Signpost, our English Wikipedia 'newspaper', began when the project was started by Michael Snow who continues to contribute to the English Wikipedia. The first issue was released on 10 January 2005. Begun as a weekly publication, in July 2016 the official schedule was changed to every two weeks, but by November the issues were already running late with the next issue appearing on 26 November and the following Signpost not being published until 22 December three weeks later.

Signpost appeared on 17 January 2017 with a lead article from editor-in-chief, Peter Forsyth, entitled Next steps for the Signpost. Forsyth's article, which explained some of the concerns surrounding the newspaper, received a significant number of comments from readers including one from Blue Rasberry who suggested that a grant may be worth considering:

If there were a rotating internship program at The Signpost for journalism students then from one perspective it seems controversial to pay for content, but from another perspective for years the international wiki community has major projects with major investment which are almost unknown for lack of journalism. (…)This is wiki's own newspaper of record and if it has problems then I wish we could explore options to support volunteers in maintaining it.

Aschmidt suggested that Signpost could be made a blog, or even a journal, with James Heilman, known for his work on the Medicine project responding with 'Sort of like the Wiki Journal of Medicine? It is a fair bit of work. But could be good.' Stating that other related projects are '...experiencing parallel attenuation (...) Better to have fewer issues with excellent content than to fake along for the sake of hitting a weekly deadline' , Carrite makes a poignant reflection.

From August 2017 that weekly deadline became monthly; now in its thirteenth year, the most recent issue was published on 20 February with a note that the next one would be due out on 27 February (a week later?). We now have 27 March. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:46, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

An indpeendent competing effort, The Citation, appears to have died out as well. Wikipediocracy hasn't had any front-page articles since December. The bread-and-butter article topics of ARBCOM cases, RfAs, etc. occur a lot less frequently than in the past. And personally, I suspect the topics I would be interested in writing about would be viewed by somebody as inappropriate canvassing. power~enwiki (π, ν) 03:39, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps, but if you look at RfCs and such, there are now so many — and some of dubious quality or necessity — that it seems honestly hard to keep up with, beyond the specific interests one chooses at WP:FRS. There are so many discussions happening at once, it's a lot to juggle. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 11:07, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Could part of the issue be the continued success of more focused newletters (tech, admin, etc.)? ~ Amory (u • t • c) 11:02, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There has obviously been a problem getting workers for a long time, but unfortunately there is also one with readership. The first "News and Notes" of this year has only had 1800-odd views, which doesn't seem a lot. I think the quality remains high - it's a pity more people don't read it. Johnbod (talk) 15:07, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

+450 views through the single-page presentation. Cabayi (talk) 15:28, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

At its bare bones the Signal could be reimagined as a Portal which aggregated the recent featured articles, staffing changes at the Foundation, highest page traffic etc. But that would lack the editorial commentary which is what makes Signpost worth reading, and the release cycle which makes splits it into issues rather than it just being a stream (trickle?). Cabayi (talk) 16:15, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly newsletters are partly to blame, but certainly not wholly; those newsletters only inform a fraction of the news and action that is (or used to be) reported in Signpost. There are people who work for and on behalf of Wikipedia who have never or rarely edited it and haven't a clue of what's going on and then claim that even major new developments have been carried out in secret. Signpost does have big messaging and mailing lists as well as social media, so it reaches a larger and much broader spectrum of people. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:26, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

From a production perspective, I think the key issue is the degree of co-ordination and commitment required from multiple contributors. For a period of time I edited a project newsletter, and I found most submitters were motivated by deadlines. So personally I think setting target release dates is still desirable. Perhaps there can be regular issues and supplementary ones: regular columns like the traffic report would continue to be in all issues, but feature articles and op-eds would appear on a less frequent basis. isaacl (talk) 17:35, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Fund The Signpost with a WMF grant for a paid administrator I posted a proposal at meta:Grants:Project/bluerasberry/fund a Signpost publisher.

The WMF should not fund Wiki content creation and editorial control - everyone agrees on this. I do think that the WMF should fund the tedious tasks which no volunteer finds enjoyable, but which when completed, amplify volunteer engagement. For various reasons, including 1990s software, the need for secretarial documentation and maintenance of a calendar, and demand for adherence to community values which are excessively time intensive for the niche purpose of running a newspaper, being the publisher of The Signpost is a lot of work. We can get a volunteer chief editor, and writers, and all the roles which are "journalism", but managing the very strange back end of publishing in Mediawiki software is tedious beyond anyone's willingness to volunteer. The least expensive way to manage administration is with payment to someone who will stay out of editorial decisions but facilitate what editors and writers submit.

The reason why we should maintain The Signpost is because it has been uniquely responsible for being the communication channel for resolving community discussions which have allocated millions of US$dollars of WMF funds in ways that would not have happened without community engagement in the community newspaper. Here are some options in front of us:

1. Let The Signpost falter. If we do this, the WMF will invest US$millions in marketing research and strategic planning to come to conclusions which would have arisen spontaneously from volunteer engagement in The Signpost. The Signpost has already proven itself to be an amazing forum for reaching broad consensus in the English and international Wikimedia communities. It has some value and merits some amount of investment for this reason. It has already earned its funding by resolving problems which otherwise are unfathomably complicated, stressful, and high risk to resolve in any other way.
2. Pay US$300,000 to a software developer to make The Signpost easier to publish. These software changes would still be a pain and go obsolete in 3 years because that is how Mediawiki development goes. Editing a newspaper is unlike publishing The Signpost. There is a bottleneck of ability to publish The Signpost and also the administrative support necessary to communicate in the normal way that any contemporary newspaper would operate is not available, because Mediawiki is not set up for this. Lots of people say "just fix the software, do not pay someone to be publisher", but it is crazy hard and crazy expensive to improve software as opposed to just paying someone outright to do the boring parts.
3. Pay ~US$100 per issue to an individual for administering The Signpost. This solves the problem, is cheap, and the money can go to a Wikimedia chapter which needs to be developed. India and Bangladesh would be my first choices because those countries, for whatever reason, have a history of attracting journalists as Wikimedia editors. Also in those economies the money would go further, and the WMF already has plans to spend $1000s to recruit volunteers who will contribute labor that could be purchased outright for $100s. I know that the Wiki community places a taboo on buying labor, but for some tasks, paying someone outreach is a lot cheaper than funding the recruitment campaign that will identify and groom the volunteer who would do the task. Administering The Signpost is esoteric and provides no job training or relevance to actually doing journalism, and the fault is in Mediawiki and the Wiki community's overriding need to publish in Mediawiki.

I advocate for paying an individual to publish as the most practical, cheapest, and most likely path to success for getting The Signpost out. We have content submissions, excellent editorial oversight, and readership. It is annoying that the bottleneck is in administration of adapting weird obsolete software to journalism.

Anyone with ideas might also try to form a The Signpost user group - meta:Wikimedia user groups. This would establish a board to oversee The Signpost, appoint a chief editor, and protect the values of the publication. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:14, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I moved this post to Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2018-03-29/Op-ed. I do not mean to fork the conversation or dismiss what others say, but the wiki threaded converation system makes it challenging to present a statement in more than one place. I am watching both conversations, but for context, the one that seems more developed and more permanent to me is in the newspaper. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:53, 30 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

One possible reason for the overall decline is that the Wikimedia blog is taking up some of what the Signpost used to do, particularly in terms of research reports and Wikipedia/WMF activities. Don't know how much energy this has bled off from the Signpost, but The ed17 and Jayen466 might have input there. I wonder if the Signpost could incorporate blog links to add to regular features such as the traffic report... I don't know. Montanabw^(talk) 21:23, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The WMF blog is not run by the community, rather it's corporate communication. It is up to the community to decide whether it will have a voice of its own. That's what the fall of Signpost is all about in the end.--Aschmidt (talk) 21:49, 27 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Replace it with something short, snappy, informative and weekly. The Administrators' newsletter could be a nucleus, obviously with a wider topic range and a spot for an opinion piece (limited as to word count). One featured picture is enough: Noyster (talk), 16:22, 28 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  Well, the Administrators' newsletter already exists, so we would not have to duplicate it, would we? – BTW, thanks for the hint, I didn't even know it even exists, I've just subscribed to it) – Another example for a brief format might be the French fr:Wikipédia:Wikimag. A showcase for a much more lively concept would be, of course, the German de:Wikipedia:Kurier which is, in fact, a multi-author blog that everyone who wants can contribute to. It has become a bit of a nuisance that the German-language Wikimedia chapters have come to use it as a channel for their corporate communication with the community, too, but by and large it still is run by Wikipedians from all projects and colours. Its main advantage over the old Signpost is that you can publish a post whenever it's suitable. There is no weekly, by-weekly, etc. format, and there is no staff that decides what comes in and what stays out. It's a community blog, not a journalists' project.--Aschmidt (talk) 22:57, 28 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I guess I stopped taking The Signpost seriously when it went from providing a succinct overview of what was going on, and moved to letting editors grind their personal axes in an attempt to stir controversy and get page views. Given the continued moribund nature of the project and low readership figures, perhaps it is best to just let it die. Certainly I don't think we can seriously argue that it is the vital communications channel that it was in the past. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 01:17, 31 March 2018 (UTC).[reply]

As much as I loved the signpost at one time.. I cannot disagree with your position. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:44, 5 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It went through an unfortunate patch, but that is hopefully over, and the role of the Signpost and the need for it remains. I suggest that we try and recruit sufficient volunteers to get at least a minimal signpost regularly circulated. Like that initial creation of a stub article, once it is in being it can attract people who wish to improve it. The problem in my view is in trying to keep such a large publication that it can't achieve its publication schedule. ϢereSpielChequers 10:06, 5 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Respectfully, if it were a "need" for the Signpost, we wouldn't be having this discussion because people would be writing and publishing it. The community seems to have been getting along just fine without it. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 04:34, 9 April 2018 (UTC).[reply]

• Well, just pick a date say the 20th of every month publish whatever is ready - that assumes there are people interested in being editors/coordinators/creators of the thing - but if there are not, there are not. It's WP:Sofixit, the do it yourself way, which is generally how anything gets done on WP. Just one has to decide to do it, and hopefully they have the skills to inspire (and deal with) others joining in -- and the foresight to meet the needs of whatever readers they wish to serve. (Note: Many of the past and future likely articles/features are compendia of what is elsewhere on the pedia, gathering together and highlighting things, which is fine and which means all one needs is someone(s) willing to do that) -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:08, 5 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Once per month, or it's over

If we can't find any editors willing to update the Signpost 'at least' once a month? then the whole thing is doomed. BTW: the title "Signpost", should be changed to "Wikipedia News", for a more accurate description. GoodDay (talk) 16:55, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If Signpost is having its thunder stolen by more focused newsletters, why not just aggregate content from those newsletters once a month? bd2412 T 17:25, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@GoodDay and BD2412: I write for the publication and I am just one person with an opinion, but my view is that the publication has always had lots of writers, editors, researchers, journalists, etc. The bottleneck is in recruiting a publisher to facilitate the actual publishing of the submitted content in a very weird publishing system. Wiki is 1990s software and not designed for either journal publishing or the kind of communication required to publish a journal. If writers and editors could be without the burden of doing the publishing then there would be more volunteer engagement. As a volunteer activity publishing itself is devoid of fun. The journalism side of The Signpost is fun for lots of people when there is a publisher. Publishing is a technical process unrelated to journalism. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:36, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm willing to do one or two "publisher" cycles to keep it running, but not every month (and certainly not every week). Do you have an IRC channel to coordinate things? power~enwiki (π, ν) 20:48, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

How about every 3 months? We could change the name from Signpost to Wikipedia Quarterly Report. GoodDay (talk) 21:33, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This is to propose that a bot be developed (I may be able to figure out how to do it, with a bit of help) that automatically assesses new articles, and periodically re-assesses these articles, until a real editor steps in and overrides the assessment. The approach would be:

This method will often give identical or similar results to those of a typical drive-by assessor. The benefits are:

• The bot will reduce the workload, since assessors now only have to tweak assessments they think are wrong, then change to|autoassess=noto show that the bot has been overridden.
• An editor may show they have reviewed and agreed with an automatic assessment by changing to |autoassess=ok. This will take the article out of Category:Automatically assessed articles/auto (which need review) and put it into Category:Automatically assessed articles/ok (reviewed).
• Newbies will not be upset when they see a bot has assessed quality based on an algorithm, where they might be upset if a human had decided their work was junk
• The bot will run periodically until a human overrides it, so will update its assessments. Human assessors typically do not review and adjust their initial assessment
• The bot's algorithm can be steadily refined, for example to consider results of Flesch–Kincaid readability tests, with the goal of steadily reducing the number of human interventions needed.

Again, as soon as a human editor changes to |autoassess=no the bot stops re-assessing. Real editors remain fully in control. Aymatth2 (talk) 18:58, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Comments on automated article assessment?

Quality assessments: How do the WMF devs plan to implement ORES article quality assessments? If they are working toward integrating it with the Mediawiki software itself, then we should probably not develop a hackish bot that does the same thing but worse. Native integration is what they already went for with ORES New filters for edit review. You asked them but didn't get a reply. You should definitely hear from them before us.

Importance assessments: My hunch is that it will be far easier to come up with working solutions for quality than importance (case in point: ORES does quality but not importance). Your proposal doesn't seek to answer the following: unlike quality assessments, importance assessments are supposed to be different for different projects. For instance, "Nightswimming" (Awake), on the Main Page a few days ago, is Top importance for WP:AWAKE, and Low importance for WP:TV and WP:USA; an episode is obviously more important to a project that focuses solely on that series than for one that has as its scope the total history of a broadcasting medium or an entire country. Your bot would crank up the importance of this article for WP:TV and WP:USA, into High and downgrade it for the only directly relevant project. There are so many problems with gauging importance from incoming links that entertaining them is not worth the effort. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 13:51, 5 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

To the first point, ORES seems designed as a generic machine learning tool that can be trained for this and various other tasks. The write-up implies that use on a given language wiki is up to that wiki. Obviously feedback from the ORES people would be welcome. If they are planning to build it into the Mediawiki software so it can do what is proposed, that would be great. The idea here is to get agreement from the people here that it would be a good idea, and then the best implementation approach can be worked out. Aymatth2 (talk) 21:37, 5 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There are about 20 inbound links to Nightswimming (Awake), which the bot would rate as mid importance. That typically means something like "Subject is only notable within its particular field or subject and has achieved notability in a particular place or area", the default definition used by WP:Wikiproject Television and WP:Wikiproject United States. The article meets that criterion. AlexNewArtBot does not support Wikipedia:WikiProject Awake, so it would take a human to assess importance for that project. A guess based on number of inbound links is just a guess, as is the ORES assessment, but if they get it right much of the time, it is worth recording the guess. Then a human can review and correct if needed. Aymatth2 (talk) 15:35, 5 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The purpose of quality assessments is to help project members prioritise work. This could involve upgrading the quality of important but low-quality articles, or pushing up high-quality articles to GA or FA status. If ORES says an article seems poor quality, and the number of inbound links suggests it is important, that is probably useful even if a strict reading of the criteria would say quality is a bit higher and importance a bit lower. See Wikipedia:WikiProject assessment#Statistics: there is a backlog of over 570,000 articles to be assessed, about 10% of the total, up from 552,983 in May 2017 per Wikipedia:Assessing articles#Statistical analysis. A rough assessment that can be refined by a human any time is better than no assessment at all. Aymatth2 (talk) 15:35, 5 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This idea sounds great. Have you seen User:Nettrom's work on m:Research:Screening WikiProject Medicine articles for quality? I found that it sometimes slightly over-rated articles that had long lists of refs, or long bulleted lists, but its stub ratings were spot-on, and if it had a gap of two classes or more, then the current assessment was always wrong.

There's more that I'd like to see a bot doing with assessments. For example, at Category:Unassessed medicine articles, every single article about a person and organization needs not just the quality rating, but also |importance=Low and |society=yes. Even if the bot could tag only stubs about people this way, it could halve the amount of work that needs to be done manually. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:42, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I did not know about User:Nettrom's work. It does not surprise me that many assessments were wrong. Partly that is from drive-by assessors who think: "1-2 paras = Stub/low, else = Start/low", partly from failure to reassess after improvements are made. Once the bot gets settled down there may be a lot of refinements both to the scoring algorithm and to adding more data. Project-specific rules like "individuals and hospitals default to Low for WikiProject Medicine" could be added. I would like to start simple though. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:22, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This is a really interesting proposal, Aymatth2! Thanks to WhatamIdoing for pinging me in this discussion, otherwise I would probably not have noticed it. The proposal is right up my alley and describes a setup that I'm fond of, having a bot propose some low-cost changes that a human can review. WhatamIdoing already pointed to the pilot study we did with WPMED on reassessing stubs, where we learned a few important lessons about how to set things up so it finds a good selection of candidate articles.

I thought I'd also mention a couple of related things. First is SuggestBot, which I run. When the bot posts suggestions it also adds info on page views and article quality (both predicted and currently assessed) so that editors can prioritize their work in the way that best suits them, and reassess the article if it's needed. One of the comments that sometimes comes up is "Why did it recommend this to me, it's not a stub?", which is an example of the challenge of keeping assessments up to date.

Secondly, I did a project with Aaron Halfaker a year ago, where we worked on building a model for predicting article importance. There's more information available on the project's research page on meta. During that work, we ran into the challenge that Finnusertop mentions: importance is WikiProject-specific. We therefore ended up training a model for each WikiProject so that it learns their preferences. We again collaborated with WPMED during that project and also incorporated a set of rules that cover their specific preferences on importance ratings for certain types of articles. Using Wikidata to identify the type of entity an article is about, we could then automatically rate all articles about people to Low-importance, for example. The results of that project were promising and suggested that article importance predictions could be useful when they're given as candidates to a human reviewer.

Again, really interesting proposal, it's precisely the type of thing that the wp10 model in ORES was built to help out with. Hope some of this info is helpful, let me know if there are questions about any of this! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:53, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Nettrom: I had no idea how much had been done already. It seems that maybe it would not be too hard to clone and tweak SuggestBot to become a first version of ArtAssBot AutoAssessBot. (?) Aymatth2 (talk) 17:49, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

How is ORES trained? I suspect a lot of assessors rate quality based on length rather than value to readers, and importance on gut feel rather than project criteria. If we train ORES using these dud assessments, it will learn wrong. Ditto with stale assessments. I started Marcel Lucet the other day with a fairly basic first version, which was assessed as Stub. I expanded it, but it is still Stub and likely to stay that way. We don't want to teach ORES that is what a stub is like. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:49, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Length matters, and is a fairly good predictor overall. But I think Nettrom's work is looking at multiple criteria, such as the number of refs and maybe section headings. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:37, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

A Start-class article "Provides some meaningful content, but most readers will need more", while a C-class article is "Useful to a casual reader". Start may also be weaker than C on citations, style, etc.. For simple topics the casual reader will often be satisfied with a short, readable and accurate article. I agree that length and quality often go together, but would prefer that ORES did not give length excessive weight. Aymatth2 (talk) 02:26, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

We can always improve the training-set for ORES' article quality model. If you are interested in doing the work to check the set of assessments used to train ORES, we can improve ORES' prediction quality. We have a system called m:Wiki labels that makes manually assessing random samples for training ORES as easy as possible. I'm thinking we can get decent fitness with 150 observations for each quality class (150 * 6 = 900). We can start by sampling article versions from the labels (WikiProject assessments) we already have in Nettrom's original dataset. It would be a lot of work, but it would be a great way to validate the model.

