User talk:Balablitz/Archive 24

Nomination for deletion of Template:Thiruthuraipoondi–Point Calimere branch line
Template:Thiruthuraipoondi–Point Calimere branch line has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page.  Zack mann  (Talk to me/What I been doing) 21:01, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi!
Many of the railway templates are up for deletion, but I find that you are not responding. What's wrong? Are you okay? Cheers. - Chandan Guha (talk) 15:01, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Coimbatore–Podanur spur line
Template:Coimbatore–Podanur spur line has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page.  Zack mann  (Talk to me/What I been doing) 22:23, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image File:Imsai Arasan 24th Pulikecei film poster.jpg
Thanks for uploading File:Imsai Arasan 24th Pulikecei film poster.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. Randykitty (talk) 16:56, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!
 Happy First Edit Day! Have a very happy first edit anniversary! From the Birthday Committee, CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 18:42, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Portal:Tiruchirappalli
Portal:Tiruchirappalli, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Tiruchirappalli and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes ( ~ ). You are free to edit the content of Portal:Tiruchirappalli during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Legacypac (talk) 04:09, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Back to the drawing board
Implementation of the new portal design has been culled back almost completely, and the cull is still ongoing. The cull has also affected portals that existed before the development of the automated design.

Some of the reasons for the purge are:
 * Portals receive insufficient traffic, making it a waste of editor resources to maintain them, especially for narrow-scope or "micro" portals
 * The default bpsp portals are redundant with the corresponding articles, being based primarily on the corresponding navigation footer displayed on each of those articles, and therefore not worth separate pages to do so
 * They were mass created

Most of the deletions have been made without prejudice to recreation of curated portals, so that approval does not need to be sought at Deletion Review in those cases.

In addition to new portals being deleted, most of the portals that were converted to an automated design have been reverted.

Which puts us back to portals with manually selected content, that need to be maintained by hand, for the most part, for the time being, and back facing some of the same problems we had when we were at this crossroads before:
 * Manually maintained portals are not scalable (they are labor intensive, and there aren't very many editors available to maintain them)
 * The builders/maintainers tend to eventually abandon them
 * Untended handcrafted portals go stale and fall into disrepair over time

These and other concepts require further discussion. See you at WT:POG.

However, after the purge/reversion is completed, some of the single-page portals might be left, due to having acceptable characteristics (their design varied some). If so, then those could possibly be used as a model to convert and/or build more, after the discussions on portal creation and design guidelines have reached a community consensus on what is and is not acceptable for a portal.

See you at WT:POG.

Curation
A major theme in the deletion discussions was the need for portals to be curated, that is, each one having a dedicated maintainer.

There are currently around 100 curated portals. Based on the predominant reasoning at MfD, it seems likely that all the other portals may be subject to deletion.

See you at WT:POG.

Traffic
An observation and argument that arose again and again during the WP:ENDPORTALS RfC and the ongoing deletion drive of bpsp default portals, was that portals simply do not get much traffic. Typically, they get a tiny fraction of what the corresponding like-titled articles get.

And while this isn't generally considered a good rationale for creation or deletion of articles, portals are not articles, and portal critics insist that traffic is a key factor in the utility of portals.

The implication is that portals won't be seen much, so wouldn't it be better to develop pages that are?

And since such development isn't limited to editing, almost anything is possible. If we can't bring readers to portals, we could bring portal features, or even better features, to the readers (i.e., to articles)...

Quantum portals?
An approach that has received some brainstorming is "quantum portals", meaning portals generated on-the-fly and presented directly on the view screen without any saved portal pages. This could be done by script or as a MediaWiki program feature, but would initially be done by script. The main benefits of this is that it would be opt-in (only those who wanted it would install it), and the resultant generated pages wouldn't be saved, so that there wouldn't be anything to maintain except the script itself.

Non-portal integrated components
Another approach would be to focus on implementing specific features independently, and provide them somewhere highly visible in a non-portal presentation context (that is, on a page that wasn't a portal that has lots of traffic, i.e., articles). Such as inserted directly into an article's HTML, as a pop-up there, or as a temporary page. There are scripts that use these approaches (providing unrelated features), and so these approaches have been proven to be feasible.

What kind of features could this be done with?

The various components of the automated portal design are transcluded excerpts, news, did you know, image slideshows, excerpt slideshows, and so on.

Some of the features, such as navigation footers and links to sister projects are already included on article pages. And some already have interface counterparts (such as image slideshows). Some of the rest may be able to be integrated directly via script, but may need further development before they are perfected. Fortunately, scripts are used on an opt-in basis, and therefore wouldn't affect readers-in-general and editors-at-large during the development process (except for those who wanted to be beta testers and installed the scripts).

The development of such scripts falls under the scope of the Javascript-WikiProject/Userscript-department, and will likely be listed on User scripts/List when completed enough for beta-testing. Be sure to watchlist that page.

Where would that leave curated portals?
Being curated. At least for the time being.

New encyclopedia program features will likely eventually render most portals obsolete. For example, the pop-up feature of MediaWiki provides much the same functionality as excerpts in portals already, and there is also a slideshow feature to view all the images on the current page (just click on any image, and that activates the slideshow). Future features could also overlap portal features, until there is nothing that portals provide that isn't provided elsewhere or as part of Wikipedia's interface.

But, that may be a ways off. Perhaps months or years. It depends on how rapidly programmers develop them.

Keep on keepin' on
The features of Wikipedia and its articles will continue to evolve, even if Portals go by the wayside. Most, if not all of portals' functionality, or functions very similar, will likely be made available in some form or other.

And who knows what else?

No worries.

Until next issue... &mdash; The Transhumanist  01:05, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Req to change the O baby article name
Hello, I am unable to change the page name. The film is actually titled now as "Oh Baby" So can you please do change it asap. Since you are the creator of this page you have the option to change the display name. So could you please do that asap.

Nothing to change
Hello, I have changed the film's title as per the latest update. You don't need to change again.

Thank you

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Military of India in fiction


A tag has been placed on Category:Military of India in fiction requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the category has been empty for seven days or more and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Liz Read! Talk! 01:33, 26 September 2019 (UTC)