User talk:Ddstretch/Archives/2018/October

Administrators' newsletter – October 2018
News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2018). Administrator changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-add.svg Justlettersandnumbers • L235
 * Gnome-colors-list-remove.svg Bgwhite • HorsePunchKid • J Greb • KillerChihuahua • Rami R • Winhunter

Interface administrator changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-add.svg Cyberpower678 • Deryck Chan • Oshwah • Pharos • Ragesoss • Ritchie333

Oversight changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-remove.svg Guerillero • NativeForeigner •  Snowolf • Xeno

Guideline and policy news
 * Following a request for comment, the process for appointing interface administrators has been established. Currently only existing admins can request these rights, while a new RfC has begun on whether it should be available to non-admins.
 * There is an open request for comment on Meta regarding the creation a new user group for global edit filter management.

Technical news
 * Partial blocks should be available for testing in October on the Test Wikipedia and the Beta-Cluster. This new feature allows admins to block users from editing specific pages and in the near-future, namespaces and uploading files. You can expect more updates and an invitation to help with testing once it is available.
 * The Foundations' Anti-Harassment Tools team is currently looking for input on how to measure the effectiveness of blocks. This is in particular related to how they will measure the success of the aforementioned partial blocks.
 * Because of a data centre test, you will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia projects for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time.

Arbitration
 * The Arbitration Committee has, by motion, amended the procedure on functionary inactivity.
 * The community consultation for 2018 CheckUser and Oversight appointments has concluded. Appointments will be made by October 11.
 * Following a request for comment, the size of the Arbitration Committee will be decreased to 13 arbitrators, starting in 2019. Additionally, the minimum support percentage required to be appointed to a two-year term on ArbCom has been increased to 60%. ArbCom candidates who receive between 50% and 60% support will be appointed to one-year terms instead.
 * Nominations for the 2018 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission are being accepted until 12 October. These are the editors who help run the ArbCom election smoothly. If you are interested in volunteering for this role, please consider nominating yourself.

Discuss this newsletter

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Archive Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:13, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #020, 12 Oct 2018
Whew, a lot has been happening.

A bit of defending of the portals has been needed. But, most activity recently has been directed upon maintenance and development of existing portals.

The majority of portals now use the new design, about 2400 of them, leaving around 1200 portals that still employ the old style.

Newest portals

 * Aceh
 * Aegean Sea
 * Arthur Wellesley
 * Azores
 * Bashkortostan
 * Birmingham
 * Black Sea
 * Canary Islands
 * Carpathian Mountains
 * Caucasus
 * Columbia River
 * Davao City
 * Dnieper
 * Easter Island
 * Exploration
 * Galápagos Islands
 * Glasgow
 * Great Wall of China
 * Guangdong
 * Kaliningrad Oblast
 * Kanpur
 * Kigali
 * Kuril Islands
 * Kuwait City
 * Leeds
 * Lhasa
 * Loire Valley
 * Lucknow
 * Lviv
 * Map projections
 * Marseille
 * Midwestern United States
 * Missouri River
 * Multan
 * Mysore
 * Niger River
 * Northeast India
 * Odessa
 * Orchestras
 * Panama Canal
 * Peshawar
 * Polynesia
 * Poznań
 * Pretoria
 * Rat Pack
 * Sammy Davis Jr.
 * Shandong
 * South China Sea
 * Southern United States
 * Suez Canal
 * Svalbard
 * Tatarstan
 * Tigris River
 * Visakhapatnam
 * Volga River
 * Western Ghats
 * Western United States
 * Yellowstone National Park
 * Yosemite National Park

Please inspect these portals, and report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

MfDs
Since the last issue of this newsletter, Nineteen portals were nominated for deletion. All posted by the same person.

Two portals were deleted.

One resolved as "no consensus".

Sixteen resolved as "keep".

Links to the archived discussions are provided below:


 * 1) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Air France
 * 2) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Alexander Korda
 * 3) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:August Derleth
 * 4) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Average White Band
 * 5) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bee-eaters
 * 6) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ben E. King
 * 7) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benny Goodman
 * 8) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bill Bryson
 * 9) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Idol
 * 10) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Ocean
 * 11) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bob Hope
 * 12) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bobbie Rosenfeld Award
 * 13) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Body piercing
 * 14) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Canton, Michigan
 * 15) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Compostela Group of Universities
 * 16) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diplo
 * 17) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diversity of fish
 * 18) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Pebble Beach
 * 19) Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Peter, Paul and Mary

Many thanks to those who participated in the discussions.

