Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Archive 13

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Portal DYKs

I have become so weary, stressed and depressed over the seemingly implacable drive to delete portals that I have withdrawn from participating in MfD for the sake of my mental health, but responding to a recent ping I found that a new argument has emerged re portal DYKs. I've put some notes under Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:University of Houston but don't intend to pursue this further. Best of luck, Espresso Addict (talk) 01:20, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

I don't blame you as I have felt the same way. Sadly our withdrawal from the project is just what the deletionists want. Bermicourt (talk) 06:18, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

I agree with the notion that the DYK section in portals is fine and perfectly functional as a means to highlight interesting factoids and facts. At MfD, there's been an unfortunate synthesis of policy to apply DYK content as it applies to Main page to portals (see Wikipedia:Did you know); portals are not Main page. One of the first things I read when reading portals is the DYK content, when present. DYK sections in portals increases their overall scope, making them more comprehensive, and also makes them more interesting for Wikipedia's WP:READERS. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 16:03, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

I enjoy browsing old DYKs too; they have always seemed a strength of the old-style portals, not a weakness. As an aside, readers here might be interested in the broken tooltips saga (these are the reader previews that are alleged to make portals redundant); see my further remark in the Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:University of Houston. Espresso Addict (talk) 03:13, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Ditto all the above, it's difficult to keep morale up when faced with a determined deletionist onslaught (which generates it's own self perpetuating pile-on). Illegitimi non carborundum I say. I know that I'm risking the indignation of the usual suspects with this post. Interesting point about the Broken Tooltips Espresso Addict, the existence of which is a major deletion rationale of more recent MFD's, to the point of becoming a broken record. It's also interesting to note that logged-in users do not have the same luxury it would seem. You're either an "editor" or a "reader" apparently, which is just bollocks.--Cactus.man ✍ 22:25, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

@Cactus.man: I don't know why MfD nominators don't stick with just "fails to meet portal guidelines; not substantially updated since [date]". Those who favour deletion of all/most portals would still vote to delete, those who favour retention would still have to demonstrate that the rationale was unfounded, and the repeated weight of the heaped up deletion rationales would not feel so oppressive.

And good point that editors overlap strongly with readers. I can never leave this place behind because I use it every day as a reader even when I'm trying to quit the editing addiction, and I never log out because my password is so strong I can't type it accurately. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:33, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Espresso Addict, well, given the history of this MFD storm and slowly changing deletion rationales by nominators, I think it's case of moving the goalposts to match one's deletionist agenda, whether they're real and valid goalposts or not. Who can really score a goal through imaginary goalposts anyway, "Hmm, isn't it" (Fast Show reference).

Good to meet a fellow reader, BTW :) --Cactus.man ✍ 00:36, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

My OH (who doesn't edit) has been talking about boiling frogs... Espresso Addict (talk) 00:46, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

I use a separate Firefox profile for editing Wikipedia. Visiting Wikipedia just to read happens on my normal profile where I'm not logged in and see tooltips, but I expect that many editors rarely see pages as a reader would. I did make a systematic attempt to improve portal DYKs but I too feel discouraged from editing portals which will be deleted. Indeed, I left Wikipedia entirely for several weeks at the height of the argument. I have to agree that the goalposts have moved. Portal:Donald Trump was once used as the example of a portal everyone agreed would never be deleted. Now it's gone, and and it is being proposed with a straight face that keeping just eight of the 1500 900 portals meets the consensus not to ENDPORTALS. Certes (talk) 07:34, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

• Sorry you feel this way. Do you really think the system of portals was working? Who agreed that Portal:Donald Trump would never be deleted? I never saw that assertion.

I think Portals need a major renovation. I regret that auto-portals were such a bad idea. I wish we could discuss it seriously, patiently, and not at MfD. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:43, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

That was probably my fault. As I recall, I essentially dared folk to nominate it for deletion, anticipating storms of protest, and someone took me up on it; checking I see it was you, SmokeyJoe. I think the discussion revolved around BLP issues and potential for PoV pushing, which is not unreasonable. Espresso Addict (talk) 06:30, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

I had, despite my intentions to avoid all Portal MfDs, got involved in Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Narendra Modi, where I see I was alone with my argument to archive not delete. Narendra Modi has POV-attractiveness issues, leader of a billion people and almost revered by most of the educated. Then someone, User:Pldx1, brought up Portal:Donald Trump with what I read as a sarcastic challenge, and I looked and saw a serious possible challenge: Portal:Donald Trump listed a series of FA articles that looked like bias to DT criticisms. I felt that reflected editor bias, I think Wikipedians on average differ from the average American in their attitude to trump. In contrast, the Donald Trump did not prominently list the select FA critical articles. In an article, Wikipedia can defend accusations of bias by saying article content reflects the best quality sources. In portals, there is no anchoring to sources. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:44, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Well, there is anchoring to sources, via the article (history), but it can take a bit of finding if the source has since been deleted from the article. The notion that a complete list of Wikipedia FAs on a topic might constitute a BLP violation is an interesting one, and for once I mean that non-ironically. (The portal list was actually a mirror of the Wikiproject, which still exists, if you want to pursue it further.) Espresso Addict (talk) 08:07, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

The listing of Trump associated FA articles is a bit of a POV issue, a completely understandable Wikipedian bias for the best wikipedians (FA developers) to work on articles they think are important. Not a BLP violation. The BLP issue was that the Portal subpages could be attacked without people noticing, a hypothetical, but one that I think would be worse if the Portal had more reader exposure. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:23, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

I can't see that as a deletion rationale. Surely we could protect them proactively, instead. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:17, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Protection, to protect content fork snippets from BLP attacks? That’s an idea, a little contrary to not creating barriers to newcomers. I thought article excerpt transclusions was a better idea, but the rushed mass implementation caused that to blow up. Tentatively going back to that idea ... I think content excerpt need to be much briefer, like one sentence, like what we have on DAB pages, and that choices of what to link and excerpt should be based on categorisation trees, not article quality. Choosing by article quality introduces Wikipedian bias. Choosing the best quality articles doesn’t expose readers to content that they are tempted to fix and improve. I think there is too much overlap between Portal look and WikiProject front page look. I think there is merit in the style of WP:Outlines, although they are not good as they are. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:30, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

We still have the option of replacing copied wikitext by transclusion templates. I don't think that particular use of automation is being used as a deletion rationale, and portals use plenty of other templates without adverse comment. Certes (talk) 07:46, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Yes, indeed, I was quite sarcastic when having the impression that some people would use different criteria for keeping/deleting Portal:Narendra Modi and keeping/deleting Portal:Donald Trump. At 10:13, 3 May 2019 (UTC), the former was a sea of red links (due to a simple resurrection after a long sleeping period as a redirect) while the later was "slightly outdated" to tell it mildly. The ensuing discussions have at least resulted into having the same arguments and the same result for the two portals. This is surely a good thing. Pldx1 (talk) 08:46, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Single-page layout portals are dead?

I would like to convert some abandoned portals to the Single-page layout. But first I'd like to know.

Single-page layout are dead? Is there still interested editors in this?

