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Time for some portal creation criteria?

FYI

 – This conversation was also posted at the deletion discussions listed here. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 16:49, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

This is mostly prompted by the recent MfD spree of a dozen newly created portals of varying scope and notability (most of which seem ok to me, but I digress). Our portal guidelines are still missing an important section: criteria for creation. We've talked before about drafting and codifying notability and other criteria to determine where the line is drawn for portal creation, and after the (mostly duplicate) discussions across those MfD's, I think it's time we finally sit down and hammer out something we can all live with, and build a set of criteria that might survive an RfC.

As a prompt, I'll take this back to the first thread I know of to discuss this matter: from WP:ENDPORTALS. I'm sure everyone here remembers that historical, semi-recent attempt to axe the entire portal namespace, which resulted in a no-consensus close and the reboot of this WikiProject. While creation criteria and notability were sprinkled all around that discussion, perhaps most relevant is the section WP:ENDPORTALS § Notability for Portal, which I have transcluded below for convenience:

Notability for Portal

An alternate solution to poorly maintained portal on narrow topics can be establishing “Notability” / Significance criteria for Portals which currently does not exist. Since WP strictly enforces notability criteria for articles, it only makes logical sense to have at least some minimum criteria for portals. There can be several approaches on how notability can be established, like:

1. . The core portal topic must be at least a Level-3 Vital Article.
2. . There must be minimum X number of Featured / Good articles that can be shown on the portal.
3. . The portal must be a level 3 or 4 sub-portal of the portals linked to the main page.

Please feel free to add why this may or may not be a good idea, or any alternative thought on how the “Notability” / Significance criteria can be established. Arman ^(Talk) 04:53, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

I agree to the idea in principle, but not in the specifics suggested above. Portals need to be understood as merely "Topic Overviews" or "Topic Tasters", and we should make them far more visible in Hatnotes, DAB pages, See Also and, especially, in Search results. As "Topic Tasters", they should exist only to introduce users to a broad subject area or theme at any level, and in a manner that single articles spectacularly fail to do. So, it's breadth and depth of subjects covered that is really important, not the current quality assessment of individual components. Have a minimum number of article linked from it, by all means, but do not require each to have a predetermined quality grading. This applies to Levels, too, I suspect. Portal:Mountain and Portal:Alps are at different levels, but they each serve as good, visual Topic Tasters to a very broad range of detailed content. Most importantly, they reach out and link sideways across other content at varying levels. So maybe judging Portals by that ability to link sideways is key here. As I'm not that familiar with the Wikipedia:Vital articles and their Levels, I can't offer more specific suggestions. But Portals are not Articles, so judging them by single article level doesn't seem appropriate. It's their function as a Topic Taster (and making them findable in the first place, and therefore functional) that should count towards an assessment of notability. If they don't give an overview across a wide range of subjects then they're probably not likely to be deemed noteworthy. Nick Moyes (talk) 08:24, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Although it's tempting, I'm not sure notability is the right criterion as it's quite subjective and will result in energy-sapping discussions. What is more critical is the willingness of WikiProject teams to commit to supporting one or more portals. That's pretty easy to assess. If they do, the portal should be well maintained and high quality. If they don't, it could be a candidate for deletion if the quality is poor. Bermicourt (talk) 19:04, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

I very much like the suggestion to view portals as "topic taster" pages. I essentially agree with Bermicourt that quality should be enough as a measure whether we should keep or delete a portal -- for topics of fairly low notability (say, my local shopping mall) it will be really hard to make a halfway decent portal. But if somebody succeeds in creating an appealing and balanced portal, we don't gain by throwing it away. —Kusma (t·c) 19:19, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

German Wikipedia makes this easier by having guidelines on what definitely constitutes a valid portal (they call it 'relevance'), e.g. countries, major sports, capital cities, and saying that the rest should go through an approval process. I've translated (and slightly tweaked) their guidelines here. Maybe we could do something similar. Bermicourt (talk) 19:05, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

I am against notability guidelines. The Quality of a Portal is important. If the Quality is high enough, I do not care about notability.--Broter (talk) 16:09, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

I don't think that "notability" is the right measure either. I do think we need to have some kind of guideline or measure in place to make sure that portals do not get too granular.--Paul McDonald (talk) 16:19, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

These "relevance guidelines" are a good idea. In response to the concerns expressed by the last two users above, there's no requirement for us to make to guidelines rigid (per WP:IAR, if a rule prevents us from making a good, relevant page, well then ...). Actually, there is no reason to delete the portals whatsoever - we should use the same criteria as for Wikiproject pages - namely, if the pages are not well maintained or frequented but fall short of being "entirely undesirable", they can be tagged with {{WikiProject status|inactive}} or a (new?) variant thereof. 198.84.253.202 (talk) 18:04, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Can we perhaps agree that at minimum a portal should:

1. be related to a notable topic (i.e., one with an article that is not likely to get deleted)
2. have a parent portal (so, no "orphaned portals") [edit: except for a small number of "top-most" portals — see discussion below]
3. have no missing/broken sections (like this)

Portals lacking these features could be tagged for refactoring (i.e., to be about a more general topic if #1 or #2 is the problem) or further improvement; in extreme cases, they could be deleted/archived. Obviously, plenty of opportunity would need to be given for interested editors to satisfy #3 before it could be used as justification for deletion/archiving. The details of "implementing" these principles could be worked out later, but I think "portals worth keeping" should satisfy these three conditions. Right? - dcljr (talk) 18:06, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

No. 3 seems good in principle, but in practice WP:NODEADLINE is a thing to consider and currently there is no policy which allows for deleting articles (or any other pages) because they are a "work in progress". No. 2 is good, but when pushed to its limit it becomes an infinite regress - of course, its possible to make "exceptions" to this "rule" for top level portals. Nevermind - No. 2 is good, too, assuming it can be linked reasonably (and without being an excessive split) to a parent portal (given that there is indeed a "parent of all portals", Portal:Contents/Portals). No. 1 is perfectly acceptable, though. 198.84.253.202 (talk) 18:12, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Oh, yeah, for #2 I was implicitly exempting the "top-most" portals—say, those currently linked to from the Main Page, or, as you point out, those that are / could be listed as the most general portals on Portal:Contents/Portals. - dcljr (talk) 20:52, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

It seems silly to me to require that a portal be about a notable topic. If it's not about a notable topic, then the links in the portal will all be redlinks because any articles in the portal would be deleted at AFD... but then again... okay it still seems silly, but that doesn't mean it isn't a good idea too.--Paul McDonald (talk) 05:25, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I much prefer Arman's criteria. 2 (once amended) seems absolutely critical. 3, while not vital, seems a fairly minimal standard to require. 1 actually might be a little under-strict: as noted, non-notable articles shouldn't be there, and if they aren't, it will just be redlinks. Should some qualitative requirement (not nearly as high as seen in the first mooted set) be needed for the primary article? E.g. a tested B standard? Nosebagbear (talk) 11:05, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I agree with the minimal standards by dcljr. This should be required for every Portal!--Broter (talk) 13:25, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I also agree with this. Under the above criteria, we could trim a significant amount of tiny, neglected, and unmaintained portals, and make our jobs of curating the rest easier. Having better guidance on when a portal should (or should not) exist is something we should work on. These criteria would be a good start on that. — AfroThundr ^(talk) 20:10, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

@Paulmcdonald: From what I see, no. 1 is indeed obvious, but it should still be stated clearly (something like "General guideline: there should already be at least a few (more than one) well-developed (not necessarily FA or GA, but more than start or stub class) articles about the topic") so as that it is clear in everyone's mind (even those who haven't discussed it here at the RfC). 198.84.253.202 (talk) 03:32, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

I mean it certainly wouldn't make sense to have a portal without at least 4 or 5 (at least!) articles to put into it. Having a "B" standard for the primary article and some general bit for a few more entries at least seems reasonable. (I don't think anything like "at least 3 more C or above articles" will help encourage portal upkeep!) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nosebagbear (talk • contribs) 10:00, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

There were several other attempts I recall to get this discussion started shortly after the reboot, but they're buried in the archives somewhere. Let's see if this one sticks. So, what do you guys think on the matter? What criteria do you think a potential new portal should meet before it can be created?

Creation criteria discussion

@The Transhumanist, Evad37, Certes, Dreamy Jazz, Pbsouthwood, SMcCandlish, FR30799386, BrownHairedGirl, Godsy, Finnusertop, Cactus.man, and BrendonTheWizard: Pinging recent participants in the WikiProject and the MfD discussions. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 16:54, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

So far, the main metric being cited is number of articles on the subject. The issue with that may be self-apparent to most: not all topics are created equal. Any number that would be sufficient for many topics may set the bar far too high (or too low) for others. I do, however, like the idea of linking them to vital articles, or the requirement for the main article to be rated a certain class or higher. If those aren't notable enough, I'm not sure what is. I also like the taxonomic suggestion that no portal can be standalone or orphaned. Ideally, all portals should have a parent and siblings that the reader can navigate like breadcrumbs to get to related topics. The rest of that section covered maintainability, which we've got in spades. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 16:27, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

• I think that we should have a guideline, but, I feel that it shouldn't be too strict. I think that because portals act as a kind of navigation aid, a portal should not exist unless there are enough articles/pictures to make the portal seem finished. Also, I feel that we should ensure that the articles used are are of a certain quality rating or higher, because we are now so heavily reliant on transcluding leads from articles, having a portal based on stubs with small or no leads makes the portal also seem incomplete and empty.

