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Discussions about the purposes and functions of portals

What do portals currently do?

Before we can answer questions such as "What should portals do?", we really need to know what they are already doing, so we can answer, "Should they continue doing that?"

Identifying the components and features of portals...

What are the various components of portals?    — The Transhumanist   09:05, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

As you come across component and feature types, especially automated ones, please add them to the following list:

Main-page-for-the-subject features

• "Topic tasters" / "You may also like"
  • Intro (prose excerpt)
    • Automatically updating excerpt (excerpt in the form of selective transclusion)
    • Flag and/or map (regional portals)
  • Quickstart or Get Started (links to 3-6 key articles)
  • Featured article (prose excerpt)
  • Selected article(s) (prose excerpt)
  • Featured picture (image)
  • Selected picture (image)
  • Article of the month (automatically rotating)
  • Image of the month (automatically rotating)
  • Selected media file (video/audio)
  • Featured character (prose excerpt)
  • Selected biography (prose excerpt)
  • Selected city
• Interesting facts / supplemental information
  • News / In the news
  • Did you know
  • Quotes (list)
  • Selected quote (prose)
  • Anniversaries for today
  • On this day
  • In this month
  • In previous year(s)
• Navigation of the subject/encyclopedia
  • Links to regions/geographic features (for geography portals)
  • Categories (list/clickable tree)
  • Web links / Web resources (list)
  • Featured content / Quality articles (list)
  • Associated Wikimedia (icons)
  • Subportals (icons)
  • Related portals (icons)
  • Topics / Articles (list(s) in boxes)
    • Customized list
    • Transcluded navigation footers
    • Transcluded sidebar

Bridge-to-editing / bridge-to-editor-community features

• WikiProjects (list)
• Maintenance boxes
  • Things you can do (list)
  • Wanted (or requested) articles
  • Wanted (or requested) images
  • Featured and good articles
  • New and expanded articles
  • Articles for improvement
  • Discussion links

Footers

• Navigation footers
• Related portals
• Wikimedia links
• Template:Portals

(Feel free to add to the above list).

It looks like the main functions of portals are to display prose excerpts, lists, and sets of icons. What does it accomplish by doing that?    — The Transhumanist   17:13, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

One reason would be to point out interesting images and articles and featured/good articles within the scope of the portal topic. Someone approaching a topic with no frame of reference can start with what is presented and explore from there. Slambo (Speak) 03:51, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

I'd second that. My idea of a typical portal user would be someone who is browsing Wikipedia - so the portal shows them some content they might be interested in. That might be the best content we have (featured/good articles, images etc), or something quirky/surprising (on this day etc); it also encourages them to explore further (categories, related portals, lists of topics/articles) and to get involved (WikiProjects, to-do lists, etc). WaggersTALK 13:31, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

When I made the speculative fiction portal, I added a possible futures section that linked to various articles using "facts" from within the universe of that article. Pretty fun. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 19:41, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

I've added some to the list. In addition, it may be worth creating a basic set of portal templates to help newbies. There is one on German Wikipedia at de:Wikipedia:Formatvorlage Portal with templates for each part of a portal including various header and box designs and templates for the index at the top and related portals and portal help at the bottom. I could translate this and produce an English-language version for us to play with if that's felt useful. Bermicourt (talk) 19:47, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Wechseln zu: Navigation, Suche

@Slambo, Waggers, Nihonjoe, and Bermicourt: Thank you for your input. It appears that portals serve five main functions or feature types, three of which go hand-in-hand with the Main page model:

1. Like the Main page, portals provide samplings of content (excerpts) – a conceptual tasting of the subject
2. As does the Main page, portals provide pictures – a visual glimpse into the subject
3. Also like the Main page, many portals provide interesting facts – more buffet items to sample
4. Another purpose, which is only marginally performed by the Main page but much more so on portals, is to provide navigation assistance (organized links) – "roadmaps" (conceptual maps) of the subject itself
5. Another aspect of portals, which the Main page does not have, is project-level support – to serve as a bridge between reading and editing, or between the encyclopedia proper and the editor community.

A characteristic that the Main page has, that most portals lack, is that the Main page is fully dynamic. That is, its content is cycled out regularly with new content, with old content being archived. Portals fall into 3 categories of dynamics:

1. Static – their content never changes
2. Semi-dynamic: their content cycles through a set of excerpts
3. Fully-dynamic: fully maintained portals receive new content regularly, not just displaying recycled content

A fourth category of dynamics, which we haven't seen in awhile, is innovative portals - portals that expand the limits of what portals do, with new features and capabilities. Hopefully, we are entering a phase in which this category will re-emerge.

Please feel free to add your own observations and comments.    — The Transhumanist   23:38, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

Intended purpose and audience

Before we get too deeply involved in fixing portals, is it worth those of us in favour of retaining and maintaining them to stop and review their intended purpose and audiences?

It seems wise to so ensure everyone is working off the 'same page' here. I suggest it might be helpful to reconsider the following:

• What are Portals actually trying to achieve?
• What are the measures of success? (Don't base these on number of visitors as we judge no other pages in this way)
• Who are the intended audiences?
• Do Portals have enough visibility?
• Should each Portal have a Redirect which comes up in Search results? (e.g. Alps (Topic overview))
  • Note that outlines are also topic overviews, usually more comprehensive than portals. To avoid competition for redirects, perhaps Alps (subject portal).
• Do Search results need to be enhanced? (i.e. how do newcomers know what Portals are if they are new here? How do they find them if they don't know they exist, or they don't appear in Search result? This is a key issue to address, I'd suggest)
• If set up effectively, do Portals need to be regularly changed? If so, how often? If not, why not?
• What is the minimum content for a successful Portal?
• What distinguishes a small Portal from a similarly named article?
• What content must be regularly maintained (frequency of changing/temporary removal if not?)
• Should non-updated section templates (e.g. In the News/Recent Articles) be deleted, or just marked between invisible text, until such time as another editor takes over the reins of updating?
• Is there merit in maintaining an informal list here of good exemplar Portals?
• Is there merit in maintaining a list of Portals we feel serve little purpose? (i.e. because their scope is too narrow and another articles serves it just as well)
• Is the name 'Portal' even appropriate anymore? Is their a better term we should use? Topic Taster? Wiki-Window? Topic Sampler? Topic Overview? Subject Overview? etc.
• Should we discourage any new Portals from being created? Is an AfC-style process appropriate for new Portals?
• Should we prepare a list of Portals which may fall short of minimum content/breadth of topic covered?
• Is it incumbent on us to identify and recommend some Portals for WP:MFD ourselves?
• Do we have one list of every single Portal we can review? Why have some slipped off from exisiting lists? If so, how to we correct this?
• Are sub-Portals always clearly indicated?
• Are 'Things to do?' sections appropriate to Portals, or best kept on WikiProjects?
• What user data could we acquire regarding their effectiveness (or otherwise) for newcomers
• What existing guidelines do we have for Portal creation/maintenance/deletion? Do we need to modify them?

Feel free to add more to the list - or continue below. Nick Moyes (talk) 19:24, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

All good things to think about. Additionally, it would be worth looking at other language Wikipedias and their portal systems. Do they have traffic? How prominently are portals linked, and where? Do they mix "presenting the topic" and "encouraging to edit"? Are they community tools or single-person vanity projects? —Kusma (t·c) 19:37, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

• 'Reply

Main-space redirects to Portals will rightly deleted - maybe even speedy deleted.

Readership is the ultimate test of effectiveness when compared to mainspace equivalent articles or overview pages. Readership and editor interest clearly show the usefulness or unlessness of a portal vs other navigation and content offerings for the topic. Legacypac (talk) 01:18, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

You just contradicted yourself and applied circular reasoning at the same time. Readership comes from links. You favor censoring the very types of links that would increase readership, and then cite the reason for deletion as a lack of readership. That's like stealing farm land by damming up the river that supplies it with water, driving off the farmers.

Regular articles get their traffic from external search engines, primarily Google, that is, Big Data. Portals get their traffic from inside Wikipedia (internal links), which is naturally going to be less. By deleting pages with low (internal level) traffic, because they have low traffic, you are basically turning over page selection (the decision over what exists on WP) from the creators of portals and internal links (Wikipedians) to Big Data. Page views have never been a valid criterion for deletion. And now you know one of the reasons why. Traffic is not a good indicator of content value.

So, maybe main space redirects to portals would be a good idea, as it would be another way besides embedded internal links to tap into (divert) the Big Data traffic stream.    — The Transhumanist   18:00, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Portals are indexed and public facing. If Google et al ignores them it might be because they are not typically very useful to the reader. Google is very good at curating content. Legacypac (talk) 13:40, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Portals are for discovering content, Google helps you search specific articles. Your argument essentially says we do not need the Main Page, either. —Kusma (t·c) 14:42, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

You are an Admin - you should be more careful about putting words in my mouth. Every website needs a mainpage and if you type "Wikipedia" into Google it will correctly deliver you to the mainpage where you can search for whatever specific info is needed. If you wamt to "discover" info on topix X search X and take your pick of pages on topic X. Legacypac (talk) 17:38, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Reading Portal:Literature is much closer to my idea of "discovering things related to literature" than reading Literature is, which doesn't give me any ideas on what novels I might be interested in that I haven't heard of yet. YMMV. From your arguments, I actually thought you want us to replace the Main Page with something like www.wikipedia.org, a perfectly acceptable website mainpage that does not contain any content. —Kusma (t·c) 19:45, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Google ignores things based on algorithms created via corporate policy. Portals are a kind of navigation tool. Google search is a navigation tool. Google search typically disintermediates, bypassing other navigation tools to go straight to base content. But Google isn't the end-all-be-all of navigation tools. It is highly appropriate for an encyclopedia to customize its own navigation tools, to cater to the variety of learning and browsing styles of its readers.    — The Transhumanist   03:01, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

The reason we are here is to discuss what portals should accomplish. And the RfC has already established that the answer is not "nothing". So, please, let us get on with the activity of making portals better, which is the goal of this WikiProject. Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   03:01, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

I was surprised at first about the citations policy, but now that I understand that the portals are meant to draw in readership, I am curious whether there is a 'Did you Know'-style to be followed. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 03:52, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

@Ancheta Wis: See #Did you know style, below    — The Transhumanist   09:52, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

So, in this spirit we might use "Did you know that portals with a Venturi could be used to draw people into", and through the portals? --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 12:31, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

This specific DYK would require a diagram to illustrate the shape of a Venturi. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 12:42, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Hello, I think that portals should allow readers to explore the millions of Wikipedia articles, helping them to find interesting topics, people, facts, etc.

As Kusma says, portals are meant to discover new things, not to find specific information. Portals should be surprising to the reader. The unexpected should be expected.

Portals are completely different way than lists, categories and outlines. For example, long lists of links won't encourage people to click them. Therefore, portals use article snippets, which provide enough information to capture the reader's interest.

Some portals put too much effort on encouraging people to edit articles. I think that should be the purpose of wikiprojects, not portals. --NaBUru38 (talk) 22:32, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

In my experience, good portals serve 3 main functions:

1. Presentational: to present a simple, concise overview of topic coverage on Wikipedia
2. Navigational: to enable readers to navigate quickly to articles about a particular topic
3. Editorial: to help interested editors and WikiProject teams to create and improve topic coverage

2 is aimed at readers; 3 is aimed at editors and 1 is useful to both. To achieve this, portals are often divided into 'content' boxes and 'maintenance' boxes.

Some editors have argued that the main article on a topic can fulfil the purpose of a portal. That is not true. Good article structure does not lend itself well to purposes 1 and 2 and has no place for purpose 3.

Another criticism is that portals have low numbers of visitors. That is also true of many other articles and pages. However we could do a lot more to improve readership including more prominent linkage from more articles and adding redirects starting with the topic name e.g. Germany portal, which would flag up in reader searches on Germany, whereas Portal:Germany wouldn't.

Finally, while individual editors can maintain a portal, it is probably better when WikiProjects can do this because of the obvious mutual benefit and potential greater numbers involved. Either way, it would be good to encourage participants to agree to maintain portals and add their names them on a subpage. German Wikipedia has two categories of maintainer known as Betreuer ("sponsor", "manager" or "overseer") and Mitarbeiter ("co-worker", "assistant" or "contributor"). Bermicourt (talk) 19:59, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Discussions about migrating selective transclusions

Migrating intro transclusions to the base page

@Certes, Broter, RockMagnetist, Waggers, Bahnfrend, Emir of Wikipedia, and Pbsouthwood:

Good job you guys. It looks like the implementation of {{Transclude lead excerpt}} is going well.

As an experiment, I tried it out on a portal base page start, Portal:Humanism, on the base page itself rather than a subpage, and ran into a couple unexpected results:

1. The Read more link started directly after the body text. Could that be moved to the next line and floated to the right?
2. The edit link to the right of the section box heading creates a subpage to edit when you click on it. But now, the section body for the intro section is on the same page. This may take a reworking of the skeleton template. Any ideas?

Once we've migrated the excerpting for the intro to the base page, that would make the 1500+ intro subpages obsolete.

I look forward to your replies.    — The Transhumanist   09:34, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

1. You can add a "read more" as normal wikitext with whatever formatting you like after {{Transclude lead excerpt}} rather than within it. The main use for more= is with {{Transclude random excerpt}}, where the editor can't craft their own wikilink because they don't know which article to link to. That said, it may be useful to have a right floated link with random articles, so I'll see what I can do.
2. The edit link is buried in the guts of the existing portal code. {{Random portal component with nominate}} calls Module:Random portal component to generate wikitext including Portal:Humanism/box-header which uses {{Box-header}}. There's a choice of methods here.

   (a) Continue to use {{Random portal component with nominate}}, which requires each extract to be on a subpage /1, /2... and provides edit links to those subpages, possibly using {{Transclude lead excerpt}} on each subpage. If you need to tailor the links, Portal:Humanism/box-header is the page which can be edited without disrupting other portals.

   (b) Replace {{Random portal component with nominate}} by {{Transclude random excerpt}}, or by a new wrapper which puts a random excerpt into a nice box like {{Box-header}}, with an edit link to the page which uses that wrapper (or no edit link at all).

Hope that helps. — Certes (talk) 10:02, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

What all can we migrate to the base page?