Alternatively, you could just test out what we have already. It seems to work very well in practice (based on years of feedback). We can always come back to re-train it when/if you identify consistent problems. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 14:55, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough. If the assessments are usually good, that is what is needed. There will always be cases where it gets it wrong, but those can be fixed by a reviewer. Maybe after the AutoAssessBot has been running for a while it would be useful to look for patterns in articles where the ORES assessment has been manually overridden. Aymatth2 (talk) 16:12, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The auto-classification of importance research results are a bit discouraging. I felt that if ArtAssBot AutoAssessBot only assigned an article to a project when AlexNewArtBot gave it a high score for the project, number of inbound links would be a reasonable proxy for importance. This would avoid the problem of giving Winston Churchill Top importance on WikiProject Architecture (he built garden walls as a hobby). Maybe that aspect of the bot has to wait for development of a better importance prediction model. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:49, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Assuming ArtAssBot AutoAssessBot was built and settled in, I would like to let it rip on the 570,000 unassessed articles. After that, it could run through all articles adding |autoassess=ok where it came up with the same result as the existing quality/importance assessment for a project. But I have no idea how to deal with the remaining millions of articles with dud or stale assessments. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:49, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You might want to consider a less potentially offensive name for your bot. ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:37, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oops. AutoAssessBot, it should be. (As an ex-Brit I tend to think of "ass" just as a useful beast of burden.) Aymatth2 (talk) 01:45, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm already doing something similar to this at AFC. It would be fairly trivial to set something up to use the wp10 model to auto-assess talkpages. SQL^{Query me!} 19:49, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I ran wp10 over CAT:FA, results were interesting. SQL^{Query me!} 22:17, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That is very encouraging. The results seem excellent. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:53, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

AutoAssessBot recap

There seems to be general support for this proposal, since it is very much in line with other work on auto-assessment using ORES. To recap how the bot would work after adjusting for feedback above:

• AutoAssessBot checks articles in two different modes:
  • Soon after an article has been created, and soon after significant changes have been made. "Soon after" allows for a flurry of edits where the final result is checked
  • Scan through all articles (possibly first all that have never been assessed, then all others)
• For each article it determines relevant projects using the AlexNewArtBot algorithm. Some experiment may be needed to find the best threshold for deciding an article is relevant to a project
• If the article does not have a talk page it creates one, with templates for the selected projects
• If the article does have a talk page, it adds templates for selected projects that are not yet on the talk page, and checks existing project templates to see if they should be updated
• A new project template parameter |autoassess= is used to control bot assessment
  • When the bot adds a project template, it sets |autoassess=auto, meaning the assessment has not yet been checked.
  • A reviewer may approve the project assessment by changing the parameter to |autoassess=ok.
  • A reviewer may change the project assessment and change the parameter to |autoassess=no, meaning the bot has been overridden.
  • A reviewer may change the parameter to |autoassess=skip, meaning despite the high AlexNewArtBot score this article is irrelevant to this project
  • The talk page is placed in a category for each project / autoassess value. Thus |autoassess=ok for WikiProject Biography would put it in Category:Autoassess ok biography articles.
• When the bot checks an existing project template, it skips it if |autoassess=no or |autoassess=skip, otherwise it refreshes the assessment if changed
• The bot creates or refreshes the quality rating on a project template using the result supplied by ORES
• At this point, the bot leaves the importance rating blank (or unchanged). More experiment is needed to find an algorithm that would give good enough results
• |autoassess=auto or |autoassess=ok add a note on the template saying, e.g., "This assessment was done mechanically by AutoAssessBot"

This is a tentative outline to be refined in the next step. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:53, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

AutoAssessBot next steps

@Finnusertop:, @WhatamIdoing:, @Nettrom:, @EpochFail:, @SQL:

I do not feel well-qualified to implement the bot, having never done one in the Wikipedia environment before. I assume there would be some sort of project set-up and standard steps to define specs, activities, acceptance criteria, testing, implementation. Any input on the next steps? Any volunteers? Aymatth2 (talk) 13:54, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Aymatth2, I recommend you put all of the details of a WP:BAG proposal together in a sandbox page. Please include a meaty description of how it will behave and what you expect the outputs to look like. If we don't find a taker by the Wikimedia Hackathon (May 18th), I can pitch it to technical contributors there. It would be great if you would be interested in doing some work as a bot-maintainer. Do you have any background in python/pywikibot? Either way, by putting the BAG proposal together, you'll be saving someone some time spec'ing it out and helping them understand what type of work they are signing on for when picking up this project. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 14:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks - I have started Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/AutoAssessBot. If anyone wants to add / improve it, feel free. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:42, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Moved to Wikipedia:Bot requests/AutoAssessBot since it is not a WP:BAG nomination. — JJMC89 (T·C) 03:31, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If it helps - here's the code I use to pull ores (and the query to grab the appropriate pages): User:SQL/FA-Ores/getOres. IIRC, ORES is limited to ~2 requests / second, but each request takes on average ~1.1s to complete. SQL^{Query me!} 15:32, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I did not even know SQL had a LIKE operator. Shows how much use I would be! Aymatth2 (talk) 17:42, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Naming conventions (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Discoveries (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) - used to point out BOLD editors who choose to apply IAR to the WSS process

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) - move to Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs

Template:Stubsort (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) - used to bug people who use the generic Template:Stub

Template:Stub sort (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) - same as stubsort

Template:WPSS-cat (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Template:WPSS-new (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

redundant over-specific templates - {{underpopulated stub category}}, {{very large stub category}}, {{deprecated stub}}

Do we really need all this bureaucracy for stub templates? I don't think so. You want to create a new stub template? You have to go through WSS first. What's that, you've decided to just be bold and create the template? Too bad; it's going to TFD, where the 5 active TFDers will ignore it, causing it to be automaticallly deleted. I propose that WSS be shut down and the stub template process be made much less process-y, per the Esperanza precedent. (This was originally on MFD, but I was told to go here, despite MFD being where the dissolution of Esperanza was discussed.) Lojbanist ^{remove cattle from stage} 01:15, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

WP:WSS is for coordination. Amongst other things, it is used to ensure that we don't get two stub templates (or two stub categories) created to do the same job; it ensures that template and category names are harmonised and consistent; it ensures that the category tree has a logical structure. The WP:WSS/P process is there to discourage the proliferation of stub templates (or stub cats) that have little potential for use. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:04, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• I agree with Redrose64. WPSS serves a valid purpose and less "process-y" will likely result is more duplicates and non-maintained categories. It's like proposing to dissolve WP:WPMOS because some people don't like following the MOS and they feel like it's too bureaucratic to have so many rules on how articles look like. The nominator also fails to mention that WikiProjects to organize certain aspects of the project are common (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Wikipedia#Maintenance). Regards SoWhy 11:07, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• I do agree that if the system continues to exist, there needs to be coordination or it'll become a mess. But TBH I've never understood why there's a system of stub sorting - it all seems very redundant to wikiproject ratings and categories there (though it does provide more specificity, I dunno how much it is actually helpful)

Giving some actual and specific examples of the "bad" that they do would help (e.g a link to specific TfDs etc) Galobtter (pingó mió) 11:30, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

They're much easier to navigate than WikiProject banners. It's how I first got involved with my early modern conclave project. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:01, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• ICYMI, details of the "Esperanza" project mentioned by nom can be found here. Pegship (talk) 13:52, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• To add, here's the MfD (which I closed) where this was initially raised. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 18:43, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Stub templates and categories do not affect the content of Wikipedia, but rather its organization, and both the project and its output are easily ignored by users and editors, who are welcome to go on their merry ways. The pages listed here for comment could certainly use some review and possibly some cleanup; some of them are long-abandoned or have already been redirected to more appropriate pages. (Template:Stubsort (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) and Template:Stub sort (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) have not been implemented since 2011 and aren't used on any article pages; Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs already redirects to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs); Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) consists of an explanation as to why the page was discontinued and where to find the current discussions.) tl;dr: WPSS serves a purpose used and valued by many editors; if deleted or "shut down", I would like to know the form and procedure that would be implemented to serve its function. Pegship (talk) 23:31, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• I have not seen an issue with this WikiProject's modus operandi and therefor oppose this proposal.--John Cline (talk) 04:00, 7 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• I don't know enough about this WikiProject to have an opinion about whether it should be dissolved, but I hope someone who does will respond to Lojbanist's concern about new stub-related templates being sent to TFD, ignored and automatically deleted. If this is actually happening, perhaps some kind of tweak in the process is in order.—Anne Delong (talk) 12:20, 7 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • As a long-time member of WPSS, I can tell you that it's not our practice to arbitrarily delete or nominate for deletion a stub template or category that was created in good faith (and sometimes not so good faith). Believe me, we're sticklers for consensus. If there has been an issue such as those referred to by nom, I'm unaware of it, and I'd appreciate someone bringing it to the attention of me or any other stub sorter. I have looked into nom's past contributions and comments (under both usernames) and can't find any reference to stub-related issues. Pegship (talk) 18:17, 7 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• WSS has been around since 2004, and a lot of its processes date from when the project and Wikipedia as a whole was more active. Perhaps if it is to stick around, it should be optimized to operate with fewer people required to approve things. --Rschen7754 18:38, 7 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose the specific motivation cited (that stub templates not approved by this group are often deleted at TfD) isn't helped by dissolving the group, and I see no good reasons to get rid of this system. There must be some place to discuss stub templates. power~enwiki (π, ν) 18:19, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose While some parts of the project may be outdated/inactive, the project as a whole goes on. -- Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 13:37, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose I find stub sorting to be helpful in editing and improving articles. Any issues that are a "downside" to the process can be improved or otherwise handled rather than obliterating the entire system.--Paul McDonald (talk) 14:45, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Stub sorters may be steadfast in their demands that NPPs stubsort instead of just mark as a stub even though that isn't their job, but stub sorting is helpful. L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 14:55, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: As the templates that "demand" sorting above have been unused for 8+ years, I'll be nominating them for deletion once this discussion is closed. Thanks for your positive comment. Pegship (talk) 16:51, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Pegship If that was supposed to be sarcastic and mean something else, it went over my head. L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 21:53, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

L3X1 - No sarcasm or meanness meant! I'm mildly chagrined that those templates still exist, and my comment on your positive note was meant in good faith. (I tend to avoid use of the word "support/ive" in these discussions unless I'm presenting my own POV.) Cheers, Pegship (talk) 22:45, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Noting here that backtagging is (or probably should be) blocked by phab:T185355. Further discussion is of course still welcomed :) — MusikAnimal ^talk 05:09, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! First to give some background... I requested that STiki start tagging edits, much like is done with Huggle and other popular off-wiki software. The author of STiki, West.andrew.g, was in favour and I think we're good to go for tagging STiki edits moving forward.

We also pondered at the idea of back-tagging edits made with STiki. I'm generally in favour, as this would make the tag data complete (in particular, this is useful for database reports and analysis). Wikipedia:Tags states "tags cannot be added to revisions yet", but it appears there is now an API endpoint for this. That same information page links to this December 2014 discussion, which seems to give consensus for bot-tagging of edits, subject to individual bot approval.

Meanwhile, Special:Log/tag is nearly empty. This tells me either folks are either unaware that tagging existing revisions is now possible, or consensus has changed. I can't find any evidence of the latter.

So, on behalf of West.andrew.g, I'm proposing we do this for STiki. The thing that is controversial is that there are over a million edits made with STiki. Mass-tagging would certainly pollute Special:Log. I think if the bot task is throttled, say, at 100 revisions a minute, this shouldn't really be that disruptive, and only take around a week to complete.

I'm personally a bit torn myself on whether this is a sane idea... mainly because of the volume of edits. I realize the benefit also isn't far-reaching, but it is of use. For instance XTools has the capability of identifying edits made with specific tools, and listing non-automated contributions, using tags or regular expressions. The latter does work to some degree (searching for edits with "using STiki" in the summary), but this is slow and not comprehensive because anyone can remove the STiki advert from the edit summary. The tag filter at Special:Contributions I'm sure will also be useful.

Thoughts? — MusikAnimal ^talk 17:45, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No thank you! Adding a million log entries just for tagging ancient page versions? I'm not seeing how this will make our encyclopedia better - it certainly doesn't help anything for the readers. If this was really that important a one-time database update may be preferable. As for the mechanics of actually doing what you propose - are you going to rely on edit summaries to identify these edits? — xaosflux ^Talk 17:52, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Logging is mainly for internal use, it wouldn't benefit readers even if it were a single revision. This is more for the data hungry people, and those who appreciate such statistics, which I realize probably isn't many :) I believe West.andrew.g has been keeping track of STiki edits in his own database, but he'll have to confirm. I had doubts back-tagging this many revisions was good idea (or of interest to many people), but I didn't think it was a bad one either. Andrew asked me to make the proposal, so here I am. WP:DWAP I think applies, especially since MediaWiki is now auto-tagging reverts and the like. And Enwiki's logging isn't that large compared to some other wikis with recent changes patrolling enabled (phab:T184485). Nonetheless, a million rows indeed is a lot! — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:14, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Err, and actually STiki edits for each user are already counted at Wikipedia:STiki/leaderboard. So that much is moot, but the concept of viewing non-automated edits, and browsing STiki edits at Special:Contribs still stands. Frankly, overall I'd like to see everything that tags be backfilled (though I know that won't happen). Some things like identifying old reverts aren't possible, but it'd be neat if it was. It's a shame we have the capability of identifying such edits, but the data is incomplete. — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:27, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

But if the edits are known already, doesn't xaosflux's proposal make more sense? DWAP or not, do we actually need to add a million log entries if the only thing that people really want is to be able use the tags for those edits? Regards SoWhy 18:38, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yes certainly, but we (the community) aren't capable of doing direct database updates without going through the API, and hence creating log entries. Sysadmins definitely aren't going to grant a request to do this for something as unimportant as STiki tags. In my opinion creating all those log entries sounds worse than it really is, but probably worth running by the DBAs... especially if we wanted to backfill other things. I wasn't following the phab discussions for the MediaWiki auto-tagging of reverts/redirects, but I suspect backfilling would have been desirable there too, except that it isn't feasible. Especially redirect tagging, since that offers a more efficient way of detecting articles created from redirects, and by whom (currently only temporarily available through mw:Extension:PageCuration tables) — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:58, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm all for this; given that nearly every damn phone edit has mobile edit (13 million and counting) in addition to either the mobile web edit or mobile app edit tag, I don't think tagging stiki is going to overwhelm anything. It's useful, and having better metadata will mean being better able to use metadata. Still, by the same rationale, should we not backtag huggle (1.1 million currently) or AWB (a laughable 13 thousand), or even twinkle (god forbid)? ~ Amory (u • t • c) 18:57, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If we want to discuss backtaging things in general I can think of much more relevant things like "uploaded edit", "transwiki import", even "bot". — xaosflux ^Talk 18:59, 7 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Are those tags? I don't see them at Special:Tags. But yes, I'm glad this came up, because maybe we should consider backtagging everything (though I agree STiki isn't the top priority). The tagging feature is there for a reason, so I don't see why we shouldn't take advantage of it. From an analytics perspective, the incomplete data is a problem. I am going to try to talk to a DBA about this to see if the effect on logging is anything meaningful, along with backtagging that many edits in general. Database consumption aside, are there other concerns? Is that we don't want to see all those entries at Special:Log? It's unlikely, but possible, that we can use a maintenance script so that no log entries are created. — MusikAnimal ^talk 23:27, 7 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@MusikAnimal:, not yet....phab:T183061...... — xaosflux ^Talk 14:26, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to see all edits from the major scripts/tools properly tagged with Special:Tags (not just an edit summary that I could, um, "accidentally" change). AWB just started tagging edits a few weeks ago, but only for people using the latest software version. It would be nice to expand this, so more editors could find out how other people are being so productive.

I'd also like to see tags on all script-based edits, i.e., the ones that aren't using the major tools. Someone replaced the contents of thousands of pages at multiple wikis with basically "testtesttesttest" last week – thousands of pages basically blanked within minutes. IMO every single one of those would ideally have come with Special:Tags that broadcast "Hey, I am NOT a fully manual edit" to any person who even glanced at Special:RecentChanges. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:52, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

For the record, that proposal has seen extensive discussion at phab:T188433. Anomie⚔ 22:47, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This thread was originally about back-tagging STiki edits, but I think now we're all wondering about back-tagging everything (at least tools that can easily be identified). It's worth pursuing, getting broader input, etc., but phab:T185355 should be resolved first. That task makes it pretty clear the current system won't scale, so we probably shouldn't introduce millions of more rows into the change_tag table at this time. — MusikAnimal ^talk 05:09, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

An RfC on the use of Wikidata in infoboxes has just started. Please !vote and/or comment on the RfC page. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:46, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

After positive results from our most recent A/B tests on Page Previews on German and English Wikipedias, the Readers web team are planning the next steps of feature rollout for the first half of April 2018. We have requested feedback and there's a discussion happening over on Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous). Yours, OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to see, for want of a better term, an editors library. That is to say, a collection of sources owned by editors which can be searched by other users for the purpose of checking sources or clarifying ambiguous sentences. I think this would be particularly useful for reviewers spotchecking sources at WP:FAC or WP:GAN, see this discussion [[7]], but would also be of value in cases such as this [[8]] where an editor had synthesised or misinterpreted the source.

The library would be searchable by source and by editor thus entering the source in the search box would bring up a list of every editor with access to it, while entering a user name would bring up a list of sources that that editor has. If it was suspected that content had been added with a fake reference or not truly representative of the source, an editor could search for a list of all editors who own the book and ask one or more of those editors to corroborate the content. I imagine quoting the source verbatim would have some copyright issues, although a private email might solve that problem, but In most cases I imagine a simple "Yes, that's okay" or "No, that's not what the source says" would suffice. Searching for a specific editor might be desirable if they are known to have a particular interest in a subject or perhaps are more readily available because they operate in the same time-zone or are simply more active. Another reason one might want to see an editor's library is when trying to fix an ambiguous sentence: After seeing which editors have access to the source, one might want to see whether a particular editor has more books which might clear things up. See the question about HMS Pallas and the French frigate Minerve, and whose guns did what, here [[9]], as an example.