I also think that having some kind of breadcrumbs link as AfroThundr3007730 mentioned is a good idea, but this could cut of having portals that do not necessarily have parents. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 17:01, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Although "not topics are created equal", I still feel that if a topic does not have the articles on it, then those articles should be developed first, as I feel a portal acts as a way to find articles / similar topics, so not having the articles to link to is like having an empty or small contents page, which is inadvisable. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 17:06, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Some ideas to consider:

1. I like the idea of a link to a higher level portal. Not sure if it should be a requirement, but am open to debate. There is almost always a possibility for a parent portal. If there are counterexamples, I would like to see a few. Siblings may or may not exist. A breadcrumb trail could be a nice touch. Breadcrumb trail upwards, box(es) of sub-portal, sister portal and related portal links downwards and sideways.
   • How do we do breadcrumb trails for portals with multiple parents? Several in parallel?
2. If there is a reasonable navbox, that may serve as the criterion for having a portal on the same topic, as the current system relies on the navbox for structure, but there is room for improvement.
3. A portal made up of mainly stubs and few substantial articles should be discouraged. First get the articles, then make the portal. If there are enough substantial articles, the number of additional stubs should not matter.
4. Images are nice but cannot be a qualifier as some topics have very few useful images. Same with news, quotes, did you knows etc, which are mainly decorative.
5. There should be a category of similar name and overlapping content. There may be cases where it does not exist, but then either the portal is frivolous or the category should be created. Navbox and category will usually have a large intersection.
6. Special cases should be considered on their merits.
7. Portals that are large and cumbersome will usually be suitable for splitting into sub-portals, based on rationalising the navboxes. I am experimenting on these lines with Portal:Underwater diving, which is in a state of flux, but demonstrates sub-portals/sister portals based on navboxes. Underwater diving is also one of those topics which does not have an obvious unique parent, as it could be a child portal of several, and the sub-portals could be sub-portals of various other parent portals. The network could get quite complex. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 20:34, 26 September 2018 (UTC)
8. New single page portals are cheap to make, we can lose a few if they are not good enough yet and no-one is available to fix them quickly, but they can be recreated as soon as the topic is ready. That which is deleted now can be undeleted when the time is ripe. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 20:57, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

You mentioned stubs. Keep in mind that our lua gurus have built-into the transclusion modules a stub filter, so that articles tagged as stubs are not displayed in portal slideshows. So stubs shouldn't be a concern. (Remember to show your appreciation to these guys, for the amazing features they have enabled in portals).    — The Transhumanist   06:21, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

@Dreamy Jazz and Pbsouthwood: These are all good points. With regards to the breadcrumbs, I'm thinking they should trace the direct lineage back to the top-level portal it descends from, and in the case of multiple parents, it would just show the main (primary?) parent, or even list two breadcrumb trails. If resolving one of those trails results in another split, the "primary" link is chosen. I think that could be implemented with minimal confusion to the readers (and editors). As for the child and sibling portals, I think each portal should only show their "immediate family" not extended cousin or nephew portals (this metaphor is getting weird). If such a network becomes tedious to maintain by hand (highly likely), we could use Lua to pull Wikidata relationships to track the genealogy. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 04:05, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

I think I follow your explanation, and it looks OK. It will probably be quite simple for most portals and horribly complicated for a few. So it goes.

Wikivoyage has a breadcrumb system that, if I remember correctly, only requires the immediate upward link to be made by the user, and automatically follows the existing trail to the top. It is only used for one trail per article, because they structure the site quite rigidly to make that possible. I have no idea whether linking upward to two parent portals would work, but would guess that it will either work all the way up or crash immediately.· · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 12:07, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

{{Breadcrumb}} works but each portal would need to list all its ancestors explicitly. We might create a variant where the portal just needs to name its immediate parent, with the trees above there recorded once, perhaps in the template itself. Certes (talk) 12:34, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

• What are the benefits of a portal? When is a root article with a portal attached better than a root article without one? And why? For example, is Quidditch (sport) a better encyclopedia page because is has a portal link in its See also section? And how do users make use of portals? How should we go about finding this out?    — The Transhumanist   00:02, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: please can you clarify whether you gave any thought to that what are the benefits of a portal question before you went on a rapid-fire spree of creating hundreds of them at a speed which sometimes exceeded over 40 per hour?? What conclusions did you reach then? And have you reconsidered those conclusions in light of subsequent discussions? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:05, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

I wonder how receptive the WMF would be on providing us more detailed analytics on Portal namespace traffic (enwiki and possibly dewiki). I'm talking things other than just generic pageviews. They run traffic studies all the time, so the infrastructure is already there. I'm guessing we'd also need to shanghai an analyst to parse that down for us, since I don't see them handing us the raw dataset (not without identification at least). — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 04:14, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl, I can attest that The Transhumanist has spent a considerable amount of effort on thinking about whether there are benefits to portals. The question above relates more to whether there is any data available. We have discussed this at length, and agree that they are potentially (and probably actually) useful, but we do not have any statistics, so hard to express a probability with any confidence. This was not done without consideration, but conclusions may differ, as they all appear to be based on personal opinion so far. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:51, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood I am sure you write in good faith, so I would like to believe you. However, TTH's many replies at MFD show near zero evidence of having done any such thought, as did their post[1] on my talk asking me to withdraw the Pebble Beach MFD ... a micro-portal which TTH subsequently G7ed after others agreed with my assessment of its narrowness. TTH's MFD comments repeatedly amounted to verbose technical descriptions of how portals work rather than why that particular one had sufficient scope to add meaningful value, and at one point he even expressed deep indignation that a portal was MFDed before it was complete because how TTH know its utility before it was fully built. That indicates little or no prior assessment, so I'd like to see TTH respond in their own words.

I am disappointed to see you joining several editors in this discussion talking of "personal opinion" to dismiss other comments. We reach consensus by having reasoned discussion and assessing what evidence is available. I have shown evidence both that narrow-scope portals are little used and that extensive promotion does not significantly raise usage levels. So we would be more likely to sustain courteous and constructive discussion if you refrained from the discourtesy of airily dismissing my evidenced assessments as "personal opinion", which implies that there is no evidence involved.

Sure, the data which we have is limited, and we could have a sensible discussion about the significance of the evidence gaps. It would be great if @AfroThundr3007730 could get more detailed usage info, but I seriously doubt that it would significantly alter the picture. There are so few examples of widely-used portals that there is little chance of learning much new about what makes them successful.

I am concerned that in both your reply and TTH's mass-creation spree the approach you describe seems to me to amount to "inconclusive evidence of utility, so let's massively increase the rate of creation". Apart from inherent perversity, that seems brazenly dismissive of the ~150 editors who at WP:ENDPORTALS expressed support for a mass cull. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:40, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl. Thank you for your explicit assumption of good faith. It is not misplaced, and I extend the same courtesy to you. If you want documentary evidence of considerable thought and discussion, it exists on my talk page and its archives, The Transhumanist's talk pages and archives, in the project newsletters and project talk pages. Whether all possible aspects were exhaustively considered is a claim I will not make, but a lot of discussion exists if one wants to examine it.

If I appear to be airily dismissing your evidenced assessments as personal opinion, I apologise, as that was not my intention. The comment about personal opinion applies equally to my opinions and those of the members of this project, and was not aimed at you specifically. I would however like to see your evidence, as I don't have any, and assumed that no-one else does either. I have been wrong before, but am amenable to evidence based correction.

I don't think I have even expressed my opinion about how fast portals should be created. I am not supporting the current rate, I am defending some of the reasoning behind it. I do not see this as a black and white issue, and do not even know how grey it is.

Have you examined the code of a new model portal? I ask this for background, as it would affect how I might explain my opinions, and do not wish to make an assumption either way. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:18, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: no, I have not examined the code of a new-style portal, and I do not intend to do so ... because I do not see how the coding alters the well-evidenced fact that microportals get microviews. If you would like to present some concise explanation of how the code has altered pageviews, I would be delighted to read it it.

As to my evidence on pageviews, I have presented some at MFD and some elsewhere on this. I do not intend to collate it, because I am pretty sure that anyone working on portals knows the data: that only the ten most-used portals even top 400 daily pageviews.

I hope you will understand why I am not going to trawl archives and multiples user pages for snippets of discussion. I assume that responsible editors follow WP:MULTI -and centralise discussion so that it can read and joined by others. It is those centralised discussions and proposal formations which I would be interested in seeing, if yo can offer any links. But I note with alarm the lack of discussion at WT:PORTAL. Not a good sign. -01:07, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

• Many thanks to @AfroThundr3007730 for starting this discussion. After the community reached a consensus at the RFC not to delete all portals at this time, this project had a reboot and some great work was done to improve the templates. Sadly, that good work does not seem to have been accompanied by similar attention to the main issue raised in the RFC: that most portals get very few views. With the exception of a very few broad scope portals, readers hardly use them. Over 150 editors supported either deletion of the whole portal namespace or a massive cull. There is absolutely no evidence of broad consensus for a massive expansion of portals, or for adopting low scope thresholds.

Some commentary in various place suggested that low usage was due to inadequate promotion. However, I have evidence to the contrary, wrt Portal:Years. Earlier this year, User:Fayenatic london and I did a lot of work on adding automatic portal links year-in-foo categories. One of the results of that is that there are now 393,762 links to Portal:Years ... but it still has a 90-day average of only 16 pageviews per day. The conclusion of obvious: promotion has not helped, and readers don't want that portal.

Similarly, Portal:France has only 75 daily pageviews vs 15,000 views per day for the head article France ... and >11,000 daily views] for London vs 36 daily views for Portal:London. Or 10,000 daily views for Queen (band) but only (band) 17 daily views for Portal:Queen (band).

Despite obvious community disquiet about the v low usage levels, the Portals Project seems to have concerned itself primarily with the how of portals, and not the why and what. On the contrary, Wikipedia:WikiProject_Portals#The_current_plan says Create new portals for all the core topics that have enough coverage to need a portal, and for whatever other topics portal creators are interested in. The lack of guidance about what constitues "enough coverage to need a portal" is a bizarre oversight, and the "whatever interests a creator" is silly. This failyre to define thresholds seems to me to be serious collective case of WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT.

So the result has been that one editor (The Transhumanist (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)) has been engaged in rapid-fire creation of small-scope portals: over 400 in the last 12 days, sometimes with only a few minutes between them (e.g. on 22 Sept, 9 new portals created in 60 minutes, or on Sept 17th 73 new portals created in 91 minutes). That clearly involves no scrutiny of the scope or viability of the portal .. and shockingly, the same editor has specifically objected to being asked why they chose to create a portal with a particular scope, at least until the portal has been completed. That is a daft way to approach any such task: the very first step should be to be assess whether the topic is suitable for a portal.

The failure so far of this project to address any of these issues is stoking up trouble for the future. The "keep" votes at MFD seem to have come overwhelmingly from a few regular participants in this project; there is no sign of wider community for the new microportals. Even the portal-project keepvotes have mostly been qualified.

My own view starts from the fact that portals are not content; they a device for navigating between content pages. We already have tools for navigating small sets (lists, categories and navboxes) ... so a portal should be a gateway to a large collection of info, not simply a shelf with a few dozen items. I deplore the attempt to use portals simply as a different way of presenting the list of titles in a navbox.

My preference would be for guidelines that restrict portals to:

1. broad topics: e.g. a country rather than a county or village; a musical genre rather than a single band; a literary movement rather than a single writer; a sport or league rather than a single team.
2. topics whose scope extends to at least five thousand non-stub articles, at least a dozen good articles, and preferably a few feature articles/lists.
3. topics where a properly-advertised discussion has shown that there is both a consensus to create it, and a group of several experienced editors who are willing to commit to maintaining it.

Others clearly have different preferences, so we need an RFC to find a broad consensus. I would be happy to work with other editors to draft such an RFC to be posted in a neutral location such as WP:VP ... but in the meantime I strongly urge this project to recommend a moratorium on the creation of new portals until such an RFC is concluded.

I also recommend that before an RFC proceeds, there should be some collaborative effort to collect evidence on the usage of portals, and on whether difft types of promotion have an effect on usage. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:51, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: Lots of good stuff there. I'm just going to poke at a couple of points, since I don't have time to post my own wall of text in response.

