This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Hello Teblick, thank you for your efforts in reviewing new pages!
Backlog update:
The new page backlog is currently at 3819 unreviewed articles, with a further 6660 unreviewed redirects.
We are very close to eliminating the backlog completely; please help by reviewing a few extra articles each day!
New Year Backlog Drive results:
We made massive progress during the recent four weeks of the NPP Backlog Drive, during which the backlog reduced by nearly six thousand articles and the length of the backlog by almost 3 months!
General project update:
ACTRIAL
will end it's initial phase on the 14th of March. Our goal is to reduce the backlog significantly below the 90 day index point by the 14th of March. Please consider helping with this goal by reviewing a few additional pages a day.
Reviewing redirects is an important and necessary part of New Page Patrol. Please read the
RfD
.
If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. 20:32, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi Eddie! I saw on Talk:Mayor of the Town (radio program) you were concerned about potential administrative action being taken against you. Your care regarding staying well within the bounds of "da rulz" and your uncontroversial, careful, and collaborative editing style make you a delight to work with. I don't see where you were warned regarding edit warring (feel free to show me what diff caused you concern), but if something such as this troubles you, please feel free to ping me and I'll do my best to help out in a timely manner. You've earned it. I'm not on 24/7, but i'm usually "around." 78.26(spin me / revolutions)15:48, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
Ah yes. Teahouse.
more than 3 reverts", and you were at 2 before your self-revert, so I don't think you were close. Going to the talk page to establish consensus was the best move. I think consensus is clearly established to leave the title without the article "the", so further reverts without discussion by the IP should be reverted by others. Thanks for all you do here! 78.26(spin me / revolutions)16:30, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
Hello Eddie. I agree with what 78.26 wrote above and thank that editor for their kind words. I did not intend to give you a formal warning but rather more of an advisory and to point you to the relevant policy. I apologize that you perceived my comment as a warning. You did not violate any policy or guideline and I wanted to be sure that you didn't in the future. Keep up the good work, and please accept my apology. Cullen328Let's discuss it22:35, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
New Page Review Newsletter No.10
Hello Teblick, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!
(auto)confirmed users ended on 14 March. As expected, a greatly increased number of unsuitable articles and candidates for deletion are showing up in the feed
again, and the backlog has since increased already by ~30%. Please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day.
Paid editing
Now that ACTRIAL is inoperative pending discussion, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to
WP:COIN
if necessary.
Subject-specific notability guidelines
The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant
BEFORE
nominating an article for deletion.
Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for
While patrolling articles, if you find an editor that is particularly competent at creating quality new articles, and that user has created more than 25 articles (rather than stubs), consider nominating them for the 'Autopatrolled' user right HERE.
News
The next issue Wikipedia's newspaper
The Signpost has now been published after a long delay. There are some articles in it, including ACTRIAL wrap-up
that will be of special interest to New Page Reviewers. Don't hesitate to contribute to the comments sections. The Signpost is one of the best ways to stay up date with news and new developments - please consider subscribing to it. All editors of Wikipedia and associated projects are welcome to submit articles on any topic for consideration by the The Signpost's editorial team for the next issue.
Here's our first project-wide update. I hope you enjoy it...
Reboot
The WikiProject reboot has been a success: the new re-envisioned project is up and running, with new members, ongoing discussions about automation, design, and upkeep; maintained task queques; and updates to members, like this, the very first one!
As you know, there's a proposal to delete all portals. It started out looking pretty dismal for portals, with primarily posts supporting their demise. It turned out that the proposer didn't post a deletion notice on the very pages being nominated for deletion (a requirement for all deletion discussions). Once that was done, a flood of opposition came in and has apparently turned the tide.
RfCs generally run for 30 days. It started April 8th, and so it has about 14 more days to run its course.
The more work we can do during that time on the portals, the stronger the reasons for keeping them will be. And the more prepared we will be for any
MfDs
that follow the closing of the RfC.
AWB
?
You may be wondering why we asked for AWB experience in the member-sign-up list.