@Certes, Broter, RockMagnetist, Waggers, Bahnfrend, Emir of Wikipedia, and Pbsouthwood: There are several kinds of subpages. Which types will we be able to migrate to the base page? Which ones will we not be able to migrate there? How many subpages will we need per portal after all the migration is done? I look forward to your replies. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   22:29, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: I have created a Selected article section without a subpage at Portal:Humanism.--Broter (talk) 15:27, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: Please could I also ask you to look at a third option, which is to use {{Portal selection}}. Take a look at the page source of Portal:South East England/Selected articles to see an example of it in action. The main aim of creating this was to get away from having lots of separate subpages, but still to be able to display a list of selected articles, and include specific images. WaggersTALK 19:56, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

The Transhumanist, I would prefer to get away from subpages completely, but I don't know which might be unavoidable. I think that well designed templates/modules should eventually be able to automate almost everything. I do not oppose anyone who wants to keep a fully manual portal, or a high maintenance portal, but I would prefer to have the option of as much automation as we can practicably arrange. I would quite like to see an automated portal gadget that is a single template with a bunch of parameters that one selects, and the whole thing just happens, and updates itself when appropriate. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:23, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

I think that Waggers' example and {{Portal selection}} are a step in the right direction, but there are many steps further we can go. I would like to see automated selection from a project category (or other appropriate selected category), maybe for B-class articles or better. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:35, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

Yes, we really need at least two levels of portal: "gold" where someone undertakes to maintain it on a regular basis and can do things however they wish, and "silver" where there is a one-off effort to automate everything into a state where it can safely be forgotten. {{Portal selection}} selection provides a very flexible solution for those willing to take the trouble to design the layout of each excerpt. Perhaps we should keep {{Transclude random excerpt}} as a backstop providing a quick and dirty fix where no one volunteers to make the effort of deploying Portal selection — "bronze" portals? Certes (talk) 11:14, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

After discussion at VPT, I don't believe we can automate selection from a category when the page is viewed (or purged). The best solution I can think of is to have a bot which periodically lists a category and copies it to a data page which we can read. That could work with {{Transclude random excerpt}} but probably not with {{Portal selection}}, as I don't see a way to specify the image, short name for link, etc. on a page by page basis. Certes (talk) 11:20, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist:: We can migrate with the {{Transclude random excerpt}} the sections: selected article, selected biography and every other sections which use a list of certain articles. The sections: selected picture and Did You Know can not be migrated. But I prefer the {{Transclude random excerpt}} template because it is easier than {{Portal selection}}. You can see the sections which can not be migrated at the Portal:Humanism.--Broter (talk) 15:07, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

I agree, {{Portal selection}} isn't as easy to use - maybe that's something I can work on. For now I'm just glad it works! I'm a bit of an image freak and like to see an illustrative image alongside the lead excerpt, which {{Transclude random excerpt}} only delivers if there's an image in the lead section but outside of the infobox (or any other template). Solving that would be a big step forward, but I understand the difficulty, given the sheer number of different infobox templates out there.

Of course the other thing {{Portal selection}} offers is a list of the selected articles, but I'm not sure how important that is - would be interested in others' thoughts on that. WaggersTALK 15:19, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

It would be great to have an extra template for the showing of the selected picture sections.--Broter (talk) 16:36, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

@Waggers:: It is very important for a Portal to show selected articles and pictures. This should be as dynamic as possible. A static list inspires no one.--Broter (talk) 16:48, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes and Waggers: It would be great if you can make a template called {{Transclude random file}}. This template should allow the depiction of files/images from an list and allow an editor to pick an image and the lead of the corresponding article.--Broter (talk) 17:08, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes and Waggers: We need now only templates to deal with the sections selected picture and Did you know in the Portal:Humanism. When this sections can be migrated to the main portal page, all sections are migrated.--Broter (talk) 05:56, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

It would also be great to have a template for the selected quote sections.--Broter (talk) 06:16, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

I just discovered that we can have JL-Bot copy some of these inaccessible page lists into a normal page where we can read them. For an example, see Wikipedia:WikiProject London Transport/Recognised content/bot list/FAbotlist. More details: User:JL-Bot/Project content. Certes (talk) 11:27, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Listing category members in a module or template

(Copy of Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 165#Listing category members in a module or template)

Some portals would like to show an excerpt from a page chosen from a category. Is there any way for a module or template to list the members of a category? title:getContent() on a category page just returns the "This is a list of foos" blurb, not the actual members. mw.site.stats.pagesInCategory counts the pages but doesn't reveal the titles. getContent doesn't work on Special:RandomInCategory, and transcluding it just produces a link rather than the text. Surely we don't need to write a bot to periodically copy the category page to a standard page (which we can then read easily)? Certes (talk) 01:32, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: You can get a listing of category members via Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Name, if it is restricted to namespace 0 (articles). This can be done via transclusion, e.g. {{Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Australia|namespace=0|limit=200}}, and so is available in Lua via frame:preprocess(). That's as far as I got in Module:Sandbox/Evad37/randomInCat, but it should be possible to do some pattern-matching magic to extract a random title from the whatlinkshere list. - Evad37 [talk] 04:39, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

No, actually, after looking into it a little. Returns a strip marker instead of the list, and per the reference manual can longer access the list: mw.text.unstrip no longer reveals the HTML behind special page transclusion, <ref> tags, and so on as it did in earlier versions of Scribunto. Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:45, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Try {{#categorytree:Countries in Africa|hideroot|namespaces=Main}}. See mw:Extension:CategoryTree. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:38, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Nope, still gives strip marker Galobtter (pingó mió) 10:44, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Galobtter beat my reply but I'll post it anyway. That's interesting because putting that into Special:ExpandTemplates shows a bunch of HTML. By contrast, trying {{Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Australia|namespace=0|limit=200}} in ExpandTemplates shows merely a single line:

[[:Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Australia]]

However, the following shows that a module gets a strip marker rather than anything useful:

{{#invoke:dump|dumphtml|1= {{#categorytree:Countries in Africa|hideroot|namespaces=Main}} }} →

'"`UNIQ--item-9--QINU`"'

That expression is using Module:Dump to pretty-print the HTML produced by categorytree, but all it shows is a strip marker. Johnuniq (talk) 10:50, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Why are you overcomplicating it? There's no need for Lua - use it directly, like this:

You can put that in a template and it works just the same, I believe that some WikiProjects do this - possibly using the alternative syntax <categorytree hideroot=on namespaces=Main>Countries in Africa</categorytree>. A third valid syntax is {{#tag:categorytree|Countries in Africa|hideroot=on|namespaces=Main}}. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:27, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

The original question is about how to get a random article from a category (list the category members in a lua readable way), hence trying to get the output readable in lua so a random member can be selected. Galobtter (pingó mió) 11:31, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for all the replies so far. #categorytree looks promising but I can't make it give me the titles within a module for further parsing. frame:preprocess returns the string "nil" (not Lua's nil value), and frame:expandTemplate gives an error (quite reasonably, since it's not a template). Attempting to preprocess a dummy page containing "<categorytree...", or to expandTemplate a template with that text, return the string "nil" too. Further suggestions are very welcome. Certes (talk) 12:24, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

This is another use-case for an interface between the MediaWiki API and Lua, even if only some API entry points. My only suggestion is a cron bot to post the data where Lua can pick it up. This 2014 thread and this 2016 comment by User:Mr. Stradivarius confirms Lua does not have access to category members. -- GreenC 14:33, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Images from infoboxes

I have made a couple of changes to Module:Excerpt. This should pull in images from the infobox, whether specified as [[File:...]] or as image=...|caption=...|alt=.... Infoboxes vary widely in style, and some article will always have a nightmare template from hell that it's impossible to parse properly, but please report any problems. In the spirit of alpha software, this may break existing portals in that pages which use file=1 to get an image from the lead may find that an image from the infobox appears instead.

I am also a little concerned that these templates may automatically pick up non-free images which have a rationale only for the article, not for the portal. Does anyone have any comments on this matter? It also applies to images not in infoboxes, of course. Certes (talk) 20:00, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: The images are far too large. Please make them smaller.--Broter (talk) 20:06, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

@Broter: I've changed the default size to "thumb"[nail] which should make images smaller. If they are still too large, please link to an example. Certes (talk) 20:10, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: You should be able to check for non-free images by getting the wikitext of the file description page, and seeing if it contains a non-free content copyright tag. Or perhaps just look if any of the phrases "non-free", "fair use", or "rationale" are used in the file description wikitext. - Evad37 [talk] 16:45, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

It seems to be impossible to get the wikitext of the file description page. getContent() will only create an object for the image itself, not its description page, even when I prepend a colon and request :File:Foo. Specifying the namespace explicitly as ":File" doesn't work either. Having spent a considerable time trying to solve this problem but been repeated frustrated by missing features, unfortunately I will have to leave this change for others to make. Module:Excerpt/sandbox contains a solution which I believe would work if :File:Foo read the description page, in case that is useful to anyone. Certes (talk) 10:00, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

I switched from getContent() to frame:preprocess(), and it seems to work - Evad37 [talk] 10:37, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you Evad37, that works! I've copied the sandbox to the main module and added testcases. Certes (talk) 12:25, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes and Evad37:Not sure if this helps, but Commons doesn't allow fair use images so testing whether an image is on Commons (if that's possible) would theoretically give another way of identifying (non-) fair use files. WaggersTALK 12:39, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

That's an interesting idea which could save processing time. Ironically, reading the descriptions of non-free images is setting off abuse detectors which mistakenly think we are displaying the images themselves (details) so we may come under pressure to stop doing that. I wonder what proportion of the free images we'd like to use are actually on Commons. Certes (talk) 12:46, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Though just because an image is local doesn't mean that it's non-free – e.g. it might be {{PD-USonly}} or a {{keep local}} image. - Evad37 [talk] 13:42, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: I have some problems now at the Portal:Community of Christ.--Broter (talk) 12:34, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

@Broter: Fixed. (Module worked with File: but not with the older Image: syntax.) Certes (talk) 12:54, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: Quite a few infobox templates use syntax like |static_image_name = myfile.jpg instead of |static_image = File:myfile.jpg, and it seems if the "File:" is missing the image doesn't get picked up by Module:Excerpt. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is, or even if there is one. One suggestion might be to look for parameter names that contain "image" as well as parameter values that contain "File:" - but that would give us problems with parameters like |static_image_width = and |image_caption = . WaggersTALK 14:04, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

I'm attempting to read two types of image syntax:

1. [[File:Foo|...]], either in the main text or within an infobox. Image: also works.
2. {{Infobox bar|image=Foo|caption=Baz|alt=Here is a nice picture}} with variants.

The "with variants" bit is the hard part. So far I just have Cover= (Infobox album's take on image=) and Caption= (capital C) but it looks as if I need to handle static_image and possibly others. (Everyone who writes an infobox seems to want to do things their way.) Certes (talk) 14:10, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: Is it worth trying looking for the standard image extensions (.jpg, .png etc) and working back from there until you find "=" or "File:"? That could potentially solve Transhumanist (talk · contribs)'s issue with picking up non-image files too. In fact, you could even make this a parameter so users can choose which types of file to include. WaggersTALK 07:34, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

That's an improvement. Checking for image types feels more robust than checking for other types: we won't need to amend the module every time someone thinks up a new audio format. Making it configurable has pros and cons: it gives useful flexibility but I was hoping to spare portal creators from that sort of detail. Certes (talk) 09:58, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

File:1+1=2.png. Starting with ".png" and working back to the "=" would give File:2.png, which doesn't exist

I guess we could get some odd cases where the file name includes an "=" or something - I've just had a look on Commons and sadly there are quite a few, but in the scheme of things they're pretty rare. Possibly rare enough to not worry about (for now)? WaggersTALK 11:17, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

The parsing shouldn't be a problem. Take the text before the first | or ] but after the preceding ., strip spaces, lowercase, then compare against gif, jpg, jpeg, png, svg, tiff, xcf and any other image suffix we can think of. Certes (talk) 11:40, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

I have now limited File: and Image: to known image types, per § Files arg is picking up ogg files. Certes (talk) 16:20, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: The image in infoboxes are not shown for files with the name: PD_image . Look for example at the infobox from Thomas S. Monson.--Broter (talk) 16:17, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

The non-standard parameter name PD_image would be easy to deal with. A harder problem is that this article hides the image name in a completely different page {{Latter Day Saint biography/Thomas S. Monson}}. I'm very reluctant to start putting topic-specific stuff like that into a general module, so we may have to file that one under "too difficult". Certes (talk) 18:44, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: Is it possible to move the data from the Wikipedia:WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement/Latter Day Saint biography back into article space? The creator ARTEST4ECHO has left wikipedia.--Broter (talk) 20:17, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Making the article more standard feels better than complicating the module. It's certainly possible: just copy and paste the subpage to replace the template call (with appropriate attribution). My only concern is that the template is also used by List of members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (LDS Church). One possibility is to have the list of members use a labeled section transclusion: copy and past the bio into Thomas S. Monson as <section begin=bio />copied bio goes here<section end=bio /> and replace the template in the list of members by {{#section:Thomas S. Monson|bio}}. Disclaimer: I've not tried this; I'm just reading it from the help page. Certes (talk) 20:48, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: I tried your approach at Thomas S. Monson in the preview function and it failed. Furthermore I succeded in transforming the templates into article-space at Thomas S. Monson and three other LDS prophets and it still failed. At last I changed the image-name in the template from PD_image to image and it also failed. I would like to transform the other LDS Portals into one-page Portals but I am not able to do this because the images in the infoboxes are not shown.--Broter (talk) 17:52, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: Now I succeded in having the images shown.--Broter (talk) 15:36, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Well done! My one concern is that similar text now appears in both Thomas S. Monson and WP:WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement/Latter Day Saint biography, which could be seen as a WP:REDUNDANTFORK. In my opinion, the content does belong in article space rather than WP namespace. You could get List of members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (LDS Church) to transclude a section as described above. We would then need the WP subpage only for attribution. Certes (talk) 17:40, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Discussions about selective transclusion in intros

Creating a template called Transclude lead excerpt

One of the problems with portals we can fix is that many of them have a static excerpt in their intro subpage. Those could be replaced with an automatically updating excerpt using selective transclusion.

Here's what we have so far...

This line will transclude the lead prose from the article Aviation:

{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''.+|s = {{#lsth:Aviation}}}}

That produces this (without the lines):

---

needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Archive 4" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A Boeing 747

Aviation includes the activities surrounding mechanical flight and the aircraft industry. Aircraft includes fixed-wing and rotary-wing types, morphable wings, wing-less lifting bodies, as well as lighter-than-air craft such as hot air balloons and airships.

Aviation began in the 18th century with the development of the hot air balloon, an apparatus capable of atmospheric displacement through buoyancy. Some of the most significant advancements in aviation technology came with the controlled gliding flying of Otto Lilienthal in 1896; then a large step in significance came with the construction of the first powered airplane by the Wright brothers in the early 1900s. Since that time, aviation has been technologically revolutionized by the introduction of the jet which permitted a major form of transport throughout the world.

---

Adding and maintaining/improving a line like that in every Portal intro subpage would be labor intensive, and could be made easier by using a template instead.

