User talk:The Transhumanist

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Please contact me concerning anything to do with outlines or the Outlines WikiProject. Questions, problems, conflicts, AfD's, etc. etc. Thank you.


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Portal category AWB[edit]

{{portal category}} or {{portal category|nolinkinfo}} should be added to subcategories of Category:Portals that have "portals" in the title. You can do it yourself, or post it to the WikiProject. wumbolo ^^^ 15:34, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

@Cesdeva, AfroThundr3007730, and TheGridExe: I know just the guys for the job. This is the perfect task for them to try out their new toy. :) Cheers.    — The Transhumanist   19:34, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Indexes[edit]

Why do we have indexes on Wikipedia?

By purpose, indexes are identical to categories, in that both alphabetically list articles related to some topic. I looked at past discussions at talk pages related to indexes, and only found a small discussion and a request for comment (both here) about their existence. I see few arguments and they don't convince me. I will discuss some of them in the next paragraph.

Generally, categories aren't ported to offline versions of Wikipedia. I would propose some kind of "printworthiness" for categories like we have for redirects. Some editors were giving arguments for having list articles, but indexes are not list articles (in the sense that they have no room for expansion, by definition). Readers don't care much about categories, but if that is so, they don't care about indexes either. It is true that categories can't contain red links, while indexes can; I must say that I fundamentally disagree with that (just like infoboxes shouldn't contain "unknown" parameters, indexes of articles on Wikipedia shouldn't contain red-links). Some said at the RfC that indexes are more editor-oriented, and I believe that makes them unsuitable for mainspace. Another argument was that indexes can have related changes tracked; however, categories can do that as well. wumbolo ^^^ 12:26, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Wumbolo, good question. It's nice to see when an editor puts thought into the purposes and practices of the encyclopedia. I hope I can provide you with some good answers...
Each of Wikipedia's navigation systems, of which categories and indexes are two, have their own strengths and weaknesses. Categories are useful for some things, and not for others. The same applies to indexes.
Categories are split up, and so are not alphabetical across the whole subject. They are classified indexes, sorted by subtopic. The counterpart to classified indexes, are alphabetical indexes. Wikipedia's index articles are alphabetically arranged for their whole subject, where possible.
One thing you can do with indexes more easily than with categories is see related changes for all the topics (or at least many more of them) belonging to the subject. Categories are split up into many smaller groups, making the operation repetitive, quite tedious, and time-consuming when you want to cover the whole subject.
Categories are decentralized (as tags at the bottom of many different articles), while indexes are centralized. The main ramification of this is that there is a record of what happened with indexes, which makes them much better for tracking. When a category is removed from a page, the page disappears from those categories with no record in the categories' histories. You would have to notice that it is missing. With indexes, the removal of links from them show up in the indexes' histories.
Indexes support redlinks, categories do not. When a page is deleted, it disappears from its categories without a trace. On indexes, you can see the redlink, and look into the reason for it. Redlinks can also indicated that an article is needed for that topic, a benefit of list articles, including indexes. Providing redlinks is one of the ways that Wikipedia has expanded so rapidly. You just click on a redlink, and an editor opens up so you can start typing away. This ease of creating new articles is why redlinks are a core feature of the MediaWiki software, and thus a key feature of Wikipedia. Very powerful, and one of the factors leading to the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the world.
Categories are not ported to offline versions of Wikipedia, leaving those versions without an index. Printed encyclopedias have tables of contents and indexes, as they are very useful. And so does Wikipedia, as they are very useful, even more so than with paper encyclopedias, because WP indexes contain links you can click on, rather than page numbers that you would have to manually open a book to. Indexes utilize the power of hypertext very effectively, compacted, all on one page.
Both categories and indexes are a form of list, while indexes are a type of list article. While potential for expansion has no bearing on the qualification to be a list, as lists can be of finite sets of things, the scope of subject indexes expand as the scope of Wikipedia's coverage of their subjects expand. And Wikipedia is expanding all the time.
Indexes are alphabetical general topics list. There are two types of general topics lists on Wikipedia: indexes and outlines. Outlines are structured general topics lists. Outlines and indexes go hand-in-hand. Outlines serve as the subject-based tables of contents of Wikipedia, while indexes serve as the alphabetical indexes of Wikipedia. Analogous to books, but with the power of hypertext. How useful is a book with the table of contents and index ripped out? Which brings us to the issue of search...
It is not actually true that readers don't care about categories or indexes. The page views indicate that those are probably used mainly when search fails a reader, when readers are forced to find what they are looking for through browsing. Having these browsing backup systems are very important. Because you can't search for something you don't know the name of. Also, search fails miserably when you type in something like "Everything on geology". Wikipedia, on the other hand, provides lists of everything on geology. They are great for students wanting an overview of everything Wikipedia includes on a subject. In this regard, the mathematics topics lists are phenomenal, including both indexes and outlines, though they don't include those terms in their titles. Search works well most of the time, but not all of the time. For those other times, we have our browsing-based navigation systems.
If indexes were moved out of article space, then ported versions of Wikipedia would be indexless. The benefits mentioned directly above would not be available to readers.
The various navigation systems are synergistic. They are built in different ways by editors with different styles, and are useful in building each other. Indexes are useful to identify topics that need to be added to categories, and are much easier to build. Therefor, they are a useful preparation step for category building, and for outline and glossary building too, for example. Categories, in turn, help to provide terms that the other navigation systems can use.
Another aspect of indexes is that they exist, and can therefor be improved upon. You can't transform them into something even better if they no longer exist. Nobody knows what improvements or inventions may be made in the future regarding them. Take the portals, for example. They are currently being improved in ways nobody ever dreamed of before. The same type of thing (innovation) is also happening to outlines, and can also happen to glossaries, indexes, categories, etc. That's a good thing. Let's keep 'em all. See WP:CLN.
I hope I've shed some light on the usefulness of indexes. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   21:57, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
Thank you for the reply. Since there is no documented scope of indexes, I would like to propose that an article X belongs to an index Y iff a subtopic of Y is a defining characteristic of X. By making criteria for index articles kind of equivalent to those for categories, we could fully automate the generation of index articles. As a matter of fact, we would only need to pick a topic, select which subcategories are "true subtopics", and let the index be generated automatically (most likely we would have to resort to updating indexes using bots, as it seems unlikely that a MediaWiki proposal would pass). Red-links can be added manually and won't be removed by automated processes.
I reread your reply and believe that my solution fulfills the whole purpose of indexes. Categories don't have histories of add/remove operations, and my proposed automatic processes would generate an accurate summary of additions/removals each time the index is updated (perhaps daily). If indexes were automated, they wouldn't lose anything; they would only be more up-to-date.
I'm thinking about why indexes could use the WP:DEFINING logic, and will try to put some arguments. I took a look at Subject indexing, which linked Subject (documents). I read the latter; however, I can't really summarize the whole article. I do feel that it both applies to Wikipedia's concept of indexes, and that it doesn't deviate much from WP:DEFINING. wumbolo ^^^ 12:49, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
@Wumbolo: See User:Mathbot. Let me know what you think.    — The Transhumanist   03:40, 7 June 2018 (UTC)
Great bot. I think a generalization of the bot could work for non-mathematics indexes. wumbolo ^^^ 12:29, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #008, 7 June 2018[edit]

The WikiProject now has 92 participants, including 16 admins.

Welcome[edit]

A warm welcome to the newest members of the team:

Be sure to say hi.

Congrats[edit]

Pbsouthwood has just gotten through the grueling RfA process to become a Wikipedia administrator. Be sure to congratulate him.

The reason he went for it was: "For some time I expect to be busy with subpage deletion for Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals as mentioned above. The amount of work is expected to keep me busy for some time. I am primarly a content creator and contributor to policy discussions, but would be willing to consider other admin work on request, providing that I feel that my involvement would be appropriate and not too far outside my comfort zone."

New feature: Picture slideshow[edit]

Picture slideshow

Evad37 has figured out a way to let the user flip through pictures without purging the page. Purging is awkward because there is an intermediary confirmation screen that you have to click on "yes". In the new picture slideshow section, all you have to do is click on the > to go to the next picture or < to instantly show the previous feature. The feature also shuffles the pictures when the page is initiated, so that they are shown in a different order each time the user visits the page (or purges it).

It is featured in Portal:Sacramento, California. Check it out to the right.

Keep in mind that the feature is a beta version. Please share your comments on how to refine this feature, at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals#Refining the Picture slideshow.

The one-page portal has been achieved[edit]

We now have a one-page portal design. It isn't fully automated, nor is it even fully semi-automated, as there are still some manually filled-in areas. But it no longer requires any subpages in portal space, and that is a huge improvement. For example, Portal:Sacramento, California utilizes the one-page design concept. While is employs heavy use of templates, it does not have any subpages of its own.

I commend you for your teamwork[edit]

This is the most cooperative team I've ever seen. With a strong spirit of working together to get an important job done. Kudos to you.

In conclusion...[edit]

There's more. A lot more. But it will have to wait until next issue, but you don't have to wait. See what's going on at the WikiProject's talk page.    — The Transhumanist   02:13, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Hints & Proposals[edit]

Hello The Transhumanist, because I am not able to place ideas or proposals in suitable areas I may drop this at yours:

Please make up your mind which elements of the above is worthy enough to be traced by Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals. Best --Tom (talk) 06:04, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

  • Picture navigation looks worthy of portal customization, by specific editors willing to put the time into making the images. Creation of these doesn't appear to be automatable at this time.
  • The picture slideshow randomizes every time you visit or purge the page, just like other "selected" sections. Adding pictures, or managing the list of pictures shown, is not automatic at this time. Though we will be working on it, it hasn't passed the discussion phase yet.
My answers to your other 3 list items will have to wait until I get a translator installed on this machine.    — The Transhumanist   20:31, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Broter[edit]

The portal project has lost a member. Hopefully this incident won't lead to auto-deletion of their portals. Certes (talk) 17:47, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: Yes, that's unfortunate. It was a behavioral block, which he might be able to get forgiven for if he promises to change his ways. Regarding your concern, he wasn't a sock violating an existing block. Therefore, his previous works remain in place. They remove edits made by editors who make them while blocked (via a sock-puppet account). Those edits are invalid. Edits made while not blocked are not rendered invalid by becoming blocked. I hope this clarification helps.    — The Transhumanist   18:06, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Executive director of portals[edit]

Portal Barnstar Hires.png The Portal Barnstar
Not sure if a simple barnstar can express the communities gratitude to the portal work that you're doing. Your an indispensable member of our community. Moxy (talk) 18:08, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Moxy, thank you. I'm honored, and I receive this praise for the team, without whom there would be very little progress on portals. They are literally transforming them into something new. I'm glad to be a part of that.    — The Transhumanist   18:20, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Nevertheless ... may I also praise your work? You are doing a great job! Best --Tom (talk) 14:01, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

:: @Tom: Thank you. By the way, I saw your thread over at WT:WPPORT, and have touched up the Portal:Anatomy. Feel free to reverse, change, or expand upon anything I did. Enjoy.    — The Transhumanist   20:35, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: Pls. compare User:Tom (LT) versus my account User:Tom ... that another colleague ;-) Cheers --Tom (talk) 22:27, 9 June 2018 (UTC)
@Tom: Whoa, and I pinged a 3rd Tom. :) There's another Tom whose pagename looks exactly the same as yours, but with different underlying letters. Very strange. Haven't seen that before. I'm glad you like the work we're doing on portals. If you have any ideas on how else the portals can be improved, please let me know. Thanks.    — The Transhumanist   23:17, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Revert at portals RFC page[edit]

As you may have already seen by the time I post this, I have reverted away the voluminous "update" information you just posted to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/RfC: Ending the system of portals. The discussion there is pretty much dead, and everyone who was interested in the topic has no doubt moved on. If you'd like to post a pointer to that information, most/all of which appears to be at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Newsletter archive, please do. But I don't think posting about 40K of additional text to the RFC page is appropriate at this point. - dcljr (talk) 23:19, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the heads up. I've added a more modest ending section to the page.  Done    — The Transhumanist   23:30, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Everywhere I go I find your lengthy portal spam. Wikiproject Math? Assorted editor talk pages? No other WikiProject or function on Wikipedia posts all this detailed advertising all over the place. It's annoying and must be against some policy - amd if not - it should be. Legacypac (talk) 15:27, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Hello again. But it's not WP:SPAM by the Wikipedia community's definition, and not even by the dictionary definition (as it is on-topic). And while what I've been posting are notifications of wiki activity which are entirely appropriate per WP:APPNOTE, thank you for reminding me that WikiProject advertising is also allowed, and that one of the WikiProject's participants has created an ad...
I've been spreading news about portals that portal supporters and related WikiProjects may wish to know. For example, there are several portals within the scope of the Mathematics WikiProject.
By the way, there is also news concerning the clean up of portal space that those who supported removal of portals may be interested in. Here it is:
Since the reboot of the Portals WikiProject, so far, we've speedy deleted:
Forty-three portals (mostly long-abandoned skeletal portal starts)
A total of over 4,000 pages from portal space, including obsoleted subpages of existing portals
For the sake of clean up, we are undergoing an effort to obsolete most if not all of the 142,000+ remaining subpages in portal space. That is being done through automating portal features and migrating subpage functions to portal base pages (in the form of much more compact code). Having 100-page portals is maintenance-intensive, and so we are in the process of developing a one-page mostly automated portal model to which they can be converted.
Other concerns that supporters of portal deletion expressed during last month's RfC are also being addressed. For example, portals' being out-of-date and their lack of maintenance are being dealt with in the following 3 ways:
1) by a larger, more vibrant WikiProject
2) through the design of new portal tools and automated components
3) by the ongoing reduction of the number of portal subpages (as mentioned above). As the theory goes, remove 99% of the pages, and you remove the need for 99% of the maintenance.
For more details, see the Portal WikiProject's newsletter archive.
Thank you for your interest in the Portal WikiProject's operations. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   18:53, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Ohio[edit]

Hi again - I think the new streamlining of portals broke Wikipedia:WikiProject Ohio. It seems it was set up using many of the same portal boxes as Portal:Ohio used. Can you help me repair this? Thanks ɱ (talk) · vbm · coi) 13:48, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

@:  Done It looks like it was caused by something wrong with its box-footer subpage. I've bypassed it.    — The Transhumanist   17:49, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #009, 15 June 2018[edit]

(Article slideshow prototype)
Selected animals

Don't mind that box to the right. We'll be talking about that later, below.

