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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4

D-batch request: Bulk

Portals have been converted into a single-page portal. The following list of subpages is no longer needed.⊂Emoteplump (Contributions) (Talk) 14:18, 1 February 2019 (UTC) @Amorymeltzer:

Extended content
I will peruse through this later. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me | my contributions 14:22, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
Oof, that's a lot! I'll try and process these carefully, but just from clicking on one I can already see one issue: Portal:Greater Los Angeles seems to have lost the in the news section in your redesign. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 15:42, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
@Amorymeltzer: Added back the missing portion, thanks for taking note of this mistake! ⊂Emoteplump (Contributions) (Talk) 08:59, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
 In progress Checking slowly... ~ Amory (u • t • c) 17:53, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
@Emoteplump: Portal:Geography has no recognized content, that section is empty. I think the content/bot templates were removed in this edit. And the Australian recognized content section is looooong and could probably be hatted or something ~ Amory (u • t • c) 19:04, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
@Emoteplump: I'm stopping for now, as some of these are pretty radical changes. Do you have any thoughts The Transhumanist or Dreamy Jazz? I did a bunch that seemed fine — in particular, anniversaries, selected biographies, and quotes seem difficult to maintain and verify — but for example Google, Greater LA, and German Empire are all losing a lot of that content as well has having their individual character changed, and pretty rapidly too. Just want to confirm there's at least some agreement before continuing here. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 21:00, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
@Emoteplump and Amorymeltzer: Thanks for the ping. Portal:Geography had already been restarted/redesigned to a one-page version with Recognized content support by JL-Bot, a populated Did you know section, a Selected geographers section, and an extensive subportals section. I've reverted the latest restart to the previous revamp, and have just added extensive featured picture support. Before restarting a portal, please make sure that it is of the old design (look for "box portal skeleton" at the top of the edit page), and that it isn't manually maintained (has a "maintained" category, or is listed in Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Specific portal maintainers). I hadn't requested to delete the subpages, because I wasn't sure if we needed to data mine the picture file names, or the picture captions, from them or not. The subpages for this portal are now obsolete. I will look over the rest of the batch, as I have time, over the next few days.    — The Transhumanist   22:54, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
@Emoteplump and Amorymeltzer: Portal:Greater Los Angeles was already restarted September 1st, and received a lot of edits after that. The new restart undid all those, including the subcategories section. I've reverted to the version prior to the latest restart. The subpages of the originl portal should not be removed until we've either mined them for any useful data or the portal gets equivalent quality content from elsewhere. The old portal (before the restarts) had a wonderful pictures collection, and so those filenames and captions should be collected and placed in the Selected images section before the subpages are nuked. A tool for this will be designed eventually, as doing this by hand is extremely tedious.    — The Transhumanist   00:27, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@Transhumanist: With Emoteplump blocked as a sock, I've restored all of these. I've reverted the changes to the Portal:Australia and Portal:Government of India, but left the change to Portal:Geography as you've reviewed it, as well as Portal:Apple Inc., for which the older versions give me script errors (the last good version is before your edits). I'm a bit annoyed with myself, feel free to slap me around with a trout for a bit. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 15:30, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@Amorymeltzer: It has come to my attention that User:Emoteplump is a sockpuppet. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Massdelete (nuke).    — The Transhumanist   21:15, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Repairing the mass-deletion damage

User:Emoteplump was discovered to be a sockpuppet of an indefinitely blocked user. Therefore, admins have deleted all the portals he or she created.

We need to re-create those.

They can be found here:

Special:Log/create/Emoteplump.    — The Transhumanist   21:18, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@Amorymeltzer:@Pbsouthwood:

