Wikipedia talk:Portal/Guidelines/Archive 6

Portal vs Project - Differences

Although I've had an account with Wikipedia for many years, I hadn't taken an interest in being an active participant until recently. I am currently struggling to understand some of the excentricities to Wikipedia, and some of the terms it uses are less clear than I would like. Can someone please confirm that the examples I give below, between a Portal and a Project are accurate? The Portal page currently reads: "Portals are pages intended to serve as "Main Pages" for specific topics or areas. A portal may be associated with one or more WikiProjects; unlike a WikiProject, however, it is meant for both readers and editors of Wikipedia, and should promote content and encourage contribution. Portals are created for encyclopedic topics only and not for article maintenance categories." Although that explanation assists with my understanding, I do not feel competent in spotting the differences beyond a shadow of a doubt. If I am to use that definition accurately, the takeaway from it is:

• A Portal is a collection of articles loosely tied together by a common theme. Example: a Portal lists a large amount of articles about Rollercoasters from all over the globe. Portal's are generally expected to be used by both editors and readers. A portal's concept is to make information more easily searchable.
• A Project is a more rigorously guarded area of Wikipedia, targeted mainly at editors, typically on a more niche topic of a broader theme. Example: Wooden Rollercoasters of North America Project, vs. the Rollercoasters Portal. The objective of a Project isn't to just attain a wide variety of articles on a broad theme, but rather to: create, edit, improve, and contribute to that projects specified niche articles in a helpful and accurate manner.

Do I have that right? There are a ton of articles on Wikipedia that go into detail about specifics of very minor things...cough...but I usually only get about a third of the way through skimming it before realizing I'm either not paying attention to the information I'm reading, or am simply too dim to understand it. A confirmation that I am understanding the general spirit of what Portals and Projects represent is more important to me then pouring over the details of the article itself. Granted, this article is relatively short and well written, but I believe that sometimes the shorter specification guidelines can be trickier to truly understand, due to the lack of examples provided in them. If there's a commonly sourced essay that better explains what it is I'm asking about, but wasn't able to find via Google, please provide the link. If no essay exists, I'd be happy to cook something up to fill the void, assuming I understand the differences sufficiently. Sawta (talk) 21:24, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Re the distinction between portals and wikiprojects - see the discussion above from March 2015. I don't think "a collection of articles" is a good description of a portal (we wouldn't describe the Wikipedia main page as a collection of articles). Nor is "rigorously guarded area" a good description of a wikiproject. DexDor ^(talk) 21:54, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:East Frisia

Portal:East Frisia, a portal which is relevant to this topic, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:East Frisia. Editors are free to edit the content of Portal:East Frisia during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. --Bermicourt (talk) 18:23, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Portals are moribund

Portals are moribund. The lost their relevance about ten years ago, at least. For every portal, there is a parent article that does the job better. Rotating grabby stories and pictures are nice, but they are not in line with the purpose of Wikipedia. Instead, they are barely viewed content forking or WP:OR. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:27, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

• I propose that all low impact Portals be archived, by redirecting subpages to the top page, and redirecting to top Portal page to the parent article. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:02, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Portals are "moribund" because they are so poorly supported, not because of any conceptual flaws. And saying they are not inline with Wikipedia's goals is just ridiculous; portals are just topical recreations of the main page. Abyssal (talk) 01:27, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

The Main Page receives more than 20 millions page views per day. Yours receives less than 1 per day, except when listed at MfD. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:00, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Firstly, I've contributed to many portals, many with vastly greater content and viewership than Portal:Brachiopods. Secondly, your smarm and rudeness are uncalled for and damage Wikipedia's community. Abyssal (talk) 23:56, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Support? What support would you like? Portals are moribund not because they need support, but because no one looks at them. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:00, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

@Abyssal and SmokeyJoe: The last time I checked, most portals got about as much traffic as the corresponding categories. Sometimes more, sometimes less. You can compare using the Pageviews tool. It can display the traffic of up to 10 pages at the same time on the same graph. Since Portals are essentially being proposed for deletion here, based on their lack of traffic, a study should be done of their traffic. If this department still compares with categories in traffic, then no way should they be deleted (such as being redirected out of existence). Individual portals that are not up to par should be nominated for deletion at MfD as per usual. But, deletion [low traffic] isn't generally considered a valid deletion argument. The Transhumanist 00:51, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Agree, low traffic is not a driving or deciding reason to deprecate. Categories as you mention may be low traffic, but are fully functional and maintained. The reason to deprecate, or archive, a portal is that the portal is out-of-date and unmaintained, and as a resource it provides a negative experience for the readers, relative to the reader visiting something else, whether the parent article, or a super-portal, or the outline, or an active WikiProject page. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:04, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Specifically, I would like to see:

1. The automatic production of article synopses of the appropriate length when articles relevant to the portal topic are accepted and the ability to edit these synopses if they need improvement.
2. The automatic addition of these synopses to the pool from which the portal draws its content selections.
3. The ability to sort or filter the article synopses on the "more articles" page (or "more pictures", "more DYKs").
4. The criteria portals use to select content should default to chronological rather than random (ie it shows the last article to be featured in that subject).
5. The automatic addition of DYK hooks after they've been displayed on the Main Page to the pool from which the portal draws its DYK selections.
6. The automatic addition to the portal's content pool of featured and quality images when they get promoted at Wikimedia Commons.
7. The automatic generation of an image summary for the featured pictures based on their synopsis at the Commons, but with the ability to edit and improve it if needed.
8. The ability to automatically pull pictures from DYK articles to be associated with their hooks on the portal.
9. The ability to randomize all of the individual DYK hooks instead of manually devising "blocks" of hooks.
10. An automatically generated list of new and recently expanded articles relevant to the subject.
11. Foundation sanction for direct outreach by Wikiprojects to portal-goers like offering topical reference desks, advertising within-project contests, user adoption drives, etc.

More probably needs to be done, but those are a start. Abyssal (talk) 23:56, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Any effort you put into a Portal these days is wasted. No one navigates via portals, the hits are random flukes. Portal:Contents, the link under Main Page, receives 12 thousand views per day, that's 0.06%. Recreating the main page look for specific topics was the rage during the period of exponential growth in content. They helped interconnect efforts to add missing content. That finished over ten years ago. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:00, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Saying that contributing to portals is a waste when you're the one advocating for their deletion verges on circular reasoning since your activities are undermining the value of those contributiongs in the first place. I don't think the contents portal is representative of the way readers use other portals because on its own it doesn't cover any distinct topic that people might be interested in. I think a well-developed portal system could continue to interconnect editors and spur content production. Abyssal (talk) 23:56, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Portals are unsourced content copied from somewhere, with a mix of WP:OR. They are not why people come to Wikipedia. Wikipedia does not need them for advertising. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:00, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Portals are not unsourced content, the content is just not sourced in the synopses displayed on the portal. Which is not surprising since those are drawn from article lead sections, which by policy tend to lack citations which are meant for article bodies. The sourcing is easily verified simply by clicking the article and reading there. Abyssal (talk) 23:56, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

• Abyssal (23:56, 27 March 2017) wrote (my bolding of what I immediately agree with):

Specifically, I would like to see:

1. The automatic production of article synopses of the appropriate length when articles relevant to the portal topic are accepted and the ability to edit these synopses if they need improvement.

2. The automatic addition of these synopses to the pool from which the portal draws its content selections.

3. The ability to sort or filter the article synopses on the "more articles" page (or "more pictures", "more DYKs").

4. The criteria portals use to select content should default to chronological rather than random (ie it shows the last article to be featured in that subject).

5. The automatic addition of DYK hooks after they've been displayed on the Main Page to the pool from which the portal draws its DYK selections.

6. The automatic addition to the portal's content pool of featured and quality images when they get promoted at Wikimedia Commons.

7. The automatic generation of an image summary for the featured pictures based on their synopsis at the Commons, but with the ability to edit and improve it if needed.

8. The ability to automatically pull pictures from DYK articles to be associated with their hooks on the portal.

9. The ability to randomize all of the individual DYK hooks instead of manually devising "blocks" of hooks.

10. An automatically generated list of new and recently expanded articles relevant to the subject.

11. Foundation sanction for direct outreach by Wikiprojects to portal-goers like offering topical reference desks, advertising within-project contests, user adoption drives, etc.

