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Navigation system challenges relating to portal creation

While building new portals, I encountered the following aspects of the various navigation systems...

The titles for lists are competed for by 2 different kinds of lists: bullet lists and tables. You go to "List of x" expecting to see a bullet list, and instead there's a table. Our transclusion templates don't work with tables. And you can't make the list easily, because what do you call it?

I ran into a similar problem with "List of x topics" years ago, where outlines and indexes competed for that same title. The solution, which still hasn't been fully implemented, was to create 2 new departments: Outlines and Indexes, and then rename the lists to "Outline of x" or "Index of x articles" (or "Index of x-related articles"). That effort worked well except where the topics lists needed to be merged into existing outlines or indexes (very time consuming).

Tables are incredibly difficult to harvest links from.

The titles for base template names are competed for by at least 3 sets of templates: horizontal navigation templates, sidebar navigation templates, and wikiproect templates (via redirects to their WikiProject templates). The standard portal template uses the base name that matches the portal title, but often times, its the wrong template type that appears in the Topics section of portals, because navigation template titles are not standardized.

Many topics are missing categories, which makes their standard category links on portals (in the CatTree section, and at the bottom of the page) show up red. Many of these subjects have subcategory categories ready and waiting for a parent to be created.

Many topics that should have a navigation template, don't have one. This is especially noticeable when building batches of portals, like one for each of the actors who received the AFI Life Achievement Award. Some of them have navigation portals and the rest don't. The same thing applies to cites, counties, districts, and divisions.

Some sections of outlines are great for supporting portal sections, others aren't. Many of the links in some sections are mostly lists, which usually don't have leads that transclude well.

With the transclusion templates, you can't access the topics in the main part of an outline section without getting all the subsections' topics too. So, "Culture" includes "Religion" and "Sports", which you don't want in a portal's culture section if you plan to have portal sections on religion and sports. Same with economic and transportation.

Harvesting links from categories to build navigation templates is slow and tedious, and leaves you with a link set that must be updated later.

There are more, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. More later.

Ciao,    — The Transhumanist   21:15, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

Some not very coherent rambling evoked by the above:

So you can't get there from here - yet. Sort of a chicken and egg thing. Which comes first? The portal or the other navigation system. This is an unsurprising consequence of a system that evolved by natural selection/contingent development rather than intelligent design. Maybe to get there from here we have to go through places that do not yet exist. Maybe we need parallel development of all the components, so we can find out which route gets to where we need to go. Maybe categories are the fundamental store of the relationships between articles, and are the most structurally appropriate for extracting the data, though currently inconvenient. Maybe bot-harvesting of category lists on a periodical basis is a way forward. If a bot could work its way down a category tree to create a list/tree of links, maybe with their short descriptions, which are useful to spot anomalies this might make a good structure for a portal. Maybe this is too ambitious for now, but I think it will come sometime. Maybe portals are just a path between where we are now and where we can go. An adjacent possibility we need to pass through to get to a fully functioning eye with which to look at the encyclopedia. Maybe I am overusing the word "maybe" and should take a break. Who knows? Anyway these are probably all just shadows on the wall as I don't really have much idea of how the database is structured. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:07, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Some slightly more focused comments on specific items:

Lists and tables: Call it what it is? Rename tables to "Table of" so the "List of" name is available for a list? It would be preferable if this could be done by an automated system as it is fundamentally duplication of data, so back to the original problem. Better extraction software, then the list need only exist when in use. Can't get there yet by this route. Bridge must be built.

I am taking at face value that tables are difficult to harvest from, as I do not know this from personal experience. Why are they difficult?

Use of base template names: A serious inconvenience that could potentially be resolved by renaming. Not a small job. Some of those templates are used quite often, to understate things a tad. A good naming schema would be a place to sart. Maybe "Navbox X", "Sidebar X" would help.

Category redlinks are an open invitation to create what appear to be necessary and useful categories - a feature, not a bug. All makes work for the working man to do. Maybe if we declare in the guidance/assessment criteria that a portal is not complete until the category exists it would encourage creation? Portal would then only be substantial, which is acceprtable as an interim status.

Lack of a navbox is similar, but less urgent. No specific ideas on that yet.

