User talk:Mercurywoodrose/Archive13

Hi Friend

I'm not sure why you're unhappy; don't get mad and leave. Take some time, relax, explain what's the matter... Not having done a "BEFORE" on Titstare is really small potatoes and I hope that I haven't done anything to offend you. I don't think that I have... Anyway, take a couple days off if that's what it takes and then vocalize what's the matter. Things that are broken can't be fixed if they're tossed in the dump. Best regards, —Tim /// Carrite (talk) 19:58, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

• I looked at that AfD and see no reason not to close it as a SNOW keep, which is what I just did. However, I have no issue with the thing having been nominated in the first place (shit happens), and accusations about a "pattern" of bad nominations (Doncram) or "Trigger-happy deletionism" (Wikidemon) are expressions of bad taste and bad faith, and those editors appear to have never read WP:AGF or WP:NPA. Wikidemon and Doncram, who in my opinion have no need to visit this talk page unless they wish to offer an apology, are advised to seek more appropriate fora and present evidence--or, of course, they can just keep those comments to themselves. Take it easy, Mercurywoodrose. Drmies (talk) 03:57, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

How exactly is that an accusation of bad faith? If someone is going to hastily invoke an administrative process to oppose and undo other editors' work, they shouldn't have a thin skin about the process they use. That's a recurring problem at AfD. I do apologize for being too harsh without considering the source. I meant to register annoyance, not to make anyone feel bad. I'll keep an eye out for MWR and try to be more kind. Cool username, BTW. - Wikidemon (talk) 19:14, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words above, added as i was typing below. the strong content below can hopefully be seen as my blowing off steam. thanks for the name compliment too. Also, it was more the other editor, who i think saw a pattern in other edits of mine, so your comment was to me more of a straw on the camels back.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 19:30, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

Because i DONT have a motherfucking pattern of doing so. and its OK to AFD something that you honestly believe is nonnotable, even if the end result is a snow keep. there is a big difference between being incorrect in one's estimate of notability (which i admit to assuming that an article on the app would be the only criteria, that the controversy is the bigger topic), or even accidentally or mistakenly skipping a step (mea culpa on not checking for more refs), and deliberately misusing the AFD process. if i AM actually misusing the AFD process, perhaps an editor would be kind enough to point it out privately on my talk page before assuming bad faith and labelling me as such at an AFD. i have considered, off and on, becoming an admin. my understanding of adminship is the review is severe, and any evidence of inappropriate editing is grounds for denial. I now have this on my record, and i suspect that i will never be allowed to become an admin, based on this accusation. I am unfortunately used to head trips from my professional life (not coworkers, mind you), but i really dont need that here. I am going to give myself an approximate 6 month break on making or commenting on AFD's, to show good faith and to avoid more discomfort, though i admit i just afd'd the socal portal, which i hope was done properly. I do have a fair edit history here and at the commons, with few reversions, so i am not a newcomer. I still do feel like my editing style could be ravaged at any time, for any reason, with no consideration of myself as a person, and I have one other incident where an admin blatantly used ownership to deny my edits, and pretended they didnt own anything, as good a display of a personality disordered, power hungry asshole as i have encountered anywhere, with few others commenting on their behaviors.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 19:28, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

I have been thinking about this for the past few days, and I think you are exhibiting a lot of qualities that are worthy and noble in a potential admin. You are thoughtful, sensitive, you care, you want to do the right thing. I am far from the administrative nomination process, I think the whole thing is pretty flawed. I know I would make an excellent admin myself, but I could never win a confirmation. I've been involved in too many policy debates, fought too many trolls, stood up too many times. Nobody would ever fault you, in an administrative appointment, for making a bad deletion nomination. I don't think anyone expects admins to be right all the time, they just have to be fair, and respectful, and thoughtful, and sincere. If someone ever said you were unfit because you made a bad process nomination you could disarm them completely by saying what you've said here, aw, gee, I'm willing to listen, I respect your point, I was not trying to steamroll you. Let's have a nice chat. I'm learning. Your "I DONT have a motherfucking" comment above is very honest but that's a temperament you can't take into the admin corps. When you carry the mop as they say, you will find many floors that do not want to be scrubbed. They will lash out, they will attack you, they will play games and create fake accounts, they will accuse you of a lot of things. What the community is looking for in admins, I think, isn't someone who will fight back, but someone who is above the fight. Drmies is a very well-respected admin of long standing around here, which means that his (her?) opinions carry some weight, but I think they went too far to be nice to you — cheering you up, as they should, at the expense of saying I was acting in bad faith or accusing you of that. Everything here leaves a trace. Nobody's perfect. Anyway, feel free to stop by my page anytime with a request, and if you are ever nominated for admin I'll support it. If you think an article I create is not notable, best ask me first and I may reconsider. You know how it is, any editor who creates a new article feels bad when it is quickly criticized. After 1000+ articles I know how to defend mine so sorry that I snapped at you in that way. Best, and happy editing! - Wikidemon (talk) 06:56, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Hey, I wanna say I'm sorry for causing you a bad day and more 2.5 years ago, when I made unfair accusation against you in that AFD. I just happened to find my way to Drmies' Talk page, and found my way to a side conversation that happened there back then, and then I came to check to see if you were still active, and I am glad to see that you are. I appreciated Drmies comment to you back then, and thanked them, but I think back then that I figured it was better I didn't say anything here. I do apologize now, if I may. Sincerely, --doncram 04:20, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

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Speedy deletion contested: A M High School

Hello Mercurywoodrose. I am just letting you know that I contested the speedy deletion of A M High School, a page you tagged for speedy deletion, because of the following concern: A7 does not apply to schools. Thank you. Eastmain (talk • contribs) 04:27, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

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A cookie for you!

Well said. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:50, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of California Massage Therapy Council

The article California Massage Therapy Council has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Nonnotable local authority of no significance or academic value, no refs other than organization

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

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Talkback

Hello, Mercurywoodrose. You have new messages at Northamerica1000's talk page.
Message added 06:28, 3 September 2014 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

NorthAmerica¹⁰⁰⁰ 06:28, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

About proof of notability

Thank you for adding the expansion tag for LGBT culture in San Francisco. I agree that the article needs to be expanded. However I don't think the article is in danger of deletion, nor is it in danger of merging:

• 1. The "further reading" is of course a resource to people who want to build the article, but it is also more or less a way of saying: Hi! This subject is notable. Please don't do an AFD, because the existence of these sources are proof of notability. Please don't attempt a merge either!
• 2. It's common sense in the western world that "San Francisco is the center of the gay community" so I feel like the bare minimum was needed to establish this subject: I would prefer to devote more time and energy to establishing lesser-known/more obscure articles, things that are not obvious through common sense. As a longtime editor I understand the sourcing requirements, WP:V, and the like. But I also believe other editors should have a sense of common sense. By following common sense, the editor should understand that it is unreasonable to suggest a merge or an AFD. If either one is tried, the natural outcome would be keeping the article.

Having said that I will look for a "statement of notability" such as "ABC, a journalist at DEF, said ...." WhisperToMe (talk) 15:50, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Hopefully what I find in the Google Books editions of The Meaning of Gay: Interaction, Publicity, and Community among Homosexual Men in 1960s San Francisco will make the subject's notability clear WhisperToMe (talk) 16:00, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Okay, I found a statement of notability from Google Books. Hopefully that will put any concerns to rest :) WhisperToMe (talk) 16:31, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I see. I wonder if anybody on Wikipedia has done studies on whether undeveloped stubs actually turn off readers.

Back when I started on Wikipedia in 2003 the idea is that a small stub is supposed to be inviting to the reader, who can take it and add more. A small stub is like a seed and an encouragement of other authors to help it grow. I'm afraid that if it just starts as a sub-section of "San Francisco" (which is already very, very large) other less experienced editors won't understand that it's a viable subject. I generally prefer to start the article ASAP and only keep things in my userpage as a draft if I'm unsure that the article meets notability standards.

I think the amount of books that are specifically about the LGBT culture in San Francisco would actually go against the idea of merging temporarily because it's obvious that the subject is viable as a standalone article. Maybe I'm more of an old-school editor but I prefer starting a stub ASAP and inviting others to complete it later, though I do work on the article as it's in the mainspace. WhisperToMe (talk) 20:01, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I believe that small stubs are a wonderful part of WP, and essential to its development. what i find problematic is when an obviously huge topic has a very skeletal article, which, when compared to what could be written, is so sparse as to be useless. nearly everyone on earth knows that sf has a lgbt community, and that harvey milk was part of it. I think WP has evolved such that highly notable topics need at the start to at least address the basics, and its a bit of a disservice to have something too sparse be representative of the topic. I think this particular topic is a gross oversight, that should have been dealt with years ago, but i guess no one really wanted to try. I will definitely help if i feel inspired (i rewrote the lede a bit). and i dont think anyone will fault you for trying. if this was built up to about 5 k in size, with links to major topics, it would be fine in articlespace. your or i could knock that out in about a day. go ahead, make my day:).Mercurywoodrose (talk) 20:07, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

PS regarding your concern that editors at the SF aticle might think its not a notable topic for a subsection. any such editors there would have their heads up their butts (so far as i know this is not a sexual practice supported by the lgbt community). i wouldnt worry about that. I think people will be flabbergasted if they suddenly realize there is not article about this yet. the only concern would be whether even a subsection can begin to address it adequately prior to full article. it needs at least 50k or so be even a "c" class article, and i wouild say at least 25k for start class, so it will never remain as a subsection, but should be a "main article" link only, not a "see also" link, with at MOST a single sentence like the lede i just created for the article.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 20:12, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I'll keep everything here. Anyway, thank you for your help! I think a lot of the big topics had already been started which is why it's rare to encounter such a big subject with a small stub. Anyway I found some articles which should help add some meat to the bones :) - Keep your eyes peeled while I work some magic WhisperToMe (talk) 20:21, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

The article's now at about 8,000 bytes WhisperToMe (talk) 18:40, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

It's now at 17,486 bytes and an editor went ahead and removed the stub tag. WhisperToMe (talk) 11:16, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I made it Start class. its about as good as it possibly could be with one editor and this short a history. I expect it to easily expand, as im sure you intend. i added it to the San Francisco article as a main article link in a subsection on lgbt in the city, which i created (that was just me adding subsection breakers or whatever they are called, no real editing), as its definitely useful now. I hope to edit some myself, but you definitely dont need my help. your writing style is very matter of fact, not promotional, which i also try to aspire to.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 15:04, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. :) I do think that using a dispassionate editing style is perhaps the most important thing in Wikipedia editing. I did intend for the article to not only to be expanded, but for it to link to other "LGBT in city" type articles (so they get more exposure) and to encourage and inspire Wikipedians to start their own "LGBT in city" articles. WhisperToMe (talk) 02:55, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

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Hispanic and Latinos task force

I'm having a bit of problem with Hispanic and Latin American task force. After merging both Latinos and Mexican-Americans projects with WikiProject United States. But the problem I'm having is getting both task forces integrated into the WikiProject United States banner (see the talk page). Could you please help me out? Erick (talk) 20:47, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

Hello again Mercurywoodrose. I got them to update the US project template so the Hispanic / Latino and Mexican-American task forces are now included. Cheers! Erick (talk) 02:57, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

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UC Jazz

Hi Mercurywoodrose! Re the Members of UC Jazz template, the people you deleted may not be notable enough for wiki pages but they are prominent alums of the jazz program and well known in varoius jazz circles. For ex., Susan Muscarella is founder and director of the Jazz School in Berkeley. Bill Aron is founder, director, and player with the San Francisco Jazz Quartet (if I rmember the name right), Paul Giorsetto is the frst call trumpet in Honolulu (again if memory serves), Linda Goldstein became the manager for numerous heavy duty musicians, etc. I didn]t include James Henson who was on a board of California educators in music. To be notable in WP you need articles written about you, right?, but as a musician it's your discography, track record, etc., and of the thousands of UC Jazz alum these folks are among the most prominent, so that's why I put them in. Many lists have people lacking WP pages, but are still prominent enough to deserve listing. I agree with your deletion of "Prominent" but I put it in to distringuish these from the many alum. I'm new here and am not going to fight over this and make a scene but I think the names I put in deserve to be included, whether or not they have a WP page. Thanks. RhymesWithBasie. oops...here's my tilde. RhymesWithBasie (talk) 23:03, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

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anonymous (street meat)

Hi. Could this page be restored? Also the date on. "Old Havana and the Great Pimp of San Isidro" was changed from 2013 to 2014 due to significant changes in sound design and DCP formatting

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Seeking neutral 3rd parties for UC Berkeley COI content

Hi, Mercurywoodrose!

You may remember me as the Wikipedian who was a COI editor working on histories of NRHP buildings on the UC Berkeley campus. The same people I worked with got in contact with me recently and hired me to walk one of their coworkers, Amy Hamaoui, through ethical editing as a COI editor. She is currently working on content for the article on former Chancellor Robert Birgeneau in her sandbox. I'm trying to keep my involvement very minimal, having given her a general intro to editing, a walkthrough on COI editor expectations, as well as preliminary language bias editing in her sandbox content. We're now looking for neutral 3rd party editors who could give her content a more thorough looking-over, and who would be willing to incorporate acceptable sandbox contributions into mainspace. Would you or any editor you know potentially be interested in helping?

Be well! -Eekiv 06:19, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 04 February 2015

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The Signpost: 11 February 2015

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The Signpost: 18 February 2015

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The Signpost: 25 February 2015

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The Signpost: 25 February 2015

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The Signpost: 04 March 2015

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The Signpost: 11 March 2015

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The Signpost: 18 March 2015

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.

barnstar

		The Original Barnstar
		this barnstar is awarded to Mercurywoodrose for his work on Operation_Sea-Spray Namecheapblues (talk) 18:52, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost – Volume 11, Issue 12 – 25 March 2015

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The Signpost, 1 April 2015

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Speedy deletion nomination of Category:American actors of Chinese descent

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A tag has been placed on Category:American actors of Chinese descent, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G4 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be a repost of material that was previously deleted following a deletion debate, such as at articles for deletion. Under the specified criteria, where an article has substantially identical content to that of an article deleted after debate, and any changes in the content do not address the reasons for which the material was previously deleted, it may be deleted at any time.

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The Signpost: 01 April 2015

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Disputed non-free use rationale for File:IBM in atoms.gif

Thank you for uploading File:IBM in atoms.gif. However, there is a concern that the rationale provided for using this file on Wikipedia may not meet the criteria required by Wikipedia:Non-free content. This can be corrected by going to the file description page and adding or clarifying the reason why the file qualifies under this policy. Adding and completing one of the templates available from Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline is an easy way to ensure that your file is in compliance with Wikipedia policy. Please be aware that a non-free use rationale is not the same as an image copyright tag; descriptions for files used under the non-free content policy require both a copyright tag and a non-free use rationale.

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The Signpost: 08 April 2015

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The Signpost: 15 April 2015

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The Signpost: 22 April 2015

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The Signpost: 29 April 2015

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Nomination of Real People Press for deletion

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Nomination of World Coffee Research for deletion

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The Signpost: 06 May 2015

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The Signpost: 13 May 2015

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The Signpost: 20 May 2015

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Nomination of New Mexican English for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article New Mexican English is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

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The Signpost: 03 June 2015

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Reference errors on 6 June

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The Signpost: 10 June 2015

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The Signpost: 17 June 2015

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The Signpost: 24 June 2015

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The Signpost: 01 July 2015

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The Signpost: 08 July 2015

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The Signpost: 15 July 2015

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The Signpost: 22 July 2015

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The Signpost: 29 July 2015

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The Signpost: 05 August 2015

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Orphaned non-free image File:Tricyclesum2007.jpg

⚠

Thanks for uploading File:Tricyclesum2007.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 02:42, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 12 August 2015

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The Signpost: 19 August 2015

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The Signpost: 26 August 2015

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The Signpost: 02 September 2015

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Philadelphia basement kidnapping

Apparently Linda Weston has plead guilty.

" ... she agreed to accept a life term plus 80 years after admitting to all 196 federal counts filed against her including charges of murder, kidnapping, sex trafficking, hate crimes, forced labor, and benefits fraud." [1]. philly.com. Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Just FYI. Regards 220 of ^Borg 11:33, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 09 September 2015

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The Signpost: 16 September 2015

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The Signpost: 23 September 2015

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The Signpost: 30 September 2015

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INCORRECT BIRTHDATE ON GOOGLE Hi - things are tough -- Mercury Woodrose, please help me remove the incorrect birthdate information from the website which Google claims exists -- please it's affecting my ability to get work. Thank you and love -- MMig (talk) 20:38, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of File:Golden Gate Bridge Yang Ming Line.jpg

A tag has been placed on File:Golden Gate Bridge Yang Ming Line.jpg requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section F2 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is an image page for a missing or corrupt image or an empty image description page for a Commons-hosted image.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Stefan2 (talk) 17:23, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

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The Signpost: 14 October 2015

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The Signpost: 28 October 2015

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Culture and Aviation Safety

Hello, I recently was setting up the page of Culture and Aviation history, but you said "a brief thesis, not an encyc. article", do you have any suggestions on how to fix it? Thank you! Wlin72 (talk) 20:04, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

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November 2015 newsletter

The WikiProject Food and Drink Newsletter Volume III, no. 3, September–November 2015 Note: To opt out from receiving future newsletters, please click here for instructions.
Project News Potential upcoming project page changes by WikiProject X. Category discussions at CfD. (more below) WikiProject X may begin pilot testing to refine WikiProject Food and Drink's project's pages. A recent discussion regarding this occurred at the project talk page here. During September–October 2015, several food and drink categories have been discussed at Categories for discussion. Notices for these discussions are sometimes posted at the project's talk page. Notice about a new discussion was recently posted at the project talk page on 8 November 2015. There are presently 3,658 unassessed Food and drink articles. Assistance in reducing this number would be appreciated. Please see the project's Tasks and To do sections for project and article tasks, and please update the lists by adding new entries and removing resolved or outdated ones. Recent Good article nominations are listed below. 04 Nov 2015 – Esparza's (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Another Believer (t · c); see discussion 03 Nov 2015 – Eagle Boys (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Clare. (t · c); see discussion 22 Oct 2015 – Grodziskie (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Neil916 (t · c); see discussion 18 Oct 2015 – Copia (museum) (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Ɱ (t · c); see discussion 18 Oct 2015 – Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Chiswick Chap (t · c); see discussion 14 Oct 2015 – The Culinary Institute of America (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Ɱ (t · c); see discussion 14 Oct 2015 – The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Ɱ (t · c); see discussion Article alerts Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Article alerts Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Curabitur pretium tincidunt lacus. Nulla gravida orci a odio. Nullam varius, turpis et commodo pharetra, est eros bibendum elit, nec luctus magna felis sollicitudin mauris. Integer in mauris eu nibh euismod gravida. Duis ac tellus et risus vulputate vehicula. Donec lobortis risus a elit. Etiam tempor. Ut ullamcorper, ligula eu tempor congue, eros est euismod turpis, id tincidunt sapien risus a quam. Maecenas fermentum consequat mi. Donec fermentum. Pellentesque malesuada nulla a mi. Duis sapien sem, aliquet nec, commodo eget, consequat quis, neque. Aliquam faucibus, elit ut dictum aliquet, felis nisl adipiscing sapien, sed malesuada diam lacus eget erat. Cras mollis scelerisque nunc. Nullam arcu. Aliquam consequat. Curabitur augue lorem, dapibus quis, laoreet et, pretium ac, nisi. Aenean magna nisl, mollis quis, molestie eu, feugiat in, orci. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Fusce convallis, mauris imperdiet gravida bibendum, nisl turpis suscipit mauris, sed placerat ipsum urna sed risus. In convallis tellus a mauris. Curabitur non elit ut libero tristique sodales. Mauris a lacus. Donec mattis semper leo. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Vivamus facilisis diam at odio. Mauris dictum, nisi eget consequat elementum, lacus ligula molestie metus, non feugiat orci magna ac sem. Donec turpis. Donec vitae metus. Morbi tristique neque eu mauris. Quisque gravida ipsum non sapien. Proin turpis lacus, scelerisque vitae, elementum at, lobortis ac, quam. Aliquam dictum eleifend risus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Etiam sit amet diam. Suspendisse odio. Suspendisse nunc. In semper bibendum libero. Proin nonummy, lacus eget pulvinar lacinia, pede felis dignissim leo, vitae tristique magna lacus sit amet eros. Nullam ornare. Praesent odio ligula, dapibus sed, tincidunt eget, dictum ac, nibh. Nam quis lacus. Nunc eleifend molestie velit. Morbi lobortis quam eu velit. Donec euismod vestibulum massa. Donec non lectus. Aliquam commodo lacus sit amet nulla. Cras dignissim elit et augue. Nullam non diam. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Aenean vestibulum. Sed lobortis elit quis lectus. Nunc sed lacus at augue bibendum dapibus.	Feel free to welcome the new members who have recently joined the project. Onel5969 Valoem DangerousJXD The project currently has 83 active members. Some recent food and drink new articles and content: Oktoberfest tents (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Cho Sang-woo (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Amira Nature Foods (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Category:Drinking establishments on the National Register of Historic Places by state (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)> Category:Edible fish by habitat (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Category:Euryhaline edible fish (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Category:Freshwater edible fish (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Almond production in Afghanistan (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Anti-café (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Jāņi cheese (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Diablo sandwich (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Hill Farmstead Brewery (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Hong Kong Food Festival (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Telstar (apple) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Dumelow's Seedling (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Hygrophoropsis mangenotii (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Goat water (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Landsberger Reinette (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Food waste recycling in Hong Kong (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) Category:Marine edible fish (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Category:Fermented dairy products (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Category:Marine edible molluscs (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) More new articles... Also see versions in the bot-generated list's Revision history for additional articles (e.g. 1 November 2015, 15 October 2015, 1 October 2015, etc.). Past newsletters
Food and drink articles by quality and importance There are currently 33,530 articles attributed to the project, including 10,438 stubs. There are 35 articles at Featured article class, 160 are at Good article class and 2 are at Featured list class. Article statistics Food and Drink WikiProject article assessment Food and drink articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total FA 7 13 28 48 FL 2 1 3 FM 139 139 GA 13 24 73 249 5 364 B 54 227 332 583 57 1,253 C 79 388 951 2,702 463 4,583 Start 23 322 1,643 9,818 5 3,787 15,598 Stub 1 26 553 7,811 1 5,038 13,430 List 9 69 108 467 23 271 947 Category 9 1 2 7,523 7,535 Disambig 7 149 156 File 2,999 2,999 Portal 614 614 Project 384 384 Redirect 10 70 534 2,676 3,290 Template 1 946 947 Other 3 187 190 Assessed 179 1,085 3,744 22,205 15,646 9,621 52,480 Unassessed 23 1,908 1,931 Total 179 1,085 3,744 22,228 15,646 11,529 54,411 WikiWork factors (?) ω = 181,378 Ω = 5.14 Assessment log and Guide to Assessment Help on Editing and Sourcing Articles

