User talk:Teblick/Archive 4

Conrad Thibault
Simply put: Thank you! 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 14:42, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 26
 The Wikipedia Library Books & Bytes

Issue 26, December – January 2018  Arabic and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!
 * # 1Lib1Ref
 * User Group update
 * Global branches update
 * Spotlight: What can we glean from OCLC’s experience with library staff learning Wikipedia?
 * Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:36, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

New Page Reviewer Newsletter
Hello, thank you for your efforts in reviewing new pages!

Backlog update: New Year Backlog Drive results:
 * The new page backlog is currently at 3819 unreviewed articles, with a further 6660 unreviewed redirects.
 * We are very close to eliminating the backlog completely; please help by reviewing a few extra articles each day!
 * We made massive progress during the recent four weeks of the NPP Backlog Drive, during which the backlog reduced by nearly six thousand articles and the length of the backlog by almost 3 months!

General project update: If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. 20:32, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
 * ACTRIAL will end it's initial phase on the 14th of March. Our goal is to reduce the backlog significantly below the 90 day index point by the 14th of March. Please consider helping with this goal by reviewing a few additional pages a day.
 * Reviewing redirects is an important and necessary part of New Page Patrol. Please read the guideline on appropriate redirects for advice on reviewing redirects. Inappropriate redirects can be re-targeted or nominated for deletion at RfD.

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 11
Newsletter • February 2018

Check out this month's issue of the WikiProject X newsletter, with plans to renew work with a followup grant proposal to support finalising the deployment of CollaborationKit!

-— Isarra ༆ 21:26, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Wiki-stress
Hi Eddie! I saw on Talk:Mayor of the Town (radio program) you were concerned about potential administrative action being taken against you. Your care regarding staying well within the bounds of "da rulz" and your uncontroversial, careful, and collaborative editing style make you a delight to work with. I don't see where you were warned regarding edit warring (feel free to show me what diff caused you concern), but if something such as this troubles you, please feel free to ping me and I'll do my best to help out in a timely manner. You've earned it. I'm not on 24/7, but i'm usually "around." 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 15:48, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Ah yes. Teahouse.   is one of our best, and he does TONS of work at the teahouse.  There he's used to dealing with new (and often problematical) editors on a constant basis.  Had you continued to further revert, it could have been considered edit warring, but there wasn't a need for you to self-revert.  Generally the rule is "more than 3 reverts", and you were at 2 before your self-revert, so I don't think you were close.  Going to the talk page to establish consensus was the best move.  I think consensus is clearly established to leave the title without the article "the", so further reverts without discussion by the IP should be reverted by others.  Thanks for all you do here!   78.26  (spin me / revolutions) 16:30, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Hello Eddie. I agree with what wrote above and thank that editor for their kind words. I did not intend to give you a formal warning but rather more of an advisory and to point you to the relevant policy. I apologize that you perceived my comment as a warning. You did not violate any policy or guideline and I wanted to be sure that you didn't in the future. Keep up the good work, and please accept my apology. Cullen328   Let's discuss it  22:35, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

New Page Review Newsletter No.10
Hello, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages! ACTRIAL:
 * ACTRIAL's six month experiment restricting new page creation to (auto)confirmed users ended on 14 March. As expected, a greatly increased number of unsuitable articles and candidates for deletion are showing up in the feed again, and the backlog has since increased already by ~30%. Please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day.

Paid editing
 * Now that ACTRIAL is inoperative pending discussion, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary.

Subject-specific notability guidelines
 * The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant BEFORE nominating an article for deletion.
 * Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for organisations and companies. A further discussion is currently taking  place at: Can a subject specific guideline invalidate the General Notability Guideline?

Nominate competent users for Autopatrolled
 * While patrolling articles, if you find an editor that is particularly competent at creating quality new articles, and that user has created more than 25 articles (rather than stubs), consider nominating them for the 'Autopatrolled' user right HERE.

News To opt-out of future mailings, go here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:06, 30 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The next issue Wikipedia's newspaper The Signpost has now been published after a long delay. There are some articles in it, including ACTRIAL wrap-up that will be of special interest to New Page Reviewers. Don't hesitate to contribute to the comments sections. The Signpost is one of the best ways to stay up date with news and new developments - please consider subscribing to it. All editors of Wikipedia and associated projects are welcome to submit articles on any topic for consideration by the The Signpost's editorial team for the next issue.

Books & Bytes - Issue 27
 The Wikipedia Library Books & Bytes

Issue 27, February – March 2018  Arabic, Chinese and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!
 * # 1Lib1Ref
 * New collections
 * Alexander Street (expansion)
 * Cambridge University Press (expansion)
 * User Group
 * Global branches update
 * Wiki Indaba Wikipedia + Library Discussions
 * Spotlight: Using librarianship to create a more equitable internet: LGBTQ+ advocacy as a wiki-librarian
 * Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:50, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update, April 22, 2018
Thank you for joining the Portals WikiProject.

Here's our first project-wide update. I hope you enjoy it...

Reboot
The WikiProject reboot has been a success: the new re-envisioned project is up and running, with new members, ongoing discussions about automation, design, and upkeep; maintained task queques; and updates to members, like this, the very first one!

The RfC
As you know, there's a proposal to delete all portals. It started out looking pretty dismal for portals, with primarily posts supporting their demise. It turned out that the proposer didn't post a deletion notice on the very pages being nominated for deletion (a requirement for all deletion discussions). Once that was done, a flood of opposition came in and has apparently turned the tide.

RfCs generally run for 30 days. It started April 8th, and so it has about 14 more days to run its course.

The more work we can do during that time on the portals, the stronger the reasons for keeping them will be. And the more prepared we will be for any MfDs that follow the closing of the RfC.

AWB?
You may be wondering why we asked for AWB experience in the member-sign-up list.

We are gearing up to do maintenance runs on the entire set of portals, and the more people we have who can use AWB, the better.

But we're not quite ready to start this yet.

To be able to use AWB on the portals, we first need to know what the end result needs to be. Like on the news sections, do we comment out the out-of-date ones, or do we place the code to activate the newsbot on those pages? That would require an assessment of WikiNews and its news generating performance (areas covered, volume in each area), etc.

You can help us figure this out at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals.

Another area we're gearing up for, to do passes with AWB, are upgrades to the intro sections of portals. Many of these have static (copied/pasted) excerpts that go stale over time.

We're trying to figure out how to make self-updating excerpts to replace the existing static excerpts that are on many portals, and once this is done, AWB will be used to place the new code. See the discussion on this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals.

"What can I do?"
There are 3 major areas of activity right now:

Update the main portal list at Portal:Contents/Portals
There are a few hundred existing portals that are missing from this list.

The list of missing entries, and instructions on what to do, can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals.

We need everybody's help on this. It's a big chore for one persons. But, many hands make light work. Please help chip away at this chore as much as you can. A little each day, form all of us, will get this done pretty quick.

Familiarize yourself with the portal system
In addition to browsing the portals in the 2 lists mentioned in the section above, you should take a look at the portal name space itself and what is in it.

That can be done at WikiProject Portals.

Join in on the discussions
There are discussions on many aspects of the WikiProject's operations, with more to come.

Such as about the purposes and functions of portals, design discussions, and so on.

There's even a automated design discussion over at Village Pump Technical, on selective transclusion.

I hope to see you on the talk page.

What's coming?
In addition to the automation efforts mentioned above, we will be looking into how to automate the selection and display of alternating excerpts, and alternating pictures, for the various portal sections.

Watch for these discussions on the Wikiproject's talk page.

Summing up...
Get ready, get set, go! &mdash; The Transhumanist  22:54, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject heads up, April 27, 2018
We now have 52 members, and more are joining daily.

New and easier way to handle excerpts
Attention portal maintainers!

There's a new template to improve existing and new portals, called Transclude lead excerpt.

It is a lot easier to use than copying and pasting text from articles, as it displays the paragraphs you specify automatically for you.

It makes excerpts so that they are always current and never go stale or fork.

It is more powerful than it looks, because it has the Lua Module:Excerpt supporting it.

Be careful, as it is alpha software. Please notify the WikiProject talkpage of any problems you come across.

To give you a sense of the reaction this template is generating, here is an excerpt of a discussion thread from the WikiProject's talk page:


 * This new template is fantastic. I've added it to the intro sections of the portals on Australian cities (eg P:PER) and it works brilliantly.  My compliments to its creators.  It can probably also be used in other sections of many portals (eg "Selected article" and "Selected biography"), and, for that reason, will probably make the task of maintaining portals a great deal easier. Bahnfrend (talk) 09:02, 24 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you for being so brave.  just got a lot simpler! Certes (talk) 10:43, 24 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Kudos on a wonderful template.   &mdash; The Transhumanist   03:27, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
 * This is amazing stuff. I'm going to get to work on using it on the selected content at most of these portals very soon. Wagge</b><b style="color:#83C">r</b><b  style="color:#728">s</b><small  style="color:#080">TALK  13:40, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

The RfC
I wrote a comment in the the April 26 section of the RfC explaining what we are up to. I liked the excerpt above so much, that I went back to my RfC posting, and inserted it.

Wish list
What's this? An old oil lamp. It's so dirty, I think I'll polish it...

*poof*

Whoa! Are you a WikiGenie? In that case, I get 3 wishes!

I wish...
 * 1) ...that Portal:Contents/Portals becomes up-to-date.   (The missing entries are listed on the talk page, with instructions).
 * 2) ...the WikiProject to have Article Alerts.   (WikiProject Portals templates have already been placed on all portal talk pages).
 * 3) ...that Portal:Cricket becomes a shining example of portal excellence.   (It was the main example of a crappy and unmaintained portal at the RfC).

Please make my wishes come true. See you around the portals! &mdash; The Transhumanist  08:03, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject Portals Overview, May 04, 2018
Thank you for being a member of the Portals WikiProject, and thank you for all the work you have all been doing on the portal namespace. To see the activity, check out the watchlist.

This is our 3rd issue, see previous issues at the Newsletter archive.

Top priority: Main list of portals needs updating
The top, and one of the most visible parts, of the portal system is Portal:Contents/Portals, which is intended to list all (completed) portals on Wikipedia.

About half of the missing existing portals have been added since this WikiProject's reboot (April 17th). Thank you to RockMagnetist, TriNitrobrick, Polyamorph, PratyushSinha101, Ganesha811, Bermicourt, Javert2113, Noyster, Ɱ, Lepricavark, XOR'easter, and Emir of Wikipedia, for working on this.

We are half-way to completion with this. We need everyone to chip in until it is done. Instructions, and the list of missing entries are at Portal talk:Contents/Portals.

I hope you'll join me there. ("Many hands make light work").

Thank you.

Membership
We're at 66 members, with more joining daily. We even have 6 WikiGnomes!

Special thanks
I have awarded Certes with a portals barnstar on his talk page for his work on the new excerpt templates that are revolutionizing the portal system (Template:Transclude lead excerpt & Template:Transclude random excerpt). If you'd like to show your appreciation, please feel free to stop by his talk page and add your signature to the barnstar itself.

Thank you Certes. You are enabling this WikiProject to get the right things done, fast.

By the way, the templates have already gone international. After being told about the templates, Mossab wrote:

"Thanks You very much!. Those are fantastic and great templates! I transferred them to Arabic Wikipedia and they do a magic great job. I worked to improve portal anatomy here and i do every thing i can to improve it and i am very sad for the nomination for deletion of portals :(. I am glad to be member on WikiProject Portals and i added my name with pleasure. Kind regards"

RFC
As you know, the (April 8th) proposal to delete all portals and the portal namespace inspired the reboot of this WikiProject. RfCs typically run for 30 days, which means there are 5 days left including today, before the RfC will be closed. The !votes are predominantly "oppose", but many editors have shared their disappointment with the portal system. We have our work cut out for us in correcting the problems of the portals to address their concerns. Complaints ranged from being out of date and lacking maintenance, to taking up the time of editors that they felt (due to low traffic) would be better spent improving articles.

Anti-WikiProject drama
This past week has been somewhat stressful for me, with more than a little conflict...

It culminated with my being reported at the Administrator's Noticeboard "for spamming and canvassing". This is the second time I've been reported there during the RfC; the first one was for posting notices of the deletion discussion (the RfC) at the top of all portal pages.

The accusations were 1) Posting notices of the deletion discussion (the RfC) at the top of all portal pages, 2) Adding an Article alerts section to the Portals WikiProject page, and 3) posting notices (invitations) about this WikiProject on user talk and portal talk pages.

None of which fall under the Wikipedia definitions of spamming or canvassing.

Thank you, Lionelt and Lepricavark, for coming to my rescue. I don't know how the discussion would have turned out if you had not spoken up.

The discussion was closed as "no action necessary".