Almost done...[edit]

With the portals upgrades?

No. :)

What is almost done is the updating of the main list of portals!

There are 23 portals left to be listed.

Kudos to the WikiGnome Squadron, for spearheading this.

Once it is fully updated, we need to keep it up to date. When you complete a portal, remember to add it to Portal:Contents/Portals.

Concerning portal upgrades, we are working on those section-by-section...

Associated Wikimedia section conversion task complete[edit]

The Associated Wikimedia sections of the entire set of portals have been upgraded. These are now handled on each portal base page (bypassing the previously used corresponding subpages), using the {{Wikimedia for portals}} template rather than reiterated copied/pasted code.

So, to be more accurate on reporting upgrade progress, that's one section down (for the whole set of portals), with (about) nine sections to go. (Skipping curated portals, regarding custom content sections, of course).

Further section conversions (using AWB)[edit]

Work is underway on converting Portals' introduction sections, and the categories sections.

If you would like to help, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Upgrade introduction sections and Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#AWB task: Convert category sections

Further section conversions (by hand)[edit]

Work has also started with converting selected picture sections to picture slideshow sections. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Install picture slideshows.

Quality rating system for portals under development[edit]

Currently, there is no quality rating for portals: in the Portals WikiProject box on each portals' talk page, it just says "Portal". But times are a changin'. Quality assessment is on the way, and you can help. See the discussion.

What's coming: excerpt slideshows[edit]

Evad37 has figured out a way to apply the picture slideshow feature to displaying article excerpts (now you can check out the provided box above). :) This allows us to bypass page purging to see the next selection, and you can even click through them rather quickly. Currently, the wikicode for doing this for article excerpts is a bit eye-boggling, and so we are looking into simplifying it. A streamlined version may be just around the corner.

Note that this is a prototype, not ready for widespread use. Click on the box in between the lesser than and greater than signs, to see what I mean. It was meant for pictures, and so the thumbnail feature doesn't apply to article prose very well. I've presented it even though it isn't ready, to show the direction portal development is heading. See the discussion.

Wow[edit]

I'm amazed at how rapidly portals are evolving. And we're still within a single generation of portal technological evolution. Imagine what they might be in 2 or 3 more generations of developments. Pretty soon, portals will be able to shake your hand. :)    — The Transhumanist   11:05, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Hello. My name is Portal:San Francisco Bay Area. i am pleased to make your acquaintance. I became operational at the W.P.P. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 2018. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you. Mercurywoodrose (talk) 07:57, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
(talk page stalker) Thought this looked familiar :-) · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 13:05, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Preferable markup, if you don't mind[edit]

[9], because many of us already have really long ToCs in user talk.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  16:13, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Can do.    — The Transhumanist   09:28, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
Sankyu beddy mush.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  11:25, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
PS: I didn't mean for you to manually do something special for me; rather, the idea was to change the template or outline that you use, to have regular boldfacing (and not ; markup either; that's really description list markup and we need to get away from abusing it). :-)  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  03:12, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Tamil civilization[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Tamil civilization, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Tamil civilization (2nd nomination) and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Tamil civilization during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Greatedits1 (I hope so | If not, let me know) 15:12, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

Birds Portal[edit]

Hi Transhumanist: I've been watching with interest as the Birds Portal undergoes its metamorphosis. You "portal folks" are doing a nice job! One question though; why have you cut the lead article (from "Bird") down from the full four paragraphs to two? I see that your automatic template allows for all four paragraphs to be shown... MeegsC (talk) 09:20, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

@MeegsC: It was formatting bias on my part. I've now expanded it to 4 paragraphs, and have replaced the selected picture section with a picture slideshow. The initial slide selection includes all the bird-related featured pictures, but this can be expanded as desired.    — The Transhumanist   10:22, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
Looks great! Thanks. MeegsC (talk) 13:07, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
One comment — if I press the advance button (the right arrow) for the slideshow, there's a massive amount of "flickering" between pictures. The section below the slideshow appears briefly and this is replaced by the picture, over and over and over. Is there any way to keep that from happening? Have a dedicated "box size" or something? MeegsC (talk) 21:04, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
@MeegsC: I don't know. I've copied this thread to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Technical#Birds Portal. Maybe we'll get an answer there.    — The Transhumanist   23:46, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

Edits working on the Wikimedia section (removing the purge link code)[edit]

The portals that still have the purge link in their box headers, now all have the purge link for the Wikimedia section, as you removed this via AWB. For examples see [10], [11] and [12]. Did you mean to do this (as the link seems out of place on a section that is static)? Wpgbrown talk | contribs 21:25, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

@Wpgbrown: I can't see any purge links in any section on any portal. The 3 examples you gave me present Wikimedia boxes with no edit link, and no purge link (for those sections). The only purge links I see are the ones below the intro section, and the ones at the bottom of the page. However, we are working toward replacing the box-header subpages, and this should be accomplished in the next month or three. It is complicated by the fact that boxheader subpage calls are included in {{Random portal component}}, but that template will likely be replaced in most portals. For any that keep it, that also have purge in their box-header subpage, the purge link bypass can be added back into those portals. We'll be doing a lot of AWB passes on the set of portals over the coming weeks, and so the set will be transforming pretty fast.    — The Transhumanist   07:51, 30 June 2018 (UTC)
@The Transhumanist: I had fixed those portals by adding the purge parameter (|Purge=<i></i>) back into the wikimedia section (example of a portal that has not been fixed (as of now): Portal:Yukon. Dreamy Jazz talk | contribs 22:20, 4 July 2018 (UTC) (I recently renamed my user account)

This Month in Education: June 2018[edit]

Wikipedia Education globe
This Month in Education

Volume 4 | Issue 6 | June 2018

This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter. Join the team! Finally, don't forget to subscribe!

In This Issue


Featured Topic Academia and Wikipedia: the first Irish conference on Wikipedia in education
From the Community

Ashesi Wiki Club: Charting the cause for Wikipedia Education Program in West Africa

Wikimedia Serbia has received a new accreditation for the Accredited seminars for teachers

Côte d'Ivoire: Wikipedia Classes 2018 are officially up and running

Basque secondary students have now better coverage for main topics thanks to the Education Program

What lecturers think about their first experience in the Basque Education Program

From the Education Team Education Extension scheduled deprecation
In the News

Wikipedia calls for participation to boost content from the continent

Wikipedia in the History Classroom

Wikipedia as a Pedagogical Tool Complicating Writing in the Technical Writing Classroom

When the World Helps Teach Your Class: Using Wikipedia to Teach Controversial Issues

Portals WikiProject update #010, 30 June 2018[edit]

We've grown to 94 participants.

A warm welcome to dcljr and Kpgjhpjm.

Rating system for portals[edit]

We are in the process of developing a rating system specifically for portals, as the quality assessment scheme for articles does not apply to portals. It is coming along nicely. Your input would be very helpful. See the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/General#Proposed new quality class assessments.

Better than a barnstar[edit]

One of our participants got involved with this WikiProject through interest in how the new generation of portals would be handled in WP's MOS (Manual of Style). It didn't take long before he got sucked in deeper. This has given him an opportunity to look around, and so, he has made an assessment of this WikiProject's operations:

I'm quite frankly really impressed and inspired by what's happening here. If you'd asked me a year ago if I thought portals should just be scrapped as a failed, dragged-out experiment, I would have said "yes". This planning and the progress toward making it all practical is exemplary of the wiki spirit, in particular of a happy service-to-readers puppy properly wagging its technological and editorial tail instead of the other way around, and without "drama". It's also one of the few examples I've seen in a long time of a new wikiproject actually doing something useful and fomenting constructive activity (instead of acting as a barrier to participation, and a canvassing/ownership farm for PoV pushers). Kudos all around. — SMcCandlish

Congratulations, everyone. Keep up the great work.

Slideshow development[edit]

We've run into a glitch with slideshows: they don't work on mobile devices.

Initially, we will need to explore options that allow portals to have slideshows without adversely affecting mobile viewers. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Mobile view support.

Eventually, we may need another way to do slideshows. If we do go this route, and I don't see why we wouldn't, then (user configurable) automatic slideshows also become a possibility.

TemplateStyles RfC passed[edit]

Once implemented, this will allow editors to create and edit cascading style sheets for use with templates. This will expand what we can do with portals. For more detail, see mw:Extension:TemplateStyles and Wikipedia:TemplateStyles.

Automation effort[edit]

We've run into an obstacle using Lua-based selective transclusion: Lua is incapable (on Wikipedia) of reading in article names from categories. Because of this, we'll need to seek other approaches for fully automating the Selected article section. We are exploring sources other than categories, and other technologies besides Lua.

Speaking of using other sources, the template {{Transclude list item excerpt}} collects list items from a specified page, or from a section of that page, and transcludes the lead from a randomly selected link from that list. Courtesy of Certes. So, if you use this in a portal, and if the template specifies a page or section serviced by JL-Bot, you've now got yourself an automatically updated section in the portal. JL-Bot provides links to featured content and good articles, by subject.

What is "fully automated"? When you create a portal using a creation template, and the portal works thereafter without editor intervention, the portal is fully automated. That is, the portal is supported by features that fetch new content. If you have to add new article names every so often for it to display new content, then it is only semi-automated.

Currently, the Selected article section is semi-automated, because it requires that an editor supplies the names of the various articles for which excerpts are (automatically) displayed. For examples, look at the wikisource code of Portal:Reptiles, Portal:Ancient Tamil civilization, and Portal:Reference works.

So far, 3 sections are fully automatable: the introduction section, the categories section, and the Associated Wikimedia section.

Where is all this heading?[edit]

Henry.

Or some other name.

Eventually, the portal department will be a software program. And we won't have to do anything (unless we want to). Not even tell it what portals to create (unless we want to). It will just do it all (plus whatever else we want it to do). And we will of course give it good manners, and a name.

But, that is a few years off.

Until then, building portals is still (partially) up to us.    — The Transhumanist   13:34, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Mass message sender?[edit]

Hey, TH. Is it on the up and up to use AWB to send mass messages to talk pages? Having fun! Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 00:57, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

@Checkingfax: Sure, for on-topic and in-scope messages. For example, you opted in to receive project updates when you added your name at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Project participants. ;) During the RfC on portals, I sent hundreds of invites to join the Portals WikiProject – one to each of those who supported portals in the RfC. I've posted thousands of notices to portal talk pages and WikiProject talk pages (those that have a corresponding portal page), about portal resources and the Portals WikiProject. I sent a thank you message to all those who supported portals in the RfC. And so on.    — The Transhumanist   18:15, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Is it still necessary to this manually?[edit]

Hello Transhumanist, I am in the process of reviving the wikiproject Buddhism bit by bit. There is a link on the form page of the project that advises people to add their articles on Buddhist topics to the subpage Wikipedia:WikiProject Buddhism/Articles. I wonder if this is still necessary, and whether it cannot be automated somehow.--Farang Rak Tham (Talk) 17:35, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

@Farang Rak Tham: The person to ask is the author of Mathbot, User:Oleg Alexandrov.    — The Transhumanist   07:40, 4 July 2018 (UTC)
Okay. Thanks, Transhumanist!--Farang Rak Tham (Talk) 10:37, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

A Barnstar for you[edit]

Portal Barnstar Hires.png The Portal Barnstar
The Portal Barnstar is awarded to Wikipedians who have made significant contributions to topic portals.
Thanks for the great work you have been doing in the WikiProject. Dreamy Jazz talk | contribs 22:15, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

You are welcome, formerly Wpgbrown. Nice new name. ;)    — The Transhumanist   10:26, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Languages of North Korea listed at Redirects for discussion[edit]

Information.svg

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Languages of North Korea. Since you had some involvement with the Languages of North Korea redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Thryduulf (talk) 13:56, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #011, 10 July 2018[edit]

We now have 97 participants.

Be sure to welcome our newest members, BrantleyIzMe, Coffeeandcrumbs, and Nolan Perry, with warm regards.

Work is proceeding apace. We have 2 major thrusts right now: converting the intro sections of portals, and building the components of the one-page automated model...

Converting the intro sections

We need everybody, except those building software components, to work on converting intros. If you have AWB, definitely use that. If not, then work on them manually. Even one a day, or as often as you can muster, will help a lot. There are only about 1,000 of them left to go, so if everyone chips in, it will go pretty quickly. Remember, there are 97 of us!

The intros for most of the portals starting with A through F have already been converted to use the {{Transclude lead excerpt}} template.

The standard wikicode for the automated intro that we want to put into place looks like this:

{{/box-header|Introduction|noedit=yes|}}
{{Transclude lead excerpt | {{PAGENAME}} | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1}}
{{Box-footer|[[{{PAGENAME}}|Read more...]]}}

That works for most portals, but not all. For some portals it requires some tweaking, and for others, we may have to use a different or more customized approach. Remember to visually inspect each portal you work on and make sure that it works before moving on to the next one.

Be sure to skip user-maintained portals. They are listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Portals#Specific_portal_maintainers.

AWB tips

I've started an AWB tips page, for those of you feeling a bit overwhelmed by that power user tool. Feel free to add to it and/or improve it.

