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*Mobile view has many problems and most Wikipedians rarely think about it (and the developers of mobile view don't seem to think of and talk to Wikipedians much, or they wouldn't have invented automated navigation tools to replace navboxes and portals in mobile view). It's a shame that the slideshows don't work in mobile view, they could really shine there (imagine something like a slideshow for stuff like the states and territories of Australia, giving you a way to navigate through important subtopics without leaving the page). Most of what we do here is still very old-fashioned hypertext. Anyway, '''support''' improving the discoverability and usability of portals in mobile. —'''[[User:Kusma|Kusma]]''' ([[User talk:Kusma|t]]·[[Special:Contributions/Kusma|c]]) 16:46, 24 November 2019 (UTC) |
*Mobile view has many problems and most Wikipedians rarely think about it (and the developers of mobile view don't seem to think of and talk to Wikipedians much, or they wouldn't have invented automated navigation tools to replace navboxes and portals in mobile view). It's a shame that the slideshows don't work in mobile view, they could really shine there (imagine something like a slideshow for stuff like the states and territories of Australia, giving you a way to navigate through important subtopics without leaving the page). Most of what we do here is still very old-fashioned hypertext. Anyway, '''support''' improving the discoverability and usability of portals in mobile. —'''[[User:Kusma|Kusma]]''' ([[User talk:Kusma|t]]·[[Special:Contributions/Kusma|c]]) 16:46, 24 November 2019 (UTC) |
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*I am going to bring {{ping|User:BrownHairedGirl}} into the loop for this one as it was mentioned in an MfD. She said something about the portal template needing a community consensus to change it to better mobile viewing. - [[User:Knowledgekid87|Knowledgekid87]] ([[User talk:Knowledgekid87|talk]]) 21:41, 24 November 2019 (UTC) |
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==Questions: Re General process here on this workspace== |
==Questions: Re General process here on this workspace== |
Revision as of 21:41, 24 November 2019
Introduction and invitations
Hello. I've taken it upon myself to make an attempt to create a framework for discussing portals, with the ultimate goal of creating a proposal for a new portal guideline that can be presented to the wider community in an RfC. I have purposely pinged a small group of editors to this discussion, and I have intentionally selected editors that I expect to have differing views on these topics. If we can work together to find proposals that have some agreement among us, I believe that we can eventually create a guideline that the community can accept. I would like to keep this discussion limited to a small group of editors, but with that said, I don't mind if a few other editors are invited to the discussion. However, in order for this discussion to be successful, it needs to be conducted in a calm, rational, civil way, where the only goal is to create a guideline that is in the best interests of Wikipedia. So, if you're going to invite other editors to the discussion, please make it a relatively small number, and please choose editors that are well-versed in portals, and who have the ability to have a rational and thoughtful discussion about them. I'd also like to keep a relative balance between portal inclusionists and portal deletionists, so that discussions don't get lopsided. I've tried to start by inviting a diverse group of people to this discussion who I've seen contributing regularly to portal MFDs, but I might have missed some important users in the world of portals.
I will essentially act as a moderator of the discussion, but may also throw a few of my own ideas in, if I have any. However, since this page is in my userspace, I reserve the right to remove comments without warning if I find them to be unproductive or uncivil, and I also reserve the right to ask specific users to stop contributing to this project if I believe that their participation is disruptive or unhelpful. My goal is to keep the discussion focused on finding compromises that everyone can live with. Remember that a good compromise is one where both sides are equally unsatisfied.
Here's how I'd like to organize this effort:
- First, I'd like to form a group of interested participants who are willing to contribute to this project.
- Secondly, once we've got a good group of people, I'd like to review the stated goals of a portal guideline (on the main workspace page) and come to an agreement on those.
- Thirdly, I'd like to find an agreement on the major elements that a portal guideline would need to include (I've also started a list on the main workspace page for this).
- Finally, I'd like to dig into each of these major elements and begin to solicit proposals for the wording of each of those sections, have discussion on them, find the points of disagreement, and see if we can find a middle-ground that everyone can accept.
- Assuming we're successful, the next step will be to start an RfC on our proposed guideline page, and see if we can gain a consensus within the larger Wikipedia community to adopt it as an official guideline.
I would like to take these steps in order, one at a time, without skipping ahead. So, let's start with taking a couple days to work on the first step. Please indicate below if you're interested in participating in this project. Additionally, this would probably be the best time to invite a few other people to this discussion by adding them to the ping list below, if you feel a strong desire to do so (but again, I think this group will work best if it remains relatively small). Anyone else that's been invited, please acknowledge your interest (or lack thereof) below. Thanks! ‑Scottywong| [yak] || 19:51, 13 November 2019 (UTC)
Invited
Users that have been invited thus far. To ensure that we have a suitable group of editors that are interested in this project before we start working, please move your signature below to acknowledge your interest in participating here.
- @Aquillion:
- @BrownHairedGirl:
- @Certes:
- @Guilherme Burn:
- @Huntster:
- @Newshunter12:
- @Northamerica1000:
- @ToThAc:
Further invitations by User:Hecato:
- @Cactus.man:
- @Nihonjoe:
- @Vermont:
- @WhisperToMe:
- @Buaidh:
- @Nick Moyes:
- @Evad37:
Participating
- @BD2412: BD2412 T 02:25, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Bermicourt:
- @Britishfinance:
- @Dmehus: --Doug Mehus T·C 15:40, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Hecato:
- @Knowledgekid87: - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 03:05, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Kusma: —Kusma (t·c) 16:52, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Levivich: – Levivich 22:46, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Ɱ: ɱ (talk) 20:28, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- @MJL: –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 01:33, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Moxy: --Moxy 🍁 00:50, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Robert McClenon: Robert McClenon (talk) 03:41, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Sm8900: Sm8900 (talk) 16:09, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- @SportingFlyer: SportingFlyer T·C 02:13, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf: Thryduulf (talk) 09:23, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- @UnitedStatesian: UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:48, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
Some introductory steps for this process
I was thinking about ways to initiate this process itself here on this page. do we want to poll all the editors here, and ask each of them for a brief introductory statement of what their concerns or questions are, and where they might wish to see things go? it's just a suggestion. that might be one good way to initiate things. if not, no problem, just suggesting that. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 14:56, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- I was really hoping to guide this conversation from very general, broad topics to very specific details. However, a lot people seem to be chomping at the bit to get right into the details. We'll have to figure out the best way to steer things. I realize that everyone has a horse in this race, and everyone wants to make sure that their thoughts are heard on what they consider to be the most important aspects of this discussion. However, I continue to believe that we need to have some level of organization to this process, or else we won't end up getting anywhere.
- I haven't heard anyone object to the overall goals for a portal guideline that I've posted on the main page, so I'll assume that those goals are accurate and complete. I suppose we can assume that everyone agrees on the main elements that a portal guideline would need to include, and we can always go back and update them if need be. So, that gets us to the first part of the guidline: the introduction and summary. Let's start discussing that below, in the Introduction and Summary section. I think it's critically important that we all agree what the overall purpose of portals is, before we start getting into the details of how to build them, and inclusion criteria, and all that. I'll start the discussion below. I'll also put a link at the top of this page that leads everyone to the currently active discussion, in the hopes that we can all stay focused on that until it's time to move on to the next topic. ‑Scottywong| [converse] || 16:47, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- ok, thanks for answers, @Scottywong:. here are some other questions, from my earlier comment below. thanks.
- Can we have a separate sub-section for each person commenting here, for them to provide their basic ideas? I have seen this method being used helpfully when a lot of people need to provide input on a specific question. users would still be free to comment in other users' sections to discuss the ideas from those users.
- Also, remember that we need to address concerns of some people who don't want portals to exist at all. any comments on that? or on how we should do that?
- thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 14:38, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Sm8900: That looks fine to me, thanks for organizing that. I've got some things that have come up in my personal life that are going to limit the amount of time I can put towards Wikipedia for the near future, but I'll continue to check in as I can. I'm glad to see that the discussions are active. ‑Scottywong| [converse] || 17:06, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
- thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 14:38, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
General discussion
I will start by saying that I do not feel that portals recently kept by consensus (past 2 to 3 months) should be deleted as it goes around the decided decision. Once guidelines are firmly established then this can be revisited. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:52, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I have no idea what this means. Also, you've skipped very far ahead to step 4 before we've even finished step 1. ‑Scottywong| [gab] || 02:55, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- Im not sure where you want comments and/or concerns. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:58, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Knowledgekid87: I don't really want comments and/or concerns just yet. But, I appreciate your enthusiasm and participation. At this point, I simply want to ensure that we have a suitable group of people who are interested and willing to commit to this project, because it's going to be a lot of work and it probably won't always be easy. Perhaps anyone that is interested can simply put their signature above next to their name? The reason I want to do this first is that I know that this is a turbulent time for portals, there is a lot of animosity between people, and there are a lot of other discussions going on simultaneously. Therefore, it's possible that no one has the energy for this right now. And, I don't want to waste a lot of my time trying to kick this can down the road if no one is going to join me. So, before we even start talking about portals at all, let's just make sure that we've got a good group of people committed to this, and it's going to be worth our time. If we don't get enough interested editors to participate, I'll likely abandon this effort and delete the page. But, at least I'm trying something. ‑Scottywong| [confabulate] || 03:04, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- Well I am in and will wait for more people then. I currently maintain Portal:Anime and manga which covers a lot of scopes and has recently been transcluded, the portal is also supported by our project. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 03:09, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Knowledgekid87: I don't really want comments and/or concerns just yet. But, I appreciate your enthusiasm and participation. At this point, I simply want to ensure that we have a suitable group of people who are interested and willing to commit to this project, because it's going to be a lot of work and it probably won't always be easy. Perhaps anyone that is interested can simply put their signature above next to their name? The reason I want to do this first is that I know that this is a turbulent time for portals, there is a lot of animosity between people, and there are a lot of other discussions going on simultaneously. Therefore, it's possible that no one has the energy for this right now. And, I don't want to waste a lot of my time trying to kick this can down the road if no one is going to join me. So, before we even start talking about portals at all, let's just make sure that we've got a good group of people committed to this, and it's going to be worth our time. If we don't get enough interested editors to participate, I'll likely abandon this effort and delete the page. But, at least I'm trying something. ‑Scottywong| [confabulate] || 03:04, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- Im not sure where you want comments and/or concerns. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:58, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I find your selection of invited participants rather odd. With most of these users being opposed to portals in principle or wanting to limit the number of portals to a very small number. --Hecato (talk) 12:08, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think that the selection reflects those who are active in generally discussing portals that have been nominated for deletion. I would add that the community in general appears to want to limit the number of portals to a fairly small number, based on the absence of opposition to proposals for the deletion of most portals for narrow topics. BD2412 T 12:26, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- If the design process of a new guideline is rigged in that direction then we might as well write down a list of ten or so acceptable portal topics, delete the rest and outlaw the creation of new portals, because that would be the outcome anyway. I don't consider users, whose sole involvement in portals is the attempt to get rid of them, "Portal power users" or positive forces in the improvement of portals for that matter. --Hecato (talk) 12:37, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks for letting us know your honest thoughts. As I explained above, my selection of people to invite was semi-random and limited to names that I recognized as frequent contributors to recent Portal MFDs, who generally had thoughtful arguments. I tried to get a roughly even split of people who seemed more likely to vote to keep most portals, and those who are more likely to delete, but I may have gotten that balance wrong. If there are truly some portal "power users" that I neglected to invite, please feel free to invite them now. In any case, I can assure you that the goal of this process is not to find a sneaky way to delete all portals. In fact, I would consider the discussion of "should we even have portals?" to be out of scope here. I intend to presume that portals are here to stay, in some form or another, so let's put together a guideline for portals that everyone can agree on, so that we can all stop arguing about them incessantly.
- If the design process of a new guideline is rigged in that direction then we might as well write down a list of ten or so acceptable portal topics, delete the rest and outlaw the creation of new portals, because that would be the outcome anyway. I don't consider users, whose sole involvement in portals is the attempt to get rid of them, "Portal power users" or positive forces in the improvement of portals for that matter. --Hecato (talk) 12:37, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think that the selection reflects those who are active in generally discussing portals that have been nominated for deletion. I would add that the community in general appears to want to limit the number of portals to a fairly small number, based on the absence of opposition to proposals for the deletion of most portals for narrow topics. BD2412 T 12:26, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I have added a few names from the top of my head. Might add a few more later. A general invitation to Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals should be extended. Do you want to do that as the organizer, or should I? --Hecato (talk) 15:22, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- My intention was to keep this to a relatively small group, because too many cooks can spoil the soup. To be clear, no one is missing out on anything if they're not here. My intention isn't to create a guideline in secret and then post it somewhere and insist that everyone follows it. The intention is to create a draft guideline that can be taken to an RFC, where all editors will have the opportunity to comment on it and further shape it. I don't think that inviting the entirety of Wikipedia here will be productive at this point in the process. ‑Scottywong| [spill the beans] || 16:23, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I don't think everyone who has been invited are going to join anyways. At some point we have to start, and the group can still be small by that point. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 16:25, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I agree that too many cooks spoil the broth. Which is why I found your selection process so odd. That said, the WikiProject should be brought in eventually. They are the people with the most experience in actually working with portals. The selection of a taskforce should have probably started there. --Hecato (talk) 17:05, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think that the argument by User:Hecato that the original invitees were selected to be against portals is just off the mark. I count 11 original invitees, and, of them, Certes, Knowledgekid87, Northamerica1000, SportingFlyer, and Thryduulf are advocates of portals. So I disagree with the claim that the group is unbalanced. I do think that the extension of invitations to additional editors by Hecato may render it unbalanced, but I trust that User:Scottywong can keep it balanced. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:09, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- Just saw this - I wouldn't consider myself an "advocate" so much as someone who finds them useful and doesn't quite understand why we would rush to delete them. I have tried to apply consistent keep/delete votes based on a set of guidelines at MfD (which have evolved with time - I didn't understand the severity of the bulk creation problem when I stumbled into the space). Some of those guidelines I have proposed below. SportingFlyer T·C 10:49, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
@Scottywong: Congratulations for the initiative. But I believe I can't help much, because I'm not fluent in English, which limits me in discussions.
- @Robert McClenon: I've just spotted this, and while it's true I have advocated against the bulk deletion of portals without examination, on individual portals I have recommended a mix of keep, delete and merge. Characterising everyone on one or other side of a binary divide is neither accurate nor helpful. Thryduulf (talk) 11:23, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Either way, my strongest opinion at the moment is that the community first needs to decide what a portal really is and update WP: PORTAL with simple and clear text. Other opnions I have are:
- Portals should be really broad topic. These broad topics should already be defined in WP: PORTAL.
- Portals should have a simple code, single page layout, with no exaggerated transclusions or content fork. Example Portal:Computer programming.
- Portals must follow a hierarchical logic. Example Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Portals tree.Guilherme Burn (talk) 14:14, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks for the input. Your English certainly seems good enough to me, so don't let that prevent you from participating. ‑Scottywong| [babble] || 14:34, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- Would it help to get people who actually care about and maintain portals involved here? I am trying to keep the balance, but it would be helpful if those who do the work be here too. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:05, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I do think inviting User:Nihonjoe was a good call as he has edited a lot of portals. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:29, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think this is a great idea but isn't it about a year too late? By the time we finish discussing and agreeing a decent portal guideline, there will be virtually no portals left unless we call a halt to the deletion of the remaining few portals against criteria which are not only obsolete, but now deprecated. If we do believe this is worth pursuing the first thing we must do is agree on the purpose of portals. It is the lack of clarity over this which has led to portals being poorly structured and rarely viewed and which is the fundamental reason why editors cannot agree on whether to keep or delete portals (now that the auto-portals have gone). FWIW I believe there are at least 3 potential uses for portals:
- To showcase a topic, encouraging readers to explore it further (this has failed in the past because portals were almost unlinked from mainspace - a fault of the guidelines - and not searchable, both can be fixed)
- To act as a navaid akin to a category tree, but with the advantage that a whole topic can be seen on one page (again failed in the past for the reasons above)
- To act as a tool for project editors to expand and improve topic coverage (I have used this very effectively, but it's never been seen as a portal purpose)
- If we really can nail the purpose, the rest becomes easier. Bermicourt (talk) 19:53, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- Better late than never. If we delay another year, then we'll be 2 years late. Btw, I've copied and pasted your bullet points to the active discussion below. ‑Scottywong| [speak] || 21:23, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks for starting this discussion. If we want to understand the purpose(s) that portals aim to serve at the moment better, maybe we could try to collect some examples of portals and check what these portals do well and for what purpose. There are "magazine"/"mini main page" things, there are "invite collaboration bits", there are lists of "our best articles", there is sometimes "overview of the topic" and there are "large navboxes". Some of these tie in well with WikiProjects, others are more independent. Many portals try to be everything at once, with mixed success. The recently renovated Portal:Canada separates some of the things it does into three tabs, each serving a different purpose, which helps make each of the tabs a lot more focused and usable. (BTW the possible purpose we're currently not great at is giving an overview of a topic; many portals just take the intro section of the main article instead of trying to cover the whole topic in a less text-heavy fashion. But doing this well is hard).—Kusma (t·c) 21:27, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- May $DEITY bless this ship and all who sail in her. I wish you all well, and if you can avoid knocking six bells out of each other I hope that we can come to a consensus of the role of portals in today's Wikipedia. Guy (help!) 23:08, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
Reasons for WP:POG's failure
I am just going to throw up some of the reasons why I feel WP:POG failed as a guideline as it will help going forward:
- 1. Rules requiring maintenance were placed in the lead section rather than the body of the guideline for further info. From the lead:
Portals which require manual updating are at a greater risk of nomination for deletion if they are not kept up to date. Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create.
- 2. The guideline was out of date, and did not take into account of new developments such as the benefit of transclusions. Here were the prior instructions on when to update:
The more often portals are updated, with fresh content, the more interesting they will be to readers and attract returning visitors. Some portals update the selected articles and pictures once a month. Others update them weekly, which is preferred. Other update schedules—ranging from once every few weeks to every time the article is refreshed—are also sometimes used.
The time to update should vary by portal as some would need it more often than others.
- 1. Rules requiring maintenance were placed in the lead section rather than the body of the guideline for further info. From the lead:
Other editors can chime in too here, these are just my thoughts. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:54, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Discussion: Goals
At this point, are we talking about the goals of this project, the goals of a document to be developed by this project, the goals of portals, or what? I think that, in addition to establishing goals for this project, we should be trying to identify the goals of portals so that we can address them. I have asked other editors what the objectives of portals are, and I get different answers from different editors, and I don't always follow them, so I would like to identify the purposes of portals, but if this will be done in a later stage of the discussion, that is all right. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:07, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I suppose it doesn't hurt to start the preliminary discussions while people are still filing into the room and deciding if they want to participate.