After that, the person responsible posted their thoughts to my talk page. Here they are, with my response:

"Congratulations, it appears your relentless targeted advertising of the RFC, your beating the RFC Supporters with a stick by posting countless times there, your dishonest insistence that Current Events was on the chopping block, and your obstruction of clean up efforts at MfD are paying dividends. Have fun playing with Portal space where no one will read your work. I'm sure someone will eventually clean up the mess when your interest wanes. Cheers. Legacypac"


 * Thank you. I accept your congratulations on behalf of Wikiproject Portals and the portal-loving community – it was a team effort. In addition, I'd like to clarify some things about your claims above...
 * Each page nominated for deletion must have a notice at the top of its page, per the deletion guideline. Not to have one there, would be unfair to those who use such pages, and would constitute a secret deletion tribunal. We don't do things that way on Wikipedia.
 * As new facts became available (e.g., a motivated and thriving WikiProject to support the portals, new building blocks, etc.), it was appropriate to post the developments to the RfC, to support informed decision making.
 * Proposals are literal, not figurative. The proposal specified "all portals". All means all.
 * The fact is, the rebooted WikiProject is cleaning up the mess, rather rapidly. By updating and upgrading the portals, rather than getting rid of them.
 * I think I'll be hanging around for awhile, but the project is more than likely to achieve critical mass and may outlive us all, due in part to the development of tools to assist editors in building, upgrading, and maintaining portals that are fully dynamic and self-updating.
 * Portals are more fun to work with than ever. Thank you for your role in making this happen. You made us try even harder, and inspired us to pull together as a team. You'll have a warm place in our hearts, forever. The Transhumanist

Automatically refreshed excerpts
The main advancement we've made so far is applying selective transclusion Transclusion is template technology, showing a page on another page. Selective transclusion shows only part of that page. We use it to show excerpts that always match the source. The two templates we have so far, are Template:Transclude lead excerpt and Template:Transclude random excerpt.

Obsoleting subpages
Excerpts are migrating toward the base page of each portal, and where this is done, a subpage is no longer needed.

Template:Transclude lead excerpt will be able to be used to put the intro excerpt directly on the portal page, rather than on an intro subpage, once we adapt a portal design to accommodate this.

Template:Transclude random excerpt is currently being used on 1st-level subpages, and eliminates the need for 2nd-level subpages. (Many portals have 2 levels of subpages).

There are about 1500 portals, but there are around 148,000 subpages in portal space. Further discussions are needed to develop designs and components that do not require them.

It is my hope that the portal of the future will be a single page, or close to it, pulling in excerpts from specified dynamic sources (like category pages), filtered by ratings. This would obviate the need for subpages at all (except for maybe the header and footer subpages, which store a portal's settings). A more likely near-term solution would be subpages with a list maintained by a bot, or editors using semi-automatic tools.

New portals
Since the reboot, a new portal has been created:
 * Portal:Limited recognition

Please watchlist these pages
Some central pages in the portal system. The more eyes on them, the better.


 * WikiProject Portals
 * User:The Transhumanist (there's a fair amount of portal project traffic on my talk page these days)
 * WikiProject Portal/List of all portals/Page 1
 * WikiProject Portal/List of all portals/Page 2
 * WikiProject Portal/List of all portals/Page 3
 * WikiProject Portal/List of all portals/Page 4
 * Wikipedia:Portal:Portal Example portal. And funny.
 * Portal:Contents/Portals
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Culture and the arts
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Geography and places
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Health and fitness
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/History and events
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Infobox
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Intro
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Mathematics and logic
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Natural and physical sciences
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/People and self
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Philosophy and thinking
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Portal nav footer
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Reference
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Religion and belief systems
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Society and social sciences
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Technology and applied sciences
 * Portal:Contents/Portals/Topic

Wrapping up...
There's more in the works, like a rating system, further redesigns, etc. Keep an eye on the discussions on the project's talk page. They should start showing up there soon.

Hope to see you there. Sincerely,    &mdash; The Transhumanist   06:23, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject Portals update, 11 May 2018
We've grown to 73 members, and morale is high. Thank you for joining. Here is some news, and some tasks...

The RfC will be closed soon...
2018-05-11: preparations are being made to close the RfC. See Administrators' noticeboard/Requests for closure.

When there, be sure to notice the consultation link.

We're trying to get a prototypical single-page portal developed in time to show the RfC closers before they make their final decision. You can help. It's Portal:Humanism. So far, we've applied selective transclusion (automation) to excerpts, and have made the following sections without subpages: intro, selected article, selected biography, categories, related portals, wikiprojects, things to do, and wikimedia. Eight down, 4 to go, plus 2 formatting subpages (not sure we can migrate those). Automating every section, would also be nice.

Main objectives
Our main objectives currently, are:


 * 1) Replace static excerpts with selective transclusions, so that the excerpts always stay fresh (that is, match the source content). We are now doing this on the portal base page as much as possible, to reduce the number of subpages that are needed. See #2...
 * 2) Migrate the functions of subpages to the portal base pages. There are around 150,000 subpages in portal space. We aim to make these obsolete by using templates and other calls from the portal base pages.
 * 3) Improve portal design to make portals self-update. Semi-dynamic sections update from a static list, as used in Transclude random excerpt. Fully-dynamic sections would update from a list maintained elsewhere on Wikipedia, like a category. We haven't found a way to do this yet, other than to create a bot (which we will probably need to do).

Maintenance pass #1: Upgrading the intro section
The intro section of many portals transcludes an "Intro" subpage that has an excerpt in it.

We're replacing that with a selective transclusion directly in the intro section, bypassing the subpage. Though, there's a little  more to it...

For instructions, see: WikiProject Portals.

Please skip Portal:American Civil War, as that is specifically being maintained by hand.

Maintenance pass #2: Obsoleting the Wikimedia subpages
One of the sections on many portals links to sister projects on the subject. This needlessly takes a subpage. The subpage can be made obsolete by using the template Wikimedia for portals directly on the portal base page.

This has been done for several hundred portals so far.

See WikiProject Portals for instructions.

Maintenance pass #3: calling the category tree from the portal base page
Certes figured out how...

}}

For more information, see the thread WikiProject Portals (it does now).

More to come...
In the meantime, see ya around the portals! &mdash; The Transhumanist  16:03, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update, 15 May 2018
We are at 74 members. If you know anyone who might find this WikiProject interesting, please invite them.

The RfC has ended
The RfC was closed May 11th, and a closing statement was posted May 12th which says "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time."

Ongoing tasks
Some major activities that we are in the middle of include:


 * Adding the missing existing portals to the main portals list at Portal:Contents/Portals. Instructions are on the talk page. There are about 125 portals left to be processed. (There were 400). Keep up the good work!
 * Development discussions on how to migrate the subpages to the base pages. There are around 150,000 subpages in portal space, associated with the various sections on a typical portal. We are trying to obsolete them section type by section type. Currently, we're working on obsoleting the intro subpages and the "selected articles" subpages. Please join in.

Other tasks

 * The list of portals not ready to be listed on the main list can be found at WikiProject Portals (scroll down to see them - they are marked ). They are incomplete. If you want a specific portal to work on, please consider choosing one from that list.
 * Over the years, some incomplete portals (portals under construction) got added to Portal:Contents/Portals. Therefore, every portal listed there needs to be inspected, and any that are incomplete should be removed from that list and added to the not ready list at WikiProject Portals (scroll down to see it). On Portal:Contents/Portals, I'm already almost done inspecting the portals in the culture section, and so you can skip those.  The types of things to look for are empty sections (most will have a redlinked subpage), lack of "selected" sections, portal stubs with just an intro and end sections, and very poor layout (like seriously unbalanced columns).

Portal-building resources
During his work on portals, Broter found a quote randomizer. It is Random quotation.

Trailblazer: approaching the one-page portal
Broter has transformed the Portal:Community of Christ so it is comprised of only 3 pages in portal space: the base page, its box-header subpage, and its box-footer subpage. Its other other subpages are now obsolete and are waiting for deletion. Nice job, Broter!

Well, that's all for now. See ya around the portals. &mdash; The Transhumanist  06:40, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.11 25 May 2018
Hello, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

ACTRIAL:
 * WP:ACREQ has been implemented. The flow at the feed has dropped back to the levels during the trial. However, the backlog is on the rise again so please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day; a backlog approaching 5,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.

Deletion tags
 * Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders. They require your further verification.

Backlog drive:
 * A backlog drive will take place from 10 through 20 June. Check out our talk page at WT:NPR for more details. NOTE: It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing. Despite our goal of reducing the backlog as much as possible, please do not rush while reviewing.

Editathons
 * There will be a large increase in the number of editathons in June. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the 'move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.

Paid editing - new policy
 * Now that ACTRIAL is ACREQ, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary. There is a new global WMF policy that requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.

Subject-specific notability guidelines
 * The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant BEFORE nominating an article for deletion.
 * Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for organisations and companies.

Not English News Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:35, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
 * A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar with WP:NPPNE. Check in Google for the language and content, tag as required, then move to draft if they do have potential.
 * Development is underway by the WMF on upgrades to the New Pages Feed, in particular ORES features that will help to identify COPYVIOs, and more granular options for selecting articles to review.
 * The next issue of The Signpost has been published. The newspaper is one of the best ways to stay up to date with news and new developments. between our newsletters.

Portals WikiProject update, 25 May 2018
We have grown to 79 members.

Please provide a warm welcome to our latest additions, Wpgbrown, Cactus.man, JLJ001, and Wumbolo.

A lot is going on, much of it on the WikiProject's talk page, so be sure to go there and join in on any of the many discussions taking place there.

Elsewhere around the portal project, or related to portals, the following is happening...

New news template ready for testing
Evad37 has created a new template, with supporting lua module, to handle news in portals...

Transclude selected current events is ready to be tested in some actual portals. Let Evad37 know if you need help with the search patterns.

Noyster commented that "This is the best portal innovation since sliced bread!"

See the relevant discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals.

Thank you, Evad.

Coming soon: Automatic article alerts (but there is a glitch)
Our WikiProject is now subscribed to the bot that makes automatic article alerts, but the subpage where they are posted has not been added to our WikiProject page yet because of a weird problem...

Featured portal nominations from two years ago keep popping up on there.

Please check WikiProject Portals/Article alerts to see if you can figure out how to fix this.

Once that is remedied, it will be posted on our WikiProject page.

Thank you.

Note that, this will only track base pages, because to track the rest, we'd have to create over 140,000 talk pages for the subpages, and that just isn't worthwhile (as we're trying to remove the subpages anyways). Therefore, any alerts for subpages will still need to be posted manually.

New portal, still needs work

 * Portal:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, courtesy of Mozart834428196. See also, the discussion.

Drafting a new portals guideline
Your input/editing is welcome on the draft-in-progress of a new guideline for portals.

See or work on the draft at User:Cesdeva/sandbox11.

See also the discussion at: Wikipedia talk:Portal guidelines

RfC on new TOC layout for main portal list
There is a proposal to change the look of the table of contents at Portal:Contents/Portals.

See: Portal talk:Contents/Portals.

Deletion discussion survivors
Thank you to those who have participated in portal deletion discussions. There are still some editors out there who despise portals, and this comes across in their argumentation style. Wow. Such negativity. But, there is some good news...


 * Portal:Quidditch survived its 2nd deletion nomination
 * Portal:Prehistory of Antarctica did the same

Current deletion discussions are posted on our WikiProject page.

Portal space clean up
While portal detractors are trying to get rid of portals via MfD, we have deleted many of them via speedy deletion (per Db-p1 or Db-p2). Essentially, they were bare skeletons, with maybe a little meat on them. The plus here is that speedy deletion is without prejudice to re-creating the portals. They can easily be restarted from scratch without getting approval, or be undeleted by request by someone willing to work on them. We have kept track of these, for when someone wants to rebuild them. They are listed at Portal talk:Contents/Portals.

We are also removing subpages, the functions of which have been migrated to portal base pages. To see which ones have been removed, look for the redlinks in our watchlist.

There is also an MfD concerning some of these at Miscellany for deletion/Redundant subpages of the Cornwall portal.

For subpages that need to be deleted, you can conveniently place this speedy deletion template at the top of each of them:

Then an admin will come along and delete them.

Please help list the unlisted portals!
There are still 100 existing portals not yet presented on the main portal list at Portal:Contents/Portals. There were 400, so we've come a long way. Thank you! But we are not done yet...

Please list a couple of them. Every little bit helps. If each member of this project listed one more, it would almost all be done. Many hands make light work.

The list of missings, and instructions, are to be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals.

I hope to see you there!

Wrapping up
These developments make up just the tip of the iceberg. I'll have more to report in the next update, soon. &mdash; The Transhumanist  00:34, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Whoa, I missed one...
There's an article about the Portals WikiProject in the new issue of Signpost:

Wikipedia Signpost/2018-05-24/WikiProject report

Enjoy.

P.S.: We now have 80 members. Evad37 just joined! &mdash; The Transhumanist  01:39, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

The Bob Crosby Show
Fair enough; I've readded the networks, but put them on a separate line just to make it clear that they're not part of the name. Trivialist (talk) 01:48, 29 May 2018 (UTC)


 * , thanks! I know it's a minor point, but I wanted to ask. Using a separate line is a good idea, too. I appreciate your consideration. Eddie Blick (talk) 01:56, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #007, 31 May 2018
We have grown to 89 members.

This is the seventh issue of this newsletter. For previous issues, see our newsletter archive.

Welcome
A warm welcome to our nearly one dozen new members...

Our new members include:
 * Evad37
 * Checkingfax
 * Grey Wanderer
 * Voceditenore
 * TestPAKISTAN
 * Godsy
 * Greatedits1
 * Charlesdrakew
 * Ww2censor
 * Simon Burchell
 * TheGridExe

Be sure to say "hi" and welcome them to the team.

