section G12 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to be an unambiguous copyright infringement. This page appears to be a direct copy from https://www.omicsonline.org/reviewer-profile/Rana_Dajani. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images taken from other web sites or printed material, and as a consequence, your addition will most likely be deleted. You may use external websites or other printed material as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. This part is crucial: say it in your own words. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing
.
If the external website or image belongs to you, and you want to allow Wikipedia to use the text or image — which means allowing other people to use it for any reason — then you must verify that externally by one of the processes explained at Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials. The same holds if you are not the owner but have their permission. If you are not the owner and do not have permission, see Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission for how you may obtain it. You might want to look at Wikipedia's copyright policy for more details, or ask a question here.
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. S Philbrick(Talk)12:28, 29 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
If you created the article, please don't be offended. Instead, consider improving the article. For help on inserting references, see
reliable source, you may remove the {{prod blp/dated}} tag. Please do not remove the tag unless the article is sourced. If you cannot provide such a source within seven days, the article may be deleted, but you can request that it be undeleted when you are ready to add one. KDS4444 (talk) 22:52, 29 July 2017 (UTC)[reply
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rana Dajani 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 article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. KDS4444 (talk) 23:39, 2 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I've taken an interest in Rana Dajani, and am working on trying to save the article on her from deletion. I don't think the nominator understood her importance, and perhaps mistook her for someone else named Raja Dajani. After some research I understand her importance in the Arab and Islam world, and also how important she must be for women scientists throughout the world - especially young aspiring women scientists. I've made some improvements to the article, and would like to create an Infobox. Can you upload to English Wikimedia Commons a copyright-free, creative-commons photo of her? I also need her birth date (year only is fine). Netherzone (talk) 23:24, 5 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Netherzone: Thank you very much for your improvements to the article. Regarding the photo its Done because she is the first scientest in hashemite university who start a successful wikipedia education programm course in advanced cell biology second edition and here is the first edition also here is bioinformatics course (i am the wikipedia education program team leader at hashemite university by the way). I can get her birth date by contacting here at university but i dont know if i can get resource for her birth date but i will search anyway. Thanks and regards----مصعب (talk) 13:18, 6 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
مصعب The photo is a nice addition to the article. Please do let me know when you have the birth year so an infobox can be added. The article is shaping up. Nice to meet you here. Netherzone (talk) 02:55, 7 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, but a second or third party source is needed to establish these facts. The link you sent seems to be her CV on a website that she directs (in other words, it is a primary source, which is not acceptable.) I don't read or speak Arabic, so if there is an appropriate source that you can find in your language, please add her birth date and place to the article, and link it to the source, even if it is in Arabic (but if you can find one in English that is better for English Wikipedia.) Netherzone (talk) 23:26, 7 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. I see you have been nominating a few articles about singers for speedy deletion
WP:A7, "No indication of importance". These singers' articles, however, makes claims of significant numbers of studio albums and in some cases live albums, and that's easily enough to beat the very low requirements of A7. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 21:13, 11 November 2017 (UTC)[reply
]
@Boing! said Zebedee: the user create some of these articles in order to authenticate facebook pages related to them and take money for that (unfortunately i have evidence of secreenshots but in arabic so it is difficult to provide them in english here). Anyway thank you for your message. Regards--مصعب (talk) 21:52, 11 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
You may well be right, but the problem is that all someone needs to do to beat speedy deletion A7 is to make a claim of importance (which doesn't even need to be sourced). If you think the claims are being exaggerated and that the subject is not sufficiently notable for a Wikipedia article, I think you'd need to use the
@Boing! said Zebedee: you are totally right but what motivate me to nominate them for speedy deletion was that there notability is weak even in arabic (but actually i am wrong because i should depend on en.wiki criteria rather than arabic one). My language is not strong enough in english and thats decreases my ability to to explain my point and go through AFD process so I'll leave the issue for english Wikipedia community. Thank you--مصعب (talk) 22:05, 11 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Similarly, you've requested A7 speedy deletion for several articles on Iraqi journalists. The notability standard that needs to be met to avoid speedy deletion is quite low, and is meant to be used on articles like "Joe is a great guy." -- no reasonable person would think Joe has notability. Articles where there's a good faith attempt at showing notability need to go through other deletion processes. --Fabrictramp | talk to me01:40, 12 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
You don't seem to understand the speedy deletion criteria on the English Wikipedia. I just declined your nomination of a Major General. Just the fact that he is a Major General is enough to survive Speedy deletion. You should probably stop nominating articles for speedy deletion. ~ GB fan12:39, 12 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Please be sure to provide a summary of every edit you make, even if you write only the briefest of summaries. The summaries are very helpful to people browsing an article's history.
Please use the edit summary to explain your reasoning for the edit, or a summary of what the edit changes. You can give yourself a reminder to add an edit summary by setting Preferences → Editing → Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary.
Thanks! Fabrictramp | talk to me01:36, 12 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
ArbCom 2017 election voter message
Hello, مصعب. Voting in the
2017 Arbitration Committee elections
is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The
topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy
describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
section G6 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is an orphaned
disambiguation page which either
disambiguates only one extant Wikipedia page and whose title ends in "(disambiguation)" (i.e., there is a primary topic); or
disambiguates no (zero) extant Wikipedia pages, regardless of its title.
Under the
see the disambiguation page guidelines for more information
.
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Boleyn (talk) 17:44, 29 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Welcome to Wikipedia from the
Anatomy Wikiproject
!
Welcome to Wikipedia from
WikiProject Anatomy
! We're a group of editors who strive to improve the quality of anatomy articles here on Wikipedia. One of our members has noticed that you are involved in editing anatomy articles; it's great to have a new interested editor on board. In your wiki-voyages, a few things that may be relevant to editing wikipedia articles are:
Thanks for coming aboard! We always appreciate a new editor. Feel free to leave us a message at any time on the WikiProject Anatomy talk page. If you are interested in joining the project yourself, there is a participant list where you can sign up. Please leave a message on the talk page if you have any problems, suggestions, would like review of an article, need suggestions for articles to edit, or would like some collaboration when editing!
You will make a big difference to the quality of information by adding
reliable sources. Sourcing anatomy articles is essential and makes a big difference to the quality of articles. And, while you're at it, why not use a book
to source information, which can source multiple articles at once!
We try and use a standard way of arranging the content in each article.
be bold
!
We write for a general audience. Every reader should be able to understand anatomical articles, so when possible please write in a simple form—most readers do not understand anatomical jargon. See
Hi Musab, thanks for your edits around anatomy pages. You're linking a lot to Portal:Anatomy I see. We don't usually link to that portal because it's unfortunately barely edited (if at all). If you had time during your edits to spruce up that page a bit it would be much appreciated :). --Tom (LT) (talk) 23:47, 10 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Tom (LT): Thank you very much for the message. I think that this portal is so important especially for readers because they usually don't access to categories but portals icons may attract them to enter it and this make the content more connected and related. I am more than happy to help. Regards---مصعب (talk) 23:54, 10 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Musab, thanks for adding links to portals. However, please add them above the navboxes, per the
layout guide. If you can, please modify the ones you've added because having them below the categories wil probably mess up tools that deal with categories. Graham8705:18, 11 February 2018 (UTC)[reply
]
@Graham87: Thanks. Actually i use append property of AWP to add portals because i cant use templates substitution as i do in ar.wiki where we have template indicates that there is no portal bar in the article so i simply substitute it with the appropriate portal but i cant do this here because no such template so that i am obligated to use substitution property although i know it will not be in the preferred layout. If you have another way to add the directly with AWP and with adherence to layout guide please tell me how. Regarding modifying the ones that I've added, i will do that soon as next step. Regards--مصعب (talk) 13:05, 11 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I have no idea how to use AWB, sorry. Perhaps ask on its talk page or something. Portals aren't really that big a deal here, though. Graham8714:43, 11 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Dear Mossab,
Thank you for the thanks for my edit on Portal:Anatomy.
I'm glad you like portals, especially the medical portals.
@The Transhumanist: Thanks You very much!. Those are fantastic and great templates! I transferred them to Arabic Wikipedia and they do a magic great job. I worked to improve portal anatomy here and i do every thing i can to improve it and i am very sad for the nomination for deletion of portals :(. I am glad to be member on WikiProject Portals and i added my name with pleasure. Kind regards--مصعب (talk) 14:33, 1 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for being a member of the Portals WikiProject, and thank you for all the work you have all been doing on the portal namespace. To see the activity, check out the watchlist.
The top, and one of the most visible parts, of the portal system is
Portal:Contents/Portals
, which is intended to list all (completed) portals on Wikipedia.
About half of the missing existing portals have been added since this WikiProject's reboot (April 17th). Thank you to RockMagnetist, TriNitrobrick, Polyamorph, PratyushSinha101, Ganesha811, Bermicourt, Javert2113, Noyster, Ɱ, Lepricavark, XOR'easter, and Emir of Wikipedia, for working on this.
We are half-way to completion with this. We need everyone to chip in until it is done. Instructions, and the list of missing entries are at
Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet
.
I hope you'll join me there. ("Many hands make light work").
Thank you.
Membership
We're at 66 members, with more joining daily. We even have 6 WikiGnomes!
Special thanks
I have awarded Certes with a portals barnstar on his talk page for his work on the new excerpt templates that are revolutionizing the portal system (Template:Transclude lead excerpt & Template:Transclude random excerpt). If you'd like to show your appreciation, please feel free to stop by his talk page and add your signature to the barnstar itself.
Thank you Certes. You are enabling this WikiProject to get the right things done, fast.
By the way, the templates have already gone international. After being told about the templates, Mossab wrote:
Thanks You very much!. Those are fantastic and great templates! I transferred them to Arabic Wikipedia and they do a magic great job. I worked to improve portal anatomy here and i do every thing i can to improve it and i am very sad for the nomination for deletion of portals :(. I am glad to be member on WikiProject Portals and i added my name with pleasure. Kind regards
RFC
As you know, the (April 8th) proposal to delete all portals and the portal namespace inspired the reboot of this WikiProject. RfCs typically run for 30 days, which means there are 5 days left including today, before the RfC will be closed. The !votes are predominantly "oppose", but many editors have shared their disappointment with the portal system. We have our work cut out for us in correcting the problems of the portals to address their concerns. Complaints ranged from being out of date and lacking maintenance, to taking up the time of editors that they felt (due to low traffic) would be better spent improving articles.
Anti-WikiProject drama
This past week has been somewhat stressful for me, with more than a little conflict...
It culminated with my being reported at the Administrator's Noticeboard "for spamming and canvassing". This is the second time I've been reported there during the RfC; the first one was for posting notices of the deletion discussion (the RfC) at the top of all portal pages.
The accusations were 1) Posting notices of the deletion discussion (the RfC) at the top of all portal pages, 2) Adding an Article alerts section to the Portals WikiProject page, and 3) posting notices (invitations) about this WikiProject on user talk and portal talk pages.
None of which fall under the Wikipedia definitions of spamming or canvassing.
Thank you, Lionelt and Lepricavark, for coming to my rescue. I don't know how the discussion would have turned out if you had not spoken up.
The discussion was closed as "no action necessary".