Outlines - some are better than others. Sure, not a surprise. Can we encourage the restructuring of outlines so they are more useful? This application was not part of the design specification when outlines were started, maybe it should be added now. Annotated outlines are probably also more useful than plain unadorned lists. Getting a transclusion template for short descriptions would automate many annotations, but might be a bit processor intensive on long lists.

The lead excerpt template manages to transclude the lead without the level 2 sections. Can this logic not be extended to section leads? Or is this not the problem?

Bot runs could update lists extracted from categories on a periodic basis, but the usefulness of such lists depends on the quality of the categories. Working out where to stop would be an important detail, as generally several levels of the category tree woulf be involved, and each branch may require a different depth. Manual selection of items from category list would be tedious, and would be facilitated by short descriptions. Manual selection of subcategories might be more practical, in which case transcluded category definitions would be helpful. This is a fine can of worms we have opened here. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:58, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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I have a bit of extra time

Hi, Peter - I've got some extra time on my hands if you need either a GA or peer review, etc. on any of your diving-related articles. ^{Atsme📞📧} 03:06, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Hi Atsme, Any suggestions for improvement of diving articles would be appreciated, and please feel free to make improvements directly, they are our articles, not mine. I will try to take a look to see if there is anything that particularly needs review at the moment, but everything could benefit from another pair of critical and knowledgeable eyes. Sometimes just a fresh pair of eyes is enough to spot what is missing or unclear. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 03:55, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

• You might read through Underwater photography with an eye to how and where it could be usefully expanded. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:12, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Shortcut

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Portal:Classical architecture

It's based mostly on the corresponding outline. The topics in the topics section came from the corresponding category, and populate the general articles section. The initial page was generated from template, and then the extra excerpt sections were added in by hand. (Just an FYI).    — The Transhumanist   10:38, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Nice portal when it renders correctly. There is a frequent truncation error after section 3. More details on the Portal's talk page. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 14:01, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

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AWB task request: please help with the backlog

Hey...

If you have AWB laying around, please dust it off and crank it up! ;)

We have a growing backlog!

There are now 545 portals. Of those, 52 are of the new design.

Many of the new portals are orphaned or near orphaned, 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.

To make a list of corresponding templates, you can use AWB's make list feature to make a list of the pages in Category:Single-page portals. Then you copy that list to a sandbox, and replace \nPortal: with ]]\n* [[Template:, using WP:wikEd. That will give you a list of templates to work on. Then you set skip in AWB to skip the ones that already have the portal link.

To make a list of corresponding root articles, make a list of portal links, and then remove "Portal:" from the links.

To make a list of category links to process, make sure you use a leading colon (:) in the category links, like this: [[:Category:Blue Öyster Cult]].

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

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   20:45, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.13 18 September 2018

Hello Pbsouthwood, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

The New Page Feed currently has 2700 unreviewed articles, up from just 500 at the start of July. For a while we were falling behind by an average of about 40 articles per day, but we have stabilised more recently. Please review some articles from the back of the queue if you can (Sort by: 'Oldest' at Special:NewPagesFeed), as we are very close to having articles older than one month.

Project news

• The New Page Feed now has a new "Articles for Creation" option which will show drafts instead of articles in the feed, this shouldn't impact NPP activities and is part of the WMF's AfC Improvement Project.

As part of this project, the feed will have some larger updates to functionality next month. Specifically, ORES predictions will be built in, which will automatically flag articles for potential issues such as vandalism or spam. Copyright violation detection will also be added to the new page feed. See the projects's talk page for more info.

• There are a number of coordination tasks for New Page Patrol that could use some help from experienced reviewers. See Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Coordination#Coordinator tasks for more info to see if you can help out.

Other

• A new summary page of reliable sources has been created; Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources/Perennial sources, which summarizes existing RfCs or RSN discussions about regularly used sources.