Only sources owned by the editor would be listed so not library books they once borrowed or internet sources which are freely available, although listing any subscription-only sources one had access to would be appropriate. Editors need not catalogue everything and might, for example, only want to include things they are particularly interested in. Entering one's library into the database would indicate one's willingness to check references but there could also be a userbox expressing that the user is happy to help and incorporating a link to his/her library page.

I don't know how much work is involved in setting it up or even if it's something other editors want, so happy to here any comments or suggestions.--Ykraps (talk) 10:14, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it's probably worth consulting with WP:RX. I like the idea. Technically, if there's a set of subpages by editor, an ISBN search should be easy (along the lines of the archive search over at WP:ANI. ∰Bellezzasolo✡ Discuss 10:24, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, this idea would probably violate all sorts of copyright laws. Most nations have laws which limit scanning published works, and making them available to others on line. Blueboar (talk) 11:43, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Blueboar: actually Ykraps is not suggesting scanning, if you look, only that the editor would be able to check a reference and say whether it is properly employed or not. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:17, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

But to discover whether a source is properly employed (or not) one needs to actually obtain a copy of the source, and READ it. I am now confused as to what is being suggested. Blueboar (talk) 12:59, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Blueboar:, User:Peter coxhead is correct. All you will see is a list of books. You are asking the person with the book to get it from his bookshelf, read the appropriate page and tell you whether it supports the paragraph in the article. Yes, there is an element of WP:AGF in that you are trusting the book owner to interpret the source faithfully, but that is no different to how it stands now with citations. The advantage is when there are multiple editors with the same book, who can jointly confirm the text is fully supported. In this case above [[10]], User:Slatersteven would've been able to go to the database and see that both I and User:Wiki-Ed own Ferguson's book. He could then ping us. If we hadn't had the article on our watchlists, we would never have known about the issue. This system overcomes all that.--Ykraps (talk) 15:26, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Ah... ok. Thanks for clarifying. Blueboar (talk) 15:36, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Seems a fair proposal. As long as that is all it is a list. Not sure it is worth all the work though.Slatersteven (talk) 15:30, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not saying this is a bad idea, but frankly it does appear to me as a rather inefficient undertaking. Because, what's the point in telling people that Joe has 200 books at home, if Jane has access to a big reasearch library with millions of volumes? If you have just one person frequenting such a library and who is ready to help others check sources - which I think is what WP:RX is about -, the value of all these documentation efforts by individual users is diminished enormously. Not only for reasons of quantity, but also because of a “specialization mismatch”: Joe's books that are of interest to many people will very likely also be available from the library. But Joe's super-specialized books - the ones that even most people with library access might struggle to obtain -, well, how likely is it that there's another Wikipedia editor interested in such a book (and who additionally knows that such a directory actually exists)? This makes me somewhat skeptical, cost-benefit wise. (By the way, Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Shared Resources and de:Wikipedia:Bibliothek pursue a similar goal to that suggested here, though these are lists. Both are also fairly deserted, judging from the version histories.) — Pajz (talk) 16:14, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Quite high I would say, given the breadth of users it is more than likely that even then most specialized subject has multiple edss with access to the sources. What is not available is a way of tying that up with the edds who have the sources. The only issue I have is the ABF inherent, one edd claiming to have access to a source is not enough, we want people to check it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Slatersteven (talk • contribs) 16:21, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Pajz This is not about telling someone where to find references for their article, this is about putting an editor in touch with another editor who can very quickly determine whether a sentence in an article is faithful to the supporting citation. I don't see how any of projects mentioned could help with the example scenarios I've given (although I may have underestimated the scope of those projects). If I wanted to know whether Winfield's book (see below) contains an entry for a 74-gun ship called Pearl, I don't want to be told there is a copy of the book in a library thirty miles away, I want to be told whether it does or it doesn't. As regards the amount of work, not being a computer programmer, I don't know what's involved but I would've thought that a searchable set of sub-pages within Wikipedia would a reasonably straightforward thing to set up, for someone with the know-how. I am anticipating that editors who want to take part in the scheme will enter their own data.--Ykraps (talk) 11:49, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• @Ykraps: Check out inventaire.io/, which is a Wikidata front-end in which people can list the books they have and make them available to loan to other people. There are lots of web platforms like this, but this one is unusual for using and contributing to Wikidata's catalog of books. You might want to check this out because they have modeled what you are describing, and their service might be ready now to do what you want. I know it is off wiki but before any such project could ever be part of Wikipedia projects, it has get an off-wiki demo and then go through multiple steps to get closer. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:59, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I fear we may be at cross-purposes, what I'm suggesting is a set of sub-pages within Wikipedia which are searchable. The idea being that you can find a fellow editor who can very quickly corroborate an off-line source without lots of searching, having to visit a library or wait for someone to send them the book in the post. As an example: A user creates an aricle entitled HMS Pearl (1767) which says it's a 74-gun third-rate ship of the line and references the article with Winfield, Rif (2007). British Warships in the Age of Sail 1714–1792: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. Seaforth Publishing. p. 195. ISBN 978-1-84415-700-6. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |titlelink1= (help). Under my proposal, anyone (including ips) can search for the source, which will bring up something like this with a list of Wikipedia editors who own the book. Any or all of those editors will be able to tell you that there is no such ship and that p.195 contains an entry for HMS Pearl (1762), a 32-gun frigate. Can anything you're suggesting help in a case like this?--Ykraps (talk) 17:27, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Ykraps: No one actually has to ship the books. Some people made wiki-based software imagining that the wiki community would want to mail books, but try to imagine that if when you found someone who had the book you wanted, you asked them to check something instead of mailing you the book. I know it is not the same, but this is as close as you are going to find for already-existing software based on Wikimedia projects. Can you imagine yourself joining their project and ask them to add a button that says, "do not mail, just check a page"?

Instead of searching Wikipedia subpages, this project has a Wikidata-based book catalog which is searchable. Does that not sound better to you than a plain text search system on Wikipedia pages? This project produces lists like that example book page you created. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:04, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Blue Rasberry: Yes, I see how that could work. I guess the advantage of having something within Wikipedia is that Wikipedians are more likely to be interested in maintaining Wikipedia articles, and are almost certainly going to have the sort of specialist books needed for some of the obscure subjects. Added to which, there is already a method of communication, the talk pages, that means there is no need to divulge your email and because it is visible to all, might attract the attention of additional editors. However, there does not seem to be a lot of support for this proposal so may be I need to rethink things.--Ykraps (talk) 05:56, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Ykraps: I would call inventaire a Wikimedia project because of all the Wikidata integration and Wikimedia culture it already uses. No one ever gets access to do weird experiments at Wikipedia.org, and even access to tools.wmflabs.org can be more trouble than developers want. Check the credits at the bottom of inventaire - they obviously care about Wikimedia projects and went to a lot of trouble to integrate these tools with that. These kinds of experiments happen continuously and 1 in 100 actually comes into Wikimedia projects. When the WMF does decide to commit their own staff to software development often it is based on someone else first doing an experiment. I know this inventaire project is not perfect but it is a working demonstration. Things like Wikimedia account integration are just additional features which a developer could install depending on how much funding they have, which depends on how much interest other people have.

I was not showing you this to make you think you have no support for your proposal, and I think you are interpreting this the wrong way. I hoped that when you looked at this you would see that someone cared so much that they coordinated labor worth US$50,000+ to build a demo of your idea. From an optimistic perspective, you could say that your idea has already recruited a massive donation of labor, development, publicity, and community building which resulted in a working demo. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:02, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, when I said there was little interest, I didn't mean from those that have commented here. I was merely noting that many people have visited this page to comment elsewhere but didn't care sufficiently to contribute to this discussion (which is absolutely fine. I have no problem with that either). It is difficult for me to get a handle on what Inventaire does or is capable of, because I am required to create an account in order to access it and this is something I am uncomfortable doing. I don't think I'm alone in my reluctance to sign up to strange things on the internet either and this is another advantage to running the project in-house; we all already have global accounts.--Ykraps (talk) 11:47, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• We have one of these for the video game domain. --Izno (talk) 22:45, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request list many books they can access by posting at Wikipedia:WikiProject Bibliographies and Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals.....that makes lists Wikipedia:List of bibliographies.--Moxy (talk) 12:12, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• I love the idea in principle. I think publicising which editors have access to which specialist publications, and are willing to check and supply reference details for the project, would be absolutely wonderful. When I worked in the GLAM sector, we had access to an amazing array of resources, and I still do within my own specialist areas of UK botany and Alpine mountaineering. I probably see this working best at the WikiProject level, but maybe with a standard format encouraged across Projects. In fact, I posted a selected set of resources I held for alpine mountaineering back in 2015, with the suggestion it could be worth expanding (See here). An issue to consider is removing content listed by an editor when that individual ceases to contribute here. Boy, the number of times I've thrown out (ie sent to charity shops/eBay) specialist books which I've used to enhance an article, or didn't feel I'd ever be likely to want to use again myself. By way of example, some colleagues who adminster my local World Heritage Site recently threw out a number of very detailed reference books they'd been given by other WHS projects around the world - which I saved from the bin. I used one to enhance this article, and thought about offering to post it to someone who might like to access the rest of the amazing detailed inscription details. The cost implication of posting put me off, but keeping it to access on someone else's behalf would have provided me the perfect excuse to retain it! Sadly, I think it went down the paper recycling route in the end. Regards from the UK, Nick Moyes (talk) 20:57, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  Nick Moyes, I guess I was thinking that at its most basic, the scheme could be administered/managed/publicised by a Wikiproject, either a new one or an existing one such as WP:RX. With regards to editors leaving, I thought probably a computer programme could take care of that. On joining, the editor would create his/her own library page - something like this. The programme would then create a page for each book, similar to this and add your user name along with any subsequent users who had that same book in their library. When someone retire, they wipe their library page and the programme removes their name from each book page. Again, I'm not a programmer so I don't know what's possible.--Ykraps (talk) 12:14, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Should the system of portals be ended? This would include the deletion of all portal pages and the removal of the portal namespace. 14:23, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

Survey: Ending the system of portals

• Support Taking at look at one example of Portal:Cricket: it contains a summary of the lead of Cricket, which is out of date (there are now twelve full members); obscure random articles that is just something someone took the effort of making them good - like Yorkshire captaincy affair of 1927; out of date news, random anniversaries and other random stuff like that. Readers aren't looking for random cricket-related stuff - it is clear, from the extremely low page-views, that readers don't care about portals. The most-viewed portals are purely from being featured on the main page; but for example Portal:Science gets only 8 out of 100000 of the views of the main page, a few hundred people a day, and they are likely from random clicks - not from people interested; which would likely account for most views of other portals too. There have been suggestions of automated systems for helping to develop portals, which even if developed wouldn't help, because portals aren't useful in any way. Personally, I've never felt the desire to read, say, a random science article, which is what portals consist of (most portals indeed have literally randomly selected content from a list)

In essence, portals try to straddle reader-facing and editor-facing stuff, but are terrible at both. They aren't really part of the encyclopedia; nor do they help in the backend - they don't benefit the encyclopaedia in anyway (the main page, which could be called a portal of everything, in contrast, encourages people to improve articles). Any navigational purpose, which I don't think portals help with at all, is better served through outlines. Featured articles and other stuff in a topic are cared more by wikiprojects, which generally link them already. Implementation could be reasonably easily done, as nearly all, I reckon, portal links in mainspace and in all pages indeed are through templates like {{portal}} (in all pages I estimate 99% of links are from being linked in wikiproject banners), which can be blanked to remove links; once the links are gone from mainspace, the portal pages can be deleted. Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:29, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support: It is time to abandon this useless relic simply because its function is duplicated (and done better) elsewhere. The portal system are also incomplete and what gets a portal is rather strange and random: take a look at Portal:Contents/Portals#Technology and applied sciences, Why is Portal:Amiga included but not Apple II? Why are Portal:Python programming and Portal:Java included but not C (programming language) or BASIC? Why Portal:Maryland Roads and Portal:Michigan Highways but nothing for Arizona Highways? -- or any roads in the UK? (We do have Portal:UK Trams -- last substantive edit in 2007 -- so there is that.) --Guy Macon (talk) 15:59, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, in the good old days, misguided by the hype, I even created Portal:Lithuania. Agree that portals are not maintained and should be deactivated. There might be one or two portals out there that have some useful stuff worth salvaging, but 99% of the 1500 portals should be deleted. At the very minimum, the {{Portal}} from articles should be removed. Renata (talk) 16:01, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, I've never understood what portals were supposed to be good for to begin with. They've always seemed like a thoroughly obsolete idea to me, and the ones I've seen were almost invariably ill-maintained, magnets for POV editing, or downright useless. Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:05, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support speaking for myself I’ve only made one portal edit (a reversion) and since that time 9 years ago have not found the desire to edit one since. They don’t seem to have any net benefit to the encyclopaedia side of things and hardly anyone seems to maintain or look at them, so it’s fine by me if they were removed. Aiken D 16:11, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support for the reasons explained above and those listed at User:DexDor/Portals. DexDor ^(talk) 16:25, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, per various comments above but FPaS's in particular. - Sitush (talk) 16:27, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support There has never been sufficient either reader or editor interest to maintain portals. I would be open to someday presenting next-generation portals which without any human involvement present Wikimedia content in a category in a human-readable way, perhaps ranked by article importance and quality. I would not want new editors looking at the portal system and using their labor to develop this content when it is a failed project. Portals are a burden for remaining out of date and abandoned. I would not want any reader to find the low quality content here. If portals get shut down then I think it should happen on a schedule of about 1 year to give anyone time to collect the information in them for re-integration, if there is anything to salvage. I think that usually there will be nothing to save, but at the same time, the portal project did recruit 1000s of editor hours and I would not want that deprecated lightly and without time for people to respond. The wind-down plan could be 3-months of comments, then 3 months of removing links pointing to portals, 3 months to move portals out of the portal: space with "deprecated" tags, then at 12 months actually delete or mark them so that they would not appear in search engines. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:45, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Strongly Oppose: Many people, including myself have invested many hours to improve and maintain portals. They are usefull to navigate. I propose that all portals which were created should be kept.--Broter (talk) 17:15, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This is an example of the Sunk cost fallacy. I get that many people have given an admirable effort to keep the portal system going, but this doesn't invalidate the well thought out reasoning for them being made obsolete. Many other elements of Wikipedia have been depreciated in spite of the hard work that users put into them. User:Axisixa [t] [c] 23:23, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support The first item on the top right of the main page, is occupied by Portal:Arts, which hasn't been serious updated in years. This is supposed to be a featured portal. It's "supported" by a project whose page hasn't seen any activity since 2016. It's embarrassing. Vexations (talk) 17:24, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support despite adding these things for years and creating many see here ... it's clear that these have failed and do not serve their function as intended.--Moxy (talk) 17:36, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support They're outdated and the updating of them takes away from precious time that could be spent making 'Outline' articles. These are much better and avoid duplicate and outdated content on portals. I find that most people don't use portals either, rather using the search function or the main articles themselves which can act as portals. For example if wanting to know about economics I would go to the Economics article rather than the outdated Portal:Economics – Craig Davison (talk) 17:40, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Largely unused an unmaintained. An outdated idea that the community clearly does not care to continue supporting. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:04, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Minimally delete the internal spam from every article directing the reader to the related portals. --RAN (talk) 18:11, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Conditional Support - Support end of portals system as we currently understand it; Oppose deletion of the portals by default - I recently had a conversation about portals with a group of people learning to contribute. A couple of them stumbled upon portals and loved the idea. Sure enough, when I looked at the particular portals they mentioned, they hadn't been updated in years. (Portal:Speculative fiction was one of them that I remember off-hand). Talking a bit more about what they liked about portals, three things stood out: (1) it has a lot of related content gathered together for a particular subject, (2) it was useful to find articles to work on and to get a better feel for the state of Wikipedia's coverage of that topic, and (3) it was much more visually appealing/inviting/useful than a WikiProject page. In other words, portals served them primarily as editors, not as readers, and that's not the way we current understand/use portals. For that reason, I'm supporting. However, it's a partial support because I oppose deletion of the portals by default -- they should be moved to relevant WikiProject subpages by default, and MfDed selectively where the WikiProject does not wish to retain them. I would love to see the portals system reconceived as a way to make WikiProjects more engaging to new editors (or any editors), maybe even thinking about using the main WikiProject page as a sort of portal to a subject. Of course, none of this is to say the outcome of this RfC should in any way mandate that any WikiProject do anything differently. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:10, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • If the portals are all deleted, it would be a Good Thing if the Wikiprojects were notified with "heads up; the following portals are about to go away. Feel free to move them to subpages of your Wikiproject before that happens." --Guy Macon (talk) 18:21, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Guy Macon: I'm sorry, but that's not very logical. The portals should instead be tagged with {{historical}} in order to preserve their page histories. ToThAc (talk) 18:08, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      • What part of "If the portals are all deleted" are you having trouble understanding? --Guy Macon (talk) 21:45, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support obsolete with respect to top articles in their subject. Don't delete, but mark as historic, lock them down (full protection), and force de-linking from content namespaces. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 18:15, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - efforts should be directed elsewhere, where they are more useful. Tazerdadog (talk) 18:16, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support – but move portal pages into Wikipedia/user space automatically or on request. Best, Kevin (aka L235 · t · c) 18:22, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - I find that portals are almost entirely useless. Delete as such. Beyond My Ken (talk) 18:24, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - I have never edited the Portal namespace, and I find many of the linked examples to be profoundly useless. However, I don't feel that cutting non-harmful features benefits the project. With a clear proposal to migrate some of these to be part of WikiProject pages, I would be neutral on this proposal. Without such a proposal, I must oppose. power~enwiki (π, ν) 18:30, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • [EC] I do feel that cutting non-harmful but useless features benefits the project. While looking over the technology portals I ran into a sneaky POV criticism of Al Gore that was put there when he was running for president. Because editors almost never read them but some users do, Portals are a great place to hide spam, BLP violations, etc. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:36, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

