Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design/Archive 4

Portal:Biology
Every other page display or purge has formatting problems.

It appears it may have something to do with Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow. &mdash; The Transhumanist  06:04, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
 * The series box in Biotechnology was breaking the gallery syntax. by moving the it onto its own line, so the slideshow module can know to remove it. - Evad37 &#91;talk]

Multi-argument-types slideshow?
Currently, we have a slideshow template that accepts file names, and another that accepts source page names (from which it gathers all the files for the slideshow).

Is it possible to create a template that accepts both kinds of arguments?

That way, if there's a file name you want to add, you can just add it, even if the slideshow uses sourcepages.

I look forward to your replies. &mdash; The Transhumanist  07:44, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

A work-around
One way to insert individual filenames into slideshows that use sourcepages, is to have a holding area for them, such as a section near the bottom of the portal. A gallery or filename list could be put in that section. Then the portal's title and that section can be specified as a sourcepage argument in the slideshow. Thus, the portal will be harvesting itself.

It would be even more convenient if filenames could be specified in Transclude files as random slideshow, along with the sourcepage arguments, perhaps with filename1=, filename2=, and so on. Is this feasible? &mdash; The Transhumanist  18:30, 24 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Self-harvesting, having the page calling the Lua module be the same page the Lua module then looks at doesn't seem like a good idea... I'm not sure how the software would handle the possible recursion could occur with a lua module finding itself on the page... particularly with modules that expand templates, since then it would be trying to expand itself, while it hasn't even finished running the first time... its just messy, and not what it was designed for, and thus more liable to be broken from changes that may be made later down the line.
 * Adding filename parameters is a much better idea, and totally feasible - Evad37 &#91;talk] 04:19, 25 August 2018 (UTC)
 * On retrospect, accepting filenames as unnamed parameters would probably be best, while using sourcepage1=, sourcepage2=, and so on for sourcepage parameters. That's because filenames are more likely to outnumber sourcepage names, rather than the other way around.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   23:16, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Just using the unnamed/positional parameters, and have the module work out if it is a file or a page containing files, turned out to be easier - Evad37 &#91;talk] 01:30, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

When is an upgrade not an upgrade?
When it is a downgrade. Like this...

Something happened while I was replacing existing 'Selected image' sections that had ten or fewer images with slideshows that automatically transcluded the pics from the root article. On Portal:German Empire, this action replaced a very high quality hand-picked selection of ten pictures with customized captions (that were written for a more prominent displaying). The replacement looked like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:German_Empire&oldid=854567132

Somebody restored the original selection, and so I migrated the subpage content and converted it into the slideshow presently on the page. I think you'll agree that this is a high-quality set of pictures that supports the subject well.

The "Selected picture" subpages of the other 200 portals that received "upgrades" are still in existence. It would be a shame to lose the work that was put into gathering the pictures and writing captions for them. In many cases, the selection goes beyond the set of pictures presented on the root article. What I'd like to do is harvest the filenames and captions from those subpages and insert them as parameters into the image slideshow on the respective portal base page.

But, in order to do that, the template used for the slideshow would need to support both sourcepage names and filenames. So, please put this one at the top of your portal to do list. ;)

Sincerely,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   00:02, 29 August 2018 (UTC)


 * ✅. You can just specify filenames (including the "File:" prefix) in the positional parameters, and use corresponding  and optionally   parameters to specify specific images – see documentation. There's also an example at Template:Transclude_files_as_random_slideshow/testcases. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 01:28, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Initially, I couldn't get it to work, but then I came back here and noticed you mentioned that the "File:" prefix needs to be included. Then, it worked like a charm. See:
 * Portal:Iron Man
 * Portal:Superman
 * Portal:Avengers (comics)
 * This might pave the way for harvesting file and caption data from subpages using AWB. But I'm not sure there is a way to insert the captionn parameters in there with AWB, due to the need of incrementing the variable n. Suggestions?  &mdash; The Transhumanist   03:36, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

We need captions without numbered parameters
Hopefully, we can find a way to implement Transclude files as random slideshow without numbering the captions.

With the necessity to number them, it makes harvesting the pics and captions from subpages using AWB infeasible, unless it has incrementing capabilities I don't know about.

