User:DexDor/Portals

This essay is about portals in the English language Wikipedia.

Who uses portals?
As a reader of Wikipedia I've never used a Wikipedia portal page, nor have I ever seen anyone else who uses Wikipedia (e.g. at home or work) use a portal.

In my experience, most people access a Wikipedia article by googling for something and clicking on the link that appears. They may then click on a blue link to navigate to another article (if they realise what the blue font means; not all readers do ). Such people are unlikely to ever come across a link to a portal (or to understand what it is if they do come across such a link). Note: I am not suggesting that this is a "problem" to be solved by adding more prominent links to portals.

The purpose of portals
The "official" purpose of portals is specified as:
 * "Portals serve as enhanced "Main Pages" for specific broad subjects. Portals are meant primarily for readers, while encouraging them to become editors of Wikipedia by providing links to project space."

Note: Main Page alternatives doesn't (as of May 2019) mention portals.

Some editors have suggested alternatives/refinements - e.g.:
 * "The idea of a Portal is to help readers and/or editors to manoeuvre their way through Wikipedia."
 * "[The purpose of portals is] to provide an attractive overview of Wikipedia coverage of a broad topic area for the benefit of readers new to Wikipedia"
 * "Portals are a way of guiding readers through a topic; in an engaging and tangible way."
 * "They help to showcase our best or most interesting content on specific topics and draw readers in. Often portals are linked with projects and have lists of "things you can do" – a great way of encouraging readers to become editors."
 * "[Consider] someone who maybe doesn't yet know much about (say) volleyball, but wishes to explore the sport through Wikipedia. Searching on "volleyball" will bring them to what is, rightly, a lengthy article going into detail about the rules and tactics. Only at the very end do they come to some navigational aids guiding them to aspects of the sport not covered in the article itself. A well-designed portal can benefit such a reader by bringing together different elements of Wikipedia's coverage in an attractive, compact package, from which they can branch out in any desired direction."

Other editors appear to believe that portals are to assist editors:
 * "A centralized hub is important for the improvement of a topic."

Other editors don't think the purpose of portals needs to be explained:
 * "the purpose of portals is to serve as portals. I don't know why there is a question as to what is the purpose of portals is in the first place, but if that's the question, then yes, the answer is really that simple."

Problems caused by portals
Note: There are several types of portals (e.g. portals built from subpages and "automatically-generated" single page portals); some of the problems listed below may apply mainly/exclusively to certain types of portals.

Presenting poor information to readers
Some portals have been created by taking a copy of text from an article (sometimes without attribution) - e.g. copying part of the Foobar article to Portal:Foobar/Intro. However, there are likely to be fewer people maintaining the copied text than are maintaining the original text (which is reasonable as most readers will go to the article rather than to the portal). A portal may thus provide poor (compared with the corresponding article) information to readers - in particular:


 * The information on a portal page may be out of date (compared with the corresponding article) - e.g. telling readers that Obama was (still) the President of the USA months/years after that was no longer correct.


 * Portals may contain uncited/unclear/biased information - e.g. ".... Despite the fears that many people have of nuclear energy, it is a very safe energy source.".


 * Portals may be vandalised - e.g. edits to Portal:Geography/Featured biography/2. Note: Cluebot NG has not (as of December 2017) been trained to check edits to the Portal namespace, so vandalism has to be checked manually and lasts longer. Sometimes a vandal's first edit is to a portal  - possibly because the article they wanted to vandalise was protected they vandalised the linked portal instead.  Even portal subpages are not immune from vandalism.

Other problems directly affecting readers
Other problems caused by portals include:


 * Portals have inconsistent formats.


 * Many portal pages are badly formatted (e.g. on small screens).


 * Many portal pages have redlinks or broken links (e.g. to Wikispecies).


 * Portals often present poorly worded material to the reader - e.g. "Do you have a question about Supermarket that you can't find the answer to?Consider asking it at the Wikipedia reference desk.".