To watch for future MfD's, keep in mind that the Portals WikiProject is supported by automatic alerts. You can see them at: WikiProject Portals

Creation criteria
There was also some discussion of creation criteria for portals. The result was that one of the participants in the discussion reverted the portal guidelines to the old version, which has the minimum number of articles for a portal included in there: "about 20 articles", a guideline that was in place since 2009.

Many of the portals that existed prior to April 2018 do not have that many (being limited to however many subpages the portal creator created), and therefore, these portals need to be upgraded to the new design (which automatically provides many articles for display). Using the new design, exceeding 20 articles for display is very easy.

Linking to the new portals
Efforts have been underway to place links to new portals (all 2200 of them created since April).


 * 1) Link (portal button) from corresponding category pages. ✅
 * 2) Link from See also section on corresponding root articles. ✅
 * 3) Link from bottom of corresponding templates. ✅
 * 4) Link for each portal on Portal:Contents/Portals. ✅

Your help is needed. It is easy to access the page mentioned in #1, #2, & #3 from the portals themselves.

AWBers could do these tasks even faster (that's how the category pages were done), except #4...

Item #4 above pretty much has to be done by hand. (If you can find a way to speed that up, I would be very impressed). The links needing placement can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals. Instructions are included there.

The conversion effort: news sections
There are still around 1200 old-style portals that have only undergone partial conversion to the new design concepts, still relying on subpages with copied/pasted excerpts that have been going stale for years, out of date (manually posted) news entries, etc.

The section currently being tackled on these is news. You can help by deleting any news section on the old-style portals that has news entries that are years old (that is the dead giveaway to a manual news section). Be sure not to delete the news sections of portals that have up-to-date news, or active maintainers. For maintainers, look at the portal's categories, and/or check the participants list at WP:WPPORT.

Eventually, conditional news sections (that appear only when news items are available for display) will be added using AWB to all portals without a news section.

News items (and even the news sections themselves) are automatically generated for portals that were created using the Basic portal start page. On those portals, there is a hidden comment at the top of the page (that you can see in the edit window), that says this:

Design development
Presently, we are in the process of implementing the new design features, creating new portals with them, and installing them in existing portals.

But, what about development of new new design features?

We have a wish department.

Post your wishes at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design, and they might come true. Many have already, and for many of those, this is where they were posted.

Cascade effect
A resource that has been elusive so far will be obtained eventually: categories. That is, the ability to pull category member links to populate a page.

Rather than populate portals directly with such links, it may be more beneficial to the encyclopedia to utilize them in navigation footers, because portals already have the ability to generate themselves based on those.

So, this would create a cascade effect: auto-gathering entries from categories, would enable the construction of new navigation footers, that would in turn support the development of new portals.

The cascade effect would also be felt by existing portals, as existing navigation footers could be expanded using the category harvesting methods, which would in turn expand the coverage of portals that access those navigation footers.

You can help by providing leads about any potential category harvesting methods. Please report anything you know about harvesting categories at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

Looking into the future: the quantum portal?
One idea that has been floating around is the concept of a pageless portal. That is, a portal that isn't stored anywhere, instead being generated when you click on a menu item or button.

Many of the new portals were generated by a single click, and then saved via a second click.

Therefore, it seems likely that the portals of the future will employ the one-click concept.

Because of the need for customization by users, this concept would need to be augmented with a way to integrate user contributions. This could be done in at least two ways: posting an existing portal, autogenerating one from scratch if such does not yet exist, or have a special data page for user contributions that is folded into the auto-generated portal.

How soon? That is up to you. All that is needed are persons to implement it.

Until next time...
Keep up the good work on portals. They are improving daily. Thank you. &mdash; The Transhumanist  04:17, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #021, 24 Oct 2018
Portals have passed the 4,000 mark.