- My intention with this section is to discuss the goals of a portal guideline, since this is ultimately the output of our efforts. In other words, let's summarize everything that we need to achieve before we're ready to take a proposed guideline to an RFC. If we can all agree on exactly what a portal guideline needs to include, then everything we do in subsequent steps can refer back to these overarching goals to ensure that we're meeting them, and that we're not proposing things that are counter to the goals or unrelated to the goals.
- I have listed some basic goals of a portal guideline at User:Scottywong/Portal_guideline_workspace#Goals. Let's discuss those goals here, and then make changes to that page once we're all in agreement. The current goals that I have started us off with are:
- To clarify the purpose of portals within the larger scope of the English Wikipedia.
- To promote consistency in the way that portals are constructed and maintained.
- To provide clear criteria for topics that are appropriate for portals.
- To document best practices for portals and encourage editors to follow them.
- As you can see, goal #1 of a portal guideline is to define the purpose of portals, which is essentially what you are asking for. But, before we get into debating the purpose of portals, let's make sure that we've captured all of the relevant goals of the entire guideline and agreed on them. So, the basis for this discussion should be: do you agree with the above goals? Do you think any of the above goals should be removed or reworded? Do you think that there are any goals missing from that list? ‑Scottywong| [confer] || 05:16, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- Looks good to me, and let me also note my appreciation of Scottywong organizing/moderating this initiative which I think is timely. My two comments on the above goals are:
- 1. For each goal, we might also state the inverse case – E.g. to also highlight/specify examples of what should not be happening (a technique I find very useful when reading WP guidelines)
- 2. As you will have read at MfDs, my overall concern re portals is that their very low adoption/engagement by all segments (readers, editors, even vandals), is due to their functional obsolesce. Ultimately, Main Articles are now better-structured consensus guides through a topic area (with links to sub-topics), NavBoxes are better navigation aids (and many portals just paste the NavBox into the portal), and WikiProjects now have a tool that lists and categorizes all topic articles by rank (plus most projects have a consensus list of their own most-important articles). This led me to consider whether a better long-term solution for portals is to merge them with WikiProjects (this does sometimes happen at MfD), and put the WikiProject link on the Main Article page (instead of the Talk Page). I outlined this on the Talk Pages of NA1K and BHG. I guess my question here, is whether this concern would (or even should), get discussed at this forum under Goal #1 – E.g. whatever purpose Portals might serve, it is done better elsewhere, and thus the functional obsolesce of portals might not be mitigated by Goals #2 to #4? I understand however if that question is out of scope.
- Britishfinance (talk) 09:46, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think that we should open this discussion to creative, out-of-the-box ideas that maybe haven't been considered before. However, ideas like merging portals into WikiProjects are likely to be viewed by some as a step towards abolishing portals altogether, and that is something that I don't think it would be productive to deliberate here. If we're going to create a guideline for portals, I think we need to presume that Wikipedia is going to have a portal namespace with portal pages, period. Our goal is to find the best way to implement them, and create the best rules to govern them. ‑Scottywong| [squeal] || 14:29, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- As for your inverse exercise, I'll take a stab at it:
- We don't want confusion within Wikipedia about the purpose of portals, and we don't want different editors designing portals for entirely different purposes.
- We don't want different editors constructing portals in different ways, using different designs. A consistent design will make it easier for all editors to maintain all portals, without having to first figure out how the mechanics of the portal work.
- We don't want editors creating portals on inappropriate topics. ("Inappropriate" is, of course, a term that will need to be better defined later.)
- We don't want inconsistently designed portals.
- It's pretty clear to me from that exercise that goals 2 and 4 are mostly redundant to each other. Perhaps we can merge those two goals and reduce it to three goals? ‑Scottywong| [spill the beans] || 14:45, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- As for your inverse exercise, I'll take a stab at it:
- I think that we should open this discussion to creative, out-of-the-box ideas that maybe haven't been considered before. However, ideas like merging portals into WikiProjects are likely to be viewed by some as a step towards abolishing portals altogether, and that is something that I don't think it would be productive to deliberate here. If we're going to create a guideline for portals, I think we need to presume that Wikipedia is going to have a portal namespace with portal pages, period. Our goal is to find the best way to implement them, and create the best rules to govern them. ‑Scottywong| [squeal] || 14:29, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- Looks good to me, and let me also note my appreciation of Scottywong organizing/moderating this initiative which I think is timely. My two comments on the above goals are:
- My thoughts on the above are as follows:
- Portals should basically be the equivalent of the main page, but for specific subject areas. They should look and feel more like the main page, with a combination of a general overview of the subject area and its organizational structure within Wikipedia, and samples of content within that subject area that is of the highest quality (FA/GA content) or that is particularly interesting or current (DYK/ITN content).
- With this goal in mind, portals should obviously only exist for subject areas that are broad enough to present a breadth of articles (and more specifically, a breadth of FA/GA-level articles), and for which DYK/ITN-type content could foreseeably be generated on a regular basis (I would think at least one new item of each kind per month).
- Maintenance of portals should be straightforward and transparent, and the best practices should be those that promote these ends.
- BD2412 T 14:15, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think these are all great topics that will need to be discussed at length, but we might be getting slightly ahead of ourselves. I realize that this process I've outlined is going to start painfully slowly, where we start with talking about the goals of a portal guideline itself, and then agree on the elements that the guideline needs, and only then do we actually start getting to the meat of the discussion where we actually talk about portals. But, given the tensions that exist about this topic, I think it's crucial to approach this slowly and methodically, get agreement on the biggest and most general concepts, and then work our way down to discussing the specifics. Do you have any input on the goals that we've set forth above for the guideline itself? Anything missing, out-of-place, or unnecessary? ‑Scottywong| [spout] || 14:49, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
While my thoughts are:
- Portals do not have to act as main pages, they can be recruiting tools to those interested in joining Wiki-projects as they need the editors badly.
- Portals basically act as showcases to highlight featured content by editors. These can help motivate others to edit their favorite subject areas.
- Portals can and have been successful in terms of viewership and interest.
- More to come...
- - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:51, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- What if we introduce into this conversation a concept of portals and sub-portals, with subportals being a separate page under a broad portal offering a deeper dive into a topic that is not one of the very broad ones, but of interest to some community nonetheless? We could have more rigid guidelines for top-level portals, and more flexibility for subportals. BD2412 T 23:04, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
Goals of Portals
On 19 July 2019, I posted a Request for Comments (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_153#RFC:_Purposes_of_Portals_(19_July_2019)) asking for input as to what the purposes of portals are.
The ideas that I offered, reflecting previous comments by various editors, were: Some of the purposes that have been proposed are:
- 1. Showcasing our best content to readers. The Main Page, for example, is a portal with this very purpose. The Main Page is also very labor-intensive. Showcasing is work.
- 2. Navigating the encyclopedia. Along with lists, navigation templates, and categories, portals are one way readers can navigate the encyclopedia.
- 3. Containing content not available elsewhere on the encyclopedia. Some editors have stated that portals contain content, so that content is harmfully deleted when portals are deleted.
- 3A. Unique, forked or transcluded encyclopedic content
- 3B. Explanatory content such as guidance and reviews (others?)
- 4. Planning and management of WikiProjects. Portals allow editors to keep track of the current and planned scope of the project's coverage.
- 5. Metatext and reviews of the topic.
- 6. A statement of the importance of the topic. The provision that portals should be about "broad subject areas" is more commonly remembered and quoted than the qualifying clause, "which will attract readers and portal maintainers". A portal is seen as a declaration that a topic is a broad subject area.
- 7. An invitation to readers and editors to develop particular articles in a topic area.
- 8. Fun, or exercise. Some editors like making portals.
Possible Discussion of Goals of Portals
- @Robert McClenon: Please see the Discussion: Introduction and summary section where we are supposed to discuss this, the discussion is duplicated here. --Hecato (talk) 23:22, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- Sorry, probably my fault, it seems multiple editors mistook this section as the place where we'd discuss the goals of portals. This section was intended to discuss the goals of a guideline, i.e. what does the guideline need to accomplish to be a successful guideline. ‑Scottywong| [gab] || 23:59, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- The purposes listed below started out with Bermicourt's three, which were (not in this order) (1) navigation, (2) showcase, (3) tool for editors, to which Hecato added two new ones (not in this order): (4) advertise WikiProject, and (5) keep readers up-to-date. Now, of these 8 from RM above, four are new: (6) containing unique content [numbered as 3/3A/3B on RM's list], (7) Metatext and reviews of the topic [#5 on RM's list], (8) statement of importance [#6 on RM's list], (9) invitation to develop articles [#7 on RM's list], and (10) fun/exercise [#8 on RM's list]. I'd suggest adding the new goals/purposes to the list of 5 purposes below, and editors can just add those to their vote lists. But I'd also suggest RM take a second look at the addition first to ensure (a) they're not duplicative or restatements of purposes already proposed, and (b) they have a snowball's chance in heck of gaining consensus. – Levivich 20:08, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
Discussion: Elements
Echoing my thoughts above, I think portals generally should include:
- a summary description of the field addressed
- two or three kinds of featured content (FA/GA articles) from within the field, e.g.:
- concepts or things in the field
- biographies of significant historical figures within the field
- significant events in a scientific area or locations in a geographic area
- DYK content, being generated with sufficient regularity to have a new item added every month or so
- ITN content, being generated with sufficient regularity to have a new item added every month or so
- links to related content going both up and down the tree (up to broader topics and down to narrower topics)
That's my baseline. BD2412 T 23:13, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
- This is good for a description of an ideal portal, but a minimum viable portal should not need to have all of this. Especially asking for one ITN and DYK item per month is asking quite a lot. (There are two things here: news/DYKs must be available, and somebody has to add them, which requires very dedicated maintainers, as automation often fails for these things). This means we could only have portals about very large topics, which often lose focus a bit (big country portals are only slightly more focused than Wikipedia's rather random Main Page). We should try not to outlaw structures like Portal:South East England and its more focused subportals. —Kusma (t·c) 10:54, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
- User:Scottywong - When can we discuss this list? Robert McClenon (talk) 06:04, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
Current examples
I believe giving a few examples would be great so all can see the vision of what different editors have in mind.--Moxy 🍁 01:41, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Good idea Moxy, and your example is noted below (I have a related section re MOS). Do we have a feel for the +10 greatest portals in WP (e.g. that most would feel are great showcases, actively read and maintained, and would never face MfD)? I ask that because they could also serve to help guide us here. thanks. Britishfinance (talk) 13:35, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Moxy vision
I have built 2 basically auotomated portals that I think covers what a traditional portal was intended to be as per the info page Wikipedia:Portal#Purposes of portals... but incorporating the new transclution method alongside new elements. This will still need maintainers to keep up with GA and FA promotions and demotions and to ensure bot sections are functioning properly.
Portal:Canada that uses the transclution method listing all it's content on sub pages while at the same time providing a navigational aid in different formats and criteria. So what does the portals have...A quick intro only 2 paragraphs. On the left we have many relevant selected FA and GA articles in 2 sections (one places and events the other Bios) with a quick one paragraph hook. We then on the left have symbols and top level vital/top importance articles...again with a quick one paragraph hook. On the right we have current articles, slelected images, DYk's and news. With the bottom having panorama's and links to other related content. As mentioned above all this has sub pages listing selected content and more. Finally we have a page to introduce readers to the back side of Wikipedia in hopes to gain editors ....in this case Canadian knowledgeable editors encouraging project joining alongside maintenance tasks that can be performed by any editor regardless if they join the project or not. This format was also used at Portal:Australia with some per existing elements.--Moxy 🍁 01:41, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- I have largely updated Portal:Croatia in a similar style. SportingFlyer T·C 10:50, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Manual of Style
Portals often have a kind of personalized "scrapbook" look and feel to them – E.g. different colours, different layouts/borders, different graphic etc. I have seen this "scrapbook" issue raised at MfD and in the larger RfCs on portals. Ultimately, portals are "showcases" of FA/GA material, which is of the highest MOS-standard in WP? It is not a mistake that the showcase for such rigorously MOS'ed content would have no real MOS rules of its own (e.g. like hanging the Mona Lisa in an ordinary office)? Is there an appetite in this forum to develop a "standardized" MOS-format for portals? Britishfinance (talk) 12:26, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Is it not also unusual that WP:FAC or WP:GAN, for whose articles portals really serve, seem to have no interest or input into portals? Britishfinance (talk) 12:26, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- We had a Featured Portals process, which died in its sleep a couple of years ago. The Wikipedia:Featured portal criteria were not very detailed. I always thought that was a plus, as it is not clear that there is one best method to do portals, and there was always some creativity in different approaches (some topics are more visual than others etc.). I see no reason why all portals should look the same. I would rather see the Mona Lisa in an attractive lookinh room than in a bland one that ticks all the checkboxes of the room design guideline. —Kusma (t·c) 12:45, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- That is very interesting Kusma. Maybe this is a mad thought, but what if there was a centralised FAC/GAN portal/repository, and that a reader could click a link on a topic article into this cental portal and it would automatically bring up the FA/GA articles relevant to the topic? E.g. Instead of having a "Portal:Alaska" (with all the issues of no MOS, no maintainer, not really a "portal" per se etc.), you have an "Alaska FA/GA Article Bar", that when you click on it, brings you to the centralised FAC/GAN portal/repository and the relevant Alaska FA/GA articles, as kept up to date by FAC/GAN, come up as a list for inspection? Instead of localized FA/GA portals, we have a centralised one? The indivisual WikiProjects or real topic maintainers would be allowed to further classify this central FAC/GAN database by major recommended topic articles in their area (in the way a good portal goes). Is that a crazy idea? thanks. Britishfinance (talk) 13:22, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Britishfinance, if I understand you correctly, we have some things in this direction: the main list of FAs at WP:FA, which isn't all that well-sorted, and bot-updated lists of FAs/GAs by project (see Portal_talk:Germany#Recognized_content for one). Currently I use that list mostly for inspiration when I want another articled for the Selected articles, but it would be possible to display such lists more publicly (in the case of Germany, I don't do that because of the dominance of military history). —Kusma (t·c) 15:38, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks again for that Kusma. Perhaps there is something in this. If the portal focus was on getting a better structured FA/GAN portal that could be more easily linked into and searched from the Main Space - would that not solve the issues of many portals that we see at MfD? Obviously, the bigger, customised, well-maintained portals could still just do their own portals, however, a better FA/GAN database/portal could substitute for many others? thanks. Britishfinance (talk) 15:54, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- That is very interesting Kusma. Maybe this is a mad thought, but what if there was a centralised FAC/GAN portal/repository, and that a reader could click a link on a topic article into this cental portal and it would automatically bring up the FA/GA articles relevant to the topic? E.g. Instead of having a "Portal:Alaska" (with all the issues of no MOS, no maintainer, not really a "portal" per se etc.), you have an "Alaska FA/GA Article Bar", that when you click on it, brings you to the centralised FAC/GAN portal/repository and the relevant Alaska FA/GA articles, as kept up to date by FAC/GAN, come up as a list for inspection? Instead of localized FA/GA portals, we have a centralised one? The indivisual WikiProjects or real topic maintainers would be allowed to further classify this central FAC/GAN database by major recommended topic articles in their area (in the way a good portal goes). Is that a crazy idea? thanks. Britishfinance (talk) 13:22, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think we should focus on the basic guidelines first, then come up with a MOS. I mean it is a good idea but I don't want us to get distracted from the central focus. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:09, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with Knowledgekid87. How a portal should look will depend in part on what its purpose is and what it is trying to achieve, so we need to sort that out first. Also, as long as WP:ACCESS is met the look isn't that important in the grand scheme of things. Thryduulf (talk) 17:30, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- But with respect Thryduulf, and I realize that you have more experience in this area than I have, the grand scheme of things is that a very high % of portals in WP are abandoned by maintainers, editors, and readers. And by abandoned, I mean last real content edit (outside of The Transhumanist type mass-edits), was a decade ago? Certainly, almost all WP portals outside of the top 100, struggle to show any activity/support post-2013 (portals really collapsed post-2013). Look at the last 50 portal MfDs – the pattern is relentless and shows no sign of stopping. Unless we do something meaningful to change this trajectory, to materially improve what portals do, then this whole discussion is moot, because most will end up being deleted within the decade (or less).
- Even though I have been on the deletion-side for portals at MfD, I am in a low minority in this discussion in trying to think of meaningful ways to make portals materially better. All the portal-keeps are focused on setting "guidelines" in the hope that these guidelines will protect portals at MfD. However, I think even if we agreed that any portal in a topic-area with 1 GA article could never be deleted, it would not change their current trend, and outside of the top 100, their inevitable end. Standing at the portal MfD for the last few months is a very sobering exposure to the abandonment of this tool as it is currently structured and configured (guidelines aside)? I don't want to be impolite, but I think this reality is missing from our discussion. Britishfinance (talk) 22:01, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think most of the discussion is looking at the wrong side of the telescope. Let's find groups of editors interested in developing and supporting a portal as part of their work in the related area, and work on ensuring the process supports them, so they'll ensure the portal is well-maintained. Finding interested editors first will naturally avoid creating more portals than can be supported. isaacl (talk) 05:26, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
Discussion: Introduction and summary
As stated above, I feel that it's important that we tackle these sections one at a time, because the results of this discussion will inform the next discussion. This discussion is about what content to put in the introduction of our portal guideline. As stated on the main workshop page, this introduction needs to provide a summary of what portals are, and what their purpose is. Please post your thoughts below and let's see if we can come to an agreement on what this opening paragraph should say. ‑Scottywong| [talk] || 16:54, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- I agree that we should discuss one idea at a time, and I am not sure how we got this far by skipping over some sections. I would like to be sure that we don't move on to the next topic until the moderator decides that we have discussed the previous ones at enough length. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:55, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
- There seemed to not be too much interest in discussing the very general concepts, so I decided to just skip to this section. I get the feeling that there isn't much disagreement on what the goals of the guideline should be, and what elements a guideline will need to include. We can always return to that discussion if necessary. ‑Scottywong| [prattle] || 17:18, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
- It is a good idea to do things one at a time. But shouldn't we agree on the purposes of portals first before writing the introduction? I assume the introduction would summarize those purposes. --Hecato (talk) 18:53, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- Exactly. The introduction of the guideline will define the purpose of portals. So, let's figure out and agree upon the purpose of portals, and then the introduction will write itself. ‑Scottywong| [confabulate] || 21:20, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
User:Bermicourt listed a couple potential ideas for what portals are above, I'll repost them here so that they're in the place where this is going to be discussed. We can use this as a launching point. Thought on these?
- To showcase a topic, encouraging readers to explore it further (this has failed in the past because portals were almost unlinked from mainspace - a fault of the guidelines - and not searchable, both can be fixed)
- To act as a navaid akin to a category tree, but with the advantage that a whole topic can be seen on one page (again failed in the past for the reasons above)
- To act as a tool for project editors to expand and improve topic coverage (I have used this very effectively, but it's never been seen as a portal purpose) -- Quote by Bermicourt
Purpose proposal 1
- Aright, in that vein, I would like to expand on that list and propose the following. Ranked from most important to least important:
- The purposes of Portals are...