More probably needs to be done, but those are a start. Abyssal (talk) 23:56, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Bolded sections I immediately agree with, and no implied disagreement with anything else. Automatic and systematic generation of Portal/Contents material sounds great. Grabbing DYK hooks sounds clever too. What this doesn't sound like is the current suite of portals, so many of which are ten+ year old remnant of individuals efforts on specific subjects. I think there is huge overlap with WP:Outlines, where User:The Transhumanist's efforts are extraordinarily admirable, but hopeless if comprehensiveness is a goal. For navigation and contents, comprehensiveness has to be a goal, and to achieve it, it needs to be automated, comprehensive, and not patchwork. I don't think these goals are at all helped by retention of the current majority moribund Portal pages. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:34, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Request: some of the existing portals have stand-alone topics lists that overlap with the outlines, while other portals merely transclude navigation footers onto their topics list pages. If portals are decommissioned, I would like to see those stand-alone topics lists moved to draft space (as "Outline of" pages), from where they can be worked on and merged into the outline system. Note that portals themselves are not similar to outlines, they are modeled after the Main page. The Transhumanist 22:50, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Note concerning outlines: I have reached the same conclusion as SmokeyJoe that manual efforts are not enough, and I have turned my attention toward building tools to assist or automate outline creation and maintenance. The mission of outlines from the start has been to summarize all knowledge, with an eye toward building a comprehensiveness navigation system in the future. To pursue these objectives, the outline system was created in levels. The higher levels (Portal:Contents/Overviews, Outline of knowledge, followed by Outline of culture, Outline of geography, etc.) being more general, with successive lower levels (e.g., Outline of chess) being more and more specific. Thus, it summarizes all knowledge, and does so in more detail over time (as lower level outlines and lists are built). But, the article-based navigation system that is evolving toward comprehensiveness is the whole list system of which outlines are a part. Item lists—that is, regular lists—are branches of outlines (many embedded in outlines, and many stand-alone lists linked to from outlines). Eventually, when all articles are listed in either outlines or item lists, and all lists (including outlines) are listed in either lists of lists or outlines, then the list system will be a comprehensive navigation system. Though the list system (including outlines) will continue to remain useful in the meantime. As alluded to above, the end goal will be achieved through automation, which is currently being worked on, in the form of scripts, and exploration into more involved programming solutions. The Transhumanist 22:50, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

• I support SmokeyJoe's proposal to substantially consolidate portals (although I doubt that this discussion will be exposed to enough of the community to count for much). We should get rid of the minor and low-interest topics. bd2412 T 02:39, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
  • Is it possible to list non-minor non-low-interest portals? Some big ones, like Portal:Science, have bare signs of life, 1500 views per day, a weekly edit history, a talk page post twice a year. Portal:Germany does not, and at 2 views per day per million residents that is not even passing traffic, it is barely passing glimpses by service personnel. I don't think "interest" of the "topic" is an appropriate measure. Mainspace is highly populated with very interesting topics. If someone is interested in a topic, why not have them read the article? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:53, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
    • I meant that as more of a confluence. Topics on universally important portals should be kept irrespective of interest (Science, Law, Art, Music, Health and fitness); high-traffic portals should also be kept, more or less regardless of importance (I have trouble conceiving of a high-traffic portal on a topic of low importance), though they could at least be merged up to whatever portal is at the next higher level of abstraction. bd2412 T 03:11, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
      • Merging should probably be done on a case-by-case basis, along with merge tags, etc. The Transhumanist 01:00, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

• I support SmokeyJoe's proposal, and BD2412's take on it. Define a set of top-priority portals, and keep those, along with other high-traffic portals ... abut purge the rest.

Portals are not encyclopedic content. They are a navigation device, and unless they are kept up-to-date, they impede navigation rather than helping it. Editor numbers and activity are way lower than ten years ago, and whatever the theoretical merits of portals, we simply don't have enough editors prepared to devote the time to maintaining them all. The result is effectively a load of incomplete and/or abandoned shop windows, which wastes the time of our readers as well as misleading them. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:32, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

• Neutral  – Perhaps there is not much portal traffic because many articles are missing portal (or subject bar) lines? For several years now I am doing article assessments of stub class and start class articles. I would estimate 80 percent or more articles are missing portal information. Regards, — JoeHebda • (talk) 19:17, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

• Support the restriction of portals to just a few high level topics. For example, Portal:Earth sciences is ok, but for lower level topics (e.g. Portal:Pseudosuchians left with redlinks and broken links to Associated Wikimedia) the costs (in creating/maintaining/deleting them, the confusion they cause to readers/editors etc) probably outweigh any benefits. Part-created portals are often abandoned leaving a large number of Wikipedia pages that show up when doing maintenance tasks (example MFD). DexDor ^(talk) 21:29, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

• FYI, on a related note Portal talk:Featured portals#Tagged as historical - as the featured portal process is dead, I have tagged it all as {{historical}}. Bencherlite^Talk 13:14, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