More new portals...
Here's a list of portals created since the last issue


 * Abbott and Costello
 * Acura
 * Adventure travel
 * AFL
 * African cuisine
 * Agatha Christie
 * AHL
 * Aikido
 * Albert Gleizes
 * Albrecht Dürer
 * Alkaloids
 * American Express
 * American Hockey League
 * Analgesics
 * Ancient Olympic Games
 * Andrea Mantegna
 * Antiarrhythmic agents
 * Anticonvulsants
 * Antidepressants
 * Antipsychotics
 * Apollo program
 * Apostles
 * Aquariums
 * Arab Spring
 * Architecture of England
 * Architecture of Greece
 * Architecture of India
 * Architecture of Portugal
 * Arthur Conan Doyle
 * Asterix
 * Austin Powers
 * Australian Football League
 * Ayn Rand
 * Back to the Future
 * Barbecue
 * Bartending
 * BBC Television
 * BDSM
 * Beef
 * Berkshire Hathaway
 * Beverly Hills Cop
 * Blackjack
 * Blizzard Entertainment
 * BMW
 * Bodybuilding
 * Bosnian War
 * Boston College
 * Buick
 * Bullfighting
 * Butter
 * Cadillac
 * Cakes
 * California State University
 * Cannabinoids
 * Cannes Film Festival
 * Capoeira
 * Caravaggio
 * Care Bears
 * Carnivorous plants
 * Caspar David Friedrich
 * CBS
 * CBS Sports
 * Chatham Islands
 * Cheese dishes
 * Chevrolet
 * Chinese Civil War
 * Chinese martial arts
 * Chrysler
 * Citigroup
 * Coagulation
 * Coca-Cola
 * Cocktails
 * Coldplay
 * Compass direction
 * Concrete
 * Condiments
 * Confidence tricks
 * Connective tissues
 * Corticosteroids
 * Cranial nerves
 * CSI: Miami
 * Cue sports
 * Daft Punk
 * Dance Dance Revolution
 * Dante Gabriel Rossetti
 * David Cronenberg
 * David Lynch
 * David Mamet
 * Desserts
 * Developmental biology
 * Devo
 * Diabetes
 * Dietary supplements
 * Disneyland
 * Doctor Dolittle
 * Doughnuts
 * Dow Chemical Company
 * DreamWorks Animation
 * Drexel University
 * Édouard Manet
 * Electromagnetic spectrum
 * Elizabeth II
 * Energy drinks
 * English law
 * Enzymes
 * Fallacies
 * Fandom
 * Fast food
 * Female reproductive system
 * Fiat
 * FIFA World Cup
 * Filmmaking
 * Flatbreads
 * Florida Keys
 * Food preservation
 * Food science
 * Football in France
 * Football in Greece
 * Football in Iran
 * Football in Italy
 * Football in Japan
 * Football in Mexico
 * Football in Portugal
 * Football in South Africa
 * Football in Spain
 * Football in Sweden
 * Ford Motor Company
 * Francisco Goya
 * Frans Hals
 * Fred Frith
 * Freight cars
 * Fuel cells
 * Furry fandom
 * Garden tools
 * Gene expression
 * General Dynamics
 * General Electric
 * General Hospital
 * General Motors
 * Ghost in the Shell
 * Gilligan's Island
 * Giovanni Bellini
 * GMC
 * Golden Raspberry Awards
 * Gothic architecture
 * Grand Theft Auto
 * Hallucinogens
 * Ham
 * Hand tools
 * Hapkido
 * Health care
 * Henri Matisse
 * Hieronymus Bosch
 * High-speed rail
 * Hindu festivals
 * History of Oklahoma
 * Holden
 * Honda
 * Hormones
 * Hosiery
 * Human impact on the environment
 * Human-powered transport
 * Hyundai
 * IBM
 * Ice cream
 * Industries
 * Infiniti
 * Instant foods
 * Intel
 * Internet access
 * Islamic art
 * Islands of Cape Verde
 * Isuzu
 * Ivy League
 * J. M. W. Turner
 * Jacob van Ruisdael
 * Jacques-Louis David
 * Jaguar Cars
 * Japanese martial arts
 * Jet Propulsion Laboratory
 * Johannes Vermeer
 * John Grisham
 * John Singer Sargent
 * Johnson & Johnson
 * Joints
 * Joss Whedon
 * Judo
 * Juice
 * Ken Burns
 * Kenneth Branagh
 * Kia
 * Kid Rock
 * Korean diaspora
 * Korean martial arts
 * Kurt Vonnegut
 * Lancaster University
 * Land Rover
 * Las Vegas Strip
 * Lincoln Motor Company
 * Linear algebra
 * Living Dead
 * Lobbying in the United States
 * Local anesthetics
 * Lymphatic system
 * M. C. Escher
 * Macross
 * Mad Max
 * Male reproductive system
 * Mandy Moore
 * Mazda
 * Mega Man
 * Mercedes-Benz
 * Mexican cuisine
 * Microorganisms
 * Missiles
 * Model organisms
 * Modern architecture
 * Muscle tissue
 * Newport
 * Nicolas Poussin
 * Nobel Prize
 * Norman Rockwell
 * Nucleic acids
 * Nuremberg trials
 * Organs
 * Packaging
 * Paralympic Games
 * Pasta
 * Patterns in nature
 * Paul Gauguin
 * Pearl Jam
 * Pens
 * Phenethylamines
 * Philippine cuisine
 * Phylogenetics
 * Pie
 * Pierre-Auguste Renoir
 * Pies
 * Pieter de Hooch
 * Pigs
 * Pizza
 * Playboy
 * Poker
 * Pope Benedict XVI
 * Pope John Paul II
 * Population
 * Population genetics
 * Porgy and Bess
 * Positivism
 * Power Rangers
 * Power tools
 * Procter & Gamble
 * Propaganda
 * Prostitution in Canada
 * Prostitution in India
 * Prostitution in Japan
 * Psalms
 * Qigong
 * Radiohead
 * Railway electrification
 * Ramones
 * Real estate developments
 * Redwall
 * Religious persecution
 * Renault
 * René Magritte
 * Republics of the Soviet Union
 * Resident Evil
 * Respiration
 * Respiratory physiology
 * Richard Brooks
 * Ridley Scott
 * Robert Altman
 * Robert Zemeckis
 * Robotech
 * Rodents
 * Roller coasters
 * Romanian cuisine
 * Rooms
 * Rowing
 * Roy Lichtenstein
 * Rubik's Cube
 * Rugby World Cup
 * Running
 * Saab Automobile
 * Sails
 * Samuel Beckett
 * Sandro Botticelli
 * Sausages
 * Scale modeling
 * Scale models
 * Scandinavian folklore
 * Sewing
 * Sex Pistols
 * Sexual fetishism
 * Sexual revolution
 * Shrek
 * Skyscrapers
 * Soft drinks
 * Soy
 * Stick-fighting
 * Super Bowl
 * Surfing
 * Table tennis
 * Tarot
 * Tells
 * Tetris
 * The Coca-Cola Company
 * Titian
 * Urinary system
 * Vale of Glamorgan
 * Veganism
 * Volvo
 * War on Terror
 * Waste
 * Wastewater
 * Water polo
 * Web search engines
 * Whisky
 * William Blake
 * William Hogarth
 * Winslow Homer
 * Portal:World Series
 * Xenophon
 * Yogurts
 * Zoophilia

