Portal talk:Weather/How to contribute

Welcome! If you are here, it's because you are interested in helping maintain, update, or fix Portal:Weather or one of its subpages. This page gives an overview of how the different sections of the portal are organized, and how you can improve the portal yourself. For quick suggestions on content to be included here, see Portal:Weather/Suggestions

On this day
The "On this day" section features a random blurb linking to an article that is related to or occurred on that date in history. The main Portal Page features blurbs from the current date as well as 3 days before and after that date. Each blurb is in the following format:

{| class=wikitable style="margin-left:50px" cellpadding=4 width="85%"
 * - style="font-size:97%"

Date
Year (bolded and wikilinked): A sentence or two describing the subject of the article (bolded and wikilinked) and (if unclear) what makes that event notable.
 * }

Some blurbs can feature multiple weather-related articles for a date if they are related; in that case, all of those articles should be bolded and wikilinked. Other relevant wikilinks can be included, but should not be bolded if they are not linked to an event on that date.

Some examples of articles that can be featured in an "On this day" blurb include:


 * A weather event which occurred, began, or ended on that date
 * A notable meteorologist or other atmospheric scientist who was born or died on that date
 * A weather-related agency or company that was founded on that date

December 24
1968: Allegheny Airlines Flight 736 crashed on approach to Bradford Regional Airport in Bradford, Pennsylvania during a driving snowstorm, killing 20 of the 47 people on board.

September 19
1914: A tropical storm, the only tropical cyclone of the 1914 Atlantic hurricane season, dissipated over coastal Louisiana. This was the least active Atlantic hurricane season on record.

August 8
2010: Heavy rain and flooding led to catastrophic mudslides which killed more than 1,400 people in Zhugqu County, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, China. This was just part of a larger series of floods and mudslides which killed more than 3,000 people across southern and central China over the summer.

Adding new event
Ideally each date should have at least two events listed, so that when readers refresh the page they will see a different set of events for that date. Currently, a number of dates only have one event with an associated article (a list is maintained at User:Runningonbrains/Portal_needed_dates), so if you know of events with an associated article which occurred on any of the dates listed there, that would be an ideal candidate for addition!

First, create a new sub-page for that date
Each date has its own page, in the format Portal:Weather/On this day list/DATE (For example, Portal:Weather/On this day list/). Each of these date pages also has a number of sub-pages in the format Portal:Weather/On this day list/DATE/number; number is just an integer number of subpages starting at 0 (For example, Portal:Weather/On this day list//0, Portal:Weather/On this day list//1, etc.). You should find the first sub-page number that does not yet have an event, and create that page with the appropriate blurb, formatted as described above.

After creating the sub-page, go to the main page for that date (you should be able to click the link just below the main title of the page) and edit that page. Here is where the real magic happens! You will see a complicated bunch of syntax and links such as this:

The page is set up this way so that when viewing the page, you can see all events for that date, but when that page is transcluded (such as on the main Portal page) it will only show one of the event subpages randomly. The first line is the date as a level-4 section header. The next line starts with the "noinclude" tag, and transcludes the first subpage. If there are more sub-pages, these will appear on the following lines. The final line closes the "noinclude" tag, and starts an "includeonly" tag for the random page selection. The final "Rand" function takes 3 arguments: the first is the number of subpages to choose from (in this case, 2), and the last two are "seeds" to the random function; by convention, the first seed is the day of the month, and the second seed is 23.

To add our new page to the above example, we would add the line " " before the final line, and edit the "2" in the Rand function on the final line to a "3". That's it!