We are gearing up to do maintenance runs on the entire set of portals, and the more people we have who can use AWB, the better.
But we're not quite ready to start this yet.
To be able to use AWB on the portals, we first need to know what the end result needs to be. Like on the news sections, do we comment out the out-of-date ones, or do we place the code to activate the newsbot on those pages? That would require an assessment of WikiNews and its news generating performance (areas covered, volume in each area), etc.
Another area we're gearing up for, to do passes with AWB, are upgrades to the intro sections of portals. Many of these have static (copied/pasted) excerpts that go stale over time.
There are a few hundred existing portals that are missing from this list.
The list of missing entries, and instructions on what to do, can be found at
Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet
.
We need everybody's help on this. It's a big chore for one persons. But, many hands make light work. Please help chip away at this chore as much as you can. A little each day, form all of us, will get this done pretty quick.
Familiarize yourself with the portal system
In addition to browsing the portals in the 2 lists mentioned in the section above, you should take a look at the portal name space itself and what is in it.
In addition to the automation efforts mentioned above, we will be looking into how to automate the selection and display of alternating excerpts, and alternating pictures, for the various portal sections.
This new template is fantastic. I've added it to the intro sections of the portals on Australian cities (eg P:PER) and it works brilliantly. My compliments to its creators. It can probably also be used in other sections of many portals (eg "Selected article" and "Selected biography"), and, for that reason, will probably make the task of maintaining portals a great deal easier. Bahnfrend (talk) 09:02, 24 April 2018 (UTC)
I wrote a comment in the the April 26 section of the RfC explaining what we are up to. I liked the excerpt above so much, that I went back to my RfC posting, and inserted it.
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.
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!
at any time by removing the {{teahouse talkback}} template).
Your thread has been archived
Hi Teblick! You created a thread called "Age" vs. "aged" in infobox at
archived because there was no discussion for a few days. You can still find the archived discussion here. If you have any additional questions that weren't answered then, please create a new thread
WP:ACREQ has been implemented. The flow at the feed
has dropped back to the levels during the trial. However, the backlog is on the rise again so please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day; a backlog approaching 5,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.
Deletion tags
Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders. They require your further verification.
Backlog drive:
A backlog drive will take place from 10 through 20 June. Check out our talk page at
WT:NPR
for more details. NOTE: It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing. Despite our goal of reducing the backlog as much as possible, please do not rush while reviewing.
Editathons
There will be a large increase in the number of editathons in June. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the 'move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.
Paid editing - new policy
Now that ACTRIAL is ACREQ, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to
WP:COIN
if necessary. There is a new global WMF policy that requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.
Subject-specific notability guidelines
The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant
BEFORE
nominating an article for deletion.
Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for
organisations and companies
.
Not English
A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar with
WP:NPPNE
. Check in Google for the language and content, tag as required, then move to draft if they do have potential.
News
Development is underway by the WMF on upgrades to the New Pages Feed, in particular ORES features that will help to identify COPYVIOs, and more granular options for selecting articles to review.
The next issue of
The Signpost
has been published. The newspaper is one of the best ways to stay up to date with news and new developments. between our newsletters.
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
Fair enough; I've readded the networks, but put them on a separate line just to make it clear that they're not part of the name. Trivialist (talk) 01:48, 29 May 2018 (UTC)
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
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 2Pocket Sacramento Canal
Image 3US Bank Tower
Image 4Sacramento Memorial Auditorium
Image 5Sacramento from near the Sacramento River
Image 6Capitol Mall, seen from the Capitol
Image 7Tower Bridge
Image 8Old Town Sacramento, the capital as it looked like in 19th century
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
Hello Teblick, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!
We can see the light at the end of the tunnel: there are currently 2900 unreviewed articles, and 4000 unreviewed redirects.
Announcing the Backlog Elimination Drive!
As a final push, we have decided to run a backlog elimination drive from the 20th to the 30th of June.