- Introduce users to the most important topics in a topic area. Encourage readers to explore it further and act as a navigational aid.
- Showcase high quality content.
- Advertise WikiProjects and related Wikimedia
- Act as a tool for WikiProject editors to expand and improve topic coverage.
- (conditional) Keep readers up-to-date with recent developments in the field (e.g. in scientific fields or big sport events like the Olympics)
Can we get an opinion poll on these? Are all of these reasonable, should the order of importance be different? --Hecato (talk) 21:58, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by Levivich
- Here are my thoughts on the 5 purposes :
- Swim on, noble marine mammals. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:14, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
- Topic introduction and navigational aid, similar to a table of contents, is what I see as the primary, and perhaps the only, purpose of portals.
- I think this contradicts #1. WP:TFA on the main page showcases our best work. If a reader wants to see our best articles, they can go to WP:FA or WP:GA. The reader who wants to learn about art and goes to Portal:Arts won't be well-served by seeing randomly-chosen, but well-written articles about art. Rather, they want to see the topic logically-presented. Hopefully the major articles about art would be high-quality already, but I don't think a primary purpose of portals can be to both act as a topic introduction/navigational aid, and showcase our best articles about a topic. It's got to be one or the other–"important" articles should be presented rather than "high quality" articles, and so I go with #1 over #2. That said, no objection if, e.g., Portal:Arts had a link to WP:FA#Art or WP:GA/AA.
- I'm not convinced of the benefit of having portals advertise WikiProjects and I'm not sure what advertising "related Wikimedia" means. But if I understand the gist of this, it's saying portals should be used as a tool to recruit reader to become editors. I guess I'm not really against any page being used as a tool to recruit editors, but I'm just not understanding what this would mean if it were recognized in the guideline as a purpose of portals. Links to related WikiProjects seem harmless enough.
- I get that a portal can be a useful tool to help a WikiProject get organized, but I don't think reader-facing content should have, as a "purpose", acting as a tool to assist editors. Whenever reader and editor interests conflict, the reader interest should prevail. So, I see no reason to list this as a purpose of portals, even as a low-priority purpose (because I don't think we should have multiple purposes and prioritize them, but just one purpose to focus on).
- WP:NOTNEWS – I don't think the purpose of any part of Wikipedia should be to keep readers up to date about recent developments about anything. – Levivich 23:40, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
- Regarding your objection to #2, perhaps there is a way to combine #1 and #2 so that they can work at the same time? For instance, something along the lines of, "Introduce users to the most important topics in a topic area, prioritizing the highest quality content, if available." I agree that we don't want to prioritize showing off the best articles over presenting a logical overview of the subject. But, if FA/GA content is available, it would make sense to direct readers to those articles first. ‑Scottywong| [confer] || 00:04, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
- I would say no, there isn't a way to combine #1 and #2, because I feel they are in direct conflict with one another–a conflict that cannot be surmounted. (I'm going to pick on Portal:Arts just because it's the first one on the main page, nothing personal against the editors who maintain it.) Portal:Arts, currently, features our best work about Arts, but it does not provide a good introduction to the topic, nor is it a useful navigational aid. I click on Portal:Arts, and if I want a list of the major artists or major works of art, that's nowhere on that page. All I get is the category tree, where "artists" isn't one of the entries. If I click on "creative works" to see a list of the major works of art, I get to Category:Creative works, which doesn't list any creative works, but instead lists subcategories, none of which are "works by importance". I don't know where on Wikipedia I can go if I want to see a list of the most important artists or the most important works of art. Portal:Arts should be that place.
- Portal:Arts should also tell me about things like art movements, methods and schools of art criticism, and types of art, like visual arts, performance art, literature, etc. Right now, those latter three are just in the category section, with the other Arts subcategories. There's no organized presentation of the topic. Instead, what Portal:Arts does–and it does it well–is showcase our best work in the field of Arts. So we have the featured article, featured biography, featured audio, featured picture, DYK, ITN, etc. But topically, it's just a random presentation of art topics.
- Last example: if I click on "More featured biographies" at Portal:Arts, it takes me to a list of Arts biographies. A ha! A list of the most important artists, no doubt! Nope, Portal:Arts/Featured biography has a list of featured articles that are biographies of art-related persons. Most of them are kind of obscure. One of them is about the subject of the Mona Lisa, Lisa del Giocondo. That's in the rotation for appearing on Portal:Arts. What's not in the rotation is the article about the artist who painted the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci. That's not an FA, just a GA. In fairness, da Vinci is mentioned in the blurb about del Giocondo, but that is entirely backwards in my view. Portal:Arts definitely needs, somewhere on there, to have something about or a link to Leonardo da Vinci. Lisa del Giocondo is not really a major topic in the world of Arts... it's kind of a "hey, it's the lady who posed for the Mona Lisa"... it's trivia, really. But we feature it at Portal:Arts, because we're prioritizing #2 over #1. But #2 shouldn't really be a consideration at all. We should list the major sub-topics for each topic (e.g., at Portal:Arts, the major artists, major works of art, major schools of art, etc.), irrespective of the quality of those articles. That's my view, anyway. (#2–a showcase portal–would be good expansion of our WP:FA ad WP:GA pages; e.g., I would replace WP:FA#Arts and WP:GA/AA with something like the current Portal:Arts.) – Levivich 00:45, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
- In theory, high-importance topics should get more attention, resulting in high-quality articles. In practice, FA and GA evaluation do not take into account the importance of the article, but WP:VITAL does. I would suggest that we work towards different outputs within the portals distinguishing levels of importance of the subjects being showcased. I would add that the history of art is not all about a handful of great artists. It is also about many thousands of little-known artists who made a small but distinct contribution to the field. BD2412 T 01:16, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
- Regarding your objection to #2, perhaps there is a way to combine #1 and #2 so that they can work at the same time? For instance, something along the lines of, "Introduce users to the most important topics in a topic area, prioritizing the highest quality content, if available." I agree that we don't want to prioritize showing off the best articles over presenting a logical overview of the subject. But, if FA/GA content is available, it would make sense to direct readers to those articles first. ‑Scottywong| [confer] || 00:04, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by MJL
- Comment. Okay, so I have a unique perspective in this portal affair. Unlike seriously 99% of people in the world, I was a person who would actually visit portals semi-regularly before I started editing. Here is my take on this proposal:
- I think portals are perfect for helping users get into the weeds of a topic area as well as being a good introduction.
- Not sure I have any clue that I get where Lev is coming from on this. A portal done right would essentially be structured in a Wikipedia:Summary style with more visibility for well-written articles. There are ways you can nudge a reader towards, say, a GA-class article rather than a stub.
- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- If this is incidental, I don't mind it. I just don't think it should be a primary focus for portals if they are reader-facing (which honestly, they don't have to be).
- Nope. I'm not into it. That'd be a lot of maintenance for not that much payoff. Portal:Current events should be the only one like that.
- That's all I got. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 01:46, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
- @MJL: to your #5, just FYI the template {{transclude selected current events}} automatically extracts subject-specific entries from Portal:Current events subpages and thus significantly reduces the maintenance required; that template is in use on Portal:Nigeria, Portal:Chess and many other portals. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:09, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- @UnitedStatesian: The template has been known to give bugged out results for certain portals though, right? –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 17:17, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- @MJL:I think careful parameter selection (and complete avoidance on certain types of portals) largely eliminates that risk. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:21, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- @UnitedStatesian: That does change the calculation a bit then. Still, it probably shouldn't be considered a "core" purpose or goal of all portals. It feels like just a nice thing to tack onto some. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 17:29, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- @MJL:I think careful parameter selection (and complete avoidance on certain types of portals) largely eliminates that risk. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:21, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- @UnitedStatesian: The template has been known to give bugged out results for certain portals though, right? –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 17:17, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- @MJL: to your #5, just FYI the template {{transclude selected current events}} automatically extracts subject-specific entries from Portal:Current events subpages and thus significantly reduces the maintenance required; that template is in use on Portal:Nigeria, Portal:Chess and many other portals. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:09, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by BD2412
- My comments:
- - absolutely, let's have this.
- - absolutely, let's have this too. Well-written articles on minor aspects of a field still display the breadth of the field.
- - I see no reason not to do this.
- - This is more the purview of WikiProjects.
- - Yes, and we should find ways to coordinate the activity of main page ITN work (or revive Wikinews to a greater degree).
- Thanks. BD2412 T 04:19, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by Kusma
- My thoughts:
- - yes, that should be a big part of what portals do (and few portals are currently very good at this -- there should be more than the main article lead, a category tree and a navbox).
- - yes, we should draw attention to our best work. (DYKs could also be seen as part of this)
- - absolutely, portals should advertise that Wikipedia is not completed and always needs new editors, and try to engage readers
- - In a systematic way, that should be done by WikiProjects. In less systematic ways, this is covered by the previous point.
- - That is a huge amount of work, and should ideally be done on Wikinews. A proper NPOV balance here is also very difficult to achieve. This shouldn't be outlawed, but it is not a central purpose of all portals.
- Good suggestions overall, though. —Kusma (t·c) 11:11, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by Thryduulf
- I support all of these, but 5 should be optional - a portal that does not do this should not be seen as having "failed" or be used as a reason for deletion. In a fast-moving field (e.g. UK politics) this will be a mammoth task and the latest developments are not always going to be the most important; in a slow-moving field (e.g. Shakespeare) there will be long periods of time without major developements; in very broad scoped portals (e.g. Science) there is just too much going on in too many disparate areas for this to be that useful. For portals with a relative moderate scope in moderately-paced fields (e.g. Rail transport) then it will be a useful thing that can be accomplished. Thryduulf (talk) 12:41, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by BritishFinance
- I think the above list is highlighting a core problem with portals. In essence, Portals are uniquely about highlighting FA/GA content (e.g. they are not really "portals", but more like a gallery or emporia of rated articles). Because our FA/GA articles in a given topic area are not always correlated with the most important sub-topics, Portals have been importing non-GA/FA articles to beef up this aspect. However, this is where they squarely conflict, and fork, with the topic-Main Articles, which is the best structured and scrutinized guide to the topic in WP (by definition). Main Articles also equipped with the main NavBoxes on the topic, which is another area the Portals have been duplicating (e.g. acting as a navigational guide). To resolve this, I think that portals should commit more to going one of two ways:
- A. Being Gallerias. Stop trying to duplicate the Main Articles/Navboxes, and become a unique galleria of interesting articles in a topic. Such a galleria will not act as a topic-guide (which the Main Article is, and we want to avoid forking), but a series of galleries on selections of articles that topic-enthusiast readers could find interesting. For example, as well as listing the highest-ranked topic articles (the original FA/GA purpose of portals I believe), we could list the "most read" topic articles (like a top 10), the "most edited" topic articles, the "largest" topic articles, and other noteworthy/interesting samples of the article directory. This would be a unique purpose of a topic portal (not replicated anywhere else), and would avoid duplication/forking with the Main Article+NavBoxes and the WikiProjects. OR;
- B. Be a true portal. The WP term "portal" is a bit misleading as WP portals are not real portals in the sense a reader would expect. Because the Main Article (plus its Main NavBoxes), is really the true "content portal" (e.g best way to navigate the topic), portals could take on more of the heavy lifting on acting as a window into the WikiProjects. In fact, there are many portals and font WikiProject pages that look very alike? We either want a person to read and/or contribute. Reading is either the Main Article (for structured content guide), or the Galleria-focus (per A. above for "interesting" slices of WP-content on the topic). However, contributing means quickly accessing into the world of the WikiProject. In this regard, Portals should be the "front page" of a WikiProject (and visa versa).
- Therefore, as I read the above list, I end up with the following:
- - This is the job of the topic Main Article, and in 99% of cases, the Main Article is far more heavily edited and scrutinized than the portal. I have spent the last few weeks at MfD seeing portal-after-portal who give a forked and materially inferior guides to the topic than the Main Article. In all cases, we should stop portals trying to focus on this area (e.g. it is neither A or B above).
- The original "galleria" concept of portals (per A. above). Yes, but, we need WikiProject/broader input into these lists, and we need more than just FA/GA to male portals viable (per my point A. above - make it a more interesting galleria or other selections of topic-articles); I am not sure readers are that into FA/GA per se.
- The "portal into WikiProjects" concept, that I think we should consider (per B. above); however, why not go the full step and make the portal the front page of the WikiProjet (and visa versa). It would automatically link WikiProjects into the Main Article, which would be a big plus, and would really give portals a future?
- This is a duplication of 2 and of 3. We should have WikiProjects inputting into the list of "galleria" content per item 2, and I think we should make portals into the front page of WikiProjects (per B. above); in any case, if 2. or 3. are done without full WikiProject input, we are back to forking (and what we see at MfD).
- We just don't have the bandwidth or resources to do this in a meaningful way. Only if the portal became a true "portal" (per B. above), AND the WikiProject on the topic was very active, could this be contemplated. I don't think anybody would object to a WikiProject doing this (but again, what item B. is preferred).
- Really sorry for the long response, but I am trying to get to core principals that could materially alter the future usefulness of portals (and give them a future), and avoid their current, and quite dramatic, state of abandonment and inferior duplication of items found elsewhere on WP. Britishfinance (talk) 21:05, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
- Britishfinance, I agree that the main article is always going to be the best text-based, linearly structured treatment of a topic that we will have. On the other hand, many of our articles are very long and fail to give a good at-a-glance impression of the topic. That's a niche where portals could play a role. Most currently don't, partly because we select content to display based on article quality, not on relevance to the topic. (Some of TTH's infamous navbox based one minute portals actually did a better job at this than the handwritten ones). —Kusma (t·c) 09:13, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks Kusma. If portals try to make up for any failings in the structure/lede etc. of the Main Article, with an at-a-glance impression, they could then end up further down the rabbit hole of forking? E.g. if the Main Article has such issues, isn't it better to spend time fixing the Main Article (e.g. better lede, better sectioning etc.), in a more heavily edited and scrutinized environment, rather than trying to "overlay" a fix on the portal page? In many MfDs, where the Main Article is tagged for issues, and has been for years, the portal is usually in even worse shape?
- I would like to find a role that could give portals a real future (hence my A and B above), but I just can't see one where a portal is providing any sort of alternative topic guide to the Main Article + NavBox? Was that was a concept that made more sense a decade ago where Main Articles were less developed, and NavBoxes might not have existed? However, if a portal was a unique galleria of different interesting sections of the thousands of articles that exist on a topic (A. above), AND/OR, the front page of the WikiProject (B. above), then I could see some kind of a future there. thanks. Britishfinance (talk) 09:39, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
- Britishfinance, both of your directions A and B have some rather attractive points. However, I am not sure that these things and the "overview" have to be mutually exclusive. A tab approach (look at Portal:Canada for the technical realisation) might be able to do both A and B, and we could include a page that has a "slideshow" type box for all of the provinces of Canada as well as maps and a couple of high level subarticles of Canada. Clever use of transclusion (or Wikidata) could make the maintenance effort bearable (although the downside is that article lead sections are not always written to be perfect for use in a portal box), and of course the other option is to make all static content as timeless as possible (don't include BLPs, don't include "current" presidents etc.) As for the history: portals were created mostly as mini main pages, based on an idea coming from the French Wikipedia. We already had navboxes similar to today, but the category system was still a bit of a mixture between a tree system and a tag system (it has much improved since). Personally I have never been too fond of navboxes; I prefer to use article links, categories or portals. —Kusma (t·c) 10:39, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks Kusma, and very interesting re history. I also agree that A and B do not need to be exclusive – E.g. it could be the front page of the WikiProject and have galleria of various interesting cross-sections of the topic directory (as decided by the WikiProject). thanks. Britishfinance (talk) 19:13, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
- Hmm, I hadn't thought about tabs. I would support purpose #2 (galleria) if it was on a separate tab from the main portal page. (Or even down "below the fold" on the main portal page.) – Levivich 19:57, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
- Britishfinance, both of your directions A and B have some rather attractive points. However, I am not sure that these things and the "overview" have to be mutually exclusive. A tab approach (look at Portal:Canada for the technical realisation) might be able to do both A and B, and we could include a page that has a "slideshow" type box for all of the provinces of Canada as well as maps and a couple of high level subarticles of Canada. Clever use of transclusion (or Wikidata) could make the maintenance effort bearable (although the downside is that article lead sections are not always written to be perfect for use in a portal box), and of course the other option is to make all static content as timeless as possible (don't include BLPs, don't include "current" presidents etc.) As for the history: portals were created mostly as mini main pages, based on an idea coming from the French Wikipedia. We already had navboxes similar to today, but the category system was still a bit of a mixture between a tree system and a tag system (it has much improved since). Personally I have never been too fond of navboxes; I prefer to use article links, categories or portals. —Kusma (t·c) 10:39, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
- Britishfinance, I agree that the main article is always going to be the best text-based, linearly structured treatment of a topic that we will have. On the other hand, many of our articles are very long and fail to give a good at-a-glance impression of the topic. That's a niche where portals could play a role. Most currently don't, partly because we select content to display based on article quality, not on relevance to the topic. (Some of TTH's infamous navbox based one minute portals actually did a better job at this than the handwritten ones). —Kusma (t·c) 09:13, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by Robert McClenon
RMcC on Proposal 1
- - No. The main article on a topic should introduce and summarize the topic. Editors who want to focus on introducing the topic should be encouraged to work on improving the article.
- - The Main Page is a portal to the encyclopedia, and it is a showcase for a Featured Article, and for a few other things.
- - WikiProjects should advertise themselves.
- - Not sure I understand, but think I disagree.
- - Why not?
Robert McClenon (talk) 05:14, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by Knowledgekid87
My responses:
- - I am unsure what if any navigational aid portals will accomplish unless they are properly linked.
- - Portals are best to showcase featured content as an encouragement to aim for good articles.
- - Projects need editors, if there is a way to get editors to join Wiki-projects then I am all for it. As it is Projects are already linked to portals.
- - As others have said, this is an area for Wikiprojects.
- - This should only be done if portals grow to be large and successful.
- Knowledgekid87 (talk) 01:21, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by Sm8900
- - yes, it is highly beneficial to enable users to find articles more easily.
- - yes, as navigational overviews, highlighting good articles, seems totally fine.
- - it is very worthwhile draw more editors to Projects
- - I think portals are a tool for anyone who wishes to use them. so allowing them to be a tool for Projects seems totally fine to me.
- - Yes. in doing so, we are not keeping readers up to date, we are keeping articles up to date. that doesn't make Wikipedia into a news service; it makes it into Wikipedia; i.e. an encyclopedia that anyone can edit any time, to add new data when appropriate.
--Sm8900 (talk) 15:53, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by Scottywong
- - I see this as being the main purpose of portals. While articles also naturally act as a navigational aid, portals are distinctly different. Articles require you to read through a significant portion of the article to find links to related topics. By contrast, portals act more like a concept tree, allowing you to quickly view a broad topic and rapidly understand its different facets without having to read an entire article on the details.