what if Portal A was redirect to Outline of A. This was the name function still directs readers to an overview/index of a topic.--Moxy (talk) 18:33, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No problem with that if [1] Outline of A exists and isn't abandoned and [2] Portal A is seeing more traffic than we would expect from bots and mis-clicks. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:40, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose - Reform may be due (which I would be happy to discuss later if this discussion shifts and does not pass), but I do not think abolition is the way to go. — Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 18:43, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I’d be interested to know how we would reform an area that is more or less abandonded. The community and the readers seem to have made it clear they don’t find these particularly useful, we can’t force anyone to look at them or maintain them. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:59, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Guns. We need squads of heavily-armed thugs who will kick down the doors of Wikipedia editors who aren't working on what we want them to work on and hold a gun to their head until they comply. Not a practical solution, you say? How do you explain the immense popularity worldwide of similar systems? :( --Guy Macon (talk) 22:46, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support — For contentious issues with a strong political POVs it a can be a real problem to maintain a political balance. Take for example Portal:Genocide a far better portal name is Portal:Human rights, but POV warriors prefer labelling "crimes against humanity" genocide for various reasons which include style (shorter more punchy name), blame game, and legalistic (genocide so defined by treaty, crimes against humanity are in part defined by custom). Given the problems of eyes and maintenance, it is too easy for contentious issues in portals to avoid the sort of scrutiny that the major articles on an issue receive see for example Portal:Terrorism which suffers from the aliments to which Galobtter referrers. -- PBS (talk) 19:38, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Conditional support Deleting them outright is not OK. In general I'm in agreeance that Portals are ill-maintained and not used often. However some are well-maintained, useful for some, and the editors worked very hard on them. They should be userfied, or moved as a subpage of a WikiProject. At the very least, every WikiProject needs to be notified that their related portal is doomed, and let them decide what to do with it. Please don't blindly delete all of them. — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:39, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: I have always thought of portals as redundant and even confusing sometime. They more or less usually look like historical archives due to outdated information with some having information dated over a decade ago. Also they generally duplicate WikiProjects pages which are more lively and better maintained. I am neutral on deleting/merging/moving or whatever, but I believe it is time for "Portals" to go. –Ammarpad (talk) 19:51, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Portals are rarely used or maintained, and they don't jell with the interface or how most readers/editors navigate. Readers want to 'click-through' straight to content. Outline articles and interlinking within standard articles offers this and makes portals obsolete. Cesdeva (talk) 20:06, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. These are largely useless and not well maintained. Natureium (talk) 20:14, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: they are redundant to other means of navigation, mostly poorly maintained, and in some areas provide a view of the structure of the underlying topic that is not neutral and by the nature of portals not sourced. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:27, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support because they are usually poorly watched they are a magnet for POV pushing and craziness. I had a heck of a time with a Portal on ISIL as there was no good way to keep it from turning into almost terrorist advertising. I finally got it redirected. The only reason selected Portals get significant traffic is because they are prominately linked. I've NEVER been directed by Google to a Wikipedia portal and you have to click a search box to find portals in internal search. Portals are so 15 years ago, the internet moved on a long time ago. Legacypac (talk) 20:40, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: Poorly maintained, rarely useful, few views except the eight portals on Main Page, not worth editor resources. "Page information" under "Tools" shows page views in the past 30 days. I compared some random portals to their main article, e.g. Portal:The Simpsons 527 views versus The Simpsons 235,536 views. The main portal page gets 0.2% of the views of a single covered article. My other examples: Portal:Cricket 1,527/185,133 = 0.8%, Portal:Tennis = 943/64,213 = 1.5%, Portal:Cars 2,213/91,460 = 2.4%, Portal:Greece 963/223,193 = 0.4%, Portal:Dance, 1,421/60,807 = 2.3%, Portal:King Arthur 373/166,466 = 0.2%, Portal:Microsoft 2,646/230,201 = 1.1%. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:18, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support deprecating them. They are utterly useless, and like many dead-end ideas from the early days, become more and more of a maintenance burden as time goes on. Next let's axe the sidebars, outlines, and bibliographies.

However, I don't think mass-deletion is going to work (it rarely does). Instead I'd suggest updating any relevant guidelines to say they are obsolete, then introducing a speedy deletion criteria along the lines of "pages in the portal namespace that are no longer actively maintained". – Joe (talk) 21:37, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Very hard to get a new CSD approved but with a clear RFC result that would be a good mechanism to remove them systematically. Perhaps X3? We should statt by removing them from the top of the mainpage - the most important real estate for the least important namespace on the project. That will drop traffic on the portals a lot. Legacypac (talk) 21:44, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support - As sad as it is, no one seems to care about portals anymore. I hepled get P:MDRD to Featured Portal status (a process which has been shut down due to inactivity) and also maintain P:USRD every month for the past several years. While I value putting in time to keep the portals updated every month, unfortunately not many other editors care enough to contribute to the portals. Several years ago, many editors would contribute to P:USRD and offer suggestions for selected articles, pictures, and Did you know? hooks, which would make the portal easy to update every month. In recent years, there are very few suggestions for content which usually leads me to have to dig for stuff every month. Perhaps we could reduce the maintenance of portals and have them just randomly generate content and change every time they are refreshed, P:MDRD does this for selected pictures and Did you know? hooks. If no one cares enough to keep portals updated, then maybe it is time to get rid of them. However, I would not want to delete the entire portal namespace but would rather mark all pages in portal namespace as historical and remove links to them from article space. By doing this, we could still keep the attribution of the history of the portal namespace rather than delete a large portion of Wikipedia history. Dough4872 21:41, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - as it appears they are largely pointless in the current environment. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:43, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per above. Largely useless, with dubious value to readers. -FASTILY 21:45, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Conditional support I feel that portals result in additional maintenance time that could probably be better invested elsewhere on the project. However, interested editors should be given an opportunity to migrate the content elsewhere, and the portals should not be outright deleted right away. --Rschen7754 22:39, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose no strong reason to do so and it'd be more of a pain to implement than it is worth. The portal namespace isn't that useful, but I see this proposal as being about equal in usefulness to the namespace as a whole (namely, not very...) When the two options are both washes, there is no reason to change. Change for the sake of change is pointless. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:42, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Alternative – Why don't we just encourage editors to de-link portals that are unmaintained when they encounter them? Then if someone cares that will prompt them to do some maintenance. Dicklyon (talk) 22:57, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Because well meaning but not clued in editors will revert them, and keep add portal links without realizing what a disservice they are doing. Legacypac (talk) 00:07, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support There's no reason to let this largely useless part of the encyclopaedia continue to exist and just create problems for readers as well as editors. That said, I'd be open to migrating some content to wikiproject pages (on a case by case basis) if editors find a need . —SpacemanSpiff 23:34, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Portals are obsolete, even the one I helped create and tried to maintain for quite some time has become an irrelevant mouldy pile of arbitrary stuff. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 23:52, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, unfortunately. They aren't a well-maintained part of the encyclopedia, and updates to most portals come very infrequently. The vast majority of page views are to the main articles themselves, as described above, and the portals are an afterthought. The featured portals process was abolished recently for a similar reason. However, I do think these portals should be archived, whether as Wikipedia project pages or in some other format. epicgenius (talk) 01:58, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose While they are most definitely obsolete, I don't like having to get rid of a piece of our history. The namespace is generally unseen and unused by the public, anyway. I suggest we use Template:Historical instead. Create a bot job to put it on all "Portal:" pages, and, if so desired, all "Portal talk:" pages, too. — Gestrid (talk) 02:01, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - Wikipedia is losing editors, and it therefore does not make sense to expend effort on a portion of the encyclopedia that is barely used and whose function is already accomplished better by other pages. User:Axisixa [t] [c] 02:15, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support but do not delete any relevant pages (just mark them as historical instead) - Portals have outlived their usefulness. They were a great idea in the past, but as both Wikipedia and the internet have evolved, they have become moribund. It's true that many had been the result of hard work, but perhaps such energy could better be devoted into our own articles. There have been suggestions that Portals could be more active if they were instead operated by bots, but that wouldn't solve the other main problem (in that no one uses them). With that said, I'm against mass deletion of portals since they did serve some historical value: they could instead simply be marked as historical. As for the Main Page portals, they could simply be moved into the Wikipedia namespace. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 03:18, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support deletion per the above. I would not mind archiving them in the Wikipedia namespace and marking them as historical, but I don't feel very strongly about it, so don't mind if they're deleted outright either. Double sharp (talk) 04:00, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - these have long outlived any value they might once have had. Neutrality^talk 04:27, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - Most are no longer maintained, and we should concentrate our work where it matters, on the article pages. Kaldari (talk) 04:29, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, these were never really popular, and it is high time that they be formally deprecated. Trimming useless or unused features is essential to manage bloat and keep the 'cost' of maintenance down. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 04:31, 9 April 2018 (UTC).[reply]
• Support. Portals should be redirected to the index or outline of their parent topic, if possible, rather than deletion, but they should definitely be deprecated. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 06:08, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose I just sampled a few portals and they all seemed reasonably well-constructed and helpful for navigation. Deleting such hard work would not encourage activity elsewhere. Per WP:BITE, such hostile action would tend to discourage voluntary effort by showing that such hard work can be casually deleted by a flash mob on a whim. I'm not seeing any benefit or necessity for this. Andrew D. (talk) 06:22, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  I understand this argument, but the problem is that portals are usually constructed by one or two enthusiastic editors who then move on to other activities or leave Wikipedia. Once they aren't maintained, their usefulness tends to diminish rapidly. We should not be encouraging editors to build stuff that in the long run is not useful to readers. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:48, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Consider the articles created by Coxhead such as James Eustace Bagnall. These get little maintenance now and, in any case, get few readers -- maybe one or two a day. When their enthusiastic creator moves on, shall we delete those too on similar grounds? Is Wikipedia only for high traffic, high maintenance pages like Kim Kardashian? All that other obscure stuff just gets in the way, right? Why not just delete everything that isn't vital and focus on getting that right before allowing anyone to start anything else? Andrew D. (talk) 13:17, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

A low-traffic target page hardly has the same maintenance reliance as a portal (which we intentionally try and funnel readers through en-masse). Cesdeva (talk) 15:05, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Andrew Davidson: you didn't pick a good example in James Eustace Bagnall – he's long dead, and the information in the article isn't going to change. I can give you better examples for your argument, e.g. Ponerorchis cucullata, where there's active research going on and the generic placement has changed recently and might change again, requiring the article to be moved and updated. But portals are different, as Cesdeva says. Since they deliberately cross-connect multiple articles they necessarily need regular maintenance, as relevant articles appear, get moved, get promoted or demoted, etc. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:00, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Portals for well-established topics like Mathematics don't need to change much. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia not a newspaper and frenetic activity is not required for such pages. The point is that once you start to claim that we can discard pages because they seem to be a backwater then you put most of our content at risk. And Wikipedia is nowhere near finished yet. People are still developing and arguing about structural aspects like infoboxes and Wikidata. It's far too soon to say that everything's settled and we can discard pages which are currently not mainstream. Andrew D. (talk) 16:12, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Well, we'll have to agree to differ, but the argument is not that portals are a backwater, but that, unlike articles, the nature of most portals means that they don't work well if they are backwaters. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:26, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No, the argument seems to be that because some portals don't work well, we should destroy them all to make sure that none of them work at all. The main benefit seems to be that we will then have some white space where the portals used to be. Presumably the people who didn't use portals will carry on as before while the people who did like and use them will be infuriated and leave Wikipedia. Me, I'm thinking that the next step should then be to tear down the Village Pump too before we get any more bright ideas like this. Andrew D. (talk) 20:17, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It's not "some" it is ALL. The topic traffic portals are dismal failures according to our readers considering the have the highest visability links on the project. The readers rejected this failed idea a long time ago. We just need to turn off the lights. Legacypac (talk) 02:01, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No, that's a fake fact – facile and false. Some actual stats are listed below to refute it. Andrew D. (talk) 23:25, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You have a funny definition of "false" and "refute". Something linked to on the main page and on thousands of pages and talk pages gets fewer clicks than the word "free" in "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" and your conclusion is that this shows that readers are interested in it? Can you think of anything -- anything at all -- that might serve as an alternate explanation? I'm just saying. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:09, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support Pretty much useless now, per all the above comments. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 07:08, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Selective support: The prominent Main Page link to a set of fragmented and often outdated resources is inappropriate and should be removed. I would support marking each Portal pages itself with Template:Historical but with any Wikiproject which links to that Portal notified so that they can remove the template if their consensus is that the Portal is active. Any Portal which Projects instead consider so poor as to merit removal can be so requested, presumably via WP:MFD. In 12-18 months time, any "orphaned" historical portals can be checked for usage volumes and considered for MFD. AllyD (talk) 07:44, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep some portals including but not limited to the eight linked from the main page, continue maintaining them, and delete the rest. I think there is still some merit to maintaining a few portals about more basic topics, and a number of featured portals still receive a healthy amount of page views, so people are still using them. Portals are prettier than outlines and still serve a limited purpose, IMO. Decreasing the number of portals maintained may be a way forward for them. feminist (talk) 08:15, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. I've done in a distant past a lot of work on two portals (Portal:Belgium, 29 views a day, and Portal:Comics, 47 views a day), and in retrospect it was way too much effort for very little effect compared to article building / maintenance. I no longer see any benefit in having portals on enwiki. Fram (talk) 08:26, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

But that's still 10,585 and 17,155 people a year respectively who have an opportunity to discover, if they so wish, new topics and sample selected encyclopaedic information in a different way to normal, without having to wade through a lengthy and maybe dull-looking article. Yes, numbers are low on the scheme of things, but there are innumerable Featured Articles like this and this that get less traffic. Shall we delete all low-traffic pages next because they don't attract enough people? The logic makes no sense. Delete a rubbish page because it's flawed and can't be fixed, for sure. But all 1500 Portals (assuming just 50 visitors a day each) still amounts to 27.6 million people a year not having an opportunity to see or discover a broad sample of articles relevant to a topic, usually in a bright, uncomplicated manner, and possibly being enthused enough to learn and study that topic in a way that might even change their direction in life. Why take that away? Nick Moyes (talk) 03:02, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose I watch and edit two portals, Portal:Germany and Portal:Opera, both featured portals, and up-to-date, - why change? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:46, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  While you maintain the portals, there may be some point. But the problem is that portals don't continue to be maintained, as noted repeatedly above. Note also that the Germany portal gets less than 1% of the number of views that Germany does. So the value to readers in relation to the work required by editors is grossly disproportionate. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:20, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I am not alone, maintaining takes me 3 minutes on days that have DYK related to Germany. It takes someone else 3 minutes to update the news. Why not? To compare portal and country is like apples and pears, - where on the country article would a reader get news and DYK? Some hundred look per day, enough for me to invest 3 minutes now and then. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:30, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support They are dead (as a whole). Let's do the honours. Although I would not cry my eyes out at the sight of their deletion, I would find it disrespectful for them to be deleted -- mark as {{historical}}. talk to !dave 10:45, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support not updated, old, hardly viewed, and not a central part of our mission.--Tom (LT) (talk) 11:00, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as written, but would Support a purge of some poor portals. -- Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 13:15, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose to Strong Oppose - although many support arguments appear to have quite rational argumentation - It is bit like some who cannot cope with having projects on talk pages - project tags help the process of evaluation - the linked nature of things seems to be lost on most above. Portals can have moribund content and appearance but they are excellent links to a more complex process - where latin names of phenomenon have category pages with no attempt at explaining as to whether they are rock, plant or animal - portal links are useful to clarify the context of many pages in complex category trees that are otherwise too labyrinthian for the average user. Portals are useful, but for whatever reason, those who visit seem to think otherwise, a small problem with dismantling parts of a structure, what is suggested next? Take care with such a suggestion, I would suggest threshold of this argument needs to be considered very carefully. JarrahTree 13:38, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Can you give an example of such a latin name category page and how a reader might arrive there without knowing whether it's about rocks/plants/animals? As an editor (when fixing categorization problems) I wouldn't rely on the portal link being correct. DexDor ^(talk) 21:03, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

reply to DexDor - having been through birds, and other category page main spacetagging - I believe that some indication on a category page reduces potential confusion as there some binomial latin phrases could be a plant or a bird. I have not found deliberate or accidental project mis-tagging. JarrahTree 09:11, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support I think the efforts expended in maintaining them can be better used elesewhere. S a g a C i t y (talk) 16:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose If the proposal here is broad deletion of all, that can and will only end in a mess - extensive one fell swoop, hacking away of multiple pages just is bad for the project, and we do it badly. Some pedians have expressed interest in some of these even in this discussion (over many years) - so, I support those pedians -- I also might support things like removal of links from the Main Page, etc. but I cannot support this. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:13, 9 April 2018 (UTC) Adding, I agree with User:Kmhkmh, below, we don't delete pages that don't get many views, we don't delete pages that don't get many edits (besides, here once the page is set-up, there are many that don't need a bunch of edits -- once a page is complete, it's complete) and we especially don't delete pages, because 'someone else works on them but not me'. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:52, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Outline articles are more efficient. Would not oppose some method of archival for portals that have been maintained up until at least the past month and archival with deactivation for those maintained up until a year ago, but definitely deletion for those that haven't been maintained in over a year. Ian.thomson (talk) 17:26, 9 April 2018 (UTC) Edit: Broter has (perhaps inadvertantly) provided good evidence that selective action (deleting some but not others) would result in increased bias in the portal area. Whatever action is taken (be it deletion or archival) should be unilateral and affect all portals in an identical manner. Ian.thomson (talk) 20:14, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, they are obsolete, and most are not maintained. Side bars and end bars provide a similar service and do a better job at it. Kierzek (talk) 17:58, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Portals are largely unviewed and unmaintained. I do think they should be marked as historical rather than deleted outright (though deletion should be an option in some cases). Plantdrew (talk) 19:08, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per Axisixa. Portals (operating like topical main pages) make sense when you have a group of editors (like a WikiProject) actively curating them. The portals (like the Main Page) aren't configured to be static. Because of that, their utility degrades over time and deletion makes sense when they aren't being updated. Maybe if the WMF had done more to retain our "wild west" editors from 2005-2008, we wouldn't be short-staffed and deprecating stuff now. Chris Troutman (talk) 20:24, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose We shouldn't be deleting pages because (i) they don't receive many page views, or (ii) they haven't been well maintained. How do readers benefit from this proposal? Some readers must find portals useful, and this proposal seems like the wrong solution to specified issues. PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 20:51, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • PaleCloudedWhite, what's your basis for believing that they are useful to some readers? (The mere fact that people sometimes click on them isn't enough, since you click before you know whether the page will be useful to you.) Is there a particular type of reader that you think they'll be more useful to? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:05, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • And what is the basis for people's assertions that they are not of any use to readers? Do the same editors make such assertions about particular articles, and that therefore they also should be deleted? PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 06:41, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

      The incredibly low readership of portals - even the 8 linked off the top of the mainpage - proves they are not useful to readers who vote with their clicks. Also every person voting here is a reader too and I've yet to see anyone really say they use portals. The objections are around preserving history or some useful bits or not offending the creators. Legacypac (talk) 06:51, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

      Portal:Christianity has received an average of 139 pageviews per day over the last 90 days - is that an incredibly low figure? Of all the articles that I've created, the most read is Dark Hedges, which over the same period has received an average of 119 pageviews per day.[11] Obviously Dark Hedges is useless to readers too and should be deleted, along with all the other articles that I have created, as they have even less readership. I am reminded of David Attenborough's comment on public service broadcasting, which he said should "cater for the broadest possible range of interests, popular as well as less popular, a network that measures its success not only by its audience size but by the range of its schedule". PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 07:05, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