1. New portals - While I agree that the new portal creation should be slowed considerably until we have a decent set of criteria in place, I don't think it needs to stop entirely. Instead of starting with the "low-hanging fruit" at the bottom of the hierarchy, we should instead be filling out the top-level subjects that are still missing (a la the vital article topic list on the project main page), then work our way down from there. By the time we reach questionable eligibility territory, we should (hopefully) have guidelines in place. Or if we're still spinning our wheels here, we can call a halt then, which brings me to my next point.
2. Scope criteria - More directly on the topic at hand, I don't think an article count in the thousands should be necessary to decide that a portal can be created. That sounds like at least an order of magnitude too high, and would describe the current top-level portals. But as you all know, we have an entire hierarchy of smaller scope subportals (and dare I say sub-sub portals?) under those. The majority of older (pre-reboot) portals would have an article scope in the hundreds at most, and I think that sounds about right for a portal. I do believe that less than a hundred articles is a bit on the slim side, (re: recent MfDs) and while I know the topic area can grow, that's why we have WP:WTAF. Portals are so easy to create now, we can always not make a tiny one now, and come back when it's ready to be created. Put it on a "future portals" list or something.
3. View count - So far as I can tell, view count has never been a priority metric for any of Wikipedia's content, least of all portals. You cited some metrics from Portal links included via categories, which are themselves viewed orders of magnitude less frequently than their member articles. The second-level negative effect that would have on the linked portal views would be expected, IMHO. It doesn't help that portals are only allowed to have a link at the bottom of the article (like many other types of non-article content), meaning that the majority of readers who don't read our sometimes overly-long articles to the end might never have seen them in the first place. Even if they are only in the dozens, if those handful of readers were able to find what they needed and walk away with a better understanding of the topic, then the portal has served its purpose.
4. Role of portals - Portals are significantly more than "fancy navboxes", and while tiny-scoped portals can seem that way, the larger ones provide much more than that. You are correct that the primary purpose of a portal is to aid the reader in navigating a topic, but that is only half their function. See WP:CLNT, which covers this nicely, along with how they coexist despite their overlapping purpose. Categories and navboxes (and even lists and outlines) don't do much more than provide a structured list of links to the reader, and leave them to fend for themselves and figure things out on their own. We have smart readers, so I'm sure they manage that just fine, however, portals can go that extra mile to present the content in a way that allows the reader to engage with the topic in a more interactive fashion (The Transhumanist has written a novel on this already, so I won't go further here.) This also includes drawing the reader in as a potential editor by encouraging them to contribute and improve the topic area, both here and on sister projects. That last part cannot be discounted as immaterial or irrelevant.

This ended up being a wall of text anyway, it seems. All that aside, the actual criteria still needs to be written, which seems to be developing in the thread above this one. Your third criteria for an approval process, was brought up before, but the discussion didn't get very far. Perhaps it should be revisited. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 03:18, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

• @AfroThundr3007730: some quick replies:

1. New portals you at least agree on a slowdown, so we are not far apart on this. However, I don't see evidence for a consensus anywhere on what is a "top-level portal" (e.g. where in this tree: Science → biology → zoology → Mammalogy → Primatology → Hylobatidae → Gibbons) ... nor any consensus that the existing set of higher level portals is inadequate. The point was not central at the recent RFC, so not assessed by the closer ... but there were a lot of voices saying that we need only a subset of the current top ones.
2. Scope criteria as I expected, we disagree on that. But if we are going to restrict portals to higher level topics, then the count will be no barrier ... and I have yet to see any evidence of a consensus for micro-portals. Remember, there is a finite number of editors ready to maintain these portals. The more portals we have, the more that manitenance effort is diluted. I am arguing for fewer and better, 'cos it seems to me that some editors here just count numbers and ignore quality, utility nad usage.
3. View count Portals are not content. Repeat after me: portals are not content. They are a navigational aid. The more navigational aids exist, they more they each decline in utitly, as happens when a road has too many signs: the crucial info is lost in the clutter. What exactly is the purpose in creating hundreds of hardly-ever -used portals?
4. Role of portals. We agree on the utility of large portals. But most of their features are useful only on larger sets; in small sets, they are just alt-navboxes and are little used. An unread portal won't draw in editors to improve topics.

Remember, we recently had ~150 editors willing to TNT the whole lot; they lost that debate because a significant swing vote likes a subset of portals, while acknowledging that most of them are pointless. If this project doesn't do a fundamental rethink and focus on quality rather than quantity, then a proposal for a mass cull stands a good chance of gaining community consensus.

The drive-by-portal-making-bot-editor is shaping up to be the poster child for such a cull. Either this project applies some brakes, or the brakes will be applied from outside ... and in my 12 years of experience on en.wp, I have repeatedly seen that when the community decides that a project lacks self-discipline, it can react quite harshly. That WP:ENDPORTALS RFC should be taken as a last warning about community patience. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:09, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

• BrownHairedGirl, Some responses to your points above:
  1. New portals:Your question on which is a top level portal with an example tree: There are two ways of looking at this. The top level portal in that tree is obviously Science, but Science would be a subportal of All knowledge, so I guess that All knowledge is The top level.

1. Scope criteria:The whole point of the new model portal is that it is largely self-updating as far as content goes. maintenance is restricted to updating the collection of templates used as and when new ones become available. This is experimental, but developing relatively quickly, thanks to several skilled coders' input.
2. View count. We cheerfully join your chorus that portals are not content, You are preaching to the choir on this point. If you take a close look at the new model portals you will see that they contain on a first approximation, no unique content. They display content from mainspace in a different way, one which we hope will be useful to a significant number of readers. Whether editors ever use them is not important. We editors who have been here for several years know how to find content through the occult and arcane byways of Wikipedia, and of course the ubiquitous search functions, when we know what we are looking for. The portals should be a relatively reader-friendly system to find out more about a topic of interest, without presupposing a level of skill or requiring the reader to know what they are looking for by name. We are still working on this, I know it is imperfect. On the other hand, I spend a bit of time clicking on the list of one page portals as a sort of QA check, and report any bugs I find, but often find myself down the rabbit hole. Not everone's cup of tea, but I find them sufficiently engaging, particularly on topics I would not normally think of reading.
3. Role of portals: We are exploring the role of portals. One of the things we are exploring is the effect of greater visibility, as that which cannot be seen is unlikely to be used. Hiding portals where no one sees them makes them unuseful.

I assume that the warning in your conclusion is just that, and not a veiled threat, which some may read into it. You may wish to clarify.

In conclusion, a question for you. What harm are the current portals doing? On what evidence is this analysis or opinion based? Bear in mind that they are not in mainspace.

BrownHairedGirl, One of the results of that is that there are now 393,762 links to Portal:Years ... but it still has a 90-day average of only 16 pageviews per day. The conclusion of obvious: promotion has not helped, and readers don't want that portal.. The conclusion is not obvious to me fron the results as quoted. Two questions immediately spring to mind: Did the readers notice the links, and if they did not, why not? If they did not notice the links, they cannot actively not want that portal, as they would be ignorant of it's existance. If they did notice the link, can we draw conclusions about their wanting the portal if they did not click it to see what it is. Can we assume that they know what is at the other end? Has anyone asked them? Of course it is possible that most readers would never use a portal even if they knew exactly what it was, but most readers do not visit most Wikipedia articles. How do we decide what is worth having? For articles it is the notability criteria. For portals it may depend on the overhead. A trivially easy to create and maintain portal which occupies very little storage in the database, and only really exists when someone looks at it is not a very large overhead. That is one of the targets we are working towards. We seem to be getting there. Is 16 pageviews per day for a low overhead portal actually a problem? Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:47, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

I also endorse AfroThundr's "wall of text" response above. In most cases I could not have put it better myself (at least not without some hard work and a few false starts). Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:47, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: First, you ask if I am making a threat. Answer: I have described what I see as a problem, and what I think should be done. I believe that there are already far too many portals, and that there has been a recent spree of trivia. There is clearly a v difft view among many project participants, and since several of them popped up at MFDs to say that there should be no deletions without guidelines, I want to see an RFC to set some guidelines on thresholds. I honestly believe that those posting so far have been ignoring the widespread disdain for portal-spam and micro-portals, and that this is a foolish position to take. There is no threat; just a promise that one way or another there will be an RFC on this, and a plea to project members to engage with why so may editors supported a TNT option rather than bury their heads in the sand of groupthink.

The overhead is not primarily in server load; per WP:SERVERLOAD we are generally encouraged to assume that any server load we are technically permitted to generate is fine. The overhead is two-fold: a) maintenance (more pages for editors to monitor); b) navigational. The second is my main concern: a portal by its nature promises a gateway to a large collection, and if it offers only a shelf-full it will disappoint readers who may thereby be less inclined to visit other portals. Such micro-portals will also need pointers from elsewhere, whether articles or categories, which means adding distracting and pointless signposting.

You ask is 16 pageviews per day for a low overhead portal actually a problem? Yes it is, because even aside from the monitoring load, that 16-a-day Portal: Queen (band) is signposted from 489 pages. That's 489 signposts to an almost-entirely unwanted destination. It is navigational clutter, and one the key aspects of effective navigational design is avoidance of clutter. That's why motorway signposts do not signal every village within reach and why sites such as Google and gov.uk use radically decluttered layouts. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:27, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl, I suggested you might want to clarify, thanks for doing so. I shall clarify my position a little too.

• I don't believe there is such a thing as "Too many portals" per se. Too many inadequate or poor quality portals, or too many portals that don't serve a sufficiently useful purpose, sure. That can happen even if there are "not enough" portals, should that be a thing.
• I am entirely in favour of sorting out a guideline for portal creation and portal deletion. As long as it is sufficiently flexible to work in an environment of fairly rapid change, and does not stop people from improving the encyclopaedia with new ideas that might be better. An RfC is the standard way to do this, so no problems there either. It looks like the time is about right. Bold - Revert - Discuss: TTH was bold, you applied the equivalent of revert, we are now discussing. This is good. This project is generally a friendly space for discussion, and we can usually come to an acceptable compromise.
• Welcome to the project discussion pages, you can help us with alternative views. We are generally enthusiastic about some or other aspects of portals, or we would not be in the project. A bit of wider perspective can be useful.
• I am glad that you don't see maintenance as a major problem, because almost all of our efforts go into minimising that.
• A portal promises a gateway to content on the topic. Where does it promise a large collection? Sometimes only a small collection exists, and I agree that there is a lower limit of usefulness, but I don't claim to know what it is. I suspect it varies by topic and even by user.
• If there are 489 articles within the scope of Portal:Queen (band) then I am inclined to think that 489 signposts is not excessive. If they are from pages not part of the topic, then I agree with your point, while noting that there may be even more in-line links to the article Queen (band) scattered through the encyclopedia. I also don't see what that the 16-a-day have to do with this, or where this clutter is that you don't like.
• If there is widespread disdain for portal-spam and micro-portals where is it expressed? Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:35, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

Pbsouthwood, Some quick replies to those points.