Applying this line in a template called {{Transclude lead excerpt}}, is currently the following erroneous code that doesn't work:

{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''{{{1}}}.+|s = {{#lsth:{{{1}}}}}}}

I don't know Lua. Perhaps you can help.    — The Transhumanist   01:07, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

That is a good idea. Perhaps we could ask at WP:VPT? Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 11:30, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

The template looks for '''Aviation... but the article incorrectly contains the wikitext '''[[Aviation... Removing the errant wikilink should fix it. I think this implementation would work in most cases but it may break when the title contains parentheses or other characters special to the regex parser, and for articles such as Elton John which begin with a name that differs from the article title. Certes (talk) 11:50, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

I ran into two problems with the code. {{{1}}} doesn't work, and putting \[\[ also doesn't work in the regex. As for things that break it, the template can be further refined over time to take more and more situations into account. I'd also like to see configurable features added, like the ability to specify number of paragraphs to transclude. Do you have any ideas on what a template like this could or should do?    — The Transhumanist   13:11, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

One option is to use #lst rather than #lsth and insert section tags in the article itself around the bits that will be used for the portal. However, that's much more work, especially if each portal rotates randomly between dozens of articles. Certes (talk) 13:18, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, I lied: it's not a regex, it's a pattern, which uses % rather than \ as an escape character. Certes (talk) 18:37, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

That (Lst) is what I implemented at Portal:Donald Trump/Intro, where we just use the lead of Donald Trump. It is an effective solution but requires editing the article. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 19:03, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

• The direction of this looks beautiful. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:39, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I've done some experimentation (including generating some internal errors) but I fear that this needs a module. Once you get your head round them, Lua patterns are almost as powerful as "real" regex like Perl's, but Module:String has irritating limitations like only returning the whole matched string rather than a specific capture. I agree that {{{1}}} appears not to work but I think this is a symptom of #lsth only partially works: it sometimes returns a wikilink to the page in circumstances where #lst correctly returns the page text. I'll see if I can produce a module. We can still go ahead on the basis that {{Transclude lead excerpt}} will be the interface; it's just that it needs to #invoke a module which is currently vapourware. Certes (talk) 14:45, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

{{Transclude lead excerpt/sandbox}} as shown in {{Transclude lead excerpt/testcases}} is my best attempt at a working template. Unfortunately, it is very hard to parse infoboxes, hatnotes and tags for removal. It should be a simple matter of removing {...} from the front repeatedly (%b{} in Lua-speak), but somehow it seems that we only see the text with templates already expanded so they look like part of the article. At least with a module we can print some debugging information and see whether, for example, Page.getContent() can get at the unadulterated wikitext. Certes (talk) 16:01, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I've edited {{Transclude lead excerpt}} to call a new module. I need to add documentation and better error handling but it works for now if used carefully - see test page. Certes (talk) 16:51, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

That's the documentation done. When things go wrong I'm quietly returning a blank string, as that looks less ugly than a big red error message splashed across your portal. Can someone suggest a portal which is broken, or about which no one cares much, where we can test the new module? Certes (talk) 18:31, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Many of the portals in Category:Portals under construction are unfinished, with empty sections.    — The Transhumanist   11:30, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

• What about citations in leads? Would they be transcluded as well? RockMagnetist(talk) 02:13, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

  All citations are removed. My logic was that the references appear the bottom of the article, in the bit we're not displaying, and it makes no sense to have a^[1] which leads nowhere. That's easily changed if others disagree. We could even have a parameter to choose the behaviour, but it might be better to agree a standard and keep all the portals consistent. Thanks to Bahnfrend for finding a bug which I've now fixed. (Module:Excerpt now handles the case when the lead refers by name to a citation which appears further down the article.) Certes (talk) 10:36, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

• @Certes: I certainly don't think they should be transcluded - that was the motivation for my question. I was just wondering if the script does that automatically. RockMagnetist(talk) 16:01, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

• 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)

I incorporated this template with an already used one. That's a brilliant idea, thanks so much.

• What a great template! I have one suggestion, though. It might be nice to automatically add the Read more ... link at the bottom. RockMagnetist(talk) 16:47, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

  I added |more= (note the = sign) to add a "Read more..." link. Or you can add custom text such as |more=Further information. Certes (talk) 18:11, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Adding further functionality to the template Transclude lead excerpt

@Certes: Some leads are excessively long. Can you add a parameter to choose the number of paragraphs that the template transcludes?    — The Transhumanist   03:27, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist:  Done. Example: {{Transclude lead excerpt|Sydney|paragraphs=1,3-5}}. — Certes (talk) 11:53, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: Good job. I was going to make the same suggestion. One problem, though. If I use your example, and put in 6 instead of 5, it produces an error message, which would also occur if I put in 5 and some other editor were to reduce the article's lead to 4 paragraphs. Bahnfrend (talk) 12:20, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Fixed; thanks. Certes (talk) 12:57, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

I have converted Portal:Underwater diving to use this template, as the article it draws from is FA. I like the result, and suggest that though having the ability to select paragraphs is useful, if the lead/primary article for a portal has an excessively long lead section, it should probably be trimmed, and if it can't be trimmed it is not excessively long. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 18:34, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: — Would you like me to convert the Selected Articles to the new format using JWB? Should I make the first bold text in the extract (which is normally some version of the article title) into a wikilink to the article being extracted, or is that job done by the "Read more..." link at the bottom? Also More articles... etc. are redlinks (easily fixed, unless it's deliberate). Certes (talk) 18:58, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Certes, Give it a go, we have to start somewhere. It is all revertible if there are problems. "Read more..." should link to the article, but that is not cast in stone. If linking from the article title in the text is much easier, we can do that. "More articles" is for adding articles to the list (if I remember correctly), a function which I would prefer to see automated by drawing articles at random from a category or an intersection of categories or some other combination, depending on what is reasonably practicable. I see this as an R&D exercise for the template, which could later be used to automate most portals. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:45, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: — Done, see Portal:Underwater diving/Selected article/1 to 19, except that I need to remove any images from the middle of the lead. Certes (talk) 20:32, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Certes, Text seems fine. I am not sure how you are managing the images. Ideally the first image from the article should be brought in with the lead, though it would probably be OK to bring in all images in the lead. I was doing some checks which you reverted, so not sure what is happening. Cheers · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 21:02, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: Images are hard because of the accompanying size, positioning, alt text, etc. Some portals use an image that's not from the lead or give it a size and position that don't match the article. So at the moment I'm removing images and letting the portals provide them. I can easily add an image=yes flag if some projects prefer to keep them. Your two edits which I reverted were workarounds for a template bug that I fixed at the same time. (An image appeared twice and we each removed one copy.) I thought it best to put things back to a consistent state. Certes (talk) 21:14, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

I added a new parameter files= with the same syntax as paragraphs= except that the default is no files. Only files=1 is likely to be useful but other values work. Certes (talk) 23:04, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Its a work in progress, change is expected. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 04:01, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Certes, It might be better in some cases to use a separate template to extract the lead image. The {{Transclude lead image}} template could then also allow formatting of image size and position to suit the portal format in use. Many lead images are inside infoboxes, and this might make getting them easier. It would also be nice to make the image size responsive to the display screen space available, but that is another issue. If these things are difficult or impossible, we can do what is reasonably practicable instead. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:00, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Choosing specific paragraphs. That's awesome.    — The Transhumanist   03:24, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

I can see that it allows hand tailoring of transcluded leads, and that will be useful in some cases, but I am most interested in systems which automate more rather than less. It may be better in the long run to fix the leads to comply with MoS. That would be a general improvement to the article, moving it along the path towards GA, as well as making the excerpt better for transclusion in a portal. That said, there are editors who prefer to handcraft their portal of interest, and anything that helps them is also good. I would like to eventually see a completely automated portal, possibly even one created in real time, providing an overview of almost any topic, drawing from category trees, annotated from short descriptions, as a response to a search, maybe from a special search window. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:00, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

I have a few ideas for features that might be useful. They would complicate the code and result in changes to existing pages, so I'd like to see whether there's consensus before going ahead.

1. Automatically wikilink the first occurrence of the article title in bold
2. If the article title does not appear in bold, create a piped link from the first bold text. This should be a synonym for the article's topic, but...
3. Attempt to extract image details from any infobox, and count that as one of the images

For 3. I thought of specifying "use image from infobox" separately, but {{Transclude random excerpt}} has a single files= setting to govern the source and number of images for all articles. We probably want to display the first image, whether from the infobox or from the lead. Beware that this feature may not work seamlessly with every permutation of infobox parameters. Thoughts please? Certes (talk) 19:56, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: The first idea is great but the two following ideas could be problematic, if this template is already inserted. Could there be problems with this template already inserted?--Broter (talk) 06:23, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

I am talking, of course, about the Transclude lead excerpt template.--Broter (talk) 06:51, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

These changes, especially 2., could be seen as "breaking", hence the consultation. Point 3 only affects pages which use the files= parameter. Currently that is just Portal:Thinking/Intro, which would be unchanged because Thought has no infobox. If we're going to get them in, let's do it before there are more cases to break. At the moment I'm minded to go ahead with 1. and 3. only, although 2. would help with cases like Elton John. Certes (talk) 10:25, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: I used the {{Transclude random excerpt}} template in the Portal:Community of Christ in the Selected article section. I am so happy I tested it. It is so easy with this template to make static portals into dynamic portals. This is also the future!--Broter (talk) 16:45, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Community of Christ/Selected article displays the title page image explicitly and also the first image (if any) from the random page. Is this what you intended? Perhaps this is a case where enhancement 3. above would help, so files=1 would give you an image from either the lead or the infobox but not both. Certes (talk) 17:03, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: I left the old images first in the section, but now I have removed them. I have improved now the sections: Selected biography, Selected Location and Selected history. With this great template, all portals can be made dynamic. Certes, you are a Hero for wikipedia!--Broter (talk) 17:17, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Can a regular portal maintainer ask to "opt out" of all this new code?

It took a fair amount of hard work to get P:ACW up to featured status. A couple of editors and I have taken some satisfaction from the effort. Today I'm shocked to find a wholesale introduction of these intro transclusions with zero discussion outside of the project. I like the idea in theory but I'd rather maintain this portal myself. The ACW portal doesn't really need fixing, and if you continue you're likely to find others who feel the same way. Please fix the broken portals but I beg you not to establish a "Procrustean bed" which injures the range of a well designed well maintained one. I am interested in seeing how this work progresses. BusterD (talk) 23:04, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

@BusterD: Do you have some diff links? ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 23:28, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

As the author of some of the new code, I'm just providing tools for those who wish to try them. I hope no one will feel obliged to use them if they prefer to produce and maintain up-to-date and attractive pages in other ways. For now at least, there's no need even to opt out: portals are using traditional methods unless they choose to opt in. The exception may be portals which have been abandoned for some time and need to be replaced efficiently by imposing a standard format. Certes (talk) 23:43, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

No worries, and thanks for the heads up. Reflecting on the spirit of the portals... Quoting Wikipedia:Portal: "There is no single standard design for portals." Portal design is left up to those who edit those pages. Experimentation and artistry is the norm in portal space; if we forced a standard, it could douse the creative spark. We have plenty of abandoned portals that need work. If we inadvertently replace a carefully crafted excerpt or a customized summary (for example), editors should feel free to revert. The last time we did an overhaul of portals (12 years or more ago), a few of us plowed through all the portals, installing the section boxes that are still in use today. Hardly anyone objected, as almost everyone loved the upgrade, but we respected those who reverted. These days, we have many more adopted portals. So, this time around, for starters, I'll avoid the list of maintained portals in the participants section on the WikiProject page, and will specifically look for portals that are abandoned. The watchlist can help with that by showing where the activity is.    — The Transhumanist   01:51, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

• Tried it on Portal:San Francisco Bay Area, it included the infobox. im SURE i did it wrong. i am NOT good at advanced code. please test it there if you cant figger out how to teach me. i of course agree that this would automate up to date portals, which is absolutely necessary.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 06:05, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

  @Mercurywoodrose: I've taken the liberty of editing Portal:San Francisco Bay Area/Selected article/1 to illustrate how the template could work. Please feel free to revert if you preferred it the old way. If you have a specific page version that shows an infobox, please send me a link, as you probably found a bug. (The template uses an alpha module, and there will be many types of input that we've not tested.) Certes (talk) 11:54, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

I think this is the edit he was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:San_Francisco_Bay_Area/Intro&oldid=838309483    — The Transhumanist   09:15, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

(Belated response, as I overlooked this) Thanks, that illustrates the difference between #lsth: and the new templates. #lsth: does a great job in some circumstances but I don't think it's the best tool for this job. Certes (talk) 19:19, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Of course a regular portal maintainer can opt out. The purpose of the coding is to automate the portals that lack such people. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 20:02, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Beta testing

One thing that has been bothering me about my urge to install this system-wide right away, is that, that would be distributing a software product without beta testing it first. So, we should install these on say, 50 or so portals to begin with, and watch for problems. That way, bugs can be fixed before going to widespread implementation. We could add the pages it is installed on to a list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/List of pages with auto-excerpts, for easy tracking. Then we need users with various device types to look at them to see if they appear the same for everybody. Thoughts?    — The Transhumanist   01:51, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Bit of a no-brainer, so yes. Maybe not as many as 50 to start, or maybe an alpha group of four ot five, and a beta group of order of 50. I have sort of volunteered Portal:Underwater diving as an alpha lab rat and I will be watching it fairly closely, but it does not have some of the features like news and DYK sections, so others would be useful too. Portal:Cricket may be up for simalar use? Ideally a few portals already monitored by members of this project. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:11, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Module:Excerpt is still alpha or possibly pre-alpha as we're still adding features. I'm all in favour of testing software properly before it's released, and I'm grateful to the helpful and patient guinea pigs (especially those with air tanks). Certes (talk) 12:16, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Upgrade root excerpts in intro sections

@Broter: This section might give editors the impression that we're ready to go ahead today. I appreciate the desire to harness all this welcome new energy but should we delay slightly until we've done more testing, then give clearer guidance as to whether to use #ltsh or {{Transclude lead excerpt}} depending on the test results? Certes (talk) 14:25, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: I have already testet this template because it was written in this wikiproject. I am very happy with the results. But Infoboxes should be excluded in the lead section. Many lead articles for Portals do not have Infoboxes and therefore the results are great.--Broter (talk) 15:54, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

@Broter: We're still developing the module behind the template. We'll try not to break anything, but there is a risk. It does try to exclude infoboxes. If you know of a case where the infobox is retained, please let me know. (One possible cause is a missing "}}" after another template nested within the infobox.) If you're confident that #lsth: is not the way forward, would it be better to reduce its prominence in this section? Certes (talk)

@Certes:: The problem is with templates, not infoboxes. Templates in the lead are always transcluded. But I think this transclusion is the best way forward.--Broter (talk) 16:13, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: You can see this problem at Portal:Christianity.--Broter (talk) 16:17, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. I've now fixed the module to handle a target such as Christianity which begins "tag templates, HTML comment, infobox". It should also work with incomplete refs in the infobox, which caused similar symptoms elsewhere. We need to make this sort of change regularly, which is why there's a risk of something breaking. Certes (talk) 17:03, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: The {{Transclude lead excerpt}} template is the future!--Broter (talk) 16:32, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: There is also a problem at Portal:Ancient Greece.--Broter (talk) 18:45, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

and at Portal:Bahá'í Faith--Broter (talk) 18:51, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Ancient Greece and Bahá'í Faith each begin "templates; image; more templates; text". Due to the feature of optionally keeping selected images, dealing with that combination is a bit harder and a large part of the module needs to be redesigned. I'm working on it. Certes (talk) 19:34, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

I've just released a major overhaul of the module which should deal with this problem. Certes (talk) 23:44, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes:: I updated Portal:Cricket/Featured article with this template. Furthermore I updated the Portal:LDS Church with the same code. I updated this Portal in the sections: Selected article, Selected biography, Selected history and Selected Location. I am very happy with the results!--Broter (talk) 20:45, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Portals with multiple main topics

Portal:Anime and manga has two main topics: Anime and Manga. Broter tried using two instances of the now template, but it made the intro far too long (see here), so I reverted the change. Can we make the template able to handle two main topics, using half of the space for each, or make a new template for the instances such as this where there are two main topics for a portal? ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 20:51, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

You could selectively include only certain parts of the leads by adding something like |paragraphs=1,2 to each of the template calls. Certes (talk) 23:42, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Picture alignment?