Moving to Draft and Page Mover

• Some unsuitable new articles can be best reviewed by moving them to the draft space, but reviewers need to do this carefully and sparingly. It is most useful for topics that look like they might have promise, but where the article as written would be unlikely to survive AfD. If the article can be easily fixed, or if the only issue is a lack of sourcing that is easily accessible, tagging or adding sources yourself is preferable. If sources do not appear to be available and the topic does not appear to be notable, tagging for deletion is preferable (PROD/AfD/CSD as appropriate). See additional guidance at WP:DRAFTIFY.
• If the user moves the draft back to mainspace, or recreates it in mainspace, please do not re-draftify the article (although swapping it to maintain the page history may be advisable in the case of copy-paste moves). AfC is optional except for editors with a clear conflict of interest.
• Articles that have been created in contravention of our paid-editing-requirements or written from a blatant NPOV perspective, or by authors with a clear COI might also be draftified at discretion.
• The best tool for draftification is User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js^(info). Kindly adapt the text in the dialogue-pop-up as necessary (the default can also be changed like this). Note that if you do not have the Page Mover userright, the redirect from main will be automatically tagged as CSD R2, but in some cases it might be better to make this a redirect to a different page instead.
• The Page Mover userright can be useful for New Page Reviewers; occasionally page swapping is needed during NPR activities, and it helps avoid excessive R2 nominations which must be processed by admins. Note that the Page Mover userright has higher requirements than the NPR userright, and is generally given to users active at Requested Moves. Only reviewers who are very experienced and are also very active reviewers are likely to be granted it solely for NPP activities.

List of other useful scripts for New Page Reviewing

Twinkle provides a lot of the same functionality as the page curation tools, and some reviewers prefer to use the Twinkle tools for some/all tasks. It can be activated simply in the gadgets section of 'preferences'. There are also a lot of options available at the Twinkle preferences panel after you install the gadget. In terms of other gadgets for NPR, HotCat is worth turning on. It allows you to easily add, remove, and change categories on a page, with name suggestions. MoreMenu also adds a bunch of very useful links for diagnosing and fixing page issues. User:Equazcion/ScriptInstaller.js(info): Installing scripts doesn't have to be complicated. Go to your common.js and copy importScript( 'User:Equazcion/ScriptInstaller.js' ); into an empty line, now you can install all other scripts with the click of a button from the script page! (Note you need to be at the ".js" page for the script for the install button to appear, not the information page) User:TheJosh/Scripts/NewPagePatrol.js(info): Creates a scrolling new pages list at the left side of the page. You can change the number of pages shown by adding the following to the next line on your common.js page (immediately after the line importing this script): npp_num_pages=20; (Recommended 20, but you can use any number from 1 to 50). User:Primefac/revdel.js(info): Is requesting revdel complicated and time consuming? This script helps simplify the process. Just have the Copyvio source URL and go to the history page and collect your diff IDs and you can drop them into the script Popups and it will create a revdel request for you. User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js(info): Creates a "Page Curation" link to Special:NewPagesFeed up near your sandbox link. User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/deletionFinder.js: Creates links next to the title of each page which show up if it has been previously deleted or nominated for deletion. User:Evad37/rater.js(info): A fantastic tool for adding WikiProject templates to article talk pages. If you add: rater_autostartNamespaces = 0; to the next line on your common.js, the prompt will pop up automatically if a page has no Wikiproject templates on the talk page (note: this can be a bit annoying if you review redirects or dab pages commonly).

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:11, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

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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   07:09, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Split and merge

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Aquarium diving

Short description problem. Maybe after the redirect?Xx236 (talk) 11:01, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Xx236, I don't see a problem, could you describe it? Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:06, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

You have created a number of redirects. I'm not sure if they redirect, I see them as texts.Xx236 (talk) 11:09, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Xx236, You are right, the short description seems to be interfering with the redirect. I will check what happens if the order is changed and let you know. This is probably a bug. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:11, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Pinging Sam Sailor to keep discussion in one place. In reply to your edit summary question at Boat diving, This is a newly discovered bug with either #REDIRECT or {{short description}}. The quick work-around appears to be to move the short description to after the redirect, but this should not happen. I will investigate further and probably open a bug on it. Any further information on idiosyncrasies of the combination would be appreciated. The short descriptions are useful in {{annotated link}} which allows automatically updated annotations in list articles, such as WP:outlines, WP:indexes and any other place where an annotated list is useful.

