User:GreenReaper/Use of interwiki summary style in Portal:Furry


 * This is a reply to Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Furry, which turned into an essay on why some portals can serve readers better by incorporating summaries of external wiki articles and linking to them.

Portals are "pages intended to serve as "Main Pages" for specific topics or areas". They're not meant to coordinate article development, but to introduce readers to topics; to draw them into learning things which they would not otherwise have learnt. This is part of Wikimedia's mission and vision, even if some of that information is outside of Wikipedia – and I think Portal:Furry does a fair job at it, even after several years of neglect.

As of December 2015, it got around 600 visits a month. What would they have seen? Well, it varies, aside from the introduction, but I see:
 * The Ursa Major Awards, which no longer has an article of its own here, but nevertheless remains the fandom's most notable award.
 * One of the longest-running comics featuring anthropomorphic animals, Kevin and Kell.
 * Samuel Conway, the chairman of furry fandom's largest convention, Anthrocon, who is also an entertainer and author.
 * Hopefully-interesting trivia on esoteric topics such as former CompuServe-hosted comic T.H.E. Fox and furry erotica writer Kyell Gold.
 * A free-content photo of furry craftwork (which I happen to have taken).
 * A brief summary of the convention Abando with a link for further information on WikiFur.
 * Links to related Wikipedia categories, projects and portals.

Now, it's true that some content is dated - and that is a problem. Events come and go; some are now far bigger, others have folded. Why has it not been kept up to date? Well, many furry editors, myself included, got tired of trying to "fight the good fight" over here, and decamped - first to Wikia, then to our own hosting - to ensure that information we felt worth keeping was not deleted out of hand the moment we looked away.

This feeds into why the portal is not entirely restricted to Wikimedia projects: because doing so would defeat the purpose of "serving as a Main Page" for the topic. Ideally, a portal would be an excellent starting place for all readers to find all information about a topic… and Wikipedia (or Wikimedia) might cover the sum of all knowledge about a particular topic. But in reality, it doesn't - and in cases such as news and conventions, it's not helpful, or indeed accurate, for a portal to imply "this is all there is", when it's really "all editors here can cover in depth".

Why doesn't Wikipedia have all the facts? Because certain editors kept deleting the pages they were on. This is particularly true for conventions, which at the time tended to discourage media coverage for historical reasons, meaning that even the list of furry conventions ended up with about five items. Projects such as WikiFur News and Flayrah were intended in part to act as free-content reliable sources; but in the end, it hasn't seemed worth the time to try reintroduce most topics here, when we could keep writing about them elsewhere. For portals, applying summary style to external sources works well, as long as you take care reviewing the facts you're summarizing.

As for "helping fans find web resources"… first off, to most readers, Wikipedia is just another web resource – and there's no real need to combine "we don't/can't cover this" with "we can't link to places which do". WikiFur is also a multilingual wiki project which shares Wikimedia's goal of "effectively disseminating educational content under a free license". Its editors link to Wikipedia for topics which they can't reasonably cover. The reverse can be true, too.