Copied thread start from user talk page

@Certes:

thank you for your efforts in portals. i replaced some sub-pages in portals. can we add an alignment option to pictures for example Portal:Medicine after replacing intro subpage the image appears on the right rather than left. regards--مصعب (talk) 18:41, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

@مصعب: I have added a new optional parameter to tweak the appearance of images. |fileargs=left should do what you describe. Certes (talk) 12:35, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: Great! Thanks--مصعب (talk) 13:31, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: can you add right also to be used in languages like arabic?--مصعب (talk) 13:31, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

I can't test this because it's the default on en.wiki but |fileargs=right should already work, along with the other keywords listed in WP:Extended image syntax#Brief syntax. If you can copy the latest Module:Excerpt to ar.wiki, making any necessary internationalisation changes, then it should work there too. Certes (talk) 14:15, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Some articles' leads are not Portal-applicable

@Certes: Take a look at Portal:1980s. To migrate the lead to the base page, I tried transcluding the lead of the root article, and discovered it is just an ultra-obvious definition of the topic. The true lead migrated to 1980s#Overview in January 2017. What to do?    — The Transhumanist   09:32, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

@Transhumanist: (ec) Yes, that's a general problem that I've seen elsewhere (and warned about without providing much practical help). I'm reluctant to bolt too many more bells and whistles onto an already complex module but we should probably do something. One solution would be to have minparagraphs= (or minchars=, minwords=, ...) which causes the text to run on from the lead if necessary. That can be a bit intricate and might slow things down because we'd have to parse and delete comments, refs, etc from the whole (potentially large) article rather than just the lead. An alternative is to pull out a named section(s) along with (or instead of) the lead. That's flexible but requires the editor to copy the section heading, so it breaks if the heading changes and wouldn't work for random articles which have different headings. What do you think? Certes (talk) 09:45, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Files arg is picking up ogg files

@Certes: On Portal:Albania, files=1 resulted in the sound bite appearing at the top center of the section.    — The Transhumanist   10:14, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: Yes, it's shown the first file from the article in the default position, as requested by files=1. Certes (talk) 10:22, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: That renders AWB useless for inserting {{Transclude lead excerpt}}. Can you make it so that it doesn't count ogg files?    — The Transhumanist   10:30, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: I could, if we're sure that we want to only want to insert images and not all files. It might add interest to the portal to have the national anthem available. Certes (talk) 11:24, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Should sound files be handled separately, so you don't get a sound file where you were expecting an image? Thoughts?    — The Transhumanist   22:39, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

I have now limited File: and Image: to known image types. Audio should no longer appear. Certes (talk) 16:18, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Can you make it go further afield for pictures?

@Certes: Instead of just getting pictures from the lead section, could the files argument select pictures from the whole article. So, files=5 would be the 5th file in the article. Is that possible? That would allow much more flexibility.    — The Transhumanist   10:34, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: It's certainly possible. The question is whether we want, say, files=1 to pick up some image, any image, even if it's at the bottom of the article and tangential to the subject. I suspect that the change would improve some portal pages but look odd in others. It also means parsing the whole article (easy to code but lots of CPU power), though we may have to do that anyway if we're going to take text from beyond the lead. Certes (talk) 11:24, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist and Certes: I'd suggest that anything involving parsing content outside of the lead should be by exception, so that we don't end up parsing the whole of every article. So maybe a |leadonly parameter (defaulting to "yes") or something similar. WaggersTALK 12:33, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

From a programming perspective, this overlaps with the short text issue: both require examining the whole article instead of just the lead. We could add two flags to do this for (a) images (b) text, but I'm wondering whether we can find a generic solution that doesn't require different portals to supply different parameters. Certes (talk) 12:50, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

What features would enable Transclude lead excerpt to be applied by AWB/bot?

@Certes, Waggers, Samee, Ɱ, مصعب, and Dan Koehl: What I've been gearing up for is running AWB on all the portals (less the ones in the maintained-by-editors list), to migrate the lead excerpt there.

But, within the first handful that I tried, I ran into an exception on pretty much every page.

So, if you find any exceptions, start a thread like those above, and we'll see if we can work them out.

Once we've got enough of them worked out, maybe we'll be able to automate the installation/maintenance of the intros. Another option is to write a wizard script that prompts the user for each parameter, and allows him/her to preview the page before saving. That could then be extended to work for more sections, and then finally, an entire portal.

I look forward to your thoughts.    — The Transhumanist   19:31, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Can you write just a short description as explanation to what 'exception' means in this case? Thanks, Dan Koehl (talk) 15:34, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Getting rid of the section edit buttons

@Abyssal, Evad37, Bermicourt, and Nihonjoe: We are rapidly redesigning portals to not have subpages, especially intro subpages.

The edit button for the intro section opens the intro subpage into the editor. That's not appropriate once the intro is generated on the base page.

Note that the edit button in the box template is not turned off by the "NOEDITSECTION" magic word.

How can we turn off the edit button so that it does not appear?    — The Transhumanist   19:43, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Why has this "decision" been taken? I clicked on that Community of Christ portal and it is one unreadable mess of code and text, and no I am not dyslectic... I worked on one of Abyssals Prehistory of... portals and it was extremely clear, clean and easy to manage. Why now taking 10 steps back to go one "forward" (I don't see the benefit of having no subpages)? If we want portals to be manageable by more people than just the designer, one of the big -and justified- criticisms of the RfC discussion, why then make it absolutely impossible for another editor to step in and make changes? Tisquesusa (talk) 11:12, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

:Hmmm. Not sure. But I have another question - see below.

I support the idea of cleaning portals up and e.g. automatic rotation of featured articles/images of the month etc. But having looked at one of the portals with minimal subpages, I also found it difficult to edit and was concerned that all it had as a navigation aid was an existing navbox. I'm sure many of the portals I've created could be streamlined, but if I trimmed the links down to a navbox they would lose a lot of information, lose their value as a navigation aid and definitely not be useful for WikiProject members trying to expand and improve a topic. So I'm in favour of giving portals a wide degree of latitude in how they do things. I'd hate to see a boring, uniform style and approach and I think there needs to be creativity, variety of emphasis and implementation, as long as the quality is good and they are well maintained. Bermicourt (talk) 22:09, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

How do you do the random articles if you don't have subpages? P:SF has hundreds of articles that are randomly inserted into the main portal page. I can't imagine listing all of them on the main page (in a template or otherwise), so they have to be listed somewhere. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 02:24, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

@Nihonjoe: I'm glad you asked, because it is due to some exciting developments. Currently, the entries in the "selected" boxes at P:SF are included as static (copied/pasted) excerpts, one per subpage. That could be whittled down to a list of article titles on the base page, or on 1 subpage. Then the excerpts for those titles are automatically fetched from the articles themselves via "selective transclusion", and therefore never go stale or become content forks, eliminating the need for monitoring or manual updating of all those subpages. The template we have for this is Template:Transclude random excerpt, which can be further developed as needed. Of course, the new methods are optional. Though, if you are feeling a little surprised by what we're talking about, the general advancements we've made so far on portals, portal construction, and portal maintenance are reported at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Newsletter archive. They can also be read in full detail in the original threads here on this talk page and in Archive 4. I hope this explanation has helped.    — The Transhumanist   22:48, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: If {{Box-header}} is being used, then it can be passed the |noedit= parameter. Variants like {{Box-header-round}} don't have that parameter, so would need to be edited to include it as an option. Or perhaps it would be better to merge all the variants into a single template? - Evad37 [talk] 09:24, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

I forgot to rtfm. :)

Combining them would just add parameters, right? Sounds cool that we could choose between all the configuration styles with configuration parameters on the box-header subpage.    — The Transhumanist   16:15, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

 Partly done {{Box-header-round}} and {{Box-header-square}} are now wrappers for {{Box-header}}, and can be passed the |noedit= parameter. - Evad37 [talk] 10:39, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Chicken or egg?

If the aim is that portal introductions should always be the same as the lede of the main article, I can see a few problems, at least initially. In the past, if the lede was too short, I've beefed it up; if it was too long, I've been selective; if it was IMHO badly written, I've redrafted it, all with the aim of making the portal intro look and read well. So what is the aim now? Do we improve the lede to suit the portal intro or do we just accept the lede and risk the portal looking too long/short/rubbish? In other words which is the driver, the portal or the main article? Bermicourt (talk) 22:09, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

I would ask: would the article benefit from having a longer lead which matches the text we'd like to see in the portal? If so, improve the article, and the portal will fix itself automatically. If not, one option is to keep a subpage. Another is to provide the template with a parameter which encourages it to add more text, though that feature is currently at the vaporware design stage. Certes (talk) 23:32, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

As a general principle I would go with Certes's recommendation of fixing the article until it is worthy of a portal. If the main article lead is very short and there is not enough content to expand it, there is some question of whether the topic needs a portal. I don't think a portal should be created until the main article is at least B-class. I specify B-class because it is not very difficult to get there. There should also be enough articles to populate the portal non-trivially. Look at the FA criteria for a lead section. If the lead complies with it it will be good. If not, make it so and the article will be improved. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 16:22, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

One of the main arguments at the RfC for deleting all the portals was that they steal valuable editor attention away from the articles in the main namespace. A portal shouldn't have a lead section that is better than the corresponding root article, because it shares exactly the same scope, and doing so creates an unacceptable content fork. I agree with Certes, that an editor should improve a portal's lead and then transclude that lead into the portal intro section. Via paragraph selection provided as a parameter in the transclusion template, a portal's lead can be adjusted to fit the needs of the portal.    — The Transhumanist   21:55, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Sometimes the issue isn't length of the lead, it's the content. I'm involved with several geographical portals with selected biography sections, and it's not always obvious in the article lead what the subject's connection is to the portal, so I've ended up adding a sentence or two ("X was born and raised in Y") so the link is clear. It's not a major issue though - if a reader doesn't see the link in the excerpt in the portal they might be enticed to click through to the article proper to read more, which is kind of the point. WaggersTALK 07:59, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Discussions about selected article sections

Setting a range for random selections

Is there a way to pick a random article from a predefined set of categories?    — The Transhumanist   07:30, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Special:RandomInCategory can be called with a specific category as shown on the {{Random page in category}} template. For example, Special:RandomInCategory/Featured articles will take you to a random article in Category:Featured articles. Slambo (Speak) 13:09, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Is template:Random portal component what you are looking for? --Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 19:06, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

What that does is displays a random subpage within a specified range. What I'd like is a way to plug a random article title into Certes's selective transclusion template above. But I want the source list to be dynamic, such as a category, that gets updated over time. That will keep the article selection fresh. Being able to specify multiple categories would provide even more flexibility.    — The Transhumanist   09:13, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Ideally we'll need to make sure this works with {{Transclude lead excerpt}} so we can automatically select a random article from a category AND automatically transclude the lead of that article. This can get tricky though: for most portals we're interested in a range of articles in various subcategories, not just a single (parent) category. So perhaps we'd need to specify how deep to explore within the specified category. WaggersTALK 13:47, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

{{Random portal component}} returns a wikilink to a Special: page. That doesn't work with {{Transclude lead excerpt}}. {{Random article}} handles subcategories but returns an external link to a tool; it's that program's output rather than its URL that we need. I'll try a few ideas and ask around, but the obvious approaches don't work. Certes (talk) 14:03, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

After much searching and head-bashing, the only way I can find to list the pages in a category is via the Scribunto extension DynamicPageListEngine (or a couple of similar facilities called DynamicPageList), but none of these seem to be installed on English Wikipedia. So I think we're stuck with compiling and updating a list which just duplicates the category but isn't hidden from templates. A bot could do that on a regular basis (or at least flag up new entries, because I just thought of a WP:BEANS way to promote my garage band on the music portal). Certes (talk) 15:03, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

In some ways, that's better, as a fully automated random selection could select a load of poor quality articles and/or stubs. With a bot, there might be a way to only select articles that have achieved a certain quality (using the assessment scores in WikiProject banners for example) that would (presumably) be much more difficult with templates/modules. WaggersTALK 15:47, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

We already have the random selection bit, with the extracts stored in pages like Portal:Foo/Featured/37. One option is simply to edit each of those pages into a single line: {{Transclude lead excerpt|Some article}}. As it's a bit silly to have dozens of one-line pages, we could replace them by one page with dozens of lines. That would need a new option to {{Random portal component}}. Alternatively, at the risk of reinventing a wheel, we could move the randomisation into {{Transclude lead excerpt}}. The intros typically include an image. {{Transclude lead excerpt}} could handle this with an image= parameter and perhaps a couple of other options to tweak its position and size. We also need to think about efficiency: we do NOT want the template to generate dozens of pages then pick one and discard the rest. An unimportant portal that we can mess about with would really help here! Certes (talk) 17:06, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: Can a template be transcluded within Lua code?    — The Transhumanist   23:02, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: I've never done that but mw:Extension:Scribunto/Lua reference manual#frame:expandTemplate suggests that it can. Do you have an application to portals in mind? Certes (talk) 23:30, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: A template can generate a random article name, right?    — The Transhumanist   23:33, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: Yes and no. {{Random page in category}} generates a wikilink of the form Special:..., which when clicked takes the reader to a random article. I have tried and failed to read that article's title or contents in a module (though someone else may do better). {{Random portal component}} generates a name like Portal:Foo/Articles/123 where the 123 bit is random. We could do either of those in the module without using a template, but sadly I don't think they help us. If you know of a more useful "random article" template, one which emits the name or text of the actual article, please let me know. Alternatively if there's any way that a template can prise out the members of a category, rather than just the "This category contains foos" blurb, that would work. Certes (talk) 23:55, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: {{totd-random}}, with the old method it used back in 2012 and before, you could create a custom list right on the page, rather than one entry per subpage: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Totd-random&action=edit&oldid=529849839

That was used to generate the subpage portion of a page title, but I believe the same method can be used to generate the whole title.