• You don't believe there is such a thing as "Too many portals" per se. I disagree: only 7 of the 8 portals linked on the front page get over 1000 hits per day. Nearly all of the rest get damn all readership. They are not content; they are navigational devices, and an unused navigatiional signpost is a cluttering distrucation. I say purge the stacks of barely-used ones
• You say A portal promises a gateway to content on the topic. Where does it promise a large collection? It used to do so at the top of WP:PORTAL, as you can see in the version of 2 May 2016, which was unchnaged for two years. The sceind para read "Please bear in mind that portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".
  That guidance was removed[2] on 23 May 2018 by The Transhumanist, whose edit summary simple says "update". No evidence was offered of a broad community consenus for such a major change of scope to an entire namespace. So I have reverted to the long-term stable version Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Portal guidelines#Current_version_of_the_guidelines.
• If there are 489 articles within the scope of Portal:Queen (band) then I am inclined to think that 489 signposts is not excessive. The 16-views-per-day for the portal demonstrates that they are signposts which readers do not want to use (16 is only 0.15% of he views of the main article). Unusused and unwanted signposts are clutter, whether on a road or on a webpage.
• If there is "widespread disdain for portal-spam and micro-portals where is it expressed?}}. Answer: in the lede of WP:PORTAL ("Please bear in mind that portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers") and in plenty of comments at WP:ENDPORTALS

I am sorry to say that my discovery of the undisclosed unilateral rewriting by TTH of the WP:PORTAL guidelines has confirmed my fear that TTH has not been acting in good faith. I would also like other editors to clarify whether they were aware of this change, and if so why they did not mention it in discussion.

Now that the unilateralism has been reverted, we can focus on clarifying the threshold set there, rather than working from first principles ... unless of course TTH or anyone else wants to open an RFC proposing the radical wideniung of scope. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:55, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

Actually, it is BHG who has violated guidelines, not me. See #Response to BHG's accusations and guideline reversion. Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   12:37, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

Metrics request

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T205681

@Pbsouthwood, BrownHairedGirl, The Transhumanist, and Waggers: I don't have time to respond to the latest discussion right now, I'm about to submit a phabricator ticket to ask the analytics team about some of this. Here's what I currently have. Feel free to add to or modify the list. I want to get a solid description drafted instead of tweaking it on phabricator. I'll submit it a bit later. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 13:21, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

Extended content

T205681: Metrics request on portal namespace usage Tag: Analytics CC: Pbsouthwood, BrownHairedGirl In preparation for a new RfC on enwiki regarding new guidelines for the Portal system, we would like to gain additional insight into how much the current portal system is currently used. We can get easy stuff like view count already, but that does not take into account other more detailed aspects. Such as: How many people clicked on a portal link from an article, or a category? Which articles, and which categories generated the highest traffic? How many people followed through to another article from the portal, or just closed the tab? Which articles and portals had the highest engagement? (useful for replicating their success) How many people even scroll to the bottom of the article and even had the opportunity to notice the portal link? About what article size tends to result in zero portal link visibility? I'm not sure how detailed the analytics are the WMF is currently collecting, so some of this may not be plausible at this time. I'm basing this off of the various studies I've seen run, like the recent citation usage study m:Research:Characterizing Wikipedia Citation Usage. Granted, that is a more involved example, and I'm not asking you to make schema changes to facilitate this or anything.

This is now tracked as T205681. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 01:34, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

Back to the topic

Let's try to keep this discussion on topic, and that topic is: how do we define what is a sufficient scope for a portal to exist? Discussions about the purpose of portals, repeating the "delete the whole namespace" RfC discussion all over again, talk of page views as if this were a commercial, advertising-driven website, or the behaviour of individual editors and whether or not they should stop creating portals are all distractions from that. They might be important discussions to be had elsewhere but let's try to keep this thread on track.

There will always need to be a bit of leeway in any such guidance. For example, if there is a large, notable topic that doesn't have many articles written about it yet, it's still a large, notable topic and therefore suitable for a portal. So the blunt instrument of counting selected articles doesn't cut the mustard (a mixed metaphor that works surprisingly well).

What's interesting about the recent MfD spree is the pattern behind it: it seems The Transhumanist went on a portal creation spree based on the notion that if there is a navbox, then the topic is sufficiently wide in scope to have a portal. Then BrownHairedGirl went on a deletion spree, nominating portals for deletion if they didn't have a corresponding category. So maybe there's something about the existence of a navbox and/or a category for a topic that could form the basis of some guidance. Not as fundamental criteria, but as an indication of whether a topic meets whatever criteria we do decide upon.

Something else we need to consider is that the new format of portals is much more lightweight in terms of the effort needed to create and maintain them, and indeed the space they take up in the Wikipedia database. As such I would argue that the bar for inclusion can be set much lower than it would have been for the old-style, manual maintenance, lots-of-subpages portals. WaggersTALK 08:06, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

Funny thing that. I have been suggesting that the existence of both a navbox and a category of same topic scope, and preferably the same or very similar title, are fairly indicative of a portal being appropriate, and have suggested that if the category does not exist and the portal should exist, then the category should be created. This helps categorisation too, which is also a gain for the whole system. So I am with you on this one.

I will go further, and generally agree on your whole post. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:30, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

I've found that creating new portals helps identify categories that need creation. In many cases there are subcategories already in place, that lack a parent category which the portal identifies. This happens a lot with singers and bands. There will be categories for their singles and albums, but not one for the singer or band itself.    — The Transhumanist   09:51, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

I've just taken a good look at WP:CAT since it seems to make sense that we use similar criteria for creating portals as we do for creating categories. So what are the minimum criteria for creating categories? Perhaps surprisingly, there don't seem to be any listed at WP:CAT. Users are encouraged to create any categories they think are appropriate provided they are appropriately named and have a parent category. A similar approach for portals doesn't seem unreasonable to me. WaggersTALK 10:05, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea. It allows editors the freedom of not having to get a portal approved by other editors. However (like categories and them being empty consitutes a speedy deletion), I still feel that keeping the speedy deletion for a portal without a substantional base is a good idea. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 11:46, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I don't think anyone is suggesting getting rid of WP:P2. WaggersTALK 13:34, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

Oh dear . Pile of ABF there, @Waggers.

First, I did not go on a deletion spree and I did not go on a deletion spree, nominating portals for deletion if they didn't have a corresponding category. What I did do was in the course of cleaning up Special:WantedCategories I found a series of redlinked cats which consisted of portals placed in non-existent eponymous categories. In such cases I found that these portals were all populated by

Category:{{PAGENAME}}

, and that they were mostly categories which would not normally be created, or deleted if they existed, such as eponymous categories for musicians and bands. This was odd; having processed tens of thousands of redlinked cats in the last year or so, I had rarely encountered portals. I was surprised to see the use of a poorly-automated category entry like this, and I noticed little effort made at other categorisation. Whatever these were was clearly rapid-fire templating. So I began scrutinising the portals, and when I saw the narrow scope of some of them I began to do what I do when I encounter other apparently inappropriate content in this process: nominate them for deletion. I was shocked by how many such micro-portals were appearing, and by he bizarre reaction of TTH to my first nomination.

In no case did I MFD a portal because it lacked category; that is no grounds for deletion. The redlinked category was solely how I encountered them.

The second point of misrepresentation is that neither I nor anyone else is trying to revive the delete-all-portals proposal. That was clearly rejected.

However, there was a lot of support in that discussion for the idea that there are too many portals. And as I have repeatedly noted, this project has gone in the other direction, creating hundreds of new portals. I do not believe that there is community consensus to do so, and esp not to create portals on such narrow topics. Waggers and others argue at MFD that there should be guidance on which portals are appropriate, and that deletion decisions should be based on that. This is the discussion I also want to have, and since Waggers sought a moratorium on MFDs then it's sensible for everyone to take a break from both creation and deletion while we try to discuss how e frame an RFC on criteria.

Thirdly, there are far more constraints on categories than Waggers sates. See for example WP:OCAT, and the stream of catefory deletion and merger discusisoins at WP:CFD.

Anyway, back on topic after correcting Waggers misrepresentations.

I get that Waggers and Pbsouthwood and TTH want a v low bar (if any) for portals. I hope it is now clear that I want a higher one. We have all made our basic positions clear, and I see a huge gap.

So the principles of this guidance needs to be settled by an RFC, not simply by members of this project. Does anyone in this project actually want o work with me on drafting such an RFC? Or do you just want to form a WP:LOCALCON amongst project members? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:55, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

I'm no expert on RFC-drafting, but I'm willing to work on the process and criteria for setting a bar for portals. There has to be a bar at some level, or anyone could create an atrociously-built portal or a portal about every village in the world. I don't think anyone here would defend those. So could we not try to find an interim solution first, before going to RFC where views are likely to polarise further? Here are some thoughts:

We agree a bar, ideally mid-way between the opposing positions for future portals

The bar isn't retrospective i.e. we don't use that to mass delete existing portals

We only create new portals that meet the new criteria

We run with the new criteria for six months and then review them

We focus our effort on a) improving existing portals and b) creating those new portals considered to be 'top level'. Someone's already posted a pretty reasonable-looking list. Bermicourt (talk) 21:35, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

@Bermicourt: thanks for that prompt and constructive response.

I agree that there should be a bar somewhere. I have my own prefs on the where, but I think the worst outcome is no bar.

However, I think that the gap between the two views is to great for any sort of trial-compromise position to be helpful. At one extreme we have those such as TTH who sets the bar so low that we could have many tens of thousands of portals without ever falling below the threshold. On the other hand, there are those like me who advocate a massive cull in the number of existig portals, reducing the number to below 100. That's nearly three orders of magnitude of difference, and a comprmise across such a big gap satisfoes nobody. As a trial it would tell us little or nothing to inform us of the merits of either propsoal. We need to choose a broad direction.