The portal set has shrunk
There were 1515 portals, but now we have 1475, because we speedy deleted a bunch of incompleted portals that had been sitting around for ages, that were empty shells or had very little content. Because they were speedied, they can be rebuilt from scratch without acquiring approval from WP:DRV.

Maintenance runs on the portals set have begun
This is what we have been gearing up for: upgrading the portals en masse, using AWB.

More than half of the Associated Wikimedia sections have been converted to no longer use a subpage. This chore will probably be completed over the next week or two. Many thanks to the WikiGnome Squad, who have added an Associated Wikimedia section to the many geography-related portals that lacked one. The rest of the subjects await. :)

The next maintenance drive will be on the intro sections. Notices have gone out to the WikiProjects for which one or more portals fall within their subject scope. Once enough time has elapsed for them to respond (1 week), AWB processing of intro sections will begin.

Thank you, you
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your part in the RfC. I went back and reread much of it. I believe your enthusiasm played a major part in turning the tide on there. I'm proud of all of you.

Why reread that mess, you ask?

To harvest ideas, and to keep the problems that need to be fixed firmly in mind. But, also to keep in touch. See below...

Thank yous all around
I've contacted all of the other opposers of the RfC proposal to delete portals, to thank them for their support, and to assure them that their decision was not made in vain. I updated them on our activities, provided the link to the interviews about this project in the Signpost, pointed out our newsletter archive so they can keep up-to-date with what we are doing, and I invited them all to come and have a look-see at our operations (on our talk page).

Sockpuppet, and reverting his work
It so happened that one of our members was a sockpuppet: JLJ001. According to the admin who blocked him, he was a particularly tricky long term abuser. This is a weird situation, since the user was quite helpful. He will be missed.

This has been somewhat disruptive, because admins are doing routine deletions of the pages (portals, templates, etc.) he created, and reversion of his edits (I don't know if they will be reverting all of them). Please bear with them, as they are only doing what is best in the long run.

The following pages have been deleted by the admins so far, that I know of:
 * Portal:Plymouth
 * Portal:Bedfordshire
 * Portal:Suffolk
 * Portal:Norfolk
 * User:JLJ001/tag
 * Template:Non-standard portal flag
 * Template:Portal flag

Automation so far, section by section...

 * Intro – Transclude lead excerpt
 * Selected article – Transclude random excerpt
 * In the news – Transclude selected current events
 * Associated Wikimedia –
 * Categories –

Automatic article alerts is up and running
Automatic article alerts are now featured on the project page.

Some super out-of-date entries kept showing up on there, so posting it on the Project page was delayed. Thanks to Evad37 and AfroThundr for providing solutions on this one. Evad37 adjusted the workflow settings per Article alerts/Subscribing, to make sure only the appropriate page types show up. AfroThundr removed the tags from the old entries that caused them to keep showing up in the article alerts.

Other things that could use some automation
Noyster pointed out that it would be nice to automate the updating of the portals section at the Community bulletin board.

Another major component of the portal system is the main list of portals, at Portal:Contents/Portals. How would we go about automating the updating of that?

Please post your ideas on the WikiProject's talk page. Thank you.

Deletion discussion survivors
Keep in mind that we have already speedy deleted almost all of the nearly empty portals, which can be rebuilt without approval whenever it is convenient to do so. Other portals should be completed if at all possible rather than delete them through MfD (which requires approval from Deletion review to rebuild).


 * Portal:Juanes – see the discussion

(Current deletion discussions are posted on our WikiProject page).

Portals needing repair

 * Portal:Toys

Wrapping up
There's still more, but it will have to wait until next issue.

Until then, see ya around the project. &mdash; The Transhumanist  12:03, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #008, 7 June 2018
The WikiProject now has 92 participants, including 16 admins.

Welcome
A warm welcome to the newest members of the team:
 * Keith D
 * RL0919

Be sure to say hi.

Congrats
Pbsouthwood has just gotten through the grueling RfA process to become a Wikipedia administrator. Be sure to congratulate him.

The reason he went for it was: "For some time I expect to be busy with subpage deletion for Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals as mentioned above. The amount of work is expected to keep me busy for some time. I am primarly a content creator and contributor to policy discussions, but would be willing to consider other admin work on request, providing that I feel that my involvement would be appropriate and not too far outside my comfort zone."

New feature: Picture slideshow
Evad37 has figured out a way to let the user flip through pictures without purging the page. Purging is awkward because there is an intermediary confirmation screen that you have to click on "yes". In the new picture slideshow section, all you have to do is click on the  to go to the next picture or   to instantly show the previous feature. The feature also shuffles the pictures when the page is initiated, so that they are shown in a different order each time the user visits the page (or purges it).

It is featured in Portal:Sacramento, California. Check it out to the right.

Keep in mind that the feature is a beta version. Please share your comments on how to refine this feature, at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals.

The one-page portal has been achieved
We now have a one-page portal design. It isn't fully automated, nor is it even fully semi-automated, as there are still some manually filled-in areas. But it no longer requires any subpages in portal space, and that is a huge improvement. For example, Portal:Sacramento, California utilizes the one-page design concept. While is employs heavy use of templates, it does not have any subpages of its own.

I commend you for your teamwork
This is the most cooperative team I've ever seen. With a strong spirit of working together to get an important job done. Kudos to you.

In conclusion...
There's more. A lot more. But it will have to wait until next issue, but you don't have to wait. See what's going on at the WikiProject's talk page. &mdash; The Transhumanist  02:11, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

NPP Backlog Elimination Drive
Hello, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

We can see the light at the end of the tunnel: there are currently 2900 unreviewed articles, and 4000 unreviewed redirects.

Announcing the Backlog Elimination Drive! Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. —  Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)  06:57, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
 * As a final push, we have decided to run a backlog elimination drive from the 20th to the 30th of June.
 * Reviewers who review at least 50 articles or redirects will receive a Special Edition NPP Barnstar: NPPbarnstar SE.png. Those who review 100, 250, 500, or 1000 pages will also receive tiered awards: RR3217-0014 100 rubles USSR 1989 Gold avers.png, Swiss-Commemorative-Coin-1991-CHF-250-reverse.png, Coin of Kazakhstan 500Thinker averse.png, US-$1000-SC-1878-FR-346a-PROOF.jpg.
 * Please do not be hasty, take your time and fully review each page. It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing.

Portals WikiProject update #009, 15 June 2018
Don't mind that box to the right. We'll be talking about that later, below.

Almost done...
With the portals upgrades?

No. :)

What is almost done is the updating of the main list of portals!

There are 23 portals left to be listed.

Kudos to the WikiGnome Squadron, for spearheading this.

Once it is fully updated, we need to keep it up to date. When you complete a portal, remember to add it to Portal:Contents/Portals.

Concerning portal upgrades, we are working on those section-by-section...

Associated Wikimedia section conversion task complete
The Associated Wikimedia sections of the entire set of portals have been upgraded. These are now handled on each portal base page (bypassing the previously used corresponding subpages), using the Wikimedia for portals template rather than reiterated copied/pasted code.

So, to be more accurate on reporting upgrade progress, that's one section down (for the whole set of portals), with (about) nine sections to go. (Skipping curated portals, regarding custom content sections, of course).

Further section conversions (using AWB)
Work is underway on converting Portals' introduction sections, and the categories sections.

If you would like to help, see WikiProject Portals and WikiProject Portals

Further section conversions (by hand)
Work has also started with converting selected picture sections to picture slideshow sections. See WikiProject Portals.

Quality rating system for portals under development
Currently, there is no quality rating for portals: in the Portals WikiProject box on each portals' talk page, it just says "Portal". But times are a changin'. Quality assessment is on the way, and you can help. See the discussion.

What's coming: excerpt slideshows
Evad37 has figured out a way to apply the picture slideshow feature to displaying article excerpts (now you can check out the provided box above). :) This allows us to bypass page purging to see the next selection, and you can even click through them rather quickly. Currently, the wikicode for doing this for article excerpts is a bit eye-boggling, and so we are looking into simplifying it. A streamlined version may be just around the corner.

Note that this is a prototype, not ready for widespread use. Click on the box in between the lesser than and greater than signs, to see what I mean. It was meant for pictures, and so the thumbnail feature doesn't apply to article prose very well. I've presented it even though it isn't ready, to show the direction portal development is heading. See the discussion.

Wow
I'm amazed at how rapidly portals are evolving. And we're still within a single generation of portal technological evolution. Imagine what they might be in 2 or 3 more generations of developments. Pretty soon, portals will be able to shake your hand. :)   &mdash; The Transhumanist   11:05, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 28
<div style = "color: #936c29; font-size: 4em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif"> The Wikipedia Library <span style="font-size: 2em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif">Books & Bytes

Issue 28, April – May 2018 <div style = "margin-top: 1.5em; border: 3px solid #ae8c55; border-radius: .5em; padding: 1em 1.5em; font-size: .9em"> Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Italian and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!
 * # 1Bib1Ref
 * New partners
 * Rock's Backpages
 * Invaluable
 * Termsoup
 * User Group update
 * Global branches update
 * Wikipedia Library global coordinators' meeting
 * Spotlight: What are the ten most cited sources on Wikipedia? Let's ask the data
 * Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:33, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #010, 30 June 2018
We've grown to 94 participants.

A warm welcome to dcljr and Kpgjhpjm.

Rating system for portals
We are in the process of developing a rating system specifically for portals, as the quality assessment scheme for articles does not apply to portals. It is coming along nicely. Your input would be very helpful. See the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/General.

Better than a barnstar
One of our participants got involved with this WikiProject through interest in how the new generation of portals would be handled in WP's MOS (Manual of Style). It didn't take long before he got sucked in deeper. This has given him an opportunity to look around, and so, he has made an assessment of this WikiProject's operations:

"I'm quite frankly really impressed and inspired by what's happening here. If you'd asked me a year ago if I thought portals should just be scrapped as a failed, dragged-out experiment, I would have said 'yes'. This planning and the progress toward making it all practical is exemplary of the wiki spirit, in particular of a happy service-to-readers puppy properly wagging its technological and editorial tail instead of the other way around, and without 'drama'. It's also one of the few examples I've seen in a long time of a new wikiproject actually doing something useful and fomenting constructive activity (instead of acting as a barrier to participation, and a canvassing/ownership farm for PoV pushers). Kudos all around. — SMcCandlish"

Congratulations, everyone. Keep up the great work.

Slideshow development
We've run into a glitch with slideshows: they don't work on mobile devices.

Initially, we will need to explore options that allow portals to have slideshows without adversely affecting mobile viewers. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Eventually, we may need another way to do slideshows. If we do go this route, and I don't see why we wouldn't, then (user configurable) automatic slideshows also become a possibility.

TemplateStyles RfC passed
Once implemented, this will allow editors to create and edit cascading style sheets for use with templates. This will expand what we can do with portals. For more detail, see mw:Extension:TemplateStyles and TemplateStyles.

Automation effort
We've run into an obstacle using Lua-based selective transclusion: Lua is incapable (on Wikipedia) of reading in article names from categories. Because of this, we'll need to seek other approaches for fully automating the Selected article section. We are exploring sources other than categories, and other technologies besides Lua.

Speaking of using other sources, the template Transclude list item excerpt collects list items from a specified page, or from a section of that page, and transcludes the lead from a randomly selected link from that list. Courtesy of Certes. So, if you use this in a portal, and if the template specifies a page or section serviced by JL-Bot, you've now got yourself an automatically updated section in the portal. JL-Bot provides links to featured content and good articles, by subject.

What is "fully automated"? When you create a portal using a creation template, and the portal works thereafter without editor intervention, the portal is fully automated. That is, the portal is supported by features that fetch new content. If you have to add new article names every so often for it to display new content, then it is only semi-automated.

Currently, the Selected article section is semi-automated, because it requires that an editor supplies the names of the various articles for which excerpts are (automatically) displayed. For examples, look at the wikisource code of Portal:Reptiles, Portal:Ancient Tamil civilization, and Portal:Reference works.

So far, 3 sections are fully automatable: the introduction section, the categories section, and the Associated Wikimedia section.

Where is all this heading?
Henry.

Or some other name.

Eventually, the portal department will be a software program. And we won't have to do anything (unless we want to). Not even tell it what portals to create (unless we want to). It will just do it all (plus whatever else we want it to do). And we will of course give it good manners, and a name.

But, that is a few years off.

Until then, building portals is still (partially) up to us. &mdash; The Transhumanist  13:34, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #011, 10 July 2018
We now have 97 participants.

Be sure to welcome our newest members, BrantleyIzMe, Coffeeandcrumbs, and Nolan Perry, with warm regards.

Work is proceeding apace. We have 2 major thrusts right now: converting the intro sections of portals, and building the components of the one-page automated model...


 * Converting the intro sections

We need everybody, except those building software components, to work on converting intros. If you have AWB, definitely use that. If not, then work on them manually. Even one a day, or as often as you can muster, will help a lot. There are only about 1,000 of them left to go, so if everyone chips in, it will go pretty quickly. Remember, there are 97 of us!

The intros for most of the portals starting with A through F have already been converted to use the Transclude lead excerpt template.

The standard wikicode for the automated intro that we want to put into place looks like this:

That works for most portals, but not all. For some portals it requires some tweaking, and for others, we may have to use a different or more customized approach. Remember to visually inspect each portal you work on and make sure that it works before moving on to the next one.

Be sure to skip user-maintained portals. They are listed at WikiProject_Portals.


