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Portals

This page is within the scope of WikiProject Portals, a collaborative effort to improve portals on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PortalsWikipedia:WikiProject PortalsTemplate:WikiProject PortalsPortals Project This page does not require a rating on the project's quality scale. See also: List of Portals

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General discussion threads

This section is for all other general discussions that don't fit elsewhere.

Concerning portal guidelines and topic minimums (eom)

Guideline discussions announcement

• Misplaced Pages talk:Portal guidelines#Second sentence contradicts WP:NOTCOMPULSORY policy, and should be removed
• Misplaced Pages talk:Portal guidelines#Concerning the inclusion of "Related portals" section
• Misplaced Pages talk:Portal guidelines#Concerning the inclusion of "Selected article(s)" section
• Misplaced Pages talk:Portal guidelines#Concerning section: Recommended
• Misplaced Pages talk:Portal guidelines#Concerning section: Article selection
• Misplaced Pages talk:Portal guidelines#Concerning section: Required

Proposal to shut down or reform this WikiProject

Template:featured portal

With the recent exclusion of portals tagged with {{featured portal}} I don't see sense in keeping the old featured portals with this template.Guilherme Burn (talk) 19:57, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

The historical reference function can best be fulfilled by Template:WikiProject PortalsGuilherme Burn (talk) 22:00, 5 July 2019 (UTC).

I'd oppose this. It states that the portal was peer reviewed in the past, and forms a visual reminder to MfD nominators & participants, most of whom would not look at the portal's talk page. A comparison with de-featured articles is not apt, as these are +/– never targeted for deletion after de-featuring. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:21, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Also Oppose. WHY?? , there's no need to remove information that's relevant to the Portal history.

This is just more absurd deletionist nonsense and superfluous to our encyclopaedic aims. Why don't you go and do some useful work instead of suggesting ideas that would screw up the Portals history?worthwhile for a change. --Cactus.man ✍ 00:48, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Oppose per Espresso Addict. and yes, per Cactus.man, I agree that no need exists to remove relevant portal history. North America 13:14, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Maybe the first step to a "new featured portal" is the re-exam of the old one, so I brought it to discussion. I do not understand the irritation in certain comments.Guilherme Burn (talk) 19:10, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

It is the interaction of your suggestion with the ongoing portal deletion efforts that I think is generating irritation. Espresso Addict (talk) 22:13, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

@ Guilherme Burn I have just read your post this evening, and I think it may be directed at my comment? Espresso Addict sums it up perfectly for me. It's a case of extreme irritation that, despite Portal deletion nominations having died down recently to a trickle, there was this sudden outpouring of (IMHO) nonsensical proposals (merge all Portals into subsets of the Portals listed on the mainpage, then your suggested deprecation of the historical marker shown on Portals that were once Featured). Its as if there's nothing else going on right now than needs attention. I got a little bit too riled up, and realise now, with hindsight, that my comment was a bit over-aggressive. I was not intending to suggest that you don't do any other useful work and I apologise if that's how it came across to you. I have re-factored my comment to be a bit less confrontational. Best wishes. --Cactus.man ✍ 18:34, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

It's all right @Cactus.man:;)Guilherme Burn (talk) 12:24, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Oppose. I'm similarly irritated with the relentless and enormous movement of goal posts here, so don't feel alone User:Cactus.man. There are serious questions which deserve to be raised and fully discussed about portals. This is not one of them. BusterD (talk) 18:53, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Oppose. for the reasons outlined by Espresso Addict. For the record, I am also irritated by this unconstructive proposal. Voceditenore (talk) 06:10, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

• Delete. Guilherme Burn is right. We shouldn't be tagging the face of pages by an assessment process which has been discontinued. Portals require regular updating, so a portal which met FP standard two years may be well below that standard now. The best solution would be to tag the talk pages with something like a Template:Former featured portal, so the fact of it being a former FP is recorded .... but it's completely wrong to keep it on the face of the portal. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:08, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

• TFD nomination. I have formally nominated the template for deletion, at WP:Templates for discussion/Log/2019 July 9#Template:Featured_portal. Thanks to @Guilherme Burn for raising this issue. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:54, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

• Pinging all users who have participated in this thread, regarding the new TfD discussion (except the nominator, who is already aware of it): @Guilherme Burn, Espresso Addict, Cactus.man, BusterD, and Voceditenore: (yes, I'm aware that some have already contributed there, but it's best practice to ping all). North America 00:26, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

• Nb. The TfD discussion was closed with a keep result. North America 08:19, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

