User talk:Polarmaps

Invitation to WikiProject Portals
Hi,

I noticed your interest in portals. Here is what has been going on behind-the-scenes with them...

Currently, there are about 1500 portals, comprised of 150,000 pages in portal space, the rest beyond the 1500 being subpages. Most of those subpages contain an excerpt, copied and pasted from some article. Such excerpts never change, and they go stale over time (no longer matching the original source material).

The Portal WikiProject was rebooted on April 17th, and has grown to 68 members. We've been busy redesigning the portal model so that portals will not need all those subpages.

The design concept called "selective transclusion", which is used for migrating excerpts (moving them to the base page), does so by displaying part of an article the same as a template. An added benefit of this is that it also keeps them fresh, by always showing the current version of the content that is transcluded.

We are also working on ways to make excerpted content, and listed entries, dynamic, so that the material or links shown automatically change over time without the intervention of an editor. Selected articles, could be set up to change daily, for example, to present a different article each day. This can even be made to show a different article every time a user visits the page. Currently, we can do this from a set list. We're trying to make it so that the list is updated automatically from an external source that is regularly maintained.

Other automated solutions are being sought or developed for each section type of portals. To automatically update and archive news, did you know entries, and so on.

Once we get a fully automated design worked out, it will be applied to all the portals that do not have dedicated maintainers. This will reduce the amount of maintenance they need. A single editor will then be able to watch over far more portals than before, ideally, with each portal taking up only a single page in portal space.

The Portal WikiProject is dedicated to updating, upgrading, and maintaining the entire portal system and every portal in it.

Come check us out, and if you like what you see, feel free to join. &mdash; The Transhumanist  05:37, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much
The RfC discussion to eliminate portals was closed May 12, with the statement "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time." This was made possible because you and others came to the rescue. Thank you for speaking up.

By the way, the current issue of the Signpost features an article with interviews about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

I'd also like to let you know that the Portals WikiProject is working hard to make sure your support of portals was not in vain. Toward that end, we have been working diligently to innovate portals, while building, updating, upgrading, and maintaining them. The project has grown to 80 members so far, and has become a beehive of activity.

Our two main goals at this time are to automate portals (in terms of refreshing, rotating, and selecting content), and to develop a one-page model in order to make obsolete and eliminate most of the 150,000 subpages from the portal namespace by migrating their functions to the portal base pages, using technologies such as selective transclusion. Please feel free to join in on any of the many threads of development at the WikiProject's talk page, or just stop by to see how we are doing. If you have any questions about portals or portal development, that is the best place to ask them.

If you would like to keep abreast of developments on portals, keep in mind that the project's members receive updates on their talk pages. The updates are also posted here, for your convenience.

Again, we can't thank you enough for your support of portals, and we hope to make you proud of your decision. Sincerely,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   00:16, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

P.S.: if you reply to this message, please ping me. Thank you. -TT