Without numbered captions, many of the portals' subpages could be harvested in 4 AWB passes:
 * 1) Convert portal basepage to one-page design
 * 2) Substitute all the "Selected picture" subsubpages for the portal to the "Selected picture" subpage, by editing that subpage using AWB's search/replace, stripping the page down to just substitution calls
 * 3) Massage the resulting filenames and captions into parameter format
 * 4) Substitute the "Selected picture" subpage into the Transclude filenames as random slideshow instance, as its block of filename parameters on the portal's base page

If the captions have to be numbered, I don't know how that can be done within the above method. Doing the numbering by hand would slow this process down immensely.

Thoughts? &mdash; The Transhumanist  09:56, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
 * I have seen many portals that use the caption and credit parameters. We could go around this problem, by writing some kind of bot that would be able to place captions etc., as a bot can do this via some kind of list that maps captions/credits to images. I don't think it is possible using AWB. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 10:25, 5 September 2018 (UTC)


 * I'm not talking about getting rid of the parameters, just the numbered part of them. Or, add the ability to process unnumbered parameters while retaining the numbered capability. To do either of these things, the lua modules would have to be modified. Doing so would allow the above AWB procedure to work.   &mdash; The Transhumanist   11:26, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
 * ✅, you can now specify captions and credits in the same parameter as the filename, using  as a separator – i.e. , or  . Whitespace around the   doesn't matter, and raw equals signs have to be replaced with  . - Evad37 &#91;talk] 05:14, 24 September 2018 (UTC)


 * I've tested it out at Portal:Pebble Beach. Works great!  &mdash; The Transhumanist   08:32, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Great work! Thanks, Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:46, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

I have created a template which may be useful on some portals
I'm sorry if this is the wrong place to mention this but I have created a template that displays articles as boxes with an image and a description: article card. It could be used an interesting way for portals to showcase their featured content. Please tell me if anyone thinks it would actually be usable because it does need improvement and i'd rather not waste my time creating something pointless. 🌸  WeegaweeK   ^  🌸 19:58, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I like it. Perhaps there should be some styling options exposed as parameters. One thing I have my eye on is the enormous box-shadow, which might get annoying if several of these are used on a page. what do you think about these? — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 03:31, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

  Ward Cunningham

Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki.   Ward Cunningham


 * Cool. It looks like it is floating off the page! And it can almost present selectively transcluded article leads. Could you put a scroll bar on there?
 * I sense another portal page layout coming on.
 * Yes, you've come to the right place, and we would be honored if you joined this WikiProject!  &mdash; The Transhumanist   07:20, 28 September 2018 (UTC)
 * I've added a scroll bar but the problem with transcluding the lead on to it is that the nesting of links causes bugs:   having link syntax appear at the end and start of the text.   bold sans-serif text in the second half.   the text being repeated twice. 
 * if there is any way to transclude without links please tell me as I could use it as a default for the description. 🌸  WeegaweeK   ^  🌸 15:33, 28 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Please take a look at the above.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   07:20, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

I've created another bigger version of the template with the image above: Article card vertical 🌸  WeegaweeK   ^  🌸 15:11, 28 September 2018 (UTC)
 * UPDATE:
 * That looks wonderful. I've modified the template slightly so that, if the description is missing, it will transclude the article's lead as an excerpt:

<div style="margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; background-color: white; box-shadow: 0px 20px 40px -30px black; max-width: 500px; height: 110px; overflow: hidden; position: relative; border: 0.5px solid #999; border-radius: 8px;"> <div style="margin-right: 10px; padding: 0; max-width: 200px; height: 110px; float: left; overflow: hidden; border-right: 1px solid #999; text-align: center;"> Ward Cunningham