- - While I agree that articles shouldn't necessarily be selected based on quality alone, I think it makes sense to prioritize higher quality articles over lower quality ones.
- - I think that portals should primarily benefit readers. If we do too much to prioritize WikiProjects and other internal wiki-stuff, we'll end up confusing casual readers.
- - This can (and should) be done more effectively within the subpages of the Wikiproject itself.
- - To the extent that portals should be kept up-to-date and relevant. If the subject is one that is rapidly changing and growing, then it is important that the selected articles are regularly updated to reflect new articles on new topics in that emerging field.
‑Scottywong| [soliloquize] || 17:33, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by Hecato
For the sake of the Consensus-o-meter. Also it gives me a chance to respond to some ideas above without WP:BLUDGEONing too much.
- - I think Kusma said it best. Few portals currently do this (well) and I think that is a big part of the reason why Portals are unpopular in large parts of the community. I do not agree with the idea that articles should be the only way to navigate Wikipedia. Navigation per hyperlinked nouns in running text is a great navigational method and one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so successful, but it also comes with its downsides. A portal can be more focused and deliberate in its navigation. People don't have to scan a text first to find the important topics. And it can be more extensive than some (quickly overfilled) navbox, which requires manual hovering to get a glimpse of what each topic is about.
- - I think this makes sense as well, but I think it should be a secondary goal of portals. BD2412 made an especially good point in so far that showing random selections of high quality articles can give a wider overview of the topic area.
- - I think we can do this without infringing too much on the first two purposes. I do not see any real downsides. Though Scottywong maybe has a point in that portals should primarily serve the readers. But a modest introduction to the associated WikiProject at the bottom half of the portal should be acceptable.
- - An interesting idea by Bermicourt. But after reading some of the arguments here I also think this should only be incidental rather than done on purpose by the portal designer. A related question we should discuss later would be whether red links in portals are acceptable as a way to encourage editing.
- - It makes sense for some portals, but like Thryduulf said, it should be optional. Only some portals should manually keep readers up to date and even then, it should only be done when there are already articles about these new developments. There are ways to do this by transcluding from the Current Events portal and Wikinews. Both are somewhat limited in their coverage though.
--Hecato (talk) 19:03, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
- (FWIW, I already counted you as a "yes" on all 5 points, as you were the proposer. But, it doesn't change the percentages that much either way.) ‑Scottywong| [verbalize] || 00:40, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Scottywong: I think you forgot to count Thryduulf then. The count was 10 before I added myself as 11. They did not have a headline either. --Hecato (talk) 00:44, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- Ahh ok, you might be right, thanks. ‑Scottywong| [express] || 03:25, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Scottywong: I think you forgot to count Thryduulf then. The count was 10 before I added myself as 11. They did not have a headline either. --Hecato (talk) 00:44, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- (FWIW, I already counted you as a "yes" on all 5 points, as you were the proposer. But, it doesn't change the percentages that much either way.) ‑Scottywong| [verbalize] || 00:40, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by SportingFlyer
Seeing how this discussion has been constructive so far, I thought I'd jump in as I had originally steered very clear.
- 1. Yes. I think there's some confusion now as portals should now serve as introductions or showcases as a specific topic. I think the "main article" argument is a logical fallacy, as the portals are meant to showcase not only the main article, but different elements of the topic the main article may not cover. I just updated a specific portal I'm very familiar with, and while I learned some things - portals should best be aimed at people who want to learn more about a specific topic area, as opposed to being a page users go to on a regular basis. The best portals do an excellent job of showcasing content and drawing you into the encyclopaedia, which is a bit different from how I think people access the encyclopaedia generally (Google a topic -> click the Wikipedia result.) It should also put all of the navigational aids in one spot for easy reading.
- 2. Yes. Portals should be a way to showcase the best-written articles on a topic. There are only 365 days in the year on the main page, but a good article in a specific topic should be advertised in portal space.
- 3. Yes Though this shouldn't be their specific purpose - I wouldn't mind seeing portals replace the main pages of WikiProjects
- 4. This dovetails in with 3, but I don't think it's their primary purpose.
- 5. No. SportingFlyer T·C 23:51, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
Response by Bermicourt
- My comments:
- - definitely, let's have this, but let's ensure it's well linked as a navaid unlike most current portals because the ex-guidelines didn't encourage strong linking.
- - this is not essential, but enhances the 1st purpose.
- - why not?
- - I have found them invaluable for this purpose and created or expanded thousands of articles because I had a clear overview of the gaps and coverage. It is not well understood, however, and the guidelines need to explain how to get the best out of this function.
- - This is maintenance intensive and will only work for some portals e.g. Portal:Germany. It should be seen as "nice to have" not essential.
- Can someone update the consensus-o-meter? Cheers. Bermicourt (talk) 11:47, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Consensus-o-meter
Total | Percent | ||
---|---|---|---|
One | 10.5 | 13 | 81% |
Two | 11.5 | 13 | 89% |
Three | 10.5 | 13 | 81% |
Four | 6 | 13 | 46% |
Five | 5.5 | 13 | 42% |
I know it's not a vote, but I did want to get a rough feel for consensus here thus far. Everyone has agreed to point one, there is mostly agreement on points two and three, and there is less agreement on point four. Point five has the least amount of support, though (numbers-wise).
It might be more helpful to pick apart the points of more contention to really figure out what the consensus is there. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 17:29, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
- I'm not so sure it's a straight yes/no for all of them, rather a must/should/can/shouldn't/cannot (I don't recall any must nots). Thryduulf (talk) 21:49, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
I updated the meter to capture more recent votes. I gave a full point for any , a half point for any or , and no points for any . ‑Scottywong| [verbalize] || 17:40, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think it's encouraging to see 3 out of 5 proposals appear to be for the most part supported, this means that we can build upon that going forward. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:43, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
Off-topic discussion
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Another ListI tried, above, to include a list of possible purposes of portals that were discussed in an RFC a few months ago. It had eight points. Do I get a chance to propose it, or has it been overtaken by a five-item list, or can they be compared to each other? Robert McClenon (talk) 06:09, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
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Proposal 1 summary
It would seem to me that items 1-3 of proposal 1 have gotten pretty strong consensus. I would propose that we include those 3 goals in the guideline for now, and in the meantime, we can see if any other proposals for goals are put forth that gain consensus. ‑Scottywong| [gossip] || 23:55, 19 November 2019 (UTC) I've listed those three goals (and slightly reworded them) on the main page at User:Scottywong/Portal guideline workspace#Introduction and summary for now, to keep track of them. They can still be changed at any time. ‑Scottywong| [spill the beans] || 00:08, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Purpose proposal 2
In July 2019, I proposed the following possible reasons for portals:
- 1. Showcasing our best content to readers. The Main Page, for example, is a portal with this very purpose. The Main Page is also very labor-intensive. Showcasing is work.
- 2. Navigating the encyclopedia. Along with lists, navigation templates, and categories, portals are one way readers can navigate the encyclopedia.
- 3. Containing content not available elsewhere on the encyclopedia. Some editors have stated that portals contain content, so that content is harmfully deleted when portals are deleted.
- 3A. Unique, forked or transcluded encyclopedic content
- 3B. Explanatory content such as guidance and reviews (others?)
- 4. Planning and management of WikiProjects. Portals allow editors to keep track of the current and planned scope of the project's coverage.
- 5. Metatext and reviews of the topic.
- 6. A statement of the importance of the topic. The provision that portals should be about "broad subject areas" is more commonly remembered and quoted than the qualifying clause, "which will attract readers and portal maintainers". A portal is seen as a declaration that a topic is a broad subject area.
- 7. An invitation to readers and editors to develop particular articles in a topic area.
- 8. Fun, or exercise. Some editors like making portals.
Robert McClenon (talk) 21:38, 18 November 2019 (UTC) I think that this list of reasons to create portals is descriptive, in that it lists reasons why editors create portals, while Proposal 1 is normative, listing reasons why we may think that portals should be created. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:40, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
Collapsed at request of moderator. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:40, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
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I will try to map between Proposal 1 and Proposal 2:
Robert McClenon (talk) 21:38, 18 November 2019 (UTC) |
- @Robert McClenon: I'd encourage you to simply state your proposal independently, rather than trying to map your proposal to the previous one. I think that will just increase confusion. Put forth the proposal that you think is best, and we'll comment on it. ‑Scottywong| [confess] || 00:42, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
Statement by Scottywong
@Robert McClenon: One thing I'm not clear on: do you personally support all 8 of these above goals for portals, or are you simply putting them out for discussion? If you don't support all 8 of these goals, I think it would be good for you to post your thoughts on the validity of them. ‑Scottywong| [soliloquize] || 23:49, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
As far as I can see, goals 3, 6, and 8 are the only ones that are significantly different than the goals put forth in proposal 1. And personally, I would put a next to goals 3, 6, and 8 in your list. I don't believe that these should be included in the stated goals for portals. ‑Scottywong| [soliloquize] || 23:49, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with Scotty. – Levivich 00:25, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- I also agree with Scottywong. I'm also unclear with what you mean by number 5. Number 8 is fine as a statement of fact, but it shouldn't be a purpose of portals in the same way that people enjoying fixing typos isn't a purpose of articles. Thryduulf (talk) 10:32, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- I am not presenting any of these as a valid purpose of portals, at this time. This was a list that I pulled together a few months ago, summarizing all of the arguments for or reasons for portals. If I am asked to comment on what I think are their merits, I will. I was offering this list for what I saw as completeness. If you want me to rate them, I will. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:07, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Discussion: Criteria for determining which topics should have portals
Slightly off-topic discussion about what articles should be used in a portal
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Wikipedia already has three solid processes for highlighting quality material, these being FA determinations, GA determinations, and DYK. Although articles making it to DYK are often not FA or GA material, they do go through a heightened level of scrutiny and editing by DYK participants before the content is able to make it to the main page. I see no reason to reinvent the wheel on this, although there are some neat little articles that have not been evaluated for GA status for which I would not object to a process to have them featured on a portal. I would prefer that we not use portals to highlight poor articles in need of improvement. That's what WikiProjects are for, and we can use portals to promote the WikiProjects more directly. I do think, however, that we can use the potential for being featured on a portal as a means to encourage editors to work on content in specific areas. Some editors like to collect GA/FA/DYK badges, and I see no reason why we can't offer similar rewards to editors who create or improve content sufficient to get featured in a portal. BD2412 T 04:10, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
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With respect to the question of which topics should have portals, there have been some suggestions in the past to tie portals in to WP:VITAL at some level, although even in the top 100, not every "vital" topic is actually a good fit for a portal (for example, I'm not sure what a portal for Knowledge or even Country or Ethnic group would look like), but that would be my starting point. I think that we should definitely not have portals keyed to individual persons, which we begin to see a lot of with level 3 vital articles (i.e. the top 1,000). I would actually support a system where we set a maximum number of portals (say, 500 or 750) and then have a process similar to that used at WP:VITAL to hammer out the list of those that should exist. As I have mentioned above, I also think that we should allow sub-portals under primary portals to explore specific concepts within a topic. BD2412 T 22:40, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
I have a crazy suggestion that not everyone will probably like: what if we created a page where users could suggest/request an idea for a portal, and allow the community to discuss it for a short time and decide whether that topic is deserving of a portal? This would give the community a chance to judge whether a topic is broad enough, has enough quality articles, has an active enough WikiProject, and ensure that there are editors committed to regularly maintaining the portal... before the work of creating the portal is done. WP:Request for portal or something. This wouldn't negate the need for clear inclusion criteria in a guideline, but could possibly supplement it. This would ensure that rogue editors can't unilaterally decide to create thousands of inappropriate portals, and then force the community to nominate them all for deletion individually. It would also prevent an editor from going through all the hard work of creating a portal, just to later discover that the community doesn't support having a portal on that topic. Just an idea. Thoughts? ‑Scottywong| [speak] || 23:44, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- I would support something like that. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 00:50, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- I would only support this if it leads to the creation of rules, i.e. it's not a continual, ongoing process, but rather a one or two month committee. One of the advantages of SNGs is they provide users the ability to create articles with the knowledge they will be kept at AfD. We should strive for similar rules here, but I don't mind the idea of gaining consensus on what the rules should be based on different topic examples. SportingFlyer T·C 02:49, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- This is not a bad idea and could solve several issues; formalizing the usefulness of the topic and identifying registered topic maintainers, the absence of which for a period would automatically send the portal into another process (e.g. moved to WikiProject, deleted etc.), until new topic maintainers appear. Portals with no proper topic maintainers (who have topic expertise or WikiProject involvement), is a core problem of portals. It recognizes that portals are not articles, but tools/showcases, and need active topic maintainers, or the showcase begins to decay. Britishfinance (talk) 22:57, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Well rather than discuss what topics should have portals I am taking the opposite route to narrow things down:
- Portals should not be localized - Any given portal must be able to reach out to a broad worldwide audience as determined by consensus.
- Examples include Portal:Middle-earth, North Palatine Uplands, Portal:Dragon Ball. Note: In regards to BD2412's idea above, some "vital list" areas that were portals have already been deleted or are up for deletion (examples: Painting, and Weather). This seems like a case by case basis as determined by consensus for now until this one area can be addressed at a later time.
This is all I have for now... - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 00:49, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- My hunch is that if portals are limited to a smaller set of most important topics, then editors who are inclined to work on portals will focus their efforts on that set, including things like painting and weather. I also generally support merging subtopic portals into supertopic portals of greater importance, with the understanding that some substantial vetting will need to be done to insure that material merged in is proper and up to date. BD2412 T 01:20, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Yeah but "most important topics" are open to debate as some subjects have multiple layers of media connected to different subjects. Portals have to provide a neutral point of view and when they become too large doing that may pose an even bigger challenge trying to cover all of the scopes. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:28, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- The "most important topics" are the ones that have the most readers and editors. I agree strongly with
if portals are limited to a smaller set of most important topics, then editors who are inclined to work on portals will focus their efforts on that set
(and I think it's true for articles, too). Concentrated effort is better for building an encyclopedia than dispersed effort. – Levivich 02:31, 20 November 2019 (UTC)- It isn't black and white though is what I am trying to say.... Some portals are advertised more than others so those of course would receive more readers over time. There is also the lingering concern about presenting huge portals in a neutral point of view. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:41, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- The "most important topics" are the ones that have the most readers and editors. I agree strongly with
- Yeah but "most important topics" are open to debate as some subjects have multiple layers of media connected to different subjects. Portals have to provide a neutral point of view and when they become too large doing that may pose an even bigger challenge trying to cover all of the scopes. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:28, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Proposal (copied from other header) I viewed this space as the guidelines by which a portal could be created, instead of jumping into whether transclusion is necessary - I view these as two distinct issues.
- A topic should be eligible for a portal if:
- It has an associated WikiProject (though the WikiProject need not be required adopt the portal); or is a topic that does not have its own WikiProject, but would be eligible for a WikiProject (this needs to be better phrased - I know a lot of African content gets tagged as "WikiProject Africa," which should not preclude, say, Uganda from having a portal created for it, and I'm really only thinking about country-level portals here.)
- It has enough content to sustain a portal, which would include at least roughly 50 good and featured articles and several thousand articles within the associated WikiProject.
- The portal has not been automatically generated or has a maintainer.
- Is not Portal:Burger King, the ridiculousness which appears to have started this discussion.
- Other arguments I've seen at MfD are common sense articles about pageviews and such - as long as the portals have a maintainer present and have a large enough content base to exist, I see no reason against having them. For instance, I really fail to understand why Portal:Basketball has been considered a narrow topic in the close per Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Basketball (it only came up twice, and once was my own keep vote) given there are 46,000 basketball-related articles on the encyclopaedia - all that portal needed was a maintainer. SportingFlyer T·C 05:35, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- I would support these as reasonable, many Wiki-projects support the portals they have. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:53, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- SportingFlyer's suggestions seem good to me, although I'd say around 1000 articles would be sufficient, as long as most are not stubs. I dislike the idea that portals should not be "localised" or should have exclusively world-wide interest - most countries I think are potentially broad enough for a portal (not all, e.g. Portal:Monaco seems unlikely) and these are definitely going to be skewed towards people from that region. I also disagree with an absolute prohibition on portals about people - Portal:Donald Trump and Portal:Stephen King might be viable as two examples, worded badly it could also exclude Portal:The Beatles or Portal:Popes and similarly some large corporations are probably viable subjects, e.g. Portal:Microsoft. The existence of a portal at one level should not preclude overlapping portals at a different level, e.g. Portal:Science should not preclude the existence of Portal:Physics and/or Portal:Quantum physics or vice versa, and the same content featuring in multiple portals should not be an issue (e.g. Portal:Military aircraft, Portal:World War II, Portal:United Kingdom and Portal:History might all include content related to the Battle of Britain). Thryduulf (talk) 10:55, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Just asking - does Donald Trump have his own associated WikiProject?!? I don't mind lowering the total articles requirement as long as we have a consistent featured/good articles requirement. SportingFlyer T·C 10:57, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Donald Trump did have his own portal, but it was narrowly deleted at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Donald Trump but my reading of the close is that it would have been kept if it was being actively maintained. All the portals I quote are just examples of the sort of subjects I consider potentially viable in theory rather than assertions that these specific ones are or would be in practice. Thryduulf (talk) 11:15, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- I'd like to take a look at that portal just to see how many potential articles it could hold. It seems far too narrow of a topic for me to support in its present state. SportingFlyer T·C 11:53, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Wayback Machine delivers: [1] --Hecato (talk) 12:21, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Donald Trump has 1,050 pages tagged as within its scope, 676 of them have been assessed as an article or list. A further 64 pages are unassessed, all of which are in the main namespace and so are almost certainly articles or lists with a small possibility of redirects. Again though this was just an example of a single person portal that might be viable to back up my point that single-person portals should not be absolutely excluded, Portal:Jesus would be another example (that was an automated portal that was deleted for being an automated portal, no assessment was made of the topic's potential). Thryduulf (talk) 12:45, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Genuinely surprised that's a WikiProject. Perhaps I need to take a look at the WikiProjects and tighten the guidelines a bit? SportingFlyer T·C 14:26, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- To restate and expand on a point I believe I have made elsewhere on this page, I do not think that we should ever have a portal for an individual person, and for that matter for an individual company, TV show, music group, or sports team (or even sports franchise). BD2412 T 23:05, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- On that I fundamentally disagree with you. Individual people/companies/etc will rarely be suitable for a portal, but an absolute prohibition is excessive, unnecessary and will likely be counter productive at some point in the future. Thryduulf (talk) 11:27, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- I would suggest as an alternative that we allow sub-portals under existing portals with a focus on things like these that are of significance to their super-portal. I can't see the case for a portal for even the most significant individual people in history—Jesus, Marx, Einstein, Newton, Gandhi—they all, I would contend, fit better as featured biographies under a more broadly topical portal. The same goes for bands and companies. Once we allow portals on individual people or ensembles like these, that opens the door to anyone saying, for example, the if we can have a portal on the Beatles, why not one on Megadeth, or R.E.M., or Public Enemy; if we can have a portal on Gandhi, then why not one on Jimmy Carter or Mother Teresa or Steve Wozniak? BD2412 T 12:36, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with you about "opens the door", but what's a sub-portal? (further complication?) DexDor (talk) 12:47, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- Portals on individuals will be far too limited in scope. There are only about ~50 WikiProjects dedicated to individuals, 45 of them are individuals in bands, 5 are American politicians (would say presidents but Hillary Clinton has one), and 1 is the remnants of the Gian Lorenzo Bernini WikiProject. I would agree a ban is necessary, there just won't be enough topics to highlight. SportingFlyer T·C 12:54, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- SportingFlyer, if there won't be enough topics to highlight for most individuals, then an explicit ban will not be necessary. I am not a big fan of portals about people, especially about living people, but could see them make sense for, say, authors who have written many works that each have individual articles (Shakespeare, Dickens, ...) Looking at Wikipedia:WikiProject Shakespeare versus Wikipedia:WikiProject Hillary Clinton, by the numerical criteria I suggested below, Shakespeare would be allowed and Hillary Clinton would not be allowed, which seems correct to me. —Kusma (t·c) 13:24, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with Kusma. If a portal about an individual meets the criteria we agree on then there is no reason or justification for banning such a portal, if such a portal does not meet the criteria then it wont be kept/created whether there is a ban or not. This also answers your question "If we have a portal about X why not one about Y?" - if it meets the criteria you can have one, if it doesn't you can't, whether X and Y are Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich, Los Angeles and Sacramento or Christianity and Pastafarianism. Thryduulf (talk) 14:58, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Problems with WP:VITAL and number of articles in scope
User:BD2412 and User:Knowledgekid87 raised some interesting points. I would like to summarize and expand on those points.