Portal automation

We have some very talented Lua programmers, who are pushing the limits of what we can do in gathering data from Wikipedia's various namespaces and presenting it in portals. Due to their efforts, Lua is powering the selective transclusion core of our emerging automated portal design, in the form of selected article sections that rotate content, and slideshows.

To go beyond Lua's limits, to take full advantage of Mediawiki's API, we are in the midst of adding another programming language to the resources we shall be making use of: JavaScript. The ways that JavaScript can help us edit portals to boost the power of our Lua solutions, are being explored, which will likely make the two languages synergistic if not symbiotic. Research is under way on how we can use JavaScript to make some of the portal semi-automated features fully automatically self-updating, in ways that Lua cannot. Like gathering random members from a category and inserting them into a portal's templates as parameters. Once the parameters are in place, Lua does the rest.

If you would like to get involved with design efforts, or just keep up on them, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

When should we start building new portals?

Well, not at the present time, because building portals is quite time consuming. The good news is that we are working on a design that will be fully automated, or as close to that as we can get. And the new design is being implemented in the portal department's main portal creation template. This means, that not only will portals update themselves, their creation will be highly automated as well. That's the nature of templates. You put them in place, and they just... work.

What I'm getting at here, is that it would be better to wait to build lots of new portals until after the new design is completed. Because with it, instead of taking hours to create a new portal, it will likely take minutes.

That does not mean we should be idle in the meantime. The main reason most of us are here is because it became apparent that portals were largely unmaintained and had grown out-of-date. This had become so apparent that a proposal was made to delete all the portals and the portal namespace to boot. That makes our main objective in the short term to improve all the existing portals so that the community will want to keep them—forever.

Building lots of new portals comes later. Let's fix up the ones we have first. ;)

And on that note, I bid you adieu. Until next newsletter, see ya 'round the WikiProject.    — The Transhumanist   12:32, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #012, 15 July 2018[edit]

We have 97 participants.

Getting faster[edit]

Automation makes things go faster, even portal creation. One of the components Certes made was {{Transclude list item excerpt}}. I became curious about its possible applications.

So I worked out a portal design using it, the initial prototypes being Portal:Kyoto (without a "Selected pictures" section), and Portal:Dubai (with a "Selected pictures" section). Then I used Portal:Dubai as the basis for further portals of this type...

I was able to revamp Portal:Munich from start to finish in less than 22 minutes.
Portal:Dresden took about 19 minutes.
Portal:Athens took less than 17 minutes.
Did Portal:Florence in about 13 minutes.
Portal:Stockholm also in about 13.
Portal:Palermo approx. 12 minutes.

Why?

To see, and to show, what may become feasible via automation.

It now looks highly feasible that we could get portal construction time down to a few minutes, or maybe even down to a few seconds.

The singularity is just around the corner. :)

Slideshows[edit]

When using the {{Random slideshow}} template to display pictures, be sure to use the plural tense in the section title: "Selected pictures". That's because slideshows don't show up on many mobile devices. Instead the whole set of pictures is shown, hence the section title "Selected pictures", as it fits both situations.

In case you are curious, here is a list of the portals so far that have a slideshow:

Progress on intro conversions[edit]

The intros for most of the portals up through the letter "O" have been converted, using this wikicode:

{{/box-header|Introduction|noedit=yes|}}
{{Transclude lead excerpt | {{PAGENAME}} | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1}}
{{Box-footer|[[{{PAGENAME}}|Read more...]]}}

Where the pagename didn't match the article title for the subject, the title was typed in.

Most of the portals that do not contain {{/intro}} or {{{{FULLPGENAME}}/Intro}} have not yet been processed.

About a thousand portals use the method of selective transclusion for the intro section. That's about two-thirds. That means we have one-third of the way to go on the intro section conversions.

Much more to come...[edit]

So much has been happening with portals that I can't keep up with it. (That's good). Which means, more in the upcoming issue. Until then, see ya 'round the project. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   08:47, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Pssst, hey[edit]

Heads up: several portals you've made with {{box portal skeleton}} have a redundant {{portal description}} and {{portal maintenance status}} (they are a part of the skeleton already). I've fixed two of them linked in your WikiGnome notice, but there may be several more. I've also updated the box skeleton to actually subst: the date parameter in the maintenance status, so the ones created before my edit will actually need those substituted. I may do an AWB run to find those later (maybe a regex search for {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTDATE}}). — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 02:54, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

@AfroThundr3007730: I see you found and removed some of them. I found and removed another (at Portal:Dubai). There were a handful of city portals I converted. I think I've checked them all. They're good to go. Thanks for the heads up and assist.    — The Transhumanist   05:21, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

For the Checklist ==> Portals at Wikidata[edit]

Hello The Transhumanist :-) thank you so much for your ongoing Works. Due to the last Progress Report I noted Works at Portal:Dresden. I checked this and found that Wikidata was not existing in that case. I fixed it with this entry at Wikidata. Pls add a check for Wikidata in overhauling-checks for Portals. As a tool for international overview you can f.ex. use this tool with Statistics. Once again: I just drop this at yours to let you decedide where to place this suggestion for best usage. Cheers --Tom (talk) 06:44, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

@Tom: Thank you for the heads up. I've added your suggestion as Step #11 at Wikipedia:Portal/Instructions.    — The Transhumanist   07:08, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #013, 18 July 2018[edit]

I got overwhelmed IRL (in real life) during the production of issue #12. So, here is a catch-up issue, to help bring you (and me) up to speed on what is happening with portals...

By the way, we still have 97 participants. (Tell all your friends about this WikiProject, and have them join!)

Panoramas![edit]

One cool feature of some of the geographical portals is a panoramic picture at the top of the intro section.

Check these out:

The Portals WikiGnome squadron is busy adding panoramas to geographical portals that don't yet have one. Feel free to join in on the fun. See task details at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Add a panorama or skyline to a geographic portal.

Caveat: avoid super-huge pics, as they can cause portal scripts to time-out. Please try to keep picture size down below 2 megabytes. Thank you.

Auto-populated slideshows[edit]

Speaking of pictures...

We now have two slideshow templates. You may be familiar with {{Random slideshow}}, in which the editor types in (or copies/pastes) a list of pictures he or she wants it to display.

Well, now we have another template, courtesy of Evad37, which accepts one or more page names instead, and displays a random image off of the listed pages. So instead of listing dozens of files by hand, you can include a title or three to be scanned automatically. It even lets you specify particular sections.

The new slideshow template is {{Transclude files as random slideshow}}.

Here's a sample, that grabs images from a single page:

Selected motorcycle or motorcycling pictures

New Template:Box-header colour[edit]

Speaking of new templates, here's another one!

Also from Evad37, we have a new component for starting section boxes, that is color configurable, and that bypasses the need for box-header subpages altogether. It is {{Box-header colour}}.

For color support, see Web colors.

For the discussion in which this was inspired, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks#Colour combinations for accessibility.

(In case you didn't notice, the slideshow box above uses this new template).

BTW, don't forget to close your box with {{Box-footer}}.

Where are we on the redesign?[edit]

The answer to this question is quite involved, and would fill this page to overflowing. Therefore, this subject, including a complete update on where we are at and where we are going with portal design, is covered at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Where are we on portal conversion?[edit]

An AWB pass to convert intros on the portals has been completed. The pass couldn't convert them all (due to various formatting configurations, etc.).

All but about 170 portals now have introductions selectively transcluded on the base page. Not counting manually maintained portals, that leaves about 70 portals that either need their intros converted, or they need an intro.

Next, we'll be converting the categories sections!

What's the plan, man?[edit]

The course of action we have been taking goes something like this, with all steps being pursued simultaeneously...

1) Design a one-page automated portal model

2) Convert existing portals to that design (except those being manually maintained)

3) Remove subpages no longer needed

4) Develop further tools to empower editors working on portals

Later, when the tools are up to the task, filling in the gaps in coverage (with new portals) will also become practical.

Are we caught up yet?[edit]

Probably not.

Who knows what our programmers and editors have dreamed up while I was writing this.

See ya again soon,    — The Transhumanist   11:09, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Help! New portal. Image issue[edit]

Hey, how do you submit a new portal image so that it links to the actual portal rather than that ugly blue icon visible on newly created portals? Thanks. Senegambianamestudy (talk) 15:58, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

@Senegambianamestudy: See Template:Portal#Image.    — The Transhumanist   23:13, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
Thank you. Senegambianamestudy (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 23:20, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
Hi @The Transhumanist:, I have submitted it there but nothing seems to be happening. Have I done it wrong or something? Thanks. Senegambianamestudy (talk) 06:32, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
@Senegambianamestudy, Northamerica1000, Pbsouthwood, RockMagnetist, and Ancheta Wis: The images are not stored in the template. The page you need the image added to is Module:Portal/images/a. The Portals WikiProject has 16 admins on the team who are familiar with portals. I've pinged some to come here to look at the problem you are having. So, check back here.
In the future, the best place to request a change to protected portal-related pages is at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks. Make sure your message heading includes "Admin help needed". And you don't need to use a requests template there. Just explain what you need in a regular message.    — The Transhumanist   07:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
Thanks Transhumanist. Senegambianamestudy (talk) 08:32, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
 Done. I have performed the request. See Template talk:Portal § Image edit request on 20 July 2018 for more information. North America1000 08:37, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Germany[edit]

User:Kusma reverted the upgrade of the intro at Portal:Germany with a good point........is there an effort to retain images?--Moxy (talk) 17:56, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

@Moxy: Thank you for asking. Yes, {{Transclude lead excerpt}} and some of the other transclusion templates use Module:Excerpt, which is designed to pull images as well as text. The templates it supports include the parameter files=. However, the module is still under development, and as of yet, does not catch all images. We report the misses to the programmers as we find them. See Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Portals/Design#Template:Transclude lead excerpt.
We ran into a problem with the article Germany, see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Portals/Design#Portal:Germany. The file description page for the flag includes the phrase "non-free", which causes it to be skipped.
Note that we can still transclude text and insert images manually, but Kusma had issues with the text as well, favoring the portal's customized text. I agree with him, that it is better than the text from the root article's lead.
The purpose of the "upgrade" is two-fold: 1) to keep the excerpt from going stale (by always showing the lastest version of the text from the root article, which in most cases receives more attention); and 2) to remove subpages.
We can still achieve #2 here, by merging the contents of the subpage to the base page.  Done    — The Transhumanist   22:43, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Please could you help me make an infobox?[edit]

I'd like to make an infobox for music series. Similar to the infobox for television shows, but this one for music series. It would have the year it spanned from, the genre(s), the artist, producers, and so on. Please could you give me some help?

--Mozart834428196 (talk) 23:51, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

@Mozart834428196: What is a music series? Please post some links below. Thank you. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   07:17, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
What I mean is for example the Environments series. --Mozart834428196 (talk) 12:55, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
Here's how I would go about it (read this whole list before starting):
  1. Install SearchSuite.js. It is a search results formatter. It makes looking up page names much more convenient.
  2. Then do this search: intitle:"album series".
  3. In the sidebar tools menu, click SR details (turn off).
  4. Some of the pages listed will have infoboxes. Choose one that you like, and copy and paste it in to the article you want it in.
  5. Then, immediately, edit its content to fit the subject. If you can't work on it immediately, copy it into your sandbox instead. (The link for it is at the top of the page, right next to "Preferences".
Let me know if you run into any problems. I hope these tips help. Good luck. Sincererly,    — The Transhumanist   19:25, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
Well, thank you for recommending the idea, but what I meant is create a new Wikipedia infobox. Similar to the one we have for a television series. --Mozart834428196 (talk) 12:32, 24 July 2018 (UTC)
Chiming in: what precisely is a music series, and what in {{infobox musical composition}} would not work? (We try to rather have fewer infobox templates than more.) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:38, 24 July 2018 (UTC)
@Mozart834428196 and Gerda Arendt: In the infobox you envision, what do you want included?    — The Transhumanist   22:17, 24 July 2018 (UTC)
The release date span, for example "1791-1820", the musical artist, the genre(s), etc. In a sense, most of the things we have on the album infobox, kind of mixed together with the TV series infobox. --Mozart834428196 (talk) 10:25, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
@Mozart834428196 and Gerda Arendt: It sounds like all you need to do is copy an infobox into your sandbox, and edit it. What are you having problems with? Also, why don't you use {{infobox musical composition}} instead of creating a new infobox design? Why is a new one needed?    — The Transhumanist   18:37, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
I tried making a new infobox, it didn't work. Also, I'm talking about a series, not a composition. --Mozart834428196 (talk) 21:31, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
Also, I have worked on the infobox, but it needs help: Template:Infobox musical series. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mozart834428196 (talkcontribs) 21:35, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Portal talk page[edit]

What should a Portal talk page look like? My hometown portal is:

{{WikiProject Portals|importance= |quality= }} {{Portal talk}} {{WikiProject Philadelphia}} {{WikiProject Pennsylvania}} {{WikiProject New Jersey}}<!--Suburban NJ counties--> {{WikiProject United States|class=|importance=|DE=yes|DE-importance=}}<!--New Castle County, DE--> {{WikiProject Maryland}}<!--Cecil County, Maryland--> {| width="30%" align=right | {{Portal:Philadelphia/box-header|''Portal collaborators''|Portal:Philadelphia/Collaborators|}} {{Portal:Philadelphia/Collaborators}} {{Box-footer|}} |}

Please tell me what this page should be.--Dthomsen8 (talk) 20:07, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

@Dthomsen8: It's a page for discussing the development and maintenance of Portal:Philadelphia. The top of the page was a bit cluttered. I've added {{WikiProjectBannerShell}}. Let me know if that helps. You could also use an archive page. See Portal talk:United States and other portal talk pages for further ideas on talk page support features.
To see the latest developments for geographic portals applied, check out Portal:Lithuania.    — The Transhumanist   22:32, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Weird: I've lost my contents list on my talk page since your last portal update[edit]

Hi there. There's absolutely no criticism implied, but since your last portal update message I've been missing the contents list on my Talk page. By selective deletion, I've finally narrowed the cause down to the template text {{Box-header colour}}, but for the life of me I can't see what precisely is the cause as I can't see any No Contents command being invoked anywhere. And even weirder, I've just inserted the 'offending' code here, page previewed, and it hasn't affected your talk page at all. So I've no idea what additional script or conflict has caused the issue on my page and no other, but thought you and Evad37 might like to be aware of this.