 * AWB tips

I've started an AWB tips page, for those of you feeling a bit overwhelmed by that power user tool. Feel free to add to it and/or improve it.


 * Portal automation

We have some very talented Lua programmers, who are pushing the limits of what we can do in gathering data from Wikipedia's various namespaces and presenting it in portals. Due to their efforts, Lua is powering the selective transclusion core of our emerging automated portal design, in the form of selected article sections that rotate content, and slideshows.

To go beyond Lua's limits, to take full advantage of Mediawiki's API, we are in the midst of adding another programming language to the resources we shall be making use of: JavaScript. The ways that JavaScript can help us edit portals to boost the power of our Lua solutions, are being explored, which will likely make the two languages synergistic if not symbiotic. Research is under way on how we can use JavaScript to make some of the portal semi-automated features fully automatically self-updating, in ways that Lua cannot. Like gathering random members from a category and inserting them into a portal's templates as parameters. Once the parameters are in place, Lua does the rest.

If you would like to get involved with design efforts, or just keep up on them, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.


 * When should we start building new portals?

Well, not at the present time, because building portals is quite time consuming. The good news is that we are working on a design that will be fully automated, or as close to that as we can get. And the new design is being implemented in the portal department's main portal creation template. This means, that not only will portals update themselves, their creation will be highly automated as well. That's the nature of templates. You put them in place, and they just... work.

What I'm getting at here, is that it would be better to wait to build lots of new portals until after the new design is completed. Because with it, instead of taking hours to create a new portal, it will likely take minutes.

That does not mean we should be idle in the meantime. The main reason most of us are here is because it became apparent that portals were largely unmaintained and had grown out-of-date. This had become so apparent that a proposal was made to delete all the portals and the portal namespace to boot. That makes our main objective in the short term to improve all the existing portals so that the community will want to keep them&mdash;forever.

Building lots of new portals comes later. Let's fix up the ones we have first. ;)

And on that note, I bid you adieu. Until next newsletter, see ya 'round the WikiProject. &mdash; The Transhumanist  12:32, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #012, 15 July 2018
We have 97 participants.

Getting faster
Automation makes things go faster, even portal creation. One of the components Certes made was Transclude list item excerpt. I became curious about its possible applications.

So I worked out a portal design using it, the initial prototypes being Portal:Kyoto (without a "Selected pictures" section), and Portal:Dubai (with a "Selected pictures" section). Then I used Portal:Dubai as the basis for further portals of this type...


 * I was able to revamp Portal:Munich from start to finish in less than 22 minutes.
 * Portal:Dresden took about 19 minutes.
 * Portal:Athens took less than 17 minutes.
 * Did Portal:Florence in about 13 minutes.
 * Portal:Stockholm also in about 13.
 * Portal:Palermo approx. 12 minutes.

Why?

To see, and to show, what may become feasible via automation.

It now looks highly feasible that we could get portal construction time down to a few minutes, or maybe even down to a few seconds.

The singularity is just around the corner. :)

Slideshows
When using the Random slideshow template to display pictures, be sure to use the plural tense in the section title: "Selected pictures". That's because slideshows don't show up on many mobile devices. Instead the whole set of pictures is shown, hence the section title "Selected pictures", as it fits both situations.

In case you are curious, here is a list of the portals so far that have a slideshow:


 * Algae
 * Amphibians
 * Anatomy
 * Ancient Tamil civilization
 * Athens
 * Bangladesh.
 * Berkshire
 * Birds
 * Buckinghamshire
 * Cenozoic
 * Dresden
 * Dubai
 * East Sussex
 * Fish
 * Florence
 * Florida


 * Genocide
 * Gilgit-Baltistan
 * H. P. Lovecraft
 * Hampshire
 * Human body
 * Humanism
 * Isle of Wight
 * Kent
 * London transport
 * Mammals
 * Milan
 * Munich
 * Oxfordshire
 * Palermo
 * Prague
 * Reference works
 * Reptiles


 * Sacramento
 * Saint Petersburg
 * Salem
 * Scottish Islands
 * South East England
 * Stockholm
 * Surrey
 * Sydney
 * Tamil People
 * Telephones (empty – please add some pictures)
 * Turin
 * Underwater diving
 * Vienna
 * West Sussex

Progress on intro conversions
The intros for most of the portals up through the letter "O" have been converted, using this wikicode:

Where the pagename didn't match the article title for the subject, the title was typed in.

Most of the portals that do not contain  or   have not yet been processed.

About a thousand portals use the method of selective transclusion for the intro section. That's about two-thirds. That means we have one-third of the way to go on the intro section conversions.

Much more to come...
So much has been happening with portals that I can't keep up with it. (That's good). Which means, more in the upcoming issue. Until then, see ya 'round the project. Sincerely,   &mdash; The Transhumanist   08:47, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #013, 18 July 2018
I got overwhelmed IRL (in real life) during the production of issue #12. So, here is a catch-up issue, to help bring you (and me) up to speed on what is happening with portals...

By the way, we still have 97 participants. (Tell all your friends about this WikiProject, and have them join!)

Panoramas!
One cool feature of some of the geographical portals is a panoramic picture at the top of the intro section.

Check these out:
 * Portal:Kyoto
 * Portal:Miami
 * Portal:Seattle
 * Portal:Houston
 * Portal:Tokyo
 * Portal:New Orleans
 * Portal:Brisbane
 * Portal:Calgary
 * Portal:Moscow

The Portals WikiGnome squadron is busy adding panoramas to geographical portals that don't yet have one. Feel free to join in on the fun. See task details at WikiProject Portals.

Caveat: avoid super-huge pics, as they can cause portal scripts to time-out. Please try to keep picture size down below 2 megabytes. Thank you.

Auto-populated slideshows
Speaking of pictures...

We now have two slideshow templates. You may be familiar with Random slideshow, in which the editor types in (or copies/pastes) a list of pictures he or she wants it to display.

Well, now we have another template, courtesy of Evad37, which accepts one or more page names instead, and displays a random image off of the listed pages. So instead of listing dozens of files by hand, you can include a title or three to be scanned automatically. It even lets you specify particular sections.

The new slideshow template is Transclude files as random slideshow.

Here's a sample, that grabs images from a single page:

New Template:Box-header colour
Speaking of new templates, here's another one!

Also from Evad37, we have a new component for starting section boxes, that is color configurable, and that bypasses the need for box-header subpages altogether. It is Box-header colour.

For color support, see Web colors.

For the discussion in which this was inspired, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks.

(In case you didn't notice, the slideshow box above uses this new template).

BTW, don't forget to close your box with Box-footer.

Where are we on the redesign?
The answer to this question is quite involved, and would fill this page to overflowing. Therefore, this subject, including a complete update on where we are at and where we are going with portal design, is covered at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Where are we on portal conversion?
An AWB pass to convert intros on the portals has been completed. The pass couldn't convert them all (due to various formatting configurations, etc.).

All but about 170 portals now have introductions selectively transcluded on the base page. Not counting manually maintained portals, that leaves about 70 portals that either need their intros converted, or they need an intro.

Next, we'll be converting the categories sections!

What's the plan, man?
The course of action we have been taking goes something like this, with all steps being pursued simultaeneously...

1) Design a one-page automated portal model

2) Convert existing portals to that design (except those being manually maintained)

3) Remove subpages no longer needed

4) Develop further tools to empower editors working on portals

Later, when the tools are up to the task, filling in the gaps in coverage (with new portals) will also become practical.

Are we caught up yet?
Probably not.

Who knows what our programmers and editors have dreamed up while I was writing this.

See ya again soon,   &mdash; The Transhumanist   11:09, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #014, 27 July 2018
Development of design continues, full speed ahead...

Excerpt slideshows are here!
Can you say "paradigm shift"?

Now, in addition to picture slideshows, we have slideshows that can display excerpts. Portals are not just for topic tasting anymore. Now they can be made useful for surveying Wikipedia's coverage of entire subjects. This gives a deeper meaning to their name. Hmmm. "Portals"... Doorways to knowledge.

Portal:Lithuania was redesigned using excerpt slideshows. Check it out.

For those of you who cannot wait to test out these new toys...

We have not one, but three excerpt slideshow components to pick from:

Transclude excerpts as random slideshow


 * For this one, you specify the page names where the excerpts are to be extracted from.

Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow


 * This one accepts source pages from where the page names are gathered from list items. Then an excerpt from one of those pages is displayed. The selection of what is included in the slide show can be limited to a specific number from the collection (of the page names gathered), and that selection is renewed from scratch each time the page is purged.


 * For example, if you specify Template:World Heritage Sites in Spain as a source page, the slideshow will cycle through those sites. Now you don't have to type them in one-by-one. This greatly reduces portal creation time.

Transclude linked excerpts as random slideshow


 * Same as above, but gathers links instead of just linked list items.

Panoramic banners
Portal image banner displays a panoramic picture the width of the page, and adjusts its size, so it stays that way even if the user changes page view size. And it accepts multiple file names, so that the picture displayed randomizes between them each time the page is visited/purged.

Give resizing the page a try:

Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

You can now balance section boxes
Before:

After:

Notice how the box bottoms line up. That readjusts even if you click the slideshow buttons.

The template used for this is Flex columns.

By the way, when you include more than one box in a column, any left over whitespace in that column is divided between them.

Box-header colour
You may have noticed the new Box-header colour template used above. It lets you pick the color locally (right on the same page). Before, this was handled on a subpage somewhere.

Testing, testing
Now that we have lots of toys to play with for making cool portals...

Don't forget, that the majority of views of Wikipedia these days are from mobile devices. We need to make certain that portals display well on those. So, remember to check your work on portals in mobile view mode...

To see a portal in mobile view mode, insert a ".m" into a portal's url, after "en", like this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Reptile

If you discover problems in a portal you can't fix, report them on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Until next time...
Have fun. &mdash; The Transhumanist  01:00, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.12 30 July 2018
Hello, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

Overall the June backlog drive was a success, reducing the last 3,000 or so to below 500. However, as expected, 90% of the patrolling was done by less than 10% of reviewers. Since the drive closed, the backlog has begun to rise sharply again and is back up to nearly 1,400 already. Please help reduce this total and keep it from raising further by reviewing some articles each day.
 * June backlog drive


 * New technology, new rules
 * New features are shortly going to be added to the Special:NewPagesFeed which include a list of drafts for review, OTRS flags for COPYVIO, and more granular filter preferences. More details can be found at this page.
 * Probationary permissions: Now that PERM has been configured to allow expiry dates to all minor user rights, new NPR flag holders may sometimes be limited in the first instance to 6 months during which their work will be assessed for both quality and quantity of their reviews. This will allow admins to accord the right in borderline cases rather than make a flat out rejection.
 * Current reviewers who have had the flag for longer than 6 months but have not used the permissions since they were granted will have the flag removed, but may still request to have it granted again in the future, subject to the same probationary period, if they wish to become an active reviewer.


 * Editathons
 * Editathons will continue through August. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the 'move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. —  Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)  00:00, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
 * The Signpost
 * The next issue of the monthly magazine will be out soon. The newspaper is an excellent way to stay up to date with news and new developments between our newsletters. If you have special messages to be published, or if you would like to submit an article (one about NPR perhaps?), don't hesitate to contact the editorial team here.

Your help desk question
You didn't get a response. Did you find help finding out about the Vaudeville portal? I wouldn't know how to answer your question, but perhaps you could try again.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  18:59, 30 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks for asking, . I have been working on other things and haven't followed up on that question. I think I will see if I can get in touch with someone who is active in the Portals Project group. Maybe direct contact with someone there will help. I appreciate your interest. Eddie Blick (talk) 19:38, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #015, 31 July 2018
Now that we have lots of toys to play with, it's play time!

Here are some fun activities to use our new toys on...

Fun activity #1: put the improved panorama template to use
Would you like to travel around the world? Well, this may be the next best thing...

Here's another fun toy to play with: Portal image banner

To see what it looks like, check out the panoramas at the tops of the following portals:
 * Portal:India
 * Portal:Melbourne
 * Portal:Perth
 * Portal:Monaco
 * Portal:South Sudan
 * Portal:Thiruvananthapuram
 * Portal:Lithuania
 * Portal:Brisbane
 * Portal:Abu Dhabi
 * Portal:Athens
 * Portal:Barcelona
 * Portal:Calgary
 * Portal:Dhaka
 * Portal:Dresden
 * Portal:Edinburgh
 * Portal:Florence
 * Portal:Houston
 * Portal:Miami
 * Portal:Milan
 * Portal:Moscow
 * Portal:Munich
 * Portal:Seattle
 * Portal:Stockholm
 * Portal:Turin
 * Portal:Bermuda

The task: There are many geography portals that lack panoramas. Please add some. Please keep the file size down below 2 megabytes, and keep in mind that you may find quality banners at at less than 200K (.2 megabytes). Good search terms to include with the place name are "banner", "cityscape", "skyline", "panorama", "landscape", etc.

Related task: There are also lots of geography portals that have panoramas used as gaudy banners (with print or icons splattered across them) or that display them in some random location on the page. In many cases, those pages would be improved by displaying the panorama as a clean picture at the top of the intro section, like on the examples above. This works best with banner-like panoramas. Please fix such pages when you come across them, if you believe it would improve the look of the page.

Taller images might be better suited displayed further down the page, or in the "Selected images" section.

Note that Portal image banner supports multiple images, and displays one at random upon the first visit, and each time the page is purged.