 * Portals can encourage users to make bad edits to articles.

Waste of work and frustration
In April 2018 there were approximately 1,485 portals (source?). Over the following months thousands of (mostly single-page) portals were created with the number of portals reaching close to 5,705 in February 2019. Many portals were then deleted so by May 2019 there were 1,135 portals. In addition, many portals were converted into single page portals and then reverted and deleted subpages were recreated - a great waste of time and creative energy of good faith editors, generating conflicts and frustration among editors (example discussion).

Negative effects of portals on editors
Portals use (waste) editor resources that could be better spent improving/maintaining other parts of the encyclopedia. E.g:


 * Editors spend time creating / editing / maintaining / discussing portals.
 * Portals cause watchlist and edit history noise on other (non-portal) pages (as links to portals are added/removed or as other changes are made to articles to support portals ).


 * Portals add to the workload of deletion discussions at WP:MFD etc. Some portals have been repeatedly created (or part created and then abandoned) and deleted. . As portals are not articles, but are (in theory) reader-facing it is sometimes unclear which policies/guidelines apply to portals; this can complicate discussions about portals. Even some discussions that don't explictly mention portals are actually about (unnecessary) infrastructure created to support portals.

Portals cause (unnecessary) conflict between editors (and hence stress).

A portal can cause the creation of many (sometimes hundreds) of supporting pages - e.g. sub-pages, templates and categories. These pages often show up when doing maintenance activities and mean more work when the portal is deleted (example MfD). Some of the pages created to support portals (but not in the Portal namespace) have been incorrect.

Sometimes editors are confused about the distinction between portals and wikiprojects - e.g. editors ask for help at a portal talk page instead of at the corresponding wikiproject talk page - and usually get no response (probably because so few active editors have the portal watchlisted). This may be exacerbated because even those who create portals often muddle up portals and wikiprojects.

Arguments about portals have led to at least one editor being indefinitely blocked and at least one Wikipedia administrator being de-sysopped.

Other problems
Other problems caused by portals include:


 * Portals add to the complexity of Wikipedia (especially for editors) - for example:
 * They can complicate categorization.
 * The use of the term "portal" to mean different things can be confusing.
 * They add code to articles that editors may not be familiar with.
 * Portals can result in more infrastructure being created e.g. userbox templates such as Template:User Portal:Israel and hence categories (e.g. Category:Portal user templates) and talk page messages about userboxes. This is getting further and further from anything likely to benefit readers of the encyclopedia.


 * Portals often break the normal convention of separating reader-side stuff from editor-side stuff (e.g. when portals have things like a to-do list - often copying or duplicating a wikiproject to-do list or very out of date).


 * There's clutter on other pages (including category pages and talk pages ) for links to portals. This sometimes includes redlinks. Links to portals are sometimes put where they are inappropriate (e.g. on a disambiguation page).


 * Portals seem to attract bad edits.


 * Portals can be content forks. See notes in the 2018 RFC and the ISIS portal MFD.


 * Portals use some storage space.

Confusion between portals and wikiprojects
Some examples of confusion between portals and wikiprojects are listed below.


 * Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Rhön is an example where the portal creator/maintainer appears to see the portal as a sort of blend of a portal and a wikiproject (there being no wikiproject for Rhön).  E.g. the portal (as of April 2019) has sections headed "New articles" (under "Tasks"), "Members" (displayed as "embers" when viewed on a small screen) and even "Events and Meetings" (empty). In the MFD the portal creator argues that portals "are a vital tool for maintaining and improving coverage of a topic" and expresses surprise when told that portals are intended to be a "main page" for a topic (and hence should be suitable for readers).


 * I do think that portals can offer some features that can not be easily included in the mainspace. A good example, the way I see it, is the Portal:Byzantine Empire/Weblinks section. A portal is not simply about giving an "enhanced overview" in width (a moderately good main article does that already) but also provide some depth and variety of assistance and, perhaps, serve as a point of reference not only for readers, but for editors involved in a topic as well (TODO lists, links for assistance and tools, etc), something like a mainspace WikiProject.