There may be other ways I've come across but can't recall. We should both keep looking, and asking around.    — The Transhumanist   00:08, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: Yes, the module could accept any number of article names as arguments and pick one of them at random. That would be easy and it's not a bad idea. (It would even be backwards compatible, as the current calls would choose a random article from a shortlist of one.) But what would you do about picking an image, sizing it, adding a caption and alt text, etc.? Certes (talk) 00:19, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: If you can plug in a part of a title into a title, you should be able to plug in a title as part of a file call. Right?    — The Transhumanist   00:22, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: I'm not sure I quite understand the question but perhaps we should have a "list mode" where we accept a list of article titles and show one at random along with the first File: or Image: (if any) found before or within its lead, with the same size, caption, etc. as in that article. That's not hard to code and I think it's a winner. It's bedtime here but I can have a go at it tomorrow. We may want to hold off rushing ahead with conversion to the current system until it's ready. Certes (talk) 00:39, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: Good idea. I agree. I can't wait to see what you come up with.

Also, having an input list is a static element. To be fully dynamic, it would need to generate from another source (like a category). So, I'll keep looking while you work on the program. An additional possibility with the use of a static list is to update that list by bot. Though not as elegant as pulling straight off of a category.    — The Transhumanist   00:46, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Listing the articles in a category seems to be impossible. We'd need a bot to read the rendered category page (complete with members) and copy it into an ordinary page which we can actually read. Teasingly, mw.site.stats.pagesInCategory reveals how many pages are in the category but not their titles. It's almost as if this job has deliberately been made difficult. Certes (talk) 01:14, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

What about the make list features of AWB and JWB? How do they do it? I'm taking a look at the JWB source now...    — The Transhumanist   01:19, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

AWB is written in C# and JWB in JavaScript. They can do almost anything because they're running on an editor's PC. We only have access to Lua and the template language, running on Wikipedia's servers. We're limited to the libraries provided, which have some features disabled for security and performance reasons. I expect AWB could copy each category into a parallel mainspace page but a volunteer would have to push the button for every portal at regular intervals. It can't start automatically, either on a timer or (as Lua and templates do) whenever a reader looks at the page. Certes (talk) 01:45, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

What's the the source of Special:Random page in category written in?    — The Transhumanist   09:12, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

It's built into MediaWiki, which is written in PHP. Certes (talk) 12:34, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

I have now produced {{Transclude random excerpt}}. Unlike {{Transclude lead excerpt}}^[a], it accepts any number of article titles and chooses one at random. {{Transclude random excerpt/testcases}} shows it in action.

[a] This is a lie. The two templates behave identically, with the old one selecting randomly from a list with one element. However, they may diverge in future, so please use the old template to show a single page and the new one to show a random page.

— Certes (talk) 14:45, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

I've been working on something very similar at User:Waggers/sandpit/portal selection list test but with slightly less success, so well done Certes for getting this working! WaggersTALK 11:40, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Current processes

On Portal:Trains, the selected article is generally not repeated; an article will appear in this box only once. To update it every week, I look through the categories of featured and good articles within WikiProject Trains to find an article that has not yet been shown as the selected article. There is a nominations page, but there have been so few nominations over the 13 years the portal has been active as to effectively be no nominations. I use the |portalSAweek= parameter on the {{WikiProject Trains}} banner to specify when a particular article has appeared on the portal. Once an article is selected, I copy its lead section and edit it to a reasonable length on the appropriate portal subpage, then update the transclusion link subpage for the navigation links. Once a year I set up the upcoming year's individual selected article portal subpages with placeholder text. Slambo (Speak) 13:09, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

The "subportals" listed at Template:SEERelatedPortals all have lists of selected articles, biographies, pictures, etc. When the portal page loads, they use {{rand}} to generate random numbers to pick a selected article, biography, picture etc. at random from the list. Portal:South East England itself goes a stage further, and selects one of those subportals at random, then selects from the chosen portal's list of selections. (The portal could also select itself, and has its own lists of selected content too). WaggersTALK 13:54, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

{{Transclude random excerpt}} selects an article by picking a random number from 1 to (number of articles). Would an option to override the random number be useful? For example, passing the week number would select each article in rotation for one week each. The module could easily trim the number to the required range; for example, if article_number=23 is used (because it's week 23) but there are only 10 articles then article 3 appears again. Certes (talk) 23:28, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: That sounds like a great idea. The portals I look after tend to select articles "purely" at random, but your suggestion would support those portals that use an "article of the month" or "article of the week" approach. This could also be useful for WikiProjects that have a "collaboration of the month" article. WaggersTALK 08:04, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Maybe this should be a different template, {{Transclude excerpt of the week}} or {{Transclude rotating excerpt}} or something like that, to avoid confusion. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:26, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Other selection methods

Hello, folks! The Template:Random portal component has been for over a decade. However, it's not always the best option to select snippets. In the Spanish-language Wikipedia I have used other selection methods.

For example, people appear on specific dates, for example their birth days or death dates. When there's no match, then a random person appears. On Portal:Auto racing, people also appear the day before and after their birthdays.

Also on Portal:Auto racing, there's sections for racetracks, races and competitions. They change in order every week (one of them used to change every two weeks). Moreover, each section changes on a different day of the week, and the latest section to have changed appears above of the older ones.

Those selection methods are hardcoded, but could be put in templates so anyone can use them. Feel free to ask any questions. Have fun! --NaBUru38 (talk) 23:19, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Strange behaviour with Template:Transclude random excerpt

Hello all, I've been working on upgrading Portal:Scotland, in line with the proposals being made here, to auto-update with random content in the "Selected XX" sections and using transclusions for the lead in the intro and Selected articles. It's pretty much complete I think and I've been working on populating the relevant sections with content on numbered subpages. I've run into a strange problem with some Selected articles. I've set up the "Selected XX" pages using Template:Numbered subpages which does the work of creating the Box plus header (I've used a custom footer for each box). Numbered article subpages use Template:Transclude random excerpt to generate the content which means it will stay fresh as articles change over time.

So far, so good, but for some articles, the groupref links of any grouped references in the article lead get shown in the generated page (eg [N1], [N2] etc.) and a hideous Cite error: is displayed, along the lines of:
      "Cite error: There are <ref group=XX> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a reflist|group=XX template (see the help page)".

Examples can be seen at Portal:Scotland/Selected articles/Graham Bell test and Portal:Scotland/Selected articles/Burns test. What's strange is that the source article does include the relevant Template: Reflist|group=XX and there is no Cite error. The subpage cite error can be eliminated by including the relevant Template: Reflist|group=XX in the numbered subpage wikitext, but this just generates the full group reflist at the bottom on the subpage which leads to unacceptable results (See Portal:Scotland/Selected articles/Graham Bell test fix.

Why are the groupref links in the article lead showing up, resulting in the cite error,and can it be fixed? What's even more confusing is that I set up a duplicate in my personal sandbox to work on a fix for the problem, and the groupref links still appear there, but the Cite error doesn't. Is that a namespace issue? (See User:Cactus.man/sandbox/portal/Selected articles/Graham Bell test and User:Cactus.man/sandbox/portal/Selected articles/Burns test). I'm afraid this is all "way above my paygrade" to resolve. Any and all help from the template ninja's who do such excellent work on here would be appreciated. Thanks Cactus.man ✍ 11:17, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

@Cactus.man: Thanks for the clear report. The template (actually Module:Excerpt) attempts to edit a copy of the article to remove references but doesn't catch every variant. I've added {{Refn}} to the list of things it removes. Does this fix the problem you found? Certes (talk) 11:40, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: Thanks for the quick response. Brilliant work, that seems to have done the trick. You have been awarded an extra 100 bonus Ninja points

@Certes:My apologies, I spoke too soon based on a quick cursory review of Portal:Scotland/Selected articles/Graham Bell test. The quick impression was that all was OK: The horrible Cite error message had been eliminated and there was a complete absence of intrusive blue groupref links. Further review suggests there are still some subtle issues causing problems . Fistly the second paragraph has picked up part of a quotation embedded within the 2nd group ref within the {{Refn}} template on the source page and included it within the text output on the generated page:
      

“

"He thought he could harness the new electronic technology by creating a machine with a transmitter and receiver that would send sounds telegraphically to help people hear." lgroup=N))

”

Secondly, the output from the |more= parameter of {{Transclude random excerpt}}, which should produce '''Read More ...''', has now vanished from the generated page. You can see the problem on Portal:Scotland/Selected articles/Graham Bell test.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, I hope you can fix it. good luck. Cactus.man ✍ 16:44, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Ignore the second point above. I made an error copying over the core wikitext from another article. The |more= parameter DOES seem to be working correctly, just the partial text grab from inside the source page template seems to be the issue. Cactus.man ✍ 17:05, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

@Cactus.man: That should be the quotation removed. I needed to parse nested templates more carefully. (That {{Refn}} contains a {{cite book}} inside it, and I accidentally stopped removing text at the }} after the inner template.) Certes (talk) 20:15, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

@Certes: Thanks for fixing that. I've tested it out with some of the other aricles that were causing problems, and I think it's all good now. Cactus.man ✍ 23:36, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Discussions about news sections

Current resources

There's a newsfeedeer bot called User:JJMC89 bot/Wikinews importer.    — The Transhumanist   10:03, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Were we to develop some "Guidelines for Portal Maintenance" it might be sensible to recommend how best to deal with News Sections that have ceased to be maintained or updated by anyone. Obviously temporary removal of any News template would be sensible after some set period of time, perhaps by placing that template invisible comments <!-- and --> so it could be more easily resurrected in the future. Nick Moyes (talk) 15:29, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

A problem with that is that it doesn't address what to do about the subpage, which is still sitting in portal space with outdated info. Portal subpages have been subject to MfD directly. The best thing to do, is fix them with an automated solution, perhaps using the newsfeeder bot mentioned above. I don't know anything about it yet. I suggest we all read its instructions.    — The Transhumanist   10:23, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Would there be a way to have the page automatically search google for recent news containing certain keywords? I know Google offers a system like that to email you a list of recent articles containing keywords; I use that myself. Or perhaps it could be linked to a reliable blog, or look for recent mentions/papers in a notable journal in the field, or a selection of journals? --Nerd1a4i (talk) 17:42, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

I have a Google news category for relevant news items that I will check for items that can be included in the news section on P:Trains. My search query specifically is: ~railroad ~railway -"underground railroad" -"Railroad Earth" -"Railroad Killer" -"Grand Funk Railroad". Most of the items that appear on the list are of little consequence and are not appropriate for the portal here, so I would recommend against blindly including those results. But if a story has a lot of coverage or is of a significant event (which may have limited coverage outside of trade publications), it is a good candidate to include in the portal section, linking to the appropriate articles. That is where the subject matter curation that I do comes into play. Slambo (Speak) 04:01, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

• Wikinews is terrible outdated for many topics. Many news sections would have to die from embarrassment if populated from Wikinews only. —Kusma (t·c) 14:44, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

@Nick Moyes, Nerd1a4i, Slambo, and Kusma: Again, the bot might come to the rescue, if it has an archiving feature. I'm hoping it does everything we need, including clearing the newspage. I suggest we read the bot's instructions, and return here to discuss the matter further once we've done so. I'm on my way there to read the bot instructions now.    — The Transhumanist   10:26, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

I used to use the Wikinews importer bot at Portal:Hampshire but there's so little news at WikiNews tagged for Hampshire, it got ridiculously out of date. I ended up removing the news section altogether. WaggersTALK 13:56, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

It doesn't appear to have an archiving feature. If it cleared out the old news, it wouldn't be so bad. It's leaving the old news in there which is the main problem. Another thing we may need to do is identify which categories at Wikinews get enough traffic to make using the bot worthwhile. Is there an automated way we could do that?    — The Transhumanist   00:25, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Current events got a lot of praise during the recent discussion at Village Pump and I think it would be much more useful as source of an automatic news feed for other portals than Wikinews. Please see my comment in the DYK section below on how that could work. — Kpalion^(talk) 15:24, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Spain has an automatic feed from Wikinews. This has delivered just four items since December – all of them related to football. You wouldn't know there was an ongoing crisis about Catalan independence. Portal:Current events could provide many more relevant and up-to-date news items if there were a way to tap into it selectively: Noyster (talk), 13:55, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

Discussions about migrating the category subpage

Rendering PAGENAME inside categorytree tag doesn't work

@Certes, Broter, RockMagnetist, Waggers, Bahnfrend, Emir of Wikipedia, and Pbsouthwood:

In an effort to remove the need for a categories subpage, I tried this in the category section of the base page:

<categorytree>{{PAGENAME}}</categorytree>

...and it just produces a blank category section. Is there a way to do this without having to manual type in the category?    — The Transhumanist   20:04, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: I do not know another way than writing the name of the category in between.--Broter (talk) 20:44, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

Is there a way to substitute the page name, like substituting a template? What about substituting a template that produces the page name?    — The Transhumanist   21:18, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

This works: {{subst:Text|<category|tree>}}{{subst:PAGENAME}}</categorytree>. Note the bar between category and tree (anywhere within the tag will do) to fool the parser into not processing the category stuff until after it has substituted the page name. Of course, this turns into <categorytree>Humanism</categorytree> as soon as you save the edit. Certes (talk) 22:59, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

Wow. Fool the parser? Nice hack. I like it. Another subpage type bites the dust!    — The Transhumanist   14:23, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: An even better way is {{#tag:categorytree|{{PAGENAME}}}}, which preserves the {{PAGENAME}} magic word (example) - Evad37 [talk] 16:03, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

@Evad37 and Certes: Shorter code. Nice. Is #tag Lua?    — The Transhumanist   23:16, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Nothing to do with lua, just part of mw:Magic words (last thing on the page) that tells the parser to process the inside of the tag before the outside. Its the same thing {{ efn}} and similar templates use. - Evad37 [talk] 00:21, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

Good spot, Evad. Yes, please use #tag, which is much more elegant than my hack and probably better supported. Certes (talk) 18:13, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

Discussions about WikiProject communications

Call for interview for Signpost feature

- Zarasophos (talk) 21:38, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

+ Cesdeva ^(talk) 22:10, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Discussions about specific portals

Cricket Portal

Hi

there doesn't seem to be anyone listed here with a particular interest in maintaining the Cricket portal (or have I missed it?), nor is anyone at WikiProject Cricket putting their hand up when I ask there, in fact they seem happy to let it go. But it was also suggested on the the WikiProject Cricket talk page that the portal is of interest here too, so I thought I'd ask... anyone interested? Andrewa (talk) 03:46, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Link here Portal:Cricket if anyone wants to take a look. --Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 19:14, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

This was proposed as something of a test case at the RfC, but it seems to be more of a basket case, and to argue that all portals are similarly unsupported seems ridiculous. Andrewa (talk) 22:59, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

I have an interest in knowledge in general, and a general interest in all portals. And so, I'll work on Portal:Cricket when I have the time.    — The Transhumanist   06:29, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

I've just had a quick look at Portal:Cricket, and I'm not convinced it's all that bad. It has 24 featured articles, and 10 featured lists, on random rotation, a dates section that updates daily, and some other sections that have been updated within the last month or so. It's true that it doesn't have a lot of photos, but that's a problem it shares with the article space - recent cricket photos that are suitably licensed for commons are not easy to come by. I'd actually regard Portal:Cricket as being one of the better portals when it comes to having plenty of content and being up-to-date. Bahnfrend (talk) 02:49, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

I have inserted the transclusion-template in all selected article and selected list sections and in the introduction. This part of the Portal is up-to-date.--Broter (talk) 18:47, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Cars

What do I need to do to bring Portal:Cars into compliance with new guidelines/rules? thx L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 20:16, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

For now there are only the old guidelines. We've only just started working on the new ones. Feel free to join the discussion! — Kpalion^(talk) 09:58, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 11:58, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Hello, L3X1! here's some suggestions.