Fun activity #2: install "Selected images" sections
That is, image slideshows!

Over 200 have been installed so far. Just 1200 to go. (Be sure not to install them on portals with active maintainers, unless they want you to).

The title "Selected images" reflects the fact that not all images on Wikipedia are pictures, and encompasses maps, graphs, diagrams, sketches, paintings, pictures, and so on.

The toys we have to work with for this are:

Random slideshow

and

Transclude files as random slideshow

The task: Using one of the above templates directly on a portal's base page, replace static "Selected picture" sections, with a section like one of these:

The one on the left uses Random slideshow (which accepts file names), and the one on the right uses Transclude files as random slideshow (which accepts source pages from which the filenames are gathered).

The above section formatting is used on many of the pages you will come across, but not all. In those cases, use whatever section formatting matches the rest of the page.

Note that you may come across "Selected picture" sections done with Random portal component templates. That template call is the entire section. Replace it with a section that matches the other sections on the page, and put the new slideshow inside that.

For example, in Portal:California, this code:

was replaced with this code:

And the new section blended right in with the formatting of the rest of the page. Note the use of the  magic word. Plain article titles also work. Don't feel limited to one or two page names. But be sure to test each slideshow before installing the next one. (Or if you prefer, in batches - just don't leave them hanging). Report technical problems at the Portal design talk page.

Fun activity #3: upgrade "Selected article" sections
These sections, where unmaintained, have gone stale. That's because 1) the excerpts are static, having been manually copied and pasted, and 2) because they lack automatic addition of new entries.

They can be upgraded with:

Transclude random excerpt

or

Transclude list item excerpt

or

Transclude linked excerpt

All three of these will provide excerpts that won't go stale. The latter two can provide excerpt collections that won't go stale, by providing new entries over time. The key is to select source pages or source sections that are frequently updated, such as root article sections, mainstream lists, or navigation templates.

Where will this put us?
When the above tasks are completed for the entire collection of portals (except the ones with specific maintainers), we'll be more than half-way done with the portal system upgrade.

Keep up the great work. &mdash; The Transhumanist  19:18, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Help Fixing References on an Actors Page
Telblick,

When you get a chance, could you please help me fix the reference section for actor Earl Holliman's page? It is a bit of mess and could use some of your aid since I'm having trouble fixing what someone else had done. Please and thank youI&#39;m Listening to 80s Music (talk) 13:51, 7 August 2018 (UTC).


 * , I'll take a look at it and see what I can do. Eddie Blick (talk) 15:11, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

Help With?
Teblick,

Can you help me fix the reference sections for:

Gloria Blondell Isabel Jewell Barbara Baxley Eleanor Parker

Whenever you can? Thank you!I&#39;m Listening to 80s Music (talk) 11:45, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

TOTD help request
Dear Teblick,

I noticed you signed up as a participant at WT:TOTD.

As you know, in addition to being displayed on thousands of user pages, the Tip of the day is also presented on some of the highest-traffic pages of the Wikipedia community, including the main help page, and the Community portal.

One thing that the Tip of the day department needs on an ongoing basis is maintenance of its tips, in the form of proofreading.

One way you could help with that is to display the tip of the day at the bottom of your talk page, where you would regularly see it. Then, if you notice any problems, you could dip in and fix them.

We have a special tip template that displays the tip 2 days in advance (in order to precede all time zones), to assist in checking tips before they go "live". That template has a secondary function as well: it provides a place to post department notices, when needed.

Notice the reference at the top of this message. That is a nifty little trick, to hang anything desired at the bottom of a talk page. I've used it to display the template just mentioned. If you place that at the top of your talk page somewhere, the daily tip will always be displayed below the last message on the page.

Just a bonus tip, from your friendly neighborhood Tip of the day department. ;)  &mdash; The Transhumanist   16:21, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
 * , I will try to help. Eddie Blick (talk) 02:21, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks and...
Thank you for all your help! Greatly appreciated! When able, could you please help me update the references for the following articles:


 * Barney Martin
 * Janice Rule
 * Ben Gazzara
 * Dolores Gray
 * Ellen Drew
 * Jayne Meadows
 * Audrey Meadows
 * Evelyn Keyes
 * Anne Francis

It would be much appreciated as I'm still having a bit of trouble trying myself. Thank you so muchI&#39;m Listening to 80s Music (talk) 00:01, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Future portal tool
Discussions are underway on the design of a portal tool (user script) that will hopefully have features for modifying portals at the click of a menu item, to make editing them easier. It might do things like change the color for you, add to a selection, add a new section, move a section, and so on.

If you'd like to be involved and suggest features for the tool, please join us at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Progress report: upgrade of portals
As new portal components are built by our Lua gurus, those components are being used to upgrade portals. Each component automates a section of a portal in a particular way.

The sections that are mostly upgraded so far are the Intro, and the Associated Wikimedia section. The sections currently undergoing upgrade are: Selected image, Categories, and the Intro.

The Intro? Isn't that done already?

Yes, and no.

The upgrade of the excerpt in intros is mostly complete (there are about 70 non-standard portals that still need it).

Now we are doing another upgrade of intros in the form of adding a panoramic picture at the top of the intro, on portals for which such a picture is available on. Dozens of panoramas have been added so far, and they are really starting to affect the look of portals &mdash; the portals that have them look really good.

Regions are the most likely subjects to have panoramas, but a surprising number of other subjects have banner-shaped pictures too. Some examples of non-geographic portals that they have been added to are:
 * Portal:Underwater diving
 * Portal:Sharks
 * Portal:Reptiles
 * Portal:Meat
 * Portal:Cheese
 * Portal:Cereals
 * Portal:Tea
 * Portal:Milk
 * Portal:Wheat
 * Portal:Rice
 * Portal:Clothing

Speaking of pictures, several hundred Selected image sections have been upgraded to include image slideshows.

Progress report: design
The push for automation continues, with new components under continuous testing in the field. As problems are spotted, they are reported to our programmers, who have done a fantastic job of keeping up with bug reports and fixing the relevant Lua modules fast. I am highly impressed.

Construction time on new portals is now down to as little as a minute or less. Though not in general. If you are lucky enough to spot portals that fit the profile of the new tools (their strengths), then a portal can be complete almost as soon as it is created, with the added time it takes to find and add a panorama. Source page titles are not generally standardized, and so it source pages in many cases must be entered manually. Where source page titles follow a standard naming convention, portal creation for those subjects goes quickly.

So, we still have some hurdles, but the outlook on portals is very good. New features, and many improvements to features are on the horizon. I'll be sure to report them when they become available.

What will the portal of the future look like? That is up to you!

See you on the project's talk pages.

Sincerely,   &mdash; The Transhumanist   21:10, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #017, 22 Aug 2018
This issue is about portal creation...

Creating new portals
Myself and others have been testing and experimenting with the new components in upgrading existing portals and in building new portals. They have now been applied in hundreds of portals.

The templates are ready for general use for portal creation.

They are still a bit buggy, but the only way we are going to work the rest of the bugs out is by using them and reporting the bugs as we come across them.

I look forward to seeing what new portals you create!

Be sure to report bugs at WT:WPPORTD.

The main portal creation template is box portal skeleton.

Portal creation tips
After starting a portal using box portal skeleton...
 * 1) Placing a panorama (banner picture) at the top of the intro section is a nice touch, and really makes a portal look good. box portal skeleton doesn't automatically insert panoramas. So, you will need to do that by hand. They can be found at . For some examples, check out Portal:Sharks, Portal:Cheese, and Portal:Florence
 * 2) The search term provided in the Did you know? and In the news sections is very basic and rarely matches anything. It is best to replace that term with multiple search arguments, if possible (separate each argument with a pipe character). For example, in Portal:Capital punishment, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:Capital_punishment&diff=855255361&oldid=855137403 Searches in templates use Lua search notation.
 * 3) Check the In the news and Did you know? sections for mismatches. That is, sometimes entries come up that shouldn't be displayed. If there are any, refine the search strings further, so they don't return such results.
 * 4) Finish each portal you've created before creating a new one. We don't want unfinished portals sitting around.

Need a laugh?
Check out the Did you know? section on Portal:Determinism. &mdash; The Transhumanist  02:45, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 29
<div style = "color: #936c29; font-size: 4em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif"> The Wikipedia Library <span style="font-size: 2em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif">Books & Bytes

Issue 29, June – July 2018 <div style = "margin-top: 1.5em; border: 3px solid #ae8c55; border-radius: .5em; padding: 1em 1.5em; font-size: .9em"> Hindi, Italian and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!
 * New partners
 * Economic & Political Weekly–10 accounts
 * Wikimania
 * Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
 * Global branches update
 * Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:03, 25 August 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 12
Newsletter • August 2018

This month: WikiProject X: The resumption

Work has resumed on WikiProject X and CollaborationKit, backed by a successfully funded Project Grant. For more information on the current status and planned work, please see this month's issue of the newsletter!

-— Isarra ༆ 22:24, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Bug hunt!
As you know, portals are now supported by a number of new templates, which are in turn supported by some new Lua modules.

Those templates and modules are being put to the test, in the new portals that have been created since this WikiProject rebooted, plus a number of existing portals that have been revamped.

The new portals, and revamped ones, can be found at Category:Single-page portals.

Please browse the new portals at your leisure, and report any and all problems that you spot. Post bug and other portal problem reports at WT:WPPORTD. Please report bugs, quirks, awkward aspects, or anything weird or off that you notice. Compliments and suggestions are also welcome. :)

When you report a bug, please indicate the portal's name, the section that the problem appeared in, and the name of the article appearing (first) in the section with the problem. Most problems will likely be encountered in the ''Selected general articles" section, due to quirks in a displayed article's wikicode that the lua modules don't handle yet. Your help in spotting those is of utmost value. Thank you.

Don't delete portal subpages just yet
For portals that have been converted to the single-page design, we are not deleting their subpages at this time, because we are working on ways to harvest the data from those pages. For example, the Selected picture subpages include filenames and captions that would be valuable for the image slideshows. Please don't delete portal subpages, for now. They'll be slated for d-batch speedy deletion after harvesting. Thank you.

Development notes
We are currently testing a feature added to Transclude files as random slideshow that allows it to accept both sourcepages and filenames. Courtesy of Evad37. This will pave the way for harvesting files and their captions from portal subpages, for use in image slideshows.

We need your help
The bulk of the work is being done by a handful of editors. But we can't do it all. We need help with spotting bugs, refining the search parameters in new/revamped portals (in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections), adding images to slideshows for a broader selection (they default to showing the images on the root article page but are capable of showing so much more), adding panoramic pictures at the top of the intro section of region portals (cities, counties, states, provinces, countries, continents, and other regions), to name but a few task types.

It is rewarding to be a part of the growing portal phenomenon. And you get to see its expansion and refinement up close.

Feel free to join in on the fun. ;)

Thank you,   &mdash; The Transhumanist   06:58, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for Duane Thompson edits
I happened upon Duane Thompson yesterday, and having a newspaper account, decided to see what I could do to add citations. Sometime next week, I will see if I can find a few more. I appreciate your edits. As all of my citations involve a paywall, it was helpful having an example to show me how to add that to my citations. Anobium625 (talk) 15:19, 7 September 2018 (UTC)


 * , You're welcome, and thanks for your note. Much of my work on Wikipedia involves actors and actresses from the past, so I'm glad to hear from a fellow editor with similar interests. I use my Newspapers.com account almost every day to search for material for Wikipedia articles. If you use a Windows-based computer, I can recommend a macro program that saves me a lot of time when I enter information in the "cite news" template.


 * Are you familiar with the Media History Digital Library? It often can provide useful information about entertainers from years gone by. When I entered "Duane Thompson" (including the quotation marks), it showed 492 hits. I haven't gone through them, so I don't know how many are useful and how many are not. You might want to check there when you have time.


 * I gather from the creation date of your user page that you are relatively new to Wikipedia. If I can help, please let me know. I've been doing this about 4 1/2 years now. There is still a lot that I don't know, but if you have questions, I'll try to answer them. Eddie Blick (talk) 20:02, 7 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Hello ! Yes, I am just learning my way around Wikipedia. I began by writing an article about Constance Savery, an English author of (mostly) children's books. That taught me a lot! If you look at Constance Savery, you will find strong criticism about trivia, citations, and tone. I've pruned the article a great deal, added many citations, and removed my enthusiastic prose, but I am waiting with bated breath for an editor to come along and cut me to the bone.
 * When I am not working on Savery, I look at random Wiki articles, and when I find one that looks as if it would profit from my newspaper accounts, then I see what I can do. I created Project Harvest Moon from scratch, and I thought Duane Thompson ought to amenable to a thorough newspaper search, which she was. There were, as you noted, hundreds of hits, especially between 1923 and 1930 (and 1938). Besides those, there were far fewer hits, but the ones I found were useful.
 * Some of the newspaper information isn't as reliable as it ought to be, because some press agents have been busy on her behalf, so I took that information with a grain of salt. I have seen two accounts of her birth, neither well documented, and the IMDB description of "Up and at 'Em" doesn't mention her, while another account did. I didn't trust, and didn't quote, either.
 * I work on a Macintosh, using Microsoft Word and Excel only under duress. Still I appreciate the app that you mentioned. Anobium625 (talk) 20:28, 7 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Your approach sounds good, . When I'm not creating articles for Wikipedia, I often try to add information (or citations for existing information) to existing articles. Newspapers.com often works well for that. Since you mentioned IMDB, I will add that it is not considered a reliable source for use in citations on Wikipedia (even though it often appears in citations). It's good that you didn't use IMDB in the situation that you mentioned. Eddie Blick (talk) 20:56, 7 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Hello . I've added Newspapers.com reference to all my Duane Thompson citations. It was a bit tedious, but not difficult. I welcome any suggestions. There's one omission that I'd like to correct. A typical reference begins with the author's name. I cheated and added Walter Winchell's name to the title of his column, but there is probably a proper way with a format like "|author:Walter Winchell ". Can you help? Thanks in advance. Eric. Anobium625 (talk) 01:31, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.13 18 September 2018
Hello, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

The New Page Feed currently has 2700 unreviewed articles, up from just 500 at the start of July. For a while we were falling behind by an average of about 40 articles per day, but we have stabilised more recently. Please review some articles from the back of the queue if you can (Sort by: 'Oldest' at Special:NewPagesFeed), as we are very close to having articles older than one month.