Reviewers who review at least 50 articles or redirects will receive a Special Edition NPP Barnstar: . Those who review 100, 250, 500, or 1000 pages will also receive tiered awards: , , , .
Please do not be hasty, take your time and fully review each page. It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing.
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 Transhumanist11:05, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
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)
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.
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...)
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:
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months. (Purge)
Hello Teblick, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!
June backlog drive
Overall the June backlog drive was a success, reducing the last 3,000 or so to below 500. However, as expected, 90% of the patrolling was done by less than 10% of reviewers. Since the drive closed, the backlog has begun to rise sharply again and is back up to nearly 1,400 already. Please help reduce this total and keep it from raising further by reviewing some articles each day.
New technology, new rules
New features are shortly going to be added to the Special:NewPagesFeed which include a list of drafts for review, OTRS flags for COPYVIO, and more granular filter preferences. More details can be found at this page.
Probationary permissions: Now that PERM has been configured to allow expiry dates to all minor user rights, new NPR flag holders may sometimes be limited in the first instance to 6 months during which their work will be assessed for both quality and quantity of their reviews. This will allow admins to accord the right in borderline cases rather than make a flat out rejection.
Current reviewers who have had the flag for longer than 6 months but have not used the permissions since they were granted will have the flag removed, but may still request to have it granted again in the future, subject to the same probationary period, if they wish to become an active reviewer.
Editathons
Editathons will continue through August. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the 'move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.
The Signpost
The next issue of
the monthly magazine will be out soon. The newspaper is an excellent way to stay up to date with news and new developments between our newsletters. If you have special messages to be published, or if you would like to submit an article (one about NPR perhaps?), don't hesitate to contact the editorial team here
You didn't get a response. Did you find help finding out about the Vaudeville portal? I wouldn't know how to answer your question, but perhaps you could try again.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:59, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for asking, Vchimpanzee. I have been working on other things and haven't followed up on that question. I think I will see if I can get in touch with someone who is active in the Portals Project group. Maybe direct contact with someone there will help. I appreciate your interest. Eddie Blick (talk) 19:38, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
Portals tasks requests: presented in the newsletter below...
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 1
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 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 3The 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 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.
Selected images
Image 1A Monterey pine forest in Sydney, Australia (from Conifer)
Image 2A wildfire in Venezuela during a drought (from Wildfire)
Image 11National 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 14In 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 16Aerial 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 26Wildland firefighter working a brush fire in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, US (from Wildfire)
Image 27First growth or virgin forest near Mount Rainier, 1914 (from Old-growth forest)
Image 28
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
Image 34Wildfire 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 35Charred landscape following a crown fire in the North Cascades, United States (from Wildfire)
Image 36A Russian firefighter extinguishing a wildfire (from Wildfire)
Image 43The 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 45A 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)
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.
When you get a chance, could you please help me fix the reference section for actor Earl Holliman's page? It is a bit of mess and could use some of your aid since I'm having trouble fixing what someone else had done. Please and thank youI'm Listening to 80s Music (talk) 13:51, 7 August 2018 (UTC).
Hi Teblick! You created a thread called Use of "U.S." after city and state at
archived because there was no discussion for a few days. You can still find the archived discussion here. If you have any additional questions that weren't answered then, please create a new thread
As you know, in addition to being displayed on thousands of user pages, the
Tip of the day is also presented on some of the highest-traffic pages of the Wikipedia community, including the main help page, and the Community portal
.
One thing that the Tip of the day department needs on an ongoing basis is maintenance of its tips, in the form of proofreading.
One way you could help with that is to display the tip of the day at the bottom of your talk page, where you would regularly see it. Then, if you notice any problems, you could dip in and fix them.
We have a special tip template that displays the tip 2 days in advance (in order to precede all time zones), to assist in checking tips before they go "live". That template has a secondary function as well: it provides a place to post department notices, when needed.
Notice the reference at the top of this message. That is a nifty little trick, to hang anything desired at the bottom of a talk page. I've used it to display the template just mentioned. If you place that at the top of your talk page somewhere, the daily tip will always be displayed below the last message on the page.