* Portal:Arts * Portal:Biography

These portals were started over from scratch. Whatever content the stars referred to is no longer there. These are essentially new portals built with the new automated portal framework.    — The Transhumanist   10:24, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Why on earth are we replacing portals which have been painstakingly nurtured to Featured quality by formulaic auto-generated text? Certes (talk) 10:51, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm glad you asked. The answer is: because they were abandoned. The same criterion used for upgrading any portal. Those portals, painstakingly built by hand (which is why it was painstaking) in 2006 and 2011 respectively, hadn't been updated in many years, and they suffered the same problems as all the old portals. The excerpts were stale, the tiny selections were dated, the presentation mode obsolete showing a single entry per section per visit, with everything being static. In the new portals everything is dynamic: every excerpt is automatically refreshed, the selections grow as the source page coverage grows, the selections are presented via slide show so that the user can browse through many excerpts rather than just one, and the recognized content sections are serviced regularly by bot. And the excerpts are not auto-generated text, are they? They were written by humans, and then transcluded by computer. Which is better than what they replaced, which were written by humans and then copy/pasted by humans -- once. Computers are much better at copying/pasting, because they can do it faster, which allows for it to be done every time someone visits the page.
Maintenance is also easier. A user can add new material with ease.
More importantly, the tools we have now, and more tools under development will be able to be used by editors to further develop these portals with ease.
But, the main benefit of the new portals, is the vast selection of content they can make available. The new biography portal, shows 20 biographical excerpts in a slideshow, chosen randomly each visit (or upon each purge) from the thousands of featured and good article status biographies, and vital biographies level 4. Thousands. And as those lists grow or are refined over time, they are updated in the portal automatically. Providing the reader with a new experience upon every visit.
I withdraw my request. I've figured out how to remove the stars.    — The Transhumanist   12:28, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
P.S.: By the way, I meant to write "started over from scratch and/or totally revamped." The biography portal has been under development since the beginning of November.    — The Transhumanist   12:28, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
We also have featured image stars, such as in Portal:Geography. That one may be due to inclusion of File:Hohenzollernbrücke Köln.jpg. Certes (talk) 10:51, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
That appears to be a bug.    — The Transhumanist   12:28, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
@Certes and The Transhumanist: The stars are a side-effect from checking for non-free files. The Lua modules check for non-free images by pre-processing local file description pages, and not allowing any with the words "non-free" to be displayed on a portal. A side-effect of this pre-processing is that some things get processed as if they were on the page itself, regardless of whether they actually are used. I thought I had actually fixed this a while ago by wrapping the featured star indicator in {{file other}} [1], but it seems to have come back. - Evad37 [talk] 08:40, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Though when testing on my sandbox, I was able to include File:Hohenzollernbrücke Köln.jpg via both a {{transclude lead excerpt}} and {{transclude files as random slideshow}} without the star showing up. - Evad37 [talk] 08:56, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Found the culprit: {{Featured picture set}}.  Fixed with [2] - Evad37 [talk] 09:03, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Replacing anything crafted by a human with something picked automatically is a step in the wrong direction. Who will maintain the thousands of new portals when no one wanted to maintain the 1700 old portals? Legacypac (talk) 04:01, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Tidying existing portals

A couple of tasks arising from valid criticisms here:

  1. Fixing portals with script errors: please see here
  2. DYK and news sections: are the search terms appropriate? For example, before a recent fix, Portal:Spiders looked for "Spiders", which only found an item about the Richmond Spiders men's basketball team.

– Certes (talk) 21:26, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

d-batch request: Portal:Nudity

Portal:Nudity has been converted into a single-page portal.The following list of subpages is no longer needed.Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:14, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

please @Amorymeltzer:@Pbsouthwood:.

 Done, Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 12:37, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Undeleted by request for examination in connection with RfC · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 17:02, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

d-batch request tabs subpages

Some tabs subpages are replaced per Template:Start tab and is no longer needed.Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:41, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

please @Amorymeltzer:@Pbsouthwood:.

 Done, Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 12:39, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Undeleted by request for examination in connection with RfC · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 17:03, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

d-batch request: Portal:Education

Portal:Education has been converted into a single-page portal.The following list of subpages is no longer needed.Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:21, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Extended content

please @Amorymeltzer:@Pbsouthwood:.