Sometimes both a portal and the corresponding wikiproject have a to-do list regarding the topic, but whether anyone uses the portal to-do list is another matter - e.g.:
 * Portal:Arctic/WikiProjects/todo was created in 2008 and (as of August 2019) had not been updated since (the only later edits were wikignoming of links). So, for example, Arctic Hare was listed as a stub, but that article has not been a stub since 2009.  I.e. editors were not maintaining that to-do list. The portal to-do page appeared to duplicate the WikiProject's to-do list.

Quotes
portals [are] a drama field of marginal utility with pitifully low pageviews, no broad consensus of their future, held in limbo between the ENDPORTALS consensus not to just zap the lot, and the lack of any stable consensus on what they are for, what they should look like, what topics are suitable, and how they should be built.

they offer some "work" for volunteers to do that seems cool, but is actually of almost no relevance whatsoever, because the sad truth is that readers hardly ever visit Portals.

[Portal:Zimbabwe] is *worse* than useless. Any reader finding this reader-facing page will see unmaintained, out of date, wrong information, and with its highly complicated wikimarkup, they will likely be dumbfounded by any attempt they may make to fix it. Compare with Zimbabwe, which is easily edited, and existing text is directly coupled to sources, which is what we want readers to see and understand.

It's time to stop luring editors into fettling a type of page whose heyday was over before Wikipedia was even created. Most of these portals are simply redundant forks of the head article, which offer much less navigational utility than the head article. And just look again at that pageview data: readers do not want them.

Wikipedia already has way too many features that provide little value to readers but consume inordinate amounts of editors' time (like category tags, sorting tags, stub tags, editorial tags, navboxes, wikiprojects, article evaluation, citation templates, ...). If there is an area where the Foundation should rule without piety is in the weeding out of useless features and complexity. Will it ever have the courage to do so?

the portals simply don't aid readers, at least not in any non-negligible numbers (based on their pageviews). Editors looking for somewhere to help out on the project need to be pointed in directions other than portals, because it's just busywork when we have millions of mainspace articles with serious issues that desperately need editor attention (and not the tag-bombing kind, the kind where people dive in and actually start fixing the article's problems).

mass-created portals are pointless and add nothing in the way of real content to the encyclopedia: they are all front and no bottom. This is exactly the kind of thing that quickly puts readers off. People come here to find real pages written by humans. If there is value in portals at all, it is in carefully hand-crafted introductions to a field. You won't find that in any of the pages here.

all portals require regular maintenance. That's why most of them are so dire, because editors like building them but doesn't enjoy the drudgery of ongoing monitoring them.

The history of MFD is littered with the ghosts of many hundreds [of] portals where one enthusiastic editor built or maintained a portal, but then gave up editing or moved on to other topics, and the portal rotted for years.

"Portals are basically a failed concept, because readers virtually never look at them. This portal gets 10 page views per day, probably almost all from search engines. Once a portal dies, there is no reasonable motivation to work on it (since nobody will ever look at it), and therefore no real reason to keep it."

"New encyclopedia program features will likely eventually render most portals obsolete."

"attempting to build a comprehensive navigation system in the portal namespace, which gets a tiny fraction of traffic by comparison [with articles], is misguided effort."

"I personally don't believe that portals are sustainable or justifiable if they're only being updated by, for lack of a better term, The Portal Rescue Crew. Portals need people with an interest in the subject who are willing to dedicate their time to maintaining specific portals as opposed to jumping from one to the other to try and keep them all running, and I just don't see that level of interest here."