Hello to all! I do not intend to write a regular peer review newsletter but there does occasionally come a time when those interested in contributing to peer review should be contacted, and now is one. I've mailed this out to everyone on the peer review volunteers list, and some editors that have contributed to past discussions. Apologies if I've left you off or contacted you and you didn't want it. Next time there is a newsletter / mass message it will be opt in (here), I'll talk about this below - but first:
THANK YOU! I want to thank you for your contributions and for volunteering on the list to help out at peer review. Thank you!
Peer review is useful! It's good to have an active peer review process. This is often the way that we help new or developing editors understand our ways, and improve the quality of their editing - so it fills an important and necessary gap between the teahouse (kindly introduction to our Wikiways) and GA and FA reviews (specific standards uphelp according to a set of quality criteria). And we should try and improve this process where possible (automate, simplify) so it can be used and maintained easily.
Updates
It can get quite lonely tinkering with peer review...
With a bit of effort we can renovate the place to look like this!
Update #1: the peer review volunteers list is changing
The list is here in case you've forgotten:
WP:PRV
. Kadane has kindly offered to create a bot that will ping editors on the volunteers list with unanswered reviews in their chosen subject areas every so often. You can choose the time interval by changing the "contact" parameter. Options are "never", "monthly", "quarterly", "halfyearly", and "annually". For example:
{{PRV|JohnSmith|History of engineering|contact=monthly}} - if placed in the "History" section, JohnSmith will receive an automatic update every month about unanswered peer reviews relating to history.
{{PRV|JaneSmith|Mesopotamian geography, Norwegian fjords|contact=annually}} - if placed in the "Geography" section, JaneSmith will receive an automatic update every yearly about unanswered peer reviews in the geography area.
We can at this stage only use the broad peer review section titles to guide what reviews you'd like, but that's better than nothing! You can also set an interest in multiple separate subject areas that will be updated at different times.
Update #2: a (lean) WikiProject Peer review
I don't think we need a WikiProject with a giant bureaucracy nor all sorts of whiz-bang features. However over the last few years I've found there are times when it would have been useful to have a list of editors that would like to contribute to discussions about the peer review process (e.g. instructions, layout, automation, simplification etc.). Also, it can get kind of lonely on the talk page as I am (correct me if I'm wrong) the only regular contributor, with most editors moving on after 6 - 12 months.
So, I've decided to create "WikiProject Peer review". If you'd like to contribute to the WikiProject, or make yourself available for future newsletters or contact, please add yourself to the list of members.
Update #3: advertising
We plan to do some advertising of peer review, to let editors know about it and how to volunteer to help, at a couple of different venues (Signpost, Village pump, Teahouse etc.) - but have been waiting until we get this bot + WikiProject set up so we have a way to help interested editors make more enduring contributions. So consider yourself forewarned!
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.
I happened upon Duane Thompson yesterday, and having a newspaper account, decided to see what I could do to add citations. Sometime next week, I will see if I can find a few more. I appreciate your edits. As all of my citations involve a paywall, it was helpful having an example to show me how to add that to my citations.
Anobium625 (talk) 15:19, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
Anobium625, You're welcome, and thanks for your note. Much of my work on Wikipedia involves actors and actresses from the past, so I'm glad to hear from a fellow editor with similar interests. I use my Newspapers.com account almost every day to search for material for Wikipedia articles. If you use a Windows-based computer, I can recommend a macro program that saves me a lot of time when I enter information in the "cite news" template.
Are you familiar with the Media History Digital Library? It often can provide useful information about entertainers from years gone by. When I entered "Duane Thompson" (including the quotation marks), it showed 492 hits. I haven't gone through them, so I don't know how many are useful and how many are not. You might want to check there when you have time.