Both extremes clearly have a lot of support, so we need to seek a community consensus on which broad direction to take. The mechanism for that is an RFC, which may be best done in more than one stage. Phase one, choose the many / fewer / v few options ... then in phase 2 decide how that threshold is defined (some or all of article counts/vital article asessments/pageviews/etc)

I will create a new section below with a first draft of these options. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:40, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl, I can't find the new section with draft. Possibly you have not started it yet. If/when you do, please mention the header here. For the record, I see all these options as temporary until the quantum portal (generated on demand from a template or script, and does not exist unless someone is observing it) is available, at which point the guidelines may become largely redundant, and permanent portals may become showcases built by enthusiasts again. In the meanwhile I prefer a relatively wide scope so experimentation can be more effective. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:37, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

While there is a large gap between the camps, I believe we could still come up with a workable compromise in the meantime. While community consensus is the ultimate deciding factor, it helps if that consensus can be built on an informed opinion, backed by evidence and experiment data. To that end, a trial could still be useful. Otherwise, we'll all be guessing in the dark as to which solution would be best. Should we not make the best decision in the upcoming RfC, it would take yet another RfC to change it again, by then I think the community would be getting a bit tired of Portal RfCs, regardless of which side of the argument they support. If possible, I would like to do it right the first (second?) time. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 14:33, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

@AfroThundr3007730: I believe that there are currently over 3000 portals, with a wide variation in scope. It seems to me that any data needed to develop an informed consensus at RFC can be drawn from that existing set.

Do you believe that there are some gaps in that set, gaps which should be filled on a trial basis to allow analysis? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:45, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

The portals that correspond to level 2 vital articles would be a good test pool, possibly level 3 as well. The list is posted on WP:WPPORT#Fill in the gaps and below at #Portal Wish List. I and several others have suggested we migrate portal creation efforts from the more low-level portals to these higher priority ones, working our way down those lists. If these important topics aren't indicative of a good subject for a portal, then I'm not sure what else would be. The Level 2 portals could serve as the "poster child" for the namespace, alongside the top-level and the (historically) featured portals. Once they are all built and linked in place, we could gather better data from site analytics to better gauge reader interaction. This also ties into the #Metrics request I made earlier. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 15:24, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

@AfroThundr3007730: I may be looking in the wrong place, but I see a significant number of existing portals at each of those levels. Dozens of them in WP:WikiProject Portals/Vital portals level 2 and dozens in WP:WikiProject Portals/Vital portals level 3.

It seems to me that this set of existing portals is way more than sufficient to get statistically valid data from. Creating more such portals now does not seem to me to be an exercise in building a valid test sample; it looks to me like pre-emption of consenus-building. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:46, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

Re: ABF and the duck test:

People have a tendency to call things as they see them. If a thing looks like a deletion spree it is likely to be called that by someone who is not in possession of the full background. Calling their description an assumption of bad faith does not take into account that they do not have the full picture. It is an error we all make at times, but usually not conducive to civil interaction. I think we here are all trying to build the encyclopedia. It is an evolutionary process as it has not been done this way before. Experiments are not just healthy, they are necessary to allow a robust set of characteristics which can stand up to unexpected external pressures. If there are three optional ways a thing can be done, and for some reason one becomes impracticable, the other two may allow us to survive. Even when all are workable, we cannot predict which may work best after unforeseen changes, and there will always be unforeseen changes. The most dangerous strategy is stagnation. On the other hand unchecked development can sometimes also be detrimental, and needs to be tested against reality. Let us make a virtue of necessity and use this to come up with something that works. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:54, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

Caveat

"Creation criteria" is potentially synonymous with "deletion criteria". What happens to existing portals that don't meet newly established creation criteria? If the answer is "deletion", then that means the creation criteria discussion is in fact a deletion discussion.    — The Transhumanist   10:15, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

• Since creation is becoming easier, this is not a big deal. Sometimes the post construction checks don't pick up all the problems and a lemon slips through under the radar. We should be glad to have more eyes checking, as if we identify the problems, we can fix them, and recreate the portal another day when the tools are more robust. If a topic really isn't ready for a portal, it is no loss to delete it until it is ready. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:26, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict)No, deletion would not be automatic, there would still need to be discussion around each case. Yes, a portal that fails to meet whatever criteria we agree would be more likely to be deleted - but the discussion would still need to take place first, unless the portal falls within the remit of WP:P1 or WP:P2, and if there's a good case for making an exception to the new creation guidelines, that would be the place to argue it. WaggersTALK 13:32, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) Remember that if it had not been for the RfC for deletion of the whole portal system we would not be here improving portals so effectively, and they might just have fizzled out quietly and unnoticed. That opposition had the effect of revitalising the project. For evolution to work effectively, there must be some standard of fitness to pass or some form of competition. For portals to become robust, a bit of external pressure and selective culling can improve the herd. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:40, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
• It would also be less likely for portals to be nominated for deletion if we all had a better idea of where the bar is, as we would not create them unless fairly sure they would make it. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:46, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

It thrills me to witness such independent thinking on the team. I hadn't thought of the points you all raised. I believe portals are in good hands.    — The Transhumanist   21:26, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: We have a pretty good sampling of portals right now. I would be interested in your take on the current set of portals. Which ones pass muster in their current state, and which ones need to be improved to meet acceptability. We can use currently existing portals as examples of what we are talking about in the whole criteria discussion.    — The Transhumanist   21:26, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

Any criteria for what is an appropriate portal will obviously apply both ways. A portal which exceeds the criteria would usually be kept in a deletion discussion, and those which fall below it would usually deleted -- just as happens in AFDs which consider the notability of a topic. In any such debate, there is scope for editorial discretion.

WP:P1 & WP:P2 are criteria for speedy deletion, i.e. without a discussion. Speedy deletion is reserved for extreme cases which clearly fall so far outside community norms that the community gives admins discretion to delete them without discussion. So far, I see no reason to consider changing them.

I advocate some form of pre-creation discussion, at least for a while, because it means that the viability of a portal can be assessed before an editor puts time and effort into creating it. That saves everyone a lot of work until guidelines have stabilised and clarified. The utility of a pre-creation discussion depends in large part on how high the bar is set: if the criteria are almost-anything-goes, then discussion would in most cases be pointless.

If the criteria remain as per the Portal guidelines (now restored to their long-term stable version), or something tighter, then a discussion would be both useful and infrequent. I suggested a "negative process" where creation proceeds unless there is objection, and objections trigger a discussion whih requires a consenus. Therefore an uncontested proposal does not require others to post a "support". --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:25, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood, Waggers, and BrownHairedGirl:

Since the restored version sets the criteria at "around 20 articles" (down from 30 as of May 2009), it will do until a new consensus is formed.    — The Transhumanist   19:50, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

Portal guidelines restored to long-term stable version

I just spotted today that on 23 May 2018, The Transhumanist substantially rewrote WP:PORTAL.[3].

This rewrite replaced a version which had been stable for two years, since the version of 2 . I have restored the stable version, for reasons explained below.

One of the many changes made was to the lede. The stable version read:

Please bear in mind that portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers

However, TTH's rewrite removed the stipulation of broad scope, and both of those criteria, i.e. readers and maintainers. The edit summary used was simply "update", which is so vague that it is a clear breach of WP:SUMMARYNO. It is wholly inadequate in this case.

TTH's change radically redefined the purpose of an entire en.nwp namespace. That is an extraordinarily big change, which should have been the subject of a well-advertised RFC. However, I have found no evidence even of this change being the subject of a standalone discussion on a community-wide noticeboard, let alone assessed in a properly-conducted RFC.

I am also very disappointed that in our extensive discussions both on this page and elsewhere, at no point has TTH mentioned that they made such a unilateral rewrite. The effect is sneaky and underhand; I cannot judge whether the sneakiness was intentional or a lack of WP:COMPETENCE, but either way it is disgraceful.

I know that TTH has strong views on why they believe that portals should be chosen on a very different basis to the stable community consensus. However, the way to make such a change is to propose it a WP:RFC. I strongly advise TTH not to simply reinstate the unilateral rewrite.

Unless and until such an RFC is opened, the place to discuss the substantive merits of the guidelines is at WT:Portal_guidelines#Current_version_of_the_guidelines. Guidelines such as this belong to the whole community, not to any one WikiProject, so revisions should be discussed centrally rather than on a project's pages.--BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:43, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

To what seems to me a large extent, TTH's rewrite of the portal guidelines was not incompatible with the actual process at the time, so could be considered descriptive rather than prescriptive. As in other cases mentioned on this page, not being aware of the larger picture may lead to duck calling.

Discussions often happen where they are started. There may be no particular plan behind this. If someone notices that they are in the wrong place the discussion may be moved, otherwise it is likely to stay, and spin off sub-discussions, also in the same place. No special motivations are necessarily involved. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:21, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: Thank you for your support and assumption of good faith. That means a lot to me.    — The Transhumanist   11:23, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

I call it as I see it. Sometimes there is no duck. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 16:44, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

BHG stated above that I radically changed the purpose of an entire namespace. That is both exaggerated and bit melodramatic. Below, I've reposted the response I provided on the guideline's talk page. (The statement we were discussing was "Please bear in mind that portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers."):

The purpose of the portal namespace was changed long ago, by the very people who have built portals, from the moment that statement was written. Editors build portals on the subjects that interest them (the same as with articles), rather than on the traffic prospects of a subject, and except for the few portals listed on the Main Page, always have. This practice is therefore very well established. (See WP:PGCHANGE).

In addition to this, the lead statement itself is in error, as portals by their very nature do not attract large numbers of interested readers or portal maintainers. That's because portal titles generally do not show up in external searches of their subject names, which is where large numbers of readers to pages come from. That is, "Portal:Fish" doesn't not come up when you search for "Fish". An external search will show a portal if the word "portal" is included in the search term, but googlers don't typically enter that term. Portals primarily receive internal traffic from within Wikipedia itself, via the internal links that readers click on. They always have.

And while "broad" isn't defined in the lead, guidance for the scope of portals is provided further down the page, where it states the number of articles to be included to be "about 20", a guideline that has been in place since May 2009.    — The Transhumanist   18:36, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Response to BHG's accusations and guideline reversion

Another RfC wasn't needed, because we had just gone through one that established community consensus concerning portals. Its closing statement was "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time." Based on the outcome of the WP:ENDPORTALS RfC, I updated the guideline page to reflect the community consensus and the current reality of portals.

This approach is in concordance with WP:PGCHANGE and WP:PGBOLD.

WP:PGCHANGE states:

Policies and guidelines can be edited like any other Wikipedia page. It is not strictly necessary to discuss changes or to obtain written documentation of a consensus in advance. However, because policies and guidelines are sensitive and complex, users should take care over any edits, to be sure they are faithfully reflecting the community's view and to be sure that they are not accidentally introducing new sources of error or confusion.

Because Wikipedia practice exists in the community through consensus, editing a policy/guideline/essay page does not in itself imply an immediate change to accepted practice. It is, naturally, bad practice to recommend a rejected practice on a policy or guideline page. To update best practices, you may change the practice directly (you are permitted to deviate from practice for the purposes of such change) and/or set about building widespread consensus for your change or implementation through discussion. When such a change is accepted, you can then edit the page to reflect the new situation.