Selected motorcycle or motorcycling pictures

Hope this is of interest, Nick Moyes (talk) 23:42, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

Fixed   — The Transhumanist   01:18, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #014, 27 July 2018[edit]

Development of design continues, full speed ahead...

Excerpt slideshows are here![edit]

Can you say "paradigm shift"?

Now, in addition to picture slideshows, we have slideshows that can display excerpts. Portals are not just for topic tasting anymore. Now they can be made useful for surveying Wikipedia's coverage of entire subjects. This gives a deeper meaning to their name. Hmmm. "Portals"... Doorways to knowledge.

Portal:Lithuania was redesigned using excerpt slideshows. Check it out.

For those of you who cannot wait to test out these new toys...

We have not one, but three excerpt slideshow components to pick from:

{{Transclude excerpts as random slideshow}}

For this one, you specify the page names where the excerpts are to be extracted from.

{{Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}}

This one accepts source pages from where the page names are gathered from list items. Then an excerpt from one of those pages is displayed. The selection of what is included in the slide show can be limited to a specific number from the collection (of the page names gathered), and that selection is renewed from scratch each time the page is purged.
For example, if you specify Template:World Heritage Sites in Spain as a source page, the slideshow will cycle through those sites. Now you don't have to type them in one-by-one. This greatly reduces portal creation time.

{{Transclude linked excerpts as random slideshow}}

Same as above, but gathers links instead of just linked list items.

Panoramic banners[edit]

{{Portal image banner}} displays a panoramic picture the width of the page, and adjusts its size, so it stays that way even if the user changes page view size. And it accepts multiple file names, so that the picture displayed randomizes between them each time the page is visited/purged.

Give resizing the page a try:

Vilnius old town banner.jpg
Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

You can now balance section boxes[edit]

Before:

Reptile types
Amphibian types

After:

Reptile types
Amphibian types

Notice how the box bottoms line up. That readjusts even if you click the slideshow buttons.

The template used for this is {{Flex columns}}.

By the way, when you include more than one box in a column, any left over whitespace in that column is divided between them.

Box-header colour[edit]

You may have noticed the new {{Box-header colour}} template used above. It lets you pick the color locally (right on the same page). Before, this was handled on a subpage somewhere.

Testing, testing[edit]

Now that we have lots of toys to play with for making cool portals...

Don't forget, that the majority of views of Wikipedia these days are from mobile devices. We need to make certain that portals display well on those. So, remember to check your work on portals in mobile view mode...

To see a portal in mobile view mode, insert a ".m" into a portal's url, after "en", like this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Reptile

If you discover problems in a portal you can't fix, report them on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Until next time...[edit]

Have fun.    — The Transhumanist   01:00, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Portal Monaco[edit]

May we have a Monaco portal, please? Thank you —Cote d'Azur (talk) 08:35, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

@Cote d'Azur: Portal:Monaco is under construction.    — The Transhumanist   09:26, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
@Cote d'Azur:  Done    — The Transhumanist   10:32, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
Looks very good and many thanks. —Cote d'Azur (talk) 14:07, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

SearchSuite suggestion[edit]

Hello and thanks again for User:The Transhumanist/SearchSuite.js which I find very useful. May I suggest another switch, to turn off the suppression of non-matching entries? For example, I'm currently searching for linksto:"Adventure" intitle:"film" (because many of those articles should link to Adventure film instead), but I need to comment out SearchSuite in my common.js to see any results. Thanks, Certes (talk) 09:38, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Good idea. I will work on it as time allows.    — The Transhumanist   22:37, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
Aha! The problem is that intitle: wasn't the first thing in my search. Line 147 of SearchSuite.js sets intitle to linksto:"Adventure" film, and line 151 doesn't find that string in any article titles. An extra .* in line 145 might fix it, as in RegExp('.*intitle:"(.+?)".*','i'), but I've not tested that change. Certes (talk) 23:41, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals tasks requests: presented in the newsletter below...[edit]

Portals WikiProject update #015, 31 July 2018[edit]

Now that we have lots of toys to play with, it's play time!

Here are some fun activities to use our new toys on...

Fun activity #1: put the improved panorama template to use[edit]

Would you like to travel around the world? Well, this may be the next best thing...

Here's another fun toy to play with: {{Portal image banner}}

To see what it looks like, check out the panoramas at the tops of the following portals:

The task: There are many geography portals that lack panoramas. Please add some. Please keep the file size down below 2 megabytes, and keep in mind that you may find quality banners at commons: at less than 200K (.2 megabytes). Good search terms to include with the place name are "banner", "cityscape", "skyline", "panorama", "landscape", etc.

Related task: There are also lots of geography portals that have panoramas used as gaudy banners (with print or icons splattered across them) or that display them in some random location on the page. In many cases, those pages would be improved by displaying the panorama as a clean picture at the top of the intro section, like on the examples above. This works best with banner-like panoramas. Please fix such pages when you come across them, if you believe it would improve the look of the page.

Taller images might be better suited displayed further down the page, or in the "Selected images" section.

Note that {{Portal image banner}} supports multiple images, and displays one at random upon the first visit, and each time the page is purged.

Fun activity #2: install "Selected images" sections[edit]

That is, image slideshows!

Over 200 have been installed so far. Just 1200 to go. (Be sure not to install them on portals with active maintainers, unless they want you to).

The title "Selected images" reflects the fact that not all images on Wikipedia are pictures, and encompasses maps, graphs, diagrams, sketches, paintings, pictures, and so on.

The toys we have to work with for this are:

{{Random slideshow}}

and

{{Transclude files as random slideshow}}

The task: Using one of the above templates directly on a portal's base page, replace static "Selected picture" sections, with a section like one of these:

Selected images
Selected images

The one on the left uses {{Random slideshow}} (which accepts file names), and the one on the right uses {{Transclude files as random slideshow}} (which accepts source pages from which the filenames are gathered).

The above section formatting is used on many of the pages you will come across, but not all. In those cases, use whatever section formatting matches the rest of the page.

Note that you may come across "Selected picture" sections done with {{Random portal component}} templates. That template call is the entire section. Replace it with a section that matches the other sections on the page, and put the new slideshow inside that.

For example, in Portal:California, this code:

{{Random portal component|max=21|seed=27|header=Selected picture|subpage=Selected picture}}

was replaced with this code:

{{/box-header|Selected images|noedit=yes}}
{{Transclude files as random slideshow
| {{PAGENAME}}
| Culture of {{PAGENAME}}
}}
{{Box-footer}}

And the new section blended right in with the formatting of the rest of the page. Note the use of the {{PAGENAME}} magic word. Plain article titles also work. Don't feel limited to one or two page names. But be sure to test each slideshow before installing the next one. (Or if you prefer, in batches - just don't leave them hanging). Report technical problems at the Portal design talk page.

Fun activity #3: upgrade "Selected article" sections[edit]

These sections, where unmaintained, have gone stale. That's because 1) the excerpts are static, having been manually copied and pasted, and 2) because they lack automatic addition of new entries.

They can be upgraded with:

{{Transclude random excerpt}}

or

{{Transclude list item excerpt}}

or

{{Transclude linked excerpt}}

All three of these will provide excerpts that won't go stale. The latter two can provide excerpt collections that won't go stale, by providing new entries over time. The key is to select source pages or source sections that are frequently updated, such as root article sections, mainstream lists, or navigation templates.

Where will this put us?[edit]

When the above tasks are completed for the entire collection of portals (except the ones with specific maintainers), we'll be more than half-way done with the portal system upgrade.

Keep up the great work.    — The Transhumanist   19:18, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

This Month in Education: July 2018[edit]

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This Month in Education

Volume 4 | Issue 7 | July 2018

This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter. Join the team! Finally, don't forget to subscribe!

In This Issue


Featured Topic

Wikipedia+Education Conference 2019: Community Engagement Survey


From the Community

Young wikipedian: At WikiClub you get knowledge on your own will

Wikipedia in schools project at the "New Technologies in Education" Conference

Basque Education Program: 2017-2018 school year report


In the News

UNESCO ICT in Education Prize call for nominations opens

An educator's overview of Wikimedia (in short videos format)

Your draft article, Draft:Eastern ethics[edit]

Hello, The Transhumanist. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "Eastern ethics".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply edit the submission and remove the {{db-afc}}, {{db-draft}}, or {{db-g13}} code.

If your submission has already been deleted by the time you get there, and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Hhkohh (talk) 13:52, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Bird tasks[edit]

Hi Transhumanist: Is there a reason why the {{Birds tasks}} template is now locked, so that members of the WP:BIRDS can no longer update it? The information there is now woefully out of date. All of the articles listed in the "Stubs" section are no longer stubs, for example, and Bonaparte's gull was copyedited years ago! Could this section reference the actual categories of the project's cleanup listing? If not, then we need to be able to update it problems are addressed. MeegsC (talk) 15:25, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

@MeegsC and Primefac: Let's take a look at the template's log entries, and see what's up. Clicking on View source, we discover there's a notice on there "The reason for protection can be found in the protection log", and it provides a link. Following that link and looking at the protection log, we see this: 08:29, 23 February 2018 Primefac (talk | contribs) changed protection level for Template:Birds tasks [Edit=Require template editor access] (indefinite) [Move=Require template editor access] (indefinite) (high-risk template with 4000+ transclusions). So, you have a number of options:
  1. Start a discussion on the template's talk page about its protection level
  2. Request from Primefac to unprotect it
  3. Request to be assigned the template editor right, at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Template editor
  4. Or contact someone in Category:Wikipedians who respond to template-protected edit requests to make changes each time you need them. Primefac is listed there, and will likely be very happy to help you.
I think #3 is your best option. I've pinged Primefac, for their input.    — The Transhumanist   22:43, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
Actually, for this, any one except #3 are good options (no need to get TE just to edit one template). I've dropped it down to EC protection. I've also linked the template in the first line of the thread for convenience.
As for the original concern that was brought up here, the template hasn't been edited since 2015, so I'm not overly surprised it's out of date! Primefac (talk) 22:53, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
Thanks @Primefac:. It will certainly be helpful that anyone in the project can update the work list — though, as you say, it doesn't appear that (m)any of us are actually using it. I'm guessing the project's "cleanup listing" is taking priority these days... MeegsC (talk) 08:00, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #016, 15 Aug 2018[edit]

Future portal tool[edit]

Discussions are underway on the design of a portal tool (user script) that will hopefully have features for modifying portals at the click of a menu item, to make editing them easier. It might do things like change the color for you, add to a selection, add a new section, move a section, and so on.

If you'd like to be involved and suggest features for the tool, please join us at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#What would you want a portal tool to be able to do?.

Progress report: upgrade of portals[edit]

As new portal components are built by our Lua gurus, those components are being used to upgrade portals. Each component automates a section of a portal in a particular way.

The sections that are mostly upgraded so far are the Intro, and the Associated Wikimedia section.

The sections currently undergoing upgrade are: Selected image, Categories, and the Intro.

The Intro? Isn't that done already?

Yes, and no.

The upgrade of the excerpt in intros is mostly complete (there are about 70 non-standard portals that still need it).

Now we are doing another upgrade of intros in the form of adding a panoramic picture at the top of the intro, on portals for which such a picture is available on Commons:. Dozens of panoramas have been added so far, and they are really starting to affect the look of portals — the portals that have them look really good.

Regions are the most likely subjects to have panoramas, but a surprising number of other subjects have banner-shaped pictures too. Some examples of non-geographic portals that they have been added to are:

Speaking of pictures, several hundred Selected image sections have been upgraded to include image slideshows.

Progress report: design[edit]

The push for automation continues, with new components under continuous testing in the field. As problems are spotted, they are reported to our programmers, who have done a fantastic job of keeping up with bug reports and fixing the relevant Lua modules fast. I am highly impressed.

Construction time on new portals is now down to as little as a minute or less. Though not in general. If you are lucky enough to spot portals that fit the profile of the new tools (their strengths), then a portal can be complete almost as soon as it is created, with the added time it takes to find and add a panorama. Source page titles are not generally standardized, and so it source pages in many cases must be entered manually. Where source page titles follow a standard naming convention, portal creation for those subjects goes quickly.

So, we still have some hurdles, but the outlook on portals is very good. New features, and many improvements to features are on the horizon. I'll be sure to report them when they become available.

What will the portal of the future look like? That is up to you!

See you on the project's talk pages.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   21:10, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

History of District (Austria) listed at Redirects for discussion[edit]

Information.svg

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect History of District (Austria). Since you had some involvement with the History of District (Austria) redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Damvile (talk) 00:54, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #017, 22 Aug 2018[edit]

This issue is about portal creation...

Creating new portals[edit]

Myself and others have been testing and experimenting with the new components in upgrading existing portals and in building new portals. They have now been applied in hundreds of portals.

The templates are ready for general use for portal creation.

They are still a bit buggy, but the only way we are going to work the rest of the bugs out is by using them and reporting the bugs as we come across them.

I look forward to seeing what new portals you create!

Be sure to report bugs at WT:WPPORTD.

The main portal creation template is {{box portal skeleton}}.

Portal creation tips[edit]

After starting a portal using {{box portal skeleton}}...