      Thank-you for that comparison as it should help you understand my point and might make you change your vote. 119 pages a day for page with 16 inbound wikilinks about a row of trees is impressive (and an impressive article). We don't need to delete Dark Hedges because it is meeting a need. 139 views a day on Portal:Christianity is indeed incredibly low given it is an an extremely important topic of global interest where the portal is wikilinked from a HUGE number of pages (I gave up counting at around 30,000 page). There are so many ways to get to Portal:Christianity that 139 views a day could be mostly bots and accidental clicks. Legacypac (talk) 07:43, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

      And my point is that we should not be deleting pages based on pageviews, nor using pageviews as a basis for how useful a page is (unless, perhaps, it always receives zero). PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 07:58, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

    • PaleCloudedWhite, you said that "some readers must find portals useful". I am therefore asking: Do you use portals? Do you know anyone who does? Can you think of a hypothetical scenario in which a portal would be particularly useful for some reader? Perhaps a situation in which you personally would bypass other alternatives (search, navboxes, see also, links, etc.) and head straight to the portal? I know why the critics think that portals are not useful (critics look at the low page views, and conclude that if portals with tens of thousands of links on hundreds of articles are attracting such low interest, then realistically, some people are looking at them but nobody's finding them useful enough to seek them out.) The critics may not be correct, but it is a reasonable belief. I want to know why you believe that "some readers must find portals useful". Let's say, arguendo, you're absolutely correct. Let's say that there really are some readers who use them, and let's say that portals really are useful to those readers. Now, which readers are using them, and how are portals useful to them? If we can identify a plausible scenario, some sort of user story, then that might change people's minds about deleting them. Otherwise, I think this type of claim is going to be rejected as motivated thinking (e.g., "I spent a hundred hours on portals, so it can't just be wasted effort. It just can't!"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:26, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

      Your last point does not apply to me because I haven't invested time in editing portals. I made the statement about some readers finding portals useful in response to statements higher up the page stating that they are useless. People cannot make such statements; there is no factual foundation. The WMF, as far as I'm aware, has not conducted in-depth market research on how portals may or may not be used by readers, but we do have pageviews showing that some are read at least as much as many articles. That does not quantify to what extent they are useful, nor in what way, but it does establish that they are used. It's really a rather narrow way of looking at something to say, as some have here, I haven't read them or edited them much, therefore get rid of them'. I do not look at portals as navigation aids, rather I see them more like the random article feature - showing readers something that they weren't necessarily looking for - but in a more topic-orientated way. If they aren't performing as well as they might, perhaps some thought should be given as to how to improve them and/or give them better functionality. Leaping straight to deletion seems wholly the wrong way to go about this. PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 19:49, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

      Okay, so I'm understanding that you personally don't use them or know anyone who uses them, I don't use them or know anyone who uses them, and nobody in this discussion seems to use them or know anyone who uses them. We also know that portals get remarkably few page views per link. Portal:Food, for example, is linked on more than 8,000 articles, and it gets a mere 400 page views per day. The article on Food, by contrast, is linked on only a third as many articles, but it gets about seven times as many page views. On a view-per-link basis, the encyclopedia article is 20 times more desired by readers than the portal. That limited popularity suggests that portals are not actually "useful to readers". Maybe they could be – I'd personally be happy to find something that worked for readers, and mw:Extension:RelatedArticles might be one option to consider – but the long-term lack of use, in the face of such heavy "advertising" in articles, suggests that portals (as they currently exist) do not seem to be useful to readers (including for entertainment utility). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:14, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

      We have pageviews that show that people visit portals - that is the only concrete information we have. Everything else is unproveable assumptions, which are not adequate basis for deleting a section of the encyclopedia. So what if Portal:Food gets less visits than Food? It doesn't get zero views. Editors could reasonably have a discussion about why a page might receive less pageviews than another, but it is reckless to use such comparisons as a basis for deletion. PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 08:02, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose Most of the Wikipedia hasn't been well maintained. I don't see how mass deletion of content benefits the project. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:00, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  It seems that any collection of pages will now be subject to deletion. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 07:35, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  @Hawkeye7: Are there any reasons other than mass deletion for which you're opposing? Much of the other editors here (including myself) support only the deprecation of portals, not outright deletion, so I politely ask you to either change or justify your vote. ToThAc (talk) 18:15, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  That is not the consensus. And it's the people who haven't been here for over ten years and haven't done any work on portals but still post cursory support votes who need to justify why their comments should not be stricken. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:51, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  1. There is a mechanism for the deletion of portals, and that is WP:MfD. This is a deliberate attempt to do an end run around our processes, and for a reason: none of the arguments advanced here would be acceptable at MfD. ie WP:NEGLECT, WP:NOBODYREADSIT and WP:IDONTLIKEIT. Could the portals benefit from more automation? Certainly. Is that a reason to delete anything at all? No.
  2. The proposal violates our first pillar, that Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. It is not enough that information be listed. It has to be organised as well. That is why we have portals and, less usefully, categories.
  3. When writing articles, content creators often focus on a whole series of articles on a particular subject area. Portals and topics are often the locus or goal of such efforts. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:35, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  Can you clarify what you mean by "mass deletion of content"? Portals mostly consist of just a copy (possibly out of date and copied without attribution) of the lede of an article surrounded by some pretty formatting and links. Hence, deleting a portal doesn't delete encyclopedia content (facts that are of use/interest to readers). DexDor ^(talk) 20:02, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  That's not true. The attribution to the original article is clear, just as it is in TFA. Attribution is required when you're copying a block of text from one article to another. The portals are encyclopaedic content, there's a lot more involved than you think, and the reasons given, ie low traffic and lack of maintenance apply to most of the encyclopaedia and are not valid grounds for mass deletion of content. What value is there in contributing articles under such a regime? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:51, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. It seems that better systems of directing users around has become the norm and in falling out of use they have become stagnant. Even looking at Portal:Arts the most highly trafficked portal (due to a link on the main page), it appears to have almost no editor activity (edited twice in 5 months). I'd support removing all mainspace links and adding a historical template to all of the portal pages as a good compromise (preferred choice). — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)} 21:33, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - I checked my edit pie chart & in my 12 yrs on the 'pedia, I've made only 5 edits (2 on main, 3 on talk) to portals. They're basically obsolete & need to be made historical. GoodDay (talk) 21:49, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - the portal system would greatly benefit from some sort if integration with the main article space to draw more attention to it from readers and editors. Perhaps, every article linked from a Portal page should have a link back to the Portal displayed automatically. We should also move Main_Page to the Portal: namespace. Its hard to convince people to use Portals when such a visible portal page still hasn't moved there yet. -- Netoholic @ 22:58, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support a transition to deprecation. Do not delete anything, they are project history, there may be value in the history. Instead, for each moribund Wikiproject, redirect to the parent article. Exactly as I argue at Wikipedia_talk:Portal#Portals_are_moribund. In short, they are near useless, they are out of date and misleading for people who find them, and they are near worthless time sinks for an editor who feels the desire to update them. Do no merge with WikiProject, most WikiProjects are barely active themselves. User:Abyssal and User:The Transhumanist would like to create an automatically generated indexing/outline and summary system - that would be great, but is not a reason to not deprecate the current form of portals. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:59, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Deprecating and marking historical would allow anything of value to be harvested by active Wikiprojects, or by others outside Wikipedia who may be inspired to create something better, etc. Also, there are design element in these that may be useful to know about. And the wikimarkup and formatting may be useful for some. I cut my page formatting teeth on portals.     — The Transhumanist    12:43, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Merge to WikiProjects instead of deleting. Why: There's helpful content in Portals for content organizers, and for readers, and the contents in Portals can often bridge the two groups. E.g. Portal:Mathematics contains some content/structure that is not reflected in either Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics nor in Mathematics nor in Template:Areas of mathematics. How: Perhaps we could have a deadline for portal-deprecation, with prominent notices given that all content should be merged before date. After that date, portal namespace could be redirected and frozen, or marked {{historical}} in a unique way. I oppose deletion of the portals and their talkpages. I support removing the 8 big ones from the Main Page, and support redirecting editor energy towards revitalizing WikiProject pages instead of building/maintaining Portals. Quiddity (talk) 00:13, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Quiddity, may I assume that this would happen only after asking the Wikiprojects and getting a positive response? Some Wikiprojects get a bit annoyed when someone messes with their space, an many other Wikiprojects are completely abandon and have nobody to either give permission or raise an objection. --Guy Macon (talk) 21:54, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. I like the idea of portals, but their execution leaves something to be desired. My main project has a portal that went through the FPo process a few years ago (P:USRD) and now there's really only one editor maintaining it on a regular basis. I agree with some of the others that the content should be merged into the WikiProjects and not deleted outright. –Fredddie™ 00:20, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong support – I am glad someone did this RFC. I had been thinking for a while and mentioning to editors offsite my opinion about how outdated the concept of Portals were. I used to upkeep two myself, I even have a featured portal. However, in this day and age, I am more the person who wants them to stay but marked historic. They were a nice idea 10 years ago, but really, people can find articles one way or another without a portal. Mitch32^{(My ambition is to hit .400 and talk 1.000.)} 00:59, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support As someone who dabbled a few times in creating portals that didn't seem to stick, I think it would be best to merge useful content into project pages and not leave it to rot away in a forgotten namespace. SounderBruce 01:03, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose in favor of technical overhaul. Specifically, I would like to see a portal system with:

1. The automatic production of article synopses of the appropriate length when articles relevant to the portal topic are accepted and the ability to edit these synopses if they need improvement.
2. The automatic addition of these synopses to the pool from which the portal draws its content selections.
3. The ability to sort or filter the article synopses on the "more articles" page (or "more pictures", "more DYKs").
4. The criteria portals use to select content should default to chronological rather than random (ie it shows the last article to be featured in that subject).
5. The automatic addition of DYK hooks after they've been displayed on the Main Page to the pool from which the portal draws its DYK selections.
6. The automatic addition to the portal's content pool of featured and quality images when they get promoted at Wikimedia Commons.
7. The automatic generation of an image summary for the featured pictures based on their synopsis at the Commons, but with the ability to edit and improve it if needed.
8. The ability to automatically pull pictures from DYK articles to be associated with their hooks on the portal.
9. The ability to randomize all of the individual DYK hooks instead of manually devising "blocks" of hooks.
10. An automatically generated list of new and recently expanded articles relevant to the subject.
11. Foundation sanction for direct outreach by Wikiprojects to portal-goers like offering topical reference desks, advertising within-project contests, user adoption drives, etc.

Sorry for the textwall, I just thought it was worth noting that the pro-portal camp has put forth a concrete plan for reform and I think implementing these changes would address most of the ccomplaints people have about our currently busted system. Abyssal (talk) 01:35, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. (edit conflict) There are portals that are still well-maintained. I like the idea of tagging unmaintained, out-of-date portals with a one-week deletion notice that flags the creator and the associated WikiProject(s) to either save it or let it be deleted. Project members should be allowed to extend the one-week period if editors are in an ongoing discussion about it. Maybe have a WP:Pfd page where portals can be proposed for discussion/deletion? Frankly, I'm surprised at all the support this RfC gets. What's next? Will someone come up with a case to delete little-viewed categories? or low-pageview articles? How about unused helpspace redirects to projectspace? Where does all of this end, and how much of it is due to an objectionable level of deletionism?  Paine Ellsworth  ^put'r there  01:46, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Move all portals into Wikipedia namespace and mark them as historical. Lojbanist ^{remove cattle from stage} 03:17, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak Oppose per Paine Ellsworth. I've not edited any portals except for italic runs, so they're not an area I work in. But it's odd that this discussion is taking place without alerting every portal's talk page (my apologies if they have been alerted) as well as giving a good notice on Wales' talk page (and again, apologies if it has, I'm not a constant lurker there). This is a major move, to wipe out an entire sub-culture of Wikipedia. Paine comes up with some good "way to go forward"ness. As for his concerns, I have seen, with my own eyes, editors actually contemplating if navboxes (I call them templates) should be removed from the project. They already are banned from the mobile edition of Wikipedia. Lots of us love navboxes, they are the maps of Wikipedia. To create or add to a well-designed topic map feels like artwork. But since navboxes are already banned for 50% or our reader-views, maybe it won't take much to push them over the side. Is that what comes next? As I said, portals are not my thing here, so I don't know the level of work and care that has been put into them. Probably a lot, I'd guess. So this move is pretty major, either way it goes down, which is why every portal talk page should be alerted, so active editors know about it (I mentioned it in a move review and I think, judging from the recent comments to this discussion, that that mention at that move review alerted quite a few active editors that this discussion was going on, let alone that they'd have a chance to read six "that's" in one sentence). This major discussion is likely not very well known in the community. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:10, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support removing the portal links from the Main Page as soon as reasonably possible. I generally support deprecating the portal system, but I think this needs to be a slow, structured process that is developed outside this one-time discussion. There are multiple things that need to be done (e.g., stop making new ones; remove bad ones; re-work supported ones in the mainspace; consider alternatives; stop advertising/linking to them; possibly someday deleting them), and I think that process and an approximate timeline needs to be worked out by a small group of people willing to do the work, rather than being set in stone a single large discussion such as this one. Our goal right now should be setting the direction and some basic parameters. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:19, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support and replace the Main Page links with the corresponding outlines (or how about something completely new and refreshing in the top-right?). Portal space is dusty and fairly dead. The few people who continue to maintain portals could refocus their efforts on other navigational systems, such as navboxes, sidebars, outline pages, and categories. — This, that and the other (talk) 06:18, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. I agree with some of the descriptive claims of the supporters. It's true, for example, that I hardly ever edit or use the portals, and I often forget they're even there. But glancing around at a few of them, I don't agree that they're useless — they're a nice way of gathering together related material in a way that catches the eye and sparks interest. It's not a good argument that there are POV problems; there can be POV problems anywhere. --Trovatore (talk) 07:04, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Like many above, I have very rarely edited in the portal space. They have not served their intended purpose many are completely out of the date. It is time to close the book on this chapter of Wikipedia. Prefer the history is maintained and mark as historical rather than delete though. Cheers – Ianblair23 (talk) 08:16, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. The entire idea appears to have been abandoned. Without editor engagement, the portals serve little useful purpose. Sandstein 10:28, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Not useful and distract from work that is useful. I think the portal-linking templates that litter the bottoms of articles should be deleted, as well as the links from the main page. Wholesale deletion of the portal pages themselves might be too demoralizing for the editors who created them. Calliopejen1 (talk) 12:18, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: Redundant with both regular articles and categories which can provide better content and navigation. However, I also support the condition that, should this proposal pass, all portal pages be tagged with {{historical}} instead of being deleted. ToThAc (talk) 18:08, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: I made a proposal to redesign portals, but that's up for a potential eventual return to the concept, if it is accepted. I agree that the portal system, as it is nowadays, does not work and needs to go. However, as requested by others, you should either make portals historical, or give a deadline before deletion. Cambalachero (talk) 19:18, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• deprecate and mark as historical. I have been worked on them in small ways, but they do seem moribund now. I would guess the deep linking of search engines is to blame, taking people directly to articles. Also WP is no longer new, and both editors and readers know their way around much better. So I support removing links to them, but they should be kept, as a record of the work on them, and in case anyone one day thinks of a use for them. Maybe one day when WP is lauched on a new medium it needs a totally new front end, and they may come in useful for such.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 20:25, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. In case of discontinue, existing portals should be preserved.  samee  converse  21:17, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose – There are definitely useful portals on Wikipedia (even if the daily pageviews are only in the hundreds), and even if they are preserved outside a reader-viewable space, they will be made useless even if previously useful and often-updated. Yes, there are many, many useless and deletion-worthy portals of Wikipedia, but there should have been a much larger pre-RfC discussion to consider various approaches to reform (and I do not think this discussion is large or public enough to fit that bill) prior to this proposal of outright abolition given above. Master of Time (talk) 21:28, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, never really took off, and in recent years they've faded almost totally into obscurity. Many of the opposing comments cite the large amount of time people have spent working on portals, which to me is if anything more reason to scrap them... imagine how much better the encyclopedia would be if all that time was spent actually improving articles! Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 21:59, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose outright deletion. Support marking most of them as historical, similar to inactive projects and other previous good-faith contributions that just no longer work in practise. And as Andrew D.'s numbers below seem to indicate, there is still substantial viewer interest in some of these portals. GermanJoe (talk) 23:45, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • We may be confusing cause and effect here. Is the substantial viewer interest because they are useful, or because they are linked from the main page? Would a link with the same link text to an "overview of" page get any less viewer interest? --Guy Macon (talk) 23:57, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - Most portals are not much of use, as many take too many clicks to access, or so inaccessible that most readers would've found what they have been looking for before seeking the portal. Outside the ten portals linked on the main page, the namespace rarely gets views. I would support marking them as historical, or automate them so it would be low-maintenance. Merging them into WikiProjects is also a good idea.Nova Crystallis (Talk) 00:18, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Oppose This proposal takes deletionism to new levels. It's equivalent to a mass AFC without any communication to the Portals themselves. This wouldn't even happen to an individual article at AFD. There is already a Guideline and a mechanism for the removal of any Portal that's deemed poor or irrelevant. It's at WP:MFD, and that is the route we should follow, not out and out extermination because editors don't like or don't use Portals, or feel nobody else does either. Admittedly, traffic is not high to many, but using page visitor figures as a guide in deciding whether an entire namespace should be deleted seems to go against our principles of access to information. It's as senseless as proposing that all articles with less than a certain visitor count should also be deleted en masse. Many Portals are linked directly from WikiProjects,some of whcih also have low visitor figures. Shall we delete these all, too, whilst we're about it? Just as there are many ways for newcomers to a library to access its content, so Portals offer one alternative route, and often quite a visual selection of introductory topics, giving a look into a broad subject in a way that a dull template at the foot of a page simply doesn't. To be brutally frank, until this RfC I'd never even noticed there were links to Portals from the top of our Main Page. (My eye never wanders up to these banners.) But if content deletion is based on disinterest and low visitor counts from the Main Page, then we should delete Wikipedia:Local Embassy - linked to from the centre of our Main Page, but with visitor counts far lower than each of the linked Portals. If individual Portals are seen as worthless, they should either be flagged as {{historic}}, or put up for a deletion discussion. At the time the 'Featured Portal' scheme was ended in 2017 there were 176 such Featured pages. They can't all suddenly be worthy of mass deletion! Nick Moyes (talk) 00:49, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. The lack of active maintenance and editor involvement is problematic in some ways beyond merely keeping things up-to-date. There's a small enough community, making few enough edits, that it becomes possible for one editor to create and maintain a topic portal without any meaningful oversight—which leads to potentially serious NPOV issues. Creating a portal allows someone who is careless or unscrupulous to create a content fork, subtly (or not-so-subtly) shifting the tone and emphasis – or even substance – of Wikipedia's presentation of a topic. (And arguing that that's not really a serious problem because so few readers see the Portal pages doesn't really help matters.) TenOfAllTrades(talk) 00:57, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, for many of the same reasons as the above. My opinion of what should happen: These pages are moved to WP space (WP:Portal/Science) and tagged historical. The portal namespace is summarily removed from the database. --Izno (talk) 02:52, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support – but what will happen to actually useful portals, such as Portal: Current events?  Nixinova  T  C  04:33, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong support. While it was created with good intentions (i.e. to be a "Main page" of each subject), it is no longer practical to maintain the same due to lack of interest altogether. Rehman 07:20, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Detailed proposals needed - it is clear that there is support to make drastic and sweeping changes to the portals system and namespace. What is not clear is the way to do this. This is a massive undertaking that risks causing a lot of disruption to existing infrastructure if not done carefully. I would favour marking such pages as historical, rather than outright deletion (moving pages to WikiProject namespaces is another option, but what if more than one WikiProject have a claim on a portal?). Marking historical retains a record of the contributions made (would removing the portal namespace entirely remove all record of an editor's contributions to that namespace?) and maintains a historical record of the pages. It would also retain the featured portals, which would be a great pity to lose. The point that there should be a deletion notice on each page is also a good one, and that any hard deletion should be done through Miscellany for deletion. It also feels like such a drastic proposal as doing away with an entire namespace needs a series of proposals and RfCs, running for some time and with much publicity to ensure everyone who should get a chance to speak up is afforded that opportunity, and that the whole editing community is notified about the proposed change. Carcharoth (talk) 10:54, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose the proposal as currently stated, mainly because of the number of opposes that have been made since the tagging of the portals for deletion was carried out (as should have been done in the first place) which appears to have drawn a number of people to this discussion to oppose the proposal. It is clear that there are a group of editors who work on some portals and maintain them; deleting the whole namespace rides roughshod over the work that has been done and is still being done in this namespace. Propose reforms, and selectively nominate some portals for deletion at MfD using certain criteria, and mark some historical (maybe even be WP:BOLD and mark inactive portals as historical without any discussion) but at present this proposal is an end-run around the deletion process. Carcharoth (talk) 09:53, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose: Portals are what we Indian cinema editors have been using to categorise the various GAs, FAs and FLs on the basis of language and industry. This because WP:ICTF is one convoluted task force and no-one supports the creation of multiple taskforces for each Indian film industry. --Kailash29792 (talk) 11:35, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. I have not voted in this RfC because I have no firm opinion either way. All I can say is that the portals don't take up any space on the server. That said, the proof of concept as demonstrated in this RfC seems to reflect a consensus that the community want portals deprecated. The actual process would be complex as illustrated by Carcharoth. Is it worth the effort?Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:39, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • As far as I can tell, the placing of a notification tag on all existing portals seems to have only just been done today by The Transhumanist (maybe they could confirm?). Any timings for how long this RfC should run for should take that into account. My gut feeling is that moving the pages to WikiProject space is a waste of effort. Better to mark historical and let individual editors and Wikiprojects move what they want to keep. It is trivial (using the same templates and transclusions) to replicate portals in the Wikipedia namespace for those who want to keep something going at a WikiProject or User namespace level. All that is really needed is to remove links from the article namespace to the deprecated portals. Those who keep working on updated navigational content (where ever it is hosted) will add back in links as needed, and the normal editing process takes over from that point (is it useful to readers of the articles, etc.). I shouldn't really start threaded discussion here, feel free to move if needed. Carcharoth (talk) 11:56, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reply: I placed a notice to this effect at the top of this proposal.     — The Transhumanist    12:05, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Content should, were applicable, be moved to WikiProjects, templates, article content, etc. Chicbyaccident (talk) 11:46, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose A Portal is no project, projects should support Portals in creating new content. You always find new articles in the portals. Portals provide overview.--NezLe (talk) 11:50, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I don't agree that you always find new content in some Portals, but that's not even relevant. But you are right to say they provide an overview - a different way in to a topic if you like. Having provided a taster of articles across a broad sectrum, like many articles here they do not need much modification. If we were to take the approach being proposed here, we would soon be mass deleting every article that hasn't been edited for a year or so and which receives under some unspecified number of visitors per day. How demoralising to all users. I also agree with you that WikiProjects could/should be supporting Portals more - and many are very closely linked - but they are entirely different beasts, and both have their very distinct value in my view. Nick Moyes (talk) 16:48, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose - I find portals useful and a net positive to Wikipedia. No doubt they can be improved, but this proposal is throwing out the baby with the bath water. I also agree with those pointing out the flaws in notifications regarding this proposal. Jusdafax (talk) 11:57, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as they are the best grouping of related articles that exist, far better for readers than books, categories, WikiProjects, or any other groupings. ɱ (talk) · vbm · coi) 12:08, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. Nasty little RFC, this. Oppose wholesale removal or deprecating of entire portal system and favor case-by-case review, per Nick Moyes. Full disclosure: I have worked on Portal:Mathematics content quite a bit in the past. As noted by Andrew D., that portal is not per se out of date, as Portal:Cricket is claimed to be. If a particular portal sucks, improve it or get rid of it, using existing procedures (including proper notice to the portal's talk page). If a portal is well constructed, leave it alone (well… or improve it further, like anything else). If this results in some sort of imbalance, as mentioned above (can't find the exact comment at the moment), then fine, remove the Main Page links (although, of course, that should be discussed on Talk:Main Page and not be decided here). Automation ideas of Abyssal are interesting and should be considered by interested parties. Finally, I think this RFC has been mishandled from the beginning, as apparently none of the portals themselves were notified (on their talk pages) about this until 2 or 3 days into the discussion (and Portal:Society, linked to from the Main Page, still hasn't been notified [edit: was done shortly before I posted my comment]). The propsal as stated seems to me to be (frankly) outrageously overbroad and should not be taken seriously (much less agreed to) until other avenues for improvement (as just mentioned) have been pursued. - dcljr (talk) 12:10, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support with caution. The vast majority are stale, and any that are being kept up to date should be migrated to e.g. a relevant WikiProject. Stifle (talk) 12:17, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose I'm shocked this is even being considered! I'm even more shocked that there seems to be a number of editors that support it. My first caution: don't let a large number of people automatically be considered the consensus. I check Wikipedia multiple times a day and just heard of this proposal this morning. Notification to such a wide base of editors will take some time. In any event, portals are useful and helpful for navigation, provide an outlet for enthusiastic editors to promote their favorite subjects, encourage collaboration between editors, expand Wikipedia with distinct layout and design, and are an excellent source. The argument that many portals are out of date is a sign that we need to have a campaign to update the portals, not delete them--which is my second caution: don't confuse an editing issue with a deletion issue. The solution here lies in editing, not deletion.--Paul McDonald (talk) 12:25, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support Article pages function as the default "portal" for article topics on Wikipedia. Existing content on portals should, where applicable, be moved to WikiProjects, templates, article content, etc. Mitchumch (talk) 12:31, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This suggestion is to completely misunderstand the potential of Portals in providing an alternative and often very visual route into a broad topic, without having to wade through a hugely long, and often tedious article, or visit a complicated WikiProject. Portals are (or should be) a bright window into a broad subject area, allowing the user to 'dip a toe' into topics that might interest or enthuse them. As the main explanation of Portals states: The idea of a portal is to help readers and/or editors navigate their way through Wikipedia topic areas through pages similar to the Main Page. In essence, portals are useful entry-points to Wikipedia content. Compare Mountain or WP:WikiProject Mountains to Portal:Mountain; Biology or WP:WikiProject Biology to Portal:Biology, and Arts or WP:WikiProject Arts to Portal:Arts. I do believe Portals are best off being closely associated with a relevant WikiProject in most cases, even though the latter deliver an utterly different function of focussing editor collaboration. Deleting 1,500 Portals in one go and moving content into a WikiProject would create vast work for absolutely no benefit and similarly misunderstands the purpose of WikiProjects and the role of Portals. Nick Moyes (talk) 14:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support Dead end, almost entirely unmaintained and out of date, yet included in almost every article. There's several IPs in my watchlist areas that constantly tweak and re-tweak portal bar templates to portals that haven't been updated in 11-12 years. -- ferret (talk) 12:48, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment – some of the portals are actually key projects, such as Portal:Featured content, Portal:Current events (it's Wikipedia's news department), and Wikipedia:Community portal; while Portal:Contents forms the core of Wikipedia's navigation system. Portal:Contents isn't a portal at all, as it is comprised entirely of navigation lists. It was placed in portal space because at the time (over ten years ago), we didn't know where else to put it.     — The Transhumanist    12:56, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - most are not maintained and thus are misleading to the few readers who seem to actually click on them, support deleting all. - Ahunt (talk) 12:58, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose deletion of all this content. I completely agree that most portals currently do not work, but that is no reason to nuke them all and pretend they never existed. Many collaborations used to be organised through portals, for examples see Portal:Germany/New article announcements or the archives of Portal talk:Poland/Poland-related Wikipedia notice board. Ten years ago, some people tried to use portals as something addressing both readers and editors, trying to showcase the best content in a topic area while attempting to attract further help. The same concept works reasonably well on the German Wikipedia. On the English Wikipedia, portals slowly became sidelined. I assume, however, that some are still alive serving some subcommunities (and for example Portal:Germany/Did you know is very much alive). The suggestion to just delete them all is outrageous and frankly insulting. —Kusma (t·c) 13:14, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support and remove namespace. This has been a long time coming, as the system has very limited usefulness coupled with high maintenance overhead. The category system and See Also links effectively do the same job. — Huntster (t @ c) 13:23, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• strong oppose. I find none of the reasons I've seen really convincing to justify a wholesale removal. I don't necessarily have objections in removing (or archiving/moving) most unsupported/unmaintained and outdated portals, but that can (and should) be done on an individual basis. In general portals are helpful for navigation and allow for material and discussion that have no place in the article name space and hence cannot simply be replaced by article on the field in article name space (contrary to claims above). Also on occasion they may provide a function similar to projects. So as long as a portal is supported and the maintainers are happy to do so, I see no reason to shut it down. "Many people don't use it (anymore)" is imho no proper argument and no justification to aggravate the (smaller number of) readers and editors who do.--Kmhkmh (talk) 13:40, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - Deleting all of these portals just because some are not up to standards is a terrible proposal per WP:BABY. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:41, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - This proposal is apparently originated from a personal issue with portals. That the portals are not getting updates is not a problem to be resolved via deleting them, the correct way is to devise schemes encouraging the editors to edit the portals.--Mhhossein ^talk 13:52, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong oppose A properly created portal, properly supported with inbound links, can be much more effective than a google search, or the WP category system, in helping (non-editor) readers find information related to a particular topic. I don't agree that portals should be deleted on the basis that they are (a) often not properly manually maintained and updated; and/or (b) often not much visited. Assuming that the former is the case (and I'm not sure that it is), then automation is the solution. Google has already automated the incorporation of extracts of WP articles into the results of google searches (eg if you google the name of my home suburb, you get a page including an auto-generated infobox with an auto-incorporated up-to-date extract from the Wikipedia article about the suburb). So it's clearly possible for portals to have auto-incorporated up-to-date content. Assuming that portals are not often visited (and, again, I question the assumption), then it seems to me that a large part of the problem is a lack of links from articles to relevant portals. (When I create a new article, I usually include at least one portal link. However, I just randomly visited more than half a dozen substantial articles linked from the main page, and not one of those articles had a portal link.) I agree with the comment above that the solution lies in editing (and, I would add, in automation), not deletion. Bahnfrend (talk) 14:03, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Mixed feelings though I agree that we need to find an incremental way to either depreciate portals (especially those that haven't had significant maintenance or public visibility in the last few years), this should be incremental: first with removing portals from the front page/other main subpages of Wikipedia, and then a gradual process of deletions (could probably be done with PROD on portals with less than 20 pageviews a day). The other option, is to overhaul the infrastructure used for portals, to be driven more by Lua Scripts and Wikidata Queries -- we have much better technology than we did when we first developed them 5-10 years ago: there is benefit in helping folks navigate Wikimedia projects. That being said, the portals have a very low level of demand right now. Sadads (talk) 14:08, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose What the what? I didn't realize this was going on until I saw a portal I have watchlisted tagged by Transhuminist just now. Nobody told me these were outdated when I got Portal:New York City to featured status. All I see here in the supports is that some of them are out of date. Since when do we delete articles that have {{update}} tags on them? I'm not seeing any better reason here. – Muboshgu (talk) 14:13, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that the Featured portal process itself was marked as historical last year could mean that, while Portals aren't necessarily outdated, there could be a fundamental flaw in the system that might not be easily solved. As I've mentioned elsewhere, portal automation has been proposed, which would probably solve the editing activity problem but might not be enough to solve the readership problem. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 14:18, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The point is more than that they are outdated, it is that they don't add to the encyclopedia the way an article fills gaps in coverage; are more effort than they are worth; and readers are not particularly interesting in them despite how often we link them. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:50, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Of course they don't fill in the encyclopaedia in the same way that an article does - they're not intended to. They're collections of articles which should provide a visual taster and a route in to a wide selection of subjects falling under that Portal's umbrella. More effort than they're worth? Explain please. Interest and deletion arguments are being based purely on numbers again. Like a child at school - if you can open one child's eyes to the wonder of a subject like science, geography, the moon, or whatever, that's a real success. So supporters neeed to demonstrate that all Portals turn users away, or fail to let them access articles, or that the server drain is just too high - then they might have a valid argument for mass deletion. But no-one has. It's all WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT as far as I can see. Regarding 'outdated' - I do think there could be an argument to deprecate the use of 'News' sections within portals, or at least to have a guideline to remove these templates if not regularly updated. Nick Moyes (talk) 17:10, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose Per TonyB. They aren't in the way, and deal with POV nonsense on a case by case basis. L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 14:31, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - Portals are not redundant, they are complimentary and should they be depreciated, deletion is the wrong approach.--John Cline (talk) 14:54, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Strongest Oppose. Stating low readership or out of date is a reason for mass deletion is a very very slippery slope. Stats provided by Andrew D. showed that there is plenty of readers and interest in this namespace. Stats and numbers don't lie, and far better than anecdotal comments. It's also hard to imagine that only new readers would stumble upon portal pages (a classic strawman argument), as Wikipedia has been around for 17 years and portal has been around for 13 years. What's needed is to make it more useful and attract more attention, not deletion. I'm also very displeased with this sneaky RfC which didn't consult with portal individuals before proceeding with RfC. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 14:59, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • It was posted at Wikipedia talk:Portal#Ending the system of portals, which is probably the single best place to reach people who care about the portal system (rather than just the portal for one subject). It appeared there one minute after the RFC began. It was also posted at WP:CENT within minutes, and of course at three different RFC lists. It sounds like you didn't happen to see it during the first 72 hours, but this was properly advertised. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:05, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - Neither low readership nor low updating rates are any reason to delete portals. Wikipedia is never complete, it is always being updated. There are many, many articles with low readership and low revisions, - that does not mean they should be deleted either. If Portals serve just a small section of the general readership, that is a good enough reason to keep them. In fact, a portal in need of updating may just prod some reader into editing. Simon Burchell (talk) 15:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. I was editing Wikipedia for quite a while before I was even aware of portals. I came across Portal: Science by following the edit history of a vandal and discovered that many of the "Selected Articles" had been vandalised, some going back many years, and no one was monitoring this. I took it upon myself to watchlist all of the selected articles pages and for many years appeared to be the only one doing so (thankfully, there are a couple of others now). Since then, nearly all the edits I've seen on selected articles has been vandalism, mostly from schools. It would seem that pupils in some schools are being pointed towards our portal pages for research. It is not such a problem if navigation page vandalism goes unfixed for a while, but it is a big problem if article information is corrupted and lies unfixed. That directly harms our reputation. The problem with selected articles is that they contain encyclopaedic information, but are not in mainspace. They are summaries of mainspace articles. I might be tempted to support keeping the portal namespace if these selected article summaries were directly transcluded from the mainspace lead, but the current system just encourages vandalism and errors to remain unfixed for years. Also, as many others have commented, I oppose deletion of Portal:Contents. Many users, especially, lets say, of a certain age, will expect a contents page to help them navigate and it is the second from top selection in the navigation menu. SpinningSpark 15:50, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong oppose deletion of existing portals. While I am not exactly opposed to the prevention of new portals being created, deleting the hard work of many editors, past or present, is going way overboard. "I put lots of hard work into this" is not an acceptable 'keep' argument at AfD, but I think it is when it comes to coverage of notable topics, in a non-article mainspace, from a project which is about collecting and giving access to the sum of all human knowledge. There are lots of portals which are brilliant and fascinating; they have a lot of potential for "random fact of the day"-type learning. And many need no further maintenance.
  However, it may be worth deprecating the project in some way which indicates to new editors, or those just stumbling across portals one day, "if you've got time to invest in Wikipedia, we'd prefer you invest it elsewhere". Even this is quite an extreme measure—we are all volunteers and can choose any (productive) way to contribute that we like.
  As for what should or shouldn't be featured on the main page or the sidebar, that's a discussion for elsewhere. The main page is in dire need of serious overhaul, but for what it's worth I think randomly linking to (former?) featured portals would be a fun thing to do, since this fits in with the TFA, DYK etc. theme of promoting obscure information and springboards to learning something completely new. — Bilorv_(c)(talk) 16:00, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose There is value in a portal system, especially for topics that don't change much, because it can give a reader a broad sense of the topic without wading through an article. I look at Portal:Mountains as a great example of what an overview of a topic could be, as well as a place to recognize featured and quality content. I do think that Portals probably work best when connected to a WikiProject, but I don't like the idea of a mass deletion. --Enos733 (talk) 16:14, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. While we don't gain much from portals existing, we gain nothing from getting rid of them. Their continued existence has more merit than deleting them, and given the volunteer nature of wikipedia, it's not like effort that goes or went into them would automatically be routed elsewhere. GRAPPLE ^X 16:25, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. I've always found portals to be a bad idea, often pushing POV or ideology, and generally misleading. I think we'd be better off without them. :bloodofox: (talk) 16:46, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• I respect your opinion but want to remind you that there are sometimes many editors on any given project and not all of the portals are alike. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 16:52, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• If that's true (and I'm not saying that it isn't), that is an indication of an editing issue and not a deletion issue.--Paul McDonald (talk) 18:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose – the very fact that this RfC has generated a massive response shows that portals are being watched, used, and read. Those who do not watch portals are free to ignore them. – S. Rich (talk) 17:40, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - specifically, deprecate, have bots mark them all as historical, and in time convert them to Outlines or Indexes to serve as centralized "See also" listings per topic.

They don't further our goal of being an encyclopaedia. For me, this isn't about whether they are well-maintained, and applies equally to Portal:Arts. Portals are intended to help users stumble upon quality material on random subtopics within a field. That's not a goal I care about or think Wikipedia should pursue. I like Finnusertop's proposal of topic-specific reference desks managed by WikiProjects, but that seems like a whole new idea, not an adjustment of portals. Daask (talk) 18:38, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose while some portals have been left behind (happens with WikiProjects also), some portals are still maintained regurarly and I wouldn't support just deleting them. I find some of them useful, but if the majority is supporting - I would hope the content of the portals will be moved to another nameroom. --Pelmeen10 (talk) 19:11, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. They are not helpful to our readers and divert the attention and efforts of editors that would be better spent in article improvement. -- 19:16, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ssilvers (talk • contribs) 19:16, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Strongly Oppose: I am using portals.--Maxim Pouska (talk) 19:21, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - by the way, there is presumably some canvassing going on - someone left a message on my talk page asking me to !vote to keep portals. But I really don't think that's the best use of resources. There was a heyday ten years ago when most of them were being well-maintained. Now, they are either poorly maintained or have been long-since automated and are never touched or updated. With fewer people trying to maintain more content, portals are just an opportunity for POV forks of controversial issues. --B (talk) 19:40, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Strongly Oppose: portals are a great way for understanding a topic or for finding your way around a topic quickly. They also help project teams to build a coherent set of particles. But they do need to be properly maintained and that is where our major focus should be. That would raise the quality of the poorer portals. --Bermicourt (talk) 19:44, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support – The only reason I click on portal links is to get to the pages for their related WikiProjects. There are definitely significant issues related to how often they're updated. Take this subpage on the Florida portal: Portal:Florida/Exemplary content. A few days ago I decided to add some recently promoted Florida-related featured article links to it, but I stopped when I realized that my edits were the first ones made to it in 8.5 years. When pages like this get severely out-of-date, it can cause problems. These problems can be avoided if we get rid of portals and put more focus on maintaining and updating WikiProject pages. Jackdude101 ^talk cont 19:44, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. Portals have many functions, as I point out below. Even many of the people who want to delete portals see some valuable content in them that needs to be preserved. Here's an idea: why not leave the content where it is? Contrary to the opinions of many here, portals don't really need a lot of maintenance after they are set up. And they take up very little space. Compare them with navboxes: they often add a lot of clutter to a page and contribute to overlinking, making the page load more slowly – yet you can only delete one if there are no articles transcluding it. Portals add just one link to each page, yet the supporters of this proposal are holding them to a higher standard of usage. RockMagnetist(talk) 21:34, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Opposed While it is necessary to eliminate obsolete software. it is more important not to eliminate the articles associated there on. And though I am in agreement with the elimination of portals that have ceased to function for the purpose that it was originally designed for, however, the elimination of the articles in association with those links should be made with extreme caution.
  Having edited and submitted edits on more than one of these articles; I know that the amount of time place in the study, research, writing and submission process is quite lengthy, due care needs to be taken when entertaining to proposal of elimination of any article. Consequently, I suggest that the 'portals' be reviewed individually, on an article to article basis, rather than the absolute deletion of everything.
  Birdymckee (talk) 21:34, 11 April 2018 (UTC) BirdyMcKee 11 April, 2018 14:34 hrs [Pacific Time] — This comment by Birdymckee was moved to here from a section lower on this page by User:Dcljr in order to keep the discussion from becoming fragmented. Some minor reformatting was necessary to harmonize the comment with the surrounding discussion.[reply]
• Oppose. Portal Poland, just an example, is the best place to go to when in need of having some foreign placename or a piece of difficult text confirmed as properly translated. BTW, is the Foundation running out of space or something? Poeticbent talk 21:40, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Broadly Support ending portals overall, but they should be marked as historical rather than deleted, removed from external search engine results, and links to them removed. The exception is if they are still actively maintained and well-used, although I'm not sure there are many of those. Or if we really want to keep them, then we should fully automate them to automatically stay up-to-date (maybe using Wikidata for things like 'on this day'). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:42, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Obiously a lot of people are squeezing their brains trying to come up with original new solutions for the biggest problem of the Wikipedia comunity in these days: How can we drive off still more contributing editors? We've been quite successful in that, but this proposal is liable to do much more. Sorry, but most people who like to join these discussions apparently do not have the slightest respect for other people's work. But they seem to know exactly how other people use Wikipedia. Or at least how they should use Wikipedia according to their limited horizon! Sorry again, most supporters here do so because they were never able to use a portal. That's prove enough that they are useless, so let's do away with them! I've seen quite a number of promising projects die thanks to this sort of distructive frenzy. Obviously those stupid young enthusiasts were never seen again. My opinion: as long as there is only one user making good use of a portal, that's enough to keep it. But that's just my opinion, and I'm sure you all know better. So should I OPPOSE this fantastic idea or should I simply congratulate everybody for bringing Wikipedia one step closer to suicide? MySpace took a similar highway to oblivion, and several others too. Most astounding: We don't even need Facebook to manipulate ourselves into that direction! Wow!--Lamassus (talk) 22:09, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • WP:AGF, Please. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:01, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Guy Macon: I understand the anger here, some editors here are saying in a nutshell that your project's portal is trash that needs to be disposed of. It gets me a bit irked to see these WP:IDLI comments, just because you may not like or use them doesn't mean you get to have your way over dozens of other editors that do. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:09, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      • I really don't care if people get angry because they think that they have WP:OWNERSHIP over a page. Accusing other editors of "purposely driving off contributing editors" and "not having the slightest respect for other people's work" is not allowed here. And as for your claim that "just because you may not like or use them doesn't mean you get to have your way over dozens of other editors that do", yes we do get to do exactly that -- if tyhat's what the community decides. This is called WP:CONSENSUS and it is how we make decisions here. Both Lamassus and you should post calm, reasoned arguments supporting your position instead of making this into a toxic conversation by refusing to assume good faith. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Guy Macon (talk • contribs) 03:57, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      • (abstainer comment) - Agree with Guy Macon. Lamassus needs to review WP:BATTLEGROUND, WP:AGF, and WP:FOC, and refrain from turning discussions into battles between good guys and bad guys. Knowledgekid87 knows better than to defend or excuse that, let alone participate in it. We have these policies and guidelines for a reason. ―Mandruss ☎ 04:18, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Portals are an integral and useful part of Wikipedia, and if there are some portals with specific problems they should be fixed. Don't destroy everything because of laziness.--יניב הורון (talk) 22:32, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • WP:AGF, Please. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:59, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Initially when I first read this proposal I was going to snow !vote support but re-reading this discussion a few days on it's clear that some editors have done a significant amount of work on various portals. I think Wikipedia is now too big for large changes to be made almost overnight- which the deletion of all portals would entail- without affecting a portion of editors with any change above a certain size. Sure- some unmaintained portals which attract as much as vandalism as views should be deleted, but there's some great examples which editors have dedicated a significant amount of time to, and their contributions, time and effort that they've expended for the encyclopedia shouldn't just be deleted overnight. There's a great action plan above with the idea of automating portals which sounds feasible and should reduce the maintenance overhead. jcc (tea and biscuits) 23:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - I've never seen the point in portals and still don't ..... I'm all for keeping historical things (even useless things!) but for these I support deleting ...... These aren't going to missed, Severely outdated, Severely underused, Better off deleted. –Davey2010^Talk 23:25, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• They wont be missed by you, but yeah all of the other editors who use them... what about them? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:05, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Supports are at 130 and Opposes are at 62 as of this reply .... that would indicate I'm not the only person who wont miss them, Well I'm sure those that do want them will live (if they get deleted that is). –Davey2010^Talk 02:52, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose The whole reason I became a wikipedia editor was to help with a portal. It's useful for me to find all of the information I want easily. However, I think there should maybe be some updates to the portal system? A way to make the news on the topic update without having to manually update it each time would be nice. What I mean about that is that you could put news in it that times out when it is no longer relevant and new things will update into their spots, and the input is just to put in the news, which can be done in advance (for a sports portal, games to be played, stuff like that). Maybe the original purpose of portals isn't what they're used for anymore, but things should adapt and change to fit the new needs of portals. They should not be deleted, but the system should be updated to make them easier to maintain and use. Too many people have spent too much time on portals to just have them be removed, or archived, because many of them will be unhelpful when they aren't up to date. Aabernat (talk) 23:57, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose straight deletion, support reform - The portals used to be highly valuable in aggregating users around a particular subject, agreeing common formatting and quality standards and organising maintenance of articles to keep them up to date and free of vandalism without duplication of effort. They died out not I would argue because they stopped being useful but because they became a lot less prominently featured and there was more centralisation of disputes and article standards in to a smaller elite of editors. The vast majority of more recent editors who have only ever known the centralised approach have never even seen or used them. WatcherZero (talk) 00:01, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Slightly Oppose - For me, I understand where both sides are coming from as their are comments for both for and against this argument. In my thoughts, I do think that we need to somehow improve the portal function of Wikipedia, even if its means putting work into stuff that not many would be seeing. But I do think that there is some portals that doesn't get viewed will need to be deleted but its a case by case basis. Animation is developing 00:03, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Support Some things catch on and others don't. I believe that we have given portals an opportunity, but their disadvantages outweigh their advantages. I'll take Portal:Microsoft as an example. The portal has received less than 100K page views (not bad), but comparing it to Microsoft, which has over 7.6M page views, you start to get the idea of why time spent maintaining them could be better spent elsewhere. Taking it section by section, everything seems to have a place elsewhere.

• Intro --> Intro paragraph of Microsoft
• Selected article --> Article of the day or random article
• Selected picture --> Picture of the day or main article
• Did you know --> Did you know on the main page
• In the news --> Timeline of Microsoft
• Categories/Topics --> Microsoft navbox
• Featured content --> Wikipedia:WikiProject Microsoft
• Associated Wikimedia --> Microsoft external links section

Daylen (talk) 00:13, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose but remove article links and mark as historical the most unused / unmaintained ones, and also ideally ask for some developer resources for easy creation of "automatically" maintained Portals. Portals are obsolete, readers don't use Portals, but they're also basically harmless. If somebody wants to spend a bunch of time making one, go nuts, as long as said editor recognizes nobody is going to read it. As for automatic rotation, it shouldn't be THAT hard for the devs to give us some code that, given a WikiProject or a Category, will automatically rotate between GAs / FAs selected at random and the like, and just dump the lede paragraphs into the Portal. Might vaguely help with freshness issues. SnowFire (talk) 00:36, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I appreciate both the work that editors have put into some portals and the suggestions for reforms, but the ones I checked in the China field have not been edited in years.ch (talk) 02:45, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose While I never really contributed to portals myself, I don't see any issue with having them there. They are technically not in the way of any article or list, so since people are happy to have them, I oppose deleting them.--NadirAli نادر علی (talk) 04:24, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose – This would delete the entire portal namespace, and some portals are viewed fairly often. This would also remove a navigational feature that many readers utilize. Perhaps tag outdated ones as historical instead. Deletion of all portals per some of them being outdated, and subjective reasons such as some users not liking or using them, some thinking they are useless, pointless, etc. equates to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and in the process would throw out thousands of hours of work performed by hundreds of editors in one fell, overarching swoop. It would be quite overly drastic and hasty to mass-delete all of the work that has been performed on portals in such manner. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 04:32, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose While I agree that most are in need of updates, I don't think that's valid rationale for deletion. The few portals in my watchlist that are continuously updated have helped me out a great deal. Perhaps some other reform would be a better alternative to outright deletion.LM2000 (talk) 04:34, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Conditionally oppose I personally find some of the portals very useful but if they could be integrated into something else then obviously I would care less; however the historical nature of them should be valued and like many before have stated, just because they are not as popular as they once were should not force deletion. All of the contents and Indices I see being useful. Indices are what I love as I read through articles in order when I am bored. - speednat (talk)
• Oppose per MuzikAnimal. Let the WikiProjects who scope the portal falls under decide what to do with each portal. That way, the useful ones can be kept and if needed, moved, while other ones in need of improvement can either be worked on by members of that project or deleted. Seems like a common sense solution to me. - ^theWOLFchild 05:05, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong Oppose: From the very beginning of Wikipedia days I found Portals to be useful for exploring a broad topic and considered them one of the more exciting part of Wikipedia. Here are the reasons why I feel portals should be kept:
• They facilitate a reader who wants to explore a topic of interest.

Example: Say I want to explore the topic of Mathematics. As a curious reader I go to mathematics portal. From the selected article section I learn that there is a good article on quadratic equation. I feel interested and I check out the article. If I only visited the Article on Mathematics. I would not have learnt about existence of an article on this topic so easily. Then I look at the DYK section. I see a DYK entry like: “...... that there are 115,200 solutions to the ménage problem of permuting six female-male couples at a twelve-person table so that men and women alternate and are seated away from their partners?” As a person interested in mathematics I immediately become curious. Without encountering this DYK I may not have even known about the existence of ménage problem. Then from Portal:Mathematics I jump into other related portals like Portal:Algebra and so on.

• They give an opportunity to Wiki projects to showcase the output of their work.

Example: I started my Wikipedia journey with Portal:Bangladesh and then wanted to improve the portal. To find more materials to showcase on the portal I ended up exploring numerous Bangladesh related topics and often ended up contributing in many articles.

The below are a couple of reasons why the portals should not be deleted:

• They should not be deleted because they are under-maintained. By this logic all under maintained contents should be deleted.
• They should not be deleted because they have lower number of views. By this logic all contents with low view count should be deleted.

However, we can consider the below:

• We can introduce “notability” criteria for Portal. For example, we can say, to have a Portal on a topic, the main article on the topic needs to be at least a Level:4 Vital Article.
• Portals which fail to maintain their “News” section for full 1 Year may be instructed to remove the news section and replace with a section on “Articles on Recent Developments”. Arman ^(Talk) 05:55, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support The portal system proved to be a dead end. Few, if any, are still being maintained, and they're unlikely to be being used by readers. Nick-D (talk) 06:59, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Hi Nick-D: Out of curiosity, have you checked out any of the page views for portals? Your assessment stating "...they're unlikely to be being used by readers" is countered by page statistics for several portals. For example, Portal:Biography has received 62,874 page views in the last thirty days as of this post. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 07:48, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose deletion, there are hundreds of excellent pages here. Support change, including marking many as out of date or historical, and possibly removing from the Main Page. – SJ + 07:27, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Overall their utility is not proportional to the maintainance effort as separate pages. Some elements (e.g. lists of DYKs) make sense as part of WikiProjects, but the remainder could be archived for posterity. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 07:52, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support: Many are confuse masses of content, difficult to update, and in most cases unsourced (since in most cases they do not use a system of sources).--Eckhardt Etheling (talk) 07:57, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support But: Wouldn't a technical solution like "no activity for 1 year => auto-delete" be sufficient? Also, portals with >= X hits/d (to be defiend) should probably stay as a public interest is proven. Kind regards, Grueslayer 08:41, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose deletion; the Science portal had 122,000 hits. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 08:53, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Strongly Oppose

  

  Having created a couple of portals in recent years, I have a dog in this fight. Portals provide a way of linking articles, images, quotes, DYK’s in a different manner to single articles. Yes they may be out of date, etc. etc. but so are many articles. As per Paul McDonald, this is an editing issue and not a reason for mass deletion...Jokulhlaup (talk) 09:03, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Appear to be generally unused and unmaintained. Wouldn't necessary mass-delete them, but perhaps they could be integrated into Wikiprojects where people are keen to do so Ivar the Boneful (talk) 09:23, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Portals are for readers (this is why enclosing them within WikiProjects is beside the point), and we need the "market research" as suggested by PaleCloudedWhite before we can be sure what forms of navigational aid are most useful to readers. Among portals, indexes, outlines, navboxes, sidebars, TopicTOCs and the rest there is no consistency in which ones exist for a given topic and to what extent they are linked from articles. A save-the-portals plan: (1) take up the ideas for maximum automation of their construction and maintenance; (2) also automate the provision of links from articles, thusly: for each Category assigned to an article, a process follows up the category tree until hitting one that has been marked as corresponding to a portal, then adds a link at the article; (3) keep portals for major topic areas, trimming out those for minor subtopics; (4) be aware that not all readers will have heard of web portals, and the word "portal" otherwise suggests high-flown phrases such as "entering the portals of glory" – so just putting a link saying "All portals" on the main page won't attract many clicks, you need to say "Pick a topic that specially interests you, and here's an overview of how Wikipedia covers that topic": Noyster (talk), 10:03, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion: Ending the system of portals

• Relevant discussion is at Wikipedia talk:Portal#Portals are moribund; Other useful information - there are about 1500 portals 14:31, 8 April 2018 (UTC) 1515 to be precise according to 1 February 2018 dump apparently, listed at User:John_of_Reading/List_of_portals Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:33, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Also see: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 138#RfC about marking the Featured portals process as "historical" --Guy Macon (talk) 15:07, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Some exception would need to be made for the Community portal. This has been getting over 10,000 views daily since it was linked as one of the three exits ("Start helping") from the New user landing page, introduced in conjunction with ACTRIAL. The Help Out section is essential and should be kept as visible as possible. Parts of the Community bulletin board are dusty, but just need more regular maintenance: Noyster (talk), 15:16, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Seeing as this Community Portal isn't even in the "Portal" namespace, I don't believe it would be affected either way. Good page too keep in mind, though. ~Mable (chat) 15:22, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, I did think of that, but I also saw that they're not in portal space, and wouldn't be affected. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:41, 8 April 2018 (UTC) Also, it is entirely different from general portals, being editor facing only (which is presumably why it is in WP space not portal space) and does an okay job of helping editors Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:46, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

...And of course even if there is the occasional useful portal, we can easily make an exception -- possibly with a move to a better namespace. What are the top ten most-visited pages in the portal namespace? --Guy Macon (talk) 16:03, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say 90% likely the top 8 are the ones on the main page, at the top right. But like I said above, I don't think people actually find the ones on the main page useful either, they just click it randomly Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:12, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a pageview graph of those main page portals, anyhow - extremely interestingly, they group into 3 clear bunches Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:24, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I think the top-visited portals are those linked from the left sidebar, Portal:Contents and Portal:Current events and, to a lesser degree, Portal:Featured content (pageview graph). The arguments for deleting the other 1500 portals may not apply to these. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:49, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Ahh, I forgot about them. These seem like they'd be fine in wikipedia namespace, honestly, and would be exempted; they aren't really like the other portals at all, and just seem sort of dumped there because they vaguely explore something Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:58, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Agree Current events is a every active portal and should be moved into a different namespace if all Portals are deleted.  Nixinova  T  C  04:39, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Galobtter: To set everyone's mind at ease, please add an amendment to your proposal (at the very top) exempting Portal:Contents, Portal:Current events, and Wikipedia:Community portal. Also consider exempting Portal:Featured content as it is the front page for the various "Featured" content production departments, and has a link on the sidebar menu that appears on every page of Wikipedia. Thank you.     — The Transhumanist    13:26, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Galobtter: @The Transhumanist: In addition, since there seems to be at present significant opposition to outright deleting the namespace and all related pages, maybe there could be some clarification that deprecation/marking as historical (as opposed to outright deletion) is an option too. Some of the oppose votes seem to be more due to the outright deletion proposal rather than or not just because of a support of the portal system. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 13:31, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm uncertain whether how exactly one should amend a proposal while it has received significant comment - Narutolovehinata5 feel free to add a note like "Note: Certain portals: ...have been suggested for exclusion; other options instead of deletion has also been suggested" or something along the lines of that, keeping neutrality of course Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:56, 11 April 2018 (UTC) and @Transhumanist: too Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:38, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I think it would seem rather inappropriate were the nominator to suggest altering or adding to the wording of the RfC in this way now that it is running, and numerous people have expressed their views. Would that be with the hope of better securing the desired outcome? Was not the removal and relocation by the nominator of previous comments also intended to keep the proposal clear and concise? Nick Moyes (talk) 03:27, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Count of Portal pages form Wikipedia:Database reports/Page count by namespace. Renata (talk) 16:52, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Namespace ID	Namespace	Total pages	Pages with redirects	Pages without redirects
100	Portal	148868	13188	135680
101	Portal talk	36710	2701	34009

• Question - If the current portal system ends, and the portal namespace disappears, presumably this would not prohibit certain active WikiProjects from creating a portal-like page within the WikiProject space, correct? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 17:16, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but the main thing is that they wouldn't be linked from articles - wouldn't be reader facing - and thus wouldn't be at all like the system currently here. Thus ending Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:19, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Broter I do understand that people have spent a lot of time on these, and that is is frustrating to see one's work deleted. However I don't see that portals help much with navigation - since they produce random articles, that isn't really navigation; outlines like Outline_of_science do a far better job. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:23, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Brainstorming: This is a good opportunity to radically re-think the Portal system, which isn't working well under its current inception. Feel free to pitch in with some alternatives for a simple mass-deletion. Here are some ideas:

1. Convert them to links to WikiProjects. This would help readers become editors without the need to route them through the Talk page and a collapsible banner first.
2. Turn them into Reference Desks for specific topics. While article Talk pages are strictly WP:NOTFORUM, I believe that "off topic" discussions between readers and editors could benefit both groups. We'd get an idea of what readers really want to know outside of our sometimes rigid system of articles, and readers would become contributors before they even know it.
3. Turn them into links to Outlines or Indexes to serve as centralized "See also" listings per topic.
4. Automatic listings of Featured content grouped by topics. See Bluerasberry's comment above (cf. Galobtter's for an opposing view).
5. Limiting the number of portals should help concentrate our efforts. Suitable sets could be those featured on the Main Page, some of the top categories at Portal:Contents/Portals, those corresponding with Featured articles categories, or Core topics.

Some more wild ideas? – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 21:28, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• If portal pages are moved/created in wikiproject namespace (e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Foobar/Portal) then this should (1) only be by or with the agreement of the wikiproject and (2) only be a single page (e.g. not the 45 pages currently in Category:Book of Mormon portal). DexDor ^(talk) 20:46, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Would something else replace the links on the main page? It seems like a waste of space to leave almost all of the top banner empty. KSFT ^(t|c) 21:05, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The mainpage is full of information. A little whitespace would be good, or make the rest of the box Wikipedia ... wider and thinner. Legacypac (talk) 21:23, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hey yes, this could be a great opportunity to update the 12-year old main page (only half-kidding!) Aiken D 21:40, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• If this is done, remember to move Portal - No Escape and portal – Libraries and the Academy back to the titles they should be at (I had to do a similar thing myself when Flow was uninstalled). {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 21:33, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Top 7 portals: I think it would be useful to list here the top 7 portals, those that have recieved over 1,000 pageviews a day in 2017. Perhaps we can learn something from them, or focus on replacing/improving their function —

1. Portal:Arts 3,872 / day
2. Portal:History 2,235 / day
3. Portal:Biography 2,178 / day
4. Portal:Science 1,413 / day
5. Portal:Mathematics 1,404 / day
6. Portal:Technology 1,398 / day
7. Portal:Geography 1,063 / day

--Pharos (talk) 22:51, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Those are 7 of the 8 portals on Main Page. The 8th there is Portal:Society which is number 8 in page views with 665 / day. Portal:Food with 429 / day is the most for portals not on the main page. linksto:Portal:Food currently says it has 8,045 links from mainspace. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:07, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Major takeaway - put a link to something in the best position possible on one of the world's top visited pages and it only gets 665 to 3000 odd hits a day => total rejection by the public of this useless content. There is NOTHING wikipedia can do to drive more traffic than those 8 links. Legacypac (talk) 00:21, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any way to find out how many real links go to a particular page as opposed to links because it was added to a template? For example, 1-bit architecture has a huge number of links to it,[12] but if you look at the pages that contain the links they are almost all because it is included in Template:CPU technologies and don't give an accurate picture of how many people are interested enough in 1-bit architectures to link to it. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:25, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that is possible, but It's somehing I've wanted to know for many years too (unrelated to the portals).--Pharos (talk) 23:36, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

User:PrimeHunter/Source links.js produces Source links on 1-bit architecture. It currently says 26 results in all namespaces (10 in mainspace). I also made {{source links}}. {{source links|1-bit architecture}} produces Source links. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:57, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I've done a more comprehensive query, and besides the higher-placed pages that are not conventional portals, the stand-out of those not linked from the Main Page appears to be Portal:Dance, which had 2,227 / day pageviews in 2017.--Pharos (talk) 23:36, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Dance was one of my random examples earlier with only 1,421 views in the past 30 days, meaning 47 per day. The page views graph since the first data in July 2015 [13] shows a jump from around 50 views per day to around 2300 from October 2016 to January 2018, and then back to 50. I don't know the reason but I suspect it's automated views and not humans. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:54, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• I don’t think the idea of turning them over t relevant projects is workable at a time when so many projects are inactive, just as the portals are. The fact that a small number are still being maintained is a credit to those doing so, but it doesn’t change the fact that the system as a whole has been largely abandonded. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:05, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Regarding it being more effort than it is worth - at minimum this would be blanking templates that link to portals/removing templates like {{portal}} from mainspace; then marking portals as historical; this wouldn't be much effort that I can see. Then we can save fiddling about it, and prevent other people from wasting their time for the next 10 years on portals Galobtter (pingó mió) 03:53, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Step 1 - take the portal links of the mainpage and Delete all the portal templates. Readers will not find the portals after that and we can roll up the actual portals whenever we get to them. Dead wikiprojects are another topic for another discussion. Legacypac (talk) 04:00, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

From use PrimeHunter's script, I see there seems basically 0-1 links per portal in mainspace that are not from templates. So it should be simple to use bot machinery to remove all portal links from mainspace, and then marking 1500 pages historical shouldn't be hard either. Most visible non-mainspace links are from linking portals in wikiproject banners which can be removed by removing the |PORTAL= parameter. Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:11, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Has anyone thought of keeping a decreased number of portals, which are highly used and of higher quality? They still serve a purpose and are better than an outline. feminist (talk) 08:19, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• We shouldn't be in haste to ditch the portals. Those who say "let them eat outlines, or indexes" should be aware that there over 1,500 portals to 755 outlines and 660 indexes. Many such popular topics as Football, Cricket and Dogs have a portal but no outline or index. Moreover, in all the topics I have looked at where all three types of navigation page are offered – a portal, an outline, and an index – the Portal receives the most page views of the three. I won't bore you with a table but this holds for such a range of topics as Philosophy, Engineering, Film, Forestry and United States. If we don't have the resources to maintain everything, what needs to go may be the outlines and indexes, which between them reproduce the work of the category structure: Noyster (talk), 13:49, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are two kinds of pages on Wikipedia: pages people look for and pages people stumble upon. Portals, Outlines and Indexes are almost exclusively in the latter category.

For such pages, page views are determined by visibility: how many incoming links are there and from where. With Portals, we have capitalized screen real estate that will be simply wasted if this proposal results in a mass deletion and unlinking operation. The Main Page, See also sections of countless articles, navigational templates, and WikiProject banners all give visibility to Portal links and that's where all the views come from. Even if we do away with Portals, we could use this visibility for something else. In my comment above, I suggested placing Outline and Index links where Portal links are now. We should definitely think about how to make the best out of these links. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 16:23, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Example of a Portal which should stay on wikipedia is: Portal:Right-wing populism
  • Example of a Portal which should be deleted on wikipedia is: Portal:Left-wing populism--Broter (talk) 19:26, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I agree the left-wing one is definitely not maintained, but yeah, if anything, the bias that would result from one portal being deleted but not the other is an argument against selective deletion/archival and for unilateral action on all portals. Ian.thomson (talk) 20:10, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• As a first step, I would suggest removing all links to the portal namespace from the mainspace. This would essentially remove portals from the encyclopedia proper and out of the sight of readers, relegating them to the status of "projectspace" pages. The portals themselves would then be allowed to remain for at least 6 months to 1 year so editors and respective wikiprojects have time to preserve any unique content not present elsewhere etc. Particularly useful portals could be preserved as wikiproject subpages. — Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 19:55, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • My first preference however, would be removing all links to the portal namespace from the mainspace, then marking all portals {{historical}} as has been suggested above.— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 20:03, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Question - if portals are to be discontinued, will there be anything that takes over from their job? Namely (from WP:PORTAL) to help readers and/or editors navigate their way through Wikipedia topic areas. I guess Outline of X and templates at the side of the main article do something like this job, and possibly much better than a portal. Is that the idea?  — Amakuru (talk) 21:03, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That's the impression I've had. I've used a portal maybe two or three times the entire time I've been here, but I use those templates pretty regularly and "Outline of..." articles whenever I want to access a lot of articles on a topic really quickly. Ian.thomson (talk) 21:43, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Love the "outline of" pages, hate the templates. Look at 1-bit architecture. Instead of that huge wall of links at the bottom, Wouldn't it be nicer to have a simple link to Outline of CPU technologies, and have that page contain the wall of links? What percentage of readers who are interested in 1-bit architectures are looking for a see also link to SUPS? I would say that the answer is "zero". --Guy Macon (talk) 01:06, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not opposed to having both. Whichever format I find easier to read depends on the subject and how much caffeine I've had. Sometimes I have an easier time with tables, sometimes with lists.

Since the idea of automation has come up elsewhere in this discussion, I imagine it wouldn't impossible to write a template that'd turn an "Outline of" article into one of those templates. Like, some sort of mark-up that doesn't show up in the article, that you wrap around entries that are supposed to show up in the template, that's look something like {{Subst:OutlineEntry | (line number) | [[Article Title]] }}. Then the template would just be {{ (template name) | 1=[[Article|(name of first row)]] | 2=[[Article2|(name of second row)]] }}. That should be far less work to set up than automating portals. Hell, I could probably work out how to how to do templates for an Outline-to-Table dealy, and the coding nightmare that is WP:BINGO is an anomalous highpoint for me. Ian.thomson (talk) 22:07, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• I am concerned that editors currently maintaining portals may not be aware of this discussion. Can someone create a neutrally-worded edit notice for the portal namespace? And if we want to hear from readers, maybe even a namespace-specific site notice. -- John of Reading (talk) 06:24, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Seems a reasonable idea - what do people think of adding to Template:Editnotices/Namespace/Portal? I also wonder if the editnotice should exclude Portal:Current_events and its subpages (which are probably the most active portal pages..but wouldn't be affected by this proposal), Portal:Contents, and Portal:Featured_content from the editnotice Galobtter (pingó mió) 12:59, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Seems like a good idea. While relatively few people remain active in portal contribution, nevertheless there should still be the courtesy of informing them or at least letting them be aware of this discussion. We need more input from regular portal contributors so that their voice can be heard, and at the same time their feedback can be used in implementing whatever consensus this discussion results in. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 15:08, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Question In the first place, how technically feasible is it to delete portals? It seems like a lot of work and honestly sounds like a waste of resources, when archiving and moving to the Wikipedia space (both for active and non-active portals) sounds like a more practical option. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 12:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I propose we find a new home for some portals that are well maintained. The obvious one is Portal:Current events would could end up as Wikipedia:In the news/Current events. The current events portal is widely viewed, receives lots of edits by many editors, and complements mainspace by effectively serving as a giant list of events. It is used to identify possible entries for WP:ITN/C and editors often also use it to identify information that can/should be added to mainspace articles. As such, it actively improves mainspace. I don't know much about other portals but I imagine similar cases could also find homes. -- BobTheIP editing as 2.28.13.227 (talk) 17:41, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

One problem is - there are eight linked words and 'All portals' in a corner on the top of the MP - so how many people notice them?

Perhaps the subsidiary question - given that 'a proportion' of Wikipedians (regular or occasional) are involved with starting, developing or improving particular categories of articles, for whom the various portals are, or are potentially, relevant means of navigating Wikipedia, how should the portals' presence be highlighted and/or made user friendly? Can they be variously developed so that the imbalances/absence of coverage on the MP regularly commented on can be addressed to some extent? To what extent should under-achieving portals be highlighted, so that contributors come to their rescue? Jackiespeel (talk) 16:51, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Automated portals

The most common complaint about portals is that they have an insane ammount of maintenance required, and very few users willing to engage in it. And the problem is that we have hundreds of portals, each one with its own set of subpages, and each one is a domain in itself. So, a possible solution: why not automate and centralize the work? Take for example the featured article J. R. R. Tolkien. He may be a suitable featured article for the portals on middle-earth, biography, literature, speculative fiction, etc. Under the current system, each portal has to make their own "Portal:(name)/J. R. R. Tolkien" to place the blurb that will use. And also watch if the article loses the featured article to remove it, or add it when it gets featured. But we may have a single "Portal/J. R. R. Tolkien" general subpage, with a general blurb, and add tags to it to instruct the bots about the portals that should include it. Same for the page for image blurbs, quote blurbs, etc. That would greatly reduce the number of pages, keep them organized at a single place, and most of the work would be done by bots.

A second idea would be to restrict the topics that may get a portal to those truly diverse. A portal for music, or a music genre, is justified, but a portal for a certain band can hardly be. Add a requirement of "At least X articles in scope" and "at least Y good or features articles wihin the scope". Less portals, less pages to mantain, and easier to deal with. The fandom of Z wants a portal, but there are not featured articles enough? Then make those featured articles, and then the portal. Cambalachero (talk) 19:14, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This has been proposed above, and while it might solve the editing inactivity problem, it wouldn't solve the Portal system's other major flaw: outside of just a few portals (mentioned by Andrew D. below), the vast majority barely get any views. Even the ones with a high number of views might be better off in the Wikipedia namespace anyway. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 00:07, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Main page link traffic in 2018

This proposal to destroy all portals seems to be based on the misconception that they are not used. Here's some actual stats which refute this nonsense. It's a list of the pages currently linked on the main page, ranked by their views in 2018. I've only listed the top 100 as they seem adequate to make the point. One can see from this that the portal pages get plenty of traffic and that this is comparable with other pages. If numbers are what matters then there's a better case for deleting other WP pages such as Wikipedia:Village pump. Andrew D. (talk) 23:22, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

To give a fair overview, could we please see the above table containing only links that have been on the main page for six month or more? Comparing current movies and events with permanent mainpage links is comparing apples and oranges. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:47, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, every single one of the portals listed in that table is either on the main page or the permanent sidebar. Of course they are going to have massive pageviews. --Izno (talk) 02:49, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The top item bolded as a "portal" is Wikipedia:Community portal which is not a portal and not included on this proposal. Legacypac (talk) 04:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Here's the list, edited to show only those pages which have a regular link on the main page. It seems clear that the portal traffic is comparable with other standard features such as the Help desk or Introduction to Wikipedia. These links have all had thousands of readers since the start of the year and so the claim that they are not used is false. Of course, the main users of such links will be new or occasional readers rather than we veterans. But those users are not represented here in this discussion, are they? Andrew D. (talk) 07:56, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• So the word "free" on the main page gets roughly 100,000 hits and an uninteresting link like "Local Embassy" gets roughly 20,000. And how many hits does the main page get? I want to calculate what percentage of visitors click on those two links. --Guy Macon (talk) 12:31, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Just because a link gets traffic does not mean it is getting “used”. Viewing a page does not equate to using it. Page views is not the only argument in favour of making portals obsolete. Aiken D 15:17, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to delete inactive portals then fine, but don't try and blanket them all as unused and obsolete as this isn't true based on editor comments here. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:20, 11 April 2018 (UTC) In my opinion even the inactive ones should be marked as historical rather than deleted. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:26, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• I reckon anything linked up there, be in a blank page or a portal would get about the same views (and especially if they were also linked in a few hundred/thousand pages, and a few hundred thousand talk pages) - views from being on the main page I don't think signify too much other than random clicks as I said in my support Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:52, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Are there statistics that compare "logged in" with "logged out" users? I suspect that a huge portion of the visitors to portals are Wikipedia editors going there to maintain them as opposed to readers randomly looking at them. --B (talk) 19:35, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What about Portals that are exempt from this discussion or otherwise kept?

It seems that there's consensus or at least significant support to keep at least some portals: notably Portal:Current events and the like. Assuming the proposal to deprecate the Portal namespace passes, what will happen to these pages? Will the Portal namespace be kept for them alone, or will they be moved to another namespace like the Wikipedia namespace? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 13:39, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This is the issue... nobody is thinking these things out. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:43, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm? Like I suggested above, the wikipedia namespace seems fine for these, seeing as they are barely like other portals, and the moves shouldn't be too onerous to do Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:58, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

These are part of Wikipedia's core navigation system:

1. Portal:Contents

(see this page for the list)

Such as retain the Portal namespace just for these: Portal:Contents, Portal:Featured content, and Portal:Current events.

Thank you.     — The Transhumanist    10:36, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I've replaced the list to a more convenient link to prefixindex, that also doesn't burden the page more. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:58, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Move the useful pages to Wikipedia namespace. Remove the Portal namespace completely. Everytime someone brings a Portal to MfD the discussion runs along the lines of "we dislike portals but we wamt to deal with them all, not piecemeal. As long as Portals are allowed to exist we should keep this one." So here we are - discussing them all. Legacypac (talk) 17:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand this. Wikipedia namespace is targeted at editors and is mostly used for maintenance and discussion, so it wouldn't make sense for pages that readers use to be located there. The portal namespace, however, is more reader-targeted, similar to article namespace. Master of Time (talk) 06:31, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There is one special portal that I watch and maintain: Portal:Example (I also keep an eye on Template:Example, Help:Example, Book:Example, Module:Example, etc. -- mostly reverting vandalism and dealing with misplaced talk page messages). If all other portals are deleted or moved into a different namespace, Portal:Example should be deleted. If a single portal is left in the portal namespace, Portal:Example should be left as well. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:22, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If portals are deleted, please move all the topics pages from subject portals to the outline WikiProject, for harvesting