These may only be useful where the redirect has potential to become a full article, or is to a topic too small to be a full article. Anyway, that is how I have been using them. I will go back and jury-rig the redirects I have given short descriptions so far. Unfortunately the gadget for creating them puts them right at the top of the article, which would be the best place without this bug, so some manual fiddling will be needed in many cases. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:36, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

I notice that the edit summaries for adding a short description above the redirect claim "removed redirect" which correctly describes the effect, but the redirect code remains unchanged. It also affects the categories, Category:Redirect with short description if the SD is below REDIRECT, and article with short description if SD is above REDIRECT · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 12:11, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

I have moved all that I could find to fix the problem. If I missed any, either let me know or fix them, which would be easier and faster, and I will be notified anyway. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 12:14, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Hi Peter. Yes, as demonstrated in this diff, {{short description}} should go on a new line beneath #REDIRECT[[target]]. If descriptions are to be used on redirects, perhaps the simple way forward is to ask the good Galobtter to stick in some kind of if exist ... then in User:Galobtter/Shortdesc helper.js. Sam Sailor 19:28, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

Sam Sailor, That is probably the way to go in the long run. To keep the work flowing I just move the short description below the redirect manually at present, which is easy enough. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:42, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

This isn't exactly a bug, basically any text or anything above/before a redirect breaks it, and this is known behaviour; that "Removed redirect" thing is an automatic detection by the software that you've made the page not a redirect. I'll take a look about fixing the script Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:45, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

Galobtter, That is more or less what I expected, so have been moving them below, except every now and then it seems I miss one. Thanks Sam Sailor for fixing. I do get most of them right... Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:48, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

(←) Peter, two things: (a) Looking at Category:Redirects with short description, why are so many pages categorized although they do not transclude a {{short description}}? E.g. why is Acevedo (surname) a member of the hidden cat? (b) What purpose does {{short description}} serve on Burn (stream) (please fix yourself), and North pole, and South pole? Sam Sailor 20:05, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

Sam Sailor, Burn (stream), North pole, South pole and many other alternative spellings are used in lists like Outline of geography, so having a short description is useful to the list article if is transcluded as a link annotation. There may be a better way to do it, but I have not thought of it yet. (The {{annotated link}} does not go to the redirected article as I have no idea how to do that).

I don't know anything about the Acevedo (surname) case, but will have a look and see if I can work out what is happening. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:17, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

The generic short description "Surname list" appears to have been transcluded via the {{Surname}} template, in the same way as it is done for disambiguation pages. It can be overridden by a regular short description if anyone thinks a custom short description would be better for any specific surname page. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:17, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Interface administrators

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Administrators' newsletter – October 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2018).

Administrator changes

Justlettersandnumbers • L235

Bgwhite • HorsePunchKid • J Greb • KillerChihuahua • Rami R • Winhunter

Interface administrator changes

Cyberpower678 • Deryck Chan • Oshwah • Pharos • Ragesoss • Ritchie333

Oversight changes

Guerillero • NativeForeigner • Snowolf • Xeno

Guideline and policy news

• Following a request for comment, the process for appointing interface administrators has been established. Currently only existing admins can request these rights, while a new RfC has begun on whether it should be available to non-admins.
• There is an open request for comment on Meta regarding the creation a new user group for global edit filter management.

Technical news

• Partial blocks should be available for testing in October on the Test Wikipedia and the Beta-Cluster. This new feature allows admins to block users from editing specific pages and in the near-future, namespaces and uploading files. You can expect more updates and an invitation to help with testing once it is available.
• The Foundations' Anti-Harassment Tools team is currently looking for input on how to measure the effectiveness of blocks. This is in particular related to how they will measure the success of the aforementioned partial blocks.
• Because of a data centre test, you will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia projects for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee has, by motion, amended the procedure on functionary inactivity.
• The community consultation for 2018 CheckUser and Oversight appointments has concluded. Appointments will be made by October 11.
• Following a request for comment, the size of the Arbitration Committee will be decreased to 13 arbitrators, starting in 2019. Additionally, the minimum support percentage required to be appointed to a two-year term on ArbCom has been increased to 60%. ArbCom candidates who receive between 50% and 60% support will be appointed to one-year terms instead.
• Nominations for the 2018 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission are being accepted until 12 October. These are the editors who help run the ArbCom election smoothly. If you are interested in volunteering for this role, please consider nominating yourself.