 Done, Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 12:38, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Undeleted by request for examination in connection with RfC · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 17:55, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Removing deleted portals

Regardless of whether ALL the new portals should be deleted, there are a few dozen portals which have been deleted. All traces of those portals should be removed from article-space and Category, Template, and any other user-facing spaces. Most of this could be done by bots. Since the links were mostly added by bots, this should be done by bots. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 03:12, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Silence.... — Arthur Rubin (talk) 19:05, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
@Arthur Rubin: while I agree 100% in theory, one (the only?) nice thing is that most of the portal links are implemented with the {{portal}} template. If a specific portal listed as one of its parameters is deleted, the template logic suppresses the display of a redlink. Accordingly, I have not seen portal redlinks in the user-facing spaces. UnitedStatesian (talk) 12:43, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Portal:LDS Church

Some of the "Read more" links on Portal:LDS Church lead directly to the LDS's own website. I thought that we were providing portals into Wikipedia rather than advertising external sites. Do we want to change this? Certes (talk) 12:08, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

@Certes: I think this has been changed UnitedStatesian (talk) 12:57, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Portal assessment

I have marked Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Assessment as historical since assessments are done by the subject-area WikiProjects, not by namespace area WikiProjects. Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories and Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books do not do assessments. UnitedStatesian (talk) 12:57, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

eraser Undone. Other stuff doesn't exist isn't a very good argument, and besides there are counter-examples like WP:Help Project. Unlike categories, portals can have a significant range of quality, from portals which barely (or don't even) pass WP:POG through to Featured portals – see also the extensive discussion around assessments [3]. Having assessments can help track of the overall state of things, and give the project goals to work towards (probably more so once the current cull of low-quality/mass-produced portals is completed or further progressed). Not to mention that the more "traditional" project assessments like "Project", "Template", "Category", etc are actually in use and not "historical". - Evad37 [talk] 14:23, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Seventh-day Adventist Church

Portal:Seventh-day Adventist Church/Selected article/4 This subpage shouldn't be included in Portal:Seventh-day Adventist Church. The Seventh-day Adventist Church doesn't believe in Premillennialism, look at article Seventh-day Adventist eschatology Having this subpage is very deceiving.Catfurball (talk) 20:38, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

@UnitedStatesian: Portal:Seventh-day Adventist Church/Selected biography/5 had it's biography removed by User:Legacypac since the person was never a Seventh-day Adventist. It would be nice if a war veteran would replace the removed biography like Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi; Harlon Block or Desmond Doss.Catfurball (talk) 16:50, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Cornwall

I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but I couldn't find an obviously more suitable place. At the moment, Portal:Cornwall doesn't have any of the lead section of the article Cornwall. I've tried to transplant a working peice of script in from Portal:Money but it didn't work and I'm not at all competent with the wiki-code involved. Any help or suggestions would be most appreciated. Many thanks, Gazamp (talk) 18:58, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

Pinging @Certes: is this because the Cornwall article has so much code at the top, that {{transclude lead excerpt}} doesn't work? I noticed the same issue in Portal:Computer science/Intro. UnitedStatesian (talk) 01:04, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
@UnitedStatesian:  Fixed in Cornwall. The high sheriff infobox data had a stray "{" which confused the parser (and the wrong year). Certes (talk) 10:33, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
@UnitedStatesian and Certes: - Thanks both of you Gazamp (talk) 13:08, 9 June 2019 (UTC)

New Idea

I noticed on the French Wikipedia that they have a portal called, Portal:Protestantism. Why has not someone created a similar portal for the English Wikipedia.Catfurball (talk) 21:58, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

They have. It was deleted in April. Certes (talk) 23:24, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

Then it was recreated since I was on that portal yesterday, and I just visited it again today. It goes by this: fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portail:Protestantisme.Catfurball (talk) 21:29, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

User:Certes was talking about English Wikipedia's Portal:Protestantism: it was one-click created, and then deleted per community consensus. But there is no prejudice against creating a properly maintained version if someone wishes to take it on. I think Portal:Protestantism would conform to the WP:POG guideline more than some of the existing portals on individual protestant denominations. UnitedStatesian (talk) 01:04, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

Junk Portals

Portal:Syriac Christianity is a minor religion and should not have been created. Portal:Anabaptism is a minor religion and should not have been created. And there is the worst portal on Wikipedia, Portal:Evangelical Christianity, it is ugly and should have never been created. In fact I still don't understand why the keepers came out to save that piece of junk.Catfurball (talk) 18:27, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

No longer required subpages on Portal:buses

To ease addition and maintenance of the selected images on Portal:buses, I've changed the portal from selecting an image from subpages to using template:Transclude files as random slideshow. This means Portal:Buses/Selected picture and all of it's subpages are surplus to requirements - however, the captions have been copied into the new template, so are there attribution issues? Do the captions have to be rewritten, as there is no longer any edit history (as to move captions onto the template from subpages is essentially lots of cut and paste moves)?