After that, the person responsible posted their thoughts to my talk page. Here they are, with my response:
Congratulations, it appears your relentless targeted advertising of the RFC, your beating the RFC Supporters with a stick by posting countless times there, your dishonest insistence that Current Events was on the chopping block, and your obstruction of clean up efforts at MfD are paying dividends. Have fun playing with Portal space where no one will read your work. I'm sure someone will eventually clean up the mess when your interest wanes. Cheers. Legacypac
Thank you. I accept your congratulations on behalf of Wikiproject Portals and the portal-loving community – it was a team effort. In addition, I'd like to clarify some things about your claims above...
Each page nominated for deletion must have a notice at the top of its page, per the deletion guideline. Not to have one there, would be unfair to those who use such pages, and would constitute a secret deletion tribunal. We don't do things that way on Wikipedia.
As new facts became available (e.g., a motivated and thriving WikiProject to support the portals, new building blocks, etc.), it was appropriate to post the developments to the RfC, to support informed decision making.
Proposals are literal, not figurative. The proposal specified "all portals". All means all.
The fact is, the rebooted WikiProject is cleaning up the mess, rather rapidly. By updating and upgrading the portals, rather than getting rid of them.
I think I'll be hanging around for awhile, but the project is more than likely to achieve critical mass and may outlive us all, due in part to the development of tools to assist editors in building, upgrading, and maintaining portals that are fully dynamic and self-updating.
Portals are more fun to work with than ever. Thank you for your role in making this happen. You made us try even harder, and inspired us to pull together as a team. You'll have a warm place in our hearts, forever. The Transhumanist
Automatically refreshed excerpts
The main advancement we've made so far is applying
selective transclusion Transclusion is template technology, showing a page on another page. Selective transclusion shows only part of that page. We use it to show excerpts that always match the source. The two templates we have so far, are Template:Transclude lead excerpt and Template:Transclude random excerpt
.
Obsoleting subpages
Excerpts are migrating toward the base page of each portal, and where this is done, a subpage is no longer needed.
Template:Transclude lead excerpt will be able to be used to put the intro excerpt directly on the portal page, rather than on an intro subpage, once we adapt a portal design to accommodate this.
Template:Transclude random excerpt is currently being used on 1st-level subpages, and eliminates the need for 2nd-level subpages. (Many portals have 2 levels of subpages).
There are about 1500 portals, but there are around 148,000 subpages in portal space. Further discussions are needed to develop designs and components that do not require them.
It is my hope that the portal of the future will be a single page, or close to it, pulling in excerpts from specified dynamic sources (like category pages), filtered by ratings. This would obviate the need for subpages at all (except for maybe the header and footer subpages, which store a portal's settings). A more likely near-term solution would be subpages with a list maintained by a bot, or editors using semi-automatic tools.
Portal:Contents/Portals/Natural and physical sciences
Portal:Contents/Portals/People and self
Portal:Contents/Portals/Philosophy and thinking
Portal:Contents/Portals/Portal nav footer
Portal:Contents/Portals/Reference
Portal:Contents/Portals/Religion and belief systems
Portal:Contents/Portals/Society and social sciences
Portal:Contents/Portals/Technology and applied sciences
Portal:Contents/Portals/Topic
Wrapping up...
There's more in the works, like a rating system, further redesigns, etc. Keep an eye on the discussions on the project's talk page. They should start showing up there soon.
Transhumanist: Thank you very much for your great efforts. you have encouraged me by this message and i dedicated my day 4 may completely and half of the 5 may for editing and improving portals as response to your inspiring message even-though I am in hard medical and surgical examination period so thank you another time and BTW i added this sentence which i hope it being helpful. king regards--مصعب (talk) 00:04, 5 May 2018 (UTC)[reply
We've grown to 73 members, and morale is high. Thank you for joining. Here is some news, and some tasks...
The RfC will be closed soon...
2018-05-11: preparations are being made to close the RfC. See
Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Requests for closure#Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/RfC: Ending the system of portals
.
When there, be sure to notice the consultation link.
We're trying to get a prototypical single-page portal developed in time to show the RfC closers before they make their final decision. You can help. It's Portal:Humanism. So far, we've applied selective transclusion (automation) to excerpts, and have made the following sections without subpages: intro, selected article, selected biography, categories, related portals, wikiprojects, things to do, and wikimedia. Eight down, 4 to go, plus 2 formatting subpages (not sure we can migrate those). Automating every section, would also be nice.
Main objectives
Our main objectives currently, are:
Replace static excerpts with selective transclusions, so that the excerpts always stay fresh (that is, match the source content). We are now doing this on the portal base page as much as possible, to reduce the number of subpages that are needed. See #2...
Migrate the functions of subpages to the portal base pages. There are around 150,000 subpages in portal space. We aim to make these obsolete by using templates and other calls from the portal base pages.
Improve portal design to make portals self-update. Semi-dynamic sections update from a static list, as used in {{Transclude random excerpt}}. Fully-dynamic sections would update from a list maintained elsewhere on Wikipedia, like a category. We haven't found a way to do this yet, other than to create a bot (which we will probably need to do).
Maintenance pass #1: Upgrading the intro section
The intro section of many portals transcludes an "Intro" subpage that has an excerpt in it.
We're replacing that with a selective transclusion directly in the intro section, bypassing the subpage. Though, there's a little more to it...
Maintenance pass #2: Obsoleting the Wikimedia subpages
One of the sections on many portals links to sister projects on the subject. This needlessly takes a subpage. The subpage can be made obsolete by using the template {{Wikimedia for portals}} directly on the portal base page.
This has been done for several hundred portals so far.
We are at 74 members. If you know anyone who might find this WikiProject interesting, please invite them.
The RfC has ended
The RfC was closed May 11th, and a closing statement was posted May 12th which says "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time."
Ongoing tasks
Some major activities that we are in the middle of include:
Adding the
talk page
. There are about 125 portals left to be processed. (There were 400). Keep up the good work!
Development discussions on how to migrate the subpages to the base pages. There are around 150,000 subpages in portal space, associated with the various sections on a typical portal. We are trying to obsolete them section type by section type. Currently, we're working on obsoleting the intro subpages and the "selected articles" subpages. Please join in.
Other tasks
The list of portals not ready to be listed on the main list can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#These are not listed yet (scroll down to see them - they are marked Not ready). They are incomplete. If you want a specific portal to work on, please consider choosing one from that list.
Over the years, some incomplete portals (portals under construction) got added to
Portal:Contents/Portals
, I'm already almost done inspecting the portals in the culture section, and so you can skip those. The types of things to look for are empty sections (most will have a redlinked subpage), lack of "selected" sections, portal stubs with just an intro and end sections, and very poor layout (like seriously unbalanced columns).
Portal-building resources
During his work on portals, Broter found a quote randomizer. It is {{Random quotation}}.
Trailblazer: approaching the one-page portal
Broter has transformed the Portal:Community of Christ so it is comprised of only 3 pages in portal space: the base page, its box-header subpage, and its box-footer subpage. Its other other subpages are now obsolete and are waiting for deletion. Nice job, Broter!
Coming soon: Automatic article alerts (but there is a glitch)
Our WikiProject is now subscribed to the bot that makes automatic article alerts, but the subpage where they are posted has not been added to our WikiProject page yet because of a weird problem...
Featured portal nominations from two years ago keep popping up on there.
Once that is remedied, it will be posted on our WikiProject page.
Thank you.
Note that, this will only track base pages, because to track the rest, we'd have to create over 140,000 talk pages for the subpages, and that just isn't worthwhile (as we're trying to remove the subpages anyways). Therefore, any alerts for subpages will still need to be posted manually.
Wikipedia talk:Portal guidelines#RfC on new portal guidelines
RfC on new TOC layout for main portal list
There is a proposal to change the look of the table of contents at
Portal:Contents/Portals
.
See:
Portal talk:Contents/Portals#RFC on layout update
.
Deletion discussion survivors
Thank you to those who have participated in portal deletion discussions. There are still some editors out there who despise portals, and this comes across in their argumentation style. Wow. Such negativity. But, there is some good news...
Current deletion discussions are posted on our WikiProject page.
Portal space clean up
While portal detractors are trying to get rid of portals via MfD, we have deleted many of them via speedy deletion (per {{
Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet
.
We are also removing subpages, the functions of which have been migrated to portal base pages. To see which ones have been removed, look for the redlinks in our watchlist.
For subpages that need to be deleted, you can conveniently place this speedy deletion template at the top of each of them:
{{Db-g6|rationale=of subpage clean up – this subpage's function has been migrated to the portal base page and is no longer needed}}
Then an admin will come along and delete them.
Please help list the unlisted portals!
There are still 100 existing portals not yet presented on the main portal list at
Portal:Contents/Portals
. There were 400, so we've come a long way. Thank you! But we are not done yet...
Please list a couple of them. Every little bit helps. If each member of this project listed one more, it would almost all be done. Many hands make light work.
The list of missings, and instructions, are to be found at
Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet
Speedy deletion nomination of Abdel Majid al-Majali
Hello مصعب,
I wanted to let you know that I just tagged
Abdel Majid al-Majali
for deletion, because the article doesn't clearly say why the subject is important enough to be included in an encyclopedia.
If you feel that the article shouldn't be deleted and want more time to work on it, you can contest this deletion, but please don't remove the speedy deletion tag from the top.
You can leave a note on my talk page if you have questions.
There were 1515 portals, but now we have 1475, because we speedy deleted a bunch of incompleted portals that had been sitting around for ages, that were empty shells or had very little content. Because they were speedied, they can be rebuilt from scratch without acquiring approval from
WP:DRV
.
Maintenance runs on the portals set have begun
This is what we have been gearing up for: upgrading the portals en masse, using AWB.
More than half of the Associated Wikimedia sections have been converted to no longer use a subpage. This chore will probably be completed over the next week or two.
Many thanks to the WikiGnome Squad, who have added an Associated Wikimedia section to the many geography-related portals that lacked one. The rest of the subjects await. :)
The next maintenance drive will be on the intro sections. Notices have gone out to the WikiProjects for which one or more portals fall within their subject scope. Once enough time has elapsed for them to respond (1 week), AWB processing of intro sections will begin.
Thank you, you
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your part in the RfC. I went back and reread much of it. I believe your enthusiasm played a major part in turning the tide on there. I'm proud of all of you.
Why reread that mess, you ask?
To harvest ideas, and to keep the problems that need to be fixed firmly in mind. But, also to keep in touch. See below...
Thank yous all around
I've contacted all of the other opposers of the RfC proposal to delete portals, to thank them for their support, and to assure them that their decision was not made in vain. I updated them on our activities, provided the link to the
our operations (on our talk page)
.
Sockpuppet, and reverting his work
It so happened that one of our members was a sockpuppet: JLJ001. According to the admin who blocked him, he was a particularly tricky long term abuser. This is a weird situation, since the user was quite helpful. He will be missed.
This has been somewhat disruptive, because admins are doing routine deletions of the pages (portals, templates, etc.) he created, and reversion of his edits (I don't know if they will be reverting all of them). Please bear with them, as they are only doing what is best in the long run.
The following pages have been deleted by the admins so far, that I know of:
Associated Wikimedia – {{Wikimedia for portals|species=no|voy=no}}
Categories – {{#tag:categorytree|{{PAGENAME}}}}
Automatic article alerts is up and running
Automatic article alerts are now featured on the project page.
Some super out-of-date entries kept showing up on there, so posting it on the Project page was delayed. Thanks to Evad37 and AfroThundr for providing solutions on this one. Evad37 adjusted the workflow settings per Wikipedia:Article alerts/Subscribing#Choosing workflows, to make sure only the appropriate page types show up. AfroThundr removed the tags from the old entries that caused them to keep showing up in the article alerts.