Please inspect these portals, report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD, or develop them further (see below). Thank you.

What's next?
There is still lots to do...

There are many subject gaps that need to be filled. This can be done by creating new portals, or by adding Selected article sections to existing portals. To create a new portal, simply place   on an empty portal page, and click "Preview". If the portal is complete, click "Save". After you try it, come share your experience and excitement at WT:WPPORTD.

Each new portal is just a starting point. Each portal of the new design can be further developed by:
 * refining the search parameters to improve the results displayed in the Did you know and In the news sections.
 * adding more specific Selected articles sections, like Selected biographies.
 * inserting a Recognized content section.
 * adding more pictures to the image slideshow.
 * placing a panoramic picture at the top of the intro section (especially for geographic portals).

Besides the new portals, there are still about 1200 portals of the old design that need to be converted to the new design.

Many portals need to be de-orphaned, by placing links to them (in the See also section of the corresponding root articles, at the bottom of the corresponding navigation footer templates, and on the corresponding category pages).

Many of the new portals still need to be listed at Portal:Contents/Portals.

Bugs keep popping up in portals. These need to be tracked down and reported at WT:WPPORTD.

Tools are needed to make developing and maintaining portals quicker and easier.

Dreaming up new features and capabilities. Innovation needs to continue, to design the portal of tomorrow, and the portal development-maintenance-system of the future. Automation!

So, if you find yourself with a little (or a lot) of free time, pick an area (or more) above and...

...dive in! &mdash; The Transhumanist  07:25, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

One of those BI issues
You don't fancy taking a look at the dispute here do you. It's going no where/ GoodDay is throwing in his normal 'helpful' comments and there is a lot of edit warring with no one buying into a compromise. I made what might be a clumsy effort to reframe the debate but it hasn't worked -Snowded TALK 15:55, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Would you mind stopping with the slandering of another, who doesn't fully conform with your position? GoodDay (talk) 16:02, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

Sorry a rather serious development has happened to the health of my (Chinese) father-in-law back in Zhangjiajie, China, and as a consequence I'm having to offer a lot of support to my wife and (step)son. My mind is not focused enough on editing wikipedia at the moment. If its still going strong after I return to editing, I'll take a look then. DDStretch   (talk)  15:16, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Understood and sorry to hear that - look after yourself and family! -Snowded TALK 17:22, 27 October 2018 (UTC)