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Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals

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For basic information on portals, see Wikipedia:Portal. For the portal of portals, see Portal:Contents/Portals.
WikiProject Portals
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Adds users to tracking category.
Has goals?Building, developing, and maintaining portals and the portal namespace.
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WikiProject Portals
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WikiProject Portals (4 C, 2 P)
Portals (21 C, 3 P)
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Welcome to WikiProject Portals, dedicated to developing and maintaining portals and portal tools. New participants are welcome; please feel free to join.

This project collaborates to build, improve and maintain portals, their support pages, and portal tools.

  1. Maintaining portals means updating them, and fixing problems that arise.
  2. We also build new portals to fill gaps in the portal system, and expand the portal system's coverage of subjects on Wikipedia.
  3. Portal support pages include the portal guidelines, portal building instructions, and this WikiProject.
  4. Gaining community consensus for the WikiProject's activities in the Portal, Template, and Main namespaces.
  5. Fixing bugs and repairing formatting errors that emerge, placing links to the portals, etc.
  6. Administration of the WikiProject (updating support pages and guidelines, publishing the project's newsletter, managing tasks, posting announcements and invitations, etc.)
  7. Create new portals for all the core topics that have enough coverage to need a portal
  8. Keep existing portals fully upgraded and running smoothly
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Further information: Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Newsletter archive

Portals status report

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  • 545 Current all portals (this number automatically updates as pages are added to or deleted from Category:All portals)
  • Historical trivia: up through mid-2018, French Wikipedia actually used a bot to keep regular track of how many Portals were here, in English Wikipedia; the bot's report history is here.
  • 52 Current single page portals (new creations and restarts, net of deletions).
  • 1,485 The number of portals when we started the project reboot (April 2018)
  • 4,220 Added portals (at least) April 2018-Feb 13, 2019 (many of these were subsequently deleted at MfD)
  • 5,705 Approximate peak number of portals from Newsletter #29 on Feb 13, 2019 (many of these were subsequently deleted at MfD)

Project tasks

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Main page: Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Tasks

Inspect portals, especially new ones

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Use this PetScan query to find this month's new portals. To use a different date, go to the "Page properties" screen and change the limit from 20190101, or just hack the URL. (Tip courtesy of Certes).

The list of all portals can be found at Category:All portals.

Check for errors and bugs

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Bugs and errors sometimes occur in portals.

Lua errors usually indicate an empty section, or a sourcepage that lacks images. These can be fixed by providing better parameters (pagenames), or by putting images on the image slideshow sourcepage(s). Image files can also be added directly to image slideshows, but any sourcepage name causing the lua error needs to be removed for the error to go away.

If you come across errors or bugs that you cannot fix, please report them at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

Improve

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Adding links to portals is important, so Wikipedia's readers can find them.
See Category:Portals needing placement of incoming links and Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Portals needing links

There are presently many portals with insufficient links to them existent in main namespace articles.

Here's how you can help (note to editors, replace {{subst:PAGENAME}} with the intended portal name, e.g. Language):

  1. Place a portal box in the article's See also section

    {{Portal|{{subst:PAGENAME}}}}

    – or –

    Place a list item link to a portal in the corresponding root article's See also section, using this code:

    * {{Portal-inline|{{subst:PAGENAME}}}}


  2. Place a portal bar at the article's bottom matter; and goes below standard navigation templates, and above geographical coordinates and authority control templates. Use this example, adding multiple article-relevant portals:
    {{Portal bar|A portal|B portal|C portal}}

  3. Place a portal link at the bottom of the portal's corresponding navigation box footer template, like this: 
     | belowclass = hlist
 | below =
 * {{icon|Portal}} [[Portal:{{subst:PAGENAME}}|Portal]]

    If the navbox template already has a line with | below, don't duplicate it - just add the third line of code.


  4. Place the following code at the top of the portal's corresponding category page: {{Portal|{{subst:PAGENAME}}}} If you use AWB, please apply it to removing the backlog described above. (There are over 2000 orphaned portals at this time).

Add a panorama or banner picture

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Add a banner-shaped picture (such as a panorama) to the introduction section of portals. Place them at the top of the introduction section, or if they are especially tall, place them at the bottom of that section. Please do not add pics over 2 megabytes in size, as they can cause the portal scripts to time out, causing empty sections, or sections with error messages. Watch out, because some of those pictures are huge, like 12 megabytes or more. Less than one megabyte is best, if you can manage it. Pictures can be found at commons:. Search strings that work well with city names to find these are "skyline" or "panorama". There are a large number of wide images at 7:1 aspect ratio used as Wikivoyage banners in Commons:Category:Wikivoyage banners. Most of these are not very large files. Geographic portals are listed in the Geography section of Portal:Contents/Portals. City portals are shown in parentheses (though they are not the only ones in parentheses). As for other subjects, banner-shaped pictures pertaining directly to those or any of their subtopics will typically suffice.