 * — Certes (talk) 15:58, 28 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Aside: this article is an oddity in that "Howard G." is in bold but the quotation mark before "Ward" is not. This fools Module:Excerpt into thinking that "Howard G." is the subject's entire name, and it terminates the wikilink before the non-bold quotation mark.  I hope that this syntax is rare enough to be not worth fixing, or to be fixed in the article by putting the entire name into a single stretch of bold text. Certes (talk) 16:05, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Wales
Entries for New South Wales show up in the did you know section. Can this be fixed? &mdash; The Transhumanist  19:45, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
 * There's also a DYK about Jimmy Wales in there! Transclude selected recent additions takes a not parameter, so you could try something like . Certes (talk) 00:05, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Portal:Northumberland
The entry for Morpeth, Northumberland in the general selected articles section has the image being way too big and also bugged out (stray wikitext for the end of an image). Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 11:16, 14 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, the article has an <imagemap> tag, and we're not handling those well.  also shows several images which, whilst of reasonable size individually, combine to make a huge composite.  That template does render the lead properly, except that it fails to link Morpeth to Morpeth, Northumberland (because the image section is so long that the bold text is rejected for occurring too late in the lead).  What do we think the excerpt should look like when we encounter an imagemap?  I'm tempted to take the first image, but that would illustrate Morpeth with a signpost to somewhere else, which is hardly representative. Certes (talk) 11:29, 14 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure, because I don't think that there is really a way to reliably determine which image is going to be the most representative. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 11:33, 14 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Please ignore (parts of) my previous comment! On further inspection, Evad has added code which does handle imagemap well.  There is just one image: File:Morpeth montage.jpg.  Its format is good for a whole page but clearly not what's wanted in such a small panel.
 * Editing convertImagemap to stop appending "]]" (see Module:Excerpt/sandbox) fixes this, but I don't understand why. I think you added that code, and it looks necessary to me to match the opening brackets that are added earlier in the line. Certes (talk) 12:00, 14 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Removing the appended "]]" would be a bad idea, and would probably break other imagemaps. What that function does is extract the first line from within the image map, and then puts it within square brackets – effectively making it into a normal file as far as the rest of the module is concerned. I'm not yet sure exactly what is happening here, but removing the "]]" is not the correct fix. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 00:35, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Putting  into Special:ExpandTemplates shows that the following wikitext is being generated: |thumb]] Morpeth is a historic market town in Northumberland, north-east England, lying on the River Wansbeck. Nearby villages include Mitford and Pegswood. In the 2011 census, the population of Morpeth was given as 14,017, up from 13,833 in the 2001 census. Read more... So it seems the code that extracts a  block from a template parameter is not removing the trailing , and that   is just tacked on at the end, causing mismatched square brackets. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 00:44, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I think I've fixed it in the sandbox, see Template:Transclude lead excerpt/testcases. Except that for some reason that causes Template:Transclude_lead_excerpt/testcases to miss the caption. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 02:27, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks; that's a big improvement for Morpeth but it also fails to collect captions for Cat and Dubh Artach. It's not immediately obvious what unusual property those two articles share with James Talacek.  You've also managed to link the bold title in the lead to the article, though that may just be a consequence of moving it to the first 100 characters by removing the caption.   I'll continue investigating.  Certes (talk) 12:32, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Cat and James Talacek have a different parameter (image size/aspect ratio) between the image= and caption= lines. Dubh Artach has a different problem which I've not yet diagnosed.  Even a minimal implementation doesn't pick up the caption. Certes (talk) 13:24, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I think I've fixed the bugs in the sandbox.  ImageCaption=, image_size=, image_upright=, etc. were misinterpreted as introducing an image.  ImageCaption appears in Dubh Artach and wasn't recognised as a caption because it looked like a second image.  image_size= appears in James Talacek; again it was mistaken for image= and the caption became associated with it rather than the actual image.  Similarly for image_upright= in Cat. Certes (talk) 18:45, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Automate "Did You Know?" Section
I'm having trouble converting this Portal:Organized Labour into a single page portal. The biggest obstacle is the "Did You Know?" Section. None of the existing templates (Transclude DYK and Transclude selected recent additions) appear to satisfactorily replace the subpage system in this case. Would it be possible to create a template that crosses project categories with the "Did you know" category and transcludes the results? Like this tool(https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?psid=6232674)?Guilherme Burn (talk) 20:42, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Truncating problems, and more...
Template:Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow seems to be causing weird problems, depending on which list item is displayed initially. Effects range from the page truncating after the selected herb or spice section, to rendering in single-column only, to gobble-dee-gook showing up on the page. Here are portals I created that are having these problems:


 * Portal:Herbs and spices
 * Portal:Milk
 * Portal:Tea

I hope this heads up helps. I'll post more, as I spot them. &mdash; The Transhumanist  22:16, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
 * In Portal:Herbs and spices it seems to be caused by Module:Excerpt not excluding nutritionalvalue from Caraway, which then mucks up the syntax for the gallery, and then the HTML parser tidies up the invalid markup by shoving the rest of the portal inside the excerpt gallery, at the end of the entry for Caraway.
 * Fixed in Module:Excerpt slideshow - Evad37 &#91;talk] 05:57, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Portal:Bruce Lee
In this portal, the Selected general articles section is blank! &mdash; The Transhumanist  05:10, 16 August 2018 (UTC)
 * . One of the pages had a <gallery ></gallery> in the lead, which was mucking up the slideshow gallery – the module now strips galleries from the excerpts to avoid this problem. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 17:08, 16 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Nice. Thank you.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   20:08, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Portal:Energy in China
In this portal the < > symbols appear in the wrong place, overwriting the heading for Selected general articles. &mdash; The Transhumanist  01:34, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Portal:Cabuyao
This one intermittently (but mostly) truncates after Selected general articles section. &mdash; The Transhumanist  00:39, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
 * I forgot about the limit parameter. Set it to limit=15, and the problem went away. What is the problem, again?  &mdash; The Transhumanist   02:44, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
 * It's hard to tell definitively, but either:
 * There was the Lua time limit was being reached, breaking everything after that point – in which case setting the limit would fix it; or
 * One or more of the article excerpts included markup that broke the gallery syntax (e.g. a table, another gallery, templates containing multiple lines), in which case the limit parameter just makes it less likely for that article excerpt to show up and break everything, without actually fixing the problem.
 * (or possibly even both at the same time) - Evad37 &#91;talk] 03:17, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
 * It's probably markup-related. So, I'll need to do some more tracking. Oh boy. There are over 400 new portals that need to be checked for this type of error. That's a lot of purge resets. Looks like I'll have to send for reinforcements. :)  &mdash; The Transhumanist   03:44, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Portal:Body piercing
When the  is removed, the portal displays a couple of problems. Either it truncates right after the Selected general articles section, or it shoves the rest of the page into a jewelry navigation footer that is included in one or more of the transcluded articles. It may also display all the entries instead of just one.

Someone has complained prominently about the result of the limit (there only being 11 articles displayed), and has claimed that this renders the scope of the portal as too narrow, even though the selection changes with each page purge. So, it is pretty urgent to get this thing displaying all 74 items correctly again. &mdash; The Transhumanist  09:40, 25 September 2018 (UTC)
 * . The problem was that Claw (piercing) (and possibly other short articles) were including enormous templates such as navboxes from their footers. Module:Excerpt now strips such templates.  I've removed 10 from Portal:Body piercing.  A few excerpts are not displaying correctly, especially by showing thumb instead of the image, but I don't think that's a consequence of this change. Certes (talk) 10:25, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Portal:Limited recognition
I'm using two vertical columns of random slideshows with the "Flex columns" template, and running into issues.


 * 1) While they initially load correctly, pressing the forward or back button on either column will cause the excerpt to be loaded incorrectly. Text will be formatted incorrectly and images will be cut off after pressing forward on the slideshows.
 * 2) Less of a bug than the former, but still inconvenient, is that I don't seem to have the ability to override the images selected for individual articles. As a result, while every other country biography featured at the top of this portal has the flag and arms displayed, it does not display the flag of South Ossetia. In the featured content column on the right, the page for the featured article on the SSR Abkhazia erroneously displays the former flag of Georgia because it was on a flagicon at the bottom of the infobox, but not the flag of the article's subject.

(from this page it seems that pressing "Show" results in the problem I've described becoming immediately visible, whereas they initially load correctly at Portal:Limited recognition)

Brendon the Wizard ✉️ ✨ 09:01, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
 * #1 sounds like Module talk:Excerpt slideshow. It's hard to tell what's going wrong since it is actually working on my system (Windows 7) with various browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE). #2 is caused by the order of images in the article wikitext. Placing the parameters containing the filenames/captions of more relevant images before of the ones with less relevant images should fix the problem. It probably wouldn't be too hard to allow custom images to be specified in Transclude excerpts as random slideshow, but the parameter names would be a little awkward, like image7 and caption7 for the page in the seventh unnamed parameter. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 09:07, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
 * #1 also renders ok for me (Firefox 62 on Ubuntu). What are you browsing with? For #2, it would be possible to parse out arguments beginning File:  but that hack doesn't work with captions. Certes (talk) 09:29, 18 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Thank you both for your feedback. I use Opera as my primary browser, but it worked as intended on Microsoft Edge. As for #2, I will try your advice, thank you. Brendon the Wizard  ✉️ ✨ 16:29, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

Follow up (I guess we can call this #3): Both columns of this template appear empty on mobile (using Google Chrome and an Android) Brendon the Wizard  ✉️ ✨ 18:44, 25 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Hello, I cannot reproduce this with chrome on android. I am running the latest version from what I can see. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 20:21, 25 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you for replying as quickly as you did, I'll try to provide a screenshot and further information about my device as soon as possible. Brendon the Wizard  ✉️ ✨ 20:41, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Portal:Illinois
Recently The Transhumanist converted the Selected Picture to a slideshow drawing from the Illinois and Culture of Illinois pages. I would like to also include the images that had previously been selected and stored at Portal:Illinois/Selected picture. Most of those pictures have achieved some kind of recognition either here or in Commons and I would like the portal to continue to showcase them. I tried to do that using the following markup, but it does not seem to be working:

Is there a better way to incorporate the images from that subpage? Thanks and please excuse the ignorance. I don't know the new system at all yet. Fishal (talk) 20:53, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Most likely this is because the template isn't looking for images on the transcluded subpages, or the module could be stripping them. You may want to get a second opinion from one of our resident Lua gurus though., maybe one of you can answer why? There are two options I can see to get what you want. You could substitute all the selected pictures subpages onto the main selected pictures page, or you could list all the numbered subpages directly in the template. The first option allows you to reduce the number of unnecessary subpages, and makes for a simpler syntax on the main portal page. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 05:11, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah, transcluding images from a page only works if the images are directly on that page, because the module only sees the page's wikitext. Also, because of the way the subpages are currently set up, the module would miss the captions and credits (it only looks inside  markups and galleries). So you can go with either of AfroThundr3007730's suggestions, and then move each caption inside the Image:/File: markup, or alternatively you can specify each files/captions/credits directly in the  template. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 08:30, 6 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Thank you both very much. The slideshow works well now. Fishal (talk) 16:56, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Portal:Renaissance
Sometimes exhibits the truncation bug, and at other times, the spewing bug. And sometimes really messes up the formatting of the page. &mdash; The Transhumanist  09:42, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I fixed one problem with Renaissance architecture (block template not on its own line), and revealed a problem with the Italian Renaissance excerpt, which is showing the image extracted from the infobox at full size instead of as a thumbnail. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 01:29, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Actually, its the caption being cut off, leaving loose braces – see Template:Transclude lead excerpt/testcases - Evad37 &#91;talk] 01:36, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I've extended the |caption= parsing in Module:Excerpt to accept a template which flows over multiple lines. Such templates are later stripped out by parsecaption so they don't actually display, but it's removed the rubbish and we could enhance parsecaption later to display it. Certes (talk) 12:02, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Portal:Cairo
This portal is spewing all the entries in some of the sections, especially the sports section. The arts and education sections also occasionally spew. &mdash; The Transhumanist  06:39, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
 * The "Selected area article" ends with "{ {#tag:gallery|File:Blank.png|". None of the articles linked from Outline of Cairo or its subsections have wikitext like that, so I think it's coming from Module:Excerpt slideshow (makeGalleryArgs). "File:Blank.png|" appears a lot in later panels too.  Could this be the cause of the problem?  A simple sandbox containing  looks perfect with no stray text.
 * By the way, pings don't work if added later: they have to be in a new, signed addition. Certes (talk) 10:40, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
 * is how the module makes the slideshow. If any of those bits are showing up, it means something from one of the article excerpts is breaking the syntax, such as loose pipes, linebreaks, or opening or closing braces. In this case, the problem seems to have been Cairo Opera House, which had a manually formatted hatnote that wasn't being removed by Module:Excerpt (prior to my edit ). The portal seems fine now that the article is using for the hatnote (as far as I can see after several purges). - Evad37 &#91;talk] 01:17, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you! A non-standard hatnote starting with a colon would fool Module:Excerpt into thinking it was paragraph 1 of the article, and that subsequent infoboxes etc. were within rather than before the lead.  I'll see if I can improve that tomorrow. Certes (talk) 01:24, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
 * , though since Evad's fix it no longer affects any portals. Module:Excerpt now removes a DIY hatnote indented with a colon, as in Acanthomorpha. Certes (talk) 12:15, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Portal:Evolutionary biology is truncating
It's cutting off below the "Selected general articles" section. &mdash; The Transhumanist  01:56, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Fixed that issue with this edit; the portal still needs some attention regarding pictures and topics - Evad37 &#91;talk] 02:17, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Allow manual addition of blurbs to Template:Transclude selected recent additions
The Did you know section is currently driven entirely by search strings.

Some blurbs will never be found by search.

It would be nice to be able to add those to the results somehow, manually.