  1. Placing a panorama (banner picture) at the top of the intro section is a nice touch, and really makes a portal look good. {{box portal skeleton}} doesn't automatically insert panoramas. So, you will need to do that by hand. They can be found at Commons:. For some examples, check out Portal:Sharks, Portal:Cheese, and Portal:Florence
  2. The search term provided in the Did you know? and In the news sections is very basic and rarely matches anything. It is best to replace that term with multiple search arguments, if possible (separate each argument with a pipe character). For example, in Portal:Capital punishment, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:Capital_punishment&diff=855255361&oldid=855137403 Searches in templates use Lua search notation.
  3. Check the In the news and Did you know? sections for mismatches. That is, sometimes entries come up that shouldn't be displayed. If there are any, refine the search strings further, so they don't return such results.
  4. Finish each portal you've created before creating a new one. We don't want unfinished portals sitting around.

Need a laugh?[edit]

Check out the Did you know? section on Portal:Determinism.    — The Transhumanist   02:24, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Java portal[edit]

I've diverted most of the "awkward" links from Portal:Java to Portal:Java (programming language), and switched the P:JAVAP redirect. I've also put in an edit request for Module:Portal/images/j, to fix the image. That just leaves about 200 articles with boilerplate {{Portal|Java}} (such as Applet#See also) to do later. That tidy-up will be much easier if it's completed before we create a new portal on a different topic at the same name. I've left the P:JAVA redirect as is, ready for use by the island. All the best, Certes (talk) 00:58, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

I've now fixed the boilerplate links. A few archives and inactive WP: pages still link to Portal:Java, but if you agree that leaving them unchanged is the lesser of the two evils then you're probably ready to go. Certes (talk) 10:13, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Java displays "{{#tag:gallery|File:Blank.png|". Previewing a null edit shows Warning: This page calls Template:Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow which causes a template loop (an infinite recursive call). Certes (talk) 10:50, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: I just created Portal:Java. It seems to work fine for me.    — The Transhumanist   18:38, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
Sorry, I meant that the problem is in Portal:Java (programming language). (As you say, the new Portal:Java looks good.) Certes (talk) 19:10, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
It seems to only happen sometimes, due to certain exerpts being displayed.
@Certes: Any idea how it is looping?    — The Transhumanist   19:13, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
Portal:Java (programming language) uses{{Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}} with a parameter of {{Java (programming language)}}. That navbox has a link back to Portal:Java (programming language), so my guess is that the page attempts to transclude an extract from itself and disappears up its own portal. Certes (talk) 19:23, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
@Certes: We've been getting this same type of error since before the portal link was added to the template. So that's probably not it (this can be tested by removing the link temporarily).
The error shows up for the following entries:
I removed the portal link from the template, and then ctrl-clicked on the portal links above 15 times, then purged each tab to get a different entry. Some of the entries came up with that error. So, it's not the portal link on {{Java (software platform)}} causing it.
Do these clues help you track it down?    — The Transhumanist   19:40, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
I don't see anything obvious. Evad37 wrote the template and may be more helpful. Certes (talk) 19:42, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
I'm not seeing any problems at the moment, even with purging plenty of times or doing a preview with the limit removed. So maybe it was the portal link, but there was some cache somewhere that didn't get updated straight away. - Evad37 [talk] 02:28, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
@Certes and Evad37: Okay, I found a temporary or local solution. I removed the asterisks from the items in the "below =" section of the template. Now, {{Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}} doesn't pick up the portal link.    — The Transhumanist   07:02, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
A permanent general fix will probably need to be made in the lua module that gathers the links from the sourcepage, in the form of ignoring portal links.    — The Transhumanist   07:12, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) This edit [13] should fix the problem by making sure excerpts are only taken from mainspace articles - Evad37 [talk] 07:17, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
@Evad37: That seems to have fixed the problem. Even without the limit. Excellent. Looks good.    — The Transhumanist   07:25, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

This Month in Education: August 2018[edit]

Wikipedia Education globe
This Month in Education

Volume 4 | Issue 8 | August 2018

This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter. Join the team! Finally, don't forget to subscribe!

In This Issue
From the Community

The reconnection of Wikimedia Projects in Brazil

Christ (DU) students enrolls for 3rd Wikipedia certificate course

Educational wiki-master-classes at International "Selet" forum

54 students help enrich the digital Arabic content

From the Education Team

Mapping education in the Wikimedia Movement

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 03:12, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #018, 04 Sept 2018[edit]

Bug hunt![edit]

As you know, portals are now supported by a number of new templates, which are in turn supported by some new Lua modules.

Those templates and modules are being put to the test, in the new portals that have been created since this WikiProject rebooted, plus a number of existing portals that have been revamped.

The new portals, and revamped ones, can be found at Category:Single-page portals.

Please browse the new portals at your leisure, and report any and all problems that you spot. Post bug and other portal problem reports at WT:WPPORTD. Please report bugs, quirks, awkward aspects, or anything weird or off that you notice. Compliments and suggestions are also welcome. :)

When you report a bug, please indicate the portal's name, the section that the problem appeared in, and the name of the article appearing (first) in the section with the problem. Most problems will likely be encountered in the Selected general articles" section, due to quirks in a displayed article's wikicode that the lua modules don't handle yet. Your help in spotting those is of utmost value. Thank you.

Don't delete portal subpages just yet[edit]

For portals that have been converted to the single-page design, we are not deleting their subpages at this time, because we are working on ways to harvest the data from those pages. For example, the Selected picture subpages include filenames and captions that would be valuable for the image slideshows. Please don't delete portal subpages, for now. They'll be slated for d-batch speedy deletion after harvesting. Thank you.

Development notes[edit]

We are currently testing a feature added to {{Transclude files as random slideshow}} that allows it to accept both sourcepages and filenames. Courtesy of Evad37. This will pave the way for harvesting files and their captions from portal subpages, for use in image slideshows.

We need your help[edit]

The bulk of the work is being done by a handful of editors. But we can't do it all. We need help with spotting bugs, refining the search parameters in new/revamped portals (in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections), adding images to slideshows for a broader selection (they default to showing the images on the root article page but are capable of showing so much more), adding panoramic pictures at the top of the intro section of region portals (cities, counties, states, provinces, countries, continents, and other regions), to name but a few task types.

It is rewarding to be a part of the growing portal phenomenon. And you get to see its expansion and refinement up close.

Feel free to join in on the fun. ;)

Thank you,    — The Transhumanist   06:58, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Portal maintenance template[edit]

Could you put more parameter names in when creating new portals please. It makes it a lot easier to add parameters for broken, notes etc if the names are already there. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 10:15, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: I don't know what you mean. Can you be more specific, and provide some examples? And what is the name of the template to which you are referring?    — The Transhumanist   11:32, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Sorry, I mean in {{Portal maintenance status}}, specifically the parameters |broken= and |notes=. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 17:28, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: No problem, but in the documentation it is |note= rather than |notes=. Added them to {{Box portal skeleton}} and {{Quick portal}}. Will also hit the new portals with AWB, when I can find the time.    — The Transhumanist   04:37, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
And that (notes => note) illustrates why it helps for it to be there already... Fewer options to get it wrong for the reviewer.
I looked through the parameter list again, and there do not seem to be any others from the current list that would be useful for the new style portal, assuming that you do not make any that are incomplete, as opposed to broken due to template bugs, which are not defects of the portal itself. A person who is not familiar with the presentation of the template bugs would reasonably tag the portal as broken or incomplete when one of the bugs shows up. On the other hand, I thought Portal:Capital punishment was incomplete when the truncation bug manifested, so maybe incomplete would be useful. What do you think? · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 06:22, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: Anything tagged warrants being looked at for one reason or another. Being aware of truncation bugs, we would know that when a complete portal gets marked incomplete, it is probably due to that type of bug. But the template I've been using, and all the portals I've created, don't require an "incomplete" parameter, because they are all complete. We could watch for notes on the talk page, like the one you posted for Portal:Capital punishment.
By the way, the parameters you requested have now been added in to the new portals of the new design.  Done    — The Transhumanist   06:52, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
Yes they are currently complete, and when the standard changes, I expect they will be made complete in an AWB run, but when a person unfamiliar with the truncation bug sees it in action, the first impression is likely to be that the portal is incomplete - it happened to me. It is then a question of whether we provide what they will consider the obvious parameter or not. We can leave it and see if anyone else requests it. Do we need to report multiple occurrences of the same bug, or is once enough for troubleshooting?· · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 11:25, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: Different bugs have been causing the truncation effect, so, report them all. And ping Evad37 when you do. ;)    — The Transhumanist   11:41, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
The Transhumanist - OK, will do. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 12:22, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
FWIW, |notes= is an alias to |note=. I figured that would be a common misspelling. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 19:02, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
@AfroThundr3007730: Nice. Then we don't have to go around and change it. What a relief. Thank you for the heads up.    — The Transhumanist   20:47, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
I figured that was the case because the |notes= showed up. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 03:34, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you![edit]

Vitruvian Barnstar Hires.png The Technical Barnstar
Good to see others of the view we have as to the need to know more. Im a research person here just of this week and your views relate to my work here. take care.
Tleesd (talk) 17:56, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Follow-up for your geographic portal creation spree[edit]

So I noticed several hundred new geographic portals populating our rating categories. Someone's been busy. Face-smile.svg I hate to pile on to that mountain of work, but those should also be categorized somewhere under Category:Portals (most likely Portals by country > United States portals > United States portals by city). There's a whole taxonomy for these that needs to be populated (this extends to the non-geographic portals too). Looks like another major task for the WikiProject. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 18:42, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Another thought[edit]

As an aside, Portal:Virginia Beach doesn't seem to have a Category:Virginia Beach - probably because it's at Category:Virginia Beach, Virginia. In this case, renaming the portal would suffice, but I'm thinking: should we make the category section collapsible like the DYK section if the category doesn't exist, or should it populate an error category? — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 18:51, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

@AfroThundr3007730: In that particular case, the portal was misnamed (following the template title, which was misnamed). Now it matches the article and the category. I also renamed the navigation template to match. Thank you for the heads up.
Concerning a conditional category tree section that only appears when there is a category, my inclination is no, because a redlink indicates an error or problem that needs to be fixed. Either the portal needs to be renamed, the redlink may need to be replaced, or the category needs to be created. Whichever of those 3 applies, should be done. That way, we fix the encyclopedia, rather than leaving it as a chore for someone else to do, and we improve the portal at the same time (bringing it closer to completion). By the way, can you think of any other circumstances that would result in a red category link?    — The Transhumanist   21:11, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
Those are the only reasons for a red category that I can think of, assuming the topic is notable enough to warrant a category. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 04:19, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
If the topic is not notable enough to warrant a category, is it notable enough to warrant a portal? Do we have any examples of a topic notable enough to warrant a portal, but not enough to warrant a category? · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 03:53, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: In most cases, it's a missing category. If a topic is notable enough to warrant an article, then that covers it for notability in regards to all the navigation systems (outlines, indexes, portals, navboxes, sidebar navs, books, categories, etc.) Then it becomes a question of whether or not the scope of the topic is large enough for navigation aids to be of aid. For example, if there was an article on someone's shoe, because it was a really famous shoe, I doubt there would be any subtopics for it, unless there was also an article on its shoe lace. The shoe probably doesn't have enough subtopics to support an outline, or a portal, or any of the rest. If a topic has a navbox, then it probably warrants also having a portal, a category, etc.    — The Transhumanist   22:45, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
That is my point. If there are enough articles for a portal, there are enough for a category for that portal. The names may differ slightly, but should be similar. A related question is whether the portal name should follow the category name or vice versa. Probably depends on which comes first, but if both exist and do not have the same name, should one be renamed to match the other? · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 03:43, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: Not quite. Their titles should be derived from the root article's title. Many match that title, while the rest use the plural form, depending on the part of speech the title is (nouns get pluralized for navigation pages, for example). The titles of outlines, portals, categories, and nav footers should match, like Chess, Outline of chess, Portal:Chess, Template:Chess, and Category:Chess. An example using plurals is: Machine, Outline of machines, Portal:Machines, Template:Machines, and Category:Machines. When the other nav aids match, making the portal is a breeze.    — The Transhumanist   05:32, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
@AfroThundr3007730: After thinking about this more, if there is way to identify portals with disappeared category trees, then not having them display with a redlink would be a good thing. Making them conditional, just like the news, DYK, and "Get involved" sections, is easy. But how do we have portals, where the condition to display isn't met, alert us?    — The Transhumanist   23:48, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
Most likely by leveraging an #ifexist condition to add the page to a tracking category when the link would be red.
{{#ifexist:Category:{{PAGENAME}}|{{#tag:categorytree|{{PAGENAME}}}}|[[Category:Portals with missing category trees]]}}
Or something to that effect. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 00:08, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
Brilliant!    — The Transhumanist   21:52, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
What do you mean by a "disappeared category tree"? · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 03:53, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: The category tree section currently shows up, even if there is no category, in which case it displays a redlink. Afrothundr suggested that we make the category tree section conditional, only appearing when the category exists. I referred to that section not appearing as "disappeared". A missing category tree section on a standard new portal means the same thing to us as a redlink, and so we don't really need the redlink showing, if there is a way to detect category tree sections that are not visible. Afrothundr pointed out how we could do this with conditional category tags. Brilliant.    — The Transhumanist   21:52, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Another another thought[edit]

As a side note, I'm assuming the reason {{Box portal skeleton}} is using a manual category tree (instead of {{Category tree}} and friends) is to remove the unwanted formatting for direct placement inside a {{box-header}}? Weren't we working on a template to strip styles from any template that's passed to it? Not that there's any problem with the manual method, of course. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 00:13, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Providing the raw code is simpler. It skips the extra step of using another template to strip out formatting. Fewer keystrokes too. Besides, anything handled by a template is by definition, automatic. :)    — The Transhumanist   22:21, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
By the way, {{Plain navboxes}} is for stripping formatting from navboxes, and is a huge success. It has been tested out on hundreds of portals and makes the topics section look clean, like the inserted template is actually a part of the portal (rather than just stuck in there). I don't know it if will work on any other kind of template.    — The Transhumanist   22:21, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Ancient Egypt[edit]