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Question about redirect shot descriptions

Hey, I was asking about adding short description to episode redirects (such as Into the Ring) and heard you've added to redirects and wanted to get your input on this. Is this OK or will I start getting mass amount of messages on this? --Gonnym (talk) 17:10, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

Gonnym, I have been adding short descriptions to redirects where the redirect has potential to become a full article at some stage, and in a few cases for realistically alternative titles which are used in lists. I have not had any objections except where the redirect was broken because the short description was above it, which is easily fixed. As long as the short description will be useful to the reader, it will probably be accepted by most people. I don't edit television series articles, so have no idea of the local conventions. You may get more relevant opinions from the associated wikiproject. My guess is that a short description will generally be helpful for identifying a specific episode.

You say you were asking about it. Where was this? Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:34, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the answers! I was talking with Galobtter who was helping me when I started working on creating the television episode descriptions and asked him if he knew someone who was adding these to redirects as I wanted to verify it was ok. --Gonnym (talk) 08:22, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

You are welcome. I trust you will come up with a satisfactory solution. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:26, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

There is already one ready with Module:Television episode short description which is already implemented in Template:Infobox television episode. --Gonnym (talk) 08:53, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Shortness of short descriptions

My watchlist shows you adding a lot of short descriptions. Good, and thanks! However, have you used a phone to search for a topic using the Wikipedia app? For example, at Population genetics the description is:

Study of genetic differences within and between populations including the study of adaptation, speciation, and population structure

Using a large phone, searching for "population gen" shows several suggestions including the above article. This is what the screen shows when searching:

Study of genetic differences within and betwee...

With the phone tilted in landscape mode it shows:

Study of genetic differences within and between populations including the study of adaptat...

I suppose a lot more would be visible with a large tablet but phones are claimed to be a major source of readers (and all of the description is shown after displaying the article). I am just dumping my thoughts without any good suggestions but you might consider omitting padding such as "Study of" and "within and between". Brevity with less precision might be better because the aim of the short description is help the reader find the right page. The description is not intended to give an accurate summary of the article. Johnuniq (talk) 09:57, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Johnuniq, I understand the problem, but at the moment I am more concerned with getting short descriptions into articles that optimising them for mobile display. The target of 2 million is a long way off and I consider my time better spent on providing a larger number of descriptions rather than optimum brevity. My short descriptions can be considered to be a first approximation. If you or anyone else have alternatives which you think will work better, please feel free to go ahead and make the edits. I object when a short description is reverted, but not when it edited with the clear intention of improving it in any way.

The aim of the short description is not limited to what WMF reading team want now, particularly since they are not doing the work. Short descriptions are also called by {{annotated link}} as annotations for links used in list type articles, like Wikipedia:Outlines where the length is not a problem. It can be quite difficult in some cases to get a short description condensed down to fit into the preferred length and still provide useful information to the reader.

I think that the technological limitation on display length will probably end up being the easiest to fix, but that is not my field of expertise. I also expect at some stage that short descriptions will be provided in voice responses, so it would be good to keep that in mind. If the app developers want to trim some of the short descriptions down a bit to fit their available space they are welcome to try to get it right.

While not required to be an accurate summary of the article, that is a desirable feature, and the short description must also not be a misleading description of the topic. This is a problem WMF foisted on us without thinking it through adequately, and like the rest of Wikipedia, it will evolve and probably eventually stabilise as something useful, but not necessarily exactly what we are doing now. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 10:49, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation

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A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	For adding a million Short Descriptions to all imaginable Evolution articles! Chiswick Chap (talk) 05:41, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

@Chiswick Chap: I wish! A million would be halfway to shutting off use of the wikidata descriptions, with all their errors and vulnerabilities. Thanks all the same. I am glad some people notice that it is happening. Please feel welcome to improve any for which you can think of better versions, and there are a few that defeat me completely. I am working my way through Outline of evolution and using the short descriptions as annotaions, thereby achieving two goals simultaneously, but may be missing some that are not listed in the outline. Let me know if you spot any of those. I will probably do palaeontology or geology next, also using the outline as a guide. No rest for the wicked... Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:34, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

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   04:24, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Username policy

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Canadian roads)

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Notability (organizations and companies)

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Interviews

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Leaverite

Apologies for my unfamiliarity with that template. I was tired, and tired of vandalism, and mistakenly undid your edit (reverting vandalism does not require an edit summary).--Quisqualis (talk) 21:58, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Ok Quisqualis, it happens. Easily fixed. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 04:42, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Long short descriptions

Hi Peter,

I originally became aware of "short descriptions" because of your work, and I know you've done a lot of work on them. I'm getting concerned that many short descriptions aren't short at all. As I understand it, the main purpose is as a quick disambiguator for mobile users; give them enough context to know if they want to click on an article.