Without subpages, of course. &mdash; The Transhumanist  01:31, 25 October 2018 (UTC)


 * One idea is to find DYKs which link to articles in a category tree. So Portal:Birds could look for DYKs which link to Eagle, etc.  However, that's quite a large tree, and checking it every time the portal is purged may be too strenuous for the server. Certes (talk) 00:02, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Not if done once daily (by a bot).  &mdash; The Transhumanist   05:02, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Portal:Blackberries bug
The Selected blackberry hybrids section gets its links from the hybrids subheading in the topics section.

I had to remove the Marionberry link from the topics section, because it caused the whole portal to wig out.

Here is the perm link to the problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:Blackberries&action=edit&oldid=868295111

I think it might have something to do with the ogg link in the lead of Marionberry, because nothing before the Audio template's second parameter is displayed for that entry in the portal. Then, when I removed Marionberry from the portal, the portal worked fine.

I hope you can fix this, as the Marionberry is a major cultivar, and the subject isn't complete without it. &mdash; The Transhumanist  08:56, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Duplicate leads bug
I've run across a weird quirk in the new portal design...

In Portal:Uttarakhand, the Selected general articles section is powered by Template:Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow, which displays the excerpt from each list item from Template:Uttarakhand.

One of the list items in that template is Politics of Uttarakhand, which is a redirect to Uttarakhand.

What is shown in the portal is the excerpt of the lead of Uttarakhand, rather than the Government and politics section of that article. So, you have the exact same excerpt that is in the intro also being displayed in the Selected general articles section. Aside from being very odd looking, the duplication is awkward (because it wasn't the intended selection), especially when the duplicate is the slideshow item showing when the portal is initially displayed.

In some portals, because of this quirk, the same lead that is in the intro may appear several times in the Selected general articles slideshow.

I hope you find this bug report helpful. &mdash; The Transhumanist  07:08, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm not seeing that item but perhaps it's just randomly not selected today. I've changed Module:Excerpt to transclude the relevant section when going via a redirect to a section, which may solve the problem.  An unrelated change concerning capturing imagemaps remains pending in the sandbox. Certes (talk) 11:34, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
 * This seems to have fixed it. If so, you just solved a major problem throughout the whole portal system. Well done. I'll keep you posted.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   09:03, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

In the news fix
A recent module change should make more news items appear in some portals. Please report any problems. Certes (talk) 12:53, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Unclosed bracket fix
A recent module change should prevent some portals from "splurging", by removing incomplete templates and wikilinks such as {{stack||undefined from excerpts of pages such as Gare de Lille Europe. Some splurges are due to other causes and remain unfixed. Please report any problems. Certes (talk) 12:53, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

[Lead excerpt] Portal:Patna
There's an error in the lead, in which the infobox is spewing its wikicode. &mdash; The Transhumanist  10:18, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Fixed in Patna. Its infobox has a labyrinth of footnotes and references which contained unmatched {{.  These paired with the }} which mark the end of the infobox, leaving the infobox incomplete. Certes (talk) 11:37, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

[Lead excerpt] Portal:Social sciences
The intro has a huge series box in it, which disrupts the layout of the portal. Can the module be fixed to prevent this type of problem? &mdash; The Transhumanist  23:49, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

P.S.: AmericanAir88 and Gazamp included for learning purposes. -TT
 * by a minor edit to Social science. Portals discard templates which appear on a line of their own before the lead as unwanted headers. Certes (talk) 23:59, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
 * I see, check for run-ons. Thank you for the tip.   &mdash; The Transhumanist   12:05, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

[Lead excerpt] Portal:Optical illusions
In the intro of Portal:Optical illusions, the font goes wonky. Can the module (or something else) be fixed to prevent this type of problem? &mdash; The Transhumanist  12:08, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Fixed in the article. Seems that the space between the ref tags caused the problem. Could be fixed in the Module, but I have no idea what and where this fix might go. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:11, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Or maybe it was just... an optical illusion.
 * (•_•)
 * ( •_•)>⌐■-■
 * (⌐■_■)
 * — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 21:12, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Georgia Institute of Technology
Portal:Georgia Institute of Technology appears in Category:ParserFunction errors but has no obvious errors. Can anyone find and fix the fault? Certes (talk) 11:30, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
 * It does not for me currently. The error would stem from the ParserFunctions extension and specifically I think it could stem from one (or more) of #if, #ifeq, #ifexist. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 11:51, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
 * You're right; it's gone. Perhaps my viewing the page caused a purge and either picked up the new version of a module, fixing the problem permanently, or randomly selected different articles, fixing the problem temporarily; and the category took a few minutes to catch up.  Thanks for checking; I'll keep an eye on it. Certes (talk) 11:55, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Portal talk:Goa
Dropping a link to an image proposal. Cesde v a (talk) 18:33, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * thanks. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 18:37, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Non-random slideshow
While the random slideshows are highly useful and applicable to most situations, for some portals or portal sections, it would be nice to be able to control the order of display for topics in a slideshow.

Like presenting the Presidents of the US in order, for example. Or the rules for a game. And so on. &mdash; The Transhumanist  01:26, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Provided that the order is set manually while building the portal, a non-random slideshow will be extremely easy to implement. As long as load time is not a factor, a Lua module which arranges its input alphabetically is achievable. However, it is beyond the capabilities of a computer to "automagically" arrange list items in abstract orders . — fr&thinsp;<sup style="color:grey;">+  14:26, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I was thinking that Transclude excerpts as random slideshow, which accepts individual pages as parameters, could be adapted to be non-random when desired, following the order of the parameters as listed.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   23:24, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

✅. The four random slideshow templates can now have no added to prevent randomisation. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 02:12, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * You are truly a wikigenie. { Thank you.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   12:26, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Filter for lists that have stubby leads?
The stub filter is very nice, so that stubs don't show up in excerpt slideshows.

Is it possible to adapt that to handle other types of pages, such as lists with stubby leads?

Lists that have stubby leads are not very helpful to display as excerpts.

Could there be a parameter to filter those out? &mdash; The Transhumanist  21:22, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Module:Excerpt slideshow already bins excerpts of length 0 to 10 characters. I think that limit could easily be increased if we can agree on a minimum. Certes (talk) 21:33, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Parameter to transclude navbox sections
Section support, to specify a section of a navbox (rather than just the whole template), would be very helpful in creating portals with multiple "Selected" excerpt slideshows.

For examples of portals with multiple excerpt slideshows, see:


 * Portal:17th century
 * Portal:18th century
 * Portal:Africa
 * Portal:Aircraft
 * Portal:Ancient Egypt
 * Portal:Apache
 * Portal:Association football
 * Portal:Beer
 * Portal:Cairo
 * Portal:Canadian art
 * Portal:Classical architecture
 * Portal:Continents
 * Portal:Crafts
 * Portal:English language
 * Portal:Hong Kong
 * Portal:K-pop
 * Portal:Lithuania
 * Portal:Los Angeles
 * Portal:Marvel Comics
 * Portal:Narnia
 * Portal:Painting
 * Portal:Paleobotany
 * Portal:Portland, Oregon
 * Portal:Python (programming language)
 * Portal:Saint Petersburg
 * Portal:Scottish art
 * Portal:Sculpture
 * Portal:Seventh-day Adventist Church
 * Portal:Spokane
 * Portal:Suffrage

Access to navbox sections would blow the ability to do this wide open. &mdash; The Transhumanist  22:24, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Navbox-builder tool
The main method of building portals these days is to populate the Selected general articles section from the corresponding navbox footer template.

The problem is, that not all subjects have such footers.

So, being able to build navbox footers with a user script would enable us to build portals for additional subjects. This would also serve to fill in the gaps in WP's system of navigation footers.

The tool could also be designed to easily edit existing navigation footers.

This would be a major step forward in navigation development on Wikipedia. &mdash; The Transhumanist  22:31, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

A template to harvest data from tables
I was creating Portal:Spider-Man, and came across the List of Spider-Man enemies. I thought "what a good excerpt slideshow this could populate". But, when I looked at the list, I found that all the enemy names are locked up inside tables where our current lua modules can't get at them.

Is a lua module for extracting desired links in specific columns from tables possible? &mdash; The Transhumanist  23:16, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Category harvester
Some automated method of pulling the entries from a category, and inserting them into a portal section. &mdash; The Transhumanist  11:55, 24 October 2018 (UTC)


 * With current technology, there's no way for a template or module to find the members of a category (short of reading in 5 million pages and searching them for Category:Foo). The most promising approach may be a bot which runs regularly to maintain a category listing on a portal subpage.  The portal can then either transclude the subpage directly or have a template reformat it using a Lua module. Certes (talk) 23:55, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

The core technique used in the above program could be applied for inserting parameters into the template calls made on portal pages. Specifically, to inject the list of pages to be included in Transclude excerpts as random slideshow.

How could this best be done? &mdash; The Transhumanist  00:05, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
 * That JavaScript seems to produce a list of wikilinks. If you dump its output onto a maintenance page then either Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow or Transclude excerpts as random slideshow should handle it.  I know you hate subpages, but they still have their uses. Certes (talk) 00:30, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
 * ( Transclude linked excerpts as random slideshow )
 * That's true. And, if you look at the code, you can see precisely where the asterisk is, which could easily be replaced by a pipe, along with stripping the link delimeters (not sure exactly how this would be done). Which means this technique could hypothetically be used to directly dump the list as parameters onto a portal basepage, rather than have a program 1) create a new subpage, 2) store the list on the subpage, and then 3) insert the subpage as a parameter onto the base page. That's a lot of extra program steps, and since we'll have to modify the basepage anyways, we might as well do it all on the basepage. It would be more efficient to remove the subpage steps entirely. The main question is, how will the script know when to fetch the members of a category and where to dump the list, just by looking at the page? It could look for empty Selected general articles sections using the Transclude excerpts as random slideshow template, and determine the category to fetch from from the section's title. But how? Any thoughts?  &mdash; The Transhumanist   00:55, 12 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Speaking of other pages, instead of dumping the links onto a subpage, they could be used to build a navbox footer template, which includes list items. Then the navbox could be used in turn to populate the portal's excerpt slideshow, which is the method used for the vast majority of portals these days.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   07:36, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Can portal generation time be reduced?
I'm finding that portals can take 10 or more seconds to display.

What is taking the server time?

How can this be reduced?

I look forward to your replies. &mdash; The Transhumanist  23:16, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

P.S.:


 * Considering how Lua-heavy portals tend to be these days, I'm not surprised. The server may take up to 10 seconds to generate the processed page from source (any longer and we'd have Lua timeout errors). The majority of the time people view one of these pages, it's a cached copy, so they don't need to wait for the server to generate a new version unless they purge the page. Have you tried taking a look at the template usage report embedded in the HTML to see how long those pages took to build? If it's close to 10 seconds, it may be a sign that the portal should be slimmed down a bit. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 01:08, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
 * The server time is being used up for running the various Lua modules. Keeping the current features, the only way we can cut down on the time is by using the limit parameter. The amount of time being used by a page to be loaded from scratch can be found in the collapsible 'parser profiling data' section beneath the editing area, while preveiwing a page — fr&thinsp;<sup style="color:grey;">+  17:31, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
 * So, how a lua program is written, and how the underlying data being accessed is organized, could affect how fast a lua program is?  &mdash; The Transhumanist   22:37, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes it can, but we generally design our templates and modules to be economical with their execution time and resource usage, to minimize that problem. That said, there's only so much optimization that can be done to keep a growing amount of code within a certain resource budget. We're already nearing the limit of how much stuff we can cram into the standard portal without causing timeout errors, and have already reached that limit on some of the larger portals (which has been the source of many of the bug reports previously listed above). Going forward, we'll have to start carefully considering how we go about making significant changes to the automated portal format, so that we can balance new features with reader accessibility (as in client resource usage, especially on older machines). We can also keep refining and optimizing the existing design, as well; a process which will never be truly done, I imagine. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 23:02, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Then looking at how a particular feature works may provide insight on how to make it faster. So, my first question is, how does the Did you know section in portals work? (How does it look for and find entries to display?)  &mdash; The Transhumanist   23:09, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * While I could dig into the modules and provide you with a high-level answer (Lua is not one of the languages I'm proficient in), I'll defer to one of our resident Lua gurus. In any case, in-depth implementation discussions such as these are likely to be very long and involved, if they are to produce significant results. They may be better suited to individual module talk pages, once we find targets for improvement. Our situation is not so dire that we need to focus on that right now though, so we can take the time to review the situation at our leisure. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 23:19, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm not so sure. How long do portals take to load for you? For me, they take about 10 seconds each; even more if I'm out of the house.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   07:48, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
 * , the amount of time which each portal takes to generate on the server side varies with the amount of content to show and the usage of templates. For example Portal:Asia takes 9.820 seconds from start to finish to generate on the server, whereas Portal:Northumberland takes 2.487 seconds start to finish on the server. However, most of the time, the user is shown a cached version and when the cache is deemed invalid, one user has to wait a bit longer for the page to regenerate. This does not also factor in how long it takes for you and the server to communicate, but this is not something that is practical to fix on our side.
 * Reducing the amount of "stuff" on the portal will help. Quick ways to reduce time usage include: decreasing months on the DYK section and days on the news section. Also providing a limit to the slideshows