• I have wondered for years why it doesn't draw eyeballs even though it's at the top of the main page. Then I suddenly realized that the standard bullet points preceding the names of major portals on main page was the source of confusion. To editors, we may understand that those are links to portals. But to general readers, those names appear to be a description what Wikipedia contains (arts, biography, history, science, etc.) I understand what I am proposing is not within the scope of this particular RfC, but how about we switch out those bullet points with small diagrams like what the German Main Page does? I'm not proposing a complete revamp of the main page (because we know they will always stall out), but limit the change to just switching out those boring bullet points to diagrams that illustrate the subject. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 20:21, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
• Support extensive consolidation of portals. Lower-traffic portals should have their subpages deleted (or marked historical if there is a lot of history), with their main pages redirected to the correpsonding article. – Train2104 (t • c) 20:57, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
  • A more appropriate redirect (to an overview) would be to the corresponding outline, and if there isn't one, then to the corresponding article. The Transhumanist 23:18, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

• Wider venue is required to reach community consensus – Since portals are such an integral part of Wikipedia, a community-wide discussion/vote should take place. I think you should work out the details here of a proposal to bring to the whole community, and then once polished, present it to the whole community for finalization. A lot of people will freak if portals just start disappearing based upon a discussion amongst a few people on a backwater talk page. Therefore, when the proposal is ready, its announcement should be coordinated to be posted via Signpost, on all the other major notice pages, miscellany for deletion, and at the top of every portal (like the way merge and deletion tags are posted). The Transhumanist 23:18, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
  • User talk:The Transhumanist raises an important point, when he says "some of the existing portals have stand-alone topics lists that overlap with the outlines". These have uses, even if their Portal parents are moribund. They should not be hastily archived, lit alone deleted. It may still be a good idea to redirect every moribund Portal (i.e. leave non-moribund Portals alone) to their parent article, but leave the subpage alone for now. I think there is a developing consensus here that manually made and maintained portals are mostly a relic of the early days and no longer suitable (no longer since 10 years ago). There is not a developing consensus for what to do about it.
    I think I would like to see technically-aware editors, like The Transhumanist and User:Abyssal, given all the support they can use to develop an automated, comprehensive, outline/contents/navigation service. This should replace Portal:Contents, which currently does not serve its purpose. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:03, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose the SmokeyJoe plan, Support the Abyssal plan. Portals don't have the support they should. Automation should solve many of the problems. Oppose the SmokeyJoe plan because it will lead to fighting over what's important enough to get a Portal. I honestly think a major reason why Portals are moribund right now is because they are in a different namespace, and every namespace other than the mainspace is directed more towards editors than readers. — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  05:42, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
  • The "Abyssal plan" sounds great. I support anyone who wants to do it. But it is a dream that is not happening. In the meantime, the current suite of Portals are mis-serving readers who get caught up in them. The "SmokeyJoe plan" is not incompatible with the "Abyssal plan". The "Abyssal plan" is for automated tools to rejuvenate Portals. Anyone wanting to do that can un-archive the archived Portals. I just think that it is not going to happen soon, and so a simple, temporary, archiving should be enacted. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:28, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
• Merge useful portals into WikiProjects and delete all other portals. Rename the "Portal:" namespace to "WikiProject:" and move all "WP:WikiProject Foo" pages to "WikiProject:Foo". KMF (talk) 02:38, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

• Basically support Abyssal's suggestion, with the rider that some portals may be merged on a case by case basis, and there may be some advantage to moving the revised products into mainspace. Oppose deletion unless consensus is reaches at a more generally visible forum. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:24, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

• Support depreciating most portals. Delete them, merge them, redirect up to the main article on the Topic, whatever works best on that portal but almost no one uses them and almost no one works on them and they don't help the reader at all for the info shown on them has no depth or refs. Legacypac (talk) 02:18, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

• It's been six months, so it's not like this is an active proposal actively seeking consensus... @SmokeyJoe and Abyssal, would you two (and/or anyone else interested) hash out a RfC proposal for WP:VPP, perhaps with multiple options, if needed? czar 08:49, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
  • It reminds me of that funny bureaucratic situation where to shut down the club you have to call a special meeting, not co-inciding with the annual general meeting, subject to special rules of advertising and quorum. If you achieve quorum, it is by having attracted fluffy-tailed wide-eyed enthusiasts who energetically propose new ideas and derail the orderly shut down process. Not that I think that User:The Transhumanist or User:Abyssal are spring chickens, but I would like to hear from them whether they agree that a short-term "archive all by redirection to parent articles" is non-damaging and completely compatible with resurrection using advanced automated tools capable of doing the things mentioned in the post of 23:56, 27 March 2017. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:54, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

situation

• • • No, I definitely think that removing the portals is intrinsically damaging both to their own future prospects and the community overall. Abyssal (talk) 12:04, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

• Some observations on portals, and fixing the portal problem:

@SmokeyJoe, Abyssal, Legacypac, Pbsouthwood, KATMAKROFAN, Mr. Guye, Czar, Train2104, OhanaUnited, DexDor, BrownHairedGirl, BD2412, and JoeHebda:

Portals are not moribund per se. Brand new ones get created frequently. Some portals are supported by the corresponding subject-based WikiProjects. Some other portals have dedicated individual maintainers.

