User talk:Balablitz/Archive 23

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #027, 28 Jan 2019

Portal styles

For a visually intensive portal, see Portal:Hummingbirds.

If you find any other portals that stand out, please send me the links so I can include them in the next issue. Thank you.

Conversion continues

There are about 1100 portals left in the old style, with subpages and static excerpts. As those are very labor intensive to maintain (because their maintenance is manual), all those except the ones with active maintainers (about 100) are slated for upgrade = approximately 1000. We started with 1500, and so over a quarter of them have been processed so far. That's good, but at this rate, conversion will take another 3 years. So, some automation (AWB?) is in order. We just need to keep at it, and push down on the gas pedal a bit harder.

You can find the old-style portals with an insource search of "box portal skeleton".

Flagship portals: the portals on the Main Page

Speaking of upgrades...

The following portals are listed in the header at the top of Wikipedia's Main Page, and get far more traffic than all other portals:

Of those, all but one have been revamped to an automated self-updating single-page design.

The remaining one, Portal:Mathematics has manual maintainers, and has been partially upgraded.

As these are our flagship fleet, they need to be kept in top-notch condition.

Check 'em out, and improve them if you can.

And be sure they are on your watchlist.

New portals since last issue

Keep 'em coming!

Deorphanizing the new portals

As you know, thousands of the new portals are orphans, that is, having no links to them from article space. For all practical purposes, that means they are not part of the encyclopedia yet, and readers will be unlikely to find them.

What is needed are links to these portals from the See also sections of the corresponding root articles.

Dreamy Jazz to the rescue...

Dreamy Jazz has created a bot to place the corresponding category link to the end of each portal (if it is missing), and place a link to each portal in the See also section of the corresponding root articles.

That bot, named User:Dreamy Jazz Bot, is currently in its trial period performing the above described edits!

To take a look at the edits it has made so far, see Special:Contributions/Dreamy_Jazz_Bot.

It shouldn't be long before the bot is processing the entire set of new portals.

Good news indeed.

Way to go, Dreamy Jazz!

And, that's a wrap

That's all I have to report this time around.

No doubt there will be more to tell soon.

Until then, — The Transhumanist 13:09, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image File:RE-TFC OMPS.jpg

⚠

Thanks for uploading File:RE-TFC OMPS.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 03:40, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #028, 04 Feb 2019

Here's a quicky status report:

Old-style portals: 1,018

Single-page portals: 4,367

Total portals: 5,385

But of course, there has been more going on than just that...

Dreamy Jazz Bot is up and running!

Dreamy Jazz Bot has been approved and is now up and running.

What it does is places missing links to orphaned portals. It places a link in the See also section of the corresponding root article, and it puts one at the top of the corresponding category page.

We have thousands of new portals that have yet to be added to the encyclopedia proper, just waiting to go live.

When they do go live, over the coming days or weeks, due to Dreamy Jazz Bot, it will be like an explosion of new portals on the scene. We should expect an increase in awareness and interest in the portals project. Perhaps even new participants.

Get ready...

Get set...

Go!

Another sockpuppet infiltrator has been discovered

User:Emoteplump, a recent contributor to the portals project, was discovered to be a sockpuppet account of an indefinitely blocked user.

When that happens, admins endeavor to eradicate everything the editor contributed. This aftermath has left a wake of destruction throughout the portals department, again.

The following portals which have been speedy deleted, are in the process of being re-created. Please feel free to help to turn these blue again:

And the corresponding talk pages:

New portals since the last issue

Keep up the great work

Until next time, — The Transhumanist 08:58, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Not wikivoyage

Hello Balablitz, thank you for you edit of Mysore Junction railway station. Tell me please if it's your personal taste to delete list of trains, or whether there is precedent for that. I regularly delete any table of trains that includes time, with the justification that WP is not a timetable. The tables of train number, train name, origin, and destination I generally leave alone, except that I delete the superlatives Major Trains, and important trains. The logic of the editor who put the table in is that it demonstrates that the station is somehow remarkable (an assertion I disagree with much of the time). Have you ever had any fights about deleting these tables? Rhadow (talk) 18:45, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #029, 13 Feb 2019

Where we are at:

Single-page portals: 4,704

Total portals: 5,705

The Ref desks survived the proposal to shut them down

You might be familiar with the Ref desks, by their link on every new portal. They are a place you can go to ask volunteers almost any knowledge-related question, and have been a feature of Wikipedia since August of 2005 (or perhaps earlier). They were linked to from portals in an effort to improve their visibility, and to provide a bridge from the encyclopedia proper to project space (the Wikipedia community).

Well, somebody proposed that we get rid of them, and the community decided that that was not going to happen. Thank you for defending the Ref desks!

Here's a link to the dramatic discussion:

https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Indefinitely_semiprotecting_the_refdesk#Proposal_II:_Shut_down_the_Ref_Desks

The cleanup after sockpuppet Emoteplump continues...

The wake of disruption left by Emoteplump and the admins who reverted many (but not all) of his/her edits is still undergoing cleanup. We could use all the help we can get on this task...

Almost all of the speedy deleted portals have been rebuilt from scratch.

For the portals he/she restarted (many of which were done mistakenly, overwriting restarts and further development that had already been done), and/or tagged as the maintainer, see https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=User:Emoteplump&oldid=881568794#Additional_Portals_under_my_watch

10,000 portals, here we come...

We're at 5,705 portals and counting.

New portals since issue #28

Prior to 2018, for the previous 14 years, portal creation was at about 80 portals per year on average. We did over 3 times that in just the past 9 days. At this rate, we'll hit the 10,000 portal mark in 5 months. But, I'm sure we can do it sooner than that.

What's next for portal pages?

There are 5 drives for portal development:

Create new portals
Expand existing portals, such as with new sections like Recognized content
Convert or restart old-style portals into automated single-page portals
Link to new portals from the encyclopedia
Pageless portals

Let's take a closer look at these...

1: Creating new portals

Portal creation, for subjects that happen to have the necessary support structures already in place, is down to about a minute per portal. The creation part, which is automated, takes about 10 seconds. The other 50 seconds is taken up by manual activities, such as finding candidate subjects, inspecting generated portals, and selecting the portal creation template to be used according to the resources available. Tools are under development to automate these activities as much as possible, to pare portal creation time down even more. Ten seconds each is the goal.

Eventually, we are going to run out of navigation templates to base portals off of. Though there are still thousands to go. But, when they do run out, we'll need an easy way to create more. A nav footer creation script.

Meanwhile, other resources are being explored and developed, such as categories, and methods to harvest the links they contain.

2: Expanding existing portals

The portal collection is growing, not only by the addition of new portals, but by further developing the ones we already have, by...

Improving and/or adding search parameters to better power the Did you know and In the news sections.
Adding more selected content sections, like Selected biographies.
Adding and maintaining Recognized content sections, via JL-Bot.
Adding pictures to the image slideshow.
Adding panoramic pics.
Categorizing portals.

More features will be added as we dream them up and design them. So, don't be shy, make a wish.

3: Converting old portals

By far the hardest and most time-consuming task we have been working on is updating the old portals, the very reason we revamped this WikiProject in the first place.

There are two approaches here:

A) Restart a portal from scratch, using our automated tools. For basic no-frills portals, that works find. But, for more elaborate portals, as that tends to lose content and features, the following approach is being tried...

B) Upgrade a portal section by section, so little to nothing is lost in the process.

4: Linking to new portals

Or "portal deorphanization"...

Dreamy Jazz Bot is purring along.

And a tool in the form of a script is under development for linking to portals at the time they are created, or shortly thereafter.

5...

See below...

New WikiProject for the post-saved-portal phase of operations...

Saved portals, are portals with a saved page.

What is the next stage in the evolutionary progression?

Quantum portals.

What are quantum portals?

Portals that come into existence when you click on the portal button, and which disappear when you leave the page.

Or, as Pbsouthwood put it:

...portals that exist only as a probability function (algorithm) until you collapse the wave form by observing through the portal button (run the script), and disappear again after use...

Introducing...

Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals (see it's talk page).

Keep on keepin' on

...'til next time, — The Transhumanist 10:17, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Railway stations in Nagaland

Template:Railway stations in Nagaland has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 20:18, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Pollachi–Dindigul branch line

Template:Pollachi–Dindigul branch line has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 20:39, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #030, 17 Mar 2019

Previous issue:

Single-page portals: 4,704

Total portals: 5,705

This issue:

Single-page portals: 4,562

Total portals: 5,578

The collection of portals has shrunk

All Portals closed at WP:MfD during 2019

Grouped Nominations total 127 Portals:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/US County Portals Deleted 64 portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Districts of India Portals Deleted 30 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods Deleted 23 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Allen Park, Michigan Deleted 6 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cryptocurrency Deleted 2 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:North Pole Deleted 2 Portals

Individual Nominations:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Circles Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Fruits Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:E (mathematical constant) Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Burger King Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cotingas Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Prostitution in Canada Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Agoura Hills, California Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Urinary system Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:You Am I Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cannabis (2nd nomination) Reverted to non-Automated version
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Intermodal containers Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adventure travel Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adam Ant Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benito Juárez, Mexico City Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Spaghetti Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Wikiatlas Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Greek alphabet Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Accounting Deleted G7
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Lents, Portland, Oregon Deleted P2
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ankaran Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Jiu-jitsu Deleted G8
Portal:University of Nebraska Speedy Deleted P1/A10 exactly the same as Portal:University of Nebraska–Lincoln also created by the TTH

Related WikiProject:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals Demoted

(Attribution: Copied from Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Portal MfD Results)

WikiProject Quantum portals

This was a spin-off from WikiProject Portals, for the purpose of developing zero-page portals (portals generated on-the-screen at the push of a button, with no stored pages).

It has been merged back into WikiProject Portals. In the MfD the vote was "demote". See Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals.

Hiatus on mass creation of Portals

At WP:VPR, mass creation of Portals using semi-automated tools has been put on hold until clearer community consensus is established.

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Hiatus on mass creation of Portals.

The Transhumanist banned from creating new portals for 3 months

See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Proposal 1: Interim Topic-Ban on New Portals.

Until next issue...

Keep on keepin' on. — The Transhumanist 09:58, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Salem–Vriddhachalam–Cuddalore Port line

Template:Salem–Vriddhachalam–Cuddalore Port line has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 21:48, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Tiruchirappalli–Madurai line

Template:Tiruchirappalli–Madurai line has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 21:01, 20 March 2019 (UTC)