Another major component of the portal system is the main list of portals, at
Portal:Contents/Portals
. How would we go about automating the updating of that?
Please post your ideas on the WikiProject's talk page. Thank you.
Deletion discussion survivors
Keep in mind that we have already speedy deleted almost all of the nearly empty portals, which can be rebuilt without approval whenever it is convenient to do so. Other portals should be completed if at all possible rather than delete them through MfD (which requires approval from
Transhumanist: hi. Thanks for great work! Can i ask question? I tried to replace itros using AWB but don't know how because advanced substitution doesn't work with me as every portal has its name between bracelets and that is different from portal to another do how can i do this in mass? Steps to do so would be very helpful. Regards--مصعب (talk) 15:34, 31 May 2018 (UTC)[reply
]
It's an advanced task, that will require that you make multiple passes. What I do on complex tasks like this (which is what I'm doing now for the Associated Wikimidea sections), is set AWB so that it doesn't skip. Then, when it stops on a page, I look over the code, and make a search/replace for it, then I hit stop, and start again. It'll fix that instance and others like it, but will stop when it encounters something different. Then I repeat these steps. As you proceed, AWB will process more and more of the pages automatically, stopping when a new case hasn't been covered yet. I hope this helps. — The Transhumanist00:32, 2 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abdel Majid al-Majali 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 article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.
Pbsouthwood has just gotten through the grueling RfA process to become a Wikipedia administrator. Be sure to congratulate him.
The reason he went for it was: "For some time I expect to be busy with subpage deletion for Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals as mentioned above. The amount of work is expected to keep me busy for some time. I am primarly a content creator and contributor to policy discussions, but would be willing to consider other admin work on request, providing that I feel that my involvement would be appropriate and not too far outside my comfort zone."
New feature: Picture slideshow
Picture slideshow
Image 1State Capitol Building
Image 2Sacramento Memorial Auditorium
Image 3Sacramento from near the Sacramento River
Image 4US Bank Tower
Image 5Pocket Sacramento Canal
Image 6Capitol Mall, seen from the Capitol
Image 7Old Town Sacramento, the capital as it looked like in 19th century
Image 8Tower Bridge
Evad37 has figured out a way to let the user flip through pictures without purging the page. Purging is awkward because there is an intermediary confirmation screen that you have to click on "yes". In the new picture slideshow section, all you have to do is click on the > to go to the next picture or < to instantly show the previous feature. The feature also shuffles the pictures when the page is initiated, so that they are shown in a different order each time the user visits the page (or purges it).
We now have a one-page portal design. It isn't fully automated, nor is it even fully semi-automated, as there are still some manually filled-in areas. But it no longer requires any subpages in portal space, and that is a huge improvement. For example, Portal:Sacramento, California utilizes the one-page design concept. While is employs heavy use of templates, it does not have any subpages of its own.
I commend you for your teamwork
This is the most cooperative team I've ever seen. With a strong spirit of working together to get an important job done. Kudos to you.
In conclusion...
There's more. A lot more. But it will have to wait until next issue, but you don't have to wait. See what's going on at the
Sorry, not 100% sure what you mean here. I've preserved the DYK on the anatomy portal (it's on the left column). The human body portal also has preserved DYK, even though none of it is cited. Actually, if you have time we could work on some did you knows to expand our anatomy repertoire. --Tom (LT) (talk) 14:47, 28 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Tom (LT): oh sorry it doesn't apper in mobile version (what i usually use to explore Wikipedia). Now i noticed it after converting to desktop version. Yes i think we can work together. Can you email me to discuss about that? Regards--مصعب (talk) 14:53, 28 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'd prefer to keep wiki collaboration on WP, if that is OK :). Any articles you'd like? a DYK needs an interesting hook and an article that's fairly well cited, so a smaller article might be better than a longer one. --Tom (LT) (talk) 16:32, 28 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
good article first. Shouldn't take too much doing - has lots of sources - but will need to wait until I have more time. Feel free to get started. Looks like the main issue will be the need for more references. --Tom (LT) (talk) 00:00, 2 July 2018 (UTC)[reply
]
@Tom (LT): added more resources about the main idea of Achilles tendon. Sorry for late response because i was busy with many exams. Kind Regards--مصعب (talk) 21:49, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. For a good article nomination, parts of the article such as sentences that don't have references (unless they're very obvious) will need them. Something that's already got a reference doesn't need more than one. Do all your references refer to the same fact or do they support other aspects of the article as well? If they support other aspects I'd be much obliged if you could move them down to the areas they relate to. I'll get to work too. --Tom (LT) (talk) 00:32, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Not actually being deleted - turns out there is a way to put most of the content on the portal page instead of heaps of subpages, making editing much easier. So your content will be preserved :) --Tom (LT) (talk) 00:51, 8 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
spaying and neutering, but their proliferation and the abandonment of pets has resulted in large numbers of feral cats worldwide, contributing to the extinction of bird, mammal, and reptile species.
the domestic cat was the second most popular pet in the United States, with 95.6 million cats owned and around 42 million households owning at least one cat. In the United Kingdom, 26% of adults have a cat, with an estimated population of 10.9 million pet cats there were an estimated 220 million owned and 480 million stray cats in the world. (Full article...
)
Image 2
deer mouse (Peromyscus).
Domestic mice sold as pets often differ substantially in size from the common house mouse. This is attributable to breeding and different conditions in the wild. The best-known strain of mouse is the white lab mouse. It has more uniform traits that are appropriate to its use in research. (Full article...
)
Image 3
extant subspecies of Equus ferus. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature, close to Eohippus, into the large, single-toed animal of today. Humans began domesticating horses around 4000 BCE, and their domestication is believed to have been widespread by 3000 BCE. Horses in the subspecies caballus are domesticated, although some domesticated populations live in the wild as feral horses. These feral populations are not true wild horses, which are horses that never have been domesticated and historically linked to the megafauna category of species. There is an extensive, specialized vocabulary used to describe equine-related concepts, covering everything from anatomy to life stages, size, colors, markings, breeds, locomotion, and behavior.
Horses are adapted to run, allowing them to quickly escape predators, and possess a good sense of balance and a strong fight-or-flight response. Related to this need to flee from predators in the wild is an unusual trait: horses are able to sleep both standing up and lying down, with younger horses tending to sleep significantly more than adults. Female horses, called mares, carry their young for approximately 11 months and a young horse, called a foal, can stand and run shortly following birth. Most domesticated horses begin training under a saddle or in a harness between the ages of two and four. They reach full adult development by age five, and have an average lifespan of between 25 and 30 years.
Horse breeds are loosely divided into three categories based on general temperament: spirited "hot bloods" with speed and endurance; "cold bloods", such as draft horses and some ponies, suitable for slow, heavy work; and "warmbloods", developed from crosses between hot bloods and cold bloods, often focusing on creating breeds for specific riding purposes, particularly in Europe. There are more than 300 breeds of horse in the world today, developed for many different uses. (Full article...
)
Image 4
aiding disabled people. Over the millennia, dogs became uniquely adapted to human behavior, and the human–canine bond has been a topic of frequent study. This influence on human society has given them the sobriquet of "man's best friend". (Full article...
)
Don't mind that box to the right. We'll be talking about that later, below.
Almost done...
With the portals upgrades?
No. :)
What is almost done is the updating of the main list of portals!
The Associated Wikimedia sections of the entire set of portals have been upgraded. These are now handled on each portal base page (bypassing the previously used corresponding subpages), using the {{Wikimedia for portals}} template rather than reiterated copied/pasted code.
So, to be more accurate on reporting upgrade progress, that's one section down (for the whole set of portals), with (about) nine sections to go. (Skipping curated portals, regarding custom content sections, of course).
Further section conversions (using AWB)
Work is underway on converting Portals' introduction sections, and the categories sections.
Quality rating system for portals under development
Currently, there is no quality rating for portals: in the Portals WikiProject box on each portals' talk page, it just says "Portal". But times are a changin'. Quality assessment is on the way, and you can help. See
the discussion
.
What's coming: excerpt slideshows
Evad37 has figured out a way to apply the picture slideshow feature to displaying article excerpts (now you can check out the provided box above). :) This allows us to bypass page purging to see the next selection, and you can even click through them rather quickly. Currently, the wikicode for doing this for article excerpts is a bit eye-boggling, and so we are looking into simplifying it. A streamlined version may be just around the corner.
Note that this is a prototype, not ready for widespread use. Click on the box in between the lesser than and greater than signs, to see what I mean. It was meant for pictures, and so the thumbnail feature doesn't apply to article prose very well. I've presented it even though it isn't ready, to show the direction portal development is heading. See
the discussion
.
Wow
I'm amazed at how rapidly portals are evolving. And we're still within a single generation of portal technological evolution. Imagine what they might be in 2 or 3 more generations of developments. Pretty soon, portals will be able to shake your hand. :) — The Transhumanist11:06, 16 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
We are in the process of developing a rating system specifically for portals, as the quality assessment scheme for articles does not apply to portals. It is coming along nicely. Your input would be very helpful. See the discussion at
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/General#Proposed new quality class assessments
.
Better than a barnstar
One of our participants got involved with this WikiProject through interest in how the new generation of portals would be handled in WP's MOS (Manual of Style). It didn't take long before he got sucked in deeper. This has given him an opportunity to look around, and so, he has made an assessment of this WikiProject's operations:
I'm quite frankly really impressed and inspired by what's happening here. If you'd asked me a year ago if I thought portals should just be scrapped as a failed, dragged-out experiment, I would have said "yes". This planning and the progress toward making it all practical is exemplary of the wiki spirit, in particular of a happy service-to-readers puppy properly wagging its technological and editorial tail instead of the other way around, and without "drama". It's also one of the few examples I've seen in a long time of a new wikiproject actually doing something useful and fomenting constructive activity (instead of acting as a barrier to participation, and a canvassing/ownership farm for PoV pushers). Kudos all around. — SMcCandlish
Congratulations, everyone. Keep up the great work.
Slideshow development
We've run into a glitch with slideshows: they don't work on mobile devices.
Initially, we will need to explore options that allow portals to have slideshows without adversely affecting mobile viewers. See
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Mobile view support
.
Eventually, we may need another way to do slideshows. If we do go this route, and I don't see why we wouldn't, then (user configurable) automatic slideshows also become a possibility.
TemplateStyles RfC passed
Once implemented, this will allow editors to create and edit cascading style sheets for use with templates. This will expand what we can do with portals. For more detail, see mw:Extension:TemplateStyles and Wikipedia:TemplateStyles.
Automation effort
We've run into an obstacle using Lua-based selective transclusion: Lua is incapable (on Wikipedia) of reading in article names from categories. Because of this, we'll need to seek other approaches for fully automating the Selected article section. We are exploring sources other than categories, and other technologies besides Lua.
Speaking of using other sources, the template {{Transclude list item excerpt}} collects list items from a specified page, or from a section of that page, and transcludes the lead from a randomly selected link from that list. Courtesy of Certes. So, if you use this in a portal, and if the template specifies a page or section serviced by JL-Bot, you've now got yourself an automatically updated section in the portal. JL-Bot provides links to featured content and good articles, by subject.
What is "fully automated"? When you create a portal using a creation template, and the portal works thereafter without editor intervention, the portal is fully automated. That is, the portal is supported by features that fetch new content. If you have to add new article names every so often for it to display new content, then it is only semi-automated.