I gather from the creation date of your user page that you are relatively new to Wikipedia. If I can help, please let me know. I've been doing this about 4 1/2 years now. There is still a lot that I don't know, but if you have questions, I'll try to answer them. Eddie Blick (talk) 20:02, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
Hello Teblick! Yes, I am just learning my way around Wikipedia. I began by writing an article about Constance Savery, an English author of (mostly) children's books. That taught me a lot! If you look at Constance Savery, you will find strong criticism about trivia, citations, and tone. I've pruned the article a great deal, added many citations, and removed my enthusiastic prose, but I am waiting with bated breath for an editor to come along and cut me to the bone.
When I am not working on Savery, I look at random Wiki articles, and when I find one that looks as if it would profit from my newspaper accounts, then I see what I can do. I created Project Harvest Moon from scratch, and I thought Duane Thompson ought to amenable to a thorough newspaper search, which she was. There were, as you noted, hundreds of hits, especially between 1923 and 1930 (and 1938). Besides those, there were far fewer hits, but the ones I found were useful.
Some of the newspaper information isn't as reliable as it ought to be, because some press agents have been busy on her behalf, so I took that information with a grain of salt. I have seen two accounts of her birth, neither well documented, and the IMDB description of "Up and at 'Em" doesn't mention her, while another account did. I didn't trust, and didn't quote, either.
Your approach sounds good, Anobium625. When I'm not creating articles for Wikipedia, I often try to add information (or citations for existing information) to existing articles. Newspapers.com often works well for that. Since you mentioned IMDB, I will add that it is not considered a reliable source for use in citations on Wikipedia (even though it often appears in citations). It's good that you didn't use IMDB in the situation that you mentioned. Eddie Blick (talk) 20:56, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
Hello Teblick. I've added Newspapers.com reference to all my Duane Thompson citations. It was a bit tedious, but not difficult. I welcome any suggestions. There's one omission that I'd like to correct. A typical reference begins with the author's name. I cheated and added Walter Winchell's name to the title of his column, but there is probably a proper way with a format like "|author:Walter Winchell ". Can you help? Thanks in advance. Eric. Anobium625 (talk) 01:31, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
NPR Newsletter No.13 18 September 2018
Hello Teblick, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!
The New Page Feed currently has 2700 unreviewed articles, up from just 500 at the start of July. For a while we were falling behind by an average of about 40 articles per day, but we have stabilised more recently. Please review some articles from the back of the queue if you can (Sort by: 'Oldest' at Special:NewPagesFeed), as we are very close to having articles older than one month.
Project news
The New Page Feed now has a new "Articles for Creation" option which will show drafts instead of articles in the feed, this shouldn't impact NPP activities and is part of the WMF's AfC Improvement Project.
As part of this project, the feed will have some larger updates to functionality next month. Specifically, ORES predictions will be built in, which will automatically flag articles for potential issues such as vandalism or spam. Copyright violation detection will also be added to the new page feed. See the projects's talk page for more info.
, which summarizes existing RfCs or RSN discussions about regularly used sources.
Moving to Draft and Page Mover
Some unsuitable new articles can be best reviewed by moving them to the draft space, but reviewers need to do this carefully and sparingly. It is most useful for topics that look like they might have promise, but where the article as written would be unlikely to survive AfD. If the article can be easily fixed, or if the only issue is a lack of sourcing that is easily accessible, tagging or adding sources yourself is preferable. If sources do not appear to be available and the topic does not appear to be notable, tagging for deletion is preferable (PROD/AfD/CSD as appropriate). See additional guidance at
WP:DRAFTIFY
.
If the user moves the draft back to mainspace, or recreates it in mainspace, please do not re-draftify the article (although swapping it to maintain the page history may be advisable in the case of copy-paste moves). AfC is optional except for editors with a clear
conflict of interest
.
Articles that have been created in contravention of our
COI
might also be draftified at discretion.
The best tool for draftification is
CSD R2
, but in some cases it might be better to make this a redirect to a different page instead.
The
Requested Moves
. Only reviewers who are very experienced and are also very active reviewers are likely to be granted it solely for NPP activities.