Here is an example of the main template used to place banners/panoramas:

{{Portal image banner|Jarvis Island banner sharks.jpg|[[Gray reef shark]]s over reef near [[Jarvis Island]].}}

Which looks like this:

Gray reef sharks over reef near Jarvis Island.
Tip for displaying an oversized picture as a banner
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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:

Install image slideshows

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{{Transclude files as random slideshow}} does not function in mobile view or with the Wikipedia app thus should be replaced with the {{Portal pictures}} method.

On the older portals, replace "Selected image" sections with "Selected images" sections.

The code for an image slideshow would look like this, for most existing portals: 

{{Box-header colour|Selected images}}
{{Transclude files as random slideshow| paragraphs=1-3 | files=1 | more=
| {{PAGENAME}}
|
|
}}

Entries can be sourcepage names, or file names. For each sourcepage, the template displays every image on that page. Filenames must start with "File:" and get displayed directly in the slideshow. "{{}}" is the magic word that stands for the portal's page name, without prefix, which is usually also the name of the corresponding root article.

For examples of portals that have image slideshows, see Portal:Continents and Portal:Ancient Egypt. Or see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&limit=5000&target=Template%3ATransclude+files+as+random+slideshow&namespace=100

Where do you find pictures?

At Wikipedia:Featured pictures, some of Wikipedia's best pictures are listed by subject. Many of those subjects correspond to a portal name.
On the portal's subpages, if any.
Throughout Wikipedia articles.
On Wikimedia Commons. This is a great place to find pictures not used in articles.

Review Portals that are being Drafted

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Portals currently in Draft are: (if this section is blank, no portals are currently in the Draft: namespace)

Focus: Portals

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The focus of this WikiProject is portals, all existing and future portals on Wikipedia.

What is a portal?

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"Portal" is an archaic word which means "doorway", so a portal is a form of entrance. A good synonym for a Wikipedia Portal is "signposted doorway to knowledge". Portals serve as entrance points for topics which extend across many related articles, but with more depth and engagement than a list of links. A portal focuses on a range of articles based on its title, and seeks to emulate a main page for that range. This helps specify more familiar articles and files, and narrows down searches for important and interesting, but otherwise more obscure aspects. Like a main page, a portal is not an article, but a passageway to many articles. Portals may vary in format and approach, but their main purpose is always to capture interest and provide various routes of topic exploration.

Here are a couple definitions for the word "portal" from Wiktionary:

  1. An entrance, entry point, or means of entry. For example: The local library, a portal of knowledge.
  2. A website or page that acts as an entrance to other websites or pages on the Internet.

Each portal name follows the subject covered, so we have a portal of "Geography", but all portals have a namespace, defined by adding "Portal:" to the title, so the geography portal is Portal:Geography.

The best portals are not simply domains of information, but nodes of knowledge and categorization complimenting the category, listing, and outline systems.

When a subject is covered by a range of articles, the parent portal can be considered a root article as related articles branch from it. Portals take us beyond the root article however to guide and encourage exploration of the branches. If there are too few branches, a portal is not appropriate because the root article is a better navigation tool.

As an example of how portals may be useful, the article mathematics summarizes its general subject in descriptive terms, but with over 40,000 articles on mathematics topics, navigating the various branches of the mathematics topic from the root mathematics article, or its categories and lists, can be somewhat awkward and unengaging. A portal expands the list based navigation concepts to make a subject more accessible. Portal:Mathematics, for instance, provides a selection of reading samples including more obscure and trivial topics, such as DYKs, chosen and structured to provoke interest, beside a guide to related on-wiki projects, all underscored by a comprehensive, collapsible link tree for users drawn deeper into the subject.

Portals begin as a basic template. But the design of the portal progresses and evolves to the stage where static content display transforms to dynamic user interface. With interactive components such as slideshows and rotating featured content (emulating a main page), portals aspire to be a go-to area for seeking knowledge in a particular categorical subject.

Good portals should fill a niche not covered by lists, categories, outlines or articles and improve dissemination of all categorical subjects. Innovation in the style and design of portals individually is both desired and encouraged.