Currently, the Selected article section is semi-automated, because it requires that an editor supplies the names of the various articles for which excerpts are (automatically) displayed. For examples, look at the wikisource code of
So far, 3 sections are fully automatable: the introduction section, the categories section, and the Associated Wikimedia section.
Where is all this heading?
Henry.
Or some other name.
Eventually, the portal department will be a software program. And we won't have to do anything (unless we want to). Not even tell it what portals to create (unless we want to). It will just do it all (plus whatever else we want it to do). And we will of course give it good manners, and a name.
Work is proceeding apace. We have 2 major thrusts right now: converting the intro sections of portals, and building the components of the one-page automated model...
Converting the intro sections
We need everybody, except those building software components, to work on converting intros. If you have AWB, definitely use that. If not, then work on them manually. Even one a day, or as often as you can muster, will help a lot. There are only about 1,000 of them left to go, so if everyone chips in, it will go pretty quickly. Remember, there are 97 of us!
The intros for most of the portals starting with A through F have already been converted to use the {{Transclude lead excerpt}} template.
The standard wikicode for the automated intro that we want to put into place looks like this:
That works for most portals, but not all. For some portals it requires some tweaking, and for others, we may have to use a different or more customized approach. Remember to visually inspect each portal you work on and make sure that it works before moving on to the next one.
I've started an AWB tips page, for those of you feeling a bit overwhelmed by that power user tool. Feel free to add to it and/or improve it.
Portal automation
We have some very talented Lua programmers, who are pushing the limits of what we can do in gathering data from Wikipedia's various namespaces and presenting it in portals. Due to their efforts, Lua is powering the selective transclusion core of our emerging automated portal design, in the form of selected article sections that rotate content, and slideshows.
To go beyond Lua's limits, to take full advantage of Mediawiki's API, we are in the midst of adding another programming language to the resources we shall be making use of: JavaScript. The ways that JavaScript can help us edit portals to boost the power of our Lua solutions, are being explored, which will likely make the two languages synergistic if not symbiotic. Research is under way on how we can use JavaScript to make some of the portal semi-automated features fully automatically self-updating, in ways that Lua cannot. Like gathering random members from a category and inserting them into a portal's templates as parameters. Once the parameters are in place, Lua does the rest.
If you would like to get involved with design efforts, or just keep up on them, see
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design
.
When should we start building new portals?
Well, not at the present time, because building portals is quite time consuming. The good news is that we are working on a design that will be fully automated, or as close to that as we can get. And the new design is being implemented in the portal department's
main portal creation template
. This means, that not only will portals update themselves, their creation will be highly automated as well. That's the nature of templates. You put them in place, and they just... work.
What I'm getting at here, is that it would be better to wait to build lots of new portals until after the new design is completed. Because with it, instead of taking hours to create a new portal, it will likely take minutes.
That does not mean we should be idle in the meantime. The main reason most of us are here is because it became apparent that portals were largely unmaintained and had grown out-of-date. This had become so apparent that a proposal was made to delete all the portals and the portal namespace to boot. That makes our main objective in the short term to improve all the existing portals so that the community will want to keep them—forever.
Building lots of new portals comes later. Let's fix up the ones we have first. ;)
Automation makes things go faster, even portal creation. One of the components Certes made was {{Transclude list item excerpt}}. I became curious about its possible applications.
So I worked out a portal design using it, the initial prototypes being Portal:Kyoto (without a "Selected pictures" section), and Portal:Dubai (with a "Selected pictures" section). Then I used Portal:Dubai as the basis for further portals of this type...
I was able to revamp Portal:Munich from start to finish in less than 22 minutes.
When using the {{Random slideshow}} template to display pictures, be sure to use the plural tense in the section title: "Selected pictures". That's because slideshows don't show up on many mobile devices. Instead the whole set of pictures is shown, hence the section title "Selected pictures", as it fits both situations.
In case you are curious, here is a list of the portals so far that have a slideshow:
Where the pagename didn't match the article title for the subject, the title was typed in.
Most of the portals that do not contain {{/intro}} or {{{{FULLPGENAME}}/Intro}} have not yet been processed.
About a thousand portals use the method of selective transclusion for the intro section. That's about two-thirds. That means we have one-third of the way to go on the intro section conversions.
Much more to come...
So much has been happening with portals that I can't keep up with it. (That's good). Which means, more in the upcoming issue. Until then, see ya 'round the project. Sincerely, — The Transhumanist08:47, 15 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I got overwhelmed IRL (in real life) during the production of issue #12. So, here is a catch-up issue, to help bring you (and me) up to speed on what is happening with portals...
By the way, we still have 97 participants. (Tell all your friends about this WikiProject, and have them join!)
Panoramas!
One cool feature of some of the geographical portals is a panoramic picture at the top of the intro section.
Caveat: avoid super-huge pics, as they can cause portal scripts to time-out. Please try to keep picture size down below 2 megabytes. Thank you.
Auto-populated slideshows
Speaking of pictures...
We now have two slideshow templates. You may be familiar with {{Random slideshow}}, in which the editor types in (or copies/pastes) a list of pictures he or she wants it to display.
Well, now we have another template, courtesy of Evad37, which accepts one or more page names instead, and displays a random image off of the listed pages. So instead of listing dozens of files by hand, you can include a title or three to be scanned automatically. It even lets you specify particular sections.
Also from Evad37, we have a new component for starting section boxes, that is color configurable, and that bypasses the need for box-header subpages altogether. It is {{Box-header colour}}.
For the discussion in which this was inspired, see
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks#Colour combinations for accessibility
.
(In case you didn't notice, the slideshow box above uses this new template).
BTW, don't forget to close your box with {{Box-footer}}.
Where are we on the redesign?
The answer to this question is quite involved, and would fill this page to overflowing. Therefore, this subject, including a complete update on where we are at and where we are going with portal design, is covered at
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design
.
Where are we on portal conversion?
An AWB pass to convert intros on the portals has been completed. The pass couldn't convert them all (due to various formatting configurations, etc.).
All but about 170 portals now have introductions selectively transcluded on the base page. Not counting manually maintained portals, that leaves about 70 portals that either need their intros converted, or they need an intro.
Next, we'll be converting the categories sections!
What's the plan, man?
The course of action we have been taking goes something like this, with all steps being pursued simultaeneously...
1) Design a one-page automated portal model
2) Convert existing portals to that design (except those being manually maintained)
3) Remove subpages no longer needed
4) Develop further tools to empower editors working on portals
Later, when the tools are up to the task, filling in the gaps in coverage (with new portals) will also become practical.
Are we caught up yet?
Probably not.
Who knows what our programmers and editors have dreamed up while I was writing this.
Now, in addition to picture slideshows, we have slideshows that can display excerpts. Portals are not just for topic tasting anymore. Now they can be made useful for surveying Wikipedia's coverage of entire subjects. This gives a deeper meaning to their name. Hmmm. "Portals"... Doorways to knowledge.
Portal:Lithuania was redesigned using excerpt slideshows. Check it out.
For those of you who cannot wait to test out these new toys...
We have not one, but three excerpt slideshow components to pick from:
This one accepts source pages from where the page names are gathered from list items. Then an excerpt from one of those pages is displayed. The selection of what is included in the slide show can be limited to a specific number from the collection (of the page names gathered), and that selection is renewed from scratch each time the page is purged.
For example, if you specify Template:World Heritage Sites in Spain as a source page, the slideshow will cycle through those sites. Now you don't have to type them in one-by-one. This greatly reduces portal creation time.
Same as above, but gathers links instead of just linked list items.
Panoramic banners
{{Portal image banner}} displays a panoramic picture the width of the page, and adjusts its size, so it stays that way even if the user changes page view size. And it accepts multiple file names, so that the picture displayed randomizes between them each time the page is visited/purged.
alligatorid belonging to the subfamilyCaimaninae, one of two primary lineages within the Alligatoridaefamily, the other being alligators. Caimans are native to Central and South America and inhabit marshes, swamps, lakes, and mangrove rivers. They have scaly skin and live a fairly nocturnal existence. They are relatively small-sized crocodilians with an average maximum weight of 6 to 40 kg (13 to 88 lb) depending on species, with the exception of the black caiman (Melanosuchus niger), which can grow more than 4 m (13 ft) in length and weigh in excess of 1,000 kg (2,200 Ib). The black caiman is the largest caiman species in the world and is found in the slow-moving rivers and lakes that surround the Amazon basin. The smallest species is the Cuvier's dwarf caiman (Paleosuchus palpebrosus), which grows to 1.2 to 1.5 m (3.9 to 4.9 ft) long. There are six different species of caiman found throughout the watery jungle habitats of Central and Southern America. The average length for most of the other caiman species is about 2 to 2.5 m (6.6 to 8.2 ft) long. (Full article...
)
Image 3
extant species are the American alligator (A. mississippiensis) and the Chinese alligator (A. sinensis). Additionally, several extinct species of alligator are known from fossil remains. Alligators first appeared during the late Eocene epoch about 37 million years ago. (Full article...
)
Image 4
reptiles of the orderTestudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked turtles), which differ in the way the head retracts. There are 360 living and recently extinct species of turtles, including land-dwelling tortoises and freshwater terrapins. They are found on most continents, some islands and, in the case of sea turtles, much of the ocean. Like other amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) they breathe air and do not lay eggs underwater, although many species live in or around water. (Full article...
)
Image 5
vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have independently evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs at least twenty-five times via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamidae, and Pygopodidae). (Full article...
Testudines (Latin for "tortoise"). Like other turtles, tortoises have a shell to protect from predation and other threats. The shell in tortoises is generally hard, and like other members of the suborder Cryptodira, they retract their necks and heads directly backward into the shell to protect them. (Full article...
Ancient Greek for 'snake'), as the caecilians were originally thought to be related to snakes and to lack scales.
The study of caecilian evolution is complicated by their poor fossil record and specialized anatomy. Genetic evidence and some anatomical details (such as pedicellate teeth) support the idea that frogs, salamanders, and caecilians (collectively known as lissamphibians) are each others' closest relatives. Frogs and salamanders show many similarities to dissorophoids, a group of extinct amphibians in the order Temnospondyli. Caecilians are more controversial; many studies extend dissorophoid ancestry to caecilians. Some studies have instead argued that caecilians descend from extinct lepospondyl or stereospondyl amphibians, contradicting evidence for lissamphibian monophyly (common ancestry). Rare fossils of early gymnophionans such as Eocaecilia and Funcusvermis have helped to test the various conflicting hypotheses for the relationships between caecilians and other living and extinct amphibians. ('Full article...
)
Image 2
Bufonidae, that are characterized by dry, leathery skin, short legs, and large bumps covering the parotoid glands.
A distinction between frogs and toads is not made in scientific taxonomy, but is common in popular culture (folk taxonomy), in which toads are associated with drier, rougher skin and more terrestrial habitats. (Full article...
)
Image 3
breeding season, and exhibit many different kinds of complex behaviors to attract mates, to fend off predators and to generally survive. (Full article...
Salamanders are a group of amphibians typically characterized by their lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larvae and adults. All ten extant salamander families are grouped together under the orderUrodela from the group Caudata. Urodela is a scientific Latin term based on the Ancient Greek οὐράδήλη: ourà dēlē "conspicuous tail". Caudata is the Latin for "tailed ones", from cauda : "tail".