The portal has Selected article and Selected picture sections with random snippets, which is great. However, the Selected biography and Did you know sections are static. Also, there could be additional sections about driving, design, technology and industry.

The introduction section is quite ugly. For example, I prefer (nearly) white background on every section. And there should be more links to interesting articles.

Good luck! --NaBUru38 (talk) 22:16, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Cricket

Portal:Cricket is out of date (stale excerpts, old news)

Portal:Canada Roads listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:Canada Roads to be moved to Portal:Canada roads. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 14:46, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

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Portal:London Transport listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:London Transport to be moved to Portal:London transport. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 23:00, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

To opt out of RM notifications on this page, transclude {{bots|deny=RMCD bot}}, or set up Article alerts for this WikiProject.

Note that I backed out the multi-RM case fix proposal and launched just this one first. Several users had objected that London Transport is a proper name, which can be true, but this portal is about London transport, not about London Transport. The current capitalization sends the wrong message in the context of our style of only using caps where they signal proper name. Dicklyon (talk) 23:05, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Canada Roads listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:Canada Roads to be moved to Portal:Canada roads. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 01:46, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

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This is another case where my attempt at the mulit-RM case fix attracted alternative names to confuse the issue. I expect some will prefer Canada road and some will prefer Canadian roads or Road of Canada; it's all good. Dicklyon (talk) 02:57, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Portal:UK Trams listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:UK Trams to be moved to Portal:UK trams. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 18:30, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

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Portal:UK Waterways listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Portal:UK Waterways to be moved to Portal:UK waterways. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 18:30, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

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Portal:Cornwall

Hi, I have rebuilt Portal:Cornwall in line with the recommendations, you may want to check it to see if I have made any mistakes in the code.

• It no longer uses any subpages, previously it had 71.
• "Did you know", "selected picture", "selected article" etc. All automatically randomise.
• It uses the lead excerpt templates suggested to avoid holding duplicate text.
• The header uses one of three images randomly.
• Featured content is bot updated.
• The to-do list is transcluded from the matching wikiproject.

JLJ001 (talk) 23:07, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Did you choose to use #aaaaaa etc on purpose rather than #aaa? I'm also intrigued by your #ffffff preference. I lean towards 4 capitals #FFFF. Each to their own, I'm just interested. Kind regards, Cesdeva ^(talk) 00:04, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Purely a matter of personal habit I suppose, some of my work need the full 6 characters. JLJ001 (talk) 00:54, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

General discussion threads

Ending the system of portals

Relevant RfC Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:25, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

Based on the volume of opposition to the proposal to delete portals, it looks highly unlikely that the portal system will be deleted or deprecated.    — The Transhumanist   22:06, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

• Comment had Portal:Current Events been excluded the RFC would have gone somewhat differently. We clearly need to trim the most outdated/broken/incomplete ones. Legacypac (talk) 22:15, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

  Yeah, still no consensus would've occurred Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:35, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

  Fix, merge and draftify as appropriate. Automate as much as possible. Transclusion of leads is a big step in the right direction. Randomised transclusion of leads from categories would be excellent, particularly if article class can be made a criterion. Either just articles of C-class or better, or maybe each class gets a box with randomly selected article. Like a box for featured articles, one for good articles etc, down to stubs if the project wants to draw attention to them. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:41, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

List annotations

Article short descriptions may be useful for making category trees and lists of articles more informative if we can get the short description to display as an annotation by calling it from a template. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 16:13, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Automation

There may be many ways to automate portal content changes/updates to make them more dynamic and attention holding, so that users who find them are encouraged to visit them more often. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 16:17, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Speculative fiction is fully automated, requiring very little work to maintain (new content can be updated, then the feed counts can be updated and they'll come up along with anything else in the portal). I designed it that way on purpose. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 16:36, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Portal:London Transport is mostly automated. Only the news section needs to be updated periodically and I'm thinking of removing that and replacing it with an automatic anniversaries section I'm working on. Like most portals, it uses the randomised content templates for the selected article, selected picture and selected biography sections, but the latter has a special modification, so that when a birth or death anniversary of one of the biography subjects comes roud, it will stick on that for the whole day. The recognised content section is fully automatic using a number of transcluded subpages generated by a bot that are then formatted for apprearance.--DavidCane (talk) 03:13, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Visibility

I consider one of the reasons portals are less often used than one might like is that they are virtually invisible to the casual reader. The portal link is banished to the end of the article where hardly anyone will see it. the MoS does not allow it to be anywhere that would be more likely to be seen, and then people who don't use them complain that few people use them, so they must be useless. Cause and effect? I hypothesise that portals would be used far more often if more people noticed their existence. If there was a link in the title area I would predict a tenfold increase. I also predict that this would be greeted with torches and pitchforks by the same people who complain that they are not visited much. So it goes. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 16:27, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

There's a featured article of the day and featured picture of the day on the main page...what if there was a featured portal of the day? Of course, this would require some revamping of portal quality, etc, and there might not be enough portals for this to make sense, but... I do understand that there's some broad portals listed at the top of the main page (Portal:Arts, etc) but these are small and I've never really noticed them. They may also need to be sort of...advertised (?) better - I understand they are meant to be ways to explore/taste bits of a topic, but I don't know how well they're presented as that. --Nerd1a4i (talk) 17:45, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

@Nerd1a4i: I suggested this a few years ago, but the idea was dismissed as not worthwhile. See my comment here. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 16:45, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

It is not totally clear to me that the main path to portals should be from articles. The German Wikipedia does not have very visible portal links from articles either, but de:Portal:Wikipedia nach Themen (which is the second link in the sidebar) lists them properly. Our equivalent page is Portal:Contents, which is not only one of the most boring pages in the portal namespace, but also does not advertise portals at all. —Kusma (t·c) 19:34, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

just had similar idea. if a portal is reviewed and meets featured criteria, we could have the portal link in the articles displayed more prominently, say at the top of the page, not the bottom. that would be an incentive to create better portals. Mercurywoodrose (talk) 19:51, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

There used to be a Featured portals process. That system was recently deprecated without a lot of notification to portal editors (I didn't see anything about the deprecation until the star on P:Trains was changed to an outline star image, so I didn't know that discussion happened until it was well over). Slambo (Speak) 04:06, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

The 8 portals linked from the top of the maimspace get pretty low traffic compared to their respecive articles even with the best links in the project. Some portals are linked from tens of thousands of pages yet get low views. Trying to further increase visablity of something that few bother to read or edit is not the solution. Legacypac (talk) 20:00, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

What if we substitute the existing bullet points on Main Page (which are super boring) for portals with small icons like the German Wikipedia homepage did? There's enough blank space to the right of "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" that we can re-work without changing the overall layout of our Main Page. I mentioned this many years ago but the traction to improve portal visibility this time around is much better. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:40, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Icons are not going to improve traffic over the best links on the site. Legacypac (talk) 01:26, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

• Some type of change would probably be a good thing. It's not even clearly marked that the upper right-hand corner links on main page are portal links. The only clue is the bolded link that reads "All portals". It's quite generic to say the least. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 02:51, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

• Until the April 2018 RfC, I hadn't even been aware there were tiny links to Portals on the top right of the Main Page. I cannot agree with Legacypac who says Trying to further increase visablity of something that few bother to read or edit is not the solution. It is definitely part of the solution! We need to recognise that Portals are "Topic Tasters", and that users search on one or maybe two keywords at most. So, we offer them search result options to choose from, don't we? The current default position is to provide them only with Article names to select from. If there's a related Portal (even one named on the Main Page) they are not informed of its existence. Type "Science" into the Search box and see what options drop down. If, after Science, a user were to see Science - topic overview they would have one additional optional route to select. The rest of the alphabetical results would follow it. But we don't give them that route, do we? We hide it from them. Completely and utterly. Even if a user is savvy enough to go to Advanced Search and include 'Portal' in the search criteria, they still don't get Portal:Science offered to them. Not in the first 2,000 search results, anyway. And would they know what a 'Portal' actually is? The omission of Portals from our Search algorithms, from our use of Hatnotes, our See Alsos and our DAB pages all render them virtually unfindable, and, as the deletionists can currently be heard asserting, unused and thus meriting mass deletion. This 'death by darkness' might have resulted in portal annihilation, but seems instead to have reawakened interest. We need to be clear as to the purpose of Portals in helping users find an alternative, visual and easy way in to a subject area, and this needs to be followed by a concerted effort to demonstrate the value of increasing their visibility across Wikipedia in order for their potential to be fulfilled. Is it because they are in a separate namespace that they aren't returned in Search results (even with the Portal tickbox selected)? Is it because cross namespace redirects remain controversial? We have hidden them; we have malnamed them, and we now accuse them of being abandoned and unvisited. Is that really a surprise? Once we appreciate that past policy and actions have put Portals there, and take steps to correct this, are they still likely to remain in the doldrums? Somehow I doubt it. I think most Portals would be appreciated and cared for by many more editors, and - most significantly of all - used by many more visitors. And we should seize the opportunity to address this major issue of invisibility right now. Nick Moyes (talk) 09:48, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Well Nick than support the removal of Portal mainspace and move the useful ones into mainspace. Few readers are looking for portals - its so outdated. Remember when AOL and other search engines were portals - but Google crushed them all with a nice clean search box. Legacypac (talk) 09:56, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Legacypac, we are going to transform portals into something special. We don't even know what that is yet, except that we are dedicated to improving them, beyond what they currently are. Who knows what we can achieve. 45 people have joined this WikiProject so far, and more are joining daily. This is going to be fun!    — The Transhumanist   12:22, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

@Legacypac: I'd be quite happy for portals to be in mainspace, running in parallel alongside articles, and being there serving a useful purpose as "Topic tasters/Topic overviews" as I've suggested above. Which namespace they're in seems utterly trivial to me. In fact, being in a separate namespace and never, ever appearing in any search results is obviously the cause of such low traffic, undoubtedly resulting in such high bias against them, and such low maintenance of some of them. But how would you envisage the act of "moving the useful ones into mainspace" actually happening? I wonder what form would you envisage Portals taking there? I respect you enough not to assume you're confusing portals with articles, so I really am genuinely interested to understand how you see Portals being moved over and being refreshed there. What would that entail, and what would the risks/advantages be? Whilst I accept that many WikiProjects maintain Portals, I don't like seeing them being used as an extension of WikiProjects as a promotional tool. Portals need to be delivering information in an alternative and visual way to new users, not recruiting editors or promoting newly-created articles. By all means give users a better Search box which delivers topic overviews (Portals) as well as single articles in one set of search results, and I'd probably bite your hand off to move them over. I just need to understand the pros and the cons of doing so. However, I'm not going to support any move that allows the baying hordes to get their deletionist ways if there's no benefit to users. It's facilitating user engagement that I care about, not keeping people happy playing with portals in their back bedrooms. Having worked in an education-related field all my life, I have personal experience of knowing I have changed the path of someone's life by the simple act of communicating an idea in a different way to everyone else. (For example, it took 25 years before I learned from their mother that I had managed to turn a 7 year old child into a world class cave explorer by the simple act of hanging black plastic sheets over a line of chairs and getting a group of kids to crawl through them as if it were a cave.) I care not a jot for visitor figures - it takes just one visit from one person for a 'topic taster' to potentially change that person forever. I see that as Wikipedia's educational role. So help me understand what you're suggesting and I really could support your ideas of a move. As for "outdated", no, I'm really sorry but I cannot agree with you in that. Portals are no more outdated than is the Main Page of Wikipedia itself. In fact I see them as identical in purpose. Don't you? Regards Nick Moyes (talk) 23:55, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't find them useful - and off in a seperate namespace they don't get maintained and are subject to different unclear rules. Why not trash the leas useful ones and move the best ones into mainspace. Would the same system of pages and transluded subpages not still work if it was xyz portal instead of Portal:XYZ. Add XYZ portal as a see also. Legacypac (talk) 21:12, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

I find them occasionally useful, and moving them to mainspace might make them more generally useful to readers by being more visible and therefore easier to find. I see them as potentially more valuable than they are at present, as one way out of several for navigating a topic. However, I think that it would be better not to move to mainspace until there is more clear guidance on what constitutes a good and useful portal, and particularly if there is to be a minimum standard , which would probably be a good thing, but I don't have very strong opinions on what it should be at this point. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 12:00, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Adding portals to search

It used to be, that the reason that the portal space was not included in search by default, was because search results got choked with portal subpages, rendering search results virtually useless. If I'm not mistaken, they fixed that problem. So, I don't know why portals are not included these days. But, I just did an advanced search with portal space clicked, and searched for "football". There were no portals in the first 500 results. What's up with that? So, simply adding the portal space to search may not be enough.    — The Transhumanist   00:15, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

This is a great idea. I'm actually shocked that it hasn't been mentioned in the RfC. Once the "no consensus" is called, you should start a new proposal at the VP. Brightgalrs (/braɪtˈɡæl.ərˌɛs/)^[ᴛ] 21:03, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Exploring the portals of other Wikipedias

I just tried Chromium's translation feature. It's Google Translate built right into the browser, so that every page comes up translated. So you can browse French, Spanish, German, etc. websites in Engllish.

I tried Google Translate on the Wikipedias of those languages about a year ago and it wasn't that good. But now, the Google folks have outdone themselves.

So, I've been browsing the portals of the other Wikipedias.

Check this out: the Portal:Creatures on the German Wikipedia has a feature/service where you can send them a picture of an animal, and they'll identify the species for you.