 * Project news
 * The New Page Feed now has a new "Articles for Creation" option which will show drafts instead of articles in the feed, this shouldn't impact NPP activities and is part of the WMF's AfC Improvement Project.
 * As part of this project, the feed will have some larger updates to functionality next month. Specifically, ORES predictions will be built in, which will automatically flag articles for potential issues such as vandalism or spam. Copyright violation detection will also be added to the new page feed. See the projects's talk page for more info.


 * There are a number of coordination tasks for New Page Patrol that could use some help from experienced reviewers. See New pages patrol/Coordination for more info to see if you can help out.


 * Other
 * A new summary page of reliable sources has been created; Identifying reliable sources/Perennial sources, which summarizes existing RfCs or RSN discussions about regularly used sources.


 * Moving to Draft and Page Mover
 * Some unsuitable new articles can be best reviewed by moving them to the draft space, but reviewers need to do this carefully and sparingly. It is most useful for topics that look like they might have promise, but where the article as written would be unlikely to survive AfD. If the article can be easily fixed, or if the only issue is a lack of sourcing that is easily accessible, tagging or adding sources yourself is preferable. If sources do not appear to be available and the topic does not appear to be notable, tagging for deletion is preferable (PROD/AfD/CSD as appropriate). See additional guidance at WP:DRAFTIFY.
 * If the user moves the draft back to mainspace, or recreates it in mainspace, please do not re-draftify the article (although swapping it to maintain the page history may be advisable in the case of copy-paste moves). AfC is optional except for editors with a clear conflict of interest.
 * Articles that have been created in contravention of our paid-editing-requirements or written from a blatant NPOV perspective, or by authors with a clear COI might also be draftified at discretion.
 * The best tool for draftification is User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js(info). Kindly adapt the text in the dialogue-pop-up as necessary (the default can also be changed like this). Note that if you do not have the Page Mover userright, the redirect from main will be automatically tagged as CSD R2, but in some cases it might be better to make this a redirect to a different page instead.
 * The Page Mover userright can be useful for New Page Reviewers; occasionally page swapping is needed during NPR activities, and it helps avoid excessive R2 nominations which must be processed by admins. Note that the Page Mover userright has higher requirements than the NPR userright, and is generally given to users active at Requested Moves. Only reviewers who are very experienced and are also very active reviewers are likely to be granted it solely for NPP activities.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:11, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Portals progress report
Don't blink. You might miss something.

As of a few days ago, portals had doubled in about a month and a half.

Also, there were 98 incompleted portals in Category:Portals under construction. Now there are just 43.

The WikiProject page has been thoroughly revised
The goals, plans, and task sections have all been updated.

Orphaned portals need a home...
Many new portals are still orphans, and need links pointing to them:


 * 1) A portal link at the bottom of corresponding navigation footer template. E.g., Template:Machines for Portal:Machines. See examples of a portals link at the bottom of Template:Robotics and Template:Forestry.
 * 2) A Portal box in the See also section of the corresponding root article for each portal. If there is no See also section, create one and place the portal template in that. (Rather than placing them in an external links section -- they're not external links).
 * 3) A Portal template placed at the top of the category page corresponding to each portal.

All new and revamped portals can be found at Category:Single-page portals.

Portal:Contents/Portals
This is the main list of portals.

Nearly 2,000 of the new portals need to be listed here.

They can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals. Instructions are included there.

Customized Portal Rating system is now in place
Portals now have a new rating system of their own designed specifically to support portal evaluation! We were trying to use the standard assessment system for articles, but that doesn't fit portals very well.

Many thanks to Evad37, Waggers, AfroThundr3007730, SMcCandlish, Tom, BrendonTheWizard, and Pbsouthwood for their work and input on this.

The new system can be found at the top of all portal talk pages, in the WikiProject portals box. Those with "???" ratings need to be assessed, which makes up most of the older portals.

Most of the new portals were started out with an initial "Low" level of importance when their talk pages were created. Those deserving higher importance should be promoted as you come across them.

Improving the new portals
The starting point for new portals included minimal parameters and content, in the form of default values in the template(s) used for their creation.

Embellishing embedded search strings
So, for the search strings in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections, this was the magic word, which represents the portal's name. Unfortunately, the resulting term is alway capitalized, which limits its effectiveness as a search string for anything but proper nouns. Results for those two sections can be improved, by replacing the "PAGENAME" magic word with multiple search strings, and search strings that begin with lower case letters. There is no inherent limit as to how many search parameters may be included. Lua search notation is used. The more general the subject, the more subtopic search terms you may want to include. For example, on Portal:Avengers (comics),  turned up nothing. But, when more parameters were added, as in the wikicode below...

... that returned several results in the portal's DYK section.

Be sure you make the improvements to both the DYK section and the "In the news" section, as they both require the search strings.

Expanding the slideshow contents
The default starting selection for the image slideshow in most new portals is whatever images happen to be in the corresponding root article (via the PAGENAME magic word). You can improve image slideshows by adding more sourcepages and filenames as parameters in the "Selected images" section of portals.

See Template:Transclude files as random slideshow/doc for instructions.

More exciting things are to come...
Portals used to take about 6 hours or more to create. Now, for subjects that have particular navigation support, we've got that down to about one minute each, with even more content displayed than ever. True, that means the new portals pick you, rather than the other way around. Creating a specific portal that doesn't happen to have the requisite navigation support is still pretty time consuming. But, we are working on extending our reach beyond the low-hanging fruit.

And efforts are ongoing to keep shaving time off of the creation process. Eventually, we may get it down to seconds each.

In addition to improving automation, we're always looking for new features and improvements that we can add to portals, and there is plenty of potential to expand on the standard design so that new portals are even better right out of the starting gate. Additional designs are also possible.

On the horizon, there are many more portals waiting to be created. And we can expect to see at least a few more section types emerge. I never expected slideshows, for example, especially not for excerpts. Who knows where innovation will take us next?

Keep up the great work everyone.

Sincerely,   &mdash; The Transhumanist   07:10, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

Women in Red
Hi there, Teblick, and welcome to Women in Red. I see you have already created a number of biographies about actresses and entertainers. I hope there will be many more. Happy editing!--Ipigott (talk) 10:49, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

Good work at Edythe Wright
Hello. You seem to have a comprehensive bibliography about Edythe Wright and as your next project I would like you to expand on the Patricia Farr article. Virtually nothing is known about this actress, and it would be greatly appreciated if you could contribute to it. Akld guy (talk) 04:24, 8 October 2018 (UTC)


 * , Thanks for noticing my additions to the Edythe Wright article. I happened to spot that article a few days ago and notice its need for citations at the time. I may add a little more to it, but I have about exhausted my resources with regard to her. I am not familiar with Patricia Farr, but I will see if I can find anything to add to her biography. Eddie Blick (talk) 12:51, 8 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  04:26, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Get ready for November with Women in Red!
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:40, 14 October 2018 (UTC) via MassMessaging

NPR Newsletter No.14 21 October 2018
Hello, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

, there are 3650 unreviewed articles and the backlog now stretches back 51 days.
 * Backlog


 * Community Wishlist Proposal
 * There is currently an ongoing discussion regarding the drafting of a Community Wishlist Proposal for the purpose of requesting bug fixes and missing/useful features to be added to the New Page Feed and Curation Toolbar.
 * Please join the conversation as we only have until 29 October to draft this proposal!


 * Project updates
 * ORES predictions are now built-in to the feed. These automatically predict the class of an article as well as whether it may be spam, vandalism, or an attack page, and can be filtered by these criteria now allowing reviewers to better target articles that they prefer to review.
 * There are now tools being tested to automatically detect copyright violations in the feed. This detector may not be accurate all the time, though, so it shouldn't be relied on 100% and will only start working on new revisions to pages, not older pages in the backlog.


 * New scripts
 * User:Enterprisey/cv-revdel.js(info) — A new script created for quickly placing copyvio-revdel on a page.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. —  Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)  20:49, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Books & Bytes, Issue 30
<div style = "color: #936c29; font-size: 4em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif"> The Wikipedia Library <span style="font-size: 2em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif">Books & Bytes

Issue 30, August – Septmeber 2018 <div style = "margin-top: 1.5em; border: 3px solid #ae8c55; border-radius: .5em; padding: 1em 1.5em; font-size: .9em"> French version of Books & Bytes is now available in meta!
 * Library Card translation
 * Spotlight: 1Lib1Ref spreads to the Southern Hemisphere and beyond
 * Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
 * Global branches update
 * Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:43, 25 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)

Welcome AmericanAir88
Give a hearty welcome to AmericanAir88, who has adopted working on portals as one of his main purposes on Wikipedia. So far, he has created the following portals:


 * Portal:Blueberries
 * Portal:Olives
 * Portal:Bananas
 * Portal:Bone fractures
 * Portal:Carbohydrates
 * Portal:Cherries
 * Portal:Coconuts
 * Portal:Hartford Whalers
 * Portal:Integumentary system
 * Portal:Exercise
 * Portal:Fatty acids

Way to go!

Where's Evad?
Evad disappeared from Wikipedia on October 18.

He has been, and will continue to be, sorely missed.

Hopefully, he is okay, on a Caribbean cruise or something.

The conversion continues
Portals of the old design, are slowly but surely being converted to the new single-page design.

One factor that has slowed things down is that for many sections, the section header call and section contents call are integrated into a template and buried in a lua module, locking them in on each portal. They have been that way for years.

This means that these sections can't be directly edited like the other sections on the same portal. So, search/replaces affect all the sections except those. So, upgrading headers on these portals, for example, misses the integrated sections and inadvertently results in 2 different header colors.

Before we can continue with the upgrade of these portals, the headers and section contents calls need to be restored to each portal, so that those can be edited in concert with the other sections on the portal, and worked on independently of each other.

This is underway, with a solution implemented on about 1/4 of the affected portals so far. Around 300 of them. The remaining 900 should be done within a couple weeks or so.

Going wide...
We now have banner-shaped pictures included in the introduction sections of 180 portals. The rarity of such pictures has made it difficult to find suitably narrow images for display across the tops of portals.

We have a solution for this, courtesy of FR30799386...

Most pictures are not banner-shaped. But, you can still use them as banners. Here's how:

Using both  and   produces this:

Project's status
There are now 4,140 portals, with more being created almost daily. Prior to this project's reboot, portals were created at about the rate of 80 per year. Since April of this year, we've created about 2,600 new portals, or 32.5 years' worth at the old rate.

Of those new portals, about 3/4 of them need links leading to them. Almost all of them are linked to from the category system, but they still need links in article see also sections, at the bottom of navigation templates, and on the main portals list at Portal:Contents/Portals.

Of the 1500 portals created before the reboot, about 300 have been completely converted to the new design so far. About 1100 more have been partially converted, with intros, image slideshows, and associated wikimedia sections getting the most attention.

Discussion has resumed on the portal guidelines.

Until next issue...
See ya round the portal system! &mdash; The Transhumanist  11:46, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.15 16 November 2018
Hello ,
 * Community Wishlist Survey – NPP needs you – Vote NOW
 * Community Wishlist Voting takes place 16 to 30 November for the Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements, and other software requests. The NPP community is hoping for a good turnout in support of the requests to Santa for the tools we need. This is very important as we have been asking the Foundation for these upgrades for 4 years.


 * If this proposal does not make it into the top ten, it is likely that the tools will be given no support at all for the foreseeable future. So please put in a vote today.


 * We are counting on significant support not only from our own ranks, but from everyone who is concerned with maintaining a Wikipedia that is free of vandalism, promotion, flagrant financial exploitation and other pollution.


 * With all 650 reviewers voting for these urgently needed improvements, our requests would be unlikely to fail. See also The Signpost Special report: 'NPP: This could be heaven or this could be hell for new users – and for the reviewers', and if you are not sure what the wish list is all about, take a sneak peek at an article in this month's upcoming issue of The Signpost which unfortunately due to staff holidays and an impending US holiday will probably not be published until after voting has closed.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. —  Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 18:37, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Help this article
Can you fix the Joe Roberts there's no deaths and birth place? Ryan Pikachu (talk) 16:57, 18 November 2018 (UTC)


 * I have added his places of death and birth to the article's infobox. I also added his full name to the infobox and the lead. Eddie Blick (talk) 02:32, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

When you get a moment...
Hi, Teblick,

I tried using the Refill tool to spruce up some new sources on Earl Holliman's Wiki but the system gets booting me out and not letting me redo them. When you can could you please help tweek them for me (it's only 2, it won't take long). Thank you so much and I hope you will enjoy a very nice Holiday Season. Take care!I&#39;m Listening to 80s Music (talk) 14:49, 23 November 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject Portals update #023, 25 Nov 2018
There are now 4,180 portals.

