Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Tasks

Inspect portals, especially new ones
Use this PetScan query to find this month's new portals. To use a different date, go to the "Page properties" screen and change the limit from 20190101, or just hack the URL. (Tip courtesy of Certes).

The list of all portals can be found at Category:All portals.

Check for errors and bugs
Bugs and errors sometimes occur in portals.


 * PetScan query for listing portals with Lua errors (courtesy of Certes).
 * WP search to find portals that "spew" excerpts all at once rather than one per click of the slideshow controls (courtesy of Certes)

Lua errors usually indicate an empty section, or a sourcepage that lacks images. These can be fixed by providing better parameters (pagenames), or by putting images on the image slideshow sourcepage(s). Image files can also be added directly to image slideshows, but any sourcepage name causing the lua error needs to be removed for the error to go away.

If you come across errors or bugs that you cannot fix, please report them at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

Improve

 * See Category:Portals needing attention
 * See Category:Portals under construction
 * Maintain Portal:Contents/Portals
 * Design discussions take place at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.
 * See massviews analysis of portals. In November 2023, the the top three portals were Portal:Current events, Portal:Erotica and pornography, and Portal:Anime and manga

Add links to portals in articles



 * See Category:Portals needing placement of incoming links and WikiProject Portals/Portals needing links

There are presently many portals with insufficient links to them existent in main namespace articles.

Here's how you can help: 1. Place a portal box in the article's See also section

– or –

Place a list item link to a portal in the corresponding root article's See also section, using this code:

2. Place a portal link at the bottom of the portal's corresponding navigation box footer template, like this: If the navbox template already has a line with, don't duplicate it - just add the third line of code.

3. Place the following code at the top of the portal's corresponding category page:

If you use AWB, please apply it to removing the backlog described above. (There are over 2000 orphaned portals at this time).

Add a panorama or banner picture
Add a banner-shaped picture (such as a panorama) to the introduction section of portals. Place them at the top of the introduction section, or if they are especially tall, place them at the bottom of that section. Please do not add pics over 2 megabytes in size, as they can cause the portal scripts to time out, causing empty sections, or sections with error messages. Watch out, because some of those pictures are huge, like 12 megabytes or more. Less than one megabyte is best, if you can manage it. Pictures can be found at. Search strings that work well with city names to find these are "skyline" or "panorama". There are a large number of wide images at 7:1 aspect ratio used as Wikivoyage banners in Commons:Category:Wikivoyage banners. Most of these are not very large files. Geographic portals are listed in the Geography section of Portal:Contents/Portals. City portals are shown in parentheses (though they are not the only ones in parentheses). As for other subjects, banner-shaped pictures pertaining directly to those or any of their subtopics will typically suffice.

Here is an example of the main template used to place banners/panoramas:

Which looks like this:

Tip for displaying an oversized picture as a banner
Most pictures are not banner-shaped. But, you can still use them as banners. Here's how:

Using both  and   produces this:

Install image slideshows
Transclude files as random slideshow does not function in mobile view or with the Wikipedia app thus should be replaced with the Portal pictures method. On the older portals, replace "Selected image" sections with "Selected images" sections.

The code for an image slideshow would look like this, for most existing portals:

Entries can be sourcepage names, or file names. For each sourcepage, the template displays every image on that page. Filenames must start with "File:" and get displayed directly in the slideshow. " " is the magic word that stands for the portal's page name, without prefix, which is usually also the name of the corresponding root article.

For examples of portals that have image slideshows, see Portal:Continents and Portal:Ancient Egypt. Or see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&limit=5000&target=Template%3ATransclude+files+as+random+slideshow&namespace=100

Where do you find pictures?


 * At Featured pictures, some of Wikipedia's best pictures are listed by subject. Many of those subjects correspond to a portal name.


 * On the portal's subpages, if any.


 * Throughout Wikipedia articles.


 * On Wikimedia Commons. This is a great place to find pictures not used in articles.

Review Portals that are being Drafted
Portals currently in Draft are: (if this section is blank, no portals are currently in the Draft: namespace)