This page is within the scope of WikiProject Portals, a collaborative effort to improve portals on Wikipedia. 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
Comment – As this is a detailed page that has received a fair amount of edits, it may be better to tag the page atop with the {{historical}} template, which would serve to demonstrate the work that occurred to this aspect of the portal in the past, as well as to retain the page as a general historical reference. North America100006:15, 29 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
In the previous discussions in 2019 it was understood that the exclusion of subpages must be by MfD. I believe that this section "Requests for Admin assistance " should be removed from this talk page.Guilherme Burn (talk) 12:02, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Do you have a link to that consensus? My view is that it's legitimate to request assistance for technical changes, such as when replacing Portal:Foo/Articles/1 to /99 by a template in Portal:Foo which produces similar excerpts, but not as part of demolishing a portal (for example, after quietly replacing its main page by a redirect to a broader portal). Certes (talk) 13:11, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I don't have the link, I can search for discussions, but this is unnecessary. @Certes: you are a witness, like me, of the thousands of excluded subpages that were restored. I think it is better not to repeat the same mistake again, or we exclude via MfD or leave them in limbo for a while.(Or we propose a new criterion for speed deletions)Guilherme Burn (talk) 14:01, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Bug collection
This section is only for tracking bugs and feature requests, in the MediaWiki software itself, which affect portals. For general technical help with portals or portal-related templates, create a new section on this talk page.
Do not report new bugs or feature requests in this section – only list them here after a Phabricator task has been created.
T196722: Gallery slideshow controls take up more than one line on narrow displays
T196723: Gallery slideshow flickers when changing images
T194887: Mode slideshow of gallery tag is not working in phone screens
T199126: Scribunto/Lua should have a built-in method for retrieving category members
One of the most popular reasons for suggesting deletion of portals seems to be "too narrow a scope". This makes sense if there are - and are only ever going to be - a handful of articles to display on the portal. But often that reason is used for portals on subjects for which there are hundreds or thousands of pages within the matching category - for example Portal:Isle of Wight was deleted for that reason, yet there are currently 1,806 articles in Category:Isle of Wight and its subcategories, up to a depth of 5, according to PetScan, and Commons has 69,476 files in the equivalent search. I can't fathom how that can possibly be interpreted as a narrow scope.
Recently, Portal:Hampshire was nominated for deletion on similar grounds; its equivalent numbers are 17,232 articles and 317,826 files, yet there were still editors arguing that the scope is too small for a portal.
I would like to propose a guideline that uses empirical data like these to help determine whether a topic has sufficient scope to be a portal. The proposal would need to decide on what depth of search to use - I've used 5 levels here which I think is reasonable but category trees do go much deeper. Basically the better organised a category is, the deeper articles and files tend do be in the hierarchy. It would also need to decide on what number of articles and files would indicate enough scope for a portal. For example, I think any topic with an excess of 500 articles and images in its corresponding category has more than enough scope for a portal. Maybe the number should be as low as 100?
The guideline would need to be very clear that this shouldn't be the only way of judging scope. We know that due to systemic bias there are many topics that should have more articles and images in an ideal world, but don't. They are no less worthy of having a portal about them, even if they don't match whatever benchmark we set. The intention is to curtail "too narrow a scope" arguments when the numbers clearly suggest otherwise; topics with fewer articles than the benchmark might still have sufficient potential scope to merit a portal, especially if the portal includes a list of suggested articles for creation that might draw new editors in.
Sorry for the wall of text. What do you think of the idea, and what do you think we should propose as benchmark numbers for "this topic clearly has enough scope for a portal"? WaggersTALK09:55, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Portals are an outdated and obsolete concept. They became obsolete with the advent of the internet search engine.
On Wikipedia, Portals overlap with articles and WikiProjects, and they have no unique merit. In every respect, they detract either from the parent article or the WikiProject.