  – Sent by Northamerica1000 using mass messaging on 23:45, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 11 November 2015

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The Signpost: 18 November 2015

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Disambiguation link notification for November 22

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited My Wife's Lovers, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Buena Vista, California. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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Bert Schwarz

I received the message that this page was requested for speedy deletion. Is this due to lack of content? I'm in the process of gathering more sources to expand on this subject so it will provide a more informative background on the subject and his importance. Due to the fact that his name already appeared on a page for 1929 all American football team, I wanted to expand on his personal history. If I can have an additional week I will provide the necessary bio and sources needed for his page and significance. Since others from the 1929 all American football team have their own pages, I feel it's only fair to show Bert Schwarz's significance on his own page as well. Thank you. Diana Diana2thsd (talk) 02:45, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

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You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, 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. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:33, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 November 2015

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Proposed deletion of Life in Balance

The article Life in Balance has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Almost even speedy material as my searches found nothing better than some local news passing mentions, not enough for a currently better article. All in all, this has hardly improved for the better since starting in April 2005.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. SwisterTwister talk 22:55, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

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The Signpost: 09 December 2015

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The Signpost: 16 December 2015

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The Signpost: 30 December 2015

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The Signpost: 06 January 2016

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The Signpost: 13 January 2016

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The Signpost: 20 January 2016

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The Signpost: 27 January 2016

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The Signpost: 03 February 2016

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Orphaned non-free image File:Barlowesgtextraterrestrialscvr.jpg

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The Signpost: 10 February 2016

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The Signpost: 17 February 2016

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Women's History Month worldwide online edit-a-thon

You are invited...
	Women's History Month worldwide online edit-a-thon Host: Women in Red Sponsor: Art+Feminism 1 to 31 March 2016

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Wikiproject Food and Drink Newsletter – March 2016

The WikiProject Food and Drink Newsletter Volume III, no. 4, March 2016 Note: To opt out from receiving future newsletters, please click here for instructions.
Project News Food- and drink-related CfD discussions, Cat meat, New Liquor portal, Recent Good article promotions and Unassessed articles. (more information below) Many project-related categories are presently listed at Categories for discussion. See the project's Article alerts for more information and links. A discussion regarding cat meat is occurring at Talk:Cat meat § Legality in Canada section. The new Liquor Portal was created in late November 2015 for liquor related topics. The following food and drink articles have been promoted to Good article-class in 2016: Carrot soup Crab dip English Cuisine Esparza's Grodziskie Lemon Drop Pizza cheese Plum cake Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management Royal Stag There are presently 3,575 unassessed articles. Additional attention from the project's assessors is necessary and would be appreciated to reduce this backlog. Article alerts Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Article alerts Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Curabitur pretium tincidunt lacus. Nulla gravida orci a odio. Nullam varius, turpis et commodo pharetra, est eros bibendum elit, nec luctus magna felis sollicitudin mauris. Integer in mauris eu nibh euismod gravida. Duis ac tellus et risus vulputate vehicula. Donec lobortis risus a elit. Etiam tempor. Ut ullamcorper, ligula eu tempor congue, eros est euismod turpis, id tincidunt sapien risus a quam. Maecenas fermentum consequat mi. Donec fermentum. Pellentesque malesuada nulla a mi. Duis sapien sem, aliquet nec, commodo eget, consequat quis, neque. Aliquam faucibus, elit ut dictum aliquet, felis nisl adipiscing sapien, sed malesuada diam lacus eget erat. Cras mollis scelerisque nunc. Nullam arcu. Aliquam consequat. Curabitur augue lorem, dapibus quis, laoreet et, pretium ac, nisi. Aenean magna nisl, mollis quis, molestie eu, feugiat in, orci. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Fusce convallis, mauris imperdiet gravida bibendum, nisl turpis suscipit mauris, sed placerat ipsum urna sed risus. In convallis tellus a mauris. Curabitur non elit ut libero tristique sodales. Mauris a lacus. Donec mattis semper leo. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Vivamus facilisis diam at odio. Mauris dictum, nisi eget consequat elementum, lacus ligula molestie metus, non feugiat orci magna ac sem. Donec turpis. Donec vitae metus. Morbi tristique neque eu mauris. Quisque gravida ipsum non sapien. Proin turpis lacus, scelerisque vitae, elementum at, lobortis ac, quam. Aliquam dictum eleifend risus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Etiam sit amet diam. Suspendisse odio. Suspendisse nunc. In semper bibendum libero. Proin nonummy, lacus eget pulvinar lacinia, pede felis dignissim leo, vitae tristique magna lacus sit amet eros. Nullam ornare. Praesent odio ligula, dapibus sed, tincidunt eget, dictum ac, nibh. Nam quis lacus. Nunc eleifend molestie velit. Morbi lobortis quam eu velit. Donec euismod vestibulum massa. Donec non lectus. Aliquam commodo lacus sit amet nulla. Cras dignissim elit et augue. Nullam non diam. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Aenean vestibulum. Sed lobortis elit quis lectus. Nunc sed lacus at augue bibendum dapibus.	Feel free to welcome the new members who have recently joined the project. 18 new members!CamV8AeonxKar2016Lee788OmotechoLeuven2015Rich FarmbroughChiswick ChapAnna FrodesiakAtsmePrimaPreussenErpertSueDonemOff-shellBogger GunkartaBwtranchDebbiesw The project currently has 100 active members. Some recent food and drink new articles and content: White Tiger's Milk (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Legacypac (talk · contribs · new pages (80)) started on 2016-02-26, score: 10 Olive Oil Times (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Janestreet350 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-02-22, score: 20 Terra Greens Organic (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Neetjash (talk · contribs · new pages (2)) started on 2016-02-19, score: 10 Mars Nederland Veghel (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by DinosaursLoveExistence (talk · contribs · new pages (16)) started on 2016-02-29, score: 10 Club Quilox (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Eruditescholar (talk · contribs · new pages (11)) started on 2016-02-29, score: 30 Boston Tea Party (café chain) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by LegereScire (talk · contribs · new pages (3)) started on 2016-02-29, score: 10 Refermentation (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Rachelskit (talk · contribs · new pages (3)) started on 2016-02-28, score: 40 Graeme Burns (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Drchriswilliams (talk · contribs · new pages (8)) started on 2016-02-28, score: 10 Alex Brewster (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Drchriswilliams (talk · contribs · new pages (8)) started on 2016-02-28, score: 10 List of Georgian wine appellations (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Biwom (talk · contribs · new pages (12)) started on 2016-02-27, score: 20 Tvishi (wine) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Biwom (talk · contribs · new pages (12)) started on 2016-02-27, score: 20 Wok to Walk (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Xaosflux (talk · contribs · new pages (2)) started on 2016-02-26, score: 10 Pepsi Spire (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Rowanlovescars (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-02-26, score: 20 Kill Time (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Cattus (talk · contribs · new pages (160)) started on 2016-02-26, score: 10 Royal Dragon Vodka (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Onel5969 (talk · contribs · new pages (37)) started on 2016-02-25, score: 10 Arnbitter (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Gardar Rurak (talk · contribs · new pages (25)) started on 2016-02-25, score: 10 Brian Petruzzi (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by PorridgeJohnson1 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-02-25, score: 20 2013 Northern Ireland Youth Soccer Tournament (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Sport and politics (talk · contribs · new pages (5)) started on 2016-02-24, score: 20 2012 Northern Ireland Youth Soccer Tournament (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Sport and politics (talk · contribs · new pages (5)) started on 2016-02-24, score: 10 2011 Northern Ireland Youth Soccer Tournament (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Sport and politics (talk · contribs · new pages (5)) started on 2016-02-24, score: 10 2010 Northern Ireland Youth Soccer Tournament (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Sport and politics (talk · contribs · new pages (5)) started on 2016-02-24, score: 10 2009 Northern Ireland Youth Soccer Tournament (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Sport and politics (talk · contribs · new pages (5)) started on 2016-02-24, score: 10 O-Aew (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Kwangkongkul (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-02-24, score: 10 Vazisubani (wine) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Biwom (talk · contribs · new pages (12)) started on 2016-02-24, score: 20 Monterebro (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Onel5969 (talk · contribs · new pages (37)) started on 2016-02-24, score: 10 Predictive microbiology (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by MiriamRGarcia (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-02-24, score: 10 More... Past newsletters
Food and drink articles by quality and importance There are currently 34,340 articles attributed to the project, including 10,580 stubs. There are 38 articles at Featured article class, 176 are at Good article class and 3 are at Featured list class. Article statistics Food and Drink WikiProject article assessment Food and drink articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total FA 7 13 28 48 FL 2 1 3 FM 139 139 GA 13 24 73 249 5 364 B 54 227 332 583 57 1,253 C 79 388 951 2,702 463 4,583 Start 23 322 1,643 9,818 5 3,787 15,598 Stub 1 26 553 7,811 1 5,038 13,430 List 9 69 108 467 23 271 947 Category 9 1 2 7,523 7,535 Disambig 7 149 156 File 2,999 2,999 Portal 614 614 Project 384 384 Redirect 10 70 534 2,676 3,290 Template 1 946 947 Other 3 187 190 Assessed 179 1,085 3,744 22,205 15,646 9,621 52,480 Unassessed 23 1,908 1,931 Total 179 1,085 3,744 22,228 15,646 11,529 54,411 WikiWork factors (?) ω = 181,378 Ω = 5.14 Assessment log and Guide to Assessment Help on Editing and Sourcing Articles

– Sent by Northamerica1000 using mass messaging on 17:26, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 02 March 2016

• News and notes: Tretikov resigns, WMF in transition

• Featured content: This week's featured content

• Traffic report: Brawling

• Recent research: Wikipedia and paid labour; Swedish gender gap; how verifiable is "verifiable"?

• Blog: Wikimedia Foundation details requests to alter or remove content in new transparency report

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:01, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 09 March 2016

• News and notes: Katherine Maher named interim head of WMF; Wales email re-sparks Heilman controversy; draft WMF strategy posted

• In the media: Wikipedian is break-out star of International Women's Day; dinosaur art; Wikipedia's new iOS app and its fight for market share

• Op-ed: A modest proposal for Wikimedia’s future

• Featured content: Five articles, four lists, a topic, and five images were promoted this week.

• Technology report: Wikimedia wikis will temporarily go into read-only mode on several occasions in the coming weeks

• WikiCup report: First round of the WikiCup finishes

• Blog: The new alchemy: turning online harassment into Wikipedia articles on women scientists

• Systemic bias: Revenge of "I can’t believe we didn’t have an article on ..."

• Traffic report: All business like show business

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A Dobos torte for you!

7&6=thirteen (☎) has given you a Dobos torte to enjoy! Seven layers of fun because you deserve it. To give a Dobos torte and spread the WikiLove, just place {{subst:Dobos Torte}} on someone else's talkpage, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend.

7&6=thirteen (☎) 21:15, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 March 2016

• News and notes: Wikipedia Zero: Orange mobile partnership in Africa ends; the evolution of privacy loss in Wikipedia

• In the media: Wales at SXSW; lawsuit over Wikipedia PR editing

• Op-ed: Hard work needed to address Wikimedia’s leadership challenges

• Discussion report: Is an interim WMF executive director inherently notable?

• Featured content: This week's featured content

• Technology report: Watchlists, watchlists, watchlists!

• Traffic report: Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States

• Wikipedia Weekly: Podcast #119: The Foundation and the departure of Lila Tretikov

• Blog: It “revolutionized the way German-speaking people inform themselves about the world”: Fifteen years of the German Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 March 2016

• Interview: Exclusive: interview with interim ED Katherine Maher

• News and notes: Lila Tretikov a Young Global Leader; Wikipediocracy blog post sparks indefinite blocks

• In the media: Angolan file sharers cause trouble for Wikipedia Zero; the 3D printer edit war; a culture based on change and turmoil

• Traffic report: Be weary on the Ides of March

• Editorial: "God damn it, you've got to be kind."

• Featured content: Watch out! A slave trader, a live mascot and a crested serpent awaits!

• Arbitration report: Palestine-Israel article 3 case amended

• Wikipedia Weekly: Podcast #120: Status of Wikimania 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:25, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Wikiproject Food and Drink Newsletter – April 2016

The WikiProject Food and Drink Newsletter Volume III, no. 5, Note: To opt out from receiving future newsletters, please click here for instructions.
Project News Recent Good article promotions for project-related articles. The following food and drink articles have recently been promoted to Good article-class: Applesauce cake Beurre Maître d'Hôtel Chips and dip Clementine cake Copia (museum) Dime Store (Portland, Oregon) Naem Old-fashioned doughnut Pancake machine Pink slime The Modern Cook For recent events regarding project-related articles, see Article alerts. Article alerts Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Article alerts Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Curabitur pretium tincidunt lacus. Nulla gravida orci a odio. Nullam varius, turpis et commodo pharetra, est eros bibendum elit, nec luctus magna felis sollicitudin mauris. Integer in mauris eu nibh euismod gravida. Duis ac tellus et risus vulputate vehicula. Donec lobortis risus a elit. Etiam tempor. Ut ullamcorper, ligula eu tempor congue, eros est euismod turpis, id tincidunt sapien risus a quam. Maecenas fermentum consequat mi. Donec fermentum. Pellentesque malesuada nulla a mi. Duis sapien sem, aliquet nec, commodo eget, consequat quis, neque. Aliquam faucibus, elit ut dictum aliquet, felis nisl adipiscing sapien, sed malesuada diam lacus eget erat. Cras mollis scelerisque nunc. Nullam arcu. Aliquam consequat. Curabitur augue lorem, dapibus quis, laoreet et, pretium ac, nisi. Aenean magna nisl, mollis quis, molestie eu, feugiat in, orci. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Fusce convallis, mauris imperdiet gravida bibendum, nisl turpis suscipit mauris, sed placerat ipsum urna sed risus. In convallis tellus a mauris. Curabitur non elit ut libero tristique sodales. Mauris a lacus. Donec mattis semper leo. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Vivamus facilisis diam at odio. Mauris dictum, nisi eget consequat elementum, lacus ligula molestie metus, non feugiat orci magna ac sem. Donec turpis. Donec vitae metus. Morbi tristique neque eu mauris. Quisque gravida ipsum non sapien. Proin turpis lacus, scelerisque vitae, elementum at, lobortis ac, quam. Aliquam dictum eleifend risus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Etiam sit amet diam. Suspendisse odio. Suspendisse nunc. In semper bibendum libero. Proin nonummy, lacus eget pulvinar lacinia, pede felis dignissim leo, vitae tristique magna lacus sit amet eros. Nullam ornare. Praesent odio ligula, dapibus sed, tincidunt eget, dictum ac, nibh. Nam quis lacus. Nunc eleifend molestie velit. Morbi lobortis quam eu velit. Donec euismod vestibulum massa. Donec non lectus. Aliquam commodo lacus sit amet nulla. Cras dignissim elit et augue. Nullam non diam. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Aenean vestibulum. Sed lobortis elit quis lectus. Nunc sed lacus at augue bibendum dapibus.	Feel free to welcome the new members who have recently joined the project. 6 new members!OnBeyondZebraxVMS MosaicMartinyoung2775Omni FlamesCAPTAIN RAJUEdwardx The project currently has 106 active members. Some recent food and drink new articles and content: National Identification Registration Authority (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Fsmatovu (talk · contribs · new pages (41)) started on 2016-03-31, score: 10 Domaine Tempier (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Needlepoint9 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-31, score: 20 Kill Time (film) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by In ictu oculi (talk · contribs · new pages (105)) started on 2016-03-30, score: 10 Indian Tea Association (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Rohanrafaroger (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-30, score: 10 Tops Pizza (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Edwardx (talk · contribs · new pages (51)) started on 2016-03-30, score: 20 Kaspa's (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Edwardx (talk · contribs · new pages (51)) started on 2016-03-29, score: 20 Faktong Keang Buat (Pumpkin in Coconut Cream) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Woraveerinj (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-29, score: 20 Darra Goldstein (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Jeffreyrubel (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-21, score: 10 Cervecería 100 Montaditos (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Kanghuitari (talk · contribs · new pages (55)) started on 2016-03-29, score: 10 Potentilla simplex (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Ggpauly (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-29, score: 10 Burger urge (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Lindsmay10 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-28, score: 10 B & D Burgers (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Bennyben1998 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-27, score: 10 33 Beer (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Legacypac (talk · contribs · new pages (63)) started on 2016-03-26, score: 10 F-Block Metallocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by YanwuShao (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-25, score: 10 Bamboo Chicken (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Divyaappidi (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-23, score: 10 Jianbing (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Jmps2016 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-27, score: 10 Friends of Beer Party (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Bedivere.cs (talk · contribs · new pages (3)) started on 2016-03-27, score: 10 Miniature food (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Groupgg (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-27, score: 10 English Tea House and Restaurant (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Molecule Extraction (talk · contribs · new pages (9)) started on 2016-03-27, score: 10 Bazin (bread) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Northamerica1000 (talk · contribs · new pages (14)) started on 2016-03-27, score: 10 Cyprus Wine Routes (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Euclidthalis (talk · contribs · new pages (2)) started on 2016-03-24, score: 10 Taking Care of Business (film) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by The Dragooners (talk · contribs · new pages (87)) started on 2016-03-26, score: 10 Pastrami on rye (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Onel5969 (talk · contribs · new pages (19)) started on 2016-03-26, score: 30 Pictou County Pizza (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Kelapstick (talk · contribs · new pages (2)) started on 2016-03-26, score: 10 Wasabi (restaurant) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Edwardx (talk · contribs · new pages (51)) started on 2016-03-25, score: 10 William S. Bloxsom-Carter (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Kcwatson55 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-25, score: 20 List of the largest fast food restaurant chains (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Cupido1234 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-25, score: 10 Food - Weapon of Conquest (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Bzuk (talk · contribs · new pages (9)) started on 2016-03-24, score: 20 Margot Henderson (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Gareth E. Kegg (talk · contribs · new pages (25)) started on 2016-03-25, score: 10 Sam's Chicken (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Edwardx (talk · contribs · new pages (51)) started on 2016-03-25, score: 10 Deep Fried Oreo (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Cla1402group4 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-03-24, score: 10 Past newsletters
Food and drink articles by quality and importance There are currently 34,474 articles attributed to the project, including 10,607 stubs. There are 38 articles at Featured article class, 185 are at Good article class and 3 are at Featured list class. Article statistics Food and Drink WikiProject article assessment Food and drink articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total FA 7 13 28 48 FL 2 1 3 FM 139 139 GA 13 24 73 249 5 364 B 54 227 332 583 57 1,253 C 79 388 951 2,702 463 4,583 Start 23 322 1,643 9,818 5 3,787 15,598 Stub 1 26 553 7,811 1 5,038 13,430 List 9 69 108 467 23 271 947 Category 9 1 2 7,523 7,535 Disambig 7 149 156 File 2,999 2,999 Portal 614 614 Project 384 384 Redirect 10 70 534 2,676 3,290 Template 1 946 947 Other 3 187 190 Assessed 179 1,085 3,744 22,205 15,646 9,621 52,480 Unassessed 23 1,908 1,931 Total 179 1,085 3,744 22,228 15,646 11,529 54,411 WikiWork factors (?) ω = 181,378 Ω = 5.14 Assessment log and Guide to Assessment Help on Editing and Sourcing Articles

– Sent by Northamerica1000 using mass messaging on 17:00, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 April 2016

• News and notes: Trump/Wales 2016

• In the media: Saskatoon police delete Wikipedia content about police brutality

• WikiProject report: Why should the Devil have all the good music? An interview with WikiProject Christian music

• Traffic report: Donald v Daredevil

• Featured content: A slow, slow week

• Technology report: Browse Wikipedia in safety? Use Telnet!