Concerning substantive changes to a guideline, WP:PGBOLD states:

Or be bold. The older but still valid method is to boldly edit the page. Bold editors of policy and guideline pages are strongly encouraged to follow WP:1RR or WP:0RR standards. Although most editors find advance discussion, especially at well-developed pages, very helpful, directly editing these pages is permitted by Wikipedia's policies. Consequently, you should not remove any change solely on the grounds that there was no formal discussion indicating consensus for the change before it was made. Instead, you should give a substantive reason for challenging it and, if one hasn't already been started, open a discussion to identify the community's current views.

Editing a policy to support your own argument in an active discussion may be seen as gaming the system, especially if you do not disclose your involvement in the argument when making the edits.

The lead of the guideline before I changed it was "Please bear in mind that portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers. Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance." That was made a part of the guideline on August 3rd, 2006 in this edit https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Portal_guidelines&diff=prev&oldid=67490184 . Note that broadness wasn't defined, but it was assumed that any portal on a broad subject would attract large numbers. [Editing note, 10-04-2018: I was mistaken about broadness not being defined. Further down the page it set the bar at "about 20 articles", established as of May 02, 2009 in this edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Portal_guidelines&diff=prev&oldid=287431020]

Except for a small percentage of portals, that guideline has never been followed [editing note, 10-04-2018: many of the portals from the set that existed in April 2018 have fewer than 20 articles included. Portal:Mathematics, a subject of thousands or subtopics, only has 40 articles, and of those displays only a single 1.]. Portals for the most part, do not, and have never attracted particularly large numbers of readers; and at the time of the RFC, all but about 100 of them were completely abandoned. Large numbers of maintainers never materialized; usually a person made a portal on whatever they were interested in, and then never returned. Or they lost interest over time and faded away. The odd assortment of portals exhibited a wide-range of scope.

Yet, the community decided to keep them all. "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time." Even though many weren't particularly broad, even though they weren't well read, and even though they lacked active maintainers.

So I removed the outdated statement from 2006. It hadn't represented standard practice in many years, and no longer represented community consensus.

The rest of the guideline was also out of date and lacking in detail about portals, which was spread out in haphazzard fashion among multiple pages. I merged relevant material into it from the WikiProject page, and the entirety of Wikipedia:Portal (the main information page on portals). The record of all these edits are in the edit history of the guideline page, so you can see the progression of development. I also revised explanations to reflect the current way portals were designed. The material has been proofread and refined by other portal-savy editors since, and accurately reflects the current state of affairs and practices concerning portals.

Now BHG is being even more bold than I was, has reverted the work of more than one editor, but is grasping at straws, hanging on to the old lead statement as if the RfC never happened. She has violated this part of WP:PGBOLD:

Consequently, you should not remove any change solely on the grounds that there was no formal discussion indicating consensus for the change before it was made. Instead, you should give a substantive reason for challenging it and, if one hasn't already been started, open a discussion to identify the community's current views.

The guideline needs to be restored to the version reflecting the decision of the community in the WP:ENDPORTALS RfC and current practice on portals. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   11:39, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

The text is still in the history. Restoration is not urgent. Getting an acceptable compromise by way of a usable set of creation criteria is better use of time at the moment. What we have here may just be a failure to communicate. Lets take a look at common ground for a start. I get the impression that both BHG and TTH are quite deeply involved in navigation of the site. Well, surprise, so am I. We are on the same side, we must have common ground. In a year or two this will be history that few will bother to read, so lets try to get where we are going with the least stick waving. As my cousin used to say, I'm an arsehole, you're an arsehole, now that we have that settled lets get down to work. A bit crude perhaps, but it gets the message across. And no, I am not saying that either of you are arseholes, it is just an illustrative quote, I actually believe that both of you are acting mostly in good faith and sincerely, and can both make productive and valuable contributions here. If you feel the need, vent at me and then lets get to work. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 17:01, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

Are you sure that is a better use of your time? You've witnessed an editor use intimidation tactics to push an agenda and disrupt the activities of an entire WikiProject, violating WP:AGF, WP:CIVIL, WP:BULLY (WP:POV railroad, False accusations), and Wikipedia:No personal attacks. Are you going to simply let that continue?    — The Transhumanist   20:01, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

Well we can either take that to arbitration which will be lengthy, acrimonious and unlikely to succeed. BrownHairedGirl is an experienced editor and administrator who is very familiar with Wikipedia and may just have a point. It's always important to look for the "critic's kernel of truth" as Bill Hybels would say. Then we can have a dialogue. That there will be a dialogue is certain, because BHG will take this issue to the community for discussion. So we are bound to have to compromise in the end. I would prefer us to reach some sort of consensus without widening (and thus prolonging) the debate further. Even if we have to curtail the number of portals, we still have plenty to do. Bermicourt (talk) 21:02, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

Then I say take it to arbitration. There is no WP:SENIORITY and we are looking for the best ideas, rules, and the best way to make an encyclopedia here. There is no additional merit to any comment just because it comes from an experienced editor. And since it seems there is support toward a specific editor rather than toward the idea the editor has put forward, that to me calls for arbitration. One other thing... not exactly the greatest time to quote anything from Bill Hybles.--Paul McDonald (talk) 14:17, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

Very gun-ho, but that's just seeking a wider confrontation which we don't need. Of course, experienced editors and admins are worth hearing - that's just common sense. And I wondered if you'd fall into the trap of an ad hominem argument over Hybels. We should beware of shooting the messenger, who is just a human being like the rest of us, lol. Or we'll never learn from the experience of others. Bermicourt (talk) 14:48, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

I think you mean gung-ho.--Paul McDonald (talk) 15:02, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

Oh dear. Yet another irate wall of text from @The Transhumanist.

As I noted above, this is not the place for the substantive discussion. That belongs in a community noticeboard, not on a WikiProject page.

So I will restrict my response to noting that TTH wrote Based on the outcome of the WP:ENDPORTALS RfC, I updated the guideline page to reflect the community consensus and the current reality of portals.

Llemme quote in full the outcome of the WP:ENDPORTALS RfC "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time".

Nowhere in that one sentence does it say that there is a consensus to remove the restriction that "that portals should be about broad subject areas". The consensus was weighed solely as "do not delete them all."

The community was not asked to decide whether to remove any restriction on the scope of portals. So we simply do not know whether consensus has changed from the guideline which was stable for two years.

I note significant support at the RFC for reducing the number of portals. TTH believes there was support for expansion. But neither of us can say that there was a consensus for either change, because the RFC never tested it. (I was one of several editors who expressed regret at the binary nature of the RFC, but we were too late; it was as it was.)

TTH's verbose response consists mostly of arguments for change which should have been proposed at a followup RFC. That second RFC could have asked "now that portals are not all to be deleted, should we delete most/delete some/keep existing ones/create more/massively expand". But instead TTH yet again mistakes TTH's own view for a consensus. This is wearisome: one person's view is not a consensus for change, no matter good they believe their case to be.

I took a break after reverting the guideline, because after all the discussion about the thresholds for portals, I was frankly disgusted that nobody chose to mention that the guideline had been stealthily rewritten by the editor who went on a mass-creation spree. Maybe other editors were unaware of that rewrite, but TTH was aware and should have disclosed it at the MFDs and in the subsequent discussions on this page. So I took a break from this page, because I wanted to let my annoyance pass.

My views on that non-disclosure have been made clear, but that is done now ... and now we have a restored guideline which nobody is happy with (I think it is too loose, others think it is too tight) and which is clearly incompatible with the recent mass creation spree(s).

So the RFC I was proposing earlier now has a clear focus: to build a consensus on whether to retain the current "broad subject areas" guideline, or replace it with something else. I will start drafting tomorrow, and I hope that we will be able to agree on a smallish range of options to put to RFC, to hopefully build an explicit consensus, whatever that consensus may be. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:51, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

BHG, please refrain from personal attacks.--Paul McDonald (talk) 01:10, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

@Paulmcdonald: Please read WP:No_personal_attacks#What_is_considered_to_be_a_personal_attack?, and please refrain from making unfounded allegations of personal attack.
I criticised the conduct of an editor, but I made no personal attack. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:50, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

I see the comment "Yet another irate wall of text from @The Transhumanist" as a personal attack. It added zero value to the discussion and was a negative comment addressed to an individual by name. Let's keep the discussion about the matter at hand and not about individuals in the conversation.--Paul McDonald (talk) 13:28, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

@Paulmcdonald: I would find it easier to believe in your good intent if you had some reproach for the lastest irate wall of text directed me, rather than simply at my reply. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:24, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

Not that this is in any way on topic, but I agree that some of the sidebar comments are unnecessary, not that they are particularly bad or anything. Also, both TTH and BHG tend to write long responses that some would classify as walls of text. Lots of us do. We have a lot to talk about, and this is a multifaceted subject that requires in-depth discussion. To gloss over the nuances would be doing an injustice to the portals we're here to curate, and to the community. So can we all just agree that walls of text are going to happen, and move on? — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 14:52, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

It might minimise disruption and show good faith all round if we could respect a couple of temporary guidelines until a proper RfC has concluded (or a few months have elapsed with no RfC outcome, let's say end of 2018):

• Only create portals on the most important topics, i.e. those which would be a WP:SNOW "keep" at any hypothetical MfD.
• Only nominate portals at MfD for being "too narrow" if they would be a WP:SNOW "delete". Poor quality portals may still be taken to MfD for other reasons, but it would be better to report them to this WikiProject for clean-up first.

Does that sound reasonable? Certes (talk) 11:23, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: I agree that a moratorium is a good idea until a consensus is established (or clarified, depending on you see it).

However, I am wary of relying on editors to judge what might achieve a SNOW close, esp given the widely different understandings shown so far. It seems to me to be better to simply say no creations and no MFDs. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:22, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

I would be fine with a pause on creation for the smaller type of portal until we have solid critera (the RfC). More important topics (re: Vital topics above) should still be ok, since I don't think there's significant argument against those in particular. I don't think we need to freeze an entire namespace until the RfC is done. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 14:52, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

I do intend to present an argument for a low threshold. We clearly have different views on the likely response to that position, but what's the rush to create new portals?

TTH has repeatedly shown that a new portal can be created in less than 90 seconds, but an MFD takes way more editorial time than that when the time of each participant is added up.