Will we break 5,000 by the end of the year?

I know we can. But, that is up to you!

( New portals are created with  or   )

Happy Holidays
<div style="border-style:solid; border-color:#FF4646; background-color:#F6F0F7; border-width:2px; text-align:left; padding:7px; border-radius: 1em; box-shadow: 0.1em 0.1em 0.5em rgba(0,0,0,0.75);;" class="plainlinks">Happy Holidays text.png Hello everyone! Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice (if it's occurring in your area of the world), and thanks for your work in maintaining, improving, and expanding portals. Cheers,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   06:51, 26 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings}} to send this message

Jingling along
The following portals have been created since the last issue:


 * 1) Advanced Micro Devices
 * 2) Aqua Teen Hunger Force
 * 3) Aquatic ecosystems
 * 4) Blackberries
 * 5) Blade
 * 6) Blake and Mortimer
 * 7) Climate
 * 8) Democratic Party
 * 9) Dua Lipa
 * 10) Eels
 * 11) Eggs
 * 12) Emmy Awards
 * 13) Fallout
 * 14) Flutes and whistles
 * 15) Geophysics
 * 16) Ghost
 * 17) Hartford Whalers
 * 18) HBO
 * 19) Hot sauces
 * 20) International System of Units
 * 21) Jawaharlal Nehru
 * 22) Kendrick Lamar
 * 23) KFC
 * 24) Kingdom of England
 * 25) M.I.A.
 * 26) Marvel Comics
 * 27) Marvel Entertainment
 * 28) Minerals
 * 29) Mixed martial arts
 * 30) Money
 * 31) MTV
 * 32) Museums
 * 33) National Hockey League
 * 34) Natural resources
 * 35) Nature
 * 36) NBC
 * 37) Nehru–Gandhi family
 * 38) Orthoptera
 * 39) PATH
 * 40) Pears
 * 41) Physiology
 * 42) Ponds
 * 43) Pope Francis
 * 44) Potatoes
 * 45) Presidents of the United States
 * 46) Republican Party
 * 47) Salad dressings
 * 48) Santiago
 * 49) Six Flags
 * 50) Stan Lee
 * 51) Starbucks
 * 52) Stem cells
 * 53) Systems of measurement
 * 54) SZA
 * 55) The West Wing
 * 56) Tintin
 * 57) Tomato sauces
 * 58) Tove Lo
 * 59) Viticulture
 * 60) Waffles
 * 61) Wendy's
 * 62) White House
 * 63) Will Smith
 * 64) Winemaking

Keep 'em coming!

By the way, the above list was generated using this Petscan query. It can be easily modified by changing the date. The data page (under the Output tab) also has options for receiving the data in CSV or tabbed format, which some operating systems automatically load into a spreadsheet program for ease of use, such as copying and pasting the desired column (like page names).

In closing
We'll keep it short this issue.

Expect a flood next time. Or the one after that.

Cheerio,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   08:06, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanks Ryan Pikachu (talk) 05:24, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Full name
I understand that, but we don't have a reliable source which says her full name at the moment. SL93 (talk) 02:10, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
 * , You are right, and I was wrong. My reason did not apply to an unvalidated name. That was my mistake entirely. Should the birth name be removed from the infobox so that someone else does not make the same error that I did? Eddie Blick (talk) 02:28, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and removed it. I forgot to remove it the first time and I'm sorry for that. SL93 (talk) 02:30, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, . A better article is the result. I appreciate your work on it. Eddie Blick (talk) 02:36, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

DYK for Kate McComb
Gatoclass (talk) 00:02, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.16 15 December 2018
Hello ,

This year's award for the Reviewer of the Year goes to. Around on Wikipedia since 2011, their staggering number of 26,554reviews over the past twelve months makes them, together with an additional total of 275,285edits, one of Wikipedia's most prolific users.
 * Reviewer of the Year
 * Thanks are also extended for their work to (15,059 reviews),  (12,760reviews),  (9,001reviews),  (8,440reviews),  (8,092reviews),   (5,306reviews),  (4,153 reviews),  (4,016reviews),  and  (3,615reviews)., , , and  have been New Page Reviewers for less than a year — Barkeep49 for only sevenmonths, while , with an edit count of 250,000 since she joined Wikipedia in 2008, has been a bastion of New Page Patrol for many years.

See also the list of top100 reviewers.

The backlog is now approaching 5,000, and still rising. There are around 640holders of the NPR flag, most of whom appear to be inactive. The 10% of the reviewers who do 90% of the work could do with some support especially as some of them are now taking a well deserved break.
 * Less good news, and an appeal for some help

At #1 position, the Community Wishlist poll closed on 3December with a resounding success for NPP, reminding the WMF and the volunteer communities just how critical NPP is to maintaining a clean encyclopedia and the need for improved tools to do it. A big 'thank you' to everyone who supported the NPP proposals. See the results.
 * Really good news - NPR wins the Community Wishlist Survey 2019

Due to a number of changes having been made to the feed since this three-minutevideo was created, we have been asked by the WMF for feedback on the video with a view to getting it brought up to date to reflect the new features of the system. Please leave your comments here, particularly mentioning how helpful you find it for new reviewers. If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:14, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Training video

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 13
Newsletter • December 2018

This month: A general update.

The current status of the project is as follows:
 * Progress of the project has been generally delayed since September due to development issues (more bitrot than expected, some of the code just being genuinely confusing, etc) and personal injury (I suffered a concussion in October and was out of commission for almost two months as a result).
 * I currently expect to be putting out a proper call for CollaborationKit pilots in January/February, with estimated deployment in February/March if things don't go horribly wrong (they will, though, don't worry). As a part of that, I will properly update the page and send out announcement and reach out to all projects already signed up as pilots for WikiProject X in general, at which point those (still) interested can volunteer specifically to test the CollaborationKit extension.
 * WikiProject X/Pilots was originally created for the first WikiProject X prototype, and given this is where the project has since gone, it's only logical to continue to use it. While I haven't yet updated the page to properly reflect this:
 * If you want to add your project to this page now, feel free. Just bear in mind that more information what to actually expect will be added later/included in the announcement, because by then I will have a much better idea myself.
 * Until then, you can find me in my corner working on making the CollaborationKit code do what we want and not just what we told it, per the workboard.

Until next time,

-— Isarra ༆ 22:44, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Books & Bytes, Issue 31
<div style = "color: #936c29; font-size: 4em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif"> The Wikipedia Library <span style="font-size: 2em; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif">Books & Bytes

Issue 31, October – Novemeber 2018 <div style = "margin-top: 1.5em; border: 3px solid #ae8c55; border-radius: .5em; padding: 1em 1.5em; font-size: .9em"> French version of Books & Bytes is now available on meta!
 * OAWiki
 * Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
 * Global branches update
 * Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:34, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject Portals update #024, 26 Dec 2018
Last issue, I mentioned there would be a flood, and so, here it is...

Portals status
We now have 4,620 portals.

And the race to pass 5,000 by year's end is on...

Can we make it?

The New Year, and the 5,001st portal, await.

( New portals are created with  or   )

Evad is back!
After disappearing in mid-thread, Evad37 has returned from a longer than expected wikibreak.

Be sure to welcome him back.

Improved cropping is coming to Portal image banner
User:FR30799386 is working on making Portal image banner even better by enabling it to chop the top off an image as well as the bottom.

Many pictures aren't suitable for banners because they are too tall. Therefor, User:FR30799386 added cropping to this template, so that an editor could specify part of a picture to be used rather than the whole thing.

Upgrade of flagship portals is underway
Work has begun on upgrading Wikipedia's flagship portals (those listed at the top of the Main page).

So far, Portal:Geography, Portal:History, and Portal:Technology have been revamped. Of course, you are welcome to improve them further.

Work continues on the other five. Feel free to join in on the fun.

Spotting missing portals that are redirects
In place of many missing portals, there is a redirect that leads to "the next best topic", such as a parent topic.

Most of these were created before we had the tools to easily create portals (they used to take 6 hours or more to create, because it was all done manually). Rather than leave a portal link red, some editors thought it was best that those titles led somewhere.

The subjects that have sufficient coverage should have their own portals rather than a redirect to some other subject.

Unfortunately, being blue like all other live links, redirects are harder to spot than redlinks.

To spot redirects easily, you can make them all appear green.

What's new in portal space?