~~ OxonAlex - talk 19:10, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Also no longer required Portal:Buses/Intro - now transcluded , & Portal:Buses/Reviewed articles - no longer included. ~~ OxonAlex - talk 06:44, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Please revive Portal:Basketball and Portal:Golf

I noticed that a couple months ago, the portal for basketball was deleted (see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Basketball). The same thing happened to golf. These were misguided moves, since every other major sport has a portal (see Portal:Baseball, Portal:Association football, Portal:Ice hockey, Portal:American football, Portal:Volleyball, Portal:Cricket, and Portal:Tennis). This leaves basketball and golf as the only major world sports without a portal. I have no experience in creating portals, so someone needs to help. Sanjay7373 (talk) 00:09, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

The portals were deleted per Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Basketball (November 5) and Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Golf (August 3). You would need to revisit the MFDs in order to request restoration. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 03:41, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
@Sanjay7373: Also, you state that you "have no experience in creating portals" - do you have experience in maintaining portals? If not, and you can't find someone to do it, there's no point in recreating either of them since one of the reasons that both were deleted was that they were neglected - nobody was actively maintaining them. Portals aren't static, they should be dynamic, with something fresh at frequent intervals. See for example Portal:Trains - the "Selected article" and "Selected image" both change weekly, the "Did you know..." usually has a new item added (and an old one removed) once a day, the "Selected anniversaries" changes daily. That's the thing: Slambo (talk · contribs) is willing to set aside time each day to maintain this portal, can you do the same for your sports? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:00, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
@Sanjay7373: And I would add that you should definitely first reach out to the corresponding WikiProjects (Wikipedia:WikiProject Basketball and Wikipedia:WikiProject Golf) to see if there is interest in creating and maintaining the portal. "There are other portals, so we need one" is not sufficient. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:14, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

January 2020

The ArbCom case has now closed. Whilst the case quite rightly concentrated on conduct, it also has a few practical effects on content and suggests some tasks which we can profitably start. Certes (talk) 22:26, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Guidelines

ArbCom recommends establishing guidelines for portals. Good progress has already been made here and it has restarted following a pause during the case. Both discussions should guide our progress in the medium term. That leaves a few short term questions about activity while that process continues. Certes (talk) 22:26, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Deletions

I hope that we can reach consensus about future portal MfDs. At one end of the scale, the process can be seen as a conveyor belt systematically ridding the namespace of all or almost all of its portals. At the other end, we have the vision of MfD functioning like XfD in other namespaces: an exceptional event for a few pages which suffer from unfixable problems not shared by their peers. Editors active in the namespace need to know which strategy will apply, so they can direct their efforts either to improving portals or to defending them from deletion. Certes (talk) 22:26, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Reverted changes

Many portals were recently updated to use transclusions rather than content forks, but those edits were reverted in bulk. Many but not all of the changes have now been reinstated, and in many cases further improvements have already been made. We need consensus on whether to reinstate the remaining changes in whole, to assess them individually, or to decide that the original versions were preferable. Certes (talk) 22:26, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Regarding transclusion vs fork - the best option may be to fork the main article (the article with the same name as the portal), but transclude selected articles (as forks can easily get out of date, vandalised etc and not be spotted) - see this discussion. DexDor (talk) 22:04, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
The best option may be to wait until the guideline is finalised, as it may specifically disallow either of these options. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 15:43, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Other tasks

Most other work should probably wait until the guidelines appear, or at worst until it becomes obvious that they will not appear any time soon. Any exceptions can be noted here. Certes (talk) 22:26, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Comments

Excellent and well said. I appreciate the ideas of Certes above. this all sounds fine to me. thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 15:40, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

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