The urgent task now is to establish a broad consensus. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:36, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

I disagree that any task is "urgent" for as a general rule there is no deadline. I can agree that it is "important" -- I also disagree with the term "establish" consensus, as that implies building it up and can be considered by some to be votestacking. The task at hand really should be to determine the consensus, not to build it.--Paul McDonald (talk) 15:30, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

BHG, my first "wall of text" wasn't disruptive, as you posted, nor was my next one irate as you accused. Those 2 statements of yours were false accusations, and therefore fall under our no personal attack rule. You accused me of acting a certain way, when I wasn't. Please refrain from doing that. Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   17:10, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

@Paulmcdonald, BrownHairedGirl, AfroThundr3007730, Certes, Bermicourt, and Pbsouthwood:

Note that the present guideline, the one that BHG restored, sets a low-end for scope of "about 20 articles." It was changed from "about 30 articles" in May of 2009. BHG has been objecting to portals (via MfD) based on how many articles they display, such as Portal:Body piercing, which displayed 11 articles at the time she nominated it for deletion. Note that the guideline was referring to the pool from which a portal displays selected articles, because the main design up until last April only displayed a single article per selected section -- a portal's pool of excerpts has been stored as subpages, and in a great many cases, never reached 20, and represents the established practice - though the practice has changed for new and upgraded portals since then. Portal:Mathematics, by comparison, still only has a pool of 40 article excerpts, merely double the number mentioned in the guideline, which it displays one-at-a-time. Portal:Body piercing displayed 11-at-a-time, from a pool of 74. Now it displays all 74.

In order to change the "about 20 articles" guideline, will require a new consensus. Until then, we have the "about 20 articles" standard in place.

I hope the clarification helps. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   01:55, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Sidebar: Portals approval department redux

Long ago, in a talk archive far, far away... We discussed the possibility of a formal (or semi-formal) portals approval process. I'm trucking out that discussion once more, since it was brought up earlier. For posterity, the discussion is posted below.

On random editors starting new Portals

User:The Transhumanist,

you wrote:

@SmokeyJoe and Paulmcdonald: Approval, by whom? As with other departments, such a page would be facilitated by a few regulars, and so bias always sets in. One was set up, sort of, with dismal results. They denied approval to an editor who wanted to create the cannabis portal, so I advised him to create it anyways. The department also turned into a bottleneck and created a hoop-jumping exercise. Many editors decided not to create any portals because of it. I mentioned "sort of", because it was suggestive only. We can't censor Wikipedia, but we can delete material that doesn't follow Wikipedia content policies. Because of the way the department was portrayed, people were under the impression that approval was required, but it wasn't. The only requirement for creating a page on Wikipedia is clicking the "edit" or "create" tab. The same thing applies to draft space and WP:AfC: they're optional. "Wasn't approved" is not a valid argument at the deletion departments. Wikipedia has developed into the wonderful resource that it is, because people are allowed to take the initiative - it is the core defining principal of the Wiki model and what makes it work. We don't wish to dowse the creative spark. Also, you sometimes don't know if something is going to work until you try it. If a portal proves to be inviable, it can be deleted. I like the deletion system, because it has a good cross-section of involved editors. An approval department is more like a hidden cabal (closed forum). Who do you invite to the discussions? With deletions, that's obvious: the creator and major contributors. But, with a page that hasn't been created yet, you don't know who the major contributors would be. The current system works fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. — The Transhumanist 22:30, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

Some good important points. The WikiProject Council is not very active, I would call it haphazard. Requiring approval there might just be a net non-positive bottleneck until a random anybody says "yes". Portals would be the same.

"Approval" is probably too strong a word. It begs "approval by who", suggests there is a committee, bureaucracy, yes TT, probably hopeless.

What I generally favour in many things is that a "second pair of eyes" be involved, minimally and sufficiently, in starting up any new little bureaucratic process. This includes RfCs, WikiProjects, Portals. The "second pair of eyes" is not intended to be an explicit supporter or author, but a check of sanity, technicalities. Someone proposes something (or in practice starts something), and then a second experienced Wikipedian in good standing says "yes, go ahead". Disputes, if experienced Wikipedians in good standing disagree, can go through WP:DR, or even MfD if the thing created is completely a bad idea. This would mean that someone like you can give immediate approval to anyone else, but you can't so easily stop a pair of Wikipedians proceeding with an ill-advised bad idea.

An even softer idea would be to write into instructions something like this:

• If you start, or are thinking of starting a new Portal, start a new thread stating this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals (this page)".
• For WikiProjects: "If you start, or are thinking of starting a new WikiProject, post a note at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals".

It would then be up to the watchers of these pages to choose to offer advice.

> "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"?

It is my opinion, having seen them come to MfD for years, that there are plenty of ill-advised WikiProjects and Portals, and their existence adds disrepute to the rest.

--SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:48, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

And that's why we clean them up. The main problem has been an inactive WikiProject. Keep it going strong, and you'll have the editors you need to monitor and maintain the whole system.

I like your idea of reporting new portals. There could be a section for them to be listed on the WikiProject page. That way, their development could be monitored for quality and even joined by editors who wish to make them better. Finding them is a little tricky, but can be done comparing lists using AWB's list compare feature.    — The Transhumanist   00:09, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

I suggest: A list of portals, a sortable table, columns including Portal name, Parent portal (often occurs), date started, first author, current activity level.

"Current activity level"? It would be great if this were auto-reported. What would it measure? Last manual edit? Last auto-whatever? Number of page views in the last 30 days?

--SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:19, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

We tried that. Editors would edit it once, and then that entry would never be updated again. It became horribly out-of-date. And, it was redundant with Portal:Contents/Portals. List tools make it easier to track portals. SearchSuite can list all the base pages, and then you can use AWB to compare with an earlier version to find all the new ones.    — The Transhumanist   01:29, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

That's how I think it should work. Filled in once at the start, some fields auto-updating. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:04, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

My memory was fuzzy on this issue, so I went looking around to refresh my recall...

Portals approval department: rejected by the community

SmokeyJoe wrote: I don’t believe that Portals or WikiProjects should be allowed to be created unilaterally, without approval. For WikiProjects, there is an approval process somewhere under Wikipedia:WikiProject Council. I think a Portal creation board should exist. Does it? —SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:34, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

It took me awhile to recall the history on this, for portals. There was an approval department at Wikipedia:Portal/Proposals, but it got rejected by the community at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Portal/Proposals, at my request. Some guy created the Portal:Cannabis, while I created the Portal:Thinking, both of which were nominated for deletion; Cannabis for having been previously rejected (see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cannabis), and Thinking for not going through the approval process at all (see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Thinking). I was appalled that a page could be deleted before it was even created, so I nominated the process itself for deletion. It was marked "historical" and "rejected by the community".    — The Transhumanist   01:29, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

"I don’t believe that Portals or WikiProjects should be allowed to be created unilaterally, without approval." Backing back a but from that. Reporting would be OK. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:04, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

I agree. Keeping track of what portals we have, so we can look at them, would be good.    — The Transhumanist   02:47, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

On German Wiki, unless a portal topic falls under the various categories of 'relevance' (see for a translation), the creator has to garner support first. I think they have to have 3 'overseers' (i.e. maintainers) and a majority of 10 'supporters' on the approvals page i.e. 12 'support' votes and 2 'oppose' votes gets it through the process but 12 and 3 fails. I'm not saying we should clone that, but it's a less formal approach than a 'Portal Creation Board' and more in line with other Wiki processes and we might want to think about something similar. Otherwise we'll have portals for everything and it's already a challenge to manage them all. Bermicourt (talk) 14:44, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

If we can make them automatically dynamically self-updating, it won't take many editors to maintain them.    — The Transhumanist   04:34, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

For those interested on this discussion, I also initiated a related discussion here. In my opinion we need some minimum relevance/notability criteria or approval process. A portal on a narrow topic (like an individual person, or a specific video game, or a specific movie) - where the main article itself is not yet a featured aricle - should be discouraged and the editors should be encouraged to focus on improving the core article first. Arman ^(Talk) 10:35, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

I think creating a set of guidelines would be good. For example, a portal should be about a broad enough topic to have at least 50 (or maybe 100) or so articles that could be included in the portal. If it doesn't have that many, it's not really worth the effort to create the portal as just visiting the main topic would likely give you enough information and/or links to relevant related articles.

I reject any notion of requiring approval to create one. That's just a layer of bureaucracy. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 20:23, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

I agree with the idea of guidelines and translated German Wiki's guidelines to see what they said. They've kept a lid on portals by requiring evidence that the portal will be maintained (which it will need if it's more than a showcase page and is being used e.g. to support WikiProjects) and strong support from around a dozen editors. So it's not an approval committee, but does reduce the likelihood of someone creating a half-finished portal on a non-notable topic area, which seems to have happened on English Wikipedia. Bermicourt (talk) 21:14, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

So what do you guys think? I see some merit to an informal approval process where more than one editor must agree that the portal should be created, but I don't think we should go as far as the rigorous approval process employed by the German Wikipedia. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 03:28, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

• I am open-minded about what sort of pre-approval is best. German-style bureaucracy rarely works well on en.wp, so something lightweight is best. I suggest a negative process, (like with PRODs or speedy deletion or WP:CFD/S) where approval is assumed unless contested. If the project has agreed on criteria for new portals, then it should be simple to create a DYK-style template in which the proposer assesses their own idea against the criteria, and others can chime in if they see a problem.

But something is needed to deter the sort of portal-spam we saw in the @The Transhumanist's recent drive-by spree of >400 new portals in only 12 days. That expanded the total number of portal count by ~20% and in many cases with only about 90 seconds time between them.

If this project is actually about enhancing navigation rather than creating pages for their own sake, then it needs at the very least to put an abrupt halt to such antics. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:32, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