Purposes of portals

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Each portal on Wikipedia acts as an alternative entrance to a subject. Portals supplement the encyclopedia. They support their subjects in various ways, including but not limited to:

  1. Providing a variety of sample content of subtopics ("topic tasters"), from within each portal's subject, that the reader may find interesting. Kind of like a magazine. Like what Wikipedia's Main Page does in general.
  2. Aiding navigation - portals are one of Wikipedia's navigation subsystems, designed to help users find their way around the vast amount of knowledge on Wikipedia to material within a particular subject. So, in addition to sample content, a portal may also present in various ways, links, and lists of links.
  3. Providing bridges between reading and editing, and between the encyclopedia proper and the Wikipedia community, via links to pages in project space (and the other namespaces) that are relevant to the portal's subject. A portal may be associated with one or more WikiProjects; unlike a WikiProject, however, it is meant for both readers and editors of Wikipedia, and should promote content and encourage contribution. Note that portals are created for encyclopedic topics only and not for article maintenance categories.

Discussion announcements

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Article alerts: portals for deletion at MfD

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Manual listing

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Note that portal subpages are not included in the automatic alerts. For example, if a specific subpage is nominated for deletion.
For archives, see: Portals for deletion at MfD.

Automated alerts

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Redirects for discussion

Tools

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Watchlist

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A list of all portal pages is provided below. (It is possible to get all portal pages into your watchlist, but it is difficult and tedious). The list is current as of 17 May 2022.

The list of all portal pages is useful for getting a bird's eye view of:

  1. What's in portal space
  2. Monitoring activity on the portal pages using the Related changes feature in the sidebar menu

The list was too long to get onto a single page (there are 105,352 pages in portal space[as of?]), and so it is split up into 6 parts:

The archive contains old lists and these older lists are kept for historical reference: Wikipedia:WikiProject Portal/List of all portals/Archive

SearchSuite

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Most older portals have subpages. Search is kind of cludgy for looking at these. you can use PrefixIndex for extracting subpages (Example).

SearchSuite enhances Wikipedia search results. It has a feature (menu item) that reformats search results to one-line entries, which is convenient for looking at portal subpages as a list. It has another menu item that formats the links (asterisk-style, with link delimeters) for copying/pasting into an editor. And another for sorting the results. Each feature works on the output of the others, and the script remembers the setting of each menu item between pages. When one is turned on, it stays on for all searches.

Templates

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Markers

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These markers control how a portal is edited.

Portal components

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Main page: Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Components

Here's a portal displaying the components that can be used in each section:

Here's a list of components used to build portals. Their placement (left column, etc.) is suggested only.

For a full list of portal templates, see {{Portal templates navbox}}:

Userboxes and WikiAd

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Show these off on your profile to let everyone know you contribute to the sustainment of the Portal namespace. Or you could just add Category:WikiProject Portals participants directly.

This user is a participant in WikiProject Portals.
This user is a participant in WikiProject Portals.
Wikipedia ad for Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals
Wikipedia adsfile info – #267



Project participants

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See also: Automatically generated list of active project editors and Category:WikiProject Portals participants

If you'd like to receive task requests and project-related updates on your talk page, please add your name below. Also, please indicate if you are a user of AWB or JWB, and if you know Lua, JS, perl, and/or PHP. An asterisk following a name indicates they receive updates in the form of a link instead of the whole newsletter. Follow your name with two asterisks if you do not wish to receive any project-wide updates, not even a link. Those marked with 3 asterisks have not been confirmed as wishing updates due to unreachability.

WikiGnomes

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If you prefer WikiGnome tasks and would like to receive WikiGnome-oriented updates on your talk page, please add your name below. Also let us know if you are an AWB or JWB user.

Specific portal maintainers

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This is a list of editors who work on specific portal(s) or in specific areas, in case you need to contact someone about those.

Other

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  • SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  – Primarily interested for now in working on the draft WP:Manual of Style/Portals. I'm one of the longest-term MoS shepherds. Please consider me basically an ombudsman for how to craft that in a way to get it passed as an actual guideline. (Also AWB-approved and a Template Editor and Page Mover, if such geekery is needed, though I suck at Lua.) PS: I don't directly co-maintain any portals right now but have worked on several, including Portal:Snooker; would like to see a more general Portal:Cue sports.

Support pages

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Guidance

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Newsletter archive

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General topical lists of portals

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Project Subpages

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Discover Wikipedia using portals
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