• Recent research: "Employing Wikipedia for good not evil" in education; using eyetracking to find out how readers read articles

• Wikipedia Weekly: Podcast #121: How April Fools went down

• Blog: Growing hashtags: Expanding outreach on Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:12, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Editing while logged out

If you want to have the IP address of that edit you made hidden from the page history, you can request it to be suppressed by contacting the oversight team. I figured I'd leave you a message and let you know about this in case you're sensitive about this information being public. Cheers! :-) ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 16:53, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 April 2016

• Op-ed: Should prison inmates be permitted to edit Wikipedia?

• News and notes: Denny Vrandečić resigns from Wikimedia Foundation board

• In the media: Wikimedia Sweden loses copyright case; Tex Watson; AI assistants; David Jolly biography

• Featured content: This week's featured content

• Traffic report: A welcome return to pop culture and death

• Arbitration report: The first case of 2016—Wikicology

• Gallery: A history lesson

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:46, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 April 2016

• News and notes: Lunar project; steering group formed to search for next executive director

• Op-ed: Knowledge Engine and the Wales–Heilman emails

• Special report: Update on EranBot, our new copyright violation detection bot

• Traffic report: Two for the price of one

• Featured content: The double-sized edition

• Arbitration report: Amendments made to the Race and intelligence case

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:42, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 May 2016

• News and notes: Wikimedia Switzerland's board and paid-editing firm; passing of Ed Dravecky

• In the media: Wikipedia Zero piracy in Bangladesh; bureaucracy; chilling effects; too few cooks; translation gaps

• Traffic report: Purple

• Featured content: The best ... from the past two weeks

• Arbitration report: Two editors unbanned; Wikicology case enters workshop phase; Gamaliel restricted from Gamergate at his own request

• Recent research: The eight roles of Wikipedians; do edit histories expose social relations among editors?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:09, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 May 2016

• News and notes: Affiliates' nomination of WMF trustees announced; FDC's straight talking to WMF

• Op-ed: Swiss chapter in turmoil

• In the media: Wikimedia's Dario Taraborelli quoted on Google's Knowledge Graph in The Washington Post

• Featured content: Two weeks for the prize of one

• Traffic report: Oh behave, Beyhive / Underdogs

• Arbitration report: "Wikicology" ends in site ban; evidence and workshop phases concluded for "Gamaliel and others"

• Wikicup: That's it for WikiCup Round 2!

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:34, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 May 2016

• News and notes: Upcoming Wikimedia conferences in the US and India; May Metrics and Activities Meeting

• Special report: Compensation paid to Sue Gardner increased by almost 50 percent after she stepped down as executive director

• In the media: The perils of Wikipedia's monopoly; Wikipedians' fragility; Street Sharks hoax

• Featured content: Eight articles, three lists and five pictures

• Op-ed: Journey of a Wikipedian

• Arbitration report: Gamaliel resigns from the arbitration committee

• Recent research: English as Wikipedia's Lingua Franca; deletion rationales; schizophrenia controversies

• Traffic report: Splitting (musical) airs / Slow Ride

• Blog: Freely licensed magic at Eurovision

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

Libertarianism & Eusociality

Hi Mercurywoodrose. Thank you for your insights. I apologize for taking so long to reply but I have been preoccupied with a particular project lately and have not had the time to provide attention to the thoughts that you have shared on my page. I have not even had time for Wikipedia, lately. However, I will reply fairly soon, and hopefully with some detail to your observations.Stevenmitchell (talk) 17:43, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 05 June 2016

• News and notes: WMF cuts budget for 2016-17 as scope tightens

• In the media: Jimmy Wales on net neutrality—"It's complicated"—and his $100m fundraising challenge

• Featured content: Overwhelmed ... by pictures

• Traffic report: Pop goes the culture, again.

• Arbitration report: ArbCom case "Gamaliel and others" concludes

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Video Games

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:13, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia categories named after Wikipedia categories has been nominated for discussion

Category:Wikipedia categories named after Wikipedia categories, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Fixuture (talk) 19:20, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 June 2016

• News and notes: Clarifications on status and compensation of outgoing executive directors Sue Gardner and Lila Tretikov

• Special report: Wikiversity Journal—A new user group

• Featured content: From the crème de la crème

• In the media: Biography disputes; Craig Newmark donation; PR editing

• Op-ed: Commons Picture of the Year; Wikidata licensing

• Traffic report: Another one with sports; Knockout, brief candle

• Blog: Why I proofread poetry at Wikisource

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:58, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Hispanic and Latino Americans/Did you know/3 listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Hispanic and Latino Americans/Did you know/3. Since you had some involvement with the Hispanic and Latino Americans/Did you know/3 redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Stefan2 (talk) 23:42, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Category:Photographs of the United States has been nominated for discussion

Category:Photographs of the United States, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Pichpich (talk) 21:40, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

Nomination of Jar'Edo Wens hoax for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Jar'Edo Wens hoax is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jar'Edo Wens hoax until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. GZWDer (talk) 07:03, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 04 July 2016

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The Signpost: 21 July 2016

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Template:San Jose, California

Hi! I wonder if you think the schools at Template:San Jose, California should get their own template. I started adding high schools but I realize that there are so many in San Jose... WhisperToMe (talk) 18:10, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Ok. I like having templates so Wikipedians can keep track of the schools in a given place (they're U.S. equivalents of the UK school templates User:Bleaney wrote) WhisperToMe (talk) 06:07, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 04 August 2016

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The WikiProject Food and Drink Newsletter (August 2016)

The WikiProject Food and Drink Newsletter Volume III, no. 6, August 2016 Note: To opt out from receiving future newsletters, please click here for instructions.
Project News New featured article: Borscht, Good Article nominations Borscht was promoted to featured article status on June 5, 2016. The following articles are nominated for GA status: Bean dip ReaLemon Carrot For recent events regarding project-related articles, see Article alerts. Article alerts Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Article alerts	Feel free to welcome the new members who have recently joined the project. 7 new members!MikeHikesThey Terk Err JerbsZefrsdlsy37bclavellinadtoled1Discott The project currently has 117 active members. Some recent food and drink new articles and content: Hill Street Tai Hwa Pork Noodle (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Miyagawa (talk · contribs · new pages (8)) started on 2016-08-08, score: 10 Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Miyagawa (talk · contribs · new pages (8)) started on 2016-08-08, score: 10 Double Mountain Brewery (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Another Believer (talk · contribs · new pages (156)) started on 2016-08-08, score: 20 List of largest wastewater treatment plants (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Calvin411 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-05, score: 10 Loch Duart (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Haseeb delpihero (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-03, score: 20 Henan Faria da Silveira (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Add92 (talk · contribs · new pages (36)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 10 Plutonocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 20 Neptunocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 10 Thorocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 20 Protactinocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 20 Satti (food) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Democratics (talk · contribs · new pages (3)) started on 2016-08-02, score: 10 Forum of Indian Food Importers (FIFI) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Bangaji (talk · contribs · new pages (2)) started on 2016-07-28, score: 20 Milton L. Banks (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Dbanks1112 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-06, score: 10 Watercress soup (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Northamerica1000 (talk · contribs · new pages (9)) started on 2016-08-05, score: 20 SuperMeat (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by KDS4444 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-07-31, score: 20 Abu Talib Urban Farmer (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Adjoajo (talk · contribs · new pages (2)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 10 Fisherman's Basket (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Rain and Keet (talk · contribs · new pages (5)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 20 Daegu Chimac Festival (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Kanghuitari (talk · contribs · new pages (130)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 20 Tokki Soju (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Kanghuitari (talk · contribs · new pages (130)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 10 Numbers (Vancouver) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Another Believer (talk · contribs · new pages (156)) started on 2016-08-03, score: 10 Morning Call Coffee Stand (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by MatthewVanitas (talk · contribs · new pages (9)) started on 2016-08-03, score: 10 Shinho (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Moist Towels (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-01, score: 10 Past newsletters
Food and drink articles by quality and importance There are currently articles attributed to the project, including 10,764 stubs. There are 40 articles at Featured article class, 209 are at Good article class and 3 are at Featured list class. Article statistics Food and Drink WikiProject article assessment Food and drink articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total FA 7 13 28 48 FL 2 1 3 FM 139 139 GA 13 24 73 249 5 364 B 54 227 332 583 57 1,253 C 79 388 951 2,702 463 4,583 Start 23 322 1,643 9,818 5 3,787 15,598 Stub 1 26 553 7,811 1 5,038 13,430 List 9 69 108 467 23 271 947 Category 9 1 2 7,523 7,535 Disambig 7 149 156 File 2,999 2,999 Portal 614 614 Project 384 384 Redirect 10 70 534 2,676 3,290 Template 1 946 947 Other 3 187 190 Assessed 179 1,085 3,744 22,205 15,646 9,621 52,480 Unassessed 23 1,908 1,931 Total 179 1,085 3,744 22,228 15,646 11,529 54,411 WikiWork factors (?) ω = 181,378 Ω = 5.14 Assessment log and Guide to Assessment Help on Editing and Sourcing Articles

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:33, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 August 2016

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Category:Caffeinated drinks has been nominated for discussion

Category:Caffeinated drinks, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Oculi (talk) 11:05, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

As far as I can tell from the page history, you created this as 'Caffeinated beverages' and it was renamed today (via a page move) as 'drinks'. So I am merely wishing to restore the name that you created. Oculi (talk) 14:46, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

events

hi, I noticed this edit from 3 years ago -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_talk:Events - would you still hold to that? it is just that 'events' as opposed to other designated occurrences has not much attention on the talk pages re projects - do you think that the time project is still as relevant as a specific project ? just asking, no big deal or anything JarrahTree 00:30, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

On the basis of your response, you might like the text found on the category page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Concepts JarrahTree 12:08, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Thanks!

Great job on the San Francisco Bay Area Portal! Thanks for including the Maud's and Peg's Place articles in your DYK sections. You might also be interested in Charlotte L. Brown. All the best, ABF99 (talk) 16:15, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject Food and Drink Newsletter: September 2016

The WikiProject Food and Drink Newsletter Volume III, no. 7, September 2016 Note: To opt out from receiving future newsletters, please click here for instructions.
Project News Good article Nominations The following articles were nominated for GA status: ReaLemon Carrot Malvern Water (bottled water)  Note: The articles ReaLemon and Carrot have not received any responses in weeks. Please help to improve the articles! Help us out by... Patrolling this and this watchlist for vandalism! Assessing unassessed articles Improving stubs Reviewing the "Food and drink" section in the Requested Articles section. Removing inactive users from the active section to the inactive section. For recent events regarding project-related articles, see Article alerts. Article alerts Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Article alerts	Feel free to welcome the new members who have recently joined the project. 1 new member!MeowMoon Please consider joining the welcome squad to invite more members! The project currently has 114 active members. Some recent food and drink new articles and content: Hill Street Tai Hwa Pork Noodle (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Miyagawa (talk · contribs · new pages (8)) started on 2016-08-08, score: 10 Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Miyagawa (talk · contribs · new pages (8)) started on 2016-08-08, score: 10 Double Mountain Brewery (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Another Believer (talk · contribs · new pages (156)) started on 2016-08-08, score: 20 List of largest wastewater treatment plants (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Calvin411 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-05, score: 10 Loch Duart (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Haseeb delpihero (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-03, score: 20 Henan Faria da Silveira (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Add92 (talk · contribs · new pages (36)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 10 Plutonocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 20 Neptunocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 10 Thorocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 20 Protactinocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 20 Satti (food) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Democratics (talk · contribs · new pages (3)) started on 2016-08-02, score: 10 Forum of Indian Food Importers (FIFI) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Bangaji (talk · contribs · new pages (2)) started on 2016-07-28, score: 20 Milton L. Banks (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Dbanks1112 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-06, score: 10 Watercress soup (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Northamerica1000 (talk · contribs · new pages (9)) started on 2016-08-05, score: 20 SuperMeat (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by KDS4444 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-07-31, score: 20 Abu Talib Urban Farmer (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Adjoajo (talk · contribs · new pages (2)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 10 Fisherman's Basket (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Rain and Keet (talk · contribs · new pages (5)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 20 Daegu Chimac Festival (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Kanghuitari (talk · contribs · new pages (130)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 20 Tokki Soju (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Kanghuitari (talk · contribs · new pages (130)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 10 Numbers (Vancouver) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Another Believer (talk · contribs · new pages (156)) started on 2016-08-03, score: 10 Morning Call Coffee Stand (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by MatthewVanitas (talk · contribs · new pages (9)) started on 2016-08-03, score: 10 Shinho (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Moist Towels (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-01, score: 10 Past newsletters
Food and drink articles by quality and importance There are currently 35,461 articles attributed to the project, including 10,783 stubs. There are 40 articles at Featured article class, 209 are at Good article class and 3 are at Featured list class. Article statistics Food and Drink WikiProject article assessment Food and drink articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total FA 7 13 28 48 FL 2 1 3 FM 139 139 GA 13 24 73 249 5 364 B 54 227 332 583 57 1,253 C 79 388 951 2,702 463 4,583 Start 23 322 1,643 9,818 5 3,787 15,598 Stub 1 26 553 7,811 1 5,038 13,430 List 9 69 108 467 23 271 947 Category 9 1 2 7,523 7,535 Disambig 7 149 156 File 2,999 2,999 Portal 614 614 Project 384 384 Redirect 10 70 534 2,676 3,290 Template 1 946 947 Other 3 187 190 Assessed 179 1,085 3,744 22,205 15,646 9,621 52,480 Unassessed 23 1,908 1,931 Total 179 1,085 3,744 22,228 15,646 11,529 54,411 WikiWork factors (?) ω = 181,378 Ω = 5.14 Assessment log and Guide to Assessment Help on Editing and Sourcing Articles

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:05, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

note to myself

add gay games, and the bar founder, to dyk/years. dyk at lgbt should be "dyke" (thats dumb)Mercurywoodrose (talk) 18:30, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 06 September 2016

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The Signpost: 29 September 2016

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WikiProject Food and drink Newsletter: October 2016

The WikiProject Food and Drink Newsletter Volume III, no. 8, October 2016 Note: To opt out from receiving future newsletters, please click here for instructions.
Project News Good article Nominations, Project Updates  Note: Our members page design has been tweaked so that members can easily see newsletter-receiving members. We also updated the format of adding your name (i.e. please use {{Mailing list member}} instead on {{user}}. See the page for yourself for more information! The following articles were promoted to GA status! ReaLemon Carrot One new GA nomination: The Restaurant Marco Pierre White (talk | history | start review) by Miyagawa. Some do's to do.. Please see the project's Tasks and To do sections for project and article tasks, and feel free to update the lists with new entries. Please add all food/drink-related pictures on Wikimedia Commons to the project's categories. Help us out by... Patrolling this and this watchlist for vandalism! Assessing unassessed articles. As of September 27, 2016, there are currently 3,497 unassessed articles! Improving stubs Reviewing the "Food and drink" section in the Requested Articles section. Removing inactive users from the active section to the inactive section using the status tool. For recent events regarding project-related articles, see Article alerts. Article alerts Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Article alerts	Feel free to welcome the new members who have recently joined the project. 2 new members!VarunFEB2003JoshMuirWikipedia Please consider joining the welcome squad to invite more members! The project currently has 114 active members. Some recent food and drink new articles and content: Hill Street Tai Hwa Pork Noodle (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Miyagawa (talk · contribs · new pages (8)) started on 2016-08-08, score: 10 Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Miyagawa (talk · contribs · new pages (8)) started on 2016-08-08, score: 10 Double Mountain Brewery (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Another Believer (talk · contribs · new pages (156)) started on 2016-08-08, score: 20 List of largest wastewater treatment plants (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Calvin411 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-05, score: 10 Loch Duart (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Haseeb delpihero (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-03, score: 20 Henan Faria da Silveira (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Add92 (talk · contribs · new pages (36)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 10 Plutonocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 20 Neptunocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 10 Thorocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 20 Protactinocene (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by CxHy (talk · contribs · new pages (6)) started on 2016-08-07, score: 20 Satti (food) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Democratics (talk · contribs · new pages (3)) started on 2016-08-02, score: 10 Forum of Indian Food Importers (FIFI) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Bangaji (talk · contribs · new pages (2)) started on 2016-07-28, score: 20 Milton L. Banks (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Dbanks1112 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-06, score: 10 Watercress soup (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Northamerica1000 (talk · contribs · new pages (9)) started on 2016-08-05, score: 20 SuperMeat (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by KDS4444 (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-07-31, score: 20 Abu Talib Urban Farmer (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Adjoajo (talk · contribs · new pages (2)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 10 Fisherman's Basket (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Rain and Keet (talk · contribs · new pages (5)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 20 Daegu Chimac Festival (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Kanghuitari (talk · contribs · new pages (130)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 20 Tokki Soju (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Kanghuitari (talk · contribs · new pages (130)) started on 2016-08-04, score: 10 Numbers (Vancouver) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Another Believer (talk · contribs · new pages (156)) started on 2016-08-03, score: 10 Morning Call Coffee Stand (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by MatthewVanitas (talk · contribs · new pages (9)) started on 2016-08-03, score: 10 Shinho (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | tools) by Moist Towels (talk · contribs · new pages (1)) started on 2016-08-01, score: 10 Past newsletters
Food and drink articles by quality and importance There are currently 35,572 articles attributed to the project, including 10,820 stubs. There are 40 articles at Featured article class, 212 are at Good article class and 3 are at Featured list class. Article statistics Food and Drink WikiProject article assessment Food and drink articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total FA 7 13 28 48 FL 2 1 3 FM 139 139 GA 13 24 73 249 5 364 B 54 227 332 583 57 1,253 C 79 388 951 2,702 463 4,583 Start 23 322 1,643 9,818 5 3,787 15,598 Stub 1 26 553 7,811 1 5,038 13,430 List 9 69 108 467 23 271 947 Category 9 1 2 7,523 7,535 Disambig 7 149 156 File 2,999 2,999 Portal 614 614 Project 384 384 Redirect 10 70 534 2,676 3,290 Template 1 946 947 Other 3 187 190 Assessed 179 1,085 3,744 22,205 15,646 9,621 52,480 Unassessed 23 1,908 1,931 Total 179 1,085 3,744 22,228 15,646 11,529 54,411 WikiWork factors (?) ω = 181,378 Ω = 5.14 Assessment log and Guide to Assessment Help on Editing and Sourcing Articles

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:47, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

migdia chinea

Hi Mercurywoodrose --saw the picture of hands yours and your mom -- very moving. Take a look at my IMDb to see my progress. Mig Mig (talk) 04:26, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

Disputed non-free use rationale for File:Transbay Tower Most Recent Proposal.jpg

Thank you for uploading File:Transbay Tower Most Recent Proposal.jpg. However, there is a concern that the rationale provided for using this file on Wikipedia may not meet the criteria required by Wikipedia:Non-free content. This can be corrected by going to the file description page and adding or clarifying the reason why the file qualifies under this policy. Adding and completing one of the templates available from Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline is an easy way to ensure that your file is in compliance with Wikipedia policy. Please be aware that a non-free use rationale is not the same as an image copyright tag; descriptions for files used under the non-free content policy require both a copyright tag and a non-free use rationale.

If it is determined that the file does not qualify under the non-free content policy, it might be deleted by an administrator within a few days in accordance with our criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions, please ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thank you. -- Marchjuly (talk) 06:26, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 October 2016

• News and notes: Fundraising, flora and fauna

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Hi Friend

I don't see anything wrong with fish cheeks. What do you mean that it is a study guide? Thanks from Random AccountRandom Account (talk) 23:06, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 November 2016

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Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/The 50,000 Challenge

You are invited to participate in the 50,000 Challenge, aiming for 50,000 article improvements and creations for articles relating to the United States. This effort began on November 1, 2016 and to reach our goal, we will need editors like you to participate, expand, and create. See more here!