Salamander diversity is highest in eastern North America, especially in the Appalachian Mountains; most species are found in the Holarctic realm, with some species present in the Neotropical realm. Salamanders never have more than four toes on their front legs and five on their rear legs, but some species have fewer digits and others lack hind limbs. Their permeable skin usually makes them reliant on habitats in or near water or other cool, damp places. Some salamander species are fully aquatic throughout their lives, some take to the water intermittently, and others are entirely terrestrial as adults.
This group of amphibians is capable of regenerating lost limbs as well as other damaged parts of their bodies. Researchers hope to reverse engineer the regenerative processes for potential human medical applications, such as brain and spinal cord injury treatment or preventing harmful scarring during heart surgery recovery. The remarkable ability of salamanders to regenerate is not just limited to limbs but extends to vital organs such as the heart, jaw, and parts of the spinal cord, showing their uniqueness compared to different types of vertebrates. This ability is most remarkable for occurring without any type of scarring. This has made salamanders an invaluable model organism in scientific research aimed at understanding and achieving regenerative processes for medical advancements in human and animal biology. (Full article...)
After:
Reptile types
Image 1
extant species are the American alligator (A. mississippiensis) and the Chinese alligator (A. sinensis). Additionally, several extinct species of alligator are known from fossil remains. Alligators first appeared during the late Eocene epoch about 37 million years ago. (Full article...
Testudines (Latin for "tortoise"). Like other turtles, tortoises have a shell to protect from predation and other threats. The shell in tortoises is generally hard, and like other members of the suborder Cryptodira, they retract their necks and heads directly backward into the shell to protect them. (Full article...
)
Image 6
alligatorid belonging to the subfamilyCaimaninae, one of two primary lineages within the Alligatoridaefamily, the other being alligators. Caimans are native to Central and South America and inhabit marshes, swamps, lakes, and mangrove rivers. They have scaly skin and live a fairly nocturnal existence. They are relatively small-sized crocodilians with an average maximum weight of 6 to 40 kg (13 to 88 lb) depending on species, with the exception of the black caiman (Melanosuchus niger), which can grow more than 4 m (13 ft) in length and weigh in excess of 1,000 kg (2,200 Ib). The black caiman is the largest caiman species in the world and is found in the slow-moving rivers and lakes that surround the Amazon basin. The smallest species is the Cuvier's dwarf caiman (Paleosuchus palpebrosus), which grows to 1.2 to 1.5 m (3.9 to 4.9 ft) long. There are six different species of caiman found throughout the watery jungle habitats of Central and Southern America. The average length for most of the other caiman species is about 2 to 2.5 m (6.6 to 8.2 ft) long. (Full article...
reptiles of the orderTestudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked turtles), which differ in the way the head retracts. There are 360 living and recently extinct species of turtles, including land-dwelling tortoises and freshwater terrapins. They are found on most continents, some islands and, in the case of sea turtles, much of the ocean. Like other amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) they breathe air and do not lay eggs underwater, although many species live in or around water. (Full article...
)
Image 10
vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have independently evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs at least twenty-five times via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamidae, and Pygopodidae). (Full article...
)
Amphibian types
Image 1
Bufonidae, that are characterized by dry, leathery skin, short legs, and large bumps covering the parotoid glands.
A distinction between frogs and toads is not made in scientific taxonomy, but is common in popular culture (folk taxonomy), in which toads are associated with drier, rougher skin and more terrestrial habitats. (Full article...
)
Image 2
Ancient Greek for 'snake'), as the caecilians were originally thought to be related to snakes and to lack scales.
The study of caecilian evolution is complicated by their poor fossil record and specialized anatomy. Genetic evidence and some anatomical details (such as pedicellate teeth) support the idea that frogs, salamanders, and caecilians (collectively known as lissamphibians) are each others' closest relatives. Frogs and salamanders show many similarities to dissorophoids, a group of extinct amphibians in the order Temnospondyli. Caecilians are more controversial; many studies extend dissorophoid ancestry to caecilians. Some studies have instead argued that caecilians descend from extinct lepospondyl or stereospondyl amphibians, contradicting evidence for lissamphibian monophyly (common ancestry). Rare fossils of early gymnophionans such as Eocaecilia and Funcusvermis have helped to test the various conflicting hypotheses for the relationships between caecilians and other living and extinct amphibians. ('Full article...
)
Image 3
breeding season, and exhibit many different kinds of complex behaviors to attract mates, to fend off predators and to generally survive. (Full article...
Salamanders are a group of amphibians typically characterized by their lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larvae and adults. All ten extant salamander families are grouped together under the orderUrodela from the group Caudata. Urodela is a scientific Latin term based on the Ancient Greek οὐράδήλη: ourà dēlē "conspicuous tail". Caudata is the Latin for "tailed ones", from cauda : "tail".
Salamander diversity is highest in eastern North America, especially in the Appalachian Mountains; most species are found in the Holarctic realm, with some species present in the Neotropical realm. Salamanders never have more than four toes on their front legs and five on their rear legs, but some species have fewer digits and others lack hind limbs. Their permeable skin usually makes them reliant on habitats in or near water or other cool, damp places. Some salamander species are fully aquatic throughout their lives, some take to the water intermittently, and others are entirely terrestrial as adults.
This group of amphibians is capable of regenerating lost limbs as well as other damaged parts of their bodies. Researchers hope to reverse engineer the regenerative processes for potential human medical applications, such as brain and spinal cord injury treatment or preventing harmful scarring during heart surgery recovery. The remarkable ability of salamanders to regenerate is not just limited to limbs but extends to vital organs such as the heart, jaw, and parts of the spinal cord, showing their uniqueness compared to different types of vertebrates. This ability is most remarkable for occurring without any type of scarring. This has made salamanders an invaluable model organism in scientific research aimed at understanding and achieving regenerative processes for medical advancements in human and animal biology. (Full article...)
Notice how the box bottoms line up. That readjusts even if you click the slideshow buttons.
By the way, when you include more than one box in a column, any left over whitespace in that column is divided between them.
Box-header colour
You may have noticed the new {{Box-header colour}} template used above. It lets you pick the color locally (right on the same page). Before, this was handled on a subpage somewhere.
Testing, testing
Now that we have lots of toys to play with for making cool portals...
Don't forget, that the majority of views of Wikipedia these days are from mobile devices. We need to make certain that portals display well on those. So, remember to check your work on portals in mobile view mode...
To see a portal in mobile view mode, insert a ".m" into a portal's url, after "en", like this:
The task: There are many geography portals that lack panoramas. Please add some. Please keep the file size down below 2 megabytes, and keep in mind that you may find quality banners at commons: at less than 200K (.2 megabytes). Good search terms to include with the place name are "banner", "cityscape", "skyline", "panorama", "landscape", etc.
Related task: There are also lots of geography portals that have panoramas used as gaudy banners (with print or icons splattered across them) or that display them in some random location on the page. In many cases, those pages would be improved by displaying the panorama as a clean picture at the top of the intro section, like on the examples above. This works best with banner-like panoramas. Please fix such pages when you come across them, if you believe it would improve the look of the page.
Taller images might be better suited displayed further down the page, or in the "Selected images" section.
Note that {{Portal image banner}} supports multiple images, and displays one at random upon the first visit, and each time the page is purged.
Fun activity #2: install "Selected images" sections
That is, image slideshows!
Over 200 have been installed so far. Just 1200 to go. (Be sure not to install them on portals with active maintainers, unless they want you to).
The title "Selected images" reflects the fact that not all images on Wikipedia are pictures, and encompasses maps, graphs, diagrams, sketches, paintings, pictures, and so on.
The task: Using one of the above templates directly on a portal's base page, replace static "Selected picture" sections, with a section like one of these:
Selected images
Image 1The red lionfish (Pterois volitans) is a venomous coral reef fish from the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. The red lionfish is also found off the east coast of the United States, and was likely first introduced off the Florida coast in the early to mid 1990s.
Image 2
common carp Cyprinus carpio, originated from China and widely spread in Japan. They are very closely related to goldfish. The word "koi" comes from Japanese meaning "carp
".
Image 3
Salmo salar
) - the larva has grown around the remains of the yolk - visible are the arteries spinning around the yolk and little oildrops, also the gut, the spine, the main caudal blood vessel, the bladder and the arcs of the gills.
Image 4A discus (Symphysodon discus) is guarding its eggs. As for most cichlids, brood care is highly developed with both the parents caring for the young. Additionally, adult discus produce a secretion through their skin, off which the larvae live during their first few days.
Image 22National map of groundwater and soil moisture in the United States. It shows the very low soil moisture associated with the 2011 fire season in Texas. (from Wildfire)
Image 23Charred landscape following a crown fire in the North Cascades, United States (from Wildfire)
Image 25Aerial view of deliberate wildfires on the Khun Tan Range, Thailand. These fires are lit by local farmers every year to promote the growth of a certain mushroom. (from Wildfire)
Image 27In Abies grandis (grand fir), and many other species with spirally arranged leaves, leaf bases are twisted to flatten their arrangement and maximize light capture. (from Conifer)
Image 28Lightning-sparked wildfires are frequent occurrences during the dry summer season in Nevada. (from Wildfire)
Image 38The northern spotted owl primarily inhabits old-growth forests in the northern part of its range (Canada to southern Oregon) and landscapes with a mix of old and younger forest types in the southern part of its range (the Klamath region and California). (from Old-growth forest)
Image 40A prescribed burn in a Pinus nigra stand in Portugal (from Wildfire)
Image 41A dirt road acted as a fire barrier in South Africa. The effects of the barrier can clearly be seen on the unburnt (left) and burnt (right) sides of the road. (from Wildfire)
Image 47Wildfire near Yosemite National Park, United States, in 2013. The Rim Fire burned more than 250,000 acres (1,000 km2) of forest. (from Wildfire)
Image 48
Redwood tree in northern California redwood forest: According to the National Park Service, "96 percent of the original old-growth coast redwoods have been logged." (from Old-growth forest
The one on the left uses {{Random slideshow}} (which accepts file names), and the one on the right uses {{Transclude files as random slideshow}} (which accepts source pages from which the filenames are gathered).
The above section formatting is used on many of the pages you will come across, but not all. In those cases, use whatever section formatting matches the rest of the page.
Note that you may come across "Selected picture" sections done with {{Random portal component}} templates. That template call is the entire section. Replace it with a section that matches the other sections on the page, and put the new slideshow inside that.
{{/box-header|Selected images|noedit=yes}}
{{Transclude files as random slideshow
| {{PAGENAME}}
| Culture of {{PAGENAME}}
}}
{{Box-footer}}
And the new section blended right in with the formatting of the rest of the page. Note the use of the {{PAGENAME}} magic word. Plain article titles also work. Don't feel limited to one or two page names. But be sure to test each slideshow before installing the next one. (Or if you prefer, in batches - just don't leave them hanging). Report technical problems at the
Portal design talk page
.
Fun activity #3: upgrade "Selected article" sections
These sections, where unmaintained, have gone stale. That's because 1) the excerpts are static, having been manually copied and pasted, and 2) because they lack automatic addition of new entries.
All three of these will provide excerpts that won't go stale. The latter two can provide excerpt collections that won't go stale, by providing new entries over time. The key is to select source pages or source sections that are frequently updated, such as root article sections, mainstream lists, or navigation templates.
Where will this put us?
When the above tasks are completed for the entire collection of portals (except the ones with specific maintainers), we'll be more than half-way done with the portal system upgrade.