- I see some value in using WP:VITAL to determine some essential portal topics. Having a somewhat objective non-partisan list to fall back on sounds very attractive.
- But I don't think it is the be-all and end-all solution to this question. WP:VITAL contains some umbrella concepts like Philosophy, Science and Technology, which I believe have all the ingredients to be great portal topics. But it also contains important, but rather limited, abstract concepts like Death and Tool. While important, they do not exactly act as broad groups. In fact both Portal:Death and Portal:Tool have recently been deleted (but that may not necessarily be a statement about the subject area, but rather one about the quality of the portals).
- I believe the number of articles in the scope of a topic area to be an important factor. But this comes with its own problems. For once it is hard to measure. WikiProjects tend to have a bot-maintained list of articles in their scope, based on WikiProject banners on article talk pages. But those tend to be incomplete, especially when the WikiProject is new, small or inactive/semi-active.
- Categories tend to create a more complete net of related articles, since they are mandatory in articles. But counting articles in categories is not that easy from a technical standpoint. There is Wikipedia:PetScan, but Categories tend to loop, with sub-categories listing top-categories. So articles might get counted more than once if the scan-depth is too deep. And some category trees tend to loop more than others.
- Another issue might be regional bias. Just by the nature of en.wiki being in English, there will be more articles about the Anglosphere than about the rest of the world. A topic area might be very broad, but the supply of articles just is not there (yet). Should a portal be created based on the potential for a large number of articles in its scope or just based on the actual number of articles?
--Hecato (talk) 10:48, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- I've never heard it said the bot-maintained article lists are inaccurate - does anyone have any evidence here? SportingFlyer T·C 10:54, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Well it depends on how diligent the WikiProject was in adding their template on the talk pages of related articles. This is manual work and requires some combing through categories for the members of the Project to accomplish. As far as I know the bot just looks for and counts those templates. Maybe I am wrong. --Hecato (talk) 11:07, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) Although the lists are bot-maintained, the articles have to be tagged by humans initially. Some WikiProjects have very active taggers and are very inclusive, others are a lot more focused on what they regard as in scope and/or tag less proactively. The biggest variation based on my subjective experience is in how geographical projects treat biographies, for example a person born in place A, who grew up in place B, was educated in place C, lived in D during their main period of notability which related to place E and retired to F. They will almost always be tagged with the project for place D and/or E, but could have all, none or any combination of A, B, C and F. Topically sometimes only the most specific project is tagged, sometimes multiple levels of the hierarchy are. Overlap is also possible when there are combined geographic and topical categories (e.g. a railway station in Oxfordshire may be tagged with Oxfordshire and UK railways, both of which are child projects of United Kingdom, meaning double counting is possible. So while the bot-maintained lists are a useful guide to the breadth of a project's content they should not be regarded as definitive. Thryduulf (talk) 11:12, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- If wiki-projects don't actively tag their articles then they shouldn't have portals as this is like a key thing with article assessment. It would also give an indication of the lack of a possible lack of activity in said wiki-project. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:24, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Some Portals also focus centrally on more than one area and/or strictly exclude things that do not fall within the scope. An example being American comics and Manga which sound the same but are in two very different universes. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:15, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- If we go with the number of articles in scope route: Maybe there could be a rule like "you have to demonstrate that there are at least 1000 articles in the scope of the portal"? How one demonstrates that would then be left open. With the WikiProject bot-counts being just one possible option. Good idea, bad idea? Too restrictive, not restrictive enough? --Hecato (talk) 17:42, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Its a good idea that would need a consensus here at the workshop on the articles under the scope of said portal. Portals in my opinion should be supported by Wiki-projects, those that are not and don't bother to update their numbers risk portal deletion. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 18:10, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- I would agree with such a restriction. That number might be a bit high - maybe something in the lower hundreds, but definitely not below that. BD2412 T 18:35, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- I'm just saying but, some portals have upwards of 10,000+ articles under the scope. Are we talking about total articles, or total usable articles that are GA, FA, and FL? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 18:39, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Well "usable" articles depends on what the purpose of portals is. If it is only to showcase high quality content then GA/A/FA/FL is probably a good measure, but if purposes include introducing readers to the most important articles in the topic area and/or acting as a window for content that editors can get involved with and improve then "usable" is a much wider set. I think having say at least 5 featured articles and at least say 25 Good / A-class articles would be a more useful metric than total number of articles. I know very little about featured lists so I don't know if requiring any of them would be a good thing or not. Thryduulf (talk) 19:47, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Just to be clear, I meant 1000 articles in the general topic scope. Like in the number of articles listed by a WikiProject, regardless of quality. The portal itself of course does not have to showcase or navigate to 1000 articles, that would be nuts.
- Also regarding the quality articles, I agree. We have agreed to that purpose in Proposal 1 (#2), so there should be a minimum number of quality articles. A conservative number would be like 20 articles of Good quality or better. I can make a proposal if you guys think it sounds reasonable. --Hecato (talk) 20:41, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Alternatively I could omit numbers and just propose whether these two restrictions should be in place at all. But then we will have to vote again on numbers. --Hecato (talk) 21:31, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- I propose we talk about numbers before making a proposal. See subsection immediately below. ‑Scottywong| [spout] || 23:55, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Finding agreement on rough numbers
Before we settle on a solid proposal, let's try to get agreement on some rough numbers. I've seen a lot of the same ideas thrown around when it comes to criteria for determining which topics should have portals. To me, it boils down to the following:
- Portals must always serve accurate, up-to-date, relevant information to readers. The information provided to readers should be balanced and should not suffer from any kind of significant systemic bias. This means that portals needs regular maintenance to ensure that they're keeping up with changes (not only changes within the topic itself, but also changes with quality assessments of articles that are featured in the portal, as well as new articles that are written within that topic). If it can be shown that a portal is not receiving regular maintenance, and as a result it is providing inaccurate or unbalanced information to readers, that portal is likely to be deleted. Signs that a portal are likely to receive regular maintenance include:
- There is an active WikiProject devoted to the subject.
- One or more users have explicitly committed to maintaining the portal.
- Portals should be about a sufficiently broad topic, to ensure that there is a sufficiently rich collection of high quality articles that can be featured within the portal. "Broadness" is generally measured by counting the number of articles that the portal topic comprises, while also taking quality and/or importance assessments into account.
Given the above, what numbers does everyone think should be inserted into the following statements? (If you disagree that any of these should even be requirements for a portal, feel free to say that too.)
- Portal maintenance:
- Portals should have a supporting WikiProject with a minimum of ___ active users, and/or a portal should have a minimum of ___ users that have committed to regularly maintaining the portal.
- For portals that are on a subject that changes rapidly (e.g., a cutting-edge scientific field), portals should receive attention a minimum of ___ times per ___.
- For portals that are on a subject that does not change rapidly (e.g., a historical topic), portals should receive attention a minimum of ___ times per ___.
- Portal "broadness":
- Total number of articles within the scope of the project must be at least ___.
- Total number of articles that are GA/FA/FL within the scope of the project must be at least ____.
- Total number of articles that are B class or higher within the scope of the project must be at least ___.
‑Scottywong| [spout] || 23:55, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- Also, if anyone has the ability to do it easily, it might be instructive for someone to find out what the above statistics are for some of the more "successful" existing portals on Wikipedia. In other words, how many B/GA/FA articles does Portal:Mathematics have underneath it, and how many active users are in its WikiProject? Getting a decent sample of these numbers for existing "good" portals might give us a good idea for how to set reasonable thresholds. ‑Scottywong| [confess] || 00:00, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
SportingFlyer response
Using subheadings to make this easier.
- Portals should be tied to a WikiProject. The number of users of the WikiProject should not matter, but the portal should have at least 1 active maintainer.
- Portals should be maintained at least once a year, though certain portals may be maintained more frequently, especially where the underlying topic changes rapidly. If no changes need to be made to the portal, a maintainer should at least post to the talk page saying the portal has been reviewed.
- A portal must cover the same topic as a WikiProject, and the WikiProject must have at least 2,500 articles, approximately 50 of which must be good or featured articles, and at least 250 articles must be better than start-class.
- We should be able to run a query to check articles by WikiProject. Obviously this will under-estimate the number of articles since some may not have been tagged, but I don't think this undercount is a problem for determining portal suitability. SportingFlyer T·C 01:53, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Knowledgekid87 response
1.Portal maintenance
- Since it is hard to calculate how many active members a Wikiproject has, we should go with maintainers which I feel should be at least one.
- I have no opinion on subjects that change rapidly as I have not really dealt with any.
- Portals which don't change rapidly should receive attention a minimum of 2 times per month.
2.Portal "broadness"
- A portal must cover the same topic as a WikiProject, and the WikiProject must have at least 10,000 articles. (I am in agreement with Scotty below)
- Total number of articles that are GA/FA/FL within the scope of the project must be at least 100 (seems reasonable, can always be later adjusted)
- Total number of articles that are B class or higher within the scope of the project can vary.
- Knowledgekid87 (talk) 01:59, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf: - I am open to new ideas when it comes to Portal/Wikiproject relationships. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:34, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Scottywong: - I agree with the 10,000 number and the ideal of 450 to 650 portals. I am aware that this would get rid of a lot of smaller portals, but we want portals to be successful. Lets be honest.... we aren't going to have 10,000+ portals on Wikipedia or else this guideline will never make it given the current editor mood. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:24, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Hecato: - 500 articles is far too low now in my opinion as it would mean over 10,000 portals on Wikipedia. The reality as I have said is that the Wikipedia community is unlikely to approve such a thing. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:33, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Kusma's response
I am mostly in agreement as to the general principles. I am not too happy with any fixed numbers, but that may turn out to be necessary to find a compromise acceptable to all sides (just like our sports notability guidelines are not perfect, but prevent a lot of unproductive discussion). Basically one question I have is how much portals should display our systemic biases: based on quality content and wikiproject activity, we could easily create a dozen portals on European and American military history topics, but end up merging all of Africa into a single portal. Perhaps the existence of quality articles criterion should be relaxed a bit if necessary for a more neutral selection of portal topics. or perhaps we should just highlight our awareness of the systemic bias inherent in our quality content and advertise for help in addressing the issue. —Kusma (t·c) 08:58, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- But let's go for some numbers. I think 500 related articles should be enough, and if 20 of them are GA or better, that will do (20 is a fairly typical number of selections in a portal selection box, and the number we ask for should be related to what is necessary for a portal). Some of my favourite portals are Portal:Solar System (10000+ total articles, 100+ GA or better) and Portal:Opera (10000+ articles, 70 GA or better), and they easily make the cut. Looking through the Germany project (I maintain Portal:Germany, which has almost 100k articles in its scope, 1000 of them GA or better, but lots of those are really military history articles), my cutoff would not allow a portal for Munich at the moment, but could possibly allow one in the future if a dedicated crowd comes and works on this. —Kusma (t·c) 11:00, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Thryduulf's response
I agree with pretty much everything Kusma says. I dislike Knowledgekid's implied requirement for a 1:1 relationship between portals and WikiProjects - multiple smaller wikiprojects collaborating on a broader portal should not be excluded, nor should a very broad wikiproject maintaining ones with broad and narrow focus (e.g. Physics may wish to maintain a general portal and also one for Quantum physics).
As for numbers, I think that as long as a portal is being actively maintained it is irrelevant how many (or which) people are doing it. Activity is probably best monitored by responsiveness - queries on a portal talk page should generally receive a response within about a week. An arbitrary number of edits or other actions in an arbitrary time period is just that - arbitrary. The only thing we should be caring about is whether the portal remains accurate and up-to-date (relative to our articles), and that is going to vary markedly by topic area. Portal:Current events will fail in days but a historical topic may remain within standard for years without significant action. Portal Olympics might need approximately daily attention during a games, but there may be no changes for many months between events; a portal about disasters or extreme weather will similarly have peaks and troughs but not on a predictable schedule.
If anyone has queries or concerns about the reliability or up-to-dateness of a portal then they should either (a) WP:SOFIXIT if they can, or if they can't, (b) detail their concerns on the talk page. Only if that doesn't get a response within about a week should there be any concerns over activity levels.
Regarding content numbers, 20 GA or better articles seems like a good marker but only if that drops below about 15 should an active portal be considered for deletion, especially if there is a large amount of other featured content. Circa 500 articles in scope, at least 100 better than a stub, seems like a good baseline to me but more is also better. 300 C-class or better articles covering the full breadth of the topic area is better though than 1000 start-class articles about a niche aspect. Thryduulf (talk) 11:55, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- For all those thinking that allowing portals with 20 GA/500 total articles will result in 10,000 portals - that simply isn't the case as there aren't 10,000 topics that could support a portal let alone enough people interested in maintaining that many portals. My reading of the RfCs about ending portals does not suggest that there is any desire among the community to limit the number of portals to an arbitrary level, simply that all the portals that exist should be of good quality, whether that means 5 or 5000. Accordingly I'm very firmly opposed to absurdly high requirements like 10,000 articles or 100 FAs. Thryduulf (talk) 21:16, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- That's actually exactly what happened in the past. There was no firm guidance given on what topics should have portals, and Wikipedia suddenly had thousands of portals, most of which had no maintainers and therefore rotted and died. No one is trying to artificially limit the number of portals to a specific, arbitrary level (see my response to your comments below), but we're trying to enact some common-sense guidelines to prevent history from repeating itself. ‑Scottywong| [spout] || 01:17, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Yes indeed that's the aim, but if we enact maintenance and quality guidelines then we will not get the thousands of portals last time - but even if we did get thousands of portals that meet the criteria they will, by definition, be maintained and useful so the project will benefit. Whether a portal gets abandoned or not is completely independent of anything to do with how big it is or how many other portals there are. Thryduulf (talk) 09:07, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- That's actually exactly what happened in the past. There was no firm guidance given on what topics should have portals, and Wikipedia suddenly had thousands of portals, most of which had no maintainers and therefore rotted and died. No one is trying to artificially limit the number of portals to a specific, arbitrary level (see my response to your comments below), but we're trying to enact some common-sense guidelines to prevent history from repeating itself. ‑Scottywong| [spout] || 01:17, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Hecato's response
I must say I am generally not a fan of this format. "Plug in the numbers" is begging the question. We must accept your premises to answer the poll. Not that I necessarily disagree with your premises.
Since this is already rolling though, I basically support what Kusma and Thryduulf said.
- 20GA or better.
- 500+ articles in scope.
- At least one WikiProject in scope with at least one active person. The portal should not be necessarily be tied directly to one WikiProject though.
- Some portals need more attention than others, I am against setting a hard rule. This should be decided on a case by case basis. This binary choice sounds bad to me. Some portals will probably not even need monthly maintenance, simply because there won't be new content to add. With transclusions a lot of content updates itself without much maintenance required. Maintainers will just add new quality content and fix some potential issues. Portals like Olympics will definitely need updates several times per month during the events, but not outside of the event.
- Querying maintainers for still being active is fine. That reminder-bot idea sounds good to me.
- We should show some leniency with active portals that were created before this guideline was in place (assuming it will be accepted by the community). Give them some time to get up to standard before jumping to deletion.
--Hecato (talk) 14:56, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Levivich's response
- Portal maintenance:
- I agree that portals should have at least one committed maintainer, or at least one committed active WikiProject. A "committed active WikiProject" is one where someone responds to a message on a talk page and says, "yes we're active and committed to maintaining this portal". I'd AGF that if a WikiProject says its active, then it's active. If no one responds on the WikiProject talk page, then it's inactive, even if it's not marked as inactive. (I guess this means at least one active WikiProject editor.)
- I'm persuaded by the arguments above that minimum necessary maintenance activity is going to vary from portal to portal, and for some portals, by time of year. Olympics is a good example. I think perhaps the proof is in the pudding: a portal is being maintained "enough" if it doesn't fall out of date. Any portal that falls out of date is therefore not being maintained "enough". Rather than a minimum-number-of-edits-per-time-period rule (which is easily gamed, cf. admin inactivity criteria), I'd write something in the guideline along the lines of a portal should be deleted as unmaintained if it can be shown that its content is out of date (prior to the deletion discussion... Unlike articles, I don't believe in WP:HEYing portals). Sorry, I know I'm not putting up a number here, but I agree with Thryd that any number would be arbitrary and for any possible number/time period we chose, there would be portals for which that number/time period wouldn't work.
- Portal "broadness":
- Total number of articles within the scope of the project must be at least
2,50010,000. That's a real minimum in my mind to meet the broadness criteria. I would agree to a number like10,000 or50,000. I think of Portal:Solar System, Portal:Opera, Portal:Canada, Portal:Australia, or any of the main page portals (Arts, History, etc.), and it strikes me that we must have 50k articles in those topic areas.So 2,500 strikes me as actually really low, but it's the highest number anyone else has put for this one, so I'll go with 2,500 :-)(Update: upped from 2,500 to 10,000 per comments below.) - Total number of articles that are GA/FA/FL within the scope of the project must be at least 100. All of the above-mentioned portals (I think) have 100+ GA-or-higher articles. I think 50 is the next-highest number anyone has put forward for this one, so I'd consent to 50 as well.