There was a strong consensus for maintaining the template and its usefulness, but I believe this issue will still need to be revisited in the future. It would be best to move many pages and templates related to "featured portals" to "former featured portals" and remove the {{historical}} template. We cannot maintain the status "featured portal" ad infinitum in the absence of constant review and possible delist. Yes, this leads to confusions for readers, for example the interwiki provided by wikidata which continues to tag with a star the old featured portals.Guilherme Burn (talk) 01:25, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Removal of portal links after deletion

On 30 July 2019 (UTC), Portal:Vermont was deleted per the discussion at Misplaced Pages:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Vermont. Firstly, I entirely understand why the portal was deleted, particularly per it not having been updated and not having much content. Regarding page views, it's possible that the portal didn't receive many page views because there wasn't much content for readers to go back to see from time-to-time, but I digress.

Part of the nominator's deletion rationale stated, "this portal should be deleted without prejudice to re-creating a portal maintained by a volunteer..." (et al.). By inadvertently clicking on the "contribs" button of an !voter at the discussion, I noticed that shortly after the portal was deleted, the user has removed many portal links to the Vermont portal. When a portal is deleted, the portal links simply go blank on pages, so it's not particularly necessary for them to be quickly removed.

The topic itself (Vermont) meets WP:POG in terms of being broad enough in scope to qualify for a portal, so I find it concerning that many links to it have been quickly removed. If anyone were to re-create a new, updated, maintained Vermont portal, the removal of the links to it simply creates a bunch of unnecessary extra work that will need to be redone. Also, if the portal were to be recreated, and the links are not re-added, it could naturally lead to lesser page views, which could then lead to a vicious circle of it again qualifying for deletion per low page views.

Interested in other's thoughts about this matter. Should links for portals that meet WP:POG's broadness criteria remain in place when said portals are deleted? I think they should. Cheers, North America 08:02, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

• By inadvertently clicking on some links, I got the impression that circa 350 articles/categories/whatever were spammed by a link to the late Portal:Vermont. May be nobody was looking at Category:Basketball coaches from Vermont or at Bridge 6 (Johnson, Vermont). Alternatively, maybe each reader of these files wasn't caring about a link to a portal (yet another probable shit, as taught by experiment). As a result, page views of the portal were abysmal low. Before recreating such a portal, better think why readers have such avoidance of portals, despite the "keep them all" campaign of User:Northamerica1000 and some other. Pldx1 (talk) 11:11, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

• I have no "keep them all" campaign. Fact is, I nominated a portal for deletion at MfD a couple of days ago. If you're going to state that user's have some sort of "campaign", at least get it right. Really now. I assess portals on a case-by-case basis. Regarding the Vermont portal, it is my view that a portal more fully loaded with high-quality content would have naturally attracted more readers, compared to a static portal, whereby users realize there's not much there and don't go back. North America 12:12, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

There is no "keep them all" campaign. Hundreds of portals have been deleted with virtually no opposition. However, there is currently a deletion campaign which shows little sign of letting up. It's hard to work out if its participants are in the "delete all portals" bracket or "delete as many as possible down to my personal threshold before someone stops us". Now that the spam portals have been deleted this seems, unreasonable in the light of the ongoing community discussion on new and better guidelines for portals. As is the criticism that portals aren't being maintained - of course, they're not - editors aren't going to waste time keeping them up to date knowing that, around the corner, another AfD could appear. It's all a good example of how ineffectual Misplaced Pages's processes are. Bermicourt (talk) 12:26, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

This is not an issue just with deleted portals. We need broad community consensus as to whether Article-to-portal links should 1) not exist at all (i.e. be limited strictly to talkpages: note the hundreds of talkpage links to Portal:Vermont could be restored with a single edit); 2) exist only on the head article; or 3) be placed on hundreds of articles that relate to the portal's topic. To my knowledge such broad consensus was neither sought nor obtained. UnitedStatesian (talk) 12:46, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

You're right but it's only the tip of the iceberg. We desperately need to reach a consensus on the purposes of portals. Once that's agreed, we can work out how best to achieve that. If portals are a project tool then no links are needed from mainspace; if they're also a showcase, they need lots of relevant links to be effective (and appear in the search window, which they don't). In the meantime we're just engaged in a "love them/hate them" or "keep them/delete them" battle which is unconstructive and divisive. Bermicourt (talk) 18:48, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

• One of the prime benefits of portal deletion is to rid articles of confusing links, so I think all such links should be immediately removed by bot after a deletion. Nemo 08:09, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

  Nemo bis, the "confusing links" go away the moment the portal is deleted, without any bot action. See Template:Portal. —Kusma (t·c) 09:41, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

  Irrelevant, because that still leaves the template links. Nemo 10:20, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

  Sorry, I don't understand what you mean.