List of other useful scripts for New Page Reviewing
Twinkle provides a lot of the same functionality as the page curation tools, and some reviewers prefer to use the Twinkle tools for some/all tasks. It can be activated simply in the gadgets section of 'preferences'. There are also a lot of options available at the Twinkle preferences panel after you install the gadget.
In terms of other gadgets for NPR, HotCat is worth turning on. It allows you to easily add, remove, and change categories on a page, with name suggestions.
MoreMenu also adds a bunch of very useful links for diagnosing and fixing page issues.
User:Equazcion/ScriptInstaller.js(info): Installing scripts doesn't have to be complicated. Go to your common.js and copy importScript( 'User:Equazcion/ScriptInstaller.js' ); into an empty line, now you can install all other scripts with the click of a button from the script page! (Note you need to be at the ".js" page for the script for the install button to appear, not the information page)
info
): Creates a scrolling new pages list at the left side of the page. You can change the number of pages shown by adding the following to the next line on your common.js page (immediately after the line importing this script): npp_num_pages=20; (Recommended 20, but you can use any number from 1 to 50).
info
): Is requesting revdel complicated and time consuming? This script helps simplify the process. Just have the Copyvio source URL and go to the history page and collect your diff IDs and you can drop them into the script Popups and it will create a revdel request for you.
User:Evad37/rater.js(info): A fantastic tool for adding WikiProject templates to article talk pages. If you add: rater_autostartNamespaces = 0; to the next line on your common.js, the prompt will pop up automatically if a page has no Wikiproject templates on the talk page (note: this can be a bit annoying if you review redirects or dab pages commonly).
Hi Teblick! You created a thread called Stub template for dancer? at
archived because there was no discussion for a few days. You can still find the archived discussion here. If you have any additional questions that weren't answered then, please create a new thread
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?
Hi there, Teblick, and welcome to Women in Red. I see you have already created a number of biographies about actresses and entertainers. I hope there will be many more. Happy editing!--Ipigott (talk) 10:49, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
October 2018 at Women in Red
Please join us... We have four new topics for Women in Red's worldwide online editathons in October!
Hello. You seem to have a comprehensive bibliography about Edythe Wright and as your next project I would like you to expand on the Patricia Farr article. Virtually nothing is known about this actress, and it would be greatly appreciated if you could contribute to it. Akld guy (talk) 04:24, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
Akld guy, Thanks for noticing my additions to the Edythe Wright article. I happened to spot that article a few days ago and notice its need for citations at the time. I may add a little more to it, but I have about exhausted my resources with regard to her. I am not familiar with Patricia Farr, but I will see if I can find anything to add to her biography. Eddie Blick (talk) 12:51, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
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.
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months.
Hello Teblick, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!
Backlog
As of 21 October 2018[update], there are 3650 unreviewed articles and the backlog now stretches back 51 days.
Community Wishlist Proposal
There is currently an ongoing discussion regarding the drafting of a Community Wishlist Proposal for the purpose of requesting bug fixes and missing/useful features to be added to the New Page Feed and Curation Toolbar.
Please join the conversation as we only have until 29 October to draft this proposal!
Project updates
ORES predictions are now built-in to the feed. These automatically predict the class of an article as well as whether it may be spam, vandalism, or an attack page, and can be filtered by these criteria now allowing reviewers to better target articles that they prefer to review.
There are now tools being tested to automatically detect copyright violations in the feed. This detector may not be accurate all the time, though, so it shouldn't be relied on 100% and will only start working on new revisions to pages, not older pages in the backlog.
Hi Teblick! You created a thread called Questionable item on talk page at
archived because there was no discussion for a few days. You can still find the archived discussion here. If you have any additional questions that weren't answered then, please create a new thread
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.
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months.
Hello Teblick,
Community Wishlist Survey – NPP needs you – Vote NOW
Community Wishlist Voting takes place 16 to 30 November for the Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements, and other software requests. The NPP community is hoping for a good turnout in support of the requests to Santa for the tools we need. This is very important as we have been asking the Foundation for these upgrades for 4 years.