• Oppose – Creation approval = bad idea. Quality control is handled via deletion. If a portal doesn't meet muster, then it is subject to deletion. To have another level of bureaucracy is plain wasteful and inefficient. But it really means that a portal you plan to create can be deleted (prevented) before you even create it. That is, before it ever has a chance to get reader feedback. So no, I'm not in favor of any approval process because it is really an additional deletion process in disguise. Let our deletion systems do what they were designed for: cull the bad after giving them a chance to be good. In essence, approval processes are a form of censorship. We don't really want portals blocked via contest. If all someone has to do is contest a portal creation request to block it, they've managed to delete the portal before it ever exists. That's almost as bad as time travel, where someone could go back in time and erase you, from history.    — The Transhumanist   08:41, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
  • @The Transhumanist: I don't believe this would become an issue in the majority of cases, especially once we have consensus on what the criteria are. Anyone who has an anti-portal stance would not be able to block legitimate portal creation in that case. As we all know Wikipedia is not censored, and any attempts to manipulate policy or other community mechanisms to cause that effect can (and would) be dealt with by the community. Also, as you've mentioned elsewhere, creation and deletion stem from the same criteria. It's the same with articles - if they don't meet the minimum criteria, they could be deleted, or moved to draft space, and if they were created as a draft, they wouldn't graduate until the concerns were met. Perhaps we should have a Portal:Draft where we can build new portals without threat of immediate deletion. Once they are fully built and ready, they can be moved to become a top-level portal. Portals under the draft portal would behave like draft articles do, namely they are "under construction" and are expected to improve before being subject to significant scrutiny. Also see my other responses below. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 14:45, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
• Comment – BHG appears to have a problem with portals in general (she suggested a limit above to allow level 1 portals only), and appears to be attempting to limit portals by any means she can, including before they are even created, by mere contest. The portals she has pointed out at MfD as problems look unlikely to be deleted. If there is a problem with the contents of any of the portals I have created, show us. One of two things will happen: either they will be fixed, or they will be deleted. But, the main issue that BHG has focused on is scope, which also pertains to blocking portals from being created in the first place. Don't fall for it. It's another form of deletion of portals before they even exist. It's an approval process put in place in the form of a filter. Be careful what you wish for.    — The Transhumanist   08:41, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose having a creation approval process is a bad idea. The main reason I think it is a bad idea is by looking back at history. This WikiProject went inactive and so did the featured portal process. This is one of the reasons why portals, in general, became outdated. Having a process to create portals allows the possibility for the process to become inactive and so no new portals would be created and would also lead to the portal namespace becoming more outdated as new topics are not accounted for by their own portal. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 11:35, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
  • @The Transhumanist: The deletion process serves as the counterpoint to the creation, yes, but if for instance, 10% of the recent portals created end up at MfD with 5% actually getting deleted, that may be a sign that we could improve on that. Also Dreamy Jazz, I'm pretty sure nobody here wants the full "approval department" scenario. I'm more suggesting the informal method of announcing the portal beforehand. BrownHairedGirl's negative process is a decent one. Instead of waiting for X more editors to agree on the creation, if there is no objection after a day, it gets created. If someone objects, we go through the whole discussion. I see the latter case being a minimal occurrence. I would also add that the process, being informal, would not be required, but suggested, like AfC is. If you're sure your portal is the bees knees and everyone will love it, they can go right ahead with creation. This is intended to provide an optional venue through which others who aren't as certain (or are certain, but have a problematic creation track record) can get a second opinion. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 01:27, 28 September 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose - A portal is akin to an article in this regard to me; any autoconfirmed editor should have the ability to create one. — Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 05:40, 28 September 2018 (UTC)
  • @Godsy: AFAICT, this would not prevent editors from creating portals directly, as it would not be mandatory. Perhaps I should've explained that better. Nothing technically prevents editors from creating a portal directly, just like nothing prevents them from bypassing AfC entirely. This would be for cases where the success of the portal-to-be is not certain. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 14:25, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
    • @AfroThundr3007730 and Godsy: I think we differ here. I don't see much point in an optional pre-creation process, because the most prolific portal-creator is also the most averse to restrictions in scope or to pre-approvals. So an optional process would have negligible effect on the flow. It would be like placing a roadblock on a back road while the parallel 10-lane highway was unmonitored. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:51, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
      • And if the outcome of the RfC restricts portals to, say, +500 articles (disqualifying many of the recently created portals), everyone would have to respect the new consensus. I don't believe anyone here would blatantly disregard the community decision once it has been clearly defined. There are processes for that scenario already in place, should it occur. I'll keep using AfC as an example, but if an editor has a track-record of failed articles, they could be required to use the curated creation and submission process developed by the community, via sanctions. This also goes the other way, should the community decide that small-scale portals are fine. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 15:08, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
        • I wish I could share your optimism. But given what I have seen already of TTH's prolonged outrage that anyone might not share their view, I think much drama would be avoided simply by making the pre-scrutiny phase universal. It would save the drama of multiple MFDs. And I really don't see any point in a pre-approval process if the most prolific operator can simply ignore it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:28, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
          • This only really an issue because the guidelines do not reflect the current state of affairs (and won't until the RfC is done). Everyone has a different interpretation of them in their current state, in conjunction with the (inconclusive) previous RfC closure. As I've mentioned before, I don't believe anyone here would ignore the guidelines, once they have been clearly defined by community consensus. If new portals created after the RfC and revised guidelines continue to fall short of the minimum criteria, they would be MfD'd like usual, and for editors with continuously problematic submissions, there's WP:RESTRICTIONS for that. As I've said, there are already processes in place for this. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 15:41, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
            • @AfroThundr3007730: Sorry, but I have a very different experience and assessment of the modus operandi of the most prolific portal creator, and of heir ability to interpret consensus. Either we are going to have a pre-creation scrutiny process which includes that editor, or it's pointless. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:52, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose – More unnecessary bureaucracy and red tape. The deletion process can be used to address portals that are significantly deficient. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 22:51, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

A portal that needs some loving Tender Care

--Moxy (talk) 17:03, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

@Moxy: What do you think of it now? Was that an improvement? What else does it need?    — The Transhumanist   16:59, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

All I see is

The time allocated for running scripts has expired.

The time allocated for running scripts has expired.

The time allocated for running scripts has expired.

....--Moxy (talk) 19:55, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

I did a null edit and it looks fine now. It's also removed the unwanted references from the top panel, so I think a recent edit hadn't yet purged. There's still a minor problem with a #expr: in the Somalia excerpt, which I'll look into. Certes (talk) 20:23, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Africa is oscillating between working and showing error messages. I suspect that the complexity of the content is borderline for the limits and will need to be pruned for it to work reliably.

@Evad37: When it works at all, country excerpts are showing minor Lua errors like The population of West Africa is estimated at about Expression error: Unrecognized punctuation character "{". million[1] people as of 2016. from {{UN Population}} nested within #expr:. This doesn't seem to happen in {{Transclude lead excerpt}} (and I've just fixed the bug that made the reference appear). Certes (talk) 21:11, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: Fixed. This was due to Module:Excerpt slideshow replacing all pipes (which break the slideshow gallery syntax) with either {{!}} or |, which works for regular templates or plain text but not for that parser functions, apparently. The module will now preprocess parser functions, which gets rid of the pipes without breaking them. - Evad37 [talk] 02:51, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: I still get this problem. This seems to be as the Lua execution time is at 'Lua time usage: 9.191/10.000 seconds', so slight server lag when purging the page could push this over and cause errors. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 21:15, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: It also seems that Template:Flex columns takes up nearly all of the execution time (although this could be waiting for other templates). See the full list below

Extended content

Transclusion expansion time report (%,ms,calls,template) 100.00% 9820.131 1 -total 97.71% 9595.226 1 Template:Flex_columns 48.50% 4762.903 1 Template:Transclude_selected_recent_additions 18.42% 1808.776 1 Template:Transclude_files_as_random_slideshow 14.21% 1395.825 2 Template:Transclude_excerpts_as_random_slideshow 8.71% 855.077 1 Template:Transclude_list_item_excerpts_as_random_slideshow 6.05% 594.067 1 Template:Transclude_selected_current_events 1.91% 187.541 12 Template:Lang-ar 0.76% 74.288 1 Template:Transclude_lead_excerpt 0.69% 68.024 12 Template:Box-header_colour

Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 21:20, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

I suspect that's just because all the time-consuming work is done by complex templates nested inside {{Flex columns}}. If we wrapped the whole page in {{Loop|1|all the complicated stuff}} then Template:Loop would take all the blame, even though looping once is trivially quick. Certes (talk) 21:28, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

I ran into very similar issues with Portal:Underwater diving. Maybe these portals are just too broad for the current mediawiki settings. The only way out that I could find is to split out sub-portals, and reduce the scope of the top level portal to the more general topics, reserving the finer detail for the sub-portals, I did that by modifying the navboxes. (Not finished yet - bit of a learning curve. Deciding what to put into the top level navbox is not trivial, but this is indirectly improving coverage of the topic as I tend to find new articles to create.) I have not looked at Portal:Africa yet, so can't say with any confidence that it would be the same problem. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:32, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, {{Flex columns}} is using pretty much zero time on that page. Its execution time almost equals the total time of the ones below it, all of which are nested within it. The real heavyweight right now is {{Transclude selected recent additions}}, which is eating over half the execution time. That one and {{Transclude selected current events}} I've found to be the primary culprits whenever we hit WP:TLIMIT on a portal. Usually, reducing the time span in the template call can significantly reduce the execution time (potentially at the cost of decreased content). The DYK on that portal is set to search back 36 months. Perhaps we can reduce that to 24? — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 23:23, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

I went ahead and did that. Slimmed right down. Final results below.

Extended content

NewPP limit report Parsed by mw2255 Cached time: 20181005233144 Cache expiry: 21600 Dynamic content: true CPU time usage: 6.628 seconds Real time usage: 7.190 seconds Preprocessor visited node count: 3973/1000000 Preprocessor generated node count: 0/1500000 Post‐expand include size: 175342/2097152 bytes Template argument size: 7934/2097152 bytes Highest expansion depth: 14/40 Expensive parser function count: 4/500 Unstrip recursion depth: 0/20 Unstrip post‐expand size: 116028/5000000 bytes Number of Wikibase entities loaded: 0/400 Lua time usage: 6.307/10.000 seconds Lua memory usage: 21.05 MB/50 MB Transclusion expansion time report (%,ms,calls,template) 100.00% 6966.841 1 -total 96.50% 6722.901 1 Template:Flex_columns 37.43% 2607.645 1 Template:Transclude_selected_recent_additions 32.80% 2284.981 1 Template:Transclude_files_as_random_slideshow 9.69% 674.764 1 Template:Transclude_selected_current_events 7.78% 541.853 1 Template:Transclude_list_item_excerpts_as_random_slideshow 7.72% 537.763 2 Template:Transclude_excerpts_as_random_slideshow 1.99% 138.766 1 Template:Lang-ig 1.11% 77.522 12 Template:Box-header_colour 0.95% 66.165 1 Template:Transclude_lead_excerpt

— AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 23:35, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

where is the source code of following?

Hello, where can I find the source code of {{Portal|Intelligence}}? Kindly ping while replying. Regards, —usernamekiran(talk) 22:11, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

posted at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#changing image in portal box. —usernamekiran(talk) 22:43, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

@Usernamekiran: Usually, one makes edit requests of that type at Template talk:Portal, but I see you've already opened one on Portal talk:Espionage. Either way, a template editor should be able to make the modification in short order. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 06:57, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

And it's already done. These guys move fast. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 06:59, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

We aim to please ;) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:00, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

@AfroThundr3007730 and MSGJ: thanks guys. Actually, I wasnt sure about the location where that image was located. After posting it here, I posted it to village pump (link above), and then Xaosflux moved the request to portal talkpage. See you guys around :) —usernamekiran(talk) 07:50, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

PS: how can see what links pages to {{Portal|Intelligence}}? —usernamekiran(talk) 07:53, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

I'd use a good old-fashioned text search to find what links the pages.

• 98 via {{Portal}}: [4]
• 81 via {{Portal bar}}: [5]
• 1 via {{Portal-inline}}: [6]
• 2 others (one article uses {{Subject bar}}): [7]

Those searches only show links via the redirect Portal:Intelligence. Portal:Espionage may have direct links too. Certes (talk) 11:01, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Module:PortalButton

Module:PortalButton has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. — Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 00:55, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Here's the correct link to the discussion. WaggersTALK 13:59, 15 October 2018 (UTC)