Vermont portal

Or are you talking about the wikitext? —Kusma (t·c) 10:23, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

• Another matter is that some MfD discussions for portals have been closed with no prejudice against recreation (e.g. such as for a maintained, curated portal). The links to these should remain in place: they're already invisible on article, talk and category pages when a portal is deleted, and their removal only creates much more unnecessary busy work for users who may later re-create such portals. Makes perfect sense, really. North America 07:58, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Duplicitous forum-shopping above; actual backlinks issues below

The section above is yet another example of the duplicitous techniques used by the prolifically mendacious editor @NA1K.

The discussion on this page was opened by NA1K at 08:02, 31 July 2019.

Only 13 minutes later, at 08:22, NA1K opened a similar discussion on my talk page.

Both discussions continued for several days, but at no point in either discussion did NA1K post a note in either discussion about the other one. And at no point in this discussion did NA1K even allude to the fact that I had given some counter-argument in reply. NA1K's summing-up comment of 07:58, 8 August 2019 is a classic example of NA1K's practice of mendacious omission. Written a week after my reply elsewhere to NA1K, it simply pretends that NA1K is unaware of the counter-arguments.

If NA1K's aim was to game the system by creating here on this page a fake consensus, by involving only NA1K's own cronies, then this was a great way to go about it. And given the length of NA1K's experience on Misplaced Pages, the failure to cross-notify is inexplicable in any good faith sense. An editor who wants to actually build a consensus will actively seek out those who might hold a different view and try to involve them in a centralised discussion; but I am sadly unsurprised that NA1K failed to do so. Such duplicity is simply a parallel to NA1K's serially-repeated mendacity at MFD, where NA1K repeatedly tries to manipulate consensus-formation by strategically misrepresenting the POG guidelines.

The reality is that removing backlinks is a routine part of any XFD close, and in most cases the closers use scripts to remove backlinks (e.g. WP:XFDC). Owing to the way that portal backlinks are nearly all formatted using templates, those tools do not extend to portals ... but that is a technical limitation, rather than any decision to retain backlinks to deleted portals.

Until late 2018, {{Portal}} displayed all links, red or blue. A Nov 2018 request by me to make non-display of redlinks an optional mode was implemented by User:Dreamy Jazz as the default mode, but there was never any decision or discussion anywhere that it would be used as a way to permanently store backlinks to deleted portals.

By the time the portalspammer's mass-creation spree was brought to an end in Feb 2019, there were 5,705 portals. As of right now (04:13, 14 August 2019 (UTC)), Category:All portals contains 835 portals. There is simply no way that any but a handful of the 4,870 deleted portals will re-created. So it makes no sense to retain tens of thousands of backlinks to the thousands of portals which existed only as automated spam.

Similarly, it makes no sense to retain tens of thousands of backlinks to portals which have been deleted because for a decade they have languished without readers and with so little maintenance that many of them were simply abandoned junk. (It remains a shameful indictment of the general uselessness of the portals project that it made absolutely no effort to even systematically identify and tag these abandoned junk portals, and has instead left the cleanup to outsiders).

It is true that in the early day of the current portal cleanup process, most nominations were made "without prejudice" to re-creation. I myself initiated that in the two mass deletions of portalspam (one, and two).

However, that was nearly 4 months ago, and much has changed since then. The crucial factor is scrutiny.

Back in March, the portalistas thought they were being very clever in gaming the system by the requiring to community to have a full MFD deletion discussion on each of the 4,200 portals, rather than speedy-deleting them. The portalistas were very well aware that the spam portals had been created a rate of more than one vert 2 minutes, and that their pal the portalspammer had spewed out automated pseudo-portals just for the heck of it ... but they still inisted that the community huge multiples of that time scrutinising each piece of the spam.

It was fairly clear from the ongoing outrage from portalistas that when the community nonetheless worked its way through the whole spam mountain and deleted the lot, that wasn't what the porliatas had expected. Their attempt to game the system had failed.

But more than that, the attempt had backfired badly. By requiring so much scrutiny, the portalistas had ensured that there were now several editors well-versed in portal guidelines and skilled in examining portals. And those scrutineers had found that as well as the spam portals, there were also a lot of abandoned junk portals which failed POG.