- Total number of articles that are B class or higher within the scope of the project must be at least 200. I would argue against even making this a criteria because the metric, in my opinion, is so unreliable. I have zero faith in WikiProject article classes (and importances). In my experience–admittedly anecdotal–whether an article is Start class or B or A class is a complete and total crap shoot – might as well just roll dice. It entirely depends on the project and the editor making the assessment. I can't tell you how many articles I've seen that are basically GAs categorized as Start class (just because no one has been around to assess it), or start class articles categorized as B class (because the assessor is being extremely generous, perhaps to "beef up" the project's catalog). Yes, I'm bitter about my article creations being assessed too low. :-) I feel like if we make it X number of Y-class articles, WikiProjects will just re-assess a bunch of articles to push themselves (or their portal project) into compliance. The difference with FAs and GAs is that it requires one or more independent editors to review and approve, rather than just being a self-assessment within the WikiProject the way article classes are.
- Total number of articles within the scope of the project must be at least
Scottywong's response
Great responses so far, these are all good ideas. There seems to already be a rough consensus above on how to approach maintenance of portals, and it probably won't end up being the overly simplistic binary choice that I originally proposed above. However, there seems to be a larger disparity in opinions about article broadness. Here's a thought experiment for a different way to approach the problem:
How many portals do you think Wikipedia should ideally have, in total? 10? 100? 1000? As far as I can tell, there are currently around 500, but that number will probably continue to decrease somewhat if the current activity at MFD continues. For the sake of argument, let's say we end up with 200 high quality portals that are being actively maintained, and have an active WikiProject supporting them, such that these 200 portals would survive at MFD. Now, consider that Wikipedia currently has about 6.5M articles total, 2.3M of which are Start-class or higher, 44k of which are GA or higher, and 8.8k of which are FA or FL. Assuming that every article was part of a portal (which is obviously a silly assumption, but go with it for a moment), that would equate to about 32k articles per portal, 11.5k Start+ articles per portal, 221 GA+ articles per portal, or 44 FA/FL articles per portal. Below is a table that shows how these numbers work out if we assume that we have a different number of portals:
Total portal count | Articles per portal | Start+ articles per portal | GA+ articles per portal | FA/FL articles per portal |
---|---|---|---|---|
10 | 644,470 | 231,784 | 4,414 | 882 |
100 | 64,447 | 23,178 | 441 | 88 |
200 | 32,224 | 11,589 | 221 | 44 |
500 | 12,889 | 4,636 | 88 | 18 |
1,000 | 6,445 | 2,318 | 44 | 9 |
5,000 | 1,289 | 464 | 9 | 2 |
10,000 | 645 | 232 | 4.4 | 0.9 |
Many people above seem to have latched onto a number of 500 articles beneath each portal, with at least 20 GA or better articles. At those levels, that means we'd be shooting for somewhere between 2000-13000 portals in total. Keep in mind that there are only about 5000 editors who make 100+ edits per month. In order to satisfy the maintenance requirements for that many portals, we'd need nearly every active editor to commit to maintaining some portals.
Given the analysis above, and the activity that I've seen at MFD over the last few months, my opinion would be that we need to set these thresholds at a high enough level to prevent the same problem of too many portals being created on narrow topics. I would personally vote for a requirement of a bare minimum of 10,000 articles in the topic area of each portal, and at least 100 GA or better articles. That would theoretically allow us to have a maximum of between 450-650 portals (if every article was part of a portal, or every GA+ article was part of a portal), and in reality we'd probably settle down around perhaps half that number of portals. As Levivich points out above, the most successful and most viewed portals easily meet these requirements. ‑Scottywong| [prattle] || 17:12, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- Scottywong, topics are not all the same size, and many large portals suck because they are lacking focus. Mid sized topics tend to have the best portals. Your proposal outlaws Opera although that seems to me to be a wonderful portal and topic. —Kusma (t·c) 18:28, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- I suppose some wiggle room (70 - 100?) can be made for combined GA,FL & FA candidates as WP:Opera has 14,040 pages under their scope. We really shouldn't go too low as there are only so many articles out to feature, and it has to be in a NPOV. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 18:36, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- Perhaps you're right that 100 GA+ articles is a bit too high, considering that there are successful portals that exist with less than 100 GA+ articles. I can see that as a valid argument for reducing it to perhaps as low as 50. However, I still believe that these thresholds need to be set relatively high to ensure that we end up with a reasonable number of portals that are practically maintainable. I would disagree that Portal:Opera is a "mid-sized topic", it's a pretty broad topic. Not as broad as Portal:Music, but I don't think it would be good to go much lower (i.e. narrower) than opera when it comes to portals about music. ‑Scottywong| [comment] || 18:52, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- The now-deleted portal that sold me on portals was a portal on the 1948 Australian tour of England (cricket). There were probably 40-50 good or featured articles on the subject and not a lot of stubs, and the portal did a fantastic job of basically letting me know how much quality content we had on this very specific area, and introducing me to a topic I admittedly didn't know as much about as I thought. It hadn't been maintained in awhile, though, even though it was handmade, though it didn't really need maintenance - just someone checking every so often to make sure it wasn't broken. I'm not necessarily advocating for smaller portals, but in cleaning up some portals I'm noticing that a lot of their good/featured articles are in specific topic areas, Croatia has a lot of good military articles on their wars for instance (which is kind of a shame, really.) I don't really see a problem with setting up portals on narrow topics if the quality of the content is good, but I'm now of the mindset that we should be trying to limit, instead of broaden, the amount of topics we can create portals about. SportingFlyer T·C 04:50, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Perhaps you're right that 100 GA+ articles is a bit too high, considering that there are successful portals that exist with less than 100 GA+ articles. I can see that as a valid argument for reducing it to perhaps as low as 50. However, I still believe that these thresholds need to be set relatively high to ensure that we end up with a reasonable number of portals that are practically maintainable. I would disagree that Portal:Opera is a "mid-sized topic", it's a pretty broad topic. Not as broad as Portal:Music, but I don't think it would be good to go much lower (i.e. narrower) than opera when it comes to portals about music. ‑Scottywong| [comment] || 18:52, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- I suppose some wiggle room (70 - 100?) can be made for combined GA,FL & FA candidates as WP:Opera has 14,040 pages under their scope. We really shouldn't go too low as there are only so many articles out to feature, and it has to be in a NPOV. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 18:36, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- How many portals we should have is, imho, completely the wrong question to ask because it is not a relevant question. There should be no "target" - whether we have 5 or 50,000 portals that meet whatever criteria we deem a portal should meet doesn't matter. What matters is that every portal we do have gives value to our readers. The number of portals that can be maintained is practically unknowable as it depends on how much maintenance a portal requires, and how many people maintain a portal (and there isn't necessarily a 1:1 relationship between portals and portal maintainers). In You also cannot just divide the number of articles of a given class by any number of portals and get a number that is relevant to anything - some topics are broader than others, not every article will be relevant to a portal, some articles will be relevant to more than one. Thryduulf (talk) 21:11, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with Thryduulf that it's not appropriate to target a fixed number of portals. It would be like trying to set a maximum number of navigational boxes, but this can only be evaluated on a topic-by-topic basis. Portals can only be viable in the long term if they are managed like navigation boxes and other navigational aids: the editors interested in the topic area must be the ones actively maintaining the associated portals. (In an ideal world, the interested editors would be part of one or more related WikiProjects, but unfortunately with many WikiProjects stagnant, the interested editors might have to be notified on the talk pages of key related articles.) As long as they are assuming the onus of keeping the portals up-to-date, let them decide the best way to organize the portals they are supporting, just like they organize the related navigational boxes. isaacl (talk) 22:16, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- Re "every portal we do have gives value to our readers" - there have been many examples of portals being bad for readers by presenting out of date or incorrect info (when the corresponding article was correct). DexDor (talk) 21:37, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- That might be poorly worded, I was not saying every portal does or did give value, but that every portal should do this (determining which are and which aren't is the purpose of these guidelines). What matters is whether an individual portal is or is not giving value, how many portals there are that give value is irrelevant. Thryduulf (talk) 23:00, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- This issue has also since been fixed by adding transclusions. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 23:25, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf: To clarify, I'm not suggesting that we literally put a clause in the portal guideline that says "Wikipedia should have no more than 250 portals at any time." This was only a thought experiment, intended to help us get a better idea for the consequences our choice of numbers will have. I think we all agree that there is a finite limit to how many portals Wikipedia can support. That limit is partially defined by how many active editors Wikipedia has, how many of those editors are willing to maintain portals, and how many portals each of those editors is willing to maintain. Additionally, that limit is partially defined by how we design and construct portals, because some methodologies require more maintenance than others. Some topics require more maintenance than others, but all portals require some level of maintenance. However, I don't think anyone can argue that, in the not too distant past, Wikipedia objectively had too many portals; far more than could be practically maintained by the current set of portal editors. This resulted in portals that received no updates for a decade or longer, and many portals that served inaccurate information to readers. In order to prevent this problem from happening again, there must be a force that limits the number and type of portals that can be created. Based on the discussions above as well as the status quo of portals since their inception, there is a strong consensus that portals should only be created for "broad" topics, and the best way to judge the "broadness" of a topic is by counting how many Wikipedia articles are part of that topic. We need to choose numbers that strike the right balance between these two forces: 1) a number that is low enough to allow portals on reasonable topics, not just the broadest possible topics; and 2) a number that is high enough to ensure that Wikipedia has a quantity of portals that are practically maintainable, so that we don't see portals constantly being dragged to MFD because they've been abandoned. That is the aim of this discussion. ‑Scottywong| [confabulate] || 00:11, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- The amount of interest editors have in portals is not known, though, other than to say that based on experience to date, it's pretty low. So trying to estimate an end number of portals isn't possible. It would be better to look for groups of editors actually interested in supporting a portal. Given that editors tend to be overoptimistic in estimating what they'll be able to do (which has an upside: ambition helps drive improvement), I do think there should be active editing from several interested editors for a given portal. The problem that occurred in the past is the creation of a lot of portals by editors not really active in the topic area, and a lack of engagement with the interested editors for the topic. I appreciate that identifying groups one by one and engaging with them is likely going to result in a lot fewer portals. But I can't see any other way to make portals sustainable. Either they get integrated into the normal workflow of the editors most interested in the topic and flourish (as is the case for other navigational aids), or they don't. isaacl (talk) 01:46, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Scottywong: You've missed my point. While there is a theoretical limit to the number of portals Wikipedia can support, what that number is is irrelevant and even if it were it would not be predictable based on article numbers (even if for no other reason than each article may be within the scope of 0, 1 or more than 1 portals). The only thing that matters is that each portal that exists is useful and maintained. The problem with the automated portals was nothing to do with how many there were, simply that they were (generally) not useful. Thryduulf (talk) 09:14, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Are you suggesting that a portal guideline should simply say, "Make sure any portals you create are useful and maintained", and trust that that will be sufficient to prevent another episode where an editor mass-creates 1000 portals on extremely narrow topics that all have to be individually deleted at MFD? The problem is that the word "useful" is far too subjective; everyone has a different definition. I'm sure there are a few people in the world that might consider Portal:Late 18th century opera in northwestern Italy to be "useful", but that doesn't mean that such a portal should exist. The goal here is to create an organizational structure. We need to put some definition behind the word "useful", so that all portal editors/creators are working towards the same goal.
- Also, the number of portals that can be practically maintained is not irrelevant. There's no need to find the exact number, but it would be smart to at least agree on a ballpark number. If we write a guideline that encourages/allows users to create 100,000 portals on the narrowest of topics, that would be an obvious failure on our part to create a sensible guideline that is in the best interests of Wikipedia.
- I would argue that the "usefulness" of a portal depends heavily on whether or not it is actively maintained. Abandonment is one of the primary reasons for deleting portals today. So, if we want portals to remain useful, we need to include a mechanism in the guideline that limits the number of portals to a level that can be practically maintained by the users we have today. ‑Scottywong| [prattle] || 16:14, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think we should just stick with an article scope of 10,000 with GA/FL/FA articles numbering at least 70. I'm sorry but we have to put some limitations on portals until it can be proven that more are needed. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 16:31, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Determining what "useful" and "maintained" mean is the entire point of what we're doing here. When we agree what the minimum requirements are (and 10,000 articles is on order of magnitude too high) then that will automatically limit what portals get created. If anybody mass creates portals again (unlikely) then either they will be good and maintained per the agreed definitions (in which case everybody wins) or they wont be they can be deleted (and nobody loses). None of this makes the total number of portals relevant to whether a portal is or is not good. Thryduulf (talk) 17:50, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think we should just stick with an article scope of 10,000 with GA/FL/FA articles numbering at least 70. I'm sorry but we have to put some limitations on portals until it can be proven that more are needed. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 16:31, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Thryduulf: To clarify, I'm not suggesting that we literally put a clause in the portal guideline that says "Wikipedia should have no more than 250 portals at any time." This was only a thought experiment, intended to help us get a better idea for the consequences our choice of numbers will have. I think we all agree that there is a finite limit to how many portals Wikipedia can support. That limit is partially defined by how many active editors Wikipedia has, how many of those editors are willing to maintain portals, and how many portals each of those editors is willing to maintain. Additionally, that limit is partially defined by how we design and construct portals, because some methodologies require more maintenance than others. Some topics require more maintenance than others, but all portals require some level of maintenance. However, I don't think anyone can argue that, in the not too distant past, Wikipedia objectively had too many portals; far more than could be practically maintained by the current set of portal editors. This resulted in portals that received no updates for a decade or longer, and many portals that served inaccurate information to readers. In order to prevent this problem from happening again, there must be a force that limits the number and type of portals that can be created. Based on the discussions above as well as the status quo of portals since their inception, there is a strong consensus that portals should only be created for "broad" topics, and the best way to judge the "broadness" of a topic is by counting how many Wikipedia articles are part of that topic. We need to choose numbers that strike the right balance between these two forces: 1) a number that is low enough to allow portals on reasonable topics, not just the broadest possible topics; and 2) a number that is high enough to ensure that Wikipedia has a quantity of portals that are practically maintainable, so that we don't see portals constantly being dragged to MFD because they've been abandoned. That is the aim of this discussion. ‑Scottywong| [confabulate] || 00:11, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Re "every portal we do have gives value to our readers" - there have been many examples of portals being bad for readers by presenting out of date or incorrect info (when the corresponding article was correct). DexDor (talk) 21:37, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Britishfinance response
I find SW's analysis very insightful and a smart way of trying to roughly quantify/scale the outcomes of choices. However, I have never really found that issues over the worthiness of a topic are hotly contested at MfD; it is generally apparent whether a topic is broad enough or not to both keeps and deletes (although, I did like SW's suggestion of an RfP approach to creating new portals above). The real issue is abandonment, and specifically the complete absence of any dedicated topic maintainer(s), and any interest by the WikiProject, in the portal. If we had a rule that any portal without a recognized live topic maintainer/WikiProject support – but not a mass-maintainer trying to simultaneously update a wide range of portals without any topic interest or knowledge (per the Transhumanist) – then we would probably get to about 100 core portals. A focus on dedicated topic maintainers is the key here. I have yet to see a portal with a dedicated live topic maintainer/WikiProject support that has been deleted. If we got more clarity on this issue, we would have fewer, but higher quality and relevant portals in WP. If we respected the message that complete abandonment by a live topic maintainer implies, then we could make faster progress in portal-space. The other guidelines are of lesser order/less contentious at MfD. Britishfinance (talk) 23:55, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Portal page views
I am bringing this up here as this is an issue brought up numerous times for those in favor of portal deletion. Should portals be treated like articles where WP:ATA (specifically WP:POPULARPAGE) applies more? This can apply to which portals should have topics if a decision is made regarding the importance of the matter. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:09, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose using page views to decide whether a portal should exist.
- As I see it the reasons why portals have low page views are:
- 1. The entire portal space in general has poor pageviews. Mostly due to not being included well in the navigation process, especially being excluded from mobile. With the few exceptions of a few portals that are well linked. Like the ones on the frontpage.