Why portals that I improved using Single-page layout tools like Portal:Martial arts and Portal:Human sexuality went summarily reverted to the old worst versions?Guilherme Burn (talk) 17:08, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

I am still interested in improving single-page portals but am waiting to see which ones survive before resuming work. Certes (talk) 17:57, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

Some of the better portals are single page ones but, like Certes, I'm waiting to see where we stand when the dust settles on portal creation/deletion. Bermicourt (talk) 18:29, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

For the future. ..if any the {{Transclude random excerpt}} family of Temps will be the way forward.--Moxy 🍁 02:39, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

• I think as stated, your generic question needs to go to the broader community. As you know there is currently a strong preference for multi-page portals (only 36 of the 961 portals are single-page); perhaps all single-page portals are now permanently tainted by the mass creations (though I note a number of single-pagers have survived MfD: Portal:Andes, Portal:Sex work, Portal:Volleyball, Portal:Wind power, etc.). I think if there is broad talkpage consensus on a portal-by-portal basis that a subject's single page portal is superior to the current multi-page version, I for one would not have an issue with the conversion of an existing multi-page portal to single-page; the problem from before was that apparently no editors interested in a subject were consulted before the subject's portal was converted to single-page, and this should never happen again. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:53, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

The only way forward be it on one page or with subpages is via transclusion as portals with the old style copy paste are now being deleted for copyright vios (i.e Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Military of the United States). There won't be much left when the deletion board people are done...but transclusion can save some I would image.--Moxy 🍁 04:06, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

The sub-pages in that portal had (probably) been copied without attribution so that doesn't say anything about pages copied with attribution. Note: WP:CWW says "pages that contain unattributed text do not normally need to be deleted". DexDor ^(talk) 12:07, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Attribution was never given in any portal it was implied because it's actually a snippet of the page in question....just a new deletion reason with no merit....like page views that they calculate after portals are no longer seen in mobile view. Can't do much at a noticeboard that most editors avoid on purpose.--Moxy 🍁 21:30, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

There's nothing at CWW saying that portal subpages are an exception to attribution rules - although it does appear harsh to just delete such pages (or even the whole portal) on that basis. DexDor ^(talk) 05:23, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Yup harsh is right ..Zero effort to help from them..would be so easy to replace the sub-page with a transclusion..or add attribution as we normally do in article as per WP:RIA "pages that contain unattributed text do not normally need to be deleted. Attribution can be belatedly supplied". Again that said its clear they are currently dead as a concept because of lack of communiinterestest and the fact deletion happens so fast 6-7 days. We need to develop real guidelines so the next generation and deletors have better guidance....need to empower both sides with real guidelines over vague wording from over ten years ago. --Moxy 🍁 01:26, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Not only harsh, but counter-productive. Replacement by transclusions solves the problem better. Theoretically, portals like these might have been produced by prefixing the excerpt templates with subst:, and use of subst: elsewhere doesn't trigger deletion for CWW. Certes (talk) 06:13, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Honestly, analyzing the discussions in the MFD, in WP:POG and the pageviews I think more and more that the format of "content portals" has no future, let's be honest, even main page portals are abandoned by wikiprojects, are redundant with articles and have low indices of views. The future may be in portals of utilities like Portal:Current events, Portal:Contents and Portal:Featured content. We can think of single page portals that instead of providing content provide utility, such as Portal:Did you know or Portal:Welcome (for beginners), etc.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:35, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

And why do those "utility portals" need to be in a completely separate namespace? Why not just Current events, Wikipedia:Contents, and Wikipedia:Featured content? UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:32, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Many other language wikipedias (even those that have a portal namespace) don't use portal namespace for such pages - e.g. dk:Wikipedia:Aktuelle begivenheder. DexDor ^(talk) 05:01, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Comment 1 - Portal:Climbing was a newly created portal, virtually a single-page portal that presents good layout ideas.Guilherme Burn (talk) 14:07, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Comment 2 - I propose to merge Portal:Women's association football into Portal:Association football, if approved may be an opportunity to convert the second into a new single-page portal. You agree? Guilherme Burn (talk) 14:07, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Sorry to say but no one left here from the project to help or comment as the project has been overwhelmed by deletionist . I would say go a head but most likely will still be deleted best move on to other endeavors.--Moxy 🍁 21:29, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Template:featured portal

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

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

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

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

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

Oppose per Espresso Addict. and yes, per Cactus.man, I agree that no need exists to remove relevant portal history. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 13:14, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Pinging all users who have participated in this thread, regarding the new TfD discussion (except the nominator, who is already aware of it): @Guilherme Burn, Espresso Addict, Cactus.man, BusterD, and Voceditenore: (yes, I'm aware that some have already contributed there, but it's best practice to ping all). North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 00:26, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

• Nb. The TfD discussion was closed with a keep result. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 08:19, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

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

English Wikipedia portals with least editors

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

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

Removal of portal links after deletion

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

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

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

Interested in other's thoughts about this matter. Should links for portals that meet WP:POG's broadness criteria remain in place when said portals are deleted? I think they should. Cheers, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 08:02, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

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

• I have no "keep them all" campaign. Fact is, I nominated a portal for deletion at MfD a couple of days ago. If you're going to state that user's have some sort of "campaign", at least get it right. Really now. I assess portals on a case-by-case basis. Regarding the Vermont portal, it is my view that a portal more fully loaded with high-quality content would have naturally attracted more readers, compared to a static portal, whereby users realize there's not much there and don't go back. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 12:12, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Sorry, I don't understand what you mean.

Vermont portal

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

• Another matter is that some MfD discussions for portals have been closed with no prejudice against recreation (e.g. such as for a maintained, curated portal). The links to these should remain in place: they're already invisible on article, talk and category pages when a portal is deleted, and their removal only creates much more unnecessary busy work for users who may later re-create such portals. Makes perfect sense, really. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 07:58, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Duplicitous forum-shopping above; actual backlinks issues below

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

The discussion on this page was opened[1] by NA1K at 08:02, 31 July 2019.

Only 13 minutes later, at 08:22, NA1K opened[2] a similar discussion on my talk page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redundancy between Portal:Contents subpages and portals

Hello. I was studying how the portals are organized and I realized that the subpages of the Portal:Contents are performing the function they should be of other portals.

Topic	Contents subpage	Page views (08/2018–07/2019)	Page creation	Portal	Main page portal	Page views (08/2018–07/2019)	Page creation
Culture	Portal:Contents/Culture and the arts	231	December 2007	Portal:Culture/Portal:Arts		57 / 1606	June 2005 / February 2005
Geography	Portal:Contents/Geography and places	165	December 2007	Portal:Geography/Portal:Places	yes	1258 / NA	May 2005 / NA
Health	Portal:Contents/Health and fitness	154	December 2007	Portal:Health/Portal:Fitness		NA / NA	NA / NA
History	Portal:Contents/History and events	164	December 2007	Portal:History/Portal:Events	yes	2146 / 0	April 2005 / June 2006
Mathematics	Portal:Contents/Mathematics and logic	144	December 2007	Portal:Mathematics/Portal:Logic	yes	1403 / 1407	February 2005 / June 2007
Nature	Portal:Contents/Natural and physical sciences	157	December 2007	Portal:Nature/Portal:Physical Sciences		NA /NA	NA / NA
People	Portal:Contents/People and self	384	December 2007	Portal:People(Portal:Biography)	yes	2237	May 2005
Philosophy	Portal:Contents/Philosophy and thinking	132	December 2007	Portal:Philosophy/Portal:Thinking		132 / 57	November 2005 / June 2006
Religion	Portal:Contents/Religion and belief systems	173	December 2007	Portal:Religion		86	February 2005
Society	Portal:Contents/Society and social sciences	128	December 2007	Portal:Society	yes	895	June 2005
Technology	Portal:Contents/Technology and applied sciences	156	December 2007	Portal:Technology	yes	1531	June 2005

If it is worthy of analysis I complete the table.

This divides the attention of readers and editors which in my opinion is a problem. What is your opinion?Guilherme Burn (talk) 19:22, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for raising this, @Guilherme Burn. The portals listed above are mostly main page portals, and as such they are among the very few portals which achieve enough page views to justify their existence.