If you find yourself with some spare time, consider browsing foreign language portals in English (with Chrome, or Chromium), and post anything interesting that you find out below. Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   06:29, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

I noticed the Spanish portals have did you know sections. Maybe we could manually/automatically import their entries?    — The Transhumanist   06:29, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

So do some of the German portals and I have already imported them e.g. see Portal:East Frisia. Like Article of the Month (AM) and Image of the Month (IM) sections, it should be possible to create DYKs in advance and then cycle them through, say, monthly. Again the East Frisia portal does this for the AM and IM sections. Once set up, there's no maintenance required until someone wants to refresh the series. Bermicourt (talk) 16:33, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Hello, folks! At the Spanish-language Wikipedia, I have helped a lot to redesign sports portals, anchored in Portal:Deporte, Portal:Fútbol and Portal:Automovilismo. They all share the same templates and random article snippets, as do their subportals by region and discipline. People appear on their birthdays. And the page layout is screen size responsive.

Feel free to ask me any questions. Good luck! --NaBUru38 (talk) 22:06, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Also, The Transhumanist mentioned the "Did you know" section. You may see additional information here and here. --NaBUru38 (talk) 22:09, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

During Exploring the portals of other Wikipedias I found missing Portal:Hunting for en:WP. See others in Wikidata Best --Ｔｏｍ (talk) 11:22, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Creating New Portal while arguing we can't discuss deleting an abandoned portal?

Portal:Limited recognition has been created by an editor that is arguing hard that we have no right to discuss shutting down half built abandoned portals because of the portal RFC. It seems hypocritical to argue that an RFC shuts down specific deletion but not creation. Anyway this new portal is badly named. "Limited recognition" what exactly? If countries, it's debatable if the topics it touches are countries. The poet featured there is long since dead so he is hardly limited recognition. Given there are pretty much no guidelines on what is a good portal topic and according to this editor, pretty much no applicable criteria for deleting any portal, why is a new portal being created with such a poorly defined topic? Legacypac (talk) 05:26, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

• WP:FORUMSHOP does not prohibit creation of new articles because one is in AFD. And since the portal in question is still a portal, it's being considered for deletion already. There is no conflict.--Paul McDonald (talk) 05:30, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
• I don’t believe that Portals or WikiProjects should be allowed to be created unilaterally, without approval. For WikiProjects, there is an approval process somewhere under Wikipedia:WikiProject Council. I think a Portal creation board should exist. Does it? —SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:34, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
  • @SmokeyJoe and Paulmcdonald: Approval, by whom? As with other departments, such a page would be facilitated by a few regulars, and so bias always sets in. One was set up, sort of, with dismal results. They denied approval to an editor who wanted to create the cannabis portal, so I advised him to create it anyways. The department also turned into a bottleneck and created a hoop-jumping exercise. Many editors decided not to create any portals because of it. I mentioned "sort of", because it was suggestive only. We can't censor Wikipedia, but we can delete material that doesn't follow Wikipedia content policies. Because of the way the department was portrayed, people were under the impression that approval was required, but it wasn't. The only requirement for creating a page on Wikipedia is clicking the "edit" or "create" tab. The same thing applies to draft space and WP:AfC: they're optional. "Wasn't approved" is not a valid argument at the deletion departments. Wikipedia has developed into the wonderful resource that it is, because people are allowed to take the initiative - it is the core defining principal of the Wiki model and what makes it work. We don't wish to dowse the creative spark. Also, you sometimes don't know if something is going to work until you try it. If a portal proves to be inviable, it can be deleted. I like the deletion system, because it has a good cross-section of involved editors. An approval department is more like a hidden cabal (closed forum). Who do you invite to the discussions? With deletions, that's obvious: the creator and major contributors. But, with a page that hasn't been created yet, you don't know who the major contributors would be. The current system works fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.    — The Transhumanist   22:30, 3 May 2018 (UTC)
    • Reply I have no desire for an "approval" process to create a portal.--Paul McDonald (talk) 01:26, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
• If such a board existed, then the names would be reserved I would think... or there would be bots written to sweep out unauthorized entries. I haven't heard of such a board or process... but I haven't heard of everything either!--Paul McDonald (talk) 05:36, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
  • WikiProjects, there is Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals. I am in the verge of suggesting again after several years that it become mandatory, and require formal approval. I see that people just add ideas and no one answers. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:42, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
    • SmokeyJoe, By all means go ahead and make a proposal, if it is well reasoned it may deserve support. I will follow your progress in this with interest. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:49, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
    • I'm opposed to the concept. Approval departments are nothing more than deletion departments placed at the beginning of the process rather than at the end. We don't need such redundancy in the system, as we barely have the editors to staff the existing deletion system. And it provides 2 chances for us to get it wrong. A filter. Censorship. I've created several WikiProjects. I don't think I would have done it if I had to get someone's approval. I edit Wikipedia because I can jump in anywhere and edit anything without getting anyone's permission first. Creating a page is just the initial edit. When they start telling me what edits I can and cannot make, is when I go somewhere else. Fortunately, so far, Wikipedia is huge enough that "somewhere else" is still within the WP community. Getting rid of a crappy edit is fine, after the fact, but disallowing it to be made in the first place? Preposterous! It defies the wiki model's core design feature and enabling concept. Please invite me to any such proposal discussions. Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   22:30, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

Limited recognition countries is a poorly understood contentious area. Allowing a Portal on it with few watchers and no real rules about what is ok and not ok is inviting a big problem. States with limited recognition and similar articles already suffer from a range of POV pushers, uninformed editors, and round and round in circle debates. Legacypac (talk) 05:50, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't understand what you're writing here at all.. ???--Paul McDonald (talk) 06:08, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Paulmcdonald, This is an appropriate place to let people know about a portal which may be problematic. I do not see that as a problem. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:29, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I couldn't agree more. Is that what was meant? --Paul McDonald (talk) 11:34, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I don't know for certain what was meant, but in effect, that is what it is. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:44, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Legacypac, There is no rule against it that I know of. It would be polite not to create new portals while the RfC is in process, just like it would be polite not to nominate for deletion individual portals during the same RfC. However, this is Wikipedia, so as there are no specific policies forbidding either, they happen. We live with it, and will just have to watch this new portal like any other to ensure that it does not become a soapbox. If it worries you, put it on your watchlist. If it goes pear shaped, you could notify this project, and some of us will probably help do something about it in the Wiki way. Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:29, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

At XfD, there are no restrictions on editing pages that have been nominated for deletion. On the contrary, editors are encouraged to improve the nominated articles to address the complaints being made about them. The same thing applies here. The portal system has been nominated for deletion, and we can try to improve the system while the debate is going on, which may be only few days anyways, at this point.    — The Transhumanist   22:30, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

If you have good ideas for a guideline on what a good portal should be, make a proposal. I would be willing to discuss it. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:29, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I think it is a very bad idea for a portal. I also think that creating a new portal while arguing loudly that MfDs of broken portals should be speedy closed because of the MfD is suspect behaviour. The portal enthusiasts need to come up with guidelines on what makes an appropriate topic and present these guidelines to an RFC or such guidelines will ne created outside this group an impossed via a vote. Legacypac (talk) 15:52, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I assume you mean that guidelines will be developed by consensus of the interested and affected parties, which is how things are supposed to be done on Wikipedia? There is nothing that prevents you from starting such a RfC, as you know. If you feel so strongly about it, do it.· · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 17:23, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Notwithstanding the loud protests and offensive attempts to procedurally close the MfDs there is nothing wrong with seeking deletion of the worst most abandoned portals at anytime. Better draft up spme guidelines for Portal deletion you can live with - because currently the Wikiproject portal group is building a wonderful case that the fanatically oppose removing any piece of junk in portal space and when that evidence is put to a RFC its not going to go well for Portals overall. Legacypac (talk) 01:25, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Legacypac, Could you clarify your statement above, it is a bit incoherent, and I am having difficulty making out all the points you appear to be trying to communicate.

1. I agree that it is quite OK to propose a bad portal for deletion, It is also quite OK to attempt to fix a portal proposed for deletion.
2. There are ongoing discussions for improving portal quality. The current enthusiasm of this project is for improvement, not deletion, so if you want guidelines for portal deletion, you could start working on a proposal. Some of us are too busy to do it for you.
3. The rest of your comment is unclear and I would rather not try to guess your intended meaning. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:34, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the invitation.

I have put WPP:Portals on my list of watched pages and as I feel more steady on my laptops keyboard, I welcome the challenge of tending your annual growth. Please allow me some time to address the urgent needs of two topics and monitor a third. I know that working on something as core as a portal could prove to be the most beneficial place for me to sharpen my encyclopedic tone. Not jumping in and joining you today, but you caught my eye and I will be back. Thank you. Mrphilip (talk) 07:54, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

First of all, thanks to The Transhumanist for sending invitations to potentially interested users, as well as for doing great work revitalizing this WikiProject. Secondly, thanks to Mrphilip for your potential interest in the project. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 11:50, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

How does one use the templates?

Could someone please add a section—preferably at the top of the article—which explains how to use the "transclusion" templates? I would like to participate in this project, but I am a word- and grammar-type gnome, not a techy, so I'm at a loss at present on how I can help. Or is this a case of "if you have to ask, you shouldn't be here"? Thanks for any help. —Dilidor (talk) 16:31, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

@Dilidor: The more the merrier. The templates themselves include instructions. See Template:Transclude lead excerpt and Template:Transclude random excerpt. You can also look at some portals that have these in place, as examples. To see where these are being installed, see the project's Watchlist.    — The Transhumanist   21:18, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

I've added some hints to § Using transclusion templates. Certes (talk) 11:22, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

Some Questions

Thanks for the invitation! I will do my best to help and to contribute to WikiProject Portals in any way I feel necessary and relevant. But first, I must know the answers to my questions if my contributions are to be informed and educated. Before asking them, let me just say in an unrelated note that I am super excited about portals so far and have only looked (today at least) at the 1920s portal. The portal had good information on the subject, which is part of what we want, but I am pretty sure that the featured article and biography of the day sections made it look too complicated. I don't like saying that because I like those sections but from the standpoint of a user of Wikipedia who is not an editor (which of course I was at some point or other), tell me if I'm wrong but I think the sheer number of links and amount of information might overwhelm me into looking somewhere else.

Also, I think there should be some less abstract titles. For example, like I said earlier, the 1920s portal may not be abstract in itself but it refers to a period in history that spans 10 years and Wikipedia covers many topics that may have happened in 1920 but have nothing to do with what you're looking for. I know that sounds like I'm advising against something that might still be useful to some users (and I agree, don't remove the abstract article links) but I think the portals should have an organized system of sub-portals or sub-categories that have a maximum capacity so that there is less confusion in navigation. I think I might be blathering on without getting to the point so I'll just leave what I have until I can gather my wits. Please tell me what you think about what I've said so far.

--OdysseusTroy (talk) 13:50, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

OdysseusTroy, Once you have your wits consolidated, do come back and go into more specific detail of what you find good and bad about portals, possibly with illustrative examples. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 16:42, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

@OdysseusTroy: I agree. The many links in portals are overwhelming; it shouldn't be beyond us to guide the reader, instead of showing them every option all at once. Cesdeva ^(talk) 21:23, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

@OdysseusTroy: Please look at as many portals as you can. The main list is at Portal:Contents/Portals. Those that are missing from there are listed on its talk page.    — The Transhumanist   10:55, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Does not remove <imagemap> and {{Decadebox}} when transcluding intro with {{Transclude lead excerpt}}

See this diff. Wpgbrown (talk) 21:03, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

 Done. Writing a comprehensive parser for wikitext is hard, and probably inappropriate for a template as specific as this one. So, unfortunately, there will always be one obscure construct which slips through the net. I've added imagemap to the list of tags to weed out. That also gets rid of the decadebox, which is now recognised as part of the preamble rather than the lead. Certes (talk) 00:27, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Specific portal maintainers

Moved thread from project page

There is a lot of WP:OWN suggested here. Exercise caution. Legacypac (talk) 09:23, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

I don't see it. I see only stewardship. How do you reach this conclusion? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 17:54, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

The problem is not that anyone thinks they "own" a portal and reverts other editors trying to improve it. We maintainers would be delighted if others joined in and helped as this re-energised project has demonstrated in spades. Bring it on! Bermicourt (talk) 18:26, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Yes, more a matter of saying that a portal has at least that one person maintaining it. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:26, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Wikimedia links

Hi!

In addition to working on some portals here, I'd like to link or improve links between project portals, e.g., linking w:Portal:Astronomy with s:Portal:Astronomy, v:Portal:Astronomy and d:Portal:Astronomy! Suggestions? --Marshallsumter (talk) 15:26, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Great idea! --NaBUru38 (talk) 14:56, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

@Marshallsumter and NaBUru38: I've added a Wikimedia section to Portal:Astronomy. You could put links to the corresponding portals in there. Have fun.    — The Transhumanist   10:39, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Shortcut

Does this wikiproject have a shortcut? Like for example WP:IND and WP:INDIA redirect to Wikipedia:Wikiproject India. Cesdeva ^(talk) 21:27, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

Nevermind found the list. Cesdeva ^(talk) 21:35, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

The shortcut to WikiProject Portals is WP:WPPORT

The shortcut to its talk page is WT:WPPORT.    — The Transhumanist   09:51, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

And the shortcut to Portal:Contents/Portals aka Portal:Portals is now P:PORT. Not to be confused with P:POR which redirects to Portal:Portugal. Bermicourt (talk) 08:10, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

Promotion

Hi, In the Rfc, some very good points about portal improvement were made, such as the 'viewership' issues. Some solutions to this are found in other wikis, where e.g. in the French Wikipedia, Portal bars have a better design (which incites the Wikipedians to its use on normal pages) and links to Portals, which have a certain relation with the page subject. (an Italian painter gets a portal bar with the portals Italy, Art (or painting if it exists) and whatever linked with his main domain of work.

Thus, portals must be promoted using portal bars, which are better adapted, and which will be more visible by the page viewers, who could then read the corresponding portals.

--Railfan01 (talk) 07:17, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

I totally agree that the visibility of portals needs improving. I like the French Wiki portal bars; the only disadvantage is that they're placed at the end of the article. I still think that's better than a small portal box stuck off to the right of the "See also" section. Perhaps we could have both, say, a portal box near the top of the infobox and a portal bar (with related portals) at the end.

The other problem with portals is that they don't appear in normal searches, either in the drop-down box or the search list. Type in "Bavaria" and you will not see "Portal:Bavaria" anywhere. That needs to be fixed; the portal should appear alongside the main article for the topic. But that sounds like it would need a technical fix which the nay-sayers and portal-poopers might object to. Bermicourt (talk) 08:03, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

We do have {{Portal bar}} here, used on 67,000 articles, although ours is somewhat less prominent than the larger-font French one. Compare the end of Algeria with that of fr:Algérie.

On search results: definitely yes, this would help greatly if portals appeared prominently in search results for a topic. I think we would want the main portal page like Portal:Bavaria to show up, not the subpages like Portal:Bavaria/Selected picture/4: Noyster (talk), 09:53, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Good point - we definitely don't want the subpages appearing. Bermicourt (talk) 14:33, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

One workaround is to use "Foo portal" as a redirect e.g. Germany portal. Trouble is, it won't appear in the popups or lists if it isn't freque===Template:PortalButton==

Having noticed that bare images in portals are sometimes linked, I decided to make a template that encloses images and makes them appear more clickable to readers.

