintainer.

There are currently around 100 curated portals. Based on the predominant reasoning at MfD, it seems likely that all the other portals may be subject to deletion.

See you at WT:POG.

Traffic

An observation and argument that arose again and again during the WP:ENDPORTALS RfC and the ongoing deletion drive of {{bpsp}} default portals, was that portals simply do not get much traffic. Typically, they get a tiny fraction of what the corresponding like-titled articles get.

And while this isn't generally considered a good rationale for creation or deletion of articles, portals are not articles, and portal critics insist that traffic is a key factor in the utility of portals.

The implication is that portals won't be seen much, so wouldn't it be better to develop pages that are?

And since such development isn't limited to editing, almost anything is possible. If we can't bring readers to portals, we could bring portal features, or even better features, to the readers (i.e., to articles)...

Some potential future directions of development

Quantum portals?

An approach that has received some brainstorming is "quantum portals", meaning portals generated on-the-fly and presented directly on the view screen without any saved portal pages. This could be done by script or as a MediaWiki program feature, but would initially be done by script. The main benefits of this is that it would be opt-in (only those who wanted it would install it), and the resultant generated pages wouldn't be saved, so that there wouldn't be anything to maintain except the script itself.

Non-portal integrated components

Another approach would be to focus on implementing specific features independently, and provide them somewhere highly visible in a non-portal presentation context (that is, on a page that wasn't a portal that has lots of traffic, i.e., articles). Such as inserted directly into an article's HTML, as a pop-up there, or as a temporary page. There are scripts that use these approaches (providing unrelated features), and so these approaches have been proven to be feasible.

What kind of features could this be done with?

The various components of the automated portal design are transcluded excerpts, news, did you know, image slideshows, excerpt slideshows, and so on.

Some of the features, such as navigation footers and links to sister projects are already included on article pages. And some already have interface counterparts (such as image slideshows). Some of the rest may be able to be integrated directly via script, but may need further development before they are perfected. Fortunately, scripts are used on an opt-in basis, and therefore wouldn't affect readers-in-general and editors-at-large during the development process (except for those who wanted to be beta testers and installed the scripts).

The development of such scripts falls under the scope of the Javascript-WikiProject/Userscript-department, and will likely be listed on Wikipedia:User scripts/List when completed enough for beta-testing. Be sure to watchlist that page.

Where would that leave curated portals?

Being curated. At least for the time being.

New encyclopedia program features will likely eventually render most portals obsolete. For example, the pop-up feature of MediaWiki provides much the same functionality as excerpts in portals already, and there is also a slideshow feature to view all the images on the current page (just click on any image, and that activates the slideshow). Future features could also overlap portal features, until there is nothing that portals provide that isn't provided elsewhere or as part of Wikipedia's interface.

But, that may be a ways off. Perhaps months or years. It depends on how rapidly programmers develop them.

Keep on keepin' on

The features of Wikipedia and its articles will continue to evolve, even if Portals go by the wayside. Most, if not all of portals' functionality, or functions very similar, will likely be made available in some form or other.

And who knows what else?

No worries.

Until next issue... — The Transhumanist 00:59, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:The Chronicles of Narnia

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:The Chronicles of Narnia. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:42, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

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