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:39, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Buildings and structures by former use

Hello. Do you think these two categories shall be merged? I saw that you recently edited one of them and wanted to ask you. [2] & [3] Thanks Mimar77 (talk) 14:34, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

Hello, Mercurywoodrose. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, 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.

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 November 2016

• News and notes: Arbitration Committee elections commence

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Orphaned non-free image File:American Residential Services Rescue Rooter old and new logos.jpg

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

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 21:35, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 December 2016

• Year in review: Looking back on 2016

• News and notes: Strategic planning update; English ArbCom election results

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The Signpost: 17 January 2017

• From the editor: Next steps for the Signpost

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• Interview: What is it like to edit Wikipedia when you're blind?

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The Signpost: 6 February 2017

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The Signpost: 27 February 2017

• From the editors: Results from our poll on subscription and delivery, and a new RSS feed

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• In the media: The Daily Mail does not run Wikipedia

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The Black Panther

Talk:The Black Panther (newspaper)#How it was is inappropriate, and I don't see how it contributes to discussion of the article at all.--Pharos (talk) 16:40, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Carnivorous, one-eyed, troglodyte celtic wikipedians born before JFK was shot, who reject polyandry on the grounds that one is way more than enough, and who cannot recall having been anywhere near the Texas book depository

Hello Mercurywoodrose,

When you added your userpage to the category Category:Carnivorous.2C_one-eyed.2C_troglodyte_celtic_wikipedians_born_before_JFK_was_shot.2C_who_reject_polyandry_on_the_grounds_that_one_is_way_more_than_enough.2C_and_who_cannot_recall_having_been_anywhere_near_the_Texas_book_depository, you caused it to become a functional redlinked category that causes trouble for the Special:Wantedcategories workers. Consequently, it has led to this CfD, which would benefit from your participation. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:08, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Category:Historic farms by country has been nominated for discussion

Category:Historic farms by country, which you created, has been nominated for possible merging. A discussion is taking place to see if it abides with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Marcocapelle (talk) 04:01, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 9 June 2017

• From the editors: Signpost status: On reserve power, help wanted!

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The Signpost: 23 June 2017

• News and notes: Departments reorganized at Wikimedia Foundation, and a month without new RfAs (so far)

• In the media: Kalanick's nipples; Episode #138 of Drama on the Hill

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The Signpost: 15 July 2017

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UCSF project

Hi! I am currently revamping the UCSF project. I created lots of pages and added a lot of content, but there is so much still to do. I saw that you are part of the SFBA task force, so I thought you might be interested and I wanted to invite you to collaborate once more. In particular, we need to add content, do maintenance, and we really would benefit from pictures, so if you are in SF and could help that would be great. Thanks!Eccekevin (talk) 15:11, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

Hello, Mercurywoodrose/Archive13! We are looking for editors to join WikiProject University of California, San Francisco, an outreach effort which aims to support development of UCSF related articles in Wikipedia. We thought you might be interested, and hope that you will join us. If you are interested in joining, please visit the project page, and add your name to the list of participants, check out our To Do list, and join the discussion on our talk page. Thanks!!!

The Signpost: 5 August 2017

• News and notes: Non-English special edition! 99% no news about English-based wiki communities!

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Orphaned non-free image File:The Way It Spozed to Be cover and back cover with author James Herndon.jpg

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Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 17:59, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 6 September 2017

• From the editors: What happened at Wikimania?

• News and notes: Basselpedia; WMF Board of Trustees appointments

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• Special report: Biomedical content, and some thoughts on its future

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Orphaned non-free image File:Imagescvr.jpg

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Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 17:16, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Nomination of List of American police officers killed in the line of duty for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article List of American police officers killed in the line of duty is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of American police officers killed in the line of duty until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. SummerPhD^v2.0 01:35, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 September 2017

• News and notes: Chapter updates; ACTRIAL

• In the media: Monkey settlement; Wikipedia used to give AI context clues

• Humour: Chickenz

• Recent research: Wikipedia articles vs. concepts; Wikipedia usage in Europe

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The Signpost: 23 October 2017

• News and notes: Money! WMF fundraising, Wikimedia strategy, WMF new office!

• Featured content: Don, Marcel, Emily, Jessica and other notables

• Humour: Guys named Ralph

• In focus: Offline Wikipedia developed at OFF.NETWORK Content Hackathon

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The Signpost: 24 November 2017

• News and notes: Cons, cons, cons

• Arbitration report: Administrator desysoped; How to deal with crosswiki issues; Mister Wiki case likely

• Technology report: Searching and surveying

• Interview: A featured article centurion

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Women in Red World Contest

Hi. We're into the last five days of the Women in Red World Contest. There's a new bonus prize of $200 worth of books of your choice to win for creating the most new women biographies between 0:00 on the 26th and 23:59 on 30th November. If you've been contributing to the contest, thank you for your support, we've produced over 2000 articles. If you haven't contributed yet, we would appreciate you taking the time to add entries to our articles achievements list by the end of the month. Thank you, and if participating, good luck with the finale!

ArbCom 2017 election voter message

Hello, Mercurywoodrose. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, 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.

If you wish to participate in the 2017 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for December 14

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The Signpost: 18 December 2017

• Special report: Women in Red World Contest wrap-up

• Blog: Close encounters of the Wikipedia kind

• Featured content: Featured content to finish 2017

• In the media: Stolen seagulls, public domain primates and more

• Arbitration report: Last case of 2017: Mister Wiki editors

• Gallery: Wiki loving

• Interview: Interview with Charlesjsharp, regular contributor of Wikipedia's Featured Pictures

• Recent research: French medical articles have "high rate of veracity"

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The Signpost: 16 January 2018

• News and notes: Communication is key

• In the media: The Paris Review, British Crown and British Media

• Featured content: History, gaming and multifarious topics

• Interview: Interview with Ser Amantio di Nicolao, the top contributor to English Wikipedia by edit count

• Technology report: Dedicated Wikidata database servers

• Humour: Why don't we have an article about _________?

• Arbitration report: Mister Wiki is first arbitration committee decision of 2018

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The Signpost: 5 February 2018

• Op-ed: Do editors have the right to be forgotten?

• Featured content: Wars, sieges, disasters and everything black possible

• Recent research: Automated Q&A from Wikipedia articles; Who succeeds in talk page discussions?

• Blog: New monthly dataset shows where people fall into Wikipedia rabbit holes

• Interview: Interview with The Rambling Man, Wikipedia's top contributor of Featured Lists

• Traffic report: TV, death, sports, and doodles

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• In the media: Solving crime; editing out violence allegations

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Orphaned non-free image File:Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty logo and banner.png

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Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 18:02, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 February 2018

• News and notes: The future is Swedish with a lack of administrators

• Recent research: Politically diverse editors write better articles; Reddit and Stack Overflow benefit from Wikipedia but don't give back

• Arbitration report: Arbitration committee prepares to examine two new cases

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• Technology report: Paragraph-based edit conflict screen; broken thanks

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Disambiguation link notification for March 2

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited 1906 San Francisco earthquake, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Grand Opera House (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver).

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Signpost issue 4 – 29 March 2018

• Op-ed: Death knell for The Signpost?

• News and notes: Wiki Conference roundup and new appointments.

• Arbitration report: Ironing out issues in infoboxes; not sure yet about New Jersey; and an administrator who probably wasn't uncivil to a sockpuppet.

• In the media: The media on Wikipedia's workings: the good and not-so-good

• Traffic report: Real sports, real women and an imaginary country: what's on top for Wikipedia readers

• Featured content: Animals, Ships, and Songs

• Technology report: Timeless skin review by Force Radical.

• Special report: ACTRIAL wrap-up.

• Humour: WikiWorld Reruns

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Portal:Pornography/Featured picture

Hello! I noticed that you have selected the images. I'd like to hear your opinions on these changes. Deletion of numbered images.

Guilherme Burn (talk) 17:20, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

Nomination of Portal:Sexuality for deletion

A proposal has been made to delete Portal:Sexuality, which you have made significant contributions to, as well as all other portals on English Wikipedia. You are welcome to contribute to the discussion if you'd like, which is located at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RfC: Ending the system of portals. Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 12:11, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

Invitation to WikiProject Portals

The Portals WikiProject has been rebooted.

There are sections on the WikiProject page dedicated to tasks (including WikiGnome tasks too), and areas on the talk page for discussing the improvement and automation of the various features of portals.

There's a watchlist, of all the pages in the portal namespace, for viewing Related changes.

And more.

You are invited to join, and participate in the effort to revitalize and improve the Portal system and all the portals in it.

We may even surprise ourselves and exceed all expectations. Who knows what we will be able to accomplish in what may become the biggest Wikicollaboration in years.

See ya at the WikiProject!

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   14:40, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 April 2018

• From the editors: The Signpost's presses roll again

• Signpost: Future directions for The Signpost

• News and notes: Photo of Kim Jong-un. Stephen Hawking death tops hits on many Wikipedias.

• In the media: The rise of Wikipedia as a disinformation mop

• In focus: Admin reports board under criticism

• Special report: ACTRIAL results adopted by landslide

• Opinion: Guideline for Organization Notability revised

• Op-ed: World War II Myth-making and Wikipedia

• Community view: It's time we look past Women in Red to counter systemic bias

• Discussion report: The future of portals

• Arbitration report: No new cases, and one motion on administrative misconduct

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Military History

• Blog: Why the world reads Wikipedia

• Humour: Our Favorite Places to Whine About Stuff

• Traffic report: A quiet place to wrestle with the articles of March

• Technology report: Coming soon: Books-to-PDF, interactive maps, rollback confirmation

• Featured content: Featured content selected by the community

• Gallery: A look at some famous and not as well-known border tripoints

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Portals WikiProject heads up, April 27, 2018

We now have 52 members, and more are joining daily.

New and easier way to handle excerpts

Attention portal maintainers!

There's a new template to improve existing and new portals, called {{Transclude lead excerpt}}.

It is a lot easier to use than copying and pasting text from articles, as it displays the paragraphs you specify automatically for you.

It makes excerpts so that they are always current and never go stale or fork.

It is more powerful than it looks, because it has the Lua Module:Excerpt supporting it.

Be careful, as it is alpha software. Please notify the WikiProject talkpage of any problems you come across.

To give you a sense of the reaction this template is generating, here is an excerpt of a discussion thread from the WikiProject's talk page:

• 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)

  Thank you for being so brave. Portal:Adelaide/Intro just got a lot simpler! Certes (talk) 10:43, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Kudos on a wonderful template.    — The Transhumanist   03:27, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

This is amazing stuff. I'm going to get to work on using it on the selected content at most of these portals very soon. WaggersTALK 13:40, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

The RfC

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.

Wish list

What's this? An old oil lamp. It's so dirty, I think I'll polish it...

*poof*

Whoa! Are you a WikiGenie? In that case, I get 3 wishes!

I wish...

1. ...that Portal:Contents/Portals becomes up-to-date.   (The missing entries are listed on the talk page, with instructions).
2. ...the WikiProject to have Article Alerts.   ({{WikiProject Portals}} templates have already been placed on all portal talk pages).
3. ...that Portal:Cricket becomes a shining example of portal excellence.   (It was the main example of a crappy and unmaintained portal at the RfC).

Please make my wishes come true. See you around the portals!    — The Transhumanist   08:02, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject Portals Overview, May 04, 2018

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.

This is our 3rd issue, see previous issues at the Newsletter archive.

Top priority: Main list of portals needs updating

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...

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Proposals are literal, not figurative. The proposal specified "all portals". All means all.
4. 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.
5. 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.

New portals

Since the reboot, a new portal has been created:

Portal:Limited recognition

Please watchlist these pages

Some central pages in the portal system. The more eyes on them, the better.

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals
• User:The Transhumanist (there's a fair amount of portal project traffic on my talk page these days)
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Portal/List of all portals/Page 1
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Portal/List of all portals/Page 2
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Portal/List of all portals/Page 3
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Portal/List of all portals/Page 4
• Wikipedia:Portal:Portal Example portal. And funny.
• Portal:Contents/Portals
  • Portal:Contents/Portals/Culture and the arts
  • Portal:Contents/Portals/Geography and places
  • Portal:Contents/Portals/Health and fitness
  • Portal:Contents/Portals/History and events
  • Portal:Contents/Portals/Infobox
  • Portal:Contents/Portals/Intro
  • Portal:Contents/Portals/Mathematics and logic
  • 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.

Hope to see you there. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   06:22, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update, 15 May 2018

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 missing existing portals to the main portals list at Portal:Contents/Portals. Instructions are on 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. Therefore, every portal listed there needs to be inspected, and any that are incomplete should be removed from that list and added to the not ready list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#These are not listed yet (scroll down to see it). On 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!

Well, that's all for now. See ya around the portals.    — The Transhumanist   06:38, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 May 2018

• From the editor: Another issue meets the deadline

• Op-ed: Has the wind gone out of the AdminShip's sails?

• Opinion: Integrating my many lives on Wikipedia

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Portals

• Discussion report: User rights, infoboxes, and more discussion on portals

• Featured content: Featured content selected by the community

• Arbitration report: Managing difficult topics

• News and notes: Lots of Wikimedia

• In the media: Wikipedia in Turkish politics; COI politics in Wikipedia; most cited work

• Traffic report: We love our superheroes

• Technology report: A trove of contributor and developer goodies

• Blog: Why I write about women on Wikipedia

• Recent research: Why people don't contribute to Wikipedia; using Wikipedia to teach statistics, technical writing, and controversial issues

• Humour: Play with your food

• Gallery: Wine not?

• From the archives: The Signpost scoops The Signpost

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:24, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 May 2018

• From the editor: Another issue meets the deadline

• Op-ed: Has the wind gone out of the AdminShip's sails?

• Opinion: Integrating my many lives on Wikipedia

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Portals

• Discussion report: User rights, infoboxes, and more discussion on portals

• Featured content: Featured content selected by the community

• Arbitration report: Managing difficult topics

• News and notes: Lots of Wikimedia

• In the media: Wikipedia in Turkish politics; COI politics in Wikipedia; most cited work

• Traffic report: We love our superheroes

• Technology report: A trove of contributor and developer goodies

• Blog: Why I write about women on Wikipedia

• Recent research: Why people don't contribute to Wikipedia; using Wikipedia to teach statistics, technical writing, and controversial issues

• Humour: Play with your food

• Gallery: Wine not?

• From the archives: The Signpost scoops The Signpost

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:17, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update, 25 May 2018

We have grown to 79 members.

Please provide a warm welcome to our latest additions, Wpgbrown, Cactus.man, JLJ001, and Wumbolo.

A lot is going on, much of it on the WikiProject's talk page, so be sure to go there and join in on any of the many discussions taking place there.

Elsewhere around the portal project, or related to portals, the following is happening...

New news template ready for testing

Evad37 has created a new template, with supporting lua module, to handle news in portals...

{{Transclude selected current events}} is ready to be tested in some actual portals. Let Evad37 know if you need help with the search patterns.

Noyster commented that "This is the best portal innovation since sliced bread!"

See the relevant discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals#Alternative to Wikinews.

Thank you, Evad.

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.

Please check Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Article alerts to see if you can figure out how to fix this.

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.

New portal, still needs work

• Portal:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, courtesy of Mozart834428196. See also, the discussion.

Drafting a new portals guideline

Your input/editing is welcome on the draft-in-progress of a new guideline for portals.

See or work on the draft at User:Cesdeva/sandbox11.

See also the discussion at: 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...

• Portal:Quidditch survived its 2nd deletion nomination
• Portal:Prehistory of Antarctica did the same

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 {{Db-p1}} or {{Db-p2}}). Essentially, they were bare skeletons, with maybe a little meat on them. The plus here is that speedy deletion is without prejudice to re-creating the portals. They can easily be restarted from scratch without getting approval, or be undeleted by request by someone willing to work on them. We have kept track of these, for when someone wants to rebuild them. They are listed at 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.

There is also an MfD concerning some of these at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Redundant subpages of the Cornwall portal.

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.

I hope to see you there!

Wrapping up

These developments make up just the tip of the iceberg. I'll have more to report in the next update, soon.    — The Transhumanist   00:32, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Whoa, I missed one...

There's an article about the Portals WikiProject in the new issue of Signpost:

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-05-24/WikiProject report

Enjoy.

P.S.: We now have 80 members. Evad37 just joined!    — The Transhumanist   01:37, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #007, 31 May 2018

We have grown to 89 members.

This is the seventh issue of this newsletter. For previous issues, see our newsletter archive.

Welcome

A warm welcome to our nearly one dozen new members...

Our new members include:

• Evad37
• Checkingfax
• Grey Wanderer
• Voceditenore
• TestPAKISTAN
• Godsy
• Greatedits1
• Charlesdrakew
• Ww2censor
• Simon Burchell
• TheGridExe

Be sure to say "hi" and welcome them to the team.

The portal set has shrunk

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 interviews about this project in the Signpost, pointed out our newsletter archive so they can keep up-to-date with what we are doing, and I invited them all to come and have a look-see at 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:

• Portal:Plymouth
• Portal:Bedfordshire
• Portal:Suffolk
• Portal:Norfolk
• User:JLJ001/tag
• Template:Non-standard portal flag
• Template:Portal flag

Automation so far, section by section...

• Intro – {{Transclude lead excerpt}}
• Selected article – {{Transclude random excerpt}}
• In the news – {{Transclude selected current events}}
• 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.

Other things that could use some automation

Noyster pointed out that it would be nice to automate the updating of the portals section at the Community bulletin board.

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 Deletion review to rebuild).

• Portal:Juanes – see the discussion

(Current deletion discussions are posted on our WikiProject page).

Portals needing repair

• Portal:Toys

Wrapping up

There's still more, but it will have to wait until next issue.

Until then, see ya around the project.    — The Transhumanist   12:02, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #008, 7 June 2018

The WikiProject now has 92 participants, including 16 admins.

Welcome

A warm welcome to the newest members of the team:

• Keith D
• RL0919

Be sure to say hi.

Congrats

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

• 
  Old Town Sacramento, the capital as it looked like in 19th century
• 
  Sacramento from near the Sacramento River
• 
  Sacramento Memorial Auditorium
• 
  Pocket Sacramento Canal
• 
  US Bank Tower
• 
  Tower Bridge
• 
  Capitol Mall, seen from the Capitol
• 
  State Capitol Building

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).

It is featured in Portal:Sacramento, California. Check it out to the right.

Keep in mind that the feature is a beta version. Please share your comments on how to refine this feature, at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals#Refining the Picture slideshow.

The one-page portal has been achieved

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 WikiProject's talk page.    — The Transhumanist   02:09, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #009, 15 June 2018

(Article slideshow prototype)
Selected animals

• 

  

  
  

  

  
  The dog (Canis familiaris or Canis lupus familiaris) is a domesticated descendant of the wolf. Also called the domestic dog, it is derived from extinct gray wolves, and the gray wolf is the dog's closest living relative. The dog was the first species to be domesticated by humans. Experts estimate that hunter-gatherers domesticated dogs more than 15,000 years ago, which was before the development of agriculture. Due to their long association with humans, dogs have expanded to a large number of domestic individuals and gained the ability to thrive on a starch-rich diet that would be inadequate for other canids.
  
  The dog has been selectively bred over millennia for various behaviors, sensory capabilities, and physical attributes. Dog breeds vary widely in shape, size, and color. They perform many roles for humans, such as hunting, herding, pulling loads, protection, assisting police and the military, companionship, therapy, and aiding disabled people. Over the millennia, dogs became uniquely adapted to human behavior, and the human–canine bond has been a topic of frequent study. This influence on human society has given them the sobriquet of "man's best friend". (Full article...)
• 

  

  
  

  

  
  The cat (Felis catus), commonly referred to as the domestic cat or house cat, is a small domesticated carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticed species in the family Felidae. Recent advances in archaeology and genetics have shown that the domestication of the cat occurred in the Near East around 7500 BC. It is commonly kept as a house pet and farm cat, but also ranges freely as a feral cat avoiding human contact. It is valued by humans for companionship and its ability to kill vermin. Its retractable claws are adapted to killing small prey like mice and rats. It has a strong, flexible body, quick reflexes, sharp teeth, and its night vision and sense of smell are well developed. It is a social species, but a solitary hunter and a crepuscular predator. Cat communication includes vocalizations like meowing, purring, trilling, hissing, growling, and grunting as well as cat body language. It can hear sounds too faint or too high in frequency for human ears, such as those made by small mammals. It also secretes and perceives pheromones.
  