You're welcome to your opinion of course but it's off topic for this discussion. The community has discussed whether or not to abolish portals before and decided against doing so. If you want to resurrect that discussion feel free to do so elsewhere, but please don't hijack this discussion. WaggersTALK11:04, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Before discussing a scope for portals we need a consensus on what a Wiki portal should be. Other encyclopedias still use some portal concept [1] and [2] an argument for us to keep, but I agree with the other editor that the current model, fork-based or transclusion-based is outdated and obsolete. In the MFDs there is an effort to maintain a scope that allows the current portals to exist, even if they are moribund(WP:PWP). In the current scope there could be 10000 portals and I see no reason, either encyclopedic or navigational, for more than 10 or 100.Guilherme Burn (talk) 20:28, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Again, if you want to discuss what the purpose of portals is and whether we should have them, feel free to do that elsewhere. This thread is purely about the scope question, please stick to that topic here. I do accept these things are related but let's try to focus on the questions I asked please. WaggersTALK08:43, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the current scenario I believe it is difficult to reach a consensus on content-based scoping. I believe the ideal scope would be one portal for each active Wikiproject, 1:1.Guilherme Burn (talk) 20:15, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
During the great portal purge of a few years ago, we lost Portal:Culture. I hadn't followed the discussion but we clearly tossed many babies with bathwater that day. The reason I mention this is that clearly Wikipedia is populated with lots of articles about culture. No lack of fine candidates. One of the stronger arguments portal opponents once made was that portals were commonly created out of the finest articles of the individual scope (perhaps using the model of our main page portal), but the portals themselves did not broadly cover (or progressively improve the broad coverage of) the subject, as we would expect article improvement on the subject to do. Scope is a most important discussion: as a portalista of some experience, I would assert that our existing and previous portals have tended to sample the subject, as opposed to cover it. I would argue that a wiki with almost 7 million articles should be able to do better than were doing in 2005-2010 when most legacy portals were previously created. The many new but automated portals which were created lacked any concept of scope. These portals were based purely on populating the portal with a suggested quality of articles. BusterD (talk) 09:24, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I guess my question is "Does merely sampling a subject matter provide sufficient scope for a Wikipedia portal?" I think the community generally feels it does not. BusterD (talk) 09:36, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I and others verified that there were no babies in that bathwater, or in the bathwater of any portals in which I participated in the MFD. There had never been any babies in that bathwater. It was thrown out because it only had 7 articles and had not been maintained since 2006. It wasn't deleted as being too broad or too narrow a subject area, but for not having coverage of the subject area. If someone had performed drive-by maintenance on the portal, the outcome might have been different. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:08, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That scope versus coverage distinction is an important one. I still think that in a case where a subject has sufficient scope but the portal doesn't cover it well, the answer should be WP:SOFIXIT rather than deletion - it's ok for an article to be a stub and I think the same principle should apply to the whole project, including portals - but that's obviously a moot point now; we don't need to rehash the MFD discussion here. WaggersTALK10:22, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The question I think of when it comes to portal scope is: would there be a paper encyclopaedia on that topic? For example, would I expect to find an Encyclopaedia of the Isle of Wight, an Encyclopaedia of Hampshire or an Encyclopaedia of Culture in a library or on a bookshelf of a person interested in those topics; in all three of those cases, my answer is a resounding yes. But when it comes to, say, an individual town - Shanklin for example - I might expect there to be some local history books on the topic, but not an Encyclopaedia of Shanklin.
Fundamentally a portal is the main page equivalent for these smaller encyclopaedias, all of which are subsets of Wikipedia as a whole. Just like the actual main page, their job is to provide navigation, showcase the contents, and, to some extent, encourage further collaboration (turning readers into editors).
I agree, to provide a decent navigation tool, portals should link to topics within the topic, not just pick a few articles at random to show. I think for the most part they do do that, but maybe we should strive to make the navigation elements more prominent and place less emphasis on selected content. WaggersTALK10:25, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(This is making me wonder whether Portal:Isle of Wight should be resurrected not as a standalone portal but as a page within Portal:South East England, with a redirect from the Portal:Isle of Wight page. But I don't want to make this discussion about that one case!) WaggersTALK10:26, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I really like the idea. That Britannica page looks particularly good. I think the box layout we generally use does look a bit dated now so removing all those borders etc. makes for a much cleaner and more modern look. It's a big improvement, I'll probably copy some of these ideas for the portals I look after. WaggersTALK08:50, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Greetings, On portable devices (cellphones), this new look can be helpful as easier viewing. On my laptop, without all those boxes, it looks very plain & not as readable. Any thoughts to adding "----" (horizontal line) as simple dividers? Just adding my two-cents worth here. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 15:11, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Do not report new bugs or feature requests in this section – only list them here after a Phabricator task has been created.
