User:The Transhumanist/Sandbox212

What is a portal?
A portal is a "Main page" for a subject area. Portals are modeled loosely after Wikipedia's Main Page, and go beyond that design with new features and innovations.

Portals also provide bridges to editing and the Wikipedia editing community, to promote involvement.

Features of portals
Portals present a sample or survey of material on a subject, in the form of excerpts and images. While articles may include excerpts from subtopic articles in summary style, the excerpts on portals (that use the latest design improvements) are generated dynamically (at the moment a portal is visited), so that they are always up-to-date and coincide with the articles they were copied from, to avoid undesirable forms of content forking.

New portals take up a single page. Some portals of the older designs may have over a hundred subpages. Single-page portals are much easier to build and maintain, due to their automated components.

Portals of the new design paradigm also include conditional "Did you know..." and News sections, that only appear when content is available. These are driven by search parameters (if you improve the search terms, you improve the results). They accept any number of search parameters, so adding search terms is a big help.

Some portals have a "Selected biographies" section. If there isn't one, please feel free to add it. They generally go in the right column, below the news section.

Categories are shown for the subject, in the form of an expandable category tree.

The "Need help?" section provides a link to Wikipedia's Reference Desk department.

Another conditional section, called "Get involved", only appears if there is a corresponding WikiProject for the Portal's subject, for which it provides a link to.

The ''Associated Wikimedia" section provides links to the subject on Wikipedia's various sister projects.

Some portals have additional features as well.

Please feel free to develop the portal further.

Thank you.

New developments are on the way
The WikiProject Portals is in the process of improving portal features and developing new ones. It's a virtual lab for creating new and interesting wikipage components. We need developers and testers. We also collaborate on portal development and maintenance, creating new portals and improving existing ones. We even have a WikiGnome squad and an AWB group for tackling repetitive tasks. If you would like to join in on the fun, check out ongoing discussions at WT:WPPORT and WT:WPPORTD.

WikiProject participants receive WikiProject updates and task requests on their talk page. If you'd like to partipate or keep abreast of portal developments, feel free to add your name to the participants list.

Hope to see you there. And remember, have fun!