So junk portals which were no longer automated, or had maybe never been automated, began to be MFded too. And as the discussions moved on, it became clear that POG was right to require a large number of maintainers. Scores of portals appeared at MFD with clear signs that they had been built in a spurt of enthusiasm, rebuilt or rebooted a few years later in a spurt of someone else's enthusiasm, and then rotted because they had not attracted enough maintainers to sustain the maintenance. It is very clear from MFDs in the last two months that the ability to retain a large set of maintainers is a crucial criterion of a portal being kept, and that we have clear evidence that most of the deleted portals failed that criterion.

So for all those MFDs where I proposed "that these pages be deleted without prejudice to recreating a curated portal not based on a single navbox, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time", its clear that nearly all would fail the community's current criteria place high emphasis on active maintenance.

The result of all these deletion was that by early July, there were well over 100,000 pages with links to non-existent portals, which were overwhelmingly to deleted portals. This cluttered article and category pages with redundant markup, and it also flooded the tracking categories, making it impossible to use them to identify mis-spellings etc which should be what's collected in Category:Portal templates with redlinked portals.

So I set about removing the backlinks, which a non-trivial task. I finally finished it on Tuesday 13th, having cleared up the deleted portals and finally got a clear run of hundreds of errors: mis-spellings, synonyms, foreign languages etc, which I have all fixed. All in all, I'd say that over the course of the whole run, I fixed about 2,000 broken links. Which I think is a useful pay-off.

I do understand that there is here a small clique of disgruntled editors who still bemoan the demise of abandoned junk portals, and want a return to the glory days when a single editor could run around creating lots of portals without regard to whether the topic meets the POG requirement of being likely to attract a large number of maintainers. And I do understand that for some of these drive-by portalistas, the task of spending a few minutes making a request at WP:BOTREQ for someone to make link to new portals from the relevant articles seems to be an intolerable burden.

But y'know what? It's now v clear that the community has had enough of drive-by portal makers, so I see no reason to assume that it would want to facilitate them by setting aside normal practice on backlinks.

If you disagree, then feel free to start an RFC in which you link to this post and to the discussion on my talk. But in the meantime, the forum-shopping exercise above is simply the uncritical groupthink of a cosy clique, and not any sort of consensus. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:13, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Request for improvement: Portal:Northern Ireland

Portal:Northern Ireland would benefit from the following improvements:

• Converting the layout of articles in the portal to be included directly on the page, rather than using WP:SUBPAGES, using {{Transclude random excerpt}}. This makes it much easier to expand the portal, update it, and change selections.
• Converting the layout of images using {{Random slideshow}}, for the same reasons as above.
• After the above, significantly expanding its topical focus. Portal:Northern Ireland/Selected article presently only has 3 selections, Portal:Northern Ireland/Selected picture has 6, and Portal:Northern Ireland/Selected biography has 5. Not enough at all to attract readers. It is likely that people may check out the portal, realize that it doesn't have much content, and then move on, without stopping back by from time-to-time.

The topic itself is rich, as Misplaced Pages has a great deal of content covering Northern Ireland. See Category:Northern Ireland for a general overview of topical coverage available. I have performed some work to improve the portal, but it would benefit from more. It would be nice if it had around 30 articles, 20 images, and more selected biographies, as a better start. This could lead to more readers utilizing the portal, as having a greater amount of diverse content may captivate readers to explore it more. Cheers, North America 17:17, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

Why?

. It's a non-sovereign province less than 100 years old, and it doesn't get much outside attention apart from its political divisions (which lead to very imbalanced coverage). With a population of only ~1.5 million, it's smaller than several English counties, and smaller than nearly all US states, including several which have been deleted due to abandonment.

So it's unsurprising that in January–June 2019 it averaged only a miserable 20 pageviews per day. That number is about what I would expect for that size of region.

More importantly, POG requires that a portal should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".

In this case, it has narrow scope, few readers, and almost no maintainers.

WP:WikiProject Northern Ireland (WP:NIR) has been moribund for years. There is no discussion at WT:NIR, and has not been for years.

What NA1K is doing here is approaching a portal on a highly controversial topic area in which they have no background, and and trying a one-off-update to attract readers. NA1K knows very well that POG requires the portal be likely to attract large number of portal maintainers, but has neither identified any maintainers or tried to recruit any. NA1K has not even posted at WT:NIR about this update plan, let alone had any positive responses.