- 2. The portal itself has especially poor pageviews
- 2a. ...because it is poorly linked
- 2b. ...because it is simply a bad portal
- 2c. ...because the topic area is just not fit for a portal
- Using pageviews to determine whether a portal should exist only assumes 2c can be the case, ignoring the other possibilities. So WP:POPULARPAGE applies to porals as well. At best pageviews can be used to identify portals that might need some work to raise their utility and make them more visible. Topic areas that qualify for having a portal should be determined by other means, like articles in scope, etc. --Hecato (talk) 15:24, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose using page views exactly per Hecato. Thryduulf (talk) 15:29, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose using pageviews. If a topic area is large and well-developed enough to sustain a portal, it should not matter how many readers there are. What matters is that any readers (no matter if it is 3/month or 3000/month) are presented with a suitable high quality portal. Views are also impossible to predict in advance, and asking for large number of views may cause editors to link to portals more than appropriate or necessary and could cause completely unnecessary disruption to article space. (We should talk about linking and discoverability of portals in a future section). Of course it may be more "useful" to work on portals with large numbers of viewers, but it is not realistic to expect people to work on popular pages instead of the pages they are interested in. I mainly see the "views" argument as something that tells us we should maybe relax a notch or two about portals, as whatever we end up doing is only going to be noticed by a small percentage of Wikipedia's readers anyway. —Kusma (t·c) 15:44, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- Still support using page views in some sense although I believe I'm in a minority on this. I can't escape the idea that the proof of the pudding is in the eating: we know if a page is important and useful to a reader by whether or not people are reading it. It's like if you write a book, or a song, you know it's a good book or song based on sales. If no one is buying it then no one is reading or listening to it. I never believed in the philosophy of, "I want to write a great song, even if no one likes it." Well, if no one likes it, then it's not a great song! People like great songs. Great songs get bought and listened to. So I feel the same way about websites, which would include portals (and articles). Nevertheless, the points raised above (which have been raised by others in similar prior conversations) are pretty strong, especially 2a about it not being well-linked. The problem is, if a portal has low page views, you can't tell if it's because of Hecato's reasons 2a (poor inbound linking), 2b (bad design) or 2c (poor topic choice). 2a and 2b can be fixed, 2c cannot be fixed. 2b suggests improving the portal; 2c suggests deleting it; 2a suggests not touching it and instead adding more links from articles, etc. So low page views suggests a problem but doesn't answer what the problem is, and therefore low page views are not in and of itself a reason to delete portals. I think the guideline should discuss this (that low page views is a problem but not a reason for deletion in and of itself). – Levivich 16:04, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose using pageviews. We don't delete content just because it's not seen......we have thousands of articles that are rarely viewed. In no way does page views related to quality.....as people will not know the quality until they click the page. Not like people leave notes indicating a portal is crappie thus deterring others. All about portal link saturation and visibility.--Moxy 🍁 22:19, 21 November 2019 (UTC)‘’
- Support using pageviews. At MfD, low page views are a very reliable indicator of a failed portal (one of the best, imho), and directly link to full abandonment by the maintainer(s) (i.e why support/update something that nobody reads, it is a natural human reaction), which is a very serious situation for a portal. A portal is not content (e.g. like chronicling the existence of an obscure crustation for posterity), it is a tool to showcase/display FA/GA content; if nobody wants to visit your display, then at some stage, you are going to shut it down and walk away to leave it to decay. That is where the problems arise, and where portals can make WP look like a failed/abandoned project. Britishfinance (talk) 23:28, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
- Support using pageviews as an indicator, oppose using pageviews as deletion criteria - I agree with Levivich that pageviews should be used as a measure of how well a portal is doing, and low pageviews should be a sign that there is a problem. I would support language in the guideline to this effect (as well as some best practices for identifying and resolving the problems that are causing low page views). However, I also agree with Hecato that pageviews shouldn't be used as a rationale for deletion, because low page views can have a number of different causes, and deletion is not an appropriate solution to all of those causes. ‑Scottywong| [squeal] || 00:17, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Support using pageviews as an indicator, oppose using pageviews as deletion criteria - This seems to be where consensus is heading, and it gives both sides a bit of what they want. Historically portals have not all been advertised the same is one of the issues for example. I get the feeling that within a few months of these guidelines going into place, portals will be deleted again. The difference at least be something was done to address the long standing issues. The previous guidelines were good for their time but were flawed in the sense of not taking partial portal abandonment into account (it happened to some but not all portals). - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 00:59, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose using page views in any capacity - low page views may mean the page isn't properly advertised or transcluded, but should have no bearing on whether the portal should exist. SportingFlyer T·C 01:06, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think what we're saying is that pageviews can be used as a tool to identify problems (like if a portal isn't properly advertised or transcluded) while also being explicitly excluded from the list of reasons to delete a portal. ‑Scottywong| [chat] || 01:12, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I get that, I'm saying I'd prefer not to use them as a guideline for anything. There are other ways to figure out if portals haven't been transcluded properly. SportingFlyer T·C 04:50, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think what we're saying is that pageviews can be used as a tool to identify problems (like if a portal isn't properly advertised or transcluded) while also being explicitly excluded from the list of reasons to delete a portal. ‑Scottywong| [chat] || 01:12, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Comment: Not all pageviews are created equal. A pageview that occurs in the course of checking a portal to determine whether it has problems that needs fixing counts the same as a pageview that occurs in the course of a reader indulging their interest in the topic. A page that has very few views is likely not being maintained. That said, it is conceivable that a portal is so well constructed mechanically that it functions with very little maintenance, but I do think that an extreme dearth of pageviews is a sign that something is wrong, and that the portal should not exist. I would consider this a valid factor for portals receiving only two or three views per day. BD2412 T 02:03, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I agree that an extreme dearth of pageviews is a sign that something is possibly wrong, but as that something may or may not be anything to do with the portal it really does not indicate whether the portal should or should not exist. Also for some topics interest will wax and wane as things happen or don't happen in the real world - the Olympics portal for example will naturally get many more page views during a games than it will between them, a Disasters portal will get more views in the aftermath of a large disaster than when there hasn't been one for a while, etc. low page views in the fallow periods does not indicate anything is wrong with the portal. Thryduulf (talk) 09:04, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Portals that get higher page views during specific periods of interest can be accommodated by looking at average page views over a longer period. However, to be clear, there are plenty of portals which routinely average dozens of views per day irrespective of events in the world - in fact, there are currently over 250 portals that have averaged more than two dozen views per day over the past two years. In light of that circumstance, I would say that something is definitely wrong with a portal averaging only four or five views per day over the same period. BD2412 T 21:37, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
- I agree that an extreme dearth of pageviews is a sign that something is possibly wrong, but as that something may or may not be anything to do with the portal it really does not indicate whether the portal should or should not exist. Also for some topics interest will wax and wane as things happen or don't happen in the real world - the Olympics portal for example will naturally get many more page views during a games than it will between them, a Disasters portal will get more views in the aftermath of a large disaster than when there hasn't been one for a while, etc. low page views in the fallow periods does not indicate anything is wrong with the portal. Thryduulf (talk) 09:04, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose using pageviews. Doing so is contrary to what Wikipedia stands for: not a popularity contest. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:26, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Oppose using pageviews. Well said. We don't even use pageviews as a deletion threshold for articles; certainly not for categories which are also navaids. It's simply been used to justify deletion by editors who just don't like portals. Bermicourt (talk) 08:57, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
Criteria proposal 1
I'm going to start us off with a formal proposal here, to comment and vote on, and I don't expect that it will be the only proposal in this section (so feel free to create additional proposals if you want). I believe that this is one of the most important elements of a potential guideline, so it deserves a lot of attention. Below is my proposal on criteria for determining which topics should have portals:
There are two primary criteria that must be satisfied:
- Portals must be about a sufficiently broad topic.
- Portals must be actively maintained.
- Broadness
A "sufficiently broad" topic is a subject that has a rich collection of high quality articles that can be featured within the portal. It should be a subject that is broad enough to have many different facets. Typically, topics that are broad enough to support a portal have a minimum of 5,000 Wikipedia articles that are related to that topic. Topics that have a sufficiently rich collection of high quality articles typically have a minimum of 50 Wikipedia articles that are related to the topic and are rated at GA level or higher. This is a guideline and not necessarily a hard limit, and exceptions can be made in cases where it can be shown that there is an active group of editors that are committed to indefinitely maintaining a portal on a somewhat narrower topic. The narrower the topic, the less likely it is that an exception will be made.
- Maintenance
Portals must always serve accurate, up-to-date, relevant, and balanced information to readers. In order to achieve this, all portals require regular maintenance to ensure that they're keeping up with changes (not only changes within the topic itself, but also changes with quality assessments of articles that are featured in the portal, as well as new articles that are written within that topic). If it can be shown that a portal is not receiving regular maintenance, and as a result it is providing inaccurate or unbalanced information to readers, then that portal is likely to be nominated for deletion. There is not a required cadence of maintenance for portals, but it is suggested that all portals are checked at least once every 6 months to ensure nothing is broken, to check for new articles that have recently been created, to check for articles that have recently attained GA or FA status, and generally to ensure that the portal is still serving accurate, up-to-date, and balanced content to readers. Some topics will naturally not require frequent maintenance (e.g., Portal:American Civil War) while others will naturally require very frequent maintenance (e.g. Portal:Global warming). Some topics will require a variable amount of maintenance at different times (e.g. Portal:Olympics).
In general, it is highly encouraged to only create portals for topics that have an active WikiProject associated with them. However, this is not a hard rule, and exceptions can be made in cases where it can be shown that there is an active group of editors that are committed to indefinitely maintaining a portal, even if that group of editors are not members of an associated WikiProject.
To create a new portal, first post a request at WP:Portal/Requests. The request should include a description of the topic that you'd like to create a portal on, along with an analysis of the broadness of that topic, and an indication of how many high-quality articles that topic is comprised of. Include information about related WikiProjects that will support the portal, as well as a list of specific users who have committed to maintaining the portal regularly. Include any other comments or information that might be relevant to the request. After the request is made, anyone from the community can comment on it. After 7 days of discussion, it can be closed by an uninvolved editor, and consensus can be judged. If there is a consensus that this portal should not be created, then it will not be allowed to exist. Otherwise, if there is a consensus that it should be created, or if there is no clear consensus, then the portal will be allowed to be created. New portals that are created without going through this process can be speedy deleted.
Please indicate your support or opposition to this proposal below. Thanks. ‑Scottywong| [confer] || 17:05, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Proposal 1 discussion
- I oppose the Requests requirement per WP:CREEP. The other requirements, combine with MfD/CSD, are sufficient to prevent bad portals that are created from lasting very long. Perhaps a better model would be similar to Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals, where the process is optional. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:35, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I disagree with numeric criteria to identify broadness. I feel the corresponding subject matter experts should be empowered to decide by consensus what topics make suitable entry points to a given area. I agree that portals should have a corresponding body of interested editors who monitor them for vandalism at the very least, and make appropriate updates (with the understanding that there is no deadline). I disagree with a centralized request page to approve portals. Navigation boxes are managed by the various groups of editors interested in a given topic without any centralized approval; portals ought to be treated like another navigational aid. isaacl (talk) 17:41, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Do you have an alternate measure of broadness that you would prefer? Or do you oppose the entire concept of requiring portals to be about sufficiently broad topics? ‑Scottywong| [gab] || 17:58, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with the concept of portals being about "sufficiently broad topic", I just think this is best determined by those maintaining the portal with circa 500 articles being a ball-park guideline. Thryduulf (talk) 18:01, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- How do we measure "broadness" then? At 500 articles per scope anyone can pretty much create a portal about anything and call it broad because of x y or z. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 18:03, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- 500 articles about a topic is a broad topic. If portals about such topics are well constructed and maintained then what is the problem if we have lots of them? Thryduulf (talk) 18:46, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Recent history has shown that clearly Wikipedia currently lacks the ability and organization required to maintain "lots" of portals. MFD routinely contains portals that haven't been updated in a decade, and there are only around 500 portals in existence right now. I can't understand how anyone would argue that we should be encouraging more portals to be created at a time when portals are being deleted at an unprecedented rate. ‑Scottywong| [squeal] || 21:28, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- +1 with Scottywong; the long list of MfDs on portals (that involves quite a wide range of editors over time), shows that the maintainer support for portals is nowhere near figures for even 1,000 portals. Even at the current levels of circa 500 portals, there is still a long list of portals to come whose last edit by a proper maintainer (e.g. not The Transhumanist-type edits), was pre-2013 (I notice that after 2013, portal support seemed to really collapse). I would suspect that WP doesn't even have the maintainer support for 100 good portals. Hence my suggestion under #Manual of Style above that we think of other ways to handle this (e.g. having a centralized FA/GA article database that could be linked to by a "portal-bar" on the article pages; or other ideas). MfD sees the reality of support by portal maintainers – most are gone. Britishfinance (talk) 21:40, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Recent history has shown that clearly Wikipedia currently lacks the ability and organization required to maintain "lots" of portals. MFD routinely contains portals that haven't been updated in a decade, and there are only around 500 portals in existence right now. I can't understand how anyone would argue that we should be encouraging more portals to be created at a time when portals are being deleted at an unprecedented rate. ‑Scottywong| [squeal] || 21:28, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- 500 articles about a topic is a broad topic. If portals about such topics are well constructed and maintained then what is the problem if we have lots of them? Thryduulf (talk) 18:46, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- How do we measure "broadness" then? At 500 articles per scope anyone can pretty much create a portal about anything and call it broad because of x y or z. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 18:03, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- My view on portals, which I appreciate is not shared by everyone, is that they should serve as an entry point to learn about a given topic area (hence the name). So the topic area should be broad enough such that there is an advantage in having a navigational aid to supplement the primary article on that topic. I think they should be organized with relatively distinct domains, though eliminating all overlap is not necessary. To that end, I believe broad advice on best practices is desirable, including cases where portals aren't the best approach. However I also feel the people who are invested in doing the work long term should be able to define it, by and large. I think trying to determine a count of associated articles is just asking for a lot of arguing about how that count is derived. Let those knowledgeable in the area decide what are the best entry points. The problem that had occurred is various editors on their own initiative decided they wanted to make a gift of a portal to the corresponding group of interested editors, without considering that this is effectively handing them a recurring cost that has to be paid. We need to ensure that these editors want to pay this cost, and part of that is letting them decide how they want to dole out the time and effort in support of any associated portals. isaacl (talk) 18:16, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with the concept of portals being about "sufficiently broad topic", I just think this is best determined by those maintaining the portal with circa 500 articles being a ball-park guideline. Thryduulf (talk) 18:01, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Do you have an alternate measure of broadness that you would prefer? Or do you oppose the entire concept of requiring portals to be about sufficiently broad topics? ‑Scottywong| [gab] || 17:58, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) I broadly agree with Isaacl and UnitedStatesian. A numeric guide as to the ballpark for what is broad enough is fine, but that figure should be in the region of 500 and certainly no more than 1000, but ultimately it should be based on the consensus of those doing the maintaining. Something similar to Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals is a good idea and that would work well, especially if there is a draft space where portals can be built up (it's unreasonable to expect them to be created perfectly immediately). Thryduulf (talk) 17:59, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Where did you get the 500-1000 article range from? Is that just a gut feeling, or is it based on something more concrete? ‑Scottywong| [yak] || 18:34, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- 500-1000 articles (in addition to a guideline about volume of GA+ content) indicates that there is sufficient content about the topic on Wikipedia to support a portal, based on the amount of content showcased in portals and the range of topics those articles will need to cover in order to exist as non-duplicate articles. 500 articles is what you might find in a small paper encyclopaedia focused on a single topic - by contrast 10,000 articles is about a sixth of the entire single volume Encyclopaedia Britannia. Thryduulf (talk) 18:56, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- You might note that I reduced this proposal to 5000 articles, not 10000. Are you aware of any existing portals that have survived MFD, that are on a topic area that is only comprised of around 500 articles? ‑Scottywong| [prattle] || 19:38, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- There have been so many MFDs, many (maybe even most) of which of which were completely unrelated to the broadness of the topic (and indeed far too many based on nothing more than the manner in which it was created), so what survived or did not survive MFD is not a useful guide to topic broadness. What makes 5000 articles broad enough for you but 500 not? Where did you derive that figure from? How and why will it ensure the quality of a portal but 500 not? Thryduulf (talk) 21:00, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- There is a large discussion section above on this page where I showed exactly how I derived 10000 articles as a threshold (and subsequently downgraded it to 5000 in an attempt to find consensus). You read that discussion and commented on it. I was hoping for a similar analysis from you (or, at least something a bit more concrete than a vague notion that 500 feels like the right number). Portals on broader topics are more likely to attract maintainers, that's a simple fact. It's far more likely that people will volunteer to maintain Portal:Music than Portal:German electronic music in the key of F-sharp from 1988-1992. The reason I bring MFD into this is because I think it would be smart to craft a guideline that prohibits portals from being created if they are unlikely to survive MFD. The hundreds of MFD discussions over the past year form a sort of meta-consensus that is unlikely to change anytime soon. In my opinion, it would be unwise to draft a guideline that significantly deviates from that consensus. Please keep in mind: I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm not pro- or anti-portal. I admit freely that nearly everyone in this discussion knows more about portals than I do. My opinions are derived from closing dozens of MFD discussions on portals, and reading through recent RFCs and other discussions on the subject. I see an obvious problem that needs to be solved, and I'm attempting to solve it. In my opinion, creating a guideline that encourages editors to create portals on narrow topics would not solve the problem, and would actually make the problem quite a bit worse than it already is today. But again, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. ‑Scottywong| [gossip] || 21:20, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Scottywong, it is far more likely that people want to maintain Portal:Opera than Portal:Music, as the latter is so general that most would-be maintainers will dislike a substantial part of it. People work on what they enjoy, not on what others would like them to work on, and that is a simple fact. —Kusma (t·c) 21:37, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I feel like I'm not being understood. No one is suggesting that we force editors to maintain portals that they don't want to maintain. I'm simply pointing out the obvious fact that broader topics are more likely to appeal to a larger group of people. Of course there can be exceptions to this occasionally, but there are more people in the world that are interested in the "American Civil War" than there are people that are interested in "firing mechanisms on long-bore muskets used in the American Civil War". Broader topics naturally appeal more broadly. This is not a difficult concept, and I don't understand why we're arguing over it. ‑Scottywong| [babble] || 21:59, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Scottywong, it is far more likely that people want to maintain Portal:Opera than Portal:Music, as the latter is so general that most would-be maintainers will dislike a substantial part of it. People work on what they enjoy, not on what others would like them to work on, and that is a simple fact. —Kusma (t·c) 21:37, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- There is a large discussion section above on this page where I showed exactly how I derived 10000 articles as a threshold (and subsequently downgraded it to 5000 in an attempt to find consensus). You read that discussion and commented on it. I was hoping for a similar analysis from you (or, at least something a bit more concrete than a vague notion that 500 feels like the right number). Portals on broader topics are more likely to attract maintainers, that's a simple fact. It's far more likely that people will volunteer to maintain Portal:Music than Portal:German electronic music in the key of F-sharp from 1988-1992. The reason I bring MFD into this is because I think it would be smart to craft a guideline that prohibits portals from being created if they are unlikely to survive MFD. The hundreds of MFD discussions over the past year form a sort of meta-consensus that is unlikely to change anytime soon. In my opinion, it would be unwise to draft a guideline that significantly deviates from that consensus. Please keep in mind: I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm not pro- or anti-portal. I admit freely that nearly everyone in this discussion knows more about portals than I do. My opinions are derived from closing dozens of MFD discussions on portals, and reading through recent RFCs and other discussions on the subject. I see an obvious problem that needs to be solved, and I'm attempting to solve it. In my opinion, creating a guideline that encourages editors to create portals on narrow topics would not solve the problem, and would actually make the problem quite a bit worse than it already is today. But again, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. ‑Scottywong| [gossip] || 21:20, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- There have been so many MFDs, many (maybe even most) of which of which were completely unrelated to the broadness of the topic (and indeed far too many based on nothing more than the manner in which it was created), so what survived or did not survive MFD is not a useful guide to topic broadness. What makes 5000 articles broad enough for you but 500 not? Where did you derive that figure from? How and why will it ensure the quality of a portal but 500 not? Thryduulf (talk) 21:00, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- You might note that I reduced this proposal to 5000 articles, not 10000. Are you aware of any existing portals that have survived MFD, that are on a topic area that is only comprised of around 500 articles? ‑Scottywong| [prattle] || 19:38, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- 500-1000 articles (in addition to a guideline about volume of GA+ content) indicates that there is sufficient content about the topic on Wikipedia to support a portal, based on the amount of content showcased in portals and the range of topics those articles will need to cover in order to exist as non-duplicate articles. 500 articles is what you might find in a small paper encyclopaedia focused on a single topic - by contrast 10,000 articles is about a sixth of the entire single volume Encyclopaedia Britannia. Thryduulf (talk) 18:56, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Where did you get the 500-1000 article range from? Is that just a gut feeling, or is it based on something more concrete? ‑Scottywong| [yak] || 18:34, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I support having an article scope number criteria, but oppose a requirement for portal making as it should be "WP:Portal/Proposals". I want to add that it is too much of a gamble to rely on self referred "experts" to identify scope. The general consensus among the community I feel is to downsize portals, this can easily be taken via a straw poll. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 18:08, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Support this idea. It would stop portal-spam (which the community doesn't like). It would force the community to engage more in the topic of portals at RfPs, which cannot be a bad thing - I am not sure that all the !votes at big portal RfCs really understand what is happening in portal-space. By specifying the actual maintainers of the portal (and that they are genuine topic enthusiasts), we get to the core of the issue with portals, abandonment. We might also ask that the WikiProject endorse the RfP? We should also think about automating the process of when the maintainers leave WP, or stop supporting the portal - e.g. it could automatically go back to an RfP, and if it failed (because the existing maintainers never showed up, and new ones did not step forward), it get deleted/draftified. Britishfinance (talk) 18:26, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- This proposal is silent on what imho, is the content driver of the recent conduct ArbCom portal case. In my view, a drive-by maintainer (e.g. not a topic enthusiast, not part of the original RfP, not part of the WikiProject, and especially doing mass-portal updates etc.) is not "maintenance", and is therefore to be discarded in any 6-monthly assessment of whether the portal is being maintained. This is a crunch issue for us to discuss (if not the core "Elephant in the room" for portals). thanks Britishfinance (talk) 18:53, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Britishfinance, I completely disagree. It does not matter at all who performs maintenance, if they do what needs to be done. One of the problems here is that we don't have clear expectations of what maintenance is necessary. —Kusma (t·c) 19:19, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks Kusma, and as I said in my ArbCom statement, I think this is one of the core issues both for portals, and the tensions around portals. I raised it at ArbCom to see if they had a view on it/how to resolve it. Given the abandonment of portals by most maintainers, this issue is the most material item in my view as to the trajectory of the number of portals over the next 24 months. I am almost afraid to mention it here, but outside of the underlying abandonment of most portals, it is the "elephant" in my view. thanks. Britishfinance (talk) 19:27, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- There is a discussion section below that will be devoted to the topic of portal maintenance, where we can set clear expectations of what is required. We'll get there soon. ‑Scottywong| [squeal] || 19:36, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Sounds like a good plan, I will put the "elephant" back in its enclosure :) Britishfinance (talk) 19:38, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- There is a discussion section below that will be devoted to the topic of portal maintenance, where we can set clear expectations of what is required. We'll get there soon. ‑Scottywong| [squeal] || 19:36, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks Kusma, and as I said in my ArbCom statement, I think this is one of the core issues both for portals, and the tensions around portals. I raised it at ArbCom to see if they had a view on it/how to resolve it. Given the abandonment of portals by most maintainers, this issue is the most material item in my view as to the trajectory of the number of portals over the next 24 months. I am almost afraid to mention it here, but outside of the underlying abandonment of most portals, it is the "elephant" in my view. thanks. Britishfinance (talk) 19:27, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Britishfinance, I completely disagree. It does not matter at all who performs maintenance, if they do what needs to be done. One of the problems here is that we don't have clear expectations of what maintenance is necessary. —Kusma (t·c) 19:19, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- This proposal is silent on what imho, is the content driver of the recent conduct ArbCom portal case. In my view, a drive-by maintainer (e.g. not a topic enthusiast, not part of the original RfP, not part of the WikiProject, and especially doing mass-portal updates etc.) is not "maintenance", and is therefore to be discarded in any 6-monthly assessment of whether the portal is being maintained. This is a crunch issue for us to discuss (if not the core "Elephant in the room" for portals). thanks Britishfinance (talk) 18:53, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Support broadness. I question whether there are any topics that have 500 articles, 50 of which (10%) are GA or better. It seems like keeping a 1:100 ratio between articles and FAs is more reasonable, i.e., 5k/50 or 10k/100. 50 is the minimum number of GAs+ that I think can sustain a portal (any less, and the portal will display all GAs+, rather than have a selection of the best GAs+, since we need–what–like 25-ish GAs+ in the rotation?). So, if it's 50 GAs+, I'm at 5,000 articles (1:100 ratio).