It seems to me that it would be a good idea to investigate how to remove the redundancy identified here. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:30, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Interesting, thanks (and thank you BHG for working on pageviews)! The subpages of Portal:Contents seem to me to be not very attractive, long and dull lists of lists. Portal:Contents/Geography and places links first to all countries, then to all outlines of countries, then to lists, then to the country portals, and then indices. I don't like outlines, which take up quite a bit of screen real estate here. The indices are possibly even worse. BTW outlines and indices are both usually not very well maintained and less popular than portals. Not sure how alive Wikipedia:WikiProject Contents, who may or may not be the natural "owner" of these pages, is. —Kusma (t·c) 19:51, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Certainly Portal:Mathematics is more attractive and much better maintained than its "Contents" brother. —Kusma (t·c) 19:53, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

The existence of this redundancy is a strong argument for ENDOFPORTAL. If there can be a page Wikipedia:contents/topic/subtopic, why are there portals? I am a enthusiast of single-page layout, in my opinion portal subpages should be deleted.Guilherme Burn (talk) 19:55, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Do you have a good single-page substitute solution for Portal:Germany/Anniversaries and its 378 subpages that makes editing easy and saves browser memory? —Kusma (t·c) 19:58, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Germany/Anniversaries and its 378 sub-pages could easily be consolidated into a single page with links to sections. That would be much easier to read, and much easier to maintain. Selective transclusion could allow transclusion of a month's anniversaries sat a time.

Note that the individual sub-pages are almost unused: e.g. Portal:Germany/Anniversaries/April/April 1 got a grand total of 18 pageviews in the whole of year Aug2018–Jul2019. (Note: 18 is not a daily average, but the annual total. The daily average is 0.05). --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:19, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl, I am open to other ways of displaying this content. What I like about the current system is that there are "edit" links on the main portal page that allow you to edit the entry for an individual day. If we move to a single-page system, I would like to keep this function. I haven't had difficulties maintaining this system for more than 10 years, so I am biased in finding this easy to work with. The individual day pages are clearly used, but only once a year, when they are transcluded on the main portal page (which doesn't count as a pageview). I am surprised that they get pageviews at all from anyone but me. The monthly pages and the /All page exist mostly for maintenance convenience (while still making sense to readers).

BrownHairedGirl, I don't think the subpage viewership statistics are accurate or relevant, because the subpages are transculded onto the main portal page, and get viewed via transclusion; those views are not captured in the statistic. By design, the dated page gets the same number of views as the portal on the date (none of which are counted), and zero views every other date. UnitedStatesian (talk) 06:18, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

Also, whether to have subpages or not is in my opinion mostly a technical decision on how a portal should be implemented. I fail to see how the presence or absence of subpages has a significant effect on portal quality or maintenance status. —Kusma (t·c) 20:01, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

• Sub-pages have a massively negative effect. They make portals very hard to maintain, modify or even watchlist. Their existence is an antiquated relic of the failed model of monthly-magazine style portal, which was mostly abandoned by 2010. That model's successor is the rotating-excerpt style of portal, which is a usability nightmare and redundant to the built-in preview-on-mouseover. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:10, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Preview on mouseover is another way to get an x-ray view of linked pages; it has drawbacks, though. From an accessibility standpoint, not everyone possesses the fine-motor skills to accurately position the mouse pointer with the necessary degree of precision. Even for those who do, it becomes an Easter egg hunt interface, with a lot of mouse pointer movement involved. It also lacks any curation. Accordingly, I don't see this preview ability as a straight replacement for portals. isaacl (talk) 21:38, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

• Sure, preview on mouseover has its flaws, as you describe. But while mouseover lacks curation and is vulnerable to technical issues, the idea of curating tens of thousands of sub-pages across ~1000 portals has been proven to be utterly unsustainable given the tiny number of editors interested in devoting their energies to portals which readers don't want. (The data to support that assertion is available in abundance.)

It seems to me that much of the design of portals is based on assumptions which had some validity in 2006/7: that a huge and ever-growing set of active editors would ensure that even the most labour-intensive processes and structures worked. The subpage model of portals is explicitly based on the model of a mini-mainpage. However, the mainpage requires several huge teams of busy editors to sustain it, an even on the smaller scope of a portal that model still requires a lot of ongoing work. That's why POG requires "large numbers" of maintainers.

Sadly, the reality has been the number of editors has declined markedly, and the ratio of articles to active-editors is now about a quarter of what it was a decade ago. So not only do we have abundant evidence that the content-forked-sub-page model has failed for all except a small number of portals, we can see the structural reasons for why it failed, and will continue to fail.

If portals are to survive at all, the design choices need to be made between models which are actually sustainable by the small number of editors willing to work on those portals. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:44, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl, whether a portal has subpages or not seems irrelevant compared to the question whether it is maintained or not. Having subpages has advantages and disadvantages (also depending on what the subpages are used for). Something like the Anniversaries pages required a bit of effort to set up 12 years ago but from experience I can tell you they are essentially trivial to maintain (mostly, I have to replace deleted images once or twice a year). The practical maintenance effort would not become any smaller by moving this to a single page. Anyway, portals need maintainers, no matter how they are designed, and I have agreed with you before that any portal creator should be aware that they will need to continue to invest time if they want the portal to not become an embarrassment. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kusma (talk • contribs) 18:16, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

• @Guilherme Burn, I agree with some of what you say, but not with your conclusion that this points to ENDOPORTAL.

Instead, it reinforces my tendency to agree with @SmokeyJoe's preference for keeping the big 8 portals. and deleting the rest. Call it CULLPORTAL. Except that now I see how they could be integrated into Portal:contents, which would give us an integrated system with multiple points of entry.

The whole one-item per-subpage style of portal is a failure, and I'd happily see guidelines changed to ensure that such portals are deleted or converted. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:05, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

So what is your conversion suggestion? And anyway, Special:Relatedchanges/Portal:Germany/Anniversaries is a very easy way to watch 378 subpages. Please explain to me why this is a failure. —Kusma (t·c) 20:34, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Relatedchages is a failure because it requires a specific proactive check. By contrast, watchlisting is simple generic tool which editors use to track all pages in their interest areas, without needing to do individual checks for each one or each set. There is a reason that we have watchlists.

As to the conversion suggestion, I explained it above: Portal:Germany/Anniversaries and its 378 sub-pages could easily be consolidated into a single page with links to sections. Setting up the skeleton page with substed transclusions would be less than an hour's work with skilled use of a decent programmer's text editor such as Notepad++ or Kate. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:11, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

The discussion deviated from the main focus, how to solve this redundancy?Guilherme Burn (talk) 14:02, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

• This overlap doesn't bother me. Portal:Contents (which is not really a portal) serves a different purpose than the individual subject-area portals. Just as there we live with duplication/overlap between categories, lists and navboxes, we can live with overlap here. It does bother me that so much of Portal:Contents is unreferenced, though. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:38, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

Request for improvement: Portal:Northern Ireland

Portal:Northern Ireland would benefit from the following improvements:

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

The topic itself is rich, as Wikipedia has a great deal of content covering Northern Ireland. See Category:Northern Ireland for a general overview of topical coverage available. I have performed some work to improve the portal, but it would benefit from more. It would be nice if it had around 30 articles, 20 images, and more selected biographies, as a better start. This could lead to more readers utilizing the portal, as having a greater amount of diverse content may captivate readers to explore it more. Cheers, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 17:17, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yay!

Plenty of great content exists on English Wikipedia to expand Portal:Northern Ireland. The claim here of Northern Ireland being a narrow topic is quite subjective, at best. If anyone's interested in improving the portal, great, if not, then that's the way it goes. Welcome to the Portal WikiProject. Yay! North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 12:44, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look forward to working with you and others to further improve the portal, and thanks again for replying and for your interest. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 00:40, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

• I've also expanded the selected picture area, adding two Wikimedia Commons Featured pictures and a two Wikimedia Commons Valued images. Of course, this section can also be further expanded. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:35, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

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

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

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

Have you no shame?

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

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

In this case, there is very clear evidence that the portal has simply failed to attract either a large number of readers or a large numbers of maintainers. It is also clear that WP:NIR is at best dormant, and more likely defunct. POG says "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest)[1] to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal." A defunct WikiProject is no assistance.