  Female domestic cats can have kittens from spring to late autumn in temperate zones and throughout the year in equatorial regions, with litter sizes often ranging from two to five kittens. Domestic cats are bred and shown at events as registered pedigreed cats, a hobby known as cat fancy. Animal population control of cats may be achieved by spaying and neutering, but their proliferation and the abandonment of pets has resulted in large numbers of feral cats worldwide, contributing to the extinction of bird, mammal and reptile species.
  
  the domestic cat was the second most popular pet in the United States, with 95.6 million cats owned and around 42 million households owning at least one cat. In the United Kingdom, 26% of adults have a cat, with an estimated population of 10.9 million pet cats there were an estimated 220 million owned and 480 million stray cats in the world. (Full article...)
• 

  

  House mouse (Mus musculus)

  
  A mouse (<abbr title="
  '"`UNIQ--nowiki-000000E1-QINU`"'
  ">pl.: mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (Mus musculus). Mice are also popular as pets. In some places, certain kinds of field mice are locally common. They are known to invade homes for food and shelter.
  
  Mice are typically distinguished from rats by their size. Generally, when a muroid rodent is discovered, its common name includes the term mouse if it is smaller, or rat if it is larger. The common terms rat and mouse are not taxonomically specific. Typical mice are classified in the genus Mus, but the term mouse is not confined to members of Mus and can also apply to species from other genera such as the deer mouse (Peromyscus).
  
  Domestic mice sold as pets often differ substantially in size from the common house mouse. This is attributable to breeding and different conditions in the wild. The best-known strain of mouse is the white lab mouse. It has more uniform traits that are appropriate to its use in research. (Full article...)
• 

  

  
  The horse (Equus ferus caballus) is a domesticated, one-toed, hoofed mammal. It belongs to the taxonomic family Equidae and is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature, close to Eohippus, into the large, single-toed animal of today. Humans began domesticating horses around 4000 BCE, and their domestication is believed to have been widespread by 3000 BCE. Horses in the subspecies caballus are domesticated, although some domesticated populations live in the wild as feral horses. These feral populations are not true wild horses, which are horses that never have been domesticated and historically linked to the megafauna category of species. There is an extensive, specialized vocabulary used to describe equine-related concepts, covering everything from anatomy to life stages, size, colors, markings, breeds, locomotion, and behavior.
  
  Horses are adapted to run, allowing them to quickly escape predators, and possess an good sense of balance and a strong fight-or-flight response. Related to this need to flee from predators in the wild is an unusual trait: horses are able to sleep both standing up and lying down, with younger horses tending to sleep significantly more than adults. Female horses, called mares, carry their young for approximately 11 months and a young horse, called a foal, can stand and run shortly following birth. Most domesticated horses begin training under a saddle or in a harness between the ages of two and four. They reach full adult development by age five, and have an average lifespan of between 25 and 30 years.
  
  Horse breeds are loosely divided into three categories based on general temperament: spirited "hot bloods" with speed and endurance; "cold bloods", such as draft horses and some ponies, suitable for slow, heavy work; and "warmbloods", developed from crosses between hot bloods and cold bloods, often focusing on creating breeds for specific riding purposes, particularly in Europe. There are more than 300 breeds of horse in the world today, developed for many different uses. (Full article...)

Don't mind that box to the right. We'll be talking about that later, below.

Almost done...

With the portals upgrades?

No. :)

What is almost done is the updating of the main list of portals!

There are 23 portals left to be listed.

Kudos to the WikiGnome Squadron, for spearheading this.

Once it is fully updated, we need to keep it up to date. When you complete a portal, remember to add it to Portal:Contents/Portals.

Concerning portal upgrades, we are working on those section-by-section...

Associated Wikimedia section conversion task complete

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.

If you would like to help, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Upgrade introduction sections and Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#AWB task: Convert category sections

Further section conversions (by hand)

Work has also started with converting selected picture sections to picture slideshow sections. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Install picture slideshows.

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 Transhumanist   11:04, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 June 2018

• From the editor: The Admin Ship is still barely afloat, while a Foundation project risks sinking

• Special report: NPR and AfC – The Marshall Plan: an engagement and a marriage?

• Op-ed: What do admins do?

• Opinion: Google isn't responsible for Wikipedia's mistakes

• News and notes: Money, milestones, and Wikimania

• In the media: Much wikilove from the Mayor of London, less from Paekākāriki or a certain candidate for U.S. Congress

• Discussion report: Deletion, page moves, and an update to the main page

• Featured content: New promotions

• Arbitration report: WWII, UK politics, and a user deCrat'ed

• Traffic report: Endgame

• Technology report: Improvements piled on more improvements

• Gallery: Wiki Loves Africa

• Blog: Wikipedia should be open for editors in Turkey

• Recent research: How censorship can backfire and conversations can go awry

• Humour: Television plot lines

• Wikipedia essays: This month's pick by The Signpost editors

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Portals WikiProject update #010, 30 June 2018

We've grown to 94 participants.

A warm welcome to dcljr and Kpgjhpjm.

Rating system for portals

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 Portal:Reptiles, Portal:Ancient Tamil civilization, and Portal:Reference works.

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.

But, that is a few years off.

Until then, building portals is still (partially) up to us.    — The Transhumanist   13:32, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #011, 10 July 2018

We now have 97 participants.

Be sure to welcome our newest members, BrantleyIzMe, Coffeeandcrumbs, and Nolan Perry, with warm regards.

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:

{{/box-header|Introduction|noedit=yes|}}
{{Transclude lead excerpt | {{PAGENAME}} | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1}}
{{Box-footer|[[{{PAGENAME}}|Read more...]]}}

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.

Be sure to skip user-maintained portals. They are listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Portals#Specific_portal_maintainers.

AWB tips

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. ;)

And on that note, I bid you adieu. Until next newsletter, see ya 'round the WikiProject.    — The Transhumanist   12:31, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #012, 15 July 2018

We have 97 participants.

Getting faster

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.

Portal:Dresden took about 19 minutes.

Portal:Athens took less than 17 minutes.

Did Portal:Florence in about 13 minutes.

Portal:Stockholm also in about 13.

Portal:Palermo approx. 12 minutes.

Why?

To see, and to show, what may become feasible via automation.

It now looks highly feasible that we could get portal construction time down to a few minutes, or maybe even down to a few seconds.

The singularity is just around the corner. :)

Slideshows

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:

• Algae
• Amphibians
• Anatomy
• Ancient Tamil civilization
• Athens
• Bangladesh.
• Berkshire
• Birds
• Buckinghamshire
• Cenozoic
• Dresden
• Dubai
• East Sussex
• Fish
• Florence
• Florida

• Genocide
• Gilgit-Baltistan
• H. P. Lovecraft
• Hampshire
• Human body
• Humanism
• Isle of Wight
• Kent
• London transport
• Mammals
• Milan
• Munich
• Oxfordshire
• Palermo
• Prague
• Reference works
• Reptiles

• Sacramento
• Saint Petersburg
• Salem
• Scottish Islands
• South East England
• Stockholm
• Surrey
• Sydney
• Tamil People
• Telephones (empty – please add some pictures)
• Turin
• Underwater diving
• Vienna
• West Sussex

Progress on intro conversions

The intros for most of the portals up through the letter "O" have been converted, using this wikicode:

{{/box-header|Introduction|noedit=yes|}}
{{Transclude lead excerpt | {{PAGENAME}} | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1}}
{{Box-footer|[[{{PAGENAME}}|Read more...]]}}

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 Transhumanist   08:46, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #013, 18 July 2018

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.

Check these out:

• Portal:Kyoto
• Portal:Miami
• Portal:Seattle
• Portal:Houston
• Portal:Tokyo
• Portal:New Orleans
• Portal:Brisbane
• Portal:Calgary
• Portal:Moscow

The Portals WikiGnome squadron is busy adding panoramas to geographical portals that don't yet have one. Feel free to join in on the fun. See task details at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Add a panorama or skyline to a geographic portal.

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.

The new slideshow template is {{Transclude files as random slideshow}}.

Here's a sample, that grabs images from a single page:

Selected motorcycle or motorcycling pictures

• 
  BMW's first motorcycle, the 1923-1925 R32 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  2015 BMW R1200RT Sport Touring Motorcycle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  A 1954 Triumph T110 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Honda Super Cub, the archetypal underbone and the world's best-selling motor vehicle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  A 1969 Harley-Davidson chopper, a replica of the 'Captain America' bike from Easy Rider (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Joey Dunlop on his Honda RC30 ready for the Senior TT (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Logo of the British Motorcyclists Federation (BMF) (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  FIM Motocross World Championship, taking place at Mallory Park, England (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Honda CB750 inline four, the first to be called a 'superbike', and the archetypal Universal Japanese Motorcycle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Ernesto 'Che' Guevara (left) holding the handlebars of his 500 cc single cylinder Norton motorcycle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Lucius Copeland 1894 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Brough Superior SS 100 1925 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)

New Template:Box-header colour

Speaking of new templates, here's another one!

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 color support, see Web colors.

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.

See ya again soon,    — The Transhumanist   11:07, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #014, 27 July 2018

Development of design continues, full speed ahead...

Excerpt slideshows are here!

Can you say "paradigm shift"?

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:

{{Transclude excerpts as random slideshow}}

For this one, you specify the page names where the excerpts are to be extracted from.

{{Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}}

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.

{{Transclude linked excerpts as random slideshow}}

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.

Give resizing the page a try:

Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

You can now balance section boxes

Before:

Reptile types

• 
  
  

  

  An American alligator (top) and a Chinese alligator

  
  An alligator, or colloquially gator, is a large reptile in the genus Alligator of the family Alligatoridae of the order Crocodilia. The two extant species are the American alligator (A. mississippiensis) and the Chinese alligator (A. sinensis). Additionally, several extinct species of alligator are known from fossil remains. Alligators first appeared during the late Eocene epoch about 37 million years ago. (Full article...)
• 

  

  
  Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes (/sɜːrˈpɛntiːz/). Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads (cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have independently evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs at least twenty-five times via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamidae, and Pygopodidae). (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Clockwise from top left: veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus), rock monitor (Varanus albigularis), common blue-tongued skink (Tiliqua scincoides), Italian wall lizard (Podarcis sicula), giant leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus fimbriatus), and legless lizard (Anelytropsis papillosus)

  
  Lizard is the common name used for all squamate reptiles other than snakes (and to a lesser extent amphisbaenians), encompassing over 7,000 species, ranging across all continents except Antarctica, as well as most oceanic island chains. The grouping is paraphyletic as some lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other lizards. Lizards range in size from chameleons and geckos a few centimeters long to the 3-meter-long Komodo dragon. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus)

  
  Crocodiles (family Crocodylidae) or true crocodiles are large semiaquatic reptiles that live throughout the tropics in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia. The term crocodile is sometimes used even more loosely to include all extant members of the order Crocodilia, which includes the alligators and caimans (family Alligatoridae), the gharial and false gharial (family Gavialidae) among other extinct taxa. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Blanus cinereus, Spain

  
  Amphisbaenia /æmfɪsˈbiːniə/ (called amphisbaenians or worm lizards) is a group of typically legless lizards, comprising over 200 extant species. Amphisbaenians are characterized by their long bodies, the reduction or loss of the limbs, and rudimentary eyes. As many species have a pink body and scales arranged in rings, they have a superficial resemblance to earthworms. While the genus Bipes retains forelimbs, all other genera are limbless. Phylogenetic studies suggest that they are nested within Lacertoidea, closely related to the lizard family Lacertidae. Amphisbaenians are widely distributed, occurring in North America, Europe, Africa, South America, Western Asia and the Caribbean. Most species are less than 6 inches (15 cm) long. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Turtles from different families; clockwise from top-left: Red-bellied short-necked turtle, Indian flapshell turtle, Hawksbill sea turtle, and Galápagos tortoise

  
  Turtles, or testudines, are reptiles of the order Testudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked turtles), which differ in the way the head retracts. There are 360 living and recently extinct species of turtles, including land-dwelling tortoises and freshwater terrapins. They are found on most continents, some islands and, in the case of sea turtles, much of the ocean. Like other amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) they breathe air and do not lay eggs underwater, although many species live in or around water. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Aldabra giant tortoise
  (Aldabrachelys gigantea)

  
  Tortoises (/ˈtɔːr.təs.ɪz/) are reptiles of the family Testudinidae of the order Testudines (Latin for "tortoise"). Like other turtles, tortoises have a shell to protect from predation and other threats. The shell in tortoises is generally hard, and like other members of the suborder Cryptodira, they retract their necks and heads directly backward into the shell to protect them. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Male gharial

  
  The gharial (Gavialis gangeticus), also known as gavial or fish-eating crocodile, is a crocodilian in the family Gavialidae and among the longest of all living crocodilians. Mature females are 2.6 to 4.5 m (8 ft 6 in to 14 ft 9 in) long, and males 3 to 6 m (9 ft 10 in to 19 ft 8 in). Adult males have a distinct boss at the end of the snout, which resembles an earthenware pot known as a ghara, hence the name "gharial". The gharial is well adapted to catching fish because of its long, narrow snout and 110 sharp, interlocking teeth. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Northern tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus punctatus)

  
  The tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is a species of reptile endemic to New Zealand. Despite its close resemblance to lizards, it is part of a distinct lineage, the order Rhynchocephalia. The name tuatara is derived from the Māori language and means "peaks on the back". (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Yacare caiman, Caiman yacare

  
  A caiman (/ˈkeɪmən/; also cayman as a variant spelling from Taíno kaiman) is an alligatorid belonging to the subfamily Caimaninae, one of two primary lineages within the Alligatoridae family, the other being alligators. Caimans inhabit Mexico and Central and South America from marshes and swamps to mangrove rivers and lakes. They have scaly skin and live a fairly nocturnal existence. They are relatively small-sized crocodilians with an average maximum weight of 6 to 40 kg (13 to 88 lb) depending on species, with the exception of the black caiman (Melanosuchus niger), which can grow more than 4 m (13 ft) in length and weigh in excess of 1,000 kg (2,200 Ib). The black caiman is the largest caiman species in the world and is found in the slow-moving rivers and lakes that surround the Amazon basin. The smallest species is the Cuvier's dwarf caiman (Paleosuchus palpebrosus), which grows to 1.2 to 1.5 m (3.9 to 4.9 ft) long. There are six different species of caiman found throughout the watery jungle habitats of Central and Southern America. The average length for most of the other caiman species is about 2 to 2.5 m (6.6 to 8.2 ft) long. (Full article...)

Amphibian types

• 
  
  

  

  Various types of frog

  
  A frog is any member of a diverse and largely carnivorous group of short-bodied, tailless amphibians composing the order Anura (ἀνούρα, literally without tail in Ancient Greek). The oldest fossil "proto-frog" Triadobatrachus is known from the Early Triassic of Madagascar, but molecular clock dating suggests their split from other amphibians may extend further back to the Permian, 265 million years ago. Frogs are widely distributed, ranging from the tropics to subarctic regions, but the greatest concentration of species diversity is in tropical rainforest. Frogs account for around 88% of extant amphibian species. They are also one of the five most diverse vertebrate orders. Warty frog species tend to be called toads, but the distinction between frogs and toads is informal, not from taxonomy or evolutionary history.
  
  An adult frog has a stout body, protruding eyes, anteriorly-attached tongue, limbs folded underneath, and no tail (the tail of tailed frogs is an extension of the male cloaca). Frogs have glandular skin, with secretions ranging from distasteful to toxic. Their skin varies in colour from well-camouflaged dappled brown, grey and green to vivid patterns of bright red or yellow and black to show toxicity and ward off predators. Adult frogs live in fresh water and on dry land; some species are adapted for living underground or in trees.
  
  Frogs typically lay their eggs in water. The eggs hatch into aquatic larvae called tadpoles that have tails and internal gills. They have highly specialized rasping mouth parts suitable for herbivorous, omnivorous or planktivorous diets. The life cycle is completed when they metamorphose into adults. A few species deposit eggs on land or bypass the tadpole stage. Adult frogs generally have a carnivorous diet consisting of small invertebrates, but omnivorous species exist and a few feed on plant matter. Frog skin has a rich microbiome which is important to their health. Frogs are extremely efficient at converting what they eat into body mass. They are an important food source for predators and part of the food web dynamics of many of the world's ecosystems. The skin is semi-permeable, making them susceptible to dehydration, so they either live in moist places or have special adaptations to deal with dry habitats. Frogs produce a wide range of vocalizations, particularly in their breeding season, and exhibit many different kinds of complex behaviors to attract mates, to fend off predators and to generally survive. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Spotted salamander, Ambystoma maculatum

  
  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 order Urodela from the group Caudata. 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...)
• 
  
  

  

  Oscaecilia ochrocephala (Caeciliidae)

  
  Caecilians (/sɪˈsɪliən/; New Latin for 'blind ones') are a group of limbless, vermiform (worm-shaped) or serpentine (snake-shaped) amphibians with small or sometimes nonexistent eyes. They mostly live hidden in soil or in streambeds, and this cryptic lifestyle renders caecilians among the least familiar amphibians. Modern caecilians live in the tropics of South and Central America, Africa, and southern Asia. Caecilians feed on small subterranean creatures such as earthworms. The body is cylindrical and often darkly coloured, and the skull is bullet-shaped and strongly built. Caecilian heads have several unique adaptations, including fused cranial and jaw bones, a two-part system of jaw muscles, and a chemosensory tentacle in front of the eye. The skin is slimy and bears ringlike markings or grooves and may contain scales.
  
  Modern caecilians are a clade, the order Gymnophiona /ˌdʒɪmnəˈfaɪənə/ (or Apoda /ˈæpədə/), one of the three living amphibian groups alongside Anura (frogs) and Urodela (salamanders). Gymnophiona is a crown group, encompassing all modern caecilians and all descendants of their last common ancestor. There are more than 220 living species of caecilian classified in 10 families. Gymnophionomorpha is a recently coined name for the corresponding total group which includes Gymnophiona as well as a few extinct stem-group caecilians (extinct amphibians whose closest living relatives are caecilians but are not descended from any caecilian). Some palaeontologists have used the name Gymnophiona for the total group and the old name Apoda for the crown group'. However, Apoda has other even older uses, including as the name of a genus of Butterfly making its use potentially confusing and best avoided. 'Gymnophiona' derives from the Greek words γυμνος / gymnos (Ancient Greek for 'naked') and οφις / ophis (Ancient Greek for 'snake'), as the caecilians were originally thought to be related to snakes and to lack scales.
  
  The study of caecilian evolution is complicated by their poor fossil record and specialized anatomy. Genetic evidence and some anatomical details (such as pedicellate teeth) support the idea that frogs, salamanders, and caecilians (collectively known as lissamphibians) are each others' closest relatives. Frogs and salamanders show many similarities to dissorophoids, a group of extinct amphibians in the order Temnospondyli. Caecilians are more controversial; many studies extend dissorophoid ancestry to caecilians. Some studies have instead argued that caecilians descend from extinct lepospondyl or stereospondyl amphibians, contradicting evidence for lissamphibian monophyly (common ancestry). Rare fossils of early gymnophionans such as Eocaecilia and Funcusvermis have helped to test the various conflicting hypotheses for the relationships between caecilians and other living and extinct amphibians. ('Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  European fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina), a member of the family Bombinatoridae

  
  Toad is a common name for certain frogs, especially of the family Bufonidae, that are characterized by dry, leathery skin, short legs, and large bumps covering the parotoid glands.
  
  A distinction between frogs and toads is not made in scientific taxonomy, but is common in popular culture (folk taxonomy), in which toads are associated with drier, rougher skin and more terrestrial habitats. (Full article...)