Frankly I wonder if we should only set a GA+ number, and not an article number at all.Support maintenance but I would change it to monthly instead of every 6 months. Six months is a long time to be serving readers with bad content. Even a month seems like a long time to me. Ambivalent on requests as it's kind of counter to our BOLD policy, and I just wonder if processing the requests is making too much work for volunteer editors. The way I figure, if we have a well-written guideline, an editor either (a) is competent enough to read the guideline and only make a portals that comply with the guideline, or (b) should be TBAN'd from making portals. Those in category B will make themselves known after making a few bad portals. Everyone else is in catetgory A and doesn't need to ask permission first. That's my view of it, anyway, but I'm not opposed to trying it because, well... there's a pretty good counterexample of what can happen when portal creation goes unchecked. – Levivich 20:19, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Again, support the main ideas, oppose some bits. More specifically, I support the ideas of requiring maintenance and a "broad topic". However, I think we should look at some examples before we adopt a definition of "broad topic". (For example I would consider Nigeria (13k articles, 29 GA or better) a broad topic. Roads in Maryland clock in at 600 articles, 70 GA or better, but I would describe it as a bit niche. Cheshire has 3000 articles, 79 GA or better. All three have decent portals, although Cheshire and Nigeria are far more appealing to me as a non-roadgeek). I oppose the requirement to propose a portal and oppose the idea of requiring named maintainers as un-wiki and against WP:NOTBURO/WP:OWN. I agree that a portal that has sections that are half a year or more out of date needs work, and those that are several years out of date should have out of date content hidden (if possible) or be deleted (portals shouldn't be embarrassing). So require maintenance, don't require maintainers. —Kusma (t·c) 20:42, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I guess Roads in Maryland is an example of why we need a minimum-article number and a minimum-GA+ number. – Levivich 21:45, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- I could be persuaded to support something like "if a portal has more than 5000 articles/50 GA+, it is an automatic pass of broadness; if it has less than 1000/20+ GA articles, it is an automatic fail of broadness; portals in the intermediate area should be looked at individually, taking their quality into account". That would allow us to discourage portals about narrow areas, while making it possible to keep some of the few gems of portal space like Portal:Cheshire. —Kusma (t·c) 11:16, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
- I guess Roads in Maryland is an example of why we need a minimum-article number and a minimum-GA+ number. – Levivich 21:45, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Agree with everything but requests We don't need an AfC for portals - we want to encourage people to be bold. There are bits and pieces of the proposal I'd copy edit (I would define portals as needing to be both "sufficiently broad" and "sufficiently rich" and require they be tied to a WikiProject (EDIT: I just now noticed this was at the end of the maintenance section)) but I would generally support this. Also, if "sufficiently rich" is met but "sufficiently broad" is not but the portal is maintained, I don't necessarily see a reason to delete it - we don't want to encourage these types of portals, but as I've noted above with the 1948 Australia tour of England, the best portals should draw you in to the best tended article gardens on Wikipedia. SportingFlyer T·C 11:58, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
- Support all three propositions, generally as worded. Topics should have breadth before they are even considered for a portal. Portals should either be attached to a specific WikiProject or have (at least) some editors dedicated to carrying out maintenance tasks. I can see no good reason not to have an approval process for determining which topics should have portals. I would not envisions such a process requiring a very involved discussion, but would have it entail the editor or editors proposing the creation of the new portal articulating how the portal will be arranged, what components it will have, and what specific articles or other content it will include at the beginning. BD2412 T 16:36, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
- Support all three parts. The first one, the Requests, is comparable to my previous suggestion that we should have Portals for Discussion to approve both the creation and the deletion of portals. I would prefer that, but I don't think it will be approved. By the way, I do favor the use of pageviews. I have in the past been neutral on the deletion of poorly viewed well-maintained portals, as opposed to poorly viewed poorly maintained portals , which just must be deleted. But I support all three parts. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:21, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
Consensometer
Total | Percent | ||
---|---|---|---|
Broadness | 9 | 10 | 90% |
Maintenance | 9 | 9 | 100% |
Requests | 6 | 9 | 67% |
I counted the !votes as follows, apologies if I missed or misunderstood anyone, please make adjustments as needed or let me know and I'll make them. As to broadness/maintenance/requests: Scotty (prop) 1/1/1, US 1/1/0, isaacl 0/1/0, Thryd 1/1/1, KK87 1/-/1, BF 1/1/1, L 1/1/-, Kusma 1/1/0. Note that pretty much everyone has some qualification or adjustment to the specific details in the proposal; so not everyone agrees, for example, exactly what broadness or exactly what maintenance requirements there should be. – Levivich 06:56, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
- Updated with my and Robert McClenon's !votes. BD2412 T 21:39, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
Discussion: Portal creation instructions
- All "selected biographies" MUST be transcluded per WP:BLP and related policies. If the content on portals is not updated, then it poses a serious potential risk to those who are living and recently deceased as stale information may not be factually correct.
- @Knowledgekid87:, I would agree with respect to actual BLPs and the recently deceased. I'm not sure what risk is posed for long-dead figures. BD2412 T 15:27, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
- I amended it, in general though this is a core policy which has to be taken into account as a definite guideline here. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:29, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
- An idea to discuss when we get to this section: remove the "purge" link from portals, and create a bot that purges every portal once or twice a day. ‑Scottywong| [gossip] || 01:09, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Discussion: Portal maintenance guidelines
- I'd love to see some sort of bot remind maintainers to take a look at portals they're maintaining at least annually. Maintenance need not be that complicated going forward - we just need to make sure the article selection stays fresh, the article selections match the transclusion selections, that everything still works properly, and that nothing is out of date or broken. I think failure to maintain a portal would be a reason for deletion (after the proposer discusses with any maintainers), but if anyone steps forward to adopt the article and no other reasons for deletion exist, the article should be kept automatically. SportingFlyer T·C 03:46, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- @SportingFlyer: What should a bot do if it discovers a portal that hasn't been updated in a year (or whatever length of time is chosen)? ‑Scottywong| [prattle] || 23:53, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- The bot I envision isn't supposed to clean up the portal - it's supposed to notify anyone listed as a portal maintainer to check the portal and make any necessary updates as a reminder. SportingFlyer T·C 02:50, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- I think a key question asked should be:
How much maintenance does or should a portal need?
Portals are made up of sub-pages which generally don't need tons of editors maintaining them unless we go with the format Portal:Current events has with ongoing events. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 00:59, 20 November 2019 (UTC) - I would definitely agree that every portal should get a thorough review at least once per year, touching every featured item on the portal and making sure content is up to date and displaying properly. As an example to that end, I have created Portal:Law/Maintenance, and am currently at an early stage of reviewing the content (somewhat complicated by the merger of content from the former Portal:Crime and Portal:English law). I expect this to take the rest of the year, so that the job will be much easier next year. BD2412 T 02:09, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- You make a good point here that active maintenance may not be reflected in the number of edits to the main portal page. Thryduulf (talk) 09:19, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- That is 100% right. I've had portals deleted based on the edit count implying that portals need to be constantly fiddled with. That's rubbish - we don't even use that criterion for articles. Again it was just another meaningless statistic used as an excuse to delete portals. The level of editing of a well designed main portal page, like a complete navbox, may easily be zero especially if the selected articles are refreshed on subpages. It just needs someone to oversee it and ensure it doesn't get out of date. Portals may need editing ("maintaining") in the following cases:
- Links to new topic articles may need to be created (but often they are red links already)
- Links may need to be moved from a "Wanted Articles" section to the relevant subtopic section.
- Editors may want to add "Wanted Articles" or "Wanted Images"
- Selected articles/images/biographies may need to be refreshed (but there can be a 12-month rotating cycle which does not need refreshing each year)
- Any "in the news" section will need to be refreshed almost weekly (so we should only have that on portals if editors actively update it)
- Minor edits to improve the text
- But a simple portal like Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany/Harz (put up for deletion and moved to project space) needs hardly any maintenance. Yet I used it for years to generate a comprehensive coverage and expansion of the topic with dozens of new and expanded articles, none of which needed the page to be edited. Bermicourt (talk) 09:11, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
- Of all the portals I have seen, the Bermicourt versions are some of the best. I would describe them as "mega-navboxes", and a very rational use of a portal (and very nicely constructed). One question I have asked of Bermicourt on their portals is whether they could, or should, be converted into navboxes (albeit large ones), that would be transcluded across all relevant mainspace articles, and thus even more visible/scrutinized by other editors? Britishfinance (talk) 11:54, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you, but I can't claim the credit for the design as I have imported them in most cases from German Wikipedia where they have clear guidelines and clear processes e.g. portals can't even be launched until they pass an approval process. They have a number of models:
- One - the "Harz model" if you like (linked above) - is like a mega-navbox with no subpages. To try and answer your question, I'm not sure how we'd convert them into navboxes. Even if you took out the topic overview and selected article, they're really too big to place at the bottom of an article or even on the talk page. I could never see what was wrong with using them "as is" i.e. as a portal in portal space, but they were poorly linked (hence the criticism of low pageviews which is a questionable yardstick anyway). That was probably because the guidelines were weak and despite saying that should attract large numbers of readers, didn't encourage widespread linking (in fact WP:POG only suggests one mainspace link. So it wasn't consistent. Also portals never appeared in searches which has been repeatedly flagged up as a flaw.
- Another model is the type with many subpages and e.g. rotating selected articles and images - that's much more of the sort of showcase originally envisaged.
- Another feature are the maintenance pages where editors work collaboratively to improve topic coverage using the portal as a tool - this is project editor stuff and is really an "add on" to any portal. HTH.Bermicourt (talk) 15:28, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
- When I first came to WP as saw portals, I expected to find mega-navbox type pages of large structured arrangements of the WP articles in a topic grouped into main areas (a bit like List of Ireland-related topics, that still sits as the header to the main Ireland navbox). In essence, these are the Bermicourt Hartz portals. However, I also notice that some topic areas have now done this completely with "nested navboxes" like the United Kingdom, which has a reasonably well-nested series of large navboxes and to navigate sub-articles, leaving the Portal:United Kingdom redundant as a navigation guide.
- Of all the portals I have seen, the Bermicourt versions are some of the best. I would describe them as "mega-navboxes", and a very rational use of a portal (and very nicely constructed). One question I have asked of Bermicourt on their portals is whether they could, or should, be converted into navboxes (albeit large ones), that would be transcluded across all relevant mainspace articles, and thus even more visible/scrutinized by other editors? Britishfinance (talk) 11:54, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
- That is 100% right. I've had portals deleted based on the edit count implying that portals need to be constantly fiddled with. That's rubbish - we don't even use that criterion for articles. Again it was just another meaningless statistic used as an excuse to delete portals. The level of editing of a well designed main portal page, like a complete navbox, may easily be zero especially if the selected articles are refreshed on subpages. It just needs someone to oversee it and ensure it doesn't get out of date. Portals may need editing ("maintaining") in the following cases:
- You make a good point here that active maintenance may not be reflected in the number of edits to the main portal page. Thryduulf (talk) 09:19, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
- Obviously, building nested navboxes as per the United Kingdom is a bigger task, although navboxes have the benefit of being more widely transcluded and therefore checked/updated by more editors (e.g. they are probably the best long-term solution0). However, in the absence of the full nested navbox solution, the Bermicourt Hartz portals (e.g. "mega-navboxes") are acceptable in my view, and should be separately "carved-out" in our discussions as there are much less issues of FORKING, less "scrapbooking" style (perhaps Bermicourt could develop a MOS for mega-navboxes portals), and other issues with standard portals. Britishfinance (talk) 18:07, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
- I'd be happy to develop a MOS for such portals once there is consensus that they are, in principle, acceptable. At the moment all I see is mass deletion going on and I'm not confident that any attempt to create navboxes of any type will survive without a clear thumbs up from the community. But I guess that's what we're trying to achieve here. Bermicourt (talk) 18:39, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
- Obviously, building nested navboxes as per the United Kingdom is a bigger task, although navboxes have the benefit of being more widely transcluded and therefore checked/updated by more editors (e.g. they are probably the best long-term solution0). However, in the absence of the full nested navbox solution, the Bermicourt Hartz portals (e.g. "mega-navboxes") are acceptable in my view, and should be separately "carved-out" in our discussions as there are much less issues of FORKING, less "scrapbooking" style (perhaps Bermicourt could develop a MOS for mega-navboxes portals), and other issues with standard portals. Britishfinance (talk) 18:07, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
Discussion: Portal Categorizing
We can take the discussion to update Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines/Categorizing. See:
- Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals#Categorizing
- Wikipedia talk:Categorization#Categorization of portals
Guilherme Burn (talk) 14:34, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Discussion about technical problems
Since we are talking about what is best for our readers I think we should mention technical limitations that need to be fixed.--Moxy 🍁 15:49, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
Mobile view limitations
- 1 {{Portal}} is not seen in mobile view that represents 60% of our readers unlike {{Portal-inline}} or {{Portal bar}} (when the no border parameter is used) all because the original portal template was made with "<div role=navigation". <div role=navigation was implemented because nav boxes with all their boxes result in load time concerns and format conundrum in mobile view and because portals are navigational aids the template got lumped in to all the other navigational template aids because of the border style box.--Moxy 🍁 15:49, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
- 2 {{Transclude files as random slideshow}} does not work in mobile view as it displays all images at one time Example normal view vs mobile view version.--Moxy 🍁 15:59, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
- Not sure what the technical problem is here but we need a software update.--Moxy 🍁 15:59, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
- 3 In many portals we use main navboxes to help navigation. ...however navboxes like above also use the div role=navigation parameter thus omitting them from mobile view. Example normal view vs mobile view version note how topics missing in mobile view.--Moxy 🍁 15:49, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
- Solution create a template that looks the same but omits the "<div role=navigation" for use only in portals or if posible create a wrap like {{Plain navboxes}} again only used in portals.--Moxy 🍁 15:49, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
- Mobile view has many problems and most Wikipedians rarely think about it (and the developers of mobile view don't seem to think of and talk to Wikipedians much, or they wouldn't have invented automated navigation tools to replace navboxes and portals in mobile view). It's a shame that the slideshows don't work in mobile view, they could really shine there (imagine something like a slideshow for stuff like the states and territories of Australia, giving you a way to navigate through important subtopics without leaving the page). Most of what we do here is still very old-fashioned hypertext. Anyway, support improving the discoverability and usability of portals in mobile. —Kusma (t·c) 16:46, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
- I am going to bring @BrownHairedGirl: into the loop for this one as it was mentioned in an MfD. She said something about the portal template needing a community consensus to change it to better mobile viewing. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 21:41, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
Questions: Re General process here on this workspace
Comments by Sm8900
- Can we have a separate sub-section for each person commenting here, for them to provide their basic ideas? they would still be free to comment in other users' sections to discuss the ideas from those users.
- Remember we need to address concerns of some people who don't want portals to exist at all. any comments on that?
just noting that. Sm8900 (talk) 21:03, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
- Given consensus has continually been to keep portals in some fashion, I'm hoping this conversation remains civil enough to move things forward and establish some guidelines. SportingFlyer T·C 05:37, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Sm8900: I think it's best that we approach this project with the assumption that portals are here to stay in some form or another, and we're here to simply construct guidelines on what that form is. Opening up this discussion to the question of "should portals even exist at all" will threaten to derail the conversation entirely. I believe that question was discussed at length in a somewhat recent RFC. I'd prefer to avoid trying to answer that question in this forum. ‑Scottywong| [squeal] || 23:52, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Scottywong: I agree. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 20:44, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
- @Sm8900: I think it's best that we approach this project with the assumption that portals are here to stay in some form or another, and we're here to simply construct guidelines on what that form is. Opening up this discussion to the question of "should portals even exist at all" will threaten to derail the conversation entirely. I believe that question was discussed at length in a somewhat recent RFC. I'd prefer to avoid trying to answer that question in this forum. ‑Scottywong| [squeal] || 23:52, 19 November 2019 (UTC)