If this proposal does not make it into the top ten, it is likely that the tools will be given no support at all for the foreseeable future. So please put in a vote today.
We are counting on significant support not only from our own ranks, but from everyone who is concerned with maintaining a Wikipedia that is free of vandalism, promotion, flagrant financial exploitation and other pollution.
is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 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.
I tried using the Refill tool to spruce up some new sources on Earl Holliman's Wiki but the system gets booting me out and not letting me redo them. When you can could you please help tweek them for me (it's only 2, it won't take long). Thank you so much and I hope you will enjoy a very nice Holiday Season. Take care!I'm Listening to 80s Music (talk) 14:49, 23 November 2018 (UTC)
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).
SL93, You are right, and I was wrong. My reason did not apply to an unvalidated name. That was my mistake entirely. Should the birth name be removed from the infobox so that someone else does not make the same error that I did? Eddie Blick (talk) 02:28, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
On 14 December 2018, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Kate McComb, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that Kate McComb did not decide to become a professional stage actress until she was 52 years old? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Kate McComb. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, Kate McComb), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.
This year's award for the Reviewer of the Year goes to Onel5969. Around on Wikipedia since 2011, their staggering number of 26,554reviews over the past twelve months makes them, together with an additional total of 275,285edits, one of Wikipedia's most prolific users.
Thanks are also extended for their work to JTtheOG (15,059 reviews), Boleyn (12,760reviews), Cwmhiraeth (9,001reviews), Semmendinger (8,440reviews), PRehse (8,092reviews), Arthistorian1977 (5,306reviews), Abishe (4,153 reviews), Barkeep49 (4,016reviews), and Elmidae (3,615reviews). Cwmhiraeth, Semmendinger, Barkeep49, and Elmidae have been New Page Reviewers for less than a year — Barkeep49 for only sevenmonths, while Boleyn, with an edit count of 250,000 since she joined Wikipedia in 2008, has been a bastion of New Page Patrol for many years.
The backlog is now approaching 5,000, and still rising. There are around 640holders of the NPR flag, most of whom appear to be inactive. The 10% of the reviewers who do 90% of the work could do with some support especially as some of them are now taking a well deserved break.
Really good news - NPR wins the Community Wishlist Survey 2019
At #1 position, the Community Wishlist poll closed on 3December with a resounding success for NPP, reminding the WMF and the volunteer communities just how critical NPP is to maintaining a clean encyclopedia and the need for improved tools to do it. A big 'thank you' to everyone who supported the NPP proposals. See the results.
Training video
Due to a number of changes having been made to the feed since this three-minutevideo was created, we have been asked by the WMF for feedback on the video with a view to getting it brought up to date to reflect the new features of the system. Please leave your comments here, particularly mentioning how helpful you find it for new reviewers.
If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here.
Progress of the project has been generally delayed since September due to development issues (more bitrot than expected, some of the code just being genuinely confusing, etc) and personal injury (I suffered a concussion in October and was out of commission for almost two months as a result).
I currently expect to be putting out a proper call for CollaborationKit pilots in January/February, with estimated deployment in February/March if things don't go horribly wrong (they will, though, don't worry). As a part of that, I will properly update the page and send out announcement and reach out to all projects already signed up as pilots for WikiProject X in general, at which point those (still) interested can volunteer specifically to test the CollaborationKit extension.
Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Pilots was originally created for the first WikiProject X prototype, and given this is where the project has since gone, it's only logical to continue to use it. While I haven't yet updated the page to properly reflect this:
If you want to add your project to this page now, feel free. Just bear in mind that more information what to actually expect will be added later/included in the announcement, because by then I will have a much better idea myself.
Until then, you can find me in my corner working on making the CollaborationKit code do what we want and not just what we told it, per the workboard.
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.
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Would you like to get more involved, find some new friends, or just lend a helping hand? The
Welcoming Committee is a great way to contribute. There are no requirements for membership (other than the fact that you must be extra nice to newcomers) and it's wikifun