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

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

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

BHG, your criticism of other editors is becoming more extreme and personal. Frankly most of us are trying to act in good faith and encourage what is good and positive about portals and you are simply demonising us because you don't like them. The shame is on you: as an admin, you should be setting an example, demonstrating patience and helping us all to reach a consensus over the direction of portals. Bermicourt (talk) 06:41, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

@Bermicourt, I have demonstrated extraordinary patience, for months on end. But sadly, the mendacity of a few portalistas has become both more extreme and more persistent.

I disagree with you some of you about the desirability of portals. Reasoned and legitimate disagreement is the basis of consensus-forming discussion, and I don't object to that. What I do object to, and strongly, is the way in which some portalistas are now tag-teaming to simply ignore part of the guidelines which don't suit their agenda even when they have been made aware of the relevant issues.

That is the mendacity which I am referring to. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:18, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Please try to assume good faith. Not everyone disagreeing with you is a "mendacious portalista". From my end it looks like your desire to fight against portals is becoming more extreme, and your continued pursuit of this fight is not helpful. I really can't see how some people coming together and collaboratively improving a portal about one of the constituent countries of the UK could be a bad thing. If you have better suggestions about the choice of topics, you could join in and help improve this portal. —Kusma (t·c) 10:56, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

@Kusma, the problem here is that:

1. the editors who you say are coming together have demonstrated zero knowledge of the topic. It is utterly irresponsible to try to build a portal from a position of ignorance of the topic.
2. the editors involved are clearly ignoring the portal's incompatibility with WP:POG, despite the problems there having been identified to them

This is not the conduct of good faith editors, and I am not required to assume good faith in the face of clear evidence to the contrary.

As to your suggestion that I "join in" ... I despair. I cannot commit to long-term maintenance, and per POG what the portal needs is long-term maintenance. I absolutely will not become involved in the pointless busywork of a driveby update unless the other conditions are in place. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:31, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl, you may believe that the Northern Ireland portal fails the portal guidelines, but that view does not seem to be widely shared. If you do not have anything constructive to contribute to the discussion of this portal, please find something else to do than posting in a thread about "pointless busywork" that apparently isn't worth your time. If you have evidence of bad faith editing, please pursue that through the relevant channels (WP:ANI, WP:RFAR) instead of derailing constructive threads. —Kusma (t·c) 13:53, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Kusma, that view is not shared by a clique of portalista editors who have a track record of simply ignoring the parts of POG which do not suit their agenda.

It is highly constructive and highly relevant to point out that their selective and mendacious approach to established guidelines is producing bad results.

There is nothing at all constructive in this flouting of guidelines. It is the same sort of pointless makework which left wikipedia with the hundreds of abysmal-quality portals which have been deleted in the last 6 months, mostly in the face of irate opposition from some of the editors who are cheering on this junk. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:08, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Your insinuations of bad-faith "portalistas" and your personal attacks therein are not constructive either. If anything, it's causing editors to avoid portals. Vermont (talk) 14:23, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Vermont, I m not insinuating. I am directly asserting.

If my remarks cause portals to be avoided by editors who would refer to flout established guidelines, then that is a benefit to Wikipedia. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:28, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

The issue is that people disagree with you on what the established guidelines say. Your continued argument that it's just "portalista" bad-faith users trying to push portals is not helpful in civil discussion. Vermont (talk) 14:52, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Vermont, if you or any other portalista seriously wishes to deny that:

1. WP:POG says that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers"
   or that
2. POG says "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal."

... then we can have that discussion. Do you want to be the one who claims that those words do not exist? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:58, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

I was referring to Kusma's comment above about other editors disagreeing with you about whether the Northern Ireland portal meets portal guidelines. Further, please stop referring to me as a "portalista". Your nicknames for people who disagree with you isn't relevant here, and it's insulting. Vermont (talk) 15:42, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

If it's a disagreement about points of fact rather than about the guideline, please clarify which of the portalistas disputes that:

1. WP:NIR is either dormant or defunct
2. Portal:NI has failed for years to attract large numbers of maintainers.

I look forward to seeing who wants to move beyond the usual portalista tactic of simply ignoring inconvenient realities, and actually deny these realities. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:54, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

think it may be time for an interaction ban. Will look in to what can be done.--Moxy 🍁 16:06, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Beware of WP:BOOMERANG, Moxy. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:39, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Was disappointing is that you seem obvious to the problems raised about your behavior by a dozen editors. --Moxy 🍁 21:39, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Moxy, I have not been in any doubt that there is a small set of editors who will use any means to express their anger at the deletion of abandoned junk portals, and they they are happy to try to shoot the messenger when their tactics are challenged.

It is disappointing that you and the other members of the defend-any-old-junk brigade continue to reject the established guidelines, ignore the consensus of dozens of MFDs, and deny the realities of unmaintained, unviewed portals. But at this point, it's sadly unsurprising. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:01, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

It would really help if editors here stopped giving pejorative labels to those who don't share there point of view as if there were only 2 positions: 'portalistas', 'portal lovers' or 'portaleers' who supposedly love all portals regardless of quality and 'anti-portaleers', portal haters' or whatever other epithet we wish to stick on them who hate all portals regardless of quality. Of course, these labels do enable us to take a simplistic worldview and proceed to rubbish anyone who disagrees with us, but they just ignore the truth and antagonises one another. The truth is that we're probably all somewhere on the spectrum and [almost] no-one is 100% pro- or anti-portals. I know it's more difficult, but it would be far better in the long run if we focussed on re-drafting the guidelines to achieve a consensus that would make assessment of portals far easier. Otherwise every time we discuss Portal:X the same tired old arguments are trotted out and the points of disagreement are the same. Except that it gets more and more vitriolic and polarised as we lose patience with one another. Please can we try a more orderly and mutually respectful approach? Bermicourt (talk) 18:20, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

@Bermicourt, if someone wants to start an RFC proposing that unmaintained portals should be retained, they are free to do so. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:19, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

I think that's a red herring. No-one is suggesting that AFAICS. Bermicourt (talk) 06:37, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

@Bermicourt, I am glad you are not suggesting that. Sorry that i misunderstood you. It seemed to me that was where you were pointing, but I am happy to be corrected.

A proposal to that effect was made at WT:Portal/Guidelines#Pageviews, and resoundingly rejected. So portals continue to be deleted because they are neglected and/or unused. Most of the acrimony comes from those editors who get irate about the deletions made on that basis, and who have waged a long a campaign of aggressive obstructionism which for six months has been placed with angry personal attacks against those advocating deletion. That campaign eventually met with strong rebuttals, and some of those who have normalised abusive aggression don't being called out.

I agree that the guidelines need re-drafting. But there are huge underlying issues of principle to be resolved before any redraft. I don't see anything remotely resembling a consensus on what purpose is actually being served by a portal, and from what I can see the overwhelming benefit is to the editors to like creating them. I don't see any evidence that readers actually want them, or that any of the current models of portal actually add enough value to justify creating a separate portal page. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:41, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

Great comment Bermicourt, I agree.Guilherme Burn (talk) 14:09, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

Guilherme Burn thanks. BrownHairedGirl you've homed in on the key issue: the purpose of portals. It's easy to rubbish them if you pick a purpose that they're not currently achieving; and reader views are the prime example. But I and other are saying they have other, wider purposes - navigation, topic range and coverage. We're also saying they haven't reached their full potential by a long chalk, because the guidelines are over a decade old and have never been updated - they date to an era when Wikipedia was still in its infancy. German Wikipedia, on the other hand, has a more sophisticated and tightly controlled management of portals. You'd love it! You can't even launch one without it going through a peer review and consequently there aren't many of them. You've seen some of the ones I've imported and translated and they're generally pretty good navigation tools as well as being attractive showcases as a spinoff. In addition, I and other editors have used them to expand and improve the coverage of topics far quicker than would have happened otherwise. But, as I say, we aren't there yet and I'd like to see portals owned responsibly by projects who maintain them collectively but, much more than that, use them to give an at-a-glance indication of coverage and quality, articles that need upgrading, creating, etc. That necessarily limits the numbers because project teams will have a finite capacity and unmaintained orphan portals should be deleted if non-notable or moved to project space (and delinked) if projects feel they have future potential, but don't have the time to work on them due to higher priorities. I'm still willing to work with editors on this, but only if we can agree to stop the war, declare a ceasefire and work together in a spirit of cooperation. Bermicourt (talk) 18:00, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

@Bermicourt, it's good to have dialogue, but there is no war to end -- just an ongoing process of removing abandoned junk. And in the last two months, only a small minority of the portal MFDs have been launched by me.