After:

Reptile types

• 
  
  

  

  Yacare caiman, Caiman yacare

  
  A caiman (/ˈkeɪmən/; also cayman as a variant spelling from Taíno kaiman) is an alligatorid belonging to the subfamily Caimaninae, one of two primary lineages within the Alligatoridae family, the other being alligators. Caimans inhabit Mexico and Central and South America from marshes and swamps to mangrove rivers and lakes. They have scaly skin and live a fairly nocturnal existence. They are relatively small-sized crocodilians with an average maximum weight of 6 to 40 kg (13 to 88 lb) depending on species, with the exception of the black caiman (Melanosuchus niger), which can grow more than 4 m (13 ft) in length and weigh in excess of 1,000 kg (2,200 Ib). The black caiman is the largest caiman species in the world and is found in the slow-moving rivers and lakes that surround the Amazon basin. The smallest species is the Cuvier's dwarf caiman (Paleosuchus palpebrosus), which grows to 1.2 to 1.5 m (3.9 to 4.9 ft) long. There are six different species of caiman found throughout the watery jungle habitats of Central and Southern America. The average length for most of the other caiman species is about 2 to 2.5 m (6.6 to 8.2 ft) long. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  An American alligator (top) and a Chinese alligator

  
  An alligator, or colloquially gator, is a large reptile in the genus Alligator of the family Alligatoridae of the order Crocodilia. The two extant species are the American alligator (A. mississippiensis) and the Chinese alligator (A. sinensis). Additionally, several extinct species of alligator are known from fossil remains. Alligators first appeared during the late Eocene epoch about 37 million years ago. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Male gharial

  
  The gharial (Gavialis gangeticus), also known as gavial or fish-eating crocodile, is a crocodilian in the family Gavialidae and among the longest of all living crocodilians. Mature females are 2.6 to 4.5 m (8 ft 6 in to 14 ft 9 in) long, and males 3 to 6 m (9 ft 10 in to 19 ft 8 in). Adult males have a distinct boss at the end of the snout, which resembles an earthenware pot known as a ghara, hence the name "gharial". The gharial is well adapted to catching fish because of its long, narrow snout and 110 sharp, interlocking teeth. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Clockwise from top left: veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus), rock monitor (Varanus albigularis), common blue-tongued skink (Tiliqua scincoides), Italian wall lizard (Podarcis sicula), giant leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus fimbriatus), and legless lizard (Anelytropsis papillosus)

  
  Lizard is the common name used for all squamate reptiles other than snakes (and to a lesser extent amphisbaenians), encompassing over 7,000 species, ranging across all continents except Antarctica, as well as most oceanic island chains. The grouping is paraphyletic as some lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other lizards. Lizards range in size from chameleons and geckos a few centimeters long to the 3-meter-long Komodo dragon. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Aldabra giant tortoise
  (Aldabrachelys gigantea)

  
  Tortoises (/ˈtɔːr.təs.ɪz/) are reptiles of the family Testudinidae of the order Testudines (Latin for "tortoise"). Like other turtles, tortoises have a shell to protect from predation and other threats. The shell in tortoises is generally hard, and like other members of the suborder Cryptodira, they retract their necks and heads directly backward into the shell to protect them. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus)

  
  Crocodiles (family Crocodylidae) or true crocodiles are large semiaquatic reptiles that live throughout the tropics in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia. The term crocodile is sometimes used even more loosely to include all extant members of the order Crocodilia, which includes the alligators and caimans (family Alligatoridae), the gharial and false gharial (family Gavialidae) among other extinct taxa. (Full article...)
• 

  

  
  Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes (/sɜːrˈpɛntiːz/). Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads (cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have independently evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs at least twenty-five times via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamidae, and Pygopodidae). (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Turtles from different families; clockwise from top-left: Red-bellied short-necked turtle, Indian flapshell turtle, Hawksbill sea turtle, and Galápagos tortoise

  
  Turtles, or testudines, are reptiles of the order Testudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked turtles), which differ in the way the head retracts. There are 360 living and recently extinct species of turtles, including land-dwelling tortoises and freshwater terrapins. They are found on most continents, some islands and, in the case of sea turtles, much of the ocean. Like other amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) they breathe air and do not lay eggs underwater, although many species live in or around water. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Northern tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus punctatus)

  
  The tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is a species of reptile endemic to New Zealand. Despite its close resemblance to lizards, it is part of a distinct lineage, the order Rhynchocephalia. The name tuatara is derived from the Māori language and means "peaks on the back". (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Blanus cinereus, Spain

  
  Amphisbaenia /æmfɪsˈbiːniə/ (called amphisbaenians or worm lizards) is a group of typically legless lizards, comprising over 200 extant species. Amphisbaenians are characterized by their long bodies, the reduction or loss of the limbs, and rudimentary eyes. As many species have a pink body and scales arranged in rings, they have a superficial resemblance to earthworms. While the genus Bipes retains forelimbs, all other genera are limbless. Phylogenetic studies suggest that they are nested within Lacertoidea, closely related to the lizard family Lacertidae. Amphisbaenians are widely distributed, occurring in North America, Europe, Africa, South America, Western Asia and the Caribbean. Most species are less than 6 inches (15 cm) long. (Full article...)

Amphibian types

• 
  
  

  

  European fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina), a member of the family Bombinatoridae

  
  Toad is a common name for certain frogs, especially of the family Bufonidae, that are characterized by dry, leathery skin, short legs, and large bumps covering the parotoid glands.
  
  A distinction between frogs and toads is not made in scientific taxonomy, but is common in popular culture (folk taxonomy), in which toads are associated with drier, rougher skin and more terrestrial habitats. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Spotted salamander, Ambystoma maculatum

  
  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 order Urodela from the group Caudata. 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...)
• 
  
  

  

  Oscaecilia ochrocephala (Caeciliidae)

  
  Caecilians (/sɪˈsɪliən/; New Latin for 'blind ones') are a group of limbless, vermiform (worm-shaped) or serpentine (snake-shaped) amphibians with small or sometimes nonexistent eyes. They mostly live hidden in soil or in streambeds, and this cryptic lifestyle renders caecilians among the least familiar amphibians. Modern caecilians live in the tropics of South and Central America, Africa, and southern Asia. Caecilians feed on small subterranean creatures such as earthworms. The body is cylindrical and often darkly coloured, and the skull is bullet-shaped and strongly built. Caecilian heads have several unique adaptations, including fused cranial and jaw bones, a two-part system of jaw muscles, and a chemosensory tentacle in front of the eye. The skin is slimy and bears ringlike markings or grooves and may contain scales.
  
  Modern caecilians are a clade, the order Gymnophiona /ˌdʒɪmnəˈfaɪənə/ (or Apoda /ˈæpədə/), one of the three living amphibian groups alongside Anura (frogs) and Urodela (salamanders). Gymnophiona is a crown group, encompassing all modern caecilians and all descendants of their last common ancestor. There are more than 220 living species of caecilian classified in 10 families. Gymnophionomorpha is a recently coined name for the corresponding total group which includes Gymnophiona as well as a few extinct stem-group caecilians (extinct amphibians whose closest living relatives are caecilians but are not descended from any caecilian). Some palaeontologists have used the name Gymnophiona for the total group and the old name Apoda for the crown group'. However, Apoda has other even older uses, including as the name of a genus of Butterfly making its use potentially confusing and best avoided. 'Gymnophiona' derives from the Greek words γυμνος / gymnos (Ancient Greek for 'naked') and οφις / ophis (Ancient Greek for 'snake'), as the caecilians were originally thought to be related to snakes and to lack scales.
  
  The study of caecilian evolution is complicated by their poor fossil record and specialized anatomy. Genetic evidence and some anatomical details (such as pedicellate teeth) support the idea that frogs, salamanders, and caecilians (collectively known as lissamphibians) are each others' closest relatives. Frogs and salamanders show many similarities to dissorophoids, a group of extinct amphibians in the order Temnospondyli. Caecilians are more controversial; many studies extend dissorophoid ancestry to caecilians. Some studies have instead argued that caecilians descend from extinct lepospondyl or stereospondyl amphibians, contradicting evidence for lissamphibian monophyly (common ancestry). Rare fossils of early gymnophionans such as Eocaecilia and Funcusvermis have helped to test the various conflicting hypotheses for the relationships between caecilians and other living and extinct amphibians. ('Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Various types of frog

  
  A frog is any member of a diverse and largely carnivorous group of short-bodied, tailless amphibians composing the order Anura (ἀνούρα, literally without tail in Ancient Greek). The oldest fossil "proto-frog" Triadobatrachus is known from the Early Triassic of Madagascar, but molecular clock dating suggests their split from other amphibians may extend further back to the Permian, 265 million years ago. Frogs are widely distributed, ranging from the tropics to subarctic regions, but the greatest concentration of species diversity is in tropical rainforest. Frogs account for around 88% of extant amphibian species. They are also one of the five most diverse vertebrate orders. Warty frog species tend to be called toads, but the distinction between frogs and toads is informal, not from taxonomy or evolutionary history.
  
  An adult frog has a stout body, protruding eyes, anteriorly-attached tongue, limbs folded underneath, and no tail (the tail of tailed frogs is an extension of the male cloaca). Frogs have glandular skin, with secretions ranging from distasteful to toxic. Their skin varies in colour from well-camouflaged dappled brown, grey and green to vivid patterns of bright red or yellow and black to show toxicity and ward off predators. Adult frogs live in fresh water and on dry land; some species are adapted for living underground or in trees.
  
  Frogs typically lay their eggs in water. The eggs hatch into aquatic larvae called tadpoles that have tails and internal gills. They have highly specialized rasping mouth parts suitable for herbivorous, omnivorous or planktivorous diets. The life cycle is completed when they metamorphose into adults. A few species deposit eggs on land or bypass the tadpole stage. Adult frogs generally have a carnivorous diet consisting of small invertebrates, but omnivorous species exist and a few feed on plant matter. Frog skin has a rich microbiome which is important to their health. Frogs are extremely efficient at converting what they eat into body mass. They are an important food source for predators and part of the food web dynamics of many of the world's ecosystems. The skin is semi-permeable, making them susceptible to dehydration, so they either live in moist places or have special adaptations to deal with dry habitats. Frogs produce a wide range of vocalizations, particularly in their breeding season, and exhibit many different kinds of complex behaviors to attract mates, to fend off predators and to generally survive. (Full article...)

Notice how the box bottoms line up. That readjusts even if you click the slideshow buttons.

The template used for this is {{Flex columns}}.

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:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Reptile

If you discover problems in a portal you can't fix, report them on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Until next time...

Have fun.    — The Transhumanist   00:36, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #015, 31 July 2018

Now that we have lots of toys to play with, it's play time!

Here are some fun activities to use our new toys on...

Fun activity #1: put the improved panorama template to use

Would you like to travel around the world? Well, this may be the next best thing...

Here's another fun toy to play with: {{Portal image banner}}

To see what it looks like, check out the panoramas at the tops of the following portals:

• Portal:India
• Portal:Melbourne
• Portal:Perth
• Portal:Monaco
• Portal:South Sudan
• Portal:Thiruvananthapuram
• Portal:Lithuania
• Portal:Brisbane
• Portal:Abu Dhabi
• Portal:Athens
• Portal:Barcelona
• Portal:Calgary
• Portal:Dhaka
• Portal:Dresden
• Portal:Edinburgh
• Portal:Florence
• Portal:Houston
• Portal:Miami
• Portal:Milan
• Portal:Moscow
• Portal:Munich
• Portal:Seattle
• Portal:Stockholm
• Portal:Turin
• Portal:Bermuda

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 toys we have to work with for this are:

{{Random slideshow}}

and

{{Transclude files as random slideshow}}

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

• 
  Koi are ornamental domesticated varieties of the 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".
• 
  A 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.
• 
  Salmon fry hatching (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.
• 
  The 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.

Selected images

• 
  A thin transverse section showing the internal structure of conifer wood (from Conifer)
• 
  Pinaceae: needle-like leaves and vegetative buds of Coast Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. menziesii) (from Conifer)
• 
  Sediment off the Yucatán Peninsula (from Wildfire)
• 
  A coniferous forest pictured in the coat of arms of the Kainuu region in Finland (from Conifer)
• 
  In 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)
• 
  National 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)
• 
  Wildland firefighter working a brush fire in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, US (from Wildfire)
• 
  Wildfire burning in the Kaibab National Forest, Arizona, United States, in 2020. The Mangum Fire burned more than 70,000 acres (280 km²) of forest. (from Wildfire)
• 
  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)
• 
  Charred shrubland in suburban Sydney (2019–20 Australian bushfires). (from Wildfire)
• 
  Forest fires visible from a distance in Dajti National Park, Tirana, Albania (from Wildfire)
• 
  Ecological succession after a wildfire in a boreal pine forest next to Hara Bog, Lahemaa National Park, Estonia. The pictures were taken one and two years after the fire. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Dry Mountain Fire Lookout in the Ochoco National Forest, Oregon, US circa 1930 (from Wildfire)
• 
  A prescribed burn in a Pinus nigra stand in Portugal (from Wildfire)
• 
  First growth or virgin forest near Mount Rainier, 1914 (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Antarctic beech old-growth in Lamington National Park, Queensland, Australia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Eucalyptus regnans forest in Tasmania, Australia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  A wildfire in Venezuela during a drought (from Wildfire)
• 
  Globosa, a cultivar of Pinus sylvestris, a northern European species, in the North American Red Butte Garden (from Conifer)
• 
  A Monterey pine forest in Sydney, Australia (from Conifer)
• 
  Lightning-sparked wildfires are frequent occurrences during the dry summer season in Nevada. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Fire Propagation Model (from Wildfire)
• 
  Araucariaceae: awl-like leaves of Cook pine (Araucaria columnaris) (from Conifer)
• 
  Fungus Climacocystis borealis on a tree stump in the Białowieża Forest, one of the last largely intact primeval forests in Central Europe (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Downed wood replenishes topsoil as it decays. (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  A Russian firefighter extinguishing a wildfire (from Wildfire)
• 
  Charred landscape following a crown fire in the North Cascades, United States (from Wildfire)
• 
  Cupressaceae: scale leaves of Lawson's cypress (Chamaecyparis lawsoniana); scale in mm (from Conifer)
• 
  Phylogeny of the Pinophyta based on cladistic analysis of molecular data. (from Conifer)
• 
  The 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)
• 
  Old-growth red cedar stump near Port Renfrew, British Columbia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Wildfire smoke in atmosphere off the U.S. West Coast in 2020 (from Wildfire)
• 
  Avatar Grove near Port Renfrew, British Columbia: Giant Douglas firs (left) and red cedars (right) fill the grove. (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Virgin forest about 2500 m above sea level in Shennongjia Forestry District, Hubei, China (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Old-growth European beech forest in Biogradska Gora National Park, Montenegro (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Old-growth forest in the Opal Creek Wilderness, a wilderness area located in the Willamette National Forest in the U.S. state of Oregon, on the border of Mount Hood National Forest. It has the largest uncut watershed in Oregon. (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Wildfire near Yosemite National Park, United States, in 2013. The Rim Fire burned more than 250,000 acres (1,000 km²) of forest. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Elk Bath, an award-winning photograph of elk avoiding a wildfire in Montana (from Wildfire)
• 
  Global fires during the year 2008 for the months of August (top image) and February (bottom image), as detected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite. (from Wildfire)
• 
  A surface fire in the western desert of Utah, United States (from Wildfire)
• 
  2003 Canberra bushfires, visible from Parliament House (from Wildfire)
• 
  Pinaceae: unopened female cones of subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa) (from Conifer)
• 
  Smoke from the 2020 California wildfires settles over San Francisco (from Wildfire)
• 
  A 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)
• 
  Animation of diaphragmatic breathing with the diaphragm shown in green (from Wildfire)
• 
  Aerial 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)
• 
  Tāne Mahuta, the biggest kauri (Agathis australis) tree alive, in the Waipoua Forest of the Northland Region of New Zealand. (from Conifer)
• 
  Cool temperate rainforest in Tasmania, Australia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  The narrow conical shape of northern conifers, and their downward-drooping limbs, help them shed snow. (from Conifer)

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.

For example, in Portal:California, this code:

{{Random portal component|max=21|seed=27|header=Selected picture|subpage=Selected picture}}

was replaced with this code:

{{/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.

They can be upgraded with:

{{Transclude random excerpt}}

or

{{Transclude list item excerpt}}

or

{{Transclude linked excerpt}}

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.

Keep up the great work.    — The Transhumanist   19:13, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

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Portals WikiProject update #016, 15 Aug 2018

Future portal tool

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:

• Portal:Underwater diving
• Portal:Sharks
• Portal:Reptiles
• Portal:Meat
• Portal:Cheese
• Portal:Cereals
• Portal:Tea
• Portal:Milk
• Portal:Wheat
• Portal:Rice
• Portal:Clothing

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!

See you on the project's talk pages.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   21:06, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #017, 22 Aug 2018

This issue is about portal creation...

Creating new portals

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!

Be sure to report bugs at WT:WPPORTD.

The main portal creation template is {{box portal skeleton}}.

Portal creation tips

After starting a portal using {{box portal skeleton}}...

1. 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
2. The search term provided in the Did you know? and In the news sections is very basic and rarely matches anything. It is best to replace that term with multiple search arguments, if possible (separate each argument with a pipe character). For example, in Portal:Capital punishment, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:Capital_punishment&diff=855255361&oldid=855137403 Searches in templates use Lua search notation.
3. 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.
4. Finish each portal you've created before creating a new one. We don't want unfinished portals sitting around.

Need a laugh?

Check out the Did you know? section on Portal:Determinism.    — The Transhumanist   02:22, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

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Portals WikiProject update #018, 04 Sept 2018

Bug hunt!

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.

The new portals, and revamped ones, can be found at Category:Single-page portals.

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.

Feel free to join in on the fun. ;)

Thank you,    — The Transhumanist   06:53, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #019, 22 Sept 2018

Portals progress report

Don't blink. You might miss something.

As of a few days ago, portals had doubled in about a month and a half.

Also, there were 98 incompleted portals in Category:Portals under construction. Now there are just 43.

The WikiProject page has been thoroughly revised

The goals, plans, and task sections have all been updated.

Orphaned portals need a home...

Many new portals are still orphans, and need links pointing to them:

1. A portal link at the bottom of corresponding navigation footer template. E.g., Template:Machines for Portal:Machines. See examples of a portals link at the bottom of Template:Robotics and Template:Forestry.
2. 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).
3. A {{Portal}} template placed at the top of the category page corresponding to each portal.

All new and revamped portals can be found at Category:Single-page portals.

Portal:Contents/Portals

This is the main list of portals.

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.

Many thanks to Evad37, Waggers, AfroThundr3007730, SMcCandlish, Tom, BrendonTheWizard, and Pbsouthwood for their work and input on this.

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.

See Template:Transclude files as random slideshow/doc for instructions.

More exciting things are to come...

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?

Keep up the great work everyone.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   07:08, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

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Portals WikiProject update #020, 12 Oct 2018

Whew, a lot has been happening.

A bit of defending of the portals has been needed. But, most activity recently has been directed upon maintenance and development of existing portals.

The majority of portals now use the new design, about 2400 of them, leaving around 1200 portals that still employ the old style.

Newest portals

• Aceh
• Aegean Sea
• Arthur Wellesley
• Azores
• Bashkortostan
• Birmingham
• Black Sea
• Canary Islands
• Carpathian Mountains
• Caucasus
• Columbia River
• Davao City
• Dnieper
• Easter Island
• Exploration
• Galápagos Islands
• Glasgow
• Great Wall of China
• Guangdong
• Kaliningrad Oblast
• Kanpur
• Kigali
• Kuril Islands
• Kuwait City
• Leeds
• Lhasa
• Loire Valley
• Lucknow
• Lviv
• Map projections
• Marseille
• Midwestern United States
• Missouri River
• Multan
• Mysore
• Niger River
• Northeast India
• Odessa
• Orchestras
• Panama Canal
• Peshawar
• Polynesia
• Poznań
• Pretoria
• Rat Pack
• Sammy Davis Jr.
• Shandong
• South China Sea
• Southern United States
• Suez Canal
• Svalbard
• Tatarstan
• Tigris River
• Visakhapatnam
• Volga River
• Western Ghats
• Western United States
• Yellowstone National Park
• Yosemite National Park

Please inspect these portals, and report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

MfDs

Since the last issue of this newsletter, Nineteen portals were nominated for deletion. All posted by the same person.

Two portals were deleted.

One resolved as "no consensus".

Sixteen resolved as "keep".

Links to the archived discussions are provided below:

1. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Air France
2. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Alexander Korda
3. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:August Derleth
4. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Average White Band
5. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bee-eaters
6. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ben E. King
7. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benny Goodman
8. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bill Bryson
9. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Idol
10. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Ocean
11. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bob Hope
12. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bobbie Rosenfeld Award
13. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Body piercing
14. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Canton, Michigan
15. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Compostela Group of Universities
16. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diplo
17. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diversity of fish
18. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Pebble Beach
19. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Peter, Paul and Mary

Many thanks to those who participated in the discussions.

To watch for future MfD's, keep in mind that the Portals WikiProject is supported by automatic alerts. You can see them at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Article alerts: portals for deletion at MfD

Creation criteria

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).

1. Link (portal button) from corresponding category pages.  Done
2. Link from See also section on corresponding root articles. Partially implemented
3. Link from bottom of corresponding templates. Partially implemented
4. 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.

Until next time...

Keep up the good work on portals. They are improving daily. Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   04:23, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #021, 24 Oct 2018

Portals have passed the 4,000 mark.

More new portals...

Here's a list of portals created since the last issue

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...