Discussions are underway on the design of a portal tool (user script) that will hopefully have features for modifying portals at the click of a menu item, to make editing them easier. It might do things like change the color for you, add to a selection, add a new section, move a section, and so on.
If you'd like to be involved and suggest features for the tool, please join us at
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#What would you want a portal tool to be able to do?
.
Progress report: upgrade of portals
As new portal components are built by our Lua gurus, those components are being used to upgrade portals. Each component automates a section of a portal in a particular way.
The sections that are mostly upgraded so far are the Intro, and the Associated Wikimedia section.
The sections currently undergoing upgrade are: Selected image, Categories, and the Intro.
The Intro? Isn't that done already?
Yes, and no.
The upgrade of the excerpt in intros is mostly complete (there are about 70 non-standard portals that still need it).
Now we are doing another upgrade of intros in the form of adding a panoramic picture at the top of the intro, on portals for which such a picture is available on Commons:. Dozens of panoramas have been added so far, and they are really starting to affect the look of portals — the portals that have them look really good.
Regions are the most likely subjects to have panoramas, but a surprising number of other subjects have banner-shaped pictures too. Some examples of non-geographic portals that they have been added to are:
Speaking of pictures, several hundred Selected image sections have been upgraded to include image slideshows.
Progress report: design
The push for automation continues, with new components under continuous testing in the field. As problems are spotted, they are reported to our programmers, who have done a fantastic job of keeping up with bug reports and fixing the relevant Lua modules fast. I am highly impressed.
Construction time on new portals is now down to as little as a minute or less. Though not in general. If you are lucky enough to spot portals that fit the profile of the new tools (their strengths), then a portal can be complete almost as soon as it is created, with the added time it takes to find and add a panorama. Source page titles are not generally standardized, and so it source pages in many cases must be entered manually. Where source page titles follow a standard naming convention, portal creation for those subjects goes quickly.
So, we still have some hurdles, but the outlook on portals is very good. New features, and many improvements to features are on the horizon. I'll be sure to report them when they become available.
What will the portal of the future look like? That is up to you!
Myself and others have been testing and experimenting with the new components in upgrading existing portals and in building new portals. They have now been applied in hundreds of portals.
The templates are ready for general use for portal creation.
They are still a bit buggy, but the only way we are going to work the rest of the bugs out is by using them and reporting the bugs as we come across them.
I look forward to seeing what new portals you create!
Placing a panorama (banner picture) at the top of the intro section is a nice touch, and really makes a portal look good. {{box portal skeleton}} doesn't automatically insert panoramas. So, you will need to do that by hand. They can be found at Commons:. For some examples, check out Portal:Sharks, Portal:Cheese, and Portal:Florence
Check the In the news and Did you know? sections for mismatches. That is, sometimes entries come up that shouldn't be displayed. If there are any, refine the search strings further, so they don't return such results.
Finish each portal you've created before creating a new one. We don't want unfinished portals sitting around.
As you know, portals are now supported by a number of new templates, which are in turn supported by some new
Lua modules
.
Those templates and modules are being put to the test, in the new portals that have been created since this WikiProject rebooted, plus a number of existing portals that have been revamped.
Please browse the new portals at your leisure, and report any and all problems that you spot. Post bug and other portal problem reports at
WT:WPPORTD
. Please report bugs, quirks, awkward aspects, or anything weird or off that you notice. Compliments and suggestions are also welcome. :)
When you report a bug, please indicate the portal's name, the section that the problem appeared in, and the name of the article appearing (first) in the section with the problem. Most problems will likely be encountered in the Selected general articles" section, due to quirks in a displayed article's wikicode that the lua modules don't handle yet. Your help in spotting those is of utmost value. Thank you.
Don't delete portal subpages just yet
For portals that have been converted to the single-page design, we are not deleting their subpages at this time, because we are working on ways to harvest the data from those pages. For example, the Selected picture subpages include filenames and captions that would be valuable for the image slideshows. Please don't delete portal subpages, for now. They'll be slated for d-batch speedy deletion after harvesting. Thank you.
Development notes
We are currently testing a feature added to {{Transclude files as random slideshow}} that allows it to accept both sourcepages and filenames. Courtesy of Evad37. This will pave the way for harvesting files and their captions from portal subpages, for use in image slideshows.
We need your help
The bulk of the work is being done by a handful of editors. But we can't do it all. We need help with spotting bugs, refining the search parameters in new/revamped portals (in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections), adding images to slideshows for a broader selection (they default to showing the images on the root article page but are capable of showing so much more), adding panoramic pictures at the top of the intro section of region portals (cities, counties, states, provinces, countries, continents, and other regions), to name but a few task types.
It is rewarding to be a part of the growing portal phenomenon. And you get to see its expansion and refinement up close.
A {{Portal}} box in the See also section of the corresponding root article for each portal. If there is no See also section, create one and place the portal template in that. (Rather than placing them in an external links section -- they're not external links).
A {{Portal}} template placed at the top of the category page corresponding to each portal.
To make a list of corresponding templates, you can use AWB's make list feature to make a list of the pages in
WP:wikEd
. That will give you a list of templates to work on. Then you set skip in AWB to skip the ones that already have the portal link.
To make a list of corresponding root articles, make a list of portal links, and then remove "Portal:" from the links.
To make a list of category links to process, make sure you use a leading colon (:) in the category links, like this: [[:Category:Blue Öyster Cult]].
A {{Portal}} box in the See also section of the corresponding root article for each portal. If there is no See also section, create one and place the portal template in that. (Rather than placing them in an external links section -- they're not external links).
A {{Portal}} template placed at the top of the category page corresponding to each portal.
Nearly 2,000 of the new portals need to be listed here.
They can be found at
Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet
. Instructions are included there.
Customized Portal Rating system is now in place
Portals now have a new rating system of their own designed specifically to support portal evaluation! We were trying to use the standard assessment system for articles, but that doesn't fit portals very well.
The new system can be found at the top of all portal talk pages, in the WikiProject portals box. Those with "???" ratings need to be assessed, which makes up most of the older portals.
Most of the new portals were started out with an initial "Low" level of importance when their talk pages were created. Those deserving higher importance should be promoted as you come across them.
Improving the new portals
The starting point for new portals included minimal parameters and content, in the form of default values in the template(s) used for their creation.
Embellishing embedded search strings
So, for the search strings in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections, this was the magic word {{PAGENAME}}, which represents the portal's name. Unfortunately, the resulting term is alway capitalized, which limits its effectiveness as a search string for anything but proper nouns. Results for those two sections can be improved, by replacing the "PAGENAME" magic word with multiple search strings, and search strings that begin with lower case letters. There is no inherent limit as to how many search parameters may be included. Lua search notation is used. The more general the subject, the more subtopic search terms you may want to include. For example, on Portal:Avengers (comics), {{PAGENAME}} turned up nothing. But, when more parameters were added, as in the wikicode below...
{{Transclude selected recent additions | {{PAGENAME}} | Iron Man | Spiderman | Antman | Hawkeye | The Hulk | Incredible Hulk | David Banner | Captain America | Scarlet Witch | Black Widow | Tony Stark | Nick Fury | Age of Ultron | Infinity War | months=36 | header={{Box-header colour|Did you know... }}|max=6}}
... that returned several results in the portal's DYK section.
Be sure you make the improvements to both the DYK section and the "In the news" section, as they both require the search strings.
Expanding the slideshow contents
The default starting selection for the image slideshow in most new portals is whatever images happen to be in the corresponding root article (via the PAGENAME magic word). You can improve image slideshows by adding more sourcepages and filenames as parameters in the "Selected images" section of portals.
Portals used to take about 6 hours or more to create. Now, for subjects that have particular navigation support, we've got that down to about one minute each, with even more content displayed than ever. True, that means the new portals pick you, rather than the other way around. Creating a specific portal that doesn't happen to have the requisite navigation support is still pretty time consuming. But, we are working on extending our reach beyond the low-hanging fruit.
And efforts are ongoing to keep shaving time off of the creation process. Eventually, we may get it down to seconds each.
In addition to improving automation, we're always looking for new features and improvements that we can add to portals, and there is plenty of potential to expand on the standard design so that new portals are even better right out of the starting gate. Additional designs are also possible.
On the horizon, there are many more portals waiting to be created. And we can expect to see at least a few more section types emerge. I never expected slideshows, for example, especially not for excerpts. Who knows where innovation will take us next?
There was also some discussion of creation criteria for portals. The result was that one of the participants in the discussion reverted the portal guidelines to the old version, which has the minimum number of articles for a portal included in there: "about 20 articles", a guideline that was in place since 2009.
Many of the portals that existed prior to April 2018 do not have that many (being limited to however many subpages the portal creator created), and therefore, these portals need to be upgraded to the new design (which automatically provides many articles for display). Using the new design, exceeding 20 articles for display is very easy.
Linking to the new portals
Efforts have been underway to place links to new portals (all 2200 of them created since April).
Link (portal button) from corresponding category pages. Done
Link from See also section on corresponding root articles. Partially implemented
Link from bottom of corresponding templates. Partially implemented
Link for each portal on
Portal:Contents/Portals.
Partially implemented
Your help is needed. It is easy to access the page mentioned in #1, #2, & #3 from the portals themselves.
AWBers could do these tasks even faster (that's how the category pages were done), except #4...
Item #4 above pretty much has to be done by hand. (If you can find a way to speed that up, I would be very impressed). The links needing placement can be found at
Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet
. Instructions are included there.
The conversion effort: news sections
There are still around 1200 old-style portals that have only undergone partial conversion to the new design concepts, still relying on subpages with copied/pasted excerpts that have been going stale for years, out of date (manually posted) news entries, etc.
The section currently being tackled on these is news. You can help by deleting any news section on the old-style portals that has news entries that are years old (that is the dead giveaway to a manual news section). Be sure not to delete the news sections of portals that have up-to-date news, or active maintainers. For maintainers, look at the portal's categories, and/or check the participants list at
WP:WPPORT
.
Eventually, conditional news sections (that appear only when news items are available for display) will be added using AWB to all portals without a news section.
News items (and even the news sections themselves) are automatically generated for portals that were created using the Basic portal start page. On those portals, there is a hidden comment at the top of the page (that you can see in the edit window), that says this:
<!-- This portal was created using subst:Basic portal start page -->
Design development
Presently, we are in the process of implementing the new design features, creating new portals with them, and installing them in existing portals.
But, what about development of new new design features?
We have a wish department.
Post your wishes at
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Discussions about possible cool new features
, and they might come true. Many have already, and for many of those, this is where they were posted.
Cascade effect
A resource that has been elusive so far will be obtained eventually: categories. That is, the ability to pull category member links to populate a page.
Rather than populate portals directly with such links, it may be more beneficial to the encyclopedia to utilize them in navigation footers, because portals already have the ability to generate themselves based on those.
So, this would create a cascade effect: auto-gathering entries from categories, would enable the construction of new navigation footers, that would in turn support the development of new portals.
The cascade effect would also be felt by existing portals, as existing navigation footers could be expanded using the category harvesting methods, which would in turn expand the coverage of portals that access those navigation footers.
You can help by providing leads about any potential category harvesting methods. Please report anything you know about harvesting categories at
WT:WPPORTD
. Thank you.
Looking into the future: the quantum portal?
One idea that has been floating around is the concept of a pageless portal. That is, a portal that isn't stored anywhere, instead being generated when you click on a menu item or button.