Hello The Transhumanist, many thanks for updating this Portal. There are two points from my side. In the last weeks I updated the News.:Portal:Ancient Egypt/News. This is now totally lost. Is there any change to incorporate that into the new portal? I have no idea how to do it. There was also a link for having a look at the changes made in the relevant titles. I found that very useful and wonder whether it can go back into the new design. best wishes -- Udimu (talk) 10:18, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

@Udimu, Evad37, and Pbsouthwood: You are welcome, and I'm happy to help. Per your request, I've replaced the conditional (magically appearing) news section with a static news box that contains both the auto-searched news, and the manual entries from the subpage you mentioned (merged, via cut & paste). The problem has been that when news items were added to portals by hand, whomever posted many of them forgot about them and didn't return to remove them when they were no longer current. We are still cleaning up news items from as far back as 2009. As for the static box, when there is no generated news and no manually posted news, you are left with an empty "In the news" box. Please don't let it go empty. ;)
By the way, the portal no longer transcludes subpages, so please post future news items directly on the portal base page, and return to remove them when they are no longer current. Thank you. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   23:49, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
I was pinged. I came, I saw. Is there something you wanted me to do? · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 05:11, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: Is there a better way to do that type of section?    — The Transhumanist   04:32, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
@Udimu: You also mentioned "There was a long for having a look..." I think you might have left out a word. A long what? If you meant "log", to what log were you referring? I look forward to your reply.    — The Transhumanist   23:49, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
sorry, I made a typo and did not check, what I have written. Can you perhaps incorporate this link: CHANGES? It shows the last changes made in Ancient Egypt articles. I find that very useful, for spotting spam and other (bad or good) new edits. Best wishes and many thanks again. -- Udimu (talk) 06:22, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
@Udimu: I can't find it anywhere on the old portal. To what are you referring?    — The Transhumanist   21:42, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
it was not really part of the old portal. I added it some weeks ago, before you made the big change. Look at this version Portal August 2018 -- Udimu (talk) 04:55, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
@Udimu:  Done (Used the template {{Related changes}}. See below.)    — The Transhumanist   11:57, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
Changes in Ancient Egypt articles

Nomination of Hypothetical technology for deletion[edit]

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Hypothetical technology is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hypothetical technology until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Kirbanzo (talk) 02:38, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

New tool in the box for anything using lists[edit]

{{Annotated link}} is up and running thanks to Evad37, and the portal templates for transcluding from lists have been upgraded to be compatible. This should allow outline and index lists to be automatically populated with annotations using the associated short descriptions, and remain up to date. A step forward for portals, short descriptions and lists in one go. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 12:28, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood and Evad37:
Let's try it...
That's a step in the right direction! It's good to have this in place, ready for when short descriptions are in general use. And if an editor is going to annotate a list, he can use this and annotate the articles instead, with short descriptions, and kill 2 birds with one stone. Well done.    — The Transhumanist   22:35, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
By the way, is there a way to automatically generate short descriptions for articles?    — The Transhumanist   21:02, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
Some short descriptions have been autogenerated from infoboxes. They are usually acceptable, but seldom as good as when manually generated by someone who has some comprehension of the topic. Some articles provide an adequate short description in the first sentence, some need careful reading of the whole lead, or even the whole article, others are so poorly written that it may not be possible to generate an accurate short description from anything written in the whole article, so not very amenable to automtic generation by a simple algorithm. The Wikidata descriptions also range from very good to very bad, with no obvious predictor. I have done thousands. Some are drag and drop in a few seconds, others one gives up after several minutes of bafflement. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 05:24, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
What is the maximum? How many of these can be included on a list page?    — The Transhumanist   21:02, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
No idea. I expect to find out by experiment. In our favour is that indexes and outlines don't usually have major usage of complicated templates like some of our portal excerpt slideshows. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 05:24, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Cheltenham[edit]

I just wanted to let you know that Portal:Cheltenham is extremely malformed as it mixes content related to Cheltenham in England and Cheltenham Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. I don't know which Cheltenham the portal is intended to represent but the portal needs to be focused on one of them as right now it focuses on two unrelated towns in different countries. Dough4872 02:55, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

@Dough4872: Fixed See:
Thank you for the heads up.    — The Transhumanist   03:44, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #019, 22 Sept 2018[edit]

Portals progress report[edit]

Don't blink. You might miss something.

As of a few days ago, portals had doubled in about a month and a half.

Also, there were 98 incompleted portals in Category:Portals under construction. Now there are just 43.

The WikiProject page has been thoroughly revised[edit]

The goals, plans, and task sections have all been updated.

Orphaned portals need a home...[edit]

Many new portals are still orphans, and need links pointing to them:

  1. A portal link at the bottom of corresponding navigation footer template. E.g., Template:Machines for Portal:Machines. See examples of a portals link at the bottom of Template:Robotics and Template:Forestry.
  2. A {{Portal}} box in the See also section of the corresponding root article for each portal. If there is no See also section, create one and place the portal template in that. (Rather than placing them in an external links section -- they're not external links).
  3. A {{Portal}} template placed at the top of the category page corresponding to each portal.

All new and revamped portals can be found at Category:Single-page portals.

Portal:Contents/Portals[edit]

This is the main list of portals.

Nearly 2,000 of the new portals need to be listed here.

They can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.

Customized Portal Rating system is now in place[edit]

Portals now have a new rating system of their own designed specifically to support portal evaluation! We were trying to use the standard assessment system for articles, but that doesn't fit portals very well.

Many thanks to Evad37, Waggers, AfroThundr3007730, SMcCandlish, Tom, BrendonTheWizard, and Pbsouthwood for their work and input on this.

The new system can be found at the top of all portal talk pages, in the WikiProject portals box. Those with "???" ratings need to be assessed, which makes up most of the older portals.

Most of the new portals were started out with an initial "Low" level of importance when their talk pages were created. Those deserving higher importance should be promoted as you come across them.

Improving the new portals[edit]

The starting point for new portals included minimal parameters and content, in the form of default values in the template(s) used for their creation.

Embellishing embedded search strings[edit]

So, for the search strings in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections, this was the magic word {{PAGENAME}}, which represents the portal's name. Unfortunately, the resulting term is alway capitalized, which limits its effectiveness as a search string for anything but proper nouns. Results for those two sections can be improved, by replacing the "PAGENAME" magic word with multiple search strings, and search strings that begin with lower case letters. There is no inherent limit as to how many search parameters may be included. Lua search notation is used. The more general the subject, the more subtopic search terms you may want to include. For example, on Portal:Avengers (comics), {{PAGENAME}} turned up nothing. But, when more parameters were added, as in the wikicode below...

{{Transclude selected recent additions | {{PAGENAME}} | Iron Man | Spiderman | Antman | Hawkeye | The Hulk | Incredible Hulk | David Banner | Captain America | Scarlet Witch | Black Widow | Tony Stark | Nick Fury | Age of Ultron | Infinity War | months=36 | header={{Box-header colour|Did you know... }}|max=6}}

... that returned several results in the portal's DYK section.

Be sure you make the improvements to both the DYK section and the "In the news" section, as they both require the search strings.

Expanding the slideshow contents[edit]

The default starting selection for the image slideshow in most new portals is whatever images happen to be in the corresponding root article (via the PAGENAME magic word). You can improve image slideshows by adding more sourcepages and filenames as parameters in the "Selected images" section of portals.

See Template:Transclude files as random slideshow/doc for instructions.

More exciting things are to come...[edit]

Portals used to take about 6 hours or more to create. Now, for subjects that have particular navigation support, we've got that down to about one minute each, with even more content displayed than ever. True, that means the new portals pick you, rather than the other way around. Creating a specific portal that doesn't happen to have the requisite navigation support is still pretty time consuming. But, we are working on extending our reach beyond the low-hanging fruit.

And efforts are ongoing to keep shaving time off of the creation process. Eventually, we may get it down to seconds each.

In addition to improving automation, we're always looking for new features and improvements that we can add to portals, and there is plenty of potential to expand on the standard design so that new portals are even better right out of the starting gate. Additional designs are also possible.

On the horizon, there are many more portals waiting to be created. And we can expect to see at least a few more section types emerge. I never expected slideshows, for example, especially not for excerpts. Who knows where innovation will take us next?

Keep up the great work everyone.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   07:10, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject Portals newsletter[edit]

Please post the portals newsletter to User talk:Pythoncoder/News. Thanks — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 19:05, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

I've made that your link in the participants list, so that the newsletter doesn't inadvertently go to your regular talk page.    — The Transhumanist   21:42, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

Concerning your username...[edit]

How good are you with Python?

Do you know any of the AI stuff?    — The Transhumanist   21:42, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

Category Renames[edit]

I think HotCat might be automatically resolving the soft-redirects for you, but FYI, I renamed those two categories.

The "all" prefix is generally used for {{DMC}}, so I wanted to keep that convention. I'm moving the others with JWB already. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 03:44, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

@AfroThundr3007730: The categories were specifically named that way (with "All"), so they wouldn't be divided into subcategories. Thoughts?    — The Transhumanist   05:04, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
I'm not sure that one name or the other would really lend itself to the enforcement of a no-subdivision rule, but to me at least, "all" implies there are other subsets, for which "all" would be the superset. If there are no other subcategories (dated or otherwise), "all" becomes superfluous, as anything that matches the categorization criteria would be in that main category anyway. If we needed to subcategorize, there would then be a reason to have an "all" to hold all members of all subcategories, assuming the subcategory member pages aren't also a member of the parent anyway, which would obviate the need for an "all" category.
As an example Category:Articles with dead external links is one scenario where I would see the need for an "all" category to list all of the members from the dated subcategories, or another hypothetical category with subcategories for each geographic region could have an "all" category. This is all mostly just stylistic nitpicking, as I don't believe there are hard guidelines on this bit. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 08:09, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
@AfroThundr300730: Well, as long as they can all be listed in there. Subcategories are fine, as long as the entries aren't removed from the parent. I'll be using these cats to process all the portals of those types.    — The Transhumanist   08:16, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Pebble Beach[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Pebble Beach, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Pebble Beach and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Pebble Beach during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:13, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Peter, Paul and Mary[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Peter, Paul and Mary, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Peter, Paul and Mary and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Peter, Paul and Mary during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:20, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Air France[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Air France, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Air France and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Air France during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:12, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Body piercing[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Body piercing, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Body piercing and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Body piercing during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:21, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Alexander Korda[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Alexander Korda, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Alexander Korda and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Alexander Korda during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:16, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Average White Band[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Average White Band, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Average White Band and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Average White Band during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:49, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:August Derleth[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:August Derleth, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:August Derleth and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:August Derleth during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:07, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Billy Ocean[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Billy Ocean, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Ocean and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Billy Ocean during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:36, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Billy Idol[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Billy Idol, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Idol and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Billy Idol during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:14, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Benny Goodman[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Benny Goodman, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benny Goodman and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Benny Goodman during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:17, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Bee-eaters[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Bee-eaters, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bee-eaters and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Bee-eaters during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:23, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Ben E. King[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Ben E. King, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ben E. King and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Ben E. King during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:33, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Bob Hope[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Bob Hope, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bob Hope and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Bob Hope during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:37, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Compostela Group of Universities[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Compostela Group of Universities, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Compostela Group of Universities and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Compostela Group of Universities during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:58, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Diversity of fish[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Diversity of fish, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diversity of fish and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Diversity of fish during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:39, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Diplo[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Diplo, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diplo and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Diplo during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:44, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Bill Bryson[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Bill Bryson, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bill Bryson and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Bill Bryson during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:41, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Bobbie Rosenfeld Award[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Bobbie Rosenfeld Award, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bobbie Rosenfeld Award and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Bobbie Rosenfeld Award during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:49, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Canton, Michigan[edit]

Ambox warning orange.svg Portal:Canton, Michigan, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Canton, Michigan and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Canton, Michigan during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:02, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Mexico[edit]

Hi there. I'm reaching out because you made significant chances to the Portal, and I'm trying to wrap my head around some of them. Here are my two questions:

  • Why did you delete the icons next to FAs, GAs, GANs, and DYKs?
  • Is there a way we can get the Good Article nominees section back?

I usually kept an eye on the GANs in case other editors were not available to fix the concerns that might arise from a review. Cheers, MX () 18:14, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

@MX: I was reducing overhead (server load). I've reinstated the features you desire; the icons should appear the next time JL-Bot checks the page. Note that there doesn't appear to be any good article nominations at this time (see Wikipedia:WikiProject New Mexico/Recognized content), but as soon as there are, JL-Bot will add them during its subsequent update of the page.    — The Transhumanist   20:24, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply. Happy editing, MX () 20:33, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

Portal placement[edit]

I moved the portal you added to Milwaukee Bucks to the "External links" section. I suppose it's not well coordinated with {{portal-inline}}, but {{portal}} says to not create a new section just to place a portal on the page. It looks like you are using AWB. Not sure if you can automate these changes. Regards.—Bagumba (talk) 08:33, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

@Bagumba: It is a list item, rather than a margin button, and wouldn't fit in with the list items in the external links section. Thanks for the inquiry.    — The Transhumanist   08:38, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
Sure, but a list of exactly one portal item is not all too elegant.—Bagumba (talk) 08:44, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
@Bagumba: I'll go back through 'em and see if I can populate those further, with links to related topics. Thanks for the heads up.    — The Transhumanist   08:52, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

Parkersburg, West Virginia[edit]

Hi there. At Parkersburg, West Virginia, why did you use Template:Portal-inline, and not Template:Portal? Thank you. Magnolia677 (talk) 10:08, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

@Magnolia677: Because it was available, and because it's a new style of portal.      — The Transhumanist   10:13, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
Ah, I see the discussion. It looks cool with the little icon and may get more traffic to the portals. My concern is that it hasn't been well publicized, and seems to contradict the instructions on the portal pages. You may want to mention something at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cities/US Guideline. Cheers, and thanks for your hard work on this. Magnolia677 (talk) 10:26, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
@Magnolia677: Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   10:43, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Cairo[edit]

Would it be possible for you to have a look at the "Selected sports article" column, please? Thank you, —Cote d'Azur (talk) 06:20, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

@Cote d'Azur: I've posted a bug report at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Portal:Cairo, and there, pinged our lua specialists.    — The Transhumanist   06:42, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

This Month in Education: September 2018[edit]

Wikipedia Education globe
This Month in Education

Volume 4 | Issue 9 | September 2018

This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter. Join the team! Finally, don't forget to subscribe!