...dive in!    — The Transhumanist   07:05, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

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Portals WikiProject update #022, 11 Nov 2018

Welcome AmericanAir88

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:

• Portal:Blueberries
• Portal:Olives
• Portal:Bananas
• Portal:Bone fractures
• Portal:Carbohydrates
• Portal:Cherries
• Portal:Coconuts
• Portal:Hartford Whalers
• Portal:Integumentary system
• Portal:Exercise
• Portal:Fatty acids

Way to go!

Where's Evad?

Evad disappeared from Wikipedia on October 18.

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:

{{Portal image banner|File:Blueberries .jpg |maxheight=120px |overflow=Hidden }}

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.

Discussion has resumed on the portal guidelines.

Until next issue...

See ya round the portal system!    — The Transhumanist   11:44, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Your draft article, Draft:Louis Le Duff

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In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply and remove the {{db-afc}}, {{db-draft}}, or {{db-g13}} code.

If your submission has already been deleted by the time you get there, and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. ―Abelmoschus Esculentus 08:29, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #023, 25 Nov 2018

There are now 4,180 portals.

Will we break 5,000 by the end of the year?

I know we can. But, that is up to you!

( New portals are created with {{subst:Basic portal start page}} or {{subst:bpsp}} )

Happy Holidays

Hello everyone! Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice (if it's occurring in your area of the world), and thanks for your work in maintaining, improving, and expanding portals. Cheers,    — The Transhumanist   06:51, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings}} to send this message

Jingling along

The following portals have been created since the last issue:

1. Advanced Micro Devices
2. Aqua Teen Hunger Force
3. Aquatic ecosystems
4. Blackberries
5. Blade
6. Blake and Mortimer
7. Climate
8. Democratic Party
9. Dua Lipa
10. Eels
11. Eggs
12. Emmy Awards
13. Fallout
14. Flutes and whistles
15. Geophysics
16. Ghost
17. Hartford Whalers
18. HBO
19. Hot sauces
20. International System of Units
21. Jawaharlal Nehru
22. Kendrick Lamar
23. KFC
24. Kingdom of England
25. M.I.A.
26. Marvel Comics
27. Marvel Entertainment
28. Minerals
29. Mixed martial arts
30. Money
31. MTV
32. Museums
33. National Hockey League
34. Natural resources
35. Nature
36. NBC
37. Nehru–Gandhi family
38. Orthoptera
39. PATH
40. Pears
41. Physiology
42. Ponds
43. Pope Francis
44. Potatoes
45. Presidents of the United States
46. Republican Party
47. Salad dressings
48. Santiago
49. Six Flags
50. Stan Lee
51. Starbucks
52. Stem cells
53. Systems of measurement
54. SZA
55. The West Wing
56. Tintin
57. Tomato sauces
58. Tove Lo
59. Viticulture
60. Waffles
61. Wendy's
62. White House
63. Will Smith
64. Winemaking

Keep 'em coming!

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).

In closing

We'll keep it short this issue.

Expect a flood next time. Or the one after that.

Cheerio,    — The Transhumanist   07:17, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 December 2018

• From the editor: Time for a truce

• Op-ed: Looking back, looking forward: A beginner's experience on Wikipedia

• Special report: The Christmas wishlist

• Opinion: The blogosphere migrates to Galaxy WMF

• News and notes: Reviewer of the year, WikiCup winner, and the 2019 Wikimedia Summit

• Reflections: Wikipedia, history, and the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day

• In the media: Court-ordered article redaction, paid editing, and rock stars

• Discussion report: Farewell, Mediation Committee

• Arbitration report: A long break ends

• Traffic report: Queen reigns for four weeks straight

• Gallery: Intersections

• Recent research: Why do the most active Wikipedians burn out?; only 4% of students vandalize

• Essay: No one cares about your garage band

• Humour: The dark side of our favorite root vegetable

• From the archives: Ars longa, vita brevis

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:47, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 December 2018

• From the editors: Where to draw the line in reporting?

• Op-ed: Wikipedia not trumped by Trump appointee

• Special report: The Signpost got 380,000+ views in 2018, sounds reasonable enough, right?

• News and notes: Some wishes do come true

• In the media: Political hijinks

• Discussion report: A new record low for RfA

• WikiProject report: Articlegenesis

• Arbitration report: Year ends with one active case

• Traffic report: Queen dethroned by U.S. presidents

• Gallery: Sun and Moon, water and stone

• Blog: News from the WMF

• Humour: I believe in Bigfoot

• Essay: Requests for medication

• From the archives: Compromised admin accounts – again

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:36, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #024, 26 Dec 2018

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 Main page).

So far, Portal:Geography, Portal:History, and Portal:Technology have been revamped. Of course, you are welcome to improve them further.

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.

To spot redirects easily, you can make them all appear green.

Keep 'em coming!

And I'll see you next issue.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   08:09, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #025, 30 Dec 2018

We can now crop the tops of pics to make banners

Before, we could only cut off the bottom of pics.

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}}

To see it employed in a portal, check out Portal:Niagara Falls.

About that end of the year goal...

We were racing against time to create 5,000 portals by the end of the year (just for the heck of it).

We made it. We've passed the 5,000 portals mark, with time to spare!

And the 5,000th portal is Portal:Major League Baseball, by Happypillsjr.

Congratulations!

What's next?

The 10,000th portal mark. But...

...there is plenty else to do in addition to building new portals:

1. The new portals need to be linked to from the encyclopedia.
2. 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.
3. A Recognized content section needs to be added to each portal that has a corresponding WikiProject.
4. Addition of a category on those portals that lack a subject category.
5. Implement the portal category system, adding the appropriate categories to each portal.
6. 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).
7. Find and fix the remaining bugs in the underlying lua modules.
8. Build portal tools (scripts) to assist in the creation, development, and maintenance of portals.
9. Build a script to help build navbox footer templates, via the harvesting of categories, amongst other methods.
10. Update the portal building instructions.
11. Update the portal guideline.
12. Refine the programming of the portals to reduce their load time.
13. Design and develop the next generation of portals and portal components.

And whatever else you can dream up.

But most of all, have a...

Happy New Year!

Mercurywoodrose, thank you for your contributions to the Portals Project, and have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   12:05, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #026, 20 Jan 2019

Well, here's the first issue of the new year. Enjoy...

New participants

A hearty welcome to new arrivals to the portals department:

• Emoteplump
• Pakieditor
• CASSIOPEIA
• Venomous Sniper
• DannyS712

Harvesting categories tool prototype

DannyS712 has created a user script prototype, User:DannyS712/Cat links, that can pull members from a category, a functionality we've been after since the project's revamp last Spring. Now, it's a matter of applying this technique to scripts that will place the items where needed, such as with a section starter script and/or portal builder script.

New portals since last issue

1. Academic publishing
2. Accounting
3. Adam and Eve
4. African Great Lakes
5. Al Green
6. Alternative views
7. America's Next Top Model
8. Andaman and Nicobar Islands
9. Angles
10. Applied mathematics
11. Arabic
12. Areas of mathematics
13. Atlanta metropolitan area
14. Atlantic Ocean
15. Big Bash League
16. Bijelo Dugme
17. Bill Cosby
18. Boats
19. Bombardier Aerospace
20. Bruce Willis
21. Canadian law
22. Cannons
23. Caribbean American
24. Chinese American
25. Chinese Canadians
26. Chinese gardens
27. Chris Brown
28. City
29. Common law
30. Criminal law
31. Czechoslovakia
32. Data
33. Data warehouses
34. DC Comics
35. Deities
36. DeKalb County
37. Destiny's Child
38. Differential equations
39. Discrete geometry
40. East Asia
41. Economy of China
42. Economy of India
43. Economy of Malaysia
44. Economy of the United Kingdom
45. Ellen DeGeneres
46. Email clients
47. E
48. Equations
49. European Americans
50. Filipino Americans
51. Football in Algeria
52. Fox Corporation
53. Fractions and ratios
54. Functional analysis
55. Game theory
56. Girlguiding
57. Gloucestershire
58. Grazhdanskaya Oborona
59. Greek diaspora
60. Habsburg Monarchy
61. Hilbert's problems
62. Hoodoo Gurus
63. Hyundai Motor Company
64. Iggy Azalea
65. Indian Ocean
66. Infinity
67. Information theory
68. Integrals
69. Irish diaspora
70. Irrational numbers
71. Italian diaspora
72. Japanese diaspora
73. J. Cole
74. Jennifer Lopez
75. Jessica Lange
76. John Fogerty
77. Kehlani
78. Kiev
79. K. Michelle
80. Knot theory
81. Kool & the Gang
82. Lakes in China
83. Lake Van
84. Leonardo DiCaprio
85. Limerick
86. Literary composition
87. Long Island Rail Road
88. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority
89. Lukas Graham
90. Mathematical optimization
91. Matt Damon
92. Merchant ships
93. Metallic means
94. Metro-North Railroad
95. Microsoft Windows
96. Military of India
97. Miss America
98. Modulation
99. Moon landing
100. Mozilla
101. Music of Ireland
102. Narratives
103. Nashville
104. Nassau County
105. Norfolk
106. Nottinghamshire
107. One Life to Live
108. Overseas Chinese
109. Percentages
110. Probability distributions
111. Public Broadcasting Service
112. Quezon City
113. Raven-Symoné
114. R. Kelly
115. Rodeo
116. RuneScape
117. Sarah Silverman
118. Saturn rockets
119. Science and technology
120. Sesame Street
121. Seth MacFarlane
122. Ships
123. Shipwrecks
124. Shropshire
125. Spaceports
126. Space suits
127. Spanish diaspora
128. Steam locomotives
129. Suffolk
130. Suzuki
131. Tanks
132. Tensors
133. The CW
134. Thomas Aquinas
135. T.I.
136. TISM
137. Tom Cruise
138. Toni Braxton
139. Toyota
140. Transportation in the Philippines
141. True Blood
142. Violin
143. Virgin Group
144. Vladimir Putin
145. Volkswagen
146. Volume
147. Warner Bros.
148. Warships
149. Warwickshire
150. Washington D.C.
151. [[Portal:Watercraft|
152. Web syndication
153. Wikis
154. Witchcraft
155. Women's sports
156. World of Warcraft

What else is going on

There have been some discussions at Wikipedia talk:Portal guidelines.

DreamyJazz is working on a bot to place links to portals on root articles, category pages, and navigation footer templates.

Portal bugs are getting dealt with soon after they are reported.

Lots of wikignome activity (using Hotcat, etc.).

Keep up the good work.    — The Transhumanist   08:25, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #027, 28 Jan 2019

Portal styles

For a visually intensive portal, see Portal:Hummingbirds.

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

Conversion continues

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

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

Flagship portals: the portals on the Main Page

Speaking of upgrades...

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

1. Portal:Arts
2. Portal:Biography
3. Portal:Geography
4. Portal:History
5. Portal:Mathematics
6. Portal:Science
7. Portal:Society
8. Portal:Technology

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

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

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

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

And be sure they are on your watchlist.

New portals since last issue

• Accomack County
• Adair County
• Adair County
• Adams County
• Adidas
• Airbus
• Americas
• Bangladesh Armed Forces
• Bedfordshire
• Bicycles
• Boeing
• Chester County
• Conspiracy theories
• Corals
• County Durham
• Culture of the United States
• DC Universe
• Dragons
• Economy of Pakistan
• Electricity
• Ethnic groups
• European Union law
• Fatimid Caliphate
• Flanders
• Frederick County
• Fujian
• German language
• Global issues
• Greek mathematics
• Grisons
• Guangxi
• Hebei
• Henan
• Herefordshire
• History of North America
• Hollywood
• Hubei
• Hunan
• Hybrid
• Inner Mongolia
• Jet engines
• Jiangsu
• Johor
• Johor Bahru
• Julius Caesar
• Kuala Lumpur
• Lake Constance
• Lee Kuan Yew
• Lufthansa
• Lunar eclipses
• Magnetism
• Menstrual cycle
• Mustelids
• Mutations
• New York University
• Nord-du-Québec
• North Africa
• PepsiCo
• Pitcairn Islands
• Podcasting
• Quantum electrodynamics
• Quantum mechanics
• Rawalpindi
• Réunion
• Roads in Pakistan
• Rockefeller Center
• Sichuan
• St. Gallen
• State University of New York
• Temperature
• Tsunamis
• Veterinary medicine
• Vorarlberg
• Walgreens
• Walmart
• Weasels
• Xinjiang
• Yunnan

Keep 'em coming!

Deorphanizing the new portals

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

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

Dreamy Jazz to the rescue...

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

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

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

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

Good news indeed.

Way to go, Dreamy Jazz!

And, that's a wrap

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

No doubt there will be more to tell soon.

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

The Signpost: 31 January 2019

• Op-Ed: Random Rewards Rejected

• In focus: The Collective Consciousness of Admin Userpages

• News and notes: WMF staff turntable continues to spin; Endowment gets more cash; RfA continues to be a pit of steely knives

• In the media: The Signpost's investigative story recognized, Wikipedia turns 18 and gets a birthday gift from Google, and more editors are recognized

• Discussion report: The future of the reference desk

• Featured content: Don't miss your great opportunity

• Arbitration report: An admin under the microscope

• Traffic report: Death, royals and superheroes: Avengers, Black Panther

• Technology report: When broken is easily fixed

• Gallery: Let us build a memorial fit for such pain and suffering

• News from the WMF: News from WMF

• Recent research: Ad revenue from reused Wikipedia articles; are Wikipedia researchers asking the right questions?

• Essay: How

• Humour: Village pump

• From the archives: An editorial board that includes you

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:50, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #028, 04 Feb 2019

Here's a quicky status report:

Old-style portals: 1,018

Single-page portals: 4,367

Total portals: 5,385

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

Dreamy Jazz Bot is up and running!

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

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

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

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

Get ready...

Get set...

Go!

Another sockpuppet infiltrator has been discovered

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

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

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

• Portal:Adidas
• Portal:AFC Asian Cup
• Portal:Airbus
• Portal:Anhui
• Portal:Bicycles
• Portal:Blue Cheese
• Portal:Boeing
• Portal:British Airways
• Portal:Carcinogen
• Portal:ComfortDelGro
• Portal:Construction
• Portal:Corals
• Portal:Cross-Strait relations
• Portal:Derry
• Portal:Duke University
• Portal:Electricity
• Portal:Ethnic groups
• Portal:Extraterrestrial life
• Portal:Flanders
• Portal:Fujian
• Portal:Gansu
• Portal:German language
• Portal:Gordon Ramsay
• Portal:Government of Australia
• Portal:Government of Canada
• Portal:Government of Hong Kong
• Portal:Government of Indonesia
• Portal:Government of Ireland
• Portal:Government of Japan
• Portal:Government of Malaysia
• Portal:Government of Russia
• Portal:Government of Singapore
• Portal:Government of Spain
• Portal:Government of Thailand
• Portal:Government of the United Kingdom
• Portal:Government of Ukraine
• Portal:Grapes
• Portal:Guangxi
• Portal:Guizhou
• Portal:Hasbro
• Portal:Hebei
• Portal:Heilongjiang
• Portal:Henan
• Portal:Hillary Clinton
• Portal:History of art
• Portal:History of North America
• Portal:History of Thailand
• Portal:Hollywood
• Portal:Hubei
• Portal:Hunan
• Portal:Hybrid (biology)
• Portal:Hydrogen
• Portal:Imperial College London
• Portal:Inner Mongolia
• Portal:Japan Airlines
• Portal:Jet engines
• Portal:Jet Engines
• Portal:Jiangsu
• Portal:Jiangxi
• Portal:Jilin
• Portal:Johor Bahru
• Portal:Julius Caesar
• Portal:JYP Entertainment
• Portal:Kedah
• Portal:Kelantan
• Portal:Kuala Lumpur
• Portal:Labuan
• Portal:Lee Kuan Yew
• Portal:Liaoning
• Portal:Lufthansa
• Portal:Magnetism
• Portal:McLaren
• Portal:Menstrual cycle
• Portal:Monash University
• Portal:Mutations
• Portal:Nanyang Technological University
• Portal:National University of Singapore
• Portal:Negeri Sembilan
• Portal:Nestlé
• Portal:Nike, Inc.
• Portal:Ningxia
• Portal:Nissan
• Portal:North Africa
• Portal:North Pole
• Portal:Pahang
• Portal:Penang
• Portal:PepsiCo
• Portal:Perak
• Portal:Perlis
• Portal:Qinghai
• Portal:Quantum electrodynamics
• Portal:Quantum mechanics
• Portal:S.H.I.E.L.D.
• Portal:Selangor
• Portal:Shanxi
• Portal:Sichuan
• Portal:SM Entertainment
• Portal:South Pole
• Portal:Subway (restaurant)
• Portal:Temperature
• Portal:Terengganu
• Portal:Uber
• Portal:Veterinary medicine
• Portal:Volvo Buses
• Portal:Walgreens
• Portal:Walmart
• Portal:Xinjiang
• Portal:Yahoo!
• Portal:Yale University
• Portal:YG Entertainment
• Portal:Yunnan
• Portal:Zhejiang

And the corresponding talk pages:

• Portal talk:Adidas
• Portal talk:Airbus
• Portal talk:Bicycles
• Portal talk:Boeing
• Portal talk:Carcinogen
• Portal talk:Corals
• Portal talk:Duke University
• Portal talk:Electricity
• Portal talk:Ethnic groups
• Portal talk:Flanders
• Portal talk:Fujian
• Portal talk:German language
• Portal talk:Girls' Generation
• Portal talk:Government of Australia
• Portal talk:Government of Canada
• Portal talk:Government of Hong Kong
• Portal talk:Government of Indonesia
• Portal talk:Government of Ireland
• Portal talk:Government of Japan
• Portal talk:Government of Malaysia
• Portal talk:Government of Russia
• Portal talk:Government of Singapore
• Portal talk:Government of Spain
• Portal talk:Government of Thailand
• Portal talk:Government of the United Kingdom
• Portal talk:Government of Ukraine
• Portal talk:Grapes
• Portal talk:Guangxi
• Portal talk:Hebei
• Portal talk:Henan
• Portal talk:Hillary Clinton
• Portal talk:History of art
• Portal talk:Hollywood
• Portal talk:Hubei
• Portal talk:Hunan
• Portal talk:Hybrid (biology)
• Portal talk:Imperial College London
• Portal talk:Inner Mongolia
• Portal talk:Jet engines
• Portal talk:Jet Engines
• Portal talk:Jiangsu
• Portal talk:Johor Bahru
• Portal talk:Julius Caesar
• Portal talk:JYP Entertainment
• Portal talk:Kuala Lumpur
• Portal talk:Lee Kuan Yew
• Portal talk:Lufthansa
• Portal talk:Magnetism
• Portal talk:Menstrual cycle
• Portal talk:Monash University
• Portal talk:Mutations
• Portal talk:Nanyang Technological University
• Portal talk:National University of Singapore
• Portal talk:Nike, Inc.
• Portal talk:North Africa
• Portal talk:PepsiCo
• Portal talk:Quantum electrodynamics
• Portal talk:Quantum mechanics
• Portal talk:Sichuan
• Portal talk:SM Entertainment
• Portal talk:Subway (restaurant)
• Portal talk:Temperature
• Portal talk:Veterinary medicine
• Portal talk:Walgreens
• Portal talk:Walmart
• Portal talk:Xinjiang
• Portal talk:Yale University
• Portal talk:YG Entertainment
• Portal talk:Yunnan

New portals since the last issue

• Portal:American_Horror_Story
• Portal:Bad_Religion
• Portal:Bicycles
• Portal:British_Airways
• Portal:Campania
• Portal:Ciara
• Portal:Derry
• Portal:Extraterrestrial_life
• Portal:Fujian
• Portal:Guangxi
• Portal:Imperial_College_London
• Portal:Islamic_Golden_Age
• Portal:Ivy_Queen
• Portal:Japan_Airlines
• Portal:Japanese_language
• Portal:Kate_Ceberano
• Portal:Labuan
• Portal:LL_Cool_J
• Portal:New_York_City_Police_Department
• Portal:Penang
• Portal:PepsiCo
• Portal:Perak
• Portal:Perlis
• Portal:Politics_of_Ukraine
• Portal:Quantum_mechanics
• Portal:Salads
• Portal:Selangor
• Portal:Shaquille_O'Neal
• Portal:South_Pole
• Portal:Supermarket
• Portal:Temperature
• Portal:Terengganu
• Portal:The_Fairly_OddParents
• Portal:The_Incredibles
• Portal:Vassar_College
• Portal:Voivod_(band)
• Portal:Yu-Gi-Oh!

Keep up the great work

Until next time,    — The Transhumanist   09:02, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #029, 13 Feb 2019

Where we are at:

Single-page portals: 4,704

Total portals: 5,705

The Ref desks survived the proposal to shut them down

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

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

Here's a link to the dramatic discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Indefinitely_semiprotecting_the_refdesk#Proposal_II:_Shut_down_the_Ref_Desks

The cleanup after sockpuppet Emoteplump continues...