Many of the new portals were generated by a single click, and then saved via a second click.
Therefore, it seems likely that the portals of the future will employ the one-click concept.
Because of the need for customization by users, this concept would need to be augmented with a way to integrate user contributions. This could be done in at least two ways: posting an existing portal, autogenerating one from scratch if such does not yet exist, or have a special data page for user contributions that is folded into the auto-generated portal.
How soon? That is up to you. All that is needed are persons to implement it.
Please inspect these portals, report problems or suggest improvements at
WT:WPPORTD
, or develop them further (see below). Thank you.
What's next?
There is still lots to do...
There are many subject gaps that need to be filled. This can be done by creating new portals, or by adding Selected article sections to existing portals. To create a new portal, simply place {{subst:Basic portal start page}} on an empty portal page, and click "Preview". If the portal is complete, click "Save". After you try it, come share your experience and excitement at
WT:WPPORTD
.
Each new portal is just a starting point. Each portal of the new design can be further developed by:
refining the search parameters to improve the results displayed in the Did you know and In the news sections.
adding more specific Selected articles sections, like Selected biographies.
inserting a Recognized content section.
adding more pictures to the image slideshow.
placing a panoramic picture at the top of the intro section (especially for geographic portals).
Besides the new portals, there are still about 1200 portals of the old design that need to be converted to the new design.
Many portals need to be de-orphaned, by placing links to them (in the See also section of the corresponding root articles, at the bottom of the corresponding navigation footer templates, and on the corresponding category pages).
Many of the new portals still need to be listed at
Portal:Contents/Portals
.
Bugs keep popping up in portals. These need to be tracked down and reported at
WT:WPPORTD
.
Tools are needed to make developing and maintaining portals quicker and easier.
Dreaming up new features and capabilities. Innovation needs to continue, to design the portal of tomorrow, and the portal development-maintenance-system of the future. Automation!
So, if you find yourself with a little (or a lot) of free time, pick an area (or more) above and...
Give a hearty welcome to AmericanAir88, who has adopted working on portals as one of his main purposes on Wikipedia. So far, he has created the following portals:
He has been, and will continue to be, sorely missed.
Hopefully, he is okay, on a Caribbean cruise or something.
The conversion continues
Portals of the old design, are slowly but surely being converted to the new single-page design.
One factor that has slowed things down is that for many sections, the section header call and section contents call are integrated into a template and buried in a lua module, locking them in on each portal. They have been that way for years.
This means that these sections can't be directly edited like the other sections on the same portal. So, search/replaces affect all the sections except those. So, upgrading headers on these portals, for example, misses the integrated sections and inadvertently results in 2 different header colors.
Before we can continue with the upgrade of these portals, the headers and section contents calls need to be restored to each portal, so that those can be edited in concert with the other sections on the portal, and worked on independently of each other.
This is underway, with a solution implemented on about 1/4 of the affected portals so far. Around 300 of them. The remaining 900 should be done within a couple weeks or so.
Going wide...
We now have banner-shaped pictures included in the introduction sections of 180 portals. The rarity of such pictures has made it difficult to find suitably narrow images for display across the tops of portals.
We have a solution for this, courtesy of FR30799386...
Most pictures are not banner-shaped. But, you can still use them as banners. Here's how:
Using both maxheight=120px and overflow=Hidden produces this:
Project's status
There are now 4,140 portals, with more being created almost daily. Prior to this project's reboot, portals were created at about the rate of 80 per year. Since April of this year, we've created about 2,600 new portals, or 32.5 years' worth at the old rate.
Of those new portals, about 3/4 of them need links leading to them. Almost all of them are linked to from the category system, but they still need links in article see also sections, at the bottom of navigation templates, and on the main portals list at
Portal:Contents/Portals
.
Of the 1500 portals created before the reboot, about 300 have been completely converted to the new design so far. About 1100 more have been partially converted, with intros, image slideshows, and associated wikimedia sections getting the most attention.
is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 2 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The
topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy
describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
By the way, the above list was generated using
this Petscan query. It can be easily modified by changing the date. The data page (under the Output tab) also has options for receiving the data in CSV or tabbed format, which some operating systems automatically load into a spreadsheet program for ease of use, such as copying and pasting the desired column (like page names).
@Atlantic306: the article that i nominated for deleting is part of synthesizing fake notability for some Arabic topics in order to authenticate Facebook pages for them by creating articles on Wikipedia in many languages to earn money from adding blue mark for Facebook pages. I am detecting their activities on social media and they work in Arabic Facebook groups to create articles for Facebook authentication purposes! Regards--مصعب (talk) 13:20, 14 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
None of that is a reason that is valid for speedy deletion,
@Atlantic306: ok i will stop but please note that they are doing cross wiki vandalism and they benefit from Wikipedia not for spreading knowledge but for personal benefit.--مصعب (talk) 13:42, 14 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for following up on this. The issue is that right now it's written like a resume ({{advertisement}} is also used in that context), with bullet points listing their education and accomplishments. Once it's rewritten as prose it should be ok. signed, Rosguilltalk18:46, 15 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Last issue, I mentioned there would be a flood, and so, here it is...
Portals status
We now have 4,620 portals.
And the race to pass 5,000 by year's end is on...
Can we make it?
The New Year, and the 5,001st portal, await.
( New portals are created with {{subst:Basic portal start page}} or
{{subst:bpsp}} )
Evad is back!
After disappearing in mid-thread, Evad37 has returned from a longer than expected wikibreak.
Be sure to welcome him back.
Improved cropping is coming to Portal image banner
User:FR30799386 is working on making {{Portal image banner}} even better by enabling it to chop the top off an image as well as the bottom.
Many pictures aren't suitable for banners because they are too tall. Therefor, User:FR30799386 added cropping to this template, so that an editor could specify part of a picture to be used rather than the whole thing.
Upgrade of flagship portals is underway
Work has begun on upgrading Wikipedia's flagship portals (those listed at the top of the
Work continues on the other five. Feel free to join in on the fun.
Spotting missing portals that are redirects
In place of many missing portals, there is a redirect that leads to "the next best topic", such as a parent topic.
Most of these were created before we had the tools to easily create portals (they used to take 6 hours or more to create, because it was all done manually). Rather than leave a portal link red, some editors thought it was best that those titles led somewhere.
The subjects that have sufficient coverage should have their own portals rather than a redirect to some other subject.
Unfortunately, being blue like all other live links, redirects are harder to spot than redlinks.
User:FR30799386 has pulled it off, and made the upgrade to {{Portal image banner}}...
So, this:
Niagara falls
, from the Canadian side
Becomes this:
Niagara falls
, from the Canadian side
Here's the code for the above banner:
{{Portal image banner|File:American Falls from Canadian side in winter.jpg | [[Niagara falls]], from the Canadian side |maxheight=175px |overflow=Hidden|croptop=10}}
...there is plenty else to do in addition to building new portals:
The new portals need to be linked to from the encyclopedia.
On those portals about subjects that are not typically capitalized, the search parameters need to be refined/expanded, to maximize the chances of Did you know and In the news items being found and displayed.
A Recognized content section needs to be added to each portal that has a corresponding WikiProject.
Addition of a category on those portals that lack a subject category.
Implement the portal category system, adding the appropriate categories to each portal.
Upgrade, and complete (as per the tasks enumerated above), the old-style portals that are not regularly maintained, which have not been converted yet (about 1,100 of them).
Find and fix the remaining bugs in the underlying lua modules.
Build portal tools (scripts) to assist in the creation, development, and maintenance of portals.
Build a script to help build navbox footer templates, via the harvesting of categories, amongst other methods.
Update the portal building instructions.
Update the portal guideline.
Refine the programming of the portals to reduce their load time.
Design and develop the next generation of portals and portal components.
Hello Mossab. This is with regards to your private request for deletion of the above article. I hope you don't mind me continuing the discussion here. I see that you have requested A7, and it was subsequently declined by another admin, User:Bbb23. Noted that the article was created in 2006, and the term has 331,000 hits on Google, although the latter being mostly as part of people's names. In your request, you have also asked me to look at User:Gharaibeh. May I ask how are the two related, apart from the term?
If you still have concerns, please do feel free to raise an AFD. In the mean time, don't hesitate to ask for any help. Best wishes, Rehman05:50, 18 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
DannyS712 has created a user script prototype, User:DannyS712/Cat links, that can pull members from a category, a functionality we've been after since the project's revamp last Spring. Now, it's a matter of applying this technique to scripts that will place the items where needed, such as with a section starter script and/or portal builder script.
If you find any other portals that stand out, please send me the links so I can include them in the next issue. Thank you.
Conversion continues
There are about 1100 portals left in the old style, with subpages and static excerpts. As those are very labor intensive to maintain (because their maintenance is manual), all those except the ones with active maintainers (about 100) are slated for upgrade = approximately 1000. We started with 1500, and so over a quarter of them have been processed so far. That's good, but at this rate, conversion will take another 3 years. So, some automation (AWB?) is in order. We just need to keep at it, and push down on the gas pedal a bit harder.
As you know, thousands of the new portals are orphans, that is, having no links to them from article space. For all practical purposes, that means they are not part of the encyclopedia yet, and readers will be unlikely to find them.
What is needed are links to these portals from the See also sections of the corresponding root articles.
Dreamy Jazz to the rescue...
Dreamy Jazz has created a bot to place the corresponding category link to the end of each portal (if it is missing), and place a link to each portal in the See also section of the corresponding root articles.
That bot, named User:Dreamy Jazz Bot, is currently in its trial period performing the above described edits!
Dreamy Jazz Bot has been approved and is now up and running.
What it does is places missing links to orphaned portals. It places a link in the See also section of the corresponding root article, and it puts one at the top of the corresponding category page.
We have thousands of new portals that have yet to be added to the encyclopedia proper, just waiting to go live.
When they do go live, over the coming days or weeks, due to Dreamy Jazz Bot, it will be like an explosion of new portals on the scene. We should expect an increase in awareness and interest in the portals project. Perhaps even new participants.
Get ready...
Get set...
Go!
Another sockpuppet infiltrator has been discovered
User:Emoteplump, a recent contributor to the portals project, was discovered to be a sockpuppet account of an indefinitely blocked user.
When that happens, admins endeavor to eradicate everything the editor contributed. This aftermath has left a wake of destruction throughout the portals department, again.
The following portals which have been speedy deleted, are in the process of being re-created. Please feel free to help to turn these blue again:
The Ref desks survived the proposal to shut them down
You might be familiar with the Ref desks, by their link on every new portal. They are a place you can go to ask volunteers almost any knowledge-related question, and have been a feature of Wikipedia since August of 2005 (or perhaps earlier). They were linked to from portals in an effort to improve their visibility, and to provide a bridge from the encyclopedia proper to project space (the Wikipedia community).
Well, somebody proposed that we get rid of them, and the community decided that that was not going to happen. Thank you for defending the Ref desks!
The cleanup after sockpuppet Emoteplump continues...
The wake of disruption left by Emoteplump and the admins who reverted many (but not all) of his/her edits is still undergoing cleanup. We could use all the help we can get on this task...
Almost all of the speedy deleted portals have been rebuilt from scratch.
Prior to 2018, for the previous 14 years, portal creation was at about 80 portals per year on average. We did over 3 times that in just the past 9 days. At this rate, we'll hit the 10,000 portal mark in 5 months. But, I'm sure we can do it sooner than that.