The portals which are being deleted are so woeful that they don't provide any platform to build on. If there was a consensus to build something on those titles, it would be much better to start from scratch.

I do understand where you are coming from wrt the German model. But my understanding of German wp is that it is culturally very different to en.wp. So processes which work well there may not translate well to en.wp. Sure, I'd like to see portal creation being subject to pre-approval and WikiProject involvement, but I fear that might not be feasible in the more freewheeling WP:BOLD culture here. Plus, the overwhelming majority of en.wp WikiProjects are dormant or dead, and a requirement for pre-approval by zombies would be a de facto ban.

I disagree strongly about page views. I think they are v important, for two reasons:

1. Portals are a tool. There's no point in building these elaborate tools if nobody is using them, as is the case with most en.wp portals.
2. Each viewer is a potential maintainer. If a portal isn't being viewed, it won't be on the radar of any potential maintainer . And low page views mean that any possible maintainer may reasonably conclude that the portal is a poor use of their time.

So leave aside the guidelines for now. They can be developed if there is agreed direction.

The big issue I see that portals seem to be a solution in search of a problem. None of the things they provide is in much demand, and most of it already done better elsewhere. Few things are more revealing than the tsunami of apathy which greets most portal MFDs: the objectors are nearly always the same small crew of portal-focused editors, while the editors creating and maintaining the encyclopedia's content on that topic stay away.

The navigation and showcasing functions are provided very effectively by articles and navboxes. For an examples of the power of navboxes and navbox series, see Mayo (Dáil constituency): it's only 2 clicks away from any other article on any constituency in Ireland in the ~10 parlianents which have existed in the last 500 years.

Most of the rest of portals is fluff: the DYK trivia, the crude and slim news sections, the quotes boxes, the largely-redundant image galleries. Those are ornaments to add to a portal, but too inconsequential to justify the portal's existence.

For months, it seemed to me that the one function which portals could actually fulfil was the mega-navbox format which you have deployed so diligently, and whose cause you have eloquently championed. But the more I look at it, the problem is that it doesn't seem to me to be meeting any need. Comparing the views for Portal:Germany with other major European countries (see comparison), it doesn't seem to serve more readers. And the view for the regional German portals are pretty dire. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:53, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

Section break

Nb. Regarding Portal:Northern Ireland, I initially avoided adding much content about The Troubles to it, because there's so much content about The Troubles, I didn't want the portal to become a "The Troubles" portal. More recently, I have added more content about The Troubles, while of course including other topical content to keep the portal balanced. For those interested, please feel free to further expand the portal. It is okay to improve Wikipedia's content for the encyclopedia's WP:READERS. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 13:52, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

fileargs

The Bogus file options lint errors page finds a number of portals with bogus file options, mostly left and right. Some of these lint errors are coded in parts of article pages randomly transcluded into the portals. Others are inserted by the portals themselves via templates that use the |fileargs=arg parameter. It appears to me that this parameter inserts |arg just before the closing bracket of a file wikilink, and this is almost certainly wrong, because the last parameter in an image wikilink is supposed to be the caption. I do not know the original purpose of |fileargs=arg, but in many cases, it's messed up now. For example, Portal:Liquor includes 3 fileargs=left parameters. The second one is involved in a transclusion that might randomly transclude part of Ketel One, where the fileargs=left parameter changes

[[Image:Schiedam windmolen Nolet.jpg|right|thumb|The [[De Nolet|Nolet windmill]] at the distillery in [[Schiedam]]]]

to

[[Image:Schiedam windmolen Nolet.jpg|right|thumb|The [[De Nolet|Nolet windmill]] at the distillery in [[Schiedam]]|left]]

This is wrong, but before removing fileargs=left and fileargs=right from Portal:Liquor and the many other portals that have these parameters, let's have some clarity on the purpose of the |fileargs=arg parameter.

@Certes: a search on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals for fileargs found Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Archive 4#Picture alignment?, where you discussed this parameter, so I think you know something about this. —Anomalocaris (talk) 16:40, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

P.S. Before posting here, I edited

Portal:Nepal/Featured biography/6 ‎removing fileargs=right

Portal:Islands/Selected article/1 removing fileargs=left

Portal:Religion ‎removing fileargs=left

and as I was working on Portal:Liquor I realized it was time to have a discussion. —Anomalocaris (talk) 16:47, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

I've looked at Special:LintErrors/bogus-image-options?namespace=100 and I see the problem. Do you know what exactly "file option" means there? WP:Extended image syntax allows |left or |right as a "Location", and says that other [than name, which must come first,] details are optional and can be placed in any order. Perhaps the problem is that |fileargs=left is being used on an image specification which already contains |right, or vice versa, and the report is warning us that both right and left are present. If so then I can try enhancing Module:Excerpt to strip out the overridden detail. This feature was requested by Arabic wiki, to position images around right-to-left text, and it had only basic testing on enwiki. Certes (talk) 17:15, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

Certes: I had no idea why these portals are using fileargs, but I understand now. The portal author wants a random transcluded image to appear in a certain place, either left or right. The problem is that the random transcluded image may already be coded with a Location, and the Location can be specified only once. If we want to allow fileargs=newLocation in templates including {{Transclude random excerpt}}, {{Transclude files as random slideshow}}, and {{Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}}, then we need to (a) remove any existing Location parameter and (b) insert the newLocation parameter after the Name (first) parameter and before the Caption (optional last) parameter. You're right that options can be placed in any order, except that the optional Caption must be last. —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:36, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

I've changed the module to remove conflicting options, and to place the new options earlier in the line. Let's see if that gets rid of the linter errors. Certes (talk) 12:53, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

@Anomalocaris: That seems to have got rid of the errors except Portal:Religion, which was replicating an error in Bahá'í Faith. Thanks for reporting the problem. Certes (talk) 16:11, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

Certes: Thank you for fixing it! I restored fileargs=right to the three portals I edited before. —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:32, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

Proposal to delete Portal space

It has been proposed again that the entire Portal: namespace be deleted. Discussion is at WP:VPPR#Proposal to delete Portal space. Certes (talk) 00:13, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

agreed, thanks for posting this here. --Sm8900 (talk) 17:21, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Need comments on proposal to delete portals

Please comment at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Proposal_to_delete_Portal_space. A proposal is being made there to delete all portals entirely. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 17:21, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Nanotechnology deletion review

Portal:Nanotechnology was recently deleted based on the mistaken assertion that the portal had been abandoned since 2012 and had no maintainer, with no notification given to me, the maintainer, that a deletion discussion was occurring. This now at deletion review at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2019 September 10. I invite everyone to participate in the review discussion. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 21:10, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

WP:MFD says that it is generally considered civil to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributors but doesn't explicitly forbid disposing of portals quietly. I urge everyone who maintains a portal to ensure that its main page is on their watchlist, so that the mandatory MfD notice there will tip them off. Certes (talk) 21:36, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

I agree with that advice, but depending on how many pages someone has on their watchlist and how distracted they are at the exact time of nomination, that's something that could still be missed. A user talk message is much harder to overlook. For portals that have an explicit {{Portal maintenance status}} template on them, MfD nominators should be advised to notify any named maintainer(s). --RL0919 (talk) 21:48, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

We've tried that. Even an explicit request from a maintainer to be pinged if certain portals went to MfD met with a point blank refusal. (The portals were deleted a few weeks later, while their maintainer was offline dealing with a real-life emergency.) Certes (talk) 22:11, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

The implicit notion that many portals depend on a single individual is a strong endorsement of the view that many of these portals are just the playthings of one portal enthusiast, rather than having large numbers of readers and being the read work of multiple maintainers and a Wikiproject as required by POG.