Instead, many short descriptions (maybe semi-auto-generated?) seem to be approaching full definitions of the subject matter, even when that's way more than is needed to give basic context to a mobile user, and way more than the suggested soft limit of 40 characters. I've added the CSS so that I see them and they look very messy, and must look even much worse on mobile if the local ones ever go live (are they live?).

Since you add a large fraction of the ones I've seen, I think you could have a great impact in setting the de facto standard for people who don't read the background information of the project. Would you consider trying to keep to the 40-char limit when possible, and as close as possible when not? --Trovatore (talk) 17:07, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Hi Trovatore, As soon as there are 2 million short descriptions on Wikipedia, and WMF stops displaying the Wikidata descriptions, I will have time to spend on optimising the length. Until then, I think it is more important to have a short description that is local and acceptably accurate. 40 characters was chosen as a target with absolutely no basis of practicality, merely that it is convenient for mobile display. There are many topics which may not be possible to reasonably describe in so few characters, and it seems inefficient for me to spend more than a minute or two trying to optimise them to that length.

There is also the matter of other uses within Wikipedia, which I find more compelling as a motivation to produce them. The short description can be used as an annotation to a link in a list article or section, by using the template {{annotated link}}. Use of this template makes outline lists and 'see also' sections much more informative, and for this purpose there is no downside to a slightly longer short description.

Thirdly, short descriptions are like any other content, they can be improved at any time by anyone who feels the urge. I hope this will be done wherever anyone notices a sub-optimal short description, but there is no rush. Most people probably still don't even know they are there.

It will probably be easier in the long run for WMF to produce a method of displaying a longer short description than to play Procrustes and force them all to be short to the detriment of their functions.

If one uses a voice system for searching, the length becomes irrelevant. I think this will happen in the not too distant future, as this was originally for mobile, where voice is the basic mechanism for communication.

I do try to keep then short as reasonably practicable given the circumstances. It is not often easy, so then I just use a longer description as better than none. The Wikidata descriptions vary from the extremes of as good as one is likely to get, through misleading or confusing, to simply wrong. I use the good ones, and they are seldom very short, but more often I modify something from the lead. Occasionally I have to read quite a lot of the article, and there are a small number of cases where I could not work out what the actual topic was supposed to be and have cut my losses. It has been an interesting journey.

If you have the time and inclination, you can do a few thousand yourself, and may come up with some useful suggestions for better ways to do it. I am lazy, and tend to stick to subjects I find interesting, and where I have sufficient understanding to be reasonably sure that my descriptions are at least not wrong, and are likely to be sufficiently right to pass muster. There has been a very small amount of pushback. In some cases by people unaware of the reason for doing this, sometimes accidentally, and one or two don't like it. In almost all cases a short explanation has solved the problem.

If you really think that it is more important for a short description to be short than useful or to exist loclly, we can discuss further. Meanwhile I will be creating them to the best efficiency I can manage, while it remains an enjoyable exercise, rather than spending 80% of the time to get a 20% improvement. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 18:03, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

There have been a few cases where a generic short description has been added through a template. Some are better than others, and I have overridden a few where I could come up with something better without much effort. I do not use any semi-automated system myself, it is hard enough in many cases to do it manually, and my coding skills are not up to it anyway. The template generated ones are probably the bulk of those that exist.

As far as I know they are live, so the reader is getting a local short description when one exists, a Wikidata short description as fallback, and nothing if neither exist. I don't use mobile for data, so have not checked - I go on what I have been told. Nobody from WMF has complained about the local short descriptions yet, but this may not be particularly relevant. They may not care either way, as they have decided to do what they like anyway until we have those 2 million local short descriptions. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 18:24, 20 October 2018 (UTC)