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

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

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

10,000 portals, here we come...

We're at 5,705 portals and counting.

New portals since issue #28

1. Portal:Abitibi-Témiscamingue
2. Portal:Ahold Delhaize
3. Portal:AKB48
4. Portal:Åland Islands
5. Portal:Alaska Airlines
6. Portal:Albanian Civil War
7. Portal:Albertsons
8. Portal:Alevism
9. Portal:All in the Family
10. Portal:Alternative metal
11. Portal:Ambient music
12. Portal:Ancient Near East mythology
13. Portal:Ancient Roman religion
14. Portal:Andrew Cuomo
15. Portal:Anti-consumerism
16. Portal:Antimatter
17. Portal:Arameans
18. Portal:Arianism
19. Portal:Australian Crawl
20. Portal:Bali
21. Portal:Banten
22. Portal:Bengkulu
23. Portal:Black Lives Matter
24. Portal:Bluegrass music
25. Portal:Bonnie Tyler
26. Portal:Breakbeat
27. Portal:Calypso music
28. Portal:Cambridgeshire
29. Portal:Camila Cabello
30. Portal:Capcom
31. Portal:Capsicum
32. Portal:Celtic music
33. Portal:Central American music
34. Portal:Central Java
35. Portal:Central Kalimantan
36. Portal:Central Sulawesi
37. Portal:Chanel
38. Portal:Cinema of Australia
39. Portal:Cognitive psychology
40. Portal:Communication studies
41. Portal:Conservatism in the United States
42. Portal:Cortina d'Ampezzo
43. Portal:Cross-Strait relations
44. Portal:Cryptozoology
45. Portal:Danish folk music
46. Portal:Disco
47. Portal:Dyslexia
48. Portal:East Java
49. Portal:East Kalimantan
50. Portal:East Nusa Tenggara
51. Portal:Easy listening
52. Portal:Ed Sheeran
53. Portal:Ehime
54. Portal:Electricity
55. Portal:Electronica
56. Portal:Electronic rock
57. Portal:English folk music
58. Portal:Environmental technology
59. Portal:Experimental music
60. Portal:Extreme metal
61. Portal:Fall Out Boy
62. Portal:Finnish Defence Forces
63. Portal:Finnish folk music
64. Portal:Football in Croatia
65. Portal:Football in Jordan
66. Portal:Funk
67. Portal:Gamelan
68. Portal:General Mills
69. Portal:Germanic languages
70. Portal:German language
71. Portal:Government of Canada
72. Portal:Government of Hong Kong
73. Portal:Government of Indonesia
74. Portal:Government of Ireland
75. Portal:Government of Malaysia
76. Portal:Government of Russia
77. Portal:Government of Singapore
78. Portal:Government of Spain
79. Portal:Government of Thailand
80. Portal:Grapes
81. Portal:Green Party of the United States
82. Portal:Grinspoon
83. Portal:Gwen Stefani
84. Portal:Hardcore punk
85. Portal:Hardcore techno
86. Portal:Haskell (programming language)
87. Portal:History of art
88. Portal:History of North America
89. Portal:History of Thailand
90. Portal:Hollywood
91. Portal:Hotels
92. Portal:House music
93. Portal:Hungarian folk music
94. Portal:Hunters & Collectors
95. Portal:Hydrogen
96. Portal:Icelandic folk music
97. Portal:Indigenous music of North America
98. Portal:Insomniac Games
99. Portal:International field hockey
100. Portal:International trade
101. Portal:Iranian music
102. Portal:Islamophobia
103. Portal:Jambi
104. Portal:Jet engines
105. Portal:Jordin Sparks
106. Portal:Julius Caesar
107. Portal:Kannur
108. Portal:Kansas City Spurs
109. Portal:Kelly Rowland
110. Portal:Kirby
111. Portal:Kraft Heinz
112. Portal:Krasnoyarsk Krai
113. Portal:Kroger
114. Portal:Kuala Lumpur
115. Portal:Lampung
116. Portal:Larry Kramer
117. Portal:LeBron James
118. Portal:Lehigh Valley
119. Portal:Leicestershire
120. Portal:Liège
121. Portal:Liguria
122. Portal:Los Angeles Aztecs
123. Portal:Los Angeles Wolves
124. Portal:Macedonian language
125. Portal:Magnetism
126. Portal:Maithripala Sirisena
127. Portal:Maluku (province)
128. Portal:Mangoes
129. Portal:Marco Pierre White
130. Portal:McLaren
131. Portal:Menstrual cycle
132. Portal:Metalcore
133. Portal:Miami FC
134. Portal:Microblogging
135. Portal:Microtonal music
136. Portal:Midnight Oil
137. Portal:Minnesota Kicks
138. Portal:Mission: Impossible
139. Portal:Modernism (music)
140. Portal:Moheener Ghoraguli
141. Portal:Mondelez International
142. Portal:Music genres
143. Portal:Music of Bangladesh
144. Portal:Music of India
145. Portal:Music of Italy
146. Portal:Music of Japan
147. Portal:Music of Korea
148. Portal:Music of Latin America
149. Portal:Music of Micronesia
150. Portal:Music of North Africa
151. Portal:Music of Pakistan
152. Portal:Music of Serbia
153. Portal:Music of the Philippines
154. Portal:Music of the United States
155. Portal:Mutations
156. Portal:National Rugby League
157. Portal:Neoclassicism (music)
158. Portal:Netball
159. Portal:New York City Fire Department
160. Portal:Nick Jr.
161. Portal:Nobility
162. Portal:Nordic countries
163. Portal:North Africa
164. Portal:North Kalimantan
165. Portal:North Maluku
166. Portal:North Pole
167. Portal:North Queensland
168. Portal:North Sulawesi
169. Portal:North Sumatra
170. Portal:Norwegian folk music
171. Portal:Papua (province)
172. Portal:Peaches
173. Portal:Politics of Abkhazia
174. Portal:Politics of Afghanistan
175. Portal:Politics of Albania
176. Portal:Politics of Algeria
177. Portal:Politics of Andorra
178. Portal:Politics of Angola
179. Portal:Politics of Antigua and Barbuda
180. Portal:Politics of Argentina
181. Portal:Politics of Artsakh
182. Portal:Politics of Bahrain
183. Portal:Politics of Bangladesh
184. Portal:Politics of Bavaria
185. Portal:Politics of Belarus
186. Portal:Politics of Belgium
187. Portal:Politics of Belize
188. Portal:Politics of Benin
189. Portal:Politics of Bhutan
190. Portal:Politics of Bosnia and Herzegovina
191. Portal:Politics of Botswana
192. Portal:Politics of Brazil
193. Portal:Politics of Brunei
194. Portal:Politics of Bulgaria
195. Portal:Politics of Burkina Faso
196. Portal:Politics of Burundi
197. Portal:Politics of Cambodia
198. Portal:Politics of Cameroon
199. Portal:Politics of China
200. Portal:Politics of São Tomé and Príncipe
201. Portal:Politics of South Sudan
202. Portal:Politics of Sudan
203. Portal:Politics of Tanzania
204. Portal:Politics of the Republic of the Congo
205. Portal:Politics of Togo
206. Portal:Politics of Tunisia
207. Portal:Politics of Uganda
208. Portal:Pop rock
209. Portal:Rap rock
210. Portal:Ras Al Khaimah
211. Portal:Riau
212. Portal:Riau Islands
213. Portal:Ricky Martin
214. Portal:Royal Canadian Air Force
215. Portal:Rutland
216. Portal:Saxophones
217. Portal:Semiotics
218. Portal:Ska
219. Portal:Soca music
220. Portal:Soul music
221. Portal:Sound sculptures
222. Portal:Southeast Sulawesi
223. Portal:South Kalimantan
224. Portal:South Sulawesi
225. Portal:South Sumatra
226. Portal:Space: 1999
227. Portal:Special Region of Yogyakarta
228. Portal:Swedish folk music
229. Portal:Tamil language
230. Portal:Techno
231. Portal:Terry Brooks
232. Portal:The Living End
233. Portal:Thrissur
234. Portal:Trance music
235. Portal:Tyrant flycatchers
236. Portal:Veterinary medicine
237. Portal:Wayanad
238. Portal:Welsh folk music
239. Portal:West Champaran district
240. Portal:Western dress codes
241. Portal:West Flanders
242. Portal:West Java
243. Portal:West Kalimantan
244. Portal:West Nusa Tenggara
245. Portal:West Papua (province)
246. Portal:West Sulawesi
247. Portal:West Sumatra
248. Portal:Wildlife of India
249. Portal:Wildlife of Nepal
250. Portal:Windows 10
251. Portal:Winter War
252. Portal:Woodpeckers
253. Portal:Worcestershire
254. Portal:World economy
255. Portal:World Ocean
256. Portal:World Rally Championship
257. Portal:World views
258. Portal:XTC
259. Portal:Yahoo!
260. Portal:Yoruba people
261. Portal:You Am I
262. Portal:Young Wizards
263. Portal:Yugoslavs

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

What's next for portal pages?

There are 5 drives for portal development:

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

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

1: Creating new portals

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

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

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

2: Expanding existing portals

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

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

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

3: Converting old portals

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

There are two approaches here:

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

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

4: Linking to new portals

Or "portal deorphanization"...

Dreamy Jazz Bot is purring along.

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

5...

See below...

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

Saved portals, are portals with a saved page.

What is the next stage in the evolutionary progression?

Quantum portals.

What are quantum portals?

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

Or, as Pbsouthwood put it:

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

Introducing...

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

Keep on keepin' on

...'til next time,    — The Transhumanist   10:23, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 February 2019

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #030, 17 Mar 2019

Previous issue:

Single-page portals: 4,704

Total portals: 5,705

This issue:

Single-page portals: 4,562

Total portals: 5,578

The collection of portals has shrunk

All Portals closed at WP:MfD during 2019

Grouped Nominations total 127 Portals:

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

Individual Nominations:

1. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Circles Deleted
2. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Fruits Deleted
3. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:E (mathematical constant) Deleted
4. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Burger King Deleted
5. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cotingas Deleted
6. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Prostitution in Canada Deleted
7. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Agoura Hills, California Deleted
8. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Urinary system Deleted
9. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:You Am I Deleted
10. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cannabis (2nd nomination) Reverted to non-Automated version
11. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Intermodal containers Deleted
12. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adventure travel Deleted
13. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adam Ant Deleted
14. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benito Juárez, Mexico City Deleted
15. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Spaghetti Deleted
16. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Wikiatlas Deleted
17. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Greek alphabet Deleted
18. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Deleted
19. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Accounting Deleted G7
20. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Lents, Portland, Oregon Deleted P2
21. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ankaran Deleted
22. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Jiu-jitsu Deleted G8
23. Portal:University of Nebraska Speedy Deleted P1/A10 exactly the same as Portal:University of Nebraska–Lincoln also created by the TTH

Related WikiProject:

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

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

WikiProject Quantum portals

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

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

Hiatus on mass creation of Portals

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

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

The Transhumanist banned from creating new portals for 3 months

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

Until next issue...

Keep on keepin' on.    — The Transhumanist   04:07, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 March 2019

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Nomination of C California Style & Culture Magazine for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article C California Style & Culture Magazine is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/C California Style & Culture Magazine until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. DGG ( talk ) 05:36, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #031, 01 May 2019

Back to the drawing board

Implementation of the new portal design has been culled back almost completely, and the cull is still ongoing. The cull has also affected portals that existed before the development of the automated design.

Some of the reasons for the purge are:

• Portals receive insufficient traffic, making it a waste of editor resources to maintain them, especially for narrow-scope or "micro" portals
• The default {{bpsp}} portals are redundant with the corresponding articles, being based primarily on the corresponding navigation footer displayed on each of those articles, and therefore not worth separate pages to do so
• They were mass created

Most of the deletions have been made without prejudice to recreation of curated portals, so that approval does not need to be sought at Deletion Review in those cases.

In addition to new portals being deleted, most of the portals that were converted to an automated design have been reverted.

Which puts us back to portals with manually selected content, that need to be maintained by hand, for the most part, for the time being, and back facing some of the same problems we had when we were at this crossroads before:

• Manually maintained portals are not scalable (they are labor intensive, and there aren't very many editors available to maintain them)
• The builders/maintainers tend to eventually abandon them
• Untended handcrafted portals go stale and fall into disrepair over time

These and other concepts require further discussion. See you at WT:POG.

However, after the purge/reversion is completed, some of the single-page portals might be left, due to having acceptable characteristics (their design varied some). If so, then those could possibly be used as a model to convert and/or build more, after the discussions on portal creation and design guidelines have reached a community consensus on what is and is not acceptable for a portal.

See you at WT:POG.

Curation

A major theme in the deletion discussions was the need for portals to be curated, that is, each one having a dedicated maintainer.

There are currently around 100 curated portals. Based on the predominant reasoning at MfD, it seems likely that all the other portals may be subject to deletion.

See you at WT:POG.

Traffic

An observation and argument that arose again and again during the WP:ENDPORTALS RfC and the ongoing deletion drive of {{bpsp}} default portals, was that portals simply do not get much traffic. Typically, they get a tiny fraction of what the corresponding like-titled articles get.

And while this isn't generally considered a good rationale for creation or deletion of articles, portals are not articles, and portal critics insist that traffic is a key factor in the utility of portals.

The implication is that portals won't be seen much, so wouldn't it be better to develop pages that are?

And since such development isn't limited to editing, almost anything is possible. If we can't bring readers to portals, we could bring portal features, or even better features, to the readers (i.e., to articles)...

Some potential future directions of development

Quantum portals?

An approach that has received some brainstorming is "quantum portals", meaning portals generated on-the-fly and presented directly on the view screen without any saved portal pages. This could be done by script or as a MediaWiki program feature, but would initially be done by script. The main benefits of this is that it would be opt-in (only those who wanted it would install it), and the resultant generated pages wouldn't be saved, so that there wouldn't be anything to maintain except the script itself.

Non-portal integrated components

Another approach would be to focus on implementing specific features independently, and provide them somewhere highly visible in a non-portal presentation context (that is, on a page that wasn't a portal that has lots of traffic, i.e., articles). Such as inserted directly into an article's HTML, as a pop-up there, or as a temporary page. There are scripts that use these approaches (providing unrelated features), and so these approaches have been proven to be feasible.

What kind of features could this be done with?

The various components of the automated portal design are transcluded excerpts, news, did you know, image slideshows, excerpt slideshows, and so on.

Some of the features, such as navigation footers and links to sister projects are already included on article pages. And some already have interface counterparts (such as image slideshows). Some of the rest may be able to be integrated directly via script, but may need further development before they are perfected. Fortunately, scripts are used on an opt-in basis, and therefore wouldn't affect readers-in-general and editors-at-large during the development process (except for those who wanted to be beta testers and installed the scripts).

The development of such scripts falls under the scope of the Javascript-WikiProject/Userscript-department, and will likely be listed on Wikipedia:User scripts/List when completed enough for beta-testing. Be sure to watchlist that page.

Where would that leave curated portals?

Being curated. At least for the time being.

New encyclopedia program features will likely eventually render most portals obsolete. For example, the pop-up feature of MediaWiki provides much the same functionality as excerpts in portals already, and there is also a slideshow feature to view all the images on the current page (just click on any image, and that activates the slideshow). Future features could also overlap portal features, until there is nothing that portals provide that isn't provided elsewhere or as part of Wikipedia's interface.

But, that may be a ways off. Perhaps months or years. It depends on how rapidly programmers develop them.

Keep on keepin' on

The features of Wikipedia and its articles will continue to evolve, even if Portals go by the wayside. Most, if not all of portals' functionality, or functions very similar, will likely be made available in some form or other.

And who knows what else?

No worries.

Until next issue...    — The Transhumanist   00:27, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image File:C California Style Magazine cover.jpg

⚠

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

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 02:26, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 May 2019

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The June 2019 Signpost is out!

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Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Channel Islands portal

A tag has been placed on Category:Channel Islands portal requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the category has been empty for seven days or more and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:25, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

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• Community view: Video based summaries of Wikipedia articles. How and why?

• News from the WMF: Designing ethically with AI: How Wikimedia can harness machine learning in a responsible and human-centered way

• Recent research: Most influential medical journals; detecting pages to protect

• Special report: Administrator cadre continues to contract

• Traffic report: World cups, presidential candidates, and stranger things

• In focus: The French Wikipedia is overtaking the German

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:18, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

Your user page

Hi Mercurywoodrose, Your user page appears to violate WP:POLEMIC. Would you consider cutting it back to the material that is relevant to Wikipedia? Jayjg ^(talk) 19:34, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 August 2019

• News and notes: Documenting Wikimania and our beginnings

• In focus: Ryan Merkley joins WMF as Chief of Staff

• In the media: Many layers of fake news: Fake fiction and fake news vandalism

• Discussion report: Meta proposals on partial bans and IP users

• Traffic report: Once upon a time in Greenland with Boris and cornflakes

• Op-Ed: We couldn't have told you this, but Wikipedia was censored

• Opinion: The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia

• Community view: Chinese Wikipedia and the battle against extradition from Hong Kong

• News from the WMF: Meet Emna Mizouni, the newly minted 2019 Wikimedian of the Year

• Recent research: Special issue on gender gap and gender bias research

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:41, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 September 2019

• From the editors: Where do we go from here?

• Special report: Post-Framgate wrapup

• In the media: A net loss: Wikipedia attacked, closing off Russia? welcoming back Turkey?

• Traffic report: Varied and intriguing entries, less Luck, and some retreads

• News from the WMF: How the Wikimedia Foundation is making efforts to go green

• Recent research: Wikipedia's role in assessing credibility of news sources; using wikis against procrastination; OpenSym 2019 report

• Gallery: Finding freely licensed photo collections

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• In focus: Wikidata & Wikibase for national libraries: the inaugural meeting

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:07, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 October 2019

• In the media: How to use or abuse Wikipedia for fun or profit

• Special report: “Catch and Kill” on Wikipedia: Paid editing and the suppression of material on alleged sexual abuse

• In focus: The BBC looks at Chinese government editing

• Interview: Carl Miller on Wikipedia Wars

• Community view: Observations from the mainland

• Arbitration report: October actions

• Traffic report: Wrestling with a couple of teenagers, a Nobelist, and a lot of jokers

• Gallery: Wiki Loves Broadcast

• Recent research: Research at Wikimania 2019: More communication doesn't make editors more productive; Tor users doing good work; harmful content rare on English Wikipedia

• Essay: Wikipedia is in the real world

• News from the WMF: Welcome to Wikipedia! Here's what we're doing to help you stick around

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:12, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Six-million pool

By the looks of it you've won this, next guess is in July 2020!♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:34, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

• If Wikipedia reaches six million articles before 26 March 2020, Mercurywoodrose will win. JIP | Talk 12:40, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

I just looked this up randomly RIGHT NOW. holy crap. i better make my userpage look better.

ArbCom 2019 election voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 on Monday, 2 December 2019. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, 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. If you wish to participate in the 2019 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:09, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Category:Design portal has been nominated for discussion

Category:Design portal, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:25, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2019

• From the editor: Put on your birthday best

• News and notes: How soon for the next million articles?

• In the media: You say you want a revolution

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Arbitration report: Two requests for arbitration cases

• Traffic report: The queen and the princess meet the king and the joker

• Technology report: Reference things, sister things, stranger things

• Gallery: Winter and holidays

• Recent research: Bot census; discussions differ on Spanish and English Wikipedia; how nature's seasons affect pageviews

• Essay: Adminitis

• From the archives: WikiProject Spam, revisited

• In focus: An update on the Wikimedia Movement 2030 Strategy

• Special report: How many people edit in your favorite language? Where are they from?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:24, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Hearst Castle

If you're ready to put some work into a worthy article, the Hearst Castle peer review has been underway for a month and could use some more topic experts. Binksternet (talk) 00:55, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 December 2019

• From the editors: Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, again

• News and notes: What's up (and down) with administrators, articles and languages

• Special report: Are reputation management operatives scrubbing Wikipedia articles?

• In the media: "The fulfillment of the dream of humanity" or a nightmare of PR whitewashing on behalf of one-percenters?

• Discussion report: December discussions around the wiki

• Arbitration report: Announcement of 2020 Arbitration Committee

• Traffic report: Queens and aliens, exactly alike, once upon a December

• Technology report: User scripts and more

• Gallery: Holiday wishes

• Recent research: Acoustics and Wikipedia; Wiki Workshop 2019 summary

• From the archives: The 2002 Spanish fork and ads revisited (re-revisited?)

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Op-Ed: Why we need to keep talking about Wikipedia's gender gap

• WikiProject report: Wikiproject Tree of Life: A Wikiproject report

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:37, 27 December 2019 (UTC)