If Certes and others want portals to continue to be the occasional plaything of a lone editor, they should move them to project space.

And if Certes or any other editor wants to keep en eye on which of the many abandoned portals are up for deletion, they need only watch Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Article alerts. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:04, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Not only are portal maintainers not always notified, but the relevant projects and article talk pages aren't always notified. Or they're only notified after the MfD has been on for some time which minimises the window for comment. Finally you would have thought that portal MfD's would automatically be notified here at the Portals project, but they're not... Still at the rate things are going, in a few months time there will be no portals left, so no need for this page anyway.Bermicourt (talk) 09:57, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

Watchlisting should also catch most alternatives to deletion such as the Quidditch gambit. Certes (talk) 10:32, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

Re "you would have thought that portal MfD's would automatically be notified here at the Portals project" - see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Portals#Automated_alerts. DexDor ^(talk) 11:59, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

Click here to watchlist portal-related deleted activity. —Kusma (t·c) 14:37, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

So, after ~4000 portals (85% of them) have been deleted at MFD in 6 months, we still have a cluster of vocal member of this project apparently unaware of Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Article alerts, which provides exactly what Bermicourt and Certes wants. I can imagine better ways of persuading the wider community that portalspace is overseen by an effective WikiProject. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:10, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the reminder about Article alerts. I agree that it works well for editors interested in the entire portal namespace. Here, we are trying to help maintainers who concentrate on a few portals in their subject area. They need to highlight activity on those particular pages, which might get lost amongst hundreds of alerts about other portals. Certes (talk) 10:28, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

If you want alerts for a subset of portals (e.g. technology portals) you could possibly set up a task force for that subset of portals and alter the template tags on the relevant portals to refer to that task force. However, would it really be worth the effort? Note: portals at MFD are also (assuming the portal is tagged) in the article alerts for the relevant topic's wikiproject so editors interested in deletion of any pages within that topic should also be aware. DexDor ^(talk) 11:33, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Relisted for deletion

The deletion review was successful at having the deletion discussion reopened for Portal:Nanotechnology at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Nanotechnology. Again, I invite everyone to participate. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 03:00, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

New template cache for speeding up slow page loads

I've made a template cache feature to help fix the slow page loads for portals per request from Armanaziz. It's used on heavy template calls, such as in the news sections and DYK retrival. See {{Template cache}} for documentation if you want help implementing it I'm happy to help. --Trialpears (talk) 18:52, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Trialpears!

@Armanaziz: Portals with errors appear here. I think we can ignore .../Selected... which are blank pages. The others could have errors other than excessive complexity but I don't see any at the moment. We could use the new template on Portal:Biography, Portal:New York City, Portal:San Francisco Bay Area, and perhaps Portal:Music which has no current errors but was reported previously. Certes (talk) 20:40, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks @Trialpears:. I'd love to learn how to use this feature. Will try and get in touch with you on your talk page if I struggle. Arman ^(Talk) 06:29, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Is automation dead or alive?

In April many portals that were automated just two months before were reverted to their manual versions as a result of a discussion on this page. I am a relative newcomer to the portal debate, but I've noticed recently some portals (e.g. Portal:Vietnam) that have come up for deletion have been saved from the brink by single-page automation. Is this evidence that opinion is turning in favor of automation? Should automation be the default position? Mark Schierbecker (talk) 03:40, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

@Mark Schierbecker: I don't think so. I don't think I am the only editor who sees many remaining problems with the single-page implementation as it currently stands, of which the most serious is the likelihood of Lua timeout errors like were recently re-introduced to Portal:New York City. On the other hand, I do think there is strong consensus that individual subpages should be automated, but transcluding mainspace articles, so that they may be kept up-to-date. UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:56, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

• @Mark Schierbecker, picking up on UnitedStatesian's comments, I think that there is consensus to distinguish between two different types of automation:

1. Automation of excerpt creation. This reduces maintenance, and ensures that the excerpt remains synchronised with the article. Broadly supported.
2. Automation of topic selection. This was what was done in TTH's portalspamming exercise, and there was a clear consensus at the two mass deletion MFDs (one, and two), and subsequent small groups MFDs that automation of selection was a bad idea where it simply replicates existing navigation tools. (TTH's portalspam cosnisted of navbox clones).

As USAian notes, the downside of automated excerpt production is that it is a greedy user of processor power, leading to timeouts if too many pages are included. That led me a few days ago to revert[3] some enhancements which NA1K had made to Portal:New York City, because Lua timeouts had turned the page into a sea of redlnks. The current version didn't timeout in my latest test, but it loads unacceptably slowly.

The current vogue is for type 1, i.e. a list of pages for which excerpts are automatically transcludes. I regard this as an improvement in maintenance terms over the forked sub-pages model, but still a problematic approach for two reasons:

• It produces excessively high load times, which deters readers
• It is a form of continuation of the excerpt model, which is redundant to the review-on-mouseover which is now built into every Wikipedia page (for readers who are not logged in, which is the overwhelming majority of readers). Mark, if you haven't tried this, then view in a private/incognito window a navbox sch as Template:County Antrim constituencies, and mouseover any link.

That second issue is a function of the dogged conservatism of most portals fan, who appear to have had no fundamental rethink of the nature or purpose of portals in light of the new technical developments, let alone the abysmally low usage of portals and the decade-old widespread failures of maintenance and of WikiProject involvement. As TTH noted in his final "newsletter", these new technologies make the old model of portal basically redundant. A simple navbox now does the portal job better than these portals.

That's why I believe that if we do retain standalone portal pages, then they should be converted to the mega-navbox format deployed by @Bermicourt for many German portals e.g. Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Those portals have many advantages: they load quickly, they cover far more topics than the sub-page format, and they display on the face of the portals all the available links rather than requiring the reader to view one a time with no list of the set. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:01, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

• @BrownHairedGirl: I've been using "Page previews," which is an option under the appearances tab in preferences. Preview loading speed leaves a bit to be desired. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 02:51, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

• @Mark Schierbecker, right now the DDOS attacks seem to have slowed everything. But if your comment on speed is more general, then yes, it isn't superfast ... but it's still a lot faster than waiting ten of seconds for the portal page to load (with automated transclusions) or the absurd old purge-for-new-selection approach. And readers won't necessarily want to preview a link; the title will often be enough. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:00, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

• I agree that it would be useful to have some tips on automation. I think Portal:Jamaica might be a good example of such a portal. (I'm not a fan of "did you know" sections, but this one seems to have been smartly recycled from previous DYK for the main page, so at least it has some chance of being maintained.) Nemo 10:14, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

List of aging portals

I have updated my query of English Wikipedia portals by age and number of edits, editors to include the average timestamp of the surviving revisions for all portals (or orphaned portal subpages...). If you download the table you can crunch the numbers and discover a few things which may or not be interesting.