What's next for portal pages?
There are 5 drives for portal development:
Create new portals
Expand existing portals, such as with new sections like Recognized content
Convert or restart old-style portals into automated single-page portals
Link to new portals from the encyclopedia
Pageless portals
Let's take a closer look at these...
1: Creating new portals
Portal creation, for subjects that happen to have the necessary support structures already in place, is down to about a minute per portal. The creation part, which is automated, takes about 10 seconds. The other 50 seconds is taken up by manual activities, such as finding candidate subjects, inspecting generated portals, and selecting the portal creation template to be used according to the resources available. Tools are under development to automate these activities as much as possible, to pare portal creation time down even more. Ten seconds each is the goal.
Eventually, we are going to run out of navigation templates to base portals off of. Though there are still thousands to go. But, when they do run out, we'll need an easy way to create more. A nav footer creation script.
Meanwhile, other resources are being explored and developed, such as categories, and methods to harvest the links they contain.
2: Expanding existing portals
The portal collection is growing, not only by the addition of new portals, but by further developing the ones we already have, by...
Improving and/or adding search parameters to better power the Did you know and In the news sections.
Adding more selected content sections, like Selected biographies.
Adding and maintaining Recognized content sections, via JL-Bot.
Adding pictures to the image slideshow.
Adding panoramic pics.
Categorizing portals.
More features will be added as we dream them up and design them. So, don't be shy,
make a wish
.
3: Converting old portals
By far the hardest and most time-consuming task we have been working on is updating the old portals, the very reason we revamped this WikiProject in the first place.
There are two approaches here:
A) Restart a portal from scratch, using our automated tools. For basic no-frills portals, that works find. But, for more elaborate portals, as that tends to lose content and features, the following approach is being tried...
B) Upgrade a portal section by section, so little to nothing is lost in the process.
And a tool in the form of a script is under development for linking to portals at the time they are created, or shortly thereafter.
5...
See below...
New WikiProject for the post-saved-portal phase of operations...
Saved portals, are portals with a saved page.
What is the next stage in the evolutionary progression?
Quantum portals.
What are quantum portals?
Portals that come into existence when you click on the portal button, and which disappear when you leave the page.
Or, as Pbsouthwood put it:
...portals that exist only as a probability function (algorithm) until you collapse the wave form by observing through the portal button (run the script), and disappear again after use...
This was a spin-off from WikiProject Portals, for the purpose of developing zero-page portals (portals generated on-the-screen at the push of a button, with no stored pages).
Implementation of the new portal design has been culled back almost completely, and the cull is still ongoing. The cull has also affected portals that existed before the development of the automated design.
Some of the reasons for the purge are:
Portals receive insufficient traffic, making it a waste of editor resources to maintain them, especially for narrow-scope or "micro" portals
The default {{bpsp}} portals are redundant with the corresponding articles, being based primarily on the corresponding navigation footer displayed on each of those articles, and therefore not worth separate pages to do so
They were mass created
Most of the deletions have been made without prejudice to recreation of curated portals, so that approval does not need to be sought at Deletion Review in those cases.
In addition to new portals being deleted, most of the portals that were converted to an automated design have been reverted.
Which puts us back to portals with manually selected content, that need to be maintained by hand, for the most part, for the time being, and back facing some of the same problems we had when we were at this crossroads before:
Manually maintained portals are not scalable (they are labor intensive, and there aren't very many editors available to maintain them)
The builders/maintainers tend to eventually abandon them
Untended handcrafted portals go stale and fall into disrepair over time
These and other concepts require further discussion. See you at
WT:POG
.
However, after the purge/reversion is completed, some of the single-page portals might be left, due to having acceptable characteristics (their design varied some). If so, then those could possibly be used as a model to convert and/or build more, after the discussions on portal creation and design guidelines have reached a community consensus on what is and is not acceptable for a portal.
See you at
WT:POG
.
Curation
A major theme in the deletion discussions was the need for portals to be curated, that is, each one having a dedicated maintainer.
There are currently around 100 curated portals. Based on the predominant reasoning at MfD, it seems likely that all the other portals may be subject to deletion.
See you at
WT:POG
.
Traffic
An observation and argument that arose again and again during the
WP:ENDPORTALS RfC and the ongoing deletion drive of {{bpsp
}} default portals, was that portals simply do not get much traffic. Typically, they get a tiny fraction of what the corresponding like-titled articles get.
And while this isn't generally considered a good rationale for creation or deletion of articles, portals are not articles, and portal critics insist that traffic is a key factor in the utility of portals.
The implication is that portals won't be seen much, so wouldn't it be better to develop pages that are?
And since such development isn't limited to editing, almost anything is possible. If we can't bring readers to portals, we could bring portal features, or even better features, to the readers (i.e., to articles)...
Some potential future directions of development
Quantum portals?
An approach that has received some brainstorming is "quantum portals", meaning portals generated on-the-fly and presented directly on the view screen without any saved portal pages. This could be done by script or as a MediaWiki program feature, but would initially be done by script. The main benefits of this is that it would be opt-in (only those who wanted it would install it), and the resultant generated pages wouldn't be saved, so that there wouldn't be anything to maintain except the script itself.
Non-portal integrated components
Another approach would be to focus on implementing specific features independently, and provide them somewhere highly visible in a non-portal presentation context (that is, on a page that wasn't a portal that has lots of traffic, i.e., articles). Such as inserted directly into an article's HTML, as a pop-up there, or as a temporary page. There are scripts that use these approaches (providing unrelated features), and so these approaches have been proven to be feasible.
What kind of features could this be done with?
The various components of the automated portal design are transcluded excerpts, news, did you know, image slideshows, excerpt slideshows, and so on.
Some of the features, such as navigation footers and links to sister projects are already included on article pages. And some already have interface counterparts (such as image slideshows). Some of the rest may be able to be integrated directly via script, but may need further development before they are perfected. Fortunately, scripts are used on an opt-in basis, and therefore wouldn't affect readers-in-general and editors-at-large during the development process (except for those who wanted to be beta testers and installed the scripts).
The development of such scripts falls under the scope of the Javascript-WikiProject/Userscript-department, and will likely be listed on Wikipedia:User scripts/List when completed enough for beta-testing. Be sure to watchlist that page.
Where would that leave curated portals?
Being curated. At least for the time being.
New encyclopedia program features will likely eventually render most portals obsolete. For example, the pop-up feature of MediaWiki provides much the same functionality as excerpts in portals already, and there is also a slideshow feature to view all the images on the current page (just click on any image, and that activates the slideshow). Future features could also overlap portal features, until there is nothing that portals provide that isn't provided elsewhere or as part of Wikipedia's interface.
But, that may be a ways off. Perhaps months or years. It depends on how rapidly programmers develop them.
Keep on keepin' on
The features of Wikipedia and its articles will continue to evolve, even if Portals go by the wayside. Most, if not all of portals' functionality, or functions very similar, will likely be made available in some form or other.
Welcome to Wikipedia! I edit here too, under the username Onel5969 and it's nice to meet you :-)
I wanted to let you know that I have tagged an article that you started, Wiki Project Med for deletion, because it seems to be an article that has been already decided by a [decision] to be unsuitable for inclusion.
If you feel that the article shouldn't be deleted and want more time to work on it, you can contest this deletion but please don't remove the speedy deletion tag from the top. If the page is already deleted by the time you come across this message and you wish to retrieve the deleted material, please contact the deleting administrator.
For any further query, please leave a comment here and prepend it with {{Re|Onel5969}}. And, don't forget to sign your reply with ~~~~ . Thanks!
Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.
@DGG: I searched in Google and didn't find enough results even in Arabic language but just few results about his death without taking about his personal life. Best regards--Avicenno (talk) 18:24, 21 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Standard discretionary sanctions are authorized for all discussions about pharmaceutical drug prices and pricing and for edits adding, changing, or removing pharmaceutical drug prices or pricing from articles. Any uninvolved administrator may apply sanctions as an arbitration enforcement action to users editing in this topic area, after an initial warning.
CFCF is reminded to avoid casting aspersions and similar conduct in the future.
Doc James is prohibited from making any edits relating to pharmaceutical drug prices or pricing in the article namespace.
QuackGuru is indefinitely
topic-banned
from articles relating to medicine, broadly construed.
This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.
You have shown interest in discussions about pharmaceutical drug prices and pricing and for edits adding, changing, or removing pharmaceutical drug prices or pricing from articles. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called
@SoWhy: Hi! The user who created the article was involved in advertising some people in order to authenticate their accounts on Facebook. It was cross-wiki activities that we have noticed it at Arabic wikipedia as well. Best regards--Avicenno (talk) 10:44, 18 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Requested changes to MediaWiki:Histlegend on arwiki
(I'm posting on this wiki rather than arwiki as I can't post on your talk page there due to it being semi-protected and I don't really want to do 50 edits just to request some changes)
Hi, can you update following URLs on MediaWiki:Histlegend on arwiki as the Toolforge URL has changed due to phab:T234617
[التعديلات بواسطة المستخدم tools.wmflabs.org/sigma/usersearch.py?page={{FULLPAGENAMEE}}&server=arwiki//] *
to [التعديلات بواسطة المستخدم sigma.toolforge.org/usersearch.py?page={{FULLPAGENAMEE}}&server=arwiki//] *
Hi Avicenno -- I noticed this draft in the G13 deletion pile and have tried to rescue it as the subject is obviously notable. There are still some sources needed, if you were able to assist further with its development. Regards, Espresso Addict (talk) 00:59, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hi there I noticed a message you left on another users page...
'You have been a member of
Wiki Project Med Foundation
(WPMEDF) in the past. Your membership, however, appears to have expired. As such this is a friendly reminder encouraging you to officially rejoin WPMEDF. There are no associated costs. Membership gives you the right to vote in elections for the board. The current membership round ends in 2022.
Thanks again :-) The team at Wiki Project Med Foundation
The last link (wiki project med ) is invalid, and the first one points to docjames page which might be unintentional..
Requesting you to visit Draft:Circassian women and help expand the same if topic interests you.
Part of reason to make this request to you is you seem to have previously edited article Rana Dajani who seem to have been expert on genetics of Circassian ... populations and looking for update help on Draft:Circassian women#Genetics besides other aspects of the article.
Invitation to take part in a survey about medical topics on Wikipedia
Dear fellow editor,
I am Piotr Konieczny, a sociologist of new media at Hanyang University (and User:Piotrus on Wikipedia). I would like to better understand Wikipedia's volunteers who edit medical topics, many associated with the WikiProject Medicine, and known to create some of the highest quality content on Wikipedia. I hope that the lessons I can learn from you that I will present to the academic audience will benefit both the WikiProject Medicine (improving your understanding of yourself and helping to promote it and attract new volunteers) and the wider world of medical volunteering and academia. Open access copy of the resulting research will be made available at WikiProject's Medicine upon the completion of the project.
All questions are optional. The survey is divided into 4 parts: 1 - Brief description of yourself; 2 - Questions about your volunteering; 3 - Questions about WikiProject Medicine and 4 - Questions about Wikipedia's coverage of medical topics.
Please note that by filling out this questionnaire, you consent to participate in this research. The survey is anonymous and all personal details relevant to your experience will be kept private and will not be transferred to any third party.
I appreciate your support of this research and thank you in advance for taking the time to participate and share your experiences! If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact me at my Wikipedia user page or through my email listed on the survey page (or by Wikipedia email this user function).