Do portals help readers?
Two newish features of the Wikimedia software (MediaWiki) mean that articles and navboxes offer much/all of the functionality which some portals set out to offer. Both features are provided by default to people who are not logged in to Wikipedia (i.e. ordinary readers) - Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.
 * The Page Previews (a.k.a. Hovercards) feature means a user on a PC can (by moving the mouse cursor over a link) get a quick preview of a linked topic whilst reading a page. For logged in users this feature is disabled by default ; it can be turned on by going to User Preferences and then the Appearance tab.
 * automatic imagery galleries: clicking on an image brings up an image gallery of all the images on that page. It's full-screen, so it's actually much better than a click-for-next image gallery on a portal.

The content of a portal
The things appearing on a portal page are typically some of the following (listed approximately in the order in which they typically occur):
 * Links to Contents/Portals.
 * Graphics - e.g. an image and/or colour scheme relevant to the topic.
 * A welcome message e.g. "Welcome to the Foobar Portal".
 * A copy/transclusion of the start of the article corresponding to the portal's topic (the portal's main article). This is done either by automatically copying the current lede of the article (e.g. using Template:Transclude lead excerpt) or by the portal creator having (possibly many years ago) copied part of the topic's main article (known, e.g. in MFD discussions, as a "forked subpage").
 * A copy/transclusion of a (randomly chosen) article from a set of articles that the portal creator (and in a few cases other editors) has chosen. The randomness means that a brief look at a portal may not reveal problems with the portal - e.g. that only one article is ever shown or that some of the articles are not actually about the portal's topic .  As with the portal's main article, the excerpt is either an automatic copy of part of the current article (which may not mention the portal's topic ) or a forked subpage (which may be out of date).
 * More (randomly chosen) articles shown under headings such as "Selected biography" or "Selected ship".
 * A (randomly chosen) image from a set compiled by (usually) the portal creator. However, for readers of Wikipedia a much better gallery of images for a topic can be obtained by clicking on an image in the topic's article. Advantages include that images are shown using more of the screen (which is especially important for the many readers using mobile devices with small screens), the set of images is likely to be better (less the choices of one editor, more up to date, can include fair-use images) and that this facility can be used on any page (not just articles that have a corresponding portal).
 * A (randomly chosen) selected quote.
 * A (randomly chosen) selected question.
 * A "Did you know...?" (DYK) section. This attempts to be like the DYK section of Wikipedia's Main Page, but (without the scrutiny that proposed Main Page DYKs get) it can become a set of unreferenced (and sometimes inaccurate) trivia. These are sometimes referred to (e.g. in MFD discussions) as "fake DYKs".
 * An "In the news" section. This can be very misleading - for example, in 2019 Portal:Cycling's news still said "July 22: Chris Froome wins Tour de France" (6 years after the event).
 * A list of subcategories.
 * A "Featured content" section. This is usually an automatically-generated list of the best quality articles (FAs and GAs) that have been tagged by the portal's wikiproject. This can include articles that the wikiproject has tagged as being of low importance to them. The articles may not even mention the portal's topic. Sometimes (e.g. in MFD discussions) editors mistakenly (or misleadingly) claim these lists are more relevant to the portal's topic than they are.
 * Links to related portals.
 * A "Things you can do" list. This usually either transcludes a page from the relevant wikiproject or is a portal subpage that is rarely, if ever, updated.
 * A transclusion of a template for the topic - usually/always the same template that's shown at the bottom of the portal's main article.
 * Links to wikiprojects.
 * A section titled "Associated Wikimedia".
 * Further links e.g. to subpages of the portal.

Conclusions / advice
Most portals that have been created have been deleted. In such cases not only has the portal creator wasted their own time, but they've caused other editors to spend their time trying to improve/fix/delete the portal (time which could have been spent doing something else) with no net benefit to the encyclopedia.

Don't create a portal unless -
 * 1) You understand how portals are structured (e.g. you have already improved/maintained existing portals).
 * 2) You are knowledgeable about the topic of the proposed portal.
 * 3) You (and preferably other editors) intend to maintain the portal (e.g. checking the portal and making updates as necessary) for several years.