In This Issue
From the Community

Edu Wiki Camp 2018: New Knowledge for New Generation

Education loves Monuments: A Brazilian Tale

“I have always liked literature, now I like it even more thanks to Wikipedia”. Literature is in the air of WikiClubs․

History of Wikipedia Education programme at Christ (Deemed to be University)

Preparation for the autumn educational session of Selet WikiSchool is started

Wiki Camp Doyran 2018

Wikicamp Czech Republic 2018

Wikipedia offline in rural areas of Colombia

From the Education Team

Presentation on mapping education in the Wikimedia Movement

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 01:14, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Category:Yo-Yo Ma has been nominated for discussion[edit]

Category:Yo-Yo Ma, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. StarcheerspeaksnewslostwarsTalk to me 22:16, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

Category:Jack Nicholson has been nominated for discussion[edit]

Category:Jack Nicholson, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. StarcheerspeaksnewslostwarsTalk to me 22:23, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

Category:Sidney Poitier has been nominated for discussion[edit]

Category:Sidney Poitier, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. StarcheerspeaksnewslostwarsTalk to me 22:27, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #020, 12 Oct 2018[edit]

Whew, a lot has been happening.

A bit of defending of the portals has been needed. But, most activity recently has been directed upon maintenance and development of existing portals.

The majority of portals now use the new design, about 2400 of them, leaving around 1200 portals that still employ the old style.

Newest portals[edit]

Please inspect these portals, and report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

MfDs[edit]

Since the last issue of this newsletter, Nineteen portals were nominated for deletion. All posted by the same person.

Two portals were deleted.

One resolved as "no consensus".

Sixteen resolved as "keep".

Links to the archived discussions are provided below:

  1. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Air France
  2. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Alexander Korda
  3. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:August Derleth
  4. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Average White Band
  5. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bee-eaters
  6. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ben E. King
  7. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benny Goodman
  8. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bill Bryson
  9. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Idol
  10. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Ocean
  11. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bob Hope
  12. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bobbie Rosenfeld Award
  13. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Body piercing
  14. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Canton, Michigan
  15. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Compostela Group of Universities
  16. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diplo
  17. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diversity of fish
  18. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Pebble Beach
  19. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Peter, Paul and Mary

Many thanks to those who participated in the discussions.

To watch for future MfD's, keep in mind that the Portals WikiProject is supported by automatic alerts. You can see them at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Article alerts: portals for deletion at MfD

Creation criteria[edit]

There was also some discussion of creation criteria for portals. The result was that one of the participants in the discussion reverted the portal guidelines to the old version, which has the minimum number of articles for a portal included in there: "about 20 articles", a guideline that was in place since 2009.

Many of the portals that existed prior to April 2018 do not have that many (being limited to however many subpages the portal creator created), and therefore, these portals need to be upgraded to the new design (which automatically provides many articles for display). Using the new design, exceeding 20 articles for display is very easy.

Linking to the new portals[edit]

Efforts have been underway to place links to new portals (all 2200 of them created since April).

  1. Link (portal button) from corresponding category pages.  Done
  2. Link from See also section on corresponding root articles. check Partially implemented
  3. Link from bottom of corresponding templates. check Partially implemented
  4. Link for each portal on Portal:Contents/Portals. check Partially implemented

Your help is needed. It is easy to access the page mentioned in #1, #2, & #3 from the portals themselves.

AWBers could do these tasks even faster (that's how the category pages were done), except #4...

Item #4 above pretty much has to be done by hand. (If you can find a way to speed that up, I would be very impressed). The links needing placement can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.

The conversion effort: news sections[edit]

There are still around 1200 old-style portals that have only undergone partial conversion to the new design concepts, still relying on subpages with copied/pasted excerpts that have been going stale for years, out of date (manually posted) news entries, etc.

The section currently being tackled on these is news. You can help by deleting any news section on the old-style portals that has news entries that are years old (that is the dead giveaway to a manual news section). Be sure not to delete the news sections of portals that have up-to-date news, or active maintainers. For maintainers, look at the portal's categories, and/or check the participants list at WP:WPPORT.

Eventually, conditional news sections (that appear only when news items are available for display) will be added using AWB to all portals without a news section.

News items (and even the news sections themselves) are automatically generated for portals that were created using the Basic portal start page. On those portals, there is a hidden comment at the top of the page (that you can see in the edit window), that says this:

<!-- This portal was created using subst:Basic portal start page -->

Design development[edit]

Presently, we are in the process of implementing the new design features, creating new portals with them, and installing them in existing portals.

But, what about development of new new design features?

We have a wish department.

Post your wishes at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Discussions about possible cool new features, and they might come true. Many have already, and for many of those, this is where they were posted.

Cascade effect[edit]

A resource that has been elusive so far will be obtained eventually: categories. That is, the ability to pull category member links to populate a page.

Rather than populate portals directly with such links, it may be more beneficial to the encyclopedia to utilize them in navigation footers, because portals already have the ability to generate themselves based on those.

So, this would create a cascade effect: auto-gathering entries from categories, would enable the construction of new navigation footers, that would in turn support the development of new portals.

The cascade effect would also be felt by existing portals, as existing navigation footers could be expanded using the category harvesting methods, which would in turn expand the coverage of portals that access those navigation footers.

You can help by providing leads about any potential category harvesting methods. Please report anything you know about harvesting categories at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

Looking into the future: the quantum portal?[edit]

One idea that has been floating around is the concept of a pageless portal. That is, a portal that isn't stored anywhere, instead being generated when you click on a menu item or button.

Many of the new portals were generated by a single click, and then saved via a second click.

Therefore, it seems likely that the portals of the future will employ the one-click concept.

Because of the need for customization by users, this concept would need to be augmented with a way to integrate user contributions. This could be done in at least two ways: posting an existing portal, autogenerating one from scratch if such does not yet exist, or have a special data page for user contributions that is folded into the auto-generated portal.

How soon? That is up to you. All that is needed are persons to implement it.

Until next time...[edit]

Keep up the good work on portals. They are improving daily. Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   04:26, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you![edit]

Graphic Designer Barnstar Hires.png The Graphic Designer's Barnstar
Thank's for updating the Portal:Seventh-day Adventist Church. You deserve this star for your good work. Catfurball (talk) 15:28, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Halloween cheer![edit]

Portal question[edit]

I created Portal:Pies, but after tinkering with it, I cannot get any Selected general articles to list in the port. What am I doing incorrectly? Could you fix it? North America1000 18:18, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Also having problems with Portal:Adventure travel that I created. Cannot get any images to appear as a slideshow, so I have temporarily removed the section (diff). I checked out the various portal template pages, but can't fix. What am I missing? North America1000 20:23, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Discussion at User talk:Northamerica1000#Food portals[edit]

 You are invited to join the discussion at User talk:Northamerica1000#Food portals. Another matter, regarding new food portals. North America1000 23:47, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Tell (archaeology)[edit]

Hi The Transhumanist,

Just a short note to let you know that I split off the section Notable tells, which you expanded recently, to a separate article: List of tells to keep the article on the concept of tell itself a little more focused. Best, --Zoeperkoe (talk) 11:11, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Discussion at User talk:Northamerica1000#Lua errors[edit]

 You are invited to join the discussion at User talk:Northamerica1000#Lua errors. North America1000 21:43, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Looking for Category expert help[edit]

Greetings The Transhumanist - In addition to doing article assessments, I've been contributing input for daily WP 1.0 bot assessment processing. There are on-going issues with the bot stalling, repeating WP deadlocks, not creating daily log files. Details are Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index#Conflicting project tags.

Do you know of a Category expert to help solve at least this one issue? Thanks for your advice. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 00:22, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

User:Oleg Alexandrov has created a bot that harvests categories for entries in the math article lists. If he doesn't know how to fix the problem, he may know who can.    — The Transhumanist   00:32, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

BIRDS "did you know"[edit]

Hi Transhumanist. Quick question about the "did you know" listings on the Portal:Birds page. Where are they coming from? All but one of them have nothing to do with birds, other than the fact that some permutation of "bird" appears somewhere in their title. Birdsill Holly? The novel Birdsong? Early Birds of Aviation?! Really??! How about some real bird articles?! I'm happy to populate this with actual bird-related "did you know" teasers if you'll tell me where to do so. MeegsC (talk) 20:21, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

@MeegsC: Thank you for the heads up. Keep in mind that the portal operates the DYK and ITN sections by search patterns: to improve the results, we just need to improve the search parameters (using lua search query format). There is much we can do to improve the results presented. Watch my posts there to see an example of how its done. ;) By the way, "%s" indicates a space.    — The Transhumanist   00:23, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
P.S.: I've changed the search parameter, and have added a bunch more search parameters. The results are returning more bird-related blurbs now. The new search terms even found a news item!    — The Transhumanist   00:23, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #021, 24 Oct 2018[edit]

Portals have passed the 4,000 mark.

More new portals...[edit]

Here's a list of portals created since the last issue

List of new portals

Please inspect these portals, report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD, or develop them further (see below). Thank you.

What's next?[edit]

There is still lots to do...

There are many subject gaps that need to be filled. This can be done by creating new portals, or by adding Selected article sections to existing portals. To create a new portal, simply place {{subst:Basic portal start page}} on an empty portal page, and click "Preview". If the portal is complete, click "Save". After you try it, come share your experience and excitement at WT:WPPORTD.

Each new portal is just a starting point. Each portal of the new design can be further developed by:

  • refining the search parameters to improve the results displayed in the Did you know and In the news sections.
  • adding more specific Selected articles sections, like Selected biographies.
  • inserting a Recognized content section.
  • adding more pictures to the image slideshow.
  • placing a panoramic picture at the top of the intro section (especially for geographic portals).

Besides the new portals, there are still about 1200 portals of the old design that need to be converted to the new design.

Many portals need to be de-orphaned, by placing links to them (in the See also section of the corresponding root articles, at the bottom of the corresponding navigation footer templates, and on the corresponding category pages).

Many of the new portals still need to be listed at Portal:Contents/Portals.

Bugs keep popping up in portals. These need to be tracked down and reported at WT:WPPORTD.

Tools are needed to make developing and maintaining portals quicker and easier.

Dreaming up new features and capabilities. Innovation needs to continue, to design the portal of tomorrow, and the portal development-maintenance-system of the future. Automation!

So, if you find yourself with a little (or a lot) of free time, pick an area (or more) above and...

...dive in!    — The Transhumanist   07:05, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Talkback[edit]

Nuvola apps edu languages.svg
Hello, The Transhumanist. You have new messages at Northamerica1000's talk page.
Message added 15:45, 25 October 2018 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

North America1000 15:45, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Talkback[edit]

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Hello, The Transhumanist. You have new messages at Northamerica1000's talk page.
Message added 21:18, 25 October 2018 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Important query on my talk page regarding Portal image banner heights. North America1000 21:18, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Talkback[edit]

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Hello, The Transhumanist. You have new messages at Northamerica1000's talk page.
Message added 06:06, 27 October 2018 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Not needed now, but maybe someday: portal bar to list food ports. North America1000 06:06, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Talkback[edit]

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Hello, The Transhumanist. You have new messages at Northamerica1000's talk page.
Message added 11:51, 28 October 2018 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Regarding an idea to automate related portal links templates... North America1000 11:51, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you![edit]

Tireless Contributor Barnstar Hires.gif The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
For your excellent work on Portals. Everyday the portal project improves. Your dedication and willingness to get people involved really pays off. Cannot wait to continue working with you and the Portal team. Thank you for your work. AmericanAir88(talk) 00:30, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Talkback[edit]

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Hello, The Transhumanist. You have new messages at AmericanAir88's talk page.
Message added 04:47, 31 October 2018 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Still can't get Portal:Organs (anatomy) to work right... North America1000 04:47, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

noinclude tags in article space?[edit]

As here. Why?