Some portals (even excluding portals created in 2018 or 2017) have most revisions in the same year as their creation year, suggesting they were not really worked on after creation: Finger_Lakes, Conservatism, Freedom_of_speech, Staffordshire, Human–computer_interaction, Studio_Ghibli, Mesozoic, Cretaceous, Alps, Hesse, Tuvalu, Brandenburg, Peak_District, Eifel, Lighthouses, Wetlands, Franconia, Amiga, North_Palatine_Uplands, Rivers, Evangelical_Christianity, Jakarta.

Some portals were worked on slightly longer, having their average edit age one year higher than their creation: Nursing, Rock_and_Roll, Philosophy_of_science, Numismatics, Belgium, Dogs, Scouting, Gibraltar, Television_in_Australia, Tennessee, Discworld, Motorsport, Music_of_Australia, Hawaii, English_football, Organized_Labour, Drink, Crustaceans, Primates, Horses, Fungi, English_law, North_Rhine-Westphalia, Battleships, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Bolivia, New_England, Cartoon_Network, Infrastructure, Women's_sport, Caribbean_Community, Sailing, Anglo-Saxon_England, Cartoon, European_military_history, Bollywood, Geography_of_Kenya, Sasanian_Empire, Women's_association_football, Paleozoic, Globalization, Soap_operas_and_telenovelas, Snakes, Rhön, Football_in_Africa, Mughal_Empire, Saarland, Holy_Roman_Empire, Baden-Württemberg, Frogs, Amphibians, Liquor, Latter_Day_Saint_movement, Bremen, 1930s, 1940s, Turkmenistan, German_Empire.

Some portals have an "average age" of 2014 or earlier, having been created less than 5 years earlier than their average age, and have collected edits from less than 50 editors (consider that even the most abandoned portal typically has at least 10-20 editors touching it for deletion notices and similar things): Nursing, Rock_and_Roll, Philosophy_of_science, Numismatics, Belgium, Dogs, Scouting, Gibraltar, Television_in_Australia, Tennessee, Discworld, Motorsport, Music_of_Australia, Hawaii, English_football, Organized_Labour, Drink, Crustaceans, Primates, Horses, Fungi, English_law, North_Rhine-Westphalia, Battleships, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Bolivia, New_England, Cartoon_Network, Infrastructure, Women's_sport, Caribbean_Community, Sailing, Anglo-Saxon_England, Cartoon, European_military_history, Bollywood, Geography_of_Kenya, Sasanian_Empire, Women's_association_football, Paleozoic, Globalization, Soap_operas_and_telenovelas, Snakes, Rhön, Football_in_Africa, Mughal_Empire, Saarland, Holy_Roman_Empire, Baden-Württemberg, Frogs, Amphibians, Liquor, Latter_Day_Saint_movement, Bremen, 1930s, 1940s, Turkmenistan, German_Empire.

Some of those portals only contain content which ages well, like Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. However, several of the UK counties portals have news older than ten years, while some have since replaced the news section with a link to the BCC: should that be done on all of them? Nemo 09:03, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

Although it may be debated, there seems to be a general acceptance that the portals are meant to be extensions of the main page. Just as the main page acts a wikipedia's face to a general visitor, a portal should be wikipedia's face to a visitor specifically interested in a broad topic area, like a field of study, or a country or a geame or a religion etc. If we accept that as the purpose of of a portal, then it makes all the sense that the news section of the portal should filter out news of relevant topic from the news feed on the main page and recently there have been some excellent developments in that area which was not present even a year back. There is little point for portal maintainers to manually collate and update news items while tools are available to filter out news from main page. If at all, the portal maintainers should help ensure that the main page news feed does not miss out any important news on their subject area. Once the news section is automated, there is usually no need for daily manual maintenance of the portal, rather a periodic up keep can keep it up to date. -- Arman ^(Talk) 11:18, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

Automated news can improve a portal but it does need to be used carefully. For example, we need to ensure that a portal about bears doesn't feature a sports team called the Bears. (My last serious portal work was systematically fixing such loose searches, but most of that automation has been reverted or the portal simply deleted.) One point against automation is that it fails to meet the artificial requirement that portals be manually changed for change's sake. An editor adding a news item which has been missing shows up in the page history and staves off deletion; an update which happens promptly due to automation doesn't. I would like to see more ITNs (and DYKs) automated, but that may have to wait until the deletionists consider their work in this namespace complete. Certes (talk) 11:51, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

Merger discussion for Portal:Sports

An article that you have been involved in editing—Portal:Sports—has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. Guilherme Burn (talk) 12:14, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Contents is really a portal?

It has been proposed that Portal:Contents its subpages and Portal:Featured content be moved to Wikipedia space. See Portal talk:Contents#Requested move 9 October 2019.Guilherme Burn (talk) 17:20, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of Wikipedia:US State Portal Metrics for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether Wikipedia:US State Portal Metrics is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The page will be discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:US State Portal Metrics until a consensus is reached, and anyone 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 page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the deletion notice from the top of the page. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 00:02, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal "guidelines"

The VP RfC closed with a clear consensus that the "Portal guidelines" are not, in fact, official guidelines. WP:POG has now been tagged as an information page again. Certes (talk) 09:00, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Interesting, then, that POG has been cited as the authority for deleting hundreds of portals. I've been saying all along that it's obsolete and needs a total review because portals have moved on. Bermicourt (talk) 11:42, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

POG contained a lot of old nonsense, mostly supporting the abominable forest-of-content-forked sub-pages model of magazine portal, complete with its disgraceful support for the use of "Did you know" sections as unscrutinised trivia farms.

However, its requirements that portals need broad scope, lots of readers, multiple maintainers and a supporting WikiProject have been supported by consensus at over 850 MFDs in the last six months, so clearly have broad community support. So deletion of the abandoned junk will continue.

However, the de-guidelining means that there is now clearly no community consensus for any of ways in which portals have been built. It's time for portal fans to seek a broad community consensus for whatever role they want portals to fulfil in the future. Magazine? Navigational aid? Showcase? Playground for editors who like making pretty pages? The latter function is the old one which portals have successfully filled so far.

If a consensus can be reached on the actual purpose of portals, then a discussion can start on how to serve that purpose in a way which readers might actually use, instead of shunning all but a tiny number of portals as has been the case for the last decade. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:18, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

If portal deletions show the community consensus on requirements for portals, it should be easy to write them down and to clarify what type of portals MFD participants think should exist, remembering the strong community consensus that portals should not be deleted just for being portals. As to consensus on portal roles, I am not convinced we need one. Portals have always played several roles, and I see no reason to change that. Attempts to unify all portals, e.g. by replacing everything by navbox-based automation have been strongly resisted. But if you would like to have a community consensus on how portals should be, I suggest you lead by example. Go and create or improve a portal to show us an example of a portal meeting your ideal guidelines. You could spare us the rhetoric of "disgraceful" and "abominable" and help {{sofixit}}, which is the normal wiki way of cleanup, not mass deletion. —Kusma (t·c) 21:41, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

There is a risk of circular reasoning here. Hundreds of MfDs closes have been influenced by a mistaken belief that POG was a guideline. It would probably be unproductive to take them to DRV, but it would also be wrong to cite closes based on a misunderstanding as precedent for deleting similar portals. Certes (talk) 21:57, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Not so, @Certes. Hundreds of portals have been deleted because the editors participating in the MFD agreed that the criteria cied were appropriate grounds for deletion, and that they were not just POG, but common sense. The determination of some editors to preserve and even resurrect decade-old abandoned junk which has no reasonable prospect of success is a bizarre phenomenon. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:36, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

@Kusma: the way to fix a misconceived page is, and always has been, to delete it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:40, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

• See Talk:Main Page#Add Portal:Law to the list of portals displayed on the homepage.

See Portal talk:Law#Proposed portal merger.

Deleting all the worst portals from bottom up is training for deletion methods. Looking for ideas from the top down.

If only 1 in 1 million visitors to the Main page go to a main page portal, and only 1 in 1000 of them click a second portal, that’s a sure sign the current portal structure fails from top to bottom. What is the purpose of a portal, from a reader perspective? —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:12, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: It serves as a portal to a particular subject area, by providing significant links, articles, information, etc, to give readers and editors a helpful general picture of a particular topical area. --Sm8900 (talk) 14:44, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

"From a reader perspective" refers to only one use of a portal and implies that portals are articles. PORTALS ARE NOT ARTICLES! They are, however, a useful navigation aid to a topic area, much better than categories at giving an overview of a topic. PORTALS SHOULD HAVE LOW VIEWS BECAUSE THEY ARE NAVIGATION AIDS AND PROJECT TOOLS. But to be useful they need to be linked from mainspace articles. There's the other problem: most portals have very low views because, according to WP:POG they should only be linked from the main article, the main category and templates. So PORTALS HAVE VERY LOW VIEWS BECAUSE WP:POG SAYS THEY SHOULD ONLY HAVE ONE LINK FROM MAINSPACE. So there's the final problem. WP:POG IS OUT OF DATE AND HENCE USELESS AS A GUIDELINE. In fact, it's no longer a guideline. So in a sense SmokeyJoe is right - the current portal structure fails from top to bottom, NOT because portals are a bad idea, but because the guidelines are out of date and the structure we have set up is flawed. Portals are a great tool - for navigation and for project editors - IF properly designed and well linked. But, like categories, they will never compete with articles - they were never intended to. Bermicourt (talk) 18:45, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

@Bermicourt:, well said. Sm8900 (talk) 19:13, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

• I agree it would be useful to have, if not a guideline, at least a realistic help page to show how to create a portal which will have some chance of being maintainable. The help page could answer some questions like #‎Is automation dead or alive? and maybe list some examples like Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or other. As for a guideline, I don't think it's possible to get consensus for a guideline on the content of portals, but it might be possible to find consensus on a very simple guideline with a procedural requirement or two, for instance that for a portal to be created (or to exist?) there needs to be a strong consensus on the corresponding WikiProject. Nemo 10:21, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

I think that would be most useful and I've proposed something before based on the much more rigorous German Wikipedia process where portals cannot go live until approved. However, before that we need to rewrite the now useless WP:POG so that it states clearly the purpose of portals and follows up with how to achieve those purposes. Currently it is totally contradictory e.g. it starts out by saying they should "attract large numbers of interested readers" and later says there should be a link "from the root article". How on earth will they ever attract large numbers of readers if they only have ONE LINK from mainspace??? DUH! POG is also unclear. What are "large numbers"? Does "large numbers" apply to maintainers - the sentence is unclear? If so, why would you need large numbers of maintainers; surely one or two is enough? What does good portal maintenance look like? Once a portal is up and running it needs very little maintenance - its job is to give a good overview of topic articles so that readers can see the coverage and quickly navigate to their area of interest (NAVIGATION AID) and to show gaps in coverage and quality to enable editors to improve and extend the topic (PROJECT TOOL). POG is silent both the use of portals for topic navigation, coverage and improvement of topic articles. This has been exploited in the current campaign to wipe them out, so until POG is rewritten, sadly we're wasting our time devising a portal creation process. Any new portals created will just be MfD'd. Bermicourt (talk) 11:35, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

If we let WikiProjects (dis)approve portals, maybe we'd learn what kind of portals are considered viable nowadays. I admit the chances are slim (the discussion on each WikiProject could easily get sidetracked) but it seems even less likely to find consensus on a general guidelines. Or does someone offer to write a draft (keep it simple please)? Nemo 15:07, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

On a minor note, Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines § Linking to portals doesn't say there should only be one link to any given portal. Regarding new portals, if the editors interested in a topic area were behind a portal, they should be able to make their case at a discussion for deletion. isaacl (talk) 15:39, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

In effect it does. It says "they should have the following links leading to them: 1. From the root article... 2. From the category of the same name... 3. From ...templates." That is the default setting. It then goes on to say "consider adding links to portals from the selected articles." So, yes, they may be given one or two more (depending on the portal), but it's only a suggestion. No wonder page views are so low. Bermicourt (talk) 08:17, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

It's a non-exclusive statement. isaacl (talk) 15:55, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

@Bermicourt: as @isaacl notes, POG says nothing about that being a maximum.

Many portals have thousands of incoming links. I recently replaced the backlinks to the deleted Portal:Anglicanism with Portal:Christianity, and Portal:Anglicanism had over 7,000 incoming links, including over 6,500 from articles.

Here are a few examples of the total links from articles+categories:

• Portal:Germany: 7,548
• Portal:Sports+Portal:Sport: 25,303
• Portal:Physics: 1,167
• Portal:Novels: 4,066
• Portal:Christianity :15,304
• Portal:Battleships: 506
• Portal:Liberalism: 550
• Portal:Solar System: 2,517

Note that even with thousands of links, portal pageviews remain low. Even with over 25,000 links Portal:Sports got an average of only 55 views per day in the year to date. That's abysmal, but unsurprising, because portals are redundant and readers don't use redundant pages. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:23, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

I wonder how many readers are even aware the portals exist at this point? The use of mobile platforms and how a lot of readers don't go to the end of the article (where portal links are) means few are likely to see them. I wonder if the French have better luck with their portals? WhisperToMe (talk) 21:45, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

Wording needs to be more precise "broad subject area" "many maintainers" "connected to a fictitious project" is what got us here in the first place with many bad portals and has also lead to the isolated deletion board thinking that some form of consensus exist for deletion despite what the actual Community says. Why portals exist is pretty clear to anyone not playing games....what is not clear what should be the criteria.--Moxy 🍁 03:51, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

I don't think "maintainers" is or should be a direct relevant factor. Are WP:Outlines required to have maintainers? I think a desire for maintainers implies a recognition of transient content, and I think the building of transient content is not desirable. I think a new portal structure might be better restarted from the current state of WP:Outlines than from the current state of portals. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:21, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Agree about maintainers as outlined at Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a volunteer service and I guess after all the talks most agree that a Wikiproject should not Own anything as per WP:PROJGUIDE#OWN and should not be forced to take over control of portals as per WP:PROJSCOPE. So a clear content criteria is needed. ..."board subject" changed to something along the lines of "academic fields" (as in top level disciplines Outline of academic disciplines).--Moxy 🍁 04:49, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

I believe that WikiProjects should OWN their Portals, and that their portals should be located as a subpage of their WikiProject page. Eg Move Portal:Mathematics to WP:WikiProject Mathematics. So far, no one either agrees or disagrees with me on that. A problem could be that currently, WikiProject-associated Portals are highly overlapping with the WikiProject main page. Overlap and redundancy is a common criticism of portals.

Outline of academic disciplines has, in my opinion, far more potential as a viable top-down comprehensive browsing resource than any current-style portal. It's not very attractive, is that a problem? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:01, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

I think "stewardship" is a better description than ownership. The editors interested in a topic (whether or not they choose to explicitly identify themselves with a WikiProject) are the best positioned to decide the scope of pages they plan to maintain, which includes articles, navigation templates, and portals. By definition, anyone interested in maintaining any of these pages is automatically an interested editor. This doesn't mean they own the pages, but they have a vested interest in making them effective. isaacl (talk) 23:49, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Agree "stewardship" is a better description than ownership. In practice, stewardship/ownership is demonstrated & accepted by having the talk page redirected. If the portal talk page redirects to the WikiProject talk page, then the portal is owned by consensus at the WikiProject talk page. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:49, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

One issue too is that WikiProjects themselves have been slowly fading as users have been less and less active. I remember circa 2006-2007 when Wikipedia was more buzzing with activity. Back then I could see WikiProjects being asked to maintain portals. Now that activity has gone down, I don't think that's feasible. WhisperToMe (talk) 21:45, 12 October 2019 (UTC)