Each portal is analogous to Wikpedia's main page, but for a particular subject. The relevance and popularity of the main page is the strongest argument for the existence of portals.

The typical development pattern for the majority of portals is that someone comes along, sees the portals, and then decides to build a new one. Then, or after a (usually short) period of maintaining it, abandons it forever. Portals are very easy (and fun) to create, because they showcase excerpts (by copy/paste -- there's relatively little composition or editing involved), and because there is some artistry in their design. Forgetting to go back and maintain them is the problem. A portal is very easy to forget all about once you've built it.

This is not evidenced in their traffic at all. They get viewed about as much as they always did. Their traffic is comparable to the corresponding categories and outlines. Except the portals listed on the Main page, which get a big boost in traffic. For the rest, almost all of their traffic comes from within Wikipedia via internal links in portal templates placed in the see also section of articles, and links in navigation templates (navigation footers, side bars, etc.). Portals therefore have quite a dispersed net of links feeding into them, which has kept their traffic fairly consistent over the years. So, traffic has nothing to do with their state of development.

Their net of feeder links makes them highly visible.

The portal system, by its very existence (and placement on the main page), promotes the creation of new portals. (New users see them and want to add to the collection). But there is no active campaign to maintain portals once created. This pattern has been going on for over a decade. The number of portals keeps growing year after year. There are now over 1400 of them. New ones keep getting added, while most existing ones grow out-of-date.

The total number of portals are growing by 50 to 100 per year.

You can track the addition of new portals to the master list via these links:

Reference

Culture and the arts

Geography and places

Health and fitness

History and events

Mathematics and logic

Natural and physical sciences

People and self

Philosophy and thinking

Religion and belief systems

Society and social sciences

Technology and applied sciences

Because of the steady inflow of new portals, consensus is unlikely to be reached to discontinue the portal system.

A possible solution to portals falling into disrepair would be to delete the out-of-date portals without prejudice to their re-creation from scratch. That way, new editors would come along, see that a portal was missing on say, geology, and create a brand new one. We have a system in place for doing almost exactly this: WP:PROD. The drawback of PROD is that it is a one-shot deal (only one prod can be posted per portal during its lifetime). Another is to nominate out-of-date portals for deletion at WP:MfD.

Whatever solution is chosen, will require someone to work...

So, if User:Example wanted to remove the portals that haven't been maintained for over 3 years, he'd have to look at every subpage of a portal to see when its last edit was. Once he found a candidate, he'd place a prod tag on its main page, or nominate it for deletion at MfD, proposing Delete, without prejudice for re-creation from scratch. Multiply that by the 1400+ portals that need to be checked (each with half-a-dozen subpages holding content), and you have a big chore on your hands.

If you wanted to go the maintenance route, there needs to be a team of editors to champion that objective. For example, the Tip of the day project has dedicated editors maintaining its set of 365 auto-repeating tips.

Either way, someone has to be recruited to do the work. And who is going to do the recruiting?

The portal dilemma is not one to be solved in a low-participation discussion like this one. Note, to build a community consensus to discontinue or redesign/revamp the entire portal program, a notice would need to be placed on every portal (with a link to the discussion). That would bring a lot of people to the discussion, perhaps many of whom would be willing to volunteer to get the necessary work done. The Transhumanist 23:37, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I have two propositions here. One, echoing my earlier comment, merge and redirect moribund subtopic portals to supertopic portals. Two, for those for which this is impracticable, mark them as historic and require a process to reopen them. bd2412 T 23:48, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

RfC on marking the featured portal process as historical

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RfC about marking the Featured portals process as "historical". Bencherlite^Talk 19:38, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

• Now archived at Archive 138

Did this conversation continue elsewhere? Are we looking at deprecating portals altogether? I see a lot of footdragging, ostensibly in acknowledgment of the work that was once put into these, but there does appear to be a clear movement towards (or at least in baby steps towards) their wholesale removal czar 07:14, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Czar, that was the extent of the discussion about closing down the featured portal process and it was thereafter marked as historical (with no subsequent complaints). What if anything should happen to the portal namespace is another issue. Bencherlite^Talk 11:07, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

I was referring to this part of the close:

Some suggested a radical action of deprecating portals altogether. This will also require a separate discussion.

and where any subsequent discussion has taken place. czar 15:47, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

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