Trappist the monk (talk) 09:58, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

@Trappist the monk: Article leads are transcluded into various portals, and some elements are causing/triggering bugs in those portals.    — The Transhumanist   10:12, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
Then the proper response is to fix the portal or the transcluding template / module or don't do the transclusion. The proper solution is not to sprinkle little 'fixes' here and there around article space; that kind of fragile 'fix' only masks the problem. Does the template / module author know about this particular problem?
Trappist the monk (talk) 10:45, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
I agree. I placed those to find what is causing the bugs, to enable the programmers to fix them. We've fixed many Portal bugs so far and will keep fixing them as we find them. I'm still trying to track down the bugs in Portal:Organs (anatomy).    — The Transhumanist   11:08, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

Problem at Portal:Halloween[edit]

Every article in the template is being listed in the general articles of Portal:Halloween. Hopefully there's a fix for this! North America1000 19:14, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

Subpages[edit]

Noticed another template you renamed and did not also move the /doc subpage. Please be sure when you move a template title to also check for documentation ("Template:(name)/doc"), a template sandbox ("Template:(name)/sandbox") and a testcases page ("Template:(name)/testcases"). Those subpages must also be moved along with the main template page. Thank you! Paine Ellsworth  put'r there  10:35, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

@Paine Ellsworth: Thank you for the heads up. I hadn't thought of that. Will do.    — The Transhumanist   10:39, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Contents[edit]

Hi TTH, I do not know how to add a new box section into Portal:Contents for Human activities. This needs to be done for all the subpages: Overview, Outlines, Lists, Portals, Glossaries, Categories, and Indices. If there is any documentation, I have not found it. Can you help? Cheers · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 08:27, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: Good to see you again.
There is no documentation, probably because, in this case, it would make things even more complicated. Simply copy all the Portal:Contents navigation pages of one of the other main classifications, such as History and events, and modify them for Human activities (though "Human activity" is shorter, which may be a consideration for the menu bar). Start with History on the navigation menu, and drill down from there. But, before you do, consider the titles of the classifications, and how they were structured...
Note, that the naming of the classifications uses a pairing structure. Each title includes two subjects. The first is a singular noun that (usually) encompasses the entire subject. Geography, History, Philosophy, Society, Technology, etc. Analogous to those would be "Human activity", which encompasses all human activities as a whole. We never documented the naming structure, because we didn't expect any more classifications to be added—we thought we covered the entire breadth of human knowledge. And we did - human activity entirely overlaps with the other classifications. But, the more the merrier. ;) In the end, it turns out that there is more than one way to organize things. Who knew? :)
The second part of each title is another subject, usually the most major subtopic (or, the most major one we could think of and agree upon). People → self, Culture → arts, Health → fitness, Geography → places, History → events, etc. So, a possible corresponding structure for the new classification might be "Human activity and _____". But, what would go in the blank? What is the most major human activity?
We kind of screwed up and got "Religion and belief systems" backwards (religion is a belief system, not the other way around), because we were trying to get it and all the other main classifications added to the Main page, and we didn't think the Main page workgroup would go for "Belief systems", as it is 13 characters long (including the space). But, it turned out they wouldn't accept more than 8 out of the 12 classifications at that time anyways. Not even Health. :( Plus, devout editors resisted "Religion" being relegated to a subtopic of "Belief system", as the adherents to religion far outnumber those of other types of belief system.
We messed up even worse with "Mathematics and logic", as logic isn't math, rather, both of those are formal sciences. But the mathematics department wouldn't relinquish their hold on the classification (nor their spot on the Main page). They wouldn't go for "Formal science and mathematics". Instead, we paired math with the next most major formal science (logic). Notice how "Formal sciences" is awkwardly placed at the top of the contents in that classification. I wonder how many readers wonder why the classification isn't named after it. (Sigh). Politics.
Oh well.
"Science" as a main classification was also an afterthought, as the contents department wasn't formed until a few years after the encyclopedia was established. So, there were already ad hoc classifications in place, which we were forced by their very existence to work with. Such as "Religion", which actually falls under "Culture", which in turn falls under "Society". Another consequence of the makeshift system was that science got split up into 4 of the main classifications, which raised the big question: "Where do we list "Science"? This issue still hasn't been worked out fully.
So, our rather quirky classification system may never get the serious attention of scholars that the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal systems get. But, at least we try. :)
I hope you enjoyed the history lesson, and find it enlightening if not useful. Good luck in your endeavor. Cheerio,    — The Transhumanist   11:05, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
It should be possible to put every topic in Wikipedia into one of the box sections, or the system fails. Where would you put underwater diving? · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:35, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: Good question. It definitely fits within the realm of human activity, but needs more company there, as that section is sparsely populated. It also falls under recreation, and is an area of technology, which is used for work as an applied science.    — The Transhumanist   22:49, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
Not all diving is recreational, it is also a significant support industry, and a way to get to work for science. Some diving requires very little technology, and diving itself is not a technology. The diving subportals are easier, Diving equipment is technology, Sport diving is sport, Diving medicine is health, Science of underwater diving is science, Underwater divers is biography. Underwater work is what? For that matter where do occupations fit in? Crime? Gardening? Politics? Warfare? Education? · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 15:07, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
Surely professionals have produced workable systems that could be used. We have invented a square wheel here and it will not roll well. Though possibly the analogy of the horse designed by a committee works better. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 15:20, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: Another option is to leave it in Human activities, and put sub-portals in the other classifications.    — The Transhumanist   15:27, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
That was my intention, but the more I think about it the less sure I get that users will find what they are looking for. The system is more a network than a tree.· · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 15:54, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
@Pbsouthwood: The directories of the nav systems (Portal:Contents pages and top-level category pages), are in place mostly for those who do not know what they are looking for, to allow them to explore to see what's there. When you know what you are looking for, that's what search engines are for. The main benefit of portals, rather than the catalog of them, in my humble opinion, is that they augment the root article of the corresponding root article. So, any article that has a like-named portal attached to it is more useful than one that lacks portal support. That's where most of the traffic to portals will come from, I'd wager, enabling those who wish to drill down deeper into a subject.    — The Transhumanist   03:02, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Germany - topics template[edit]

Hello The Transhumanist, first of all thank you for all the great efforts from you and the whole portal project to improve project portals. With your latest update, there has been a minor problem though with Template:Germany topics in the Germany portal. Several of the template's structural elements (row headers, rows) are using colors to distinguish these elements and add visual structure to the whole template. But these element definitions get overriden by the new layout. I could probably fix this part myself, but don't want to override any new conventions or improvements by the portal project. Could you have a look and advise please, how to handle this situation in the most consistent manner? The topics template is readable of course but it looks a bit awkward with that coloring scheme. GermanJoe (talk) 13:17, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

@GermanJoe: I'm going to that page now to see if I can handle the issue. Thank you for the heads up.    — The Transhumanist   13:39, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
Thank you for the temporary fix/rollback, The Transhumanist. Just fyi, I have copied the essential parts of this minor issue to the portal talkpage to document the actual status and avoid misunderstandings from other editors. GermanJoe (talk) 21:06, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #022, 11 Nov 2018[edit]

Welcome AmericanAir88[edit]

Give a hearty welcome to AmericanAir88, who has adopted working on portals as one of his main purposes on Wikipedia. So far, he has created the following portals:

Way to go!

Where's Evad?[edit]

Evad disappeared from Wikipedia on October 18.

He has been, and will continue to be, sorely missed.

Hopefully, he is okay, on a Caribbean cruise or something.

The conversion continues[edit]

Portals of the old design, are slowly but surely being converted to the new single-page design.

One factor that has slowed things down is that for many sections, the section header call and section contents call are integrated into a template and buried in a lua module, locking them in on each portal. They have been that way for years.

This means that these sections can't be directly edited like the other sections on the same portal. So, search/replaces affect all the sections except those. So, upgrading headers on these portals, for example, misses the integrated sections and inadvertently results in 2 different header colors.

Before we can continue with the upgrade of these portals, the headers and section contents calls need to be restored to each portal, so that those can be edited in concert with the other sections on the portal, and worked on independently of each other.

This is underway, with a solution implemented on about 1/4 of the affected portals so far. Around 300 of them. The remaining 900 should be done within a couple weeks or so.

Going wide...[edit]

We now have banner-shaped pictures included in the introduction sections of 180 portals. The rarity of such pictures has made it difficult to find suitably narrow images for display across the tops of portals.

We have a solution for this, courtesy of FR30799386...

Most pictures are not banner-shaped. But, you can still use them as banners. Here's how:

{{Portal image banner|File:Blueberries .jpg |maxheight=120px |overflow=Hidden }}

Using both maxheight=120px and overflow=Hidden produces this:

Blueberries .jpg

Project's status[edit]

There are now 4,140 portals, with more being created almost daily. Prior to this project's reboot, portals were created at about the rate of 80 per year. Since April of this year, we've created about 2,600 new portals, or 32.5 years' worth at the old rate.

Of those new portals, about 3/4 of them need links leading to them. Almost all of them are linked to from the category system, but they still need links in article see also sections, at the bottom of navigation templates, and on the main portals list at Portal:Contents/Portals.

Of the 1500 portals created before the reboot, about 300 have been completely converted to the new design so far. About 1100 more have been partially converted, with intros, image slideshows, and associated wikimedia sections getting the most attention.

Discussion has resumed on the portal guidelines.

Until next issue...[edit]

See ya round the portal system!    — The Transhumanist   11:47, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Change to Portal Germany[edit]

I have a question regarding Portal:Germany, which I raised on its talk, but no answer. Trying here, as you are the portal person: why can't I edit that portal any more, directly I mean. I know how to do it, but I imagine a reader who sees a spelling mistake and wants to fix it. I have no time to check if it is only that portal. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:42, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

See the reply at the portal's talk page.    — The Transhumanist   12:57, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

This Month in Education: November 2018[edit]

Wikipedia Education globe
This Month in Education

Volume 4 | Issue 10 | October 2018

This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter. Join the team! Finally, don't forget to subscribe!


In This Issue
From the Community

A new academic course featuring Wikidata at Tel Aviv University

How we included Wikipedia edition into a whole University department curriculum

Meet the first board of the UG Wikipedia & Education

The education program has kicked off as the new academic year starts

The education program has kicked off as the new academic year starts in Albania

The first Wikimedia+Education conference will happen on April 5-7 at Donostia-Saint Sebastian

Using ORES to assign articles in Basque education program

What to write for Wikipedia about? Monuments!

Wikifridays: editing Wikipedia in the university

Writing articles on Wikipedia is our way of leaving legacy to the next generations

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 05:55, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Possible duplicate portals[edit]

Portal:Paralympic Games seems to duplicate the older and more developed portal Paralympics. Please advise.--Auric talk 19:15, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

@Auric: Nice catch. I've tagged the duplicate for speedy deletion, to pave the way for the original portal to be moved to that title so that it matches the name of the article. Keep up the good work.    — The Transhumanist   20:51, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Help! Portal:Men's rights movement[edit]

Hi! When convert Portal:Men's rights movement to a single page format the portal has the truncated layout. Can you help me?Guilherme Burn (talk) 10:16, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

@Guilherme Burn: I'll be right there to take a look.    — The Transhumanist   10:20, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
@Guilherme Burn: Fixed Let me know if I can do anything else for you.    — The Transhumanist   10:39, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
Thank you very much. Did you automate the process?Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:14, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
@Guilherme Burn: You are welcome. Regarding your question... To what process are you referring?    — The Transhumanist   11:18, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
The process to convert to a single page.Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:21, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
Not the whole process. Not yet. What we do have is {{subst:Basic portal start page}}, which fills in most everything, except no categories at the end -- so I leave the categories in. To save keystrokes, we have the {{subst:bpsp}} redirect. This template replaces the whole portal, and therefore doesn't fit every situation.
I've also been using WP:AWB to convert portals, but that takes multiple passes, but can handle more configurations. Right now, I'm working on replacing instances of {{Random portal component}} with sections that can be worked on more easily (for further conversion).
If you are interested in power tools for working on portals, see the discussions at User talk:AmericanAir88. I'm in the process of introducing him to faster methods to work on portals.
If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.    — The Transhumanist   11:44, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
P.S.: @Guilherme Burn: (ping)

Category:Portals with titles not starting with a proper noun has been nominated for discussion[edit]

Category:Portals with titles not starting with a proper noun, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Fram (talk) 15:14, 14 November 2018 (UTC)


About Pearl Jam's Page[edit]

I have saw you editing pearl jam's page consistently in these days so i expect that you know about them and thats why i have a request for you. Considering Pearl jam's stature when talking about rock music and their influence it is pretty much well known that pearl jam have now flourished as one of the greatest rock bands of all time. I have some references too to prove thr case like corey taylor's verdict about pearl jam and etc. But there is no such claim about them on their page. I know its a pretty subjective content but when you look at other rock bands like The beatles, Pink floyd, Nirvana they all have this sort of contents on their page. So abstaining a single page from this type of content would make peoples overlook them and also it is a bit biasness too. So i was looking for the right man to look out the case and add this content on their page. If you don't know much about the bands history(which is unlikely to be) then you can simply add the discussion on their talk page asking the question. Best regards 2405:204:A02A:147A:0:0:1D2B:E0B1 (talk) 16:43, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Portal:Furry fandom[edit]

A tag has been placed on Portal:Furry fandom requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section P1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a portal which would be subject to speedy deletion if it were an article.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator, or if you have already done so, you can place a request here. wumbolo ^^^ 15:30, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

I've had a look for pairs of portals which transclude the same lead articles. The only pair I found was Portal:Hitchhiker's and Portal:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Certes (talk) 16:22, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
@Certes: For future reference, how did you find these?    — The Transhumanist   06:43, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
I did a WP search on Portal: namespace for hastemplate:"Transclude lead excerpt" insource:/ransclude lead excerpt/ (the latter to make the relevant text appear in the output snippet; no T as it may be lower case) then ran a perl script off-wiki on the output to resolve PAGENAME to the portal title and report duplicates. There were 37 pairs but 36 were acceptable uses such as Tea quoted in both Portal:Tea and Portal:Drink. Certes (talk) 12:26, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
@Certes: I think I figured it out. You didn't follow redirects, such as Portal:GuitarPortal:Guitars, Portal:IndustryPortal:Industries, Portal:MonarchyPortal:Monarchies. (These are the only portal pairs with the same lead that have a singular-plural title, I checked with a script) wumbolo ^^^ 20:34, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
@Wumbolo: You're right. That needs a different query. I found 18 cases. Certes (talk) 21:48, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Women's Classical Committee|class=start|importance=low[edit]

Are you the relevant person about {{Women's Classical Committee|class=start|importance=low}} template, which has some problems, or someone else? If someone else, tell me.--Dthomsen8 (talk) 13:35, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Check this out[edit]

...the lead banner I added for Portal:Salmon. Nice, eh? North America1000 09:02, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

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  2. ^ Quarry Beta; here's a sample SQL query: SELECT * FROM page WHERE page_namespace = 0 AND page_title LIKE "%in_Milan%" LIMIT 500;