The template has yet to be applied in a live portal so it may need tweaking; be cautious about its application if you decide to use it. It appeared stable during development however. Feedback welcome. Kind regards, Cesdeva ^(talk) 16:22, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Link to research in Libraries concerning similar issues in regard to Research Guides

Libraries have a long history of creating Research Guides to bring attention to the major resources in a given topic. With varying success. Apparently, there's been a bit of research concerning the effectiveness of Research Guides... The article I'm providing a link to was just referenced in the CircPlus listserv, and while perhaps not directly relevant, it does link to a body of research on the topic, some of which may prove of interest. Keytag It: An Exploration of a Creative and Customizable Research Guide Promotion JohnBobMead (talk) 13:39, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Too many regional portals for England, not enough local portals, and one oddity.

There is a set of portals I am unsure about, I don't even know why they were made, all things considered.

The specific portals I have an issue with are:

Portal:East Midlands England (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Portal:North East England (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Portal:North West England (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Portal:South East England (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Portal:Stamford (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

To fully understand this, note that there is an overall portal for the United Kingdom. There is then a portal for each home nation, so Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England. Then, just for England, there are portals for each county, and two of the larger cities (London and Bristol) big enough to be treated as counties. Some counties are missing, so there is scope for some new portals. But essentially there are three "layers" of portals, each with articles that fit.

However there are these four "regions" that basically don't fit, there's no content specific to a region like that which would not be better suited for either the county portal or the England portal. The portals are awkwardly named, plus linking to South East England is not ideal since only articles on the counties in it would logically regard that regional distinction as relevant.

The portal on Stamford is the oddity. It's an interesting situation, basically someone made a portal for a single town with a population of 21,000. I think this is probably too narrow a scope, and I fear it is simply cloning Portal:Lincolnshire for the most part. It even features Lincolnshire as it's selected article.

Meanwhile I feel there should be county level portals for Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland (Shires in Scotland). Along with new portals for the missing counties of England.

Ceremonial counties of the UK.

Thoughts?

JLJ001 (talk) 22:37, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Beware that UK counties can be complicated. The linked chart shows just the adminstrative counties: there are also ceremonial counties, and historical counties of various eras still in use for postal addresses, cricket teams, etc. Clackmannanshire isn't much bigger than Stamford! Certes (talk) 22:48, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Yes, good point. To clarify I am just referring to the ceremonial counties (also called lieutenancy areas), shown on the right. JLJ001 (talk) 23:17, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Merseyside isn't ceremonial but surely deserves a county portal? Also Wales is different again, I wouldn't want to be the one to choose between Clwyd and Sir y Fflint for instance.

You are right that the regional portals are probably obsolete. Regional identities in England are a vague idea to say the least.

Are you counting the Isle of Man as nation level? Cesdeva ^(talk) 23:40, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

You're right, it does get complicated. I wasn't counting Isle of Man or The Portal:Channel Islands because they aren't part of the UK. But it would seem we would be better off having a detailed look at exactly how to best organize which local portals we should make, because the boundaries really aren't clear. JLJ001 (talk) 23:48, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

The prototype of the UK diagram I listed above is still at User:Certes/UK. That version also has some useful links to divisions within Crown dependencies and British Overseas Territories. Certes (talk) 00:16, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Despite legal status, it's probably best incorporating the Manx into whatever organisational framework we come up with for the UK. Better to have them categorised than not. I'd like to state now that I think we should flat out avoid creating anything to do with Derry/Londonderry. Cesdeva ^(talk) 00:52, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

• I have drafted a short table of existing and possible portals for the UK. See below. JLJ001 (talk) 21:09, 19 May 2018 (UTC) Also since someone has picked up the South East England portal and reworked it to draw content from other portals, I think regional portals do work on this basis and should probably be kept. JLJ001 (talk) 10:21, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Concerns about this project

I received an invitation to this project, presumably because I had expressed support for keeping portals in the recent RFC. I am very concerned that this project seemingly intends to ultimately replace every portal a model based on article transclusion. That may be OK for some currently substandard, incomplete, or neglected portals, although I have very serious reservations about that approach in general. However, I'd like to emphasise this WikiProject does not own portal space and has no mandate whatsoever to imposes a particular model on all portals. I am one of the editors at Portal:Opera and was very involved in its content creation. It is a Featured Portal and uses the portal sub-pages model. It works wonderfully well. It's extremely easy to maintain and expand. It is also an integral part of Wikiproject Opera's activities. I would appreciate some assurances that WikiProject Portals will not attempt to override currently well-functioning, well-maintained portals. Voceditenore (talk) 16:09, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

I don't think anyone is claiming any mandate to impose anything. As Certes said in a section further up this page:

There's more than one way to produce a good portal. The templates are just one tool on offer; I hope there will be no pressure to use them where editors are happy to maintain the pages in other ways. Certes (talk) 23:32, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

- Evad37 [talk] 16:29, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

I see the portals falling into two classes. Where active editors are willing and able to do the work, they can continue to run the portals however they like, using some or none of the new tools as they see fit. Ideally all portals would be in that first class, but realistically some have become neglected. Those are the ones on which a simple, low-maintenance revamp should be "imposed" if and only if no one else cares enough to object. Of course, other editors may have a different vision. Certes (talk) 16:45, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, Evad and Certes. That is slightly re-assuring. But this simply reflects the hope of one of the people involved in this project. I'm frankly unconvinced that it also reflects the views and goals of the majority of project's prime movers, and frankly that causes me great concern. The "Current focus" section on the main project page gives quite a different impression from Certes's view. So does one of the tasks listed for members to carry out on all portals: "Transclude intro excerpt directly on the portal base page". Certainly no one else in the above talk page section agreed with Certes's statement. In fact, one of this project's prime movers simply doubled down on the alleged inferiority of transcluded sub-page model instead, with no qualifications. Voceditenore (talk) 17:17, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

As far as I read it, the intention is to drastically reduce the number of portal subpages whilst also increasing the amount of automatically rotating and updating content in portals. It is frankly impossible to build any but the simplest portal without having subpages, but for the majority of portals which are simple, this subpage reduction is a desired step in making portals more relevant and to some extent, self maintaining. I don't think any particular style is being imposed, in fact there isn't even a standard style to impose, everyone is doing all sorts of different layouts and coding based on whatever they took from the recommendations. The only thing that does seem to be a requirement is to avoid creating new subpages that act only as a content fork from an article lead section, since that can now be transcluded automatically. And where portals seem abandoned this is being done retrospectively. JLJ001 (talk) 18:51, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps I can offer some further assurance. I was one of the first editors to suggest and use some of the recent innovations, in particular the automatically updating transclusions of lede sections, and the random transclusions of "selected article", "selected picture" sections and the like. I don't know whether that makes me a prime mover, but I can say that I agree with all of the above responses to Voceditenore's expression of concern. The portals I maintain already had random transclusions of sub-pages referring to articles that don't have lede sections suitable for direct transclusion, and therefore I have not deleted any of the sub-pages on those portals. However, in my view the automatic transclusion of article lede sections into the main intro sections of portals is a very good idea, and a huge improvement, for most portals, including the ones I maintain. Bahnfrend (talk) 11:39, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, there is no consensus (or even a proposal) to force portals to any given format. It is likely that there will be recommendations once working models have been tested, but we are still some way from that.· · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:16, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Seconding what Voceditenore wrote. Having worked extensively in reviewing featured portals before the process was dumped, I'm very concerned that what is going on here is completely not what, historically, good-quality portals were assumed to be. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:38, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

@Espresso Addict: If there are editors are willing to put in the time and effort to keep a portal maintained, including updating subpages when the corresponding articles are updated, then the pre-existing tools and methods work fine; if not, then surely selective transclusion is better than having incomplete or broken portals; or having static content in subpages that doesn't get updated when articles are updated. - Evad37 [talk] 01:46, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

Search

How does one search for portals, while excluding all subpages and redirects, so only base portals appear? external tools are fine. JLJ001 (talk) 22:02, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

This Quarry query gives the current list of portals. Certes (talk) 22:49, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. JLJ001 (talk) 08:43, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Moved from Community bulletin board

The following long-standing content from the Community bulletin board is now more appropriate here. I have replaced it with a plug for this WikiProject: Noyster (talk), 09:47, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Attention needed

• Portal:Space - The selected article excerpts were copied and pasted between 2006 and 2009. The leads of the corresponding articles have greatly improved since then.
• Portal:Thinking - "Selected" sections need new material. Been the same for years.

The following portals have interesting design features that you may find useful:

• Portal:South East England - A "parent" portal that uses selected content from several "child" portals, chosen at random for each type of content.
• Portal:Philosophy - Automatically cycles through 52 "Selected philosophers", one per week, year after year.
• Portal:Arts - Uses random generators to display random featured status selections.
• Portal:London Transport - Randomised Selected biography list uses a custom feature to fix on a particular biography for a day when it is a birth or death anniversary. The lists of featured articles/lists, good articles and featured/good topics is bot generated automatically using sub-pages and formatted using string trimming.
• Portal:Cornwall - uses #invoke:random to rotate header images.

Linked excerpts

Would it be possible to adjust the Lua module to allow a template such as Template:Portal lead title to be used, without it being stripped out? JLJ001 (talk) 16:56, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Yes, but first please may I take a step back? Is the idea to replace the title with by that template in articles from which excerpts are transcluded? If so then we have two cases:

1. If the text matches the title (Pig: A pig is ...), we can link that with a change to the module without changing all the articles
2. If the text doesn't match the title (Elton John: Sir Elton Hercules John CBE is...), the template won't work, but we could still amend the module to replace the first bold text (regardless of content) by a link to the article title.

Have I identified the problem correctly, and would such a module change solve it better? Certes (talk) 18:01, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

• Yes that would be vastly better. All I want is for the page title (normally in the lead section in bold) to become a link when transcluded. This would be greatly appreciated. JLJ001 (talk) 18:16, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

@JLJ001: I've now implemented this. Please have a look at your examples and let me know (with a link) if you see any problems. Certes (talk) 21:38, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Looks fine on the portals I am working on. JLJ001 (talk) 21:39, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Portal policy and guidelines

I think perhaps it's about time we put our heads together to get some portal-specific policy and guidelines drafted. Moving forward, we ultimately need consensus on the acceptable standards for portals.

I think we should start a sub-page at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Discussion on policy, or a similar target, to have this hopefully extensive discussion.

What does everyone think? Cesdeva ^(talk) 19:50, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

@Cesdeva: Wikipedia:Portal guidelines already exists. What specific concerns do you think need to be addressed? — Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 23:21, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Not to put to fine a point on it, the existing guidelines are bollocks. They don't say how to tell if a subject should have a portal or not. Any portal using only the "required" content would not be worth building due to being too short, but this isn't pointed out. And the instructions are for the most part years out of date. And then there are all the new "guidelines" that are generally mentioned on the RFC, this page, and the other page. Many of these guidelines are in direct conflict with each other. There are no minimum standards for topics, matching wikiprojects, content, or anything that I would find actually helpful in deciding which new portals to make. So far we have guidelines from 2012, coupled with four new ideas.

1. Get rid of all the subpages. - now on the face of it this is a great idea, it makes it easier to maintain portals you didn't build, and it presumably makes it easier to keep an eye on everything. However I see several complaints that portals work perfectly well with subpages, and I personally have discovered that due to limitations in Module:Random, an ideal portal would have ten pages - which is the current average!
2. Spruce up the design. - It doesn't take a genius to see that portals on the whole look awful, they were mostly designed a decade ago, and that's pretty obvious, but so far no-one has found a proper UX design that is much better, although the Nanotechnology portal is a good start.
3. This is probably the main advancement - Module:Excerpt. It transcludes article lead sections onto a portal and in doing so gets rid of content forks. However, this is clearly going to be close to a requirement, at the minimum would be the default, so why is it not in the guidelines?
4. There should be less obscure or irrelevant portals. - This is hard to decipher, there is little to no indication on what makes a portal worth having, and since most existing portals get few pageviews, really no way to tell based on traffic either.

Once all these things, and anything else I missed have been cleared up, I would think dealing with portals would be much easier. JLJ001 (talk) 23:54, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Hope you don't mind the formatting but now your post is easier to follow. And I agree that we should work on revising those guidelines to become more aligned with what we want portals to eventually be. If we're taking on the task of overhauling the portal system, we should make sure the standards we follow are up-to-date and relevant. Part of that definitely should be ironing out criteria on what portals should be pruned or merged into larger ones. Better to have fewer, well-maintained portals than a million abandoned ones. — AfroThundr ^(talk) 00:39, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Agreed. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:22, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Dynamic image sizing

Does anyone know of a way to get an image to occupy a specified percentage of the box width? It would be nice to be able to display selected images at about 80% box width, but box width varies with screen width. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:43, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Well if you want your image smaller than thumb you can adjust the 'upright' parameter of image syntax. Set it below 1.0. An alternative would be to nest a div inside your container, render your image in that nested div, then in inline CSS of the nested div set width to 80% and set overflow:hidden. You'll lose some of the image at the sides, but the majority will be left and only take up 80%.

A template I created called Template:PortalButton has 'overflow:hidden' built in, and you can also adjust upright. So maybe give that a try.

PX relates to %, if you consider the environment it's in. So perhaps setting an absolute size of your image in PX will work. Sometimes absolute sizing renders alright with mobiles. Stratch absolute sizing, it probably wouldn't render consistently across screen sizes. Kind regards, Cesdeva ^(talk) 16:14, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

You can also treat the mediawiki skin as a wrapper (the absolute sized parent). So add ';position:relative' to inline css of divs and set all your widths to percentages, like I've done at Portal:Herbalism (ignore the other problems. I'm dealing with those). Cesdeva ^(talk) 16:26, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

This might be possible (or easier) if/when wp:TemplateStyles is enabled – see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#RfC: Enabling TemplateStyles - Evad37 [talk] 00:53, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

If css can do it, it should be possible to do it without TemplateStyles. But I don't know how. I have seen it done on other websites, probably in HTML, but I cant find any information on how to do it. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:04, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

I tried to re-create the problem in my sandbox here. When viewing using a mobile, both images appear equally wide. Is this what you are talking about @Pbsouthwood:? Regards, Cesdeva ^(talk) 15:15, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

No, what I am looking for is a way to set image width as x% of text width. I have been able to do this on Moodle, which has a very basic html editor available, but it does not seem to be available for images in wikicode. It is available for box/container width though, as in style="position:relative;width:100%;". I would like to set selected images to 80% or so of box width, and then as the page width varies, the image remains at the same proportion to page width. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:09, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Ok, gotcha. Please let me know if this goes to phabricator. Thanks Cesdeva ^(talk) 19:35, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

ntly used! Bermicourt (talk) 14:37, 13 May 2018 (UTC)