So NA1K's actions here seems to me to be at best a severe misjudgement, and at worst a gaming of the system. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:45, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

Ooohhh "Northern Ireland is hardly a broad topic" - that's a bold statement! I'm sure there will be a few people who disagree with that one! And you've introduced new criteria too: population and geographical size. Why not argue those as part of a new guideline for portal notability? You've been a champion for the constructive debate over portals in the past, please don't give up - we need editors like you on board. Bermicourt (talk) 09:21, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

The claim that "Northern Ireland" is a narrow scope is just absurd. Also, what do you mean by a "large number of portal maintainers"? As portals go, I would say one is normal, two is healthy, and three is a large number of maintainers, but not really necessary. —Kusma (t·c) 09:51, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Plenty of great content exists on English Misplaced Pages to expand Portal:Northern Ireland. The claim here of Northern Ireland being a narrow topic is quite subjective, at best. If anyone's interested in improving the portal, great, if not, then that's the way it goes. Welcome to the Portal WikiProject. Yay! North America 12:44, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

I Agree with Bermicourt, Kusma & Northamerica1000 above. Northern Ireland is, in my opinion, a sufficiently broad topic to justify a Portal.

@Northamerica1000 I'd be willing to join a collaborative effort to expand the Portal because there does seem to be significant material out there. As a first step, I've added a "Recognised Content" section to the Portal Talk page which will trigger JL-Bot to populate it with recognised content. That will generate a suitable central location to select decent content from. I welcome any and all additional participants. Time to stop the rot, and start saving some potentially worthy Portals.

I also think one of the greatest weaknesses currently (apart from the meagre selection of content being displayed) is the extensive use of forked content on the intro and the various subpages. I think these should be modified ASAP to use transcluded content. so that they are always up to date and minimise the vandalism risk. I'll start work on that in the next couple of days. --Cactus.man ✍ 17:29, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Update: I've left a notice / invitation for interested volunteers at WT:NIR --Cactus.man ✍ 17:58, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

• Hi Cactus.man: Glad to hear it. For starters, I have:

• Upgraded the portal's markup to use article transclusions for the selected article and selected biography sections.
• Upgraded the portal to use modernized image layout for the selected picture section
• Added more FA and GA class articles to the selected article and selected biography sections, as well as some other articles.
• Used a transclusion for the portal's introduction section, which keeps the intro up-to-date relative to content in the main article.

Look forward to working with you and others to further improve the portal, and thanks again for replying and for your interest. North America 00:40, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

• I've also expanded the selected picture area, adding two Wikimedia Commons Featured pictures and a two Wikimedia Commons Valued images. Of course, this section can also be further expanded. North America 01:35, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Great job guys. Disregard any naysayers do what you think is best.--Moxy 🍁 03:24, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

I looked at what has been done. Moxy's cheerleader assertion that this bizarre selection of topics is a "good job" will be hysterically funny to anyone who knows much about Northern Ireland, a group which clearly does not include the drive-by portalistas who made this comedy.

The portal as it stands is a poster-child for the POG requirement that an active Wikiproject be involved. Because when you are trying to create an encyclopedic overview of a topic, it helps to have more than 5 minute's acquaintance with it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)

Have you no shame?

Bermicourt, please don't play smart-alec games which try to misrepresent me and deflect the point of substance. It's very clear that I was posing population size and geographic area as some measures for comparison with other deleted portals, rather than as absolute criteria (which I'd oppose).

It is quite extraordinary to see yet again the determination of portalistas to simply lie, lie and lie again in their mendacious determination to ignore POG. This time, it's not just NA1K; it several of the groupies coming out to lie in chorus.

In this case, there is very clear evidence that the portal has simply failed to attract either a large number of readers or a large numbers of maintainers. It is also clear that WP:NIR is at best dormant, and more likely defunct. POG says "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal." A defunct WikiProject is no assistance.

I note that no editor above offers to commit themselves to long-term maintenance of the portal, and that no other maintainer has been identified.

These requirement for readers, maintainers and a WikiProject are core points of POG, devised and worded long before I ever set eyes on POG. Yet once again, a discussion on this project page is being dominated by a bunch of editors who claim to be in favour of portals ... but who simply engage in tag-team lying in order to evade their own project's guidelines.

Have you no shame, any of you? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:14, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

English Misplaced Pages portals with least editors

Useful query, I think, to go beyond pageviews: quarry:query/38221. You can download the spreadsheet and divide the number of edits or editors by the number of years, or whatever.

It also helped me find some orphan subpages (1, 2, 3). Nemo 10:19, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

• NA-importance Portal pages