 * 1) Portal:17th century
 * 2) Portal:18th century
 * 3) Portal:Absinthe
 * 4) Portal:Abuse
 * 5) Portal:Academic degrees
 * 6) Portal:Acari
 * 7) Portal:Acipenseriformes
 * 8) Portal:Actas
 * 9) Portal:Actinopterygii
 * 10) Portal:Activision
 * 11) Portal:Aerobatics
 * 12) Portal:Aeroflot
 * 13) Portal:Aesop
 * 14) Portal:Afrosoricida
 * 15) Portal:Aichi
 * 16) Portal:Airlines
 * 17) Portal:Air traffic control
 * 18) Portal:Akon
 * 19) Portal:Alan Turing
 * 20) Portal:Alfred Nobel
 * 21) Portal:Alice Paul
 * 22) Portal:Allahabad
 * 23) Portal:Allgemeine-SS
 * 24) Portal:Allium
 * 25) Portal:Aluminium
 * 26) Portal:Alvarezsauroidea
 * 27) Portal:Alveolata
 * 28) Portal:Amazon
 * 29) Portal:Amino acids
 * 30) Portal:Ancient Greek philosophy
 * 31) Portal:Andalusia
 * 32) Portal:Andes
 * 33) Portal:Animax
 * 34) Portal:Antennas
 * 35) Portal:Anthrax (American band)
 * 36) Portal:Antibiotics
 * 37) Portal:Antidotes
 * 38) Portal:Antifungals
 * 39) Portal:Antimony
 * 40) Portal:Antivirus software
 * 41) Portal:Aquifers
 * 42) Portal:Arachnids
 * 43) Portal:Armadillos
 * 44) Portal:Armour
 * 45) Portal:Art movements
 * 46) Portal:Arvicolinae
 * 47) Portal:Asanas
 * 48) Portal:Association of Southeast Asian Nations
 * 49) Portal:AstraZeneca
 * 50) Portal:Asturias
 * 51) Portal:Asus
 * 52) Portal:Atoms
 * 53) Portal:Automation
 * 54) Portal:Aylesbury
 * 55) Portal:Aztecs
 * 56) Portal:Bags
 * 57) Portal:Banks
 * 58) Portal:Basalt
 * 59) Portal:Batgirl
 * 60) Portal:Bats
 * 61) Portal:Bay Area Rapid Transit
 * 62) Portal:Beijing Subway
 * 63) Portal:Belo Horizonte
 * 64) Portal:Ben Affleck
 * 65) Portal:Binondo
 * 66) Portal:Biodiversity of Colombia
 * 67) Portal:Biomes
 * 68) Portal:Blue Origin
 * 69) Portal:Board games
 * 70) Portal:Boca Raton, Florida
 * 71) Portal:Bruno Mars
 * 72) Portal:Budapest Metro
 * 73) Portal:Buffalo, New York
 * 74) Portal:Bullying
 * 75) Portal:Busan Metro
 * 76) Portal:Buteoninae
 * 77) Portal:C++
 * 78) Portal:Cairo Metro
 * 79) Portal:Canadian art
 * 80) Portal:Character encoding
 * 81) Portal:Character encodings
 * 82) Portal:Charity
 * 83) Portal:Chemical engineering
 * 84) Portal:Chemical synthesis
 * 85) Portal:Chickenpox
 * 86) Portal:Chili peppers
 * 87) Portal:Chongqing Rail Transit
 * 88) Portal:Climate
 * 89) Portal:Communication
 * 90) Portal:Community of Madrid
 * 91) Portal:Computer files
 * 92) Portal:Concurrent computing
 * 93) Portal:Conservation biology
 * 94) Portal:Containers
 * 95) Portal:Contract bridge
 * 96) Portal:Convicts in Australia
 * 97) Portal:Copenhagen Metro
 * 98) Portal:Crochet
 * 99) Portal:Cucurbita
 * 100) Portal:Culture of Albania
 * 101) Portal:Culture of Argentina
 * 102) Portal:Culture of Armenia
 * 103) Portal:Culture of Assam
 * 104) Portal:Culture of Australia
 * 105) Portal:Culture of Austria
 * 106) Portal:Culture of Azerbaijan
 * 107) Portal:Culture of Bahrain
 * 108) Portal:Culture of Bangladesh
 * 109) Portal:Culture of Belarus
 * 110) Portal:Culture of Belgium
 * 111) Portal:Culture of Belize
 * 112) Portal:Culture of Bengal
 * 113) Portal:Culture of Cornwall
 * 114) Portal:Culture of Djibouti
 * 115) Portal:Culture of England
 * 116) Portal:Culture of Kerala
 * 117) Portal:Culture of Somalia
 * 118) Portal:Culture of West Bengal
 * 119) Portal:Curitiba
 * 120) Portal:Databases
 * 121) Portal:Data mining
 * 122) Portal:Data storage
 * 123) Portal:Deforestation and desertification
 * 124) Portal:Delta Air Lines
 * 125) Portal:Demi Lovato
 * 126) Portal:Demography
 * 127) Portal:Desalination
 * 128) Portal:Development of the human body
 * 129) Portal:Disease
 * 130) Portal:Disney Princess
 * 131) Portal:Dmitri Mendeleev
 * 132) Portal:Dublin
 * 133) Portal:DVD
 * 134) Portal:Eating
 * 135) Portal:Electronic components
 * 136) Portal:Elizabeth Cady Stanton
 * 137) Portal:Elizabeth I of England
 * 138) Portal:Ellie Goulding
 * 139) Portal:Embedded systems
 * 140) Portal:Embroidery
 * 141) Portal:Emmeline Pankhurst
 * 142) Portal:Emmy Awards
 * 143) Portal:Enugu
 * 144) Portal:Euro
 * 145) Portal:Eurostar
 * 146) Portal:Even-toed ungulates
 * 147) Portal:Executables
 * 148) Portal:Experimental aircraft
 * 149) Portal:Falkland Islands
 * 150) Portal:Fibers
 * 151) Portal:File sharing
 * 152) Portal:File systems
 * 153) Portal:Frankfurt
 * 154) Portal:Gaels
 * 155) Portal:Galicia (Spain)
 * 156) Portal:Gardens
 * 157) Portal:Gemstones
 * 158) Portal:Geotechnical engineering
 * 159) Portal:Geothermal power
 * 160) Portal:Glass
 * 161) Portal:Glass production
 * 162) Portal:GLONASS
 * 163) Portal:Guangzhou Metro
 * 164) Portal:Habitats
 * 165) Portal:Hall of Fame for Great Americans
 * 166) Portal:Helicopters
 * 167) Portal:Helmets
 * 168) Portal:Helsinki
 * 169) Portal:Hilary Duff
 * 170) Portal:Hiroshima
 * 171) Portal:History of computing
 * 172) Portal:Honey bees
 * 173) Portal:Honolulu County, Hawaii
 * 174) Portal:Hubble Space Telescope
 * 175) Portal:Hummingbirds
 * 176) Portal:HVAC
 * 177) Portal:Hymenoptera
 * 178) Portal:Intermodal containers
 * 179) Portal:International Council for Science
 * 180) Portal:International Space Station
 * 181) Portal:Interstate Highway System
 * 182) Portal:IOS
 * 183) Portal:IPv6
 * 184) Portal:Ithaca, New York
 * 185) Portal:James Webb Space Telescope
 * 186) Portal:Jammu and Kashmir
 * 187) Portal:JavaScript
 * 188) Portal:Jay-Z
 * 189) Portal:John Major
 * 190) Portal:Kabul
 * 191) Portal:KFC
 * 192) Portal:Khuzestan Province
 * 193) Portal:Launch vehicles
 * 194) Portal:Laundry
 * 195) Portal:Lenovo
 * 196) Portal:Leo Tolstoy
 * 197) Portal:Library classification systems
 * 198) Portal:Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II
 * 199) Portal:Longevity
 * 200) Portal:Los Angeles International Airport
 * 201) Portal:Love
 * 202) Portal:Lyra (constellation)
 * 203) Portal:MacOS
 * 204) Portal:Macroeconomics
 * 205) Portal:Madrid
 * 206) Portal:Mail
 * 207) Portal:Malaria
 * 208) Portal:Malware
 * 209) Portal:Manhattan Project
 * 210) Portal:Mao Zedong
 * 211) Portal:Marrakesh
 * 212) Portal:Mathematics and art
 * 213) Portal:Mattel
 * 214) Portal:Mayotte
 * 215) Portal:Media culture
 * 216) Portal:Media manipulation
 * 217) Portal:Medications
 * 218) Portal:Men
 * 219) Portal:Metalworking
 * 220) Portal:Metropolitan Transportation Authority
 * 221) Portal:Michael Faraday
 * 222) Portal:Microeconomics
 * 223) Portal:Milan Metro
 * 224) Portal:Military aircraft
 * 225) Portal:Military deception
 * 226) Portal:Mixed reality
 * 227) Portal:Modern history
 * 228) Portal:Mood disorders
 * 229) Portal:Morpeth, Northumberland
 * 230) Portal:Moscow Metro
 * 231) Portal:MPEG
 * 232) Portal:MTR
 * 233) Portal:Multihulls
 * 234) Portal:Museums
 * 235) Portal:Music of Scotland
 * 236) Portal:NASA
 * 237) Portal:National anthems
 * 238) Portal:Natural language processing
 * 239) Portal:Neoplasms
 * 240) Portal:New Delhi
 * 241) Portal:Northern Cyprus
 * 242) Portal:Nuclear weapons
 * 243) Portal:Nuts
 * 244) Portal:Odd-toed ungulates
 * 245) Portal:Ores
 * 246) Portal:Organ transplantation
 * 247) Portal:Orthoptera
 * 248) Portal:Oslo
 * 249) Portal:Palmyra
 * 250) Portal:Pan-Africanism
 * 251) Portal:Panasonic
 * 252) Portal:Parrots
 * 253) Portal:Parties
 * 254) Portal:Peanuts
 * 255) Portal:Peanuts (comic strip)
 * 256) Portal:Perl
 * 257) Portal:Permaculture
 * 258) Portal:Pesticides
 * 259) Portal:Physical fitness
 * 260) Portal:Physiology
 * 261) Portal:Plant nutrition
 * 262) Portal:Porcelain
 * 263) Portal:Ports and harbors
 * 264) Portal:Pre-Columbian era
 * 265) Portal:Prehistoric Scotland
 * 266) Portal:Private transport
 * 267) Portal:Programming languages
 * 268) Portal:Programming paradigms
 * 269) Portal:Prostitution
 * 270) Portal:Protests
 * 271) Portal:Psychological manipulation
 * 272) Portal:P. T. Barnum
 * 273) Portal:Public housing in the United Kingdom
 * 274) Portal:Public transport in Helsinki
 * 275) Portal:Public transport in Istanbul
 * 276) Portal:Pueblos
 * 277) Portal:Pune
 * 278) Portal:Quilting
 * 279) Portal:Racing
 * 280) Portal:Radiation
 * 281) Portal:RAID
 * 282) Portal:Rail transport in Argentina
 * 283) Portal:Rail transport in Finland
 * 284) Portal:Rail transport in Germany
 * 285) Portal:Rail transport in Israel
 * 286) Portal:Rail transport in Malaysia
 * 287) Portal:Rail transport in Norway
 * 288) Portal:Rail transport in Singapore
 * 289) Portal:Rail transport in Spain
 * 290) Portal:Rail transport in Sri Lanka
 * 291) Portal:Rail transport in Thailand
 * 292) Portal:Rail transport in the United Arab Emirates
 * 293) Portal:Realism (arts)
 * 294) Portal:Recycling
 * 295) Portal:Religion in China
 * 296) Portal:Religion in Egypt
 * 297) Portal:Religion in Iran
 * 298) Portal:Religion in Israel
 * 299) Portal:Religion in Mexico
 * 300) Portal:Religion in Mozambique
 * 301) Portal:Religion in Myanmar
 * 302) Portal:Religion in Norway
 * 303) Portal:Religion in Pakistan
 * 304) Portal:Religion in Poland
 * 305) Portal:Religion in Portugal
 * 306) Portal:Religion in Romania
 * 307) Portal:Religion in Scotland
 * 308) Portal:Religion in South Africa
 * 309) Portal:Religion in Sweden
 * 310) Portal:Religion in Thailand
 * 311) Portal:Religion in Turkey
 * 312) Portal:Religion in Zimbabwe
 * 313) Portal:Republic of Artsakh
 * 314) Portal:Revolutions
 * 315) Portal:Reykjavík
 * 316) Portal:Rhythm
 * 317) Portal:Rocket engines
 * 318) Portal:Rodenticides
 * 319) Portal:Roofs
 * 320) Portal:Roscosmos
 * 321) Portal:Roses
 * 322) Portal:Rowing
 * 323) Portal:RuPaul
 * 324) Portal:Saint Helena
 * 325) Portal:Sales
 * 326) Portal:San Juan, Puerto Rico
 * 327) Portal:San Marino
 * 328) Portal:São Paulo
 * 329) Portal:Scottish art
 * 330) Portal:Scottish clans
 * 331) Portal:Sex work
 * 332) Portal:Shinkansen
 * 333) Portal:Shipbuilding
 * 334) Portal:Silk
 * 335) Portal:Simple living
 * 336) Portal:SkyTrain (Vancouver)
 * 337) Portal:South Ossetia
 * 338) Portal:Space Shuttles
 * 339) Portal:SpaceX
 * 340) Portal:Spike Lee
 * 341) Portal:SQL
 * 342) Portal:Starbucks
 * 343) Portal:Statue of Liberty
 * 344) Portal:Stem cells
 * 345) Portal:Stonehenge
 * 346) Portal:Street newspapers
 * 347) Portal:Stuttgart
 * 348) Portal:Submarines
 * 349) Portal:Suffragettes
 * 350) Portal:Susan B. Anthony
 * 351) Portal:Systems
 * 352) Portal:Tallinn
 * 353) Portal:Tashkent
 * 354) Portal:Telephony
 * 355) Portal:Tents
 * 356) Portal:Tigers
 * 357) Portal:Tobacco
 * 358) Portal:Tomatoes
 * 359) Portal:Toronto Transit Commission
 * 360) Portal:Tortoises
 * 361) Portal:Transnistria
 * 362) Portal:Transport in Afghanistan
 * 363) Portal:Transport in Barcelona
 * 364) Portal:Transport in Belgium
 * 365) Portal:Transport in Bristol
 * 366) Portal:Transport in Bucharest
 * 367) Portal:Transport in Buckinghamshire
 * 368) Portal:Transport in Cardiff
 * 369) Portal:Transport in Chennai
 * 370) Portal:Transport in China
 * 371) Portal:Transport in Edinburgh
 * 372) Portal:Transport in Glasgow
 * 373) Portal:Transport in Guyana
 * 374) Portal:Transport in Hong Kong
 * 375) Portal:Transport in India
 * 376) Portal:Transport in Ireland
 * 377) Portal:Transport in Israel
 * 378) Portal:Transport in Kiev
 * 379) Portal:Transport in London
 * 380) Portal:Transport in Somerset
 * 381) Portal:Transport in Tamil Nadu
 * 382) Portal:Transport in Tiruchirappalli
 * 383) Portal:Transport in Vietnam
 * 384) Portal:Transport in Warsaw
 * 385) Portal:Tuberculosis
 * 386) Portal:Twitter
 * 387) Portal:Umayyad Caliphate
 * 388) Portal:United States Armed Forces
 * 389) Portal:United States Congress
 * 390) Portal:USB
 * 391) Portal:Valencian Community
 * 392) Portal:Vijayawada
 * 393) Portal:Voting
 * 394) Portal:Washington Metro
 * 395) Portal:Waterfalls
 * 396) Portal:Weapons
 * 397) Portal:Weaving
 * 398) Portal:Web browsers
 * 399) Portal:Websites
 * 400) Portal:Wendy's
 * 401) Portal:Women's prisons in the United States
 * 402) Portal:Woodworking
 * 403) Portal:World Chess Championships
 * 404) Portal:Yangtze

Keep 'em coming!
And I'll see you next issue.

Sincerely,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   08:12, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

We can now crop the tops of pics to make banners
Before, we could only cut off the bottom of pics.

User:FR30799386 has pulled it off, and made the upgrade to Portal image banner...

So, this:

Becomes this:

Here's the code for the above banner:

To see it employed in a portal, check out Portal:Niagara Falls.

About that end of the year goal...
We were racing against time to create 5,000 portals by the end of the year (just for the heck of it).

We made it. We've passed the 5,000 portals mark, with time to spare!

And the 5,000th portal is Portal:Major League Baseball, by Happypillsjr.

Congratulations!

What's next?
The 10,000th portal mark. But...

...there is plenty else to do in addition to building new portals:


 * 1) The new portals need to be linked to from the encyclopedia.
 * 2) On those portals about subjects that are not typically capitalized, the search parameters need to be refined/expanded, to maximize the chances of Did you know and In the news items being found and displayed.
 * 3) A Recognized content section needs to be added to each portal that has a corresponding WikiProject.
 * 4) Addition of a category on those portals that lack a subject category.
 * 5) Implement the portal category system, adding the appropriate categories to each portal.
 * 6) Upgrade, and complete (as per the tasks enumerated above), the old-style portals that are not regularly maintained, which have not been converted yet (about 1,100 of them).
 * 7) Find and fix the remaining bugs in the underlying lua modules.
 * 8) Build portal tools (scripts) to assist in the creation, development, and maintenance of portals.
 * 9) Build a script to help build navbox footer templates, via the harvesting of categories, amongst other methods.
 * 10) Update the portal building instructions.
 * 11) Update the portal guideline.
 * 12) Refine the programming of the portals to reduce their load time.
 * 13) Design and develop the next generation of portals and portal components.

And whatever else you can dream up.

But most of all, have a...

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Happy New Year! , thank you for your contributions to the Portals Project, and have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year.

Sincerely,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   12:38, 30 December 2018 (UTC)