Category talk:Portals/Archive 1

Portals for a geographic location [original]
The top category for portals tied to geographic locations is Category:Portal:Geographic. This category is hierarchically organized. The following categories are the top-level categories in the hierarchical organization of geographic portals:
 * Category:Portal:Africa
 * Category:Portal:Americas
 * Category:Portal:Asia
 * Category:Portal:Europe
 * Category:Portal:Oceania

Included in the geographic portal hierarchy are the following related portals that are tied to the geographic category:


 * Countries, states, cities or subregions
 * Places (including universities, landmarks, and other places of interest)
 * Government agencies

—Doug Bell talk•contrib 09:13, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
 * These should be subcategories of a Category:Portal:Geography not Category:Portals.--cj | talk 07:06, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I certainly don't object to that approach&mdash;it is a more correct categorization, and I considered doing that myself. On the other hand, it didn't seem unreasonable to me to eliminate the top level of that categorization and just have the major geographic regions of the world directly included in the Portals category. However, I would still keep the individual portals for the major geographic regions in the Portals category (as they currently are). —Doug Bell talk•contrib 07:32, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Blatant nonsense
*Official statement from a student of Jakob Nielsen: A 'portal' refers to a location on the World Wide Web while a 'Wikiportal' should refer to 'Wikiportals' here on Wikipedia. The 'portal' use confuses users. Let us clarify this as soon as possible. I suggest 'portal' designers begin their conversion to 'wikiportal' immediately. I should know. Like Al Gore, I built the Internet. Ha! Anyway, I have started the switch to Wikiportals with the new Central Intelligence Agency Wikiportal which you can find here Sincerely, CelebritySecurity 22:38, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I've struck the above as blatant nonsense, which had confused some users at Wikipedia talk:Portal.--cj | talk 05:30, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Portal:Nanotechnology
Wikipedia really needs this portal (link). However, I'm not an expert in the field, so I can't start it. Hopefully someone else can.--Arado 10:03, 8 April 2006 (UTC) [added link that was in heading Brian Jason Drake 11:12, 8 April 2006 (UTC)]


 * You may be able to get help at Talk:Nanotechnology. Please don't use links in the heading as with some styles/skins, you can't see them. Brian Jason Drake 11:12, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

How to clean up a major portal category
See Category:Sports and games portals (as of today, except that one poorly-named category is awaiting a speedy rename).

The salient cleanup points:
 * If there are two or more like items (e.g. several portals on motorsports of different sorts) create a subcategory for them, and move them into it (i.e., don't just add the new category to the portal; actually change its categorization so that it is removed from the original, overly-broad portal category). Another way of putting it: Make it work like stub categories - if something can be put into a more specific category put it there and not in any parent category.
 * To clarify, a huge part of the messiness problem in most of the subcats. of Category:Portals is that a large number of portals that have their own portal categories (e.g. for storing transcluded widgets), categorize both the portal page and the portal category into the same parent portal category (this is like putting both Snooker and Category:Snooker in Category:Cue sports - it's silly, redundant and makes parent categories bloated and hard to read.
 * Make all the subcategories consistently named.
 * Make sure all categorized items sort in a sane manner.
 * If current events portal archive pages are being generated for the topic (they are for sports, science & technology, and many geographical areas such as Canada, UK, Japan, etc.), move them all into a subdirectory, and inform the talk page of the "live" current events portal in question about the new categorization. Put the "live" page in there too. See Category:Sports and games current events portals for an example.

I probably should have saved some kind of snapshot of what Category:Sports and games portals looked like before today's cleanup. It was basically an unpenetrable, chaotic morass. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 09:38, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

PS: Category:Geography portals is pretty clean too, but only at the top level. By the level of Category:European portals it's a big mess with portals and their categories redundantly appearing in this same category, and very little subsectioning going on to group related portals (e.g. all British portals in there in one subdirectory instead of scattered). —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 11:26, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Portal categories as subcategories of "main" categories
This is a common occurrence and a typical example of this is as follows: Portal:Norway is a member of Category:Norway - this is reasonable as a browsing reader interested in all things Norwegian might want to look at the portal. (I wonder if actually this is best achieved by putting the portal link on the category page, rather than the portal page inside the category, but that's a different matter).

Less reasonably, Category:Norway portal is also a subcategory of Category:Norway. This category is really of zero use to a browsing reader. The category page itself contains information about the Wikicode that can be added to an article to make the portal link appear - useless and confusing to a non-editing reader. The category itself mostly contains the portal "widgets" that even experienced article-editors of Wikipedia might find confusing! And anyway, the category is part of Category:European portals so I'm sure that an editor who really is interested in getting portals into shape, is going to be able to find it okay. Really I think it should be in Category:WikiProject Norway where Norway editors can get hold of it, and not Category:Norway where it will just confuse readers. But this seems to be repeated wholesale across most portal categories; there is variation on whether or not they are under the WikiProject categories but they are almost invariably in the "main" reader categories too, and I really don't think that's acceptable when their contents are so confusing, technical and editor-centered. Am I alone in thinking this? TheGrappler (talk) 13:41, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Category:Norway portal should definitely not be a subcategory of Category:Norway, per the very clear wording of WP:SELFREF. It should be in Category:WikiProject Norway and Category:European portals of course.  I follow you that Norway's not some weird case, but that load of portals are miscategorized this way. They are clearly miscategorized, though. Internal Wikipedian editorial categories are never added to article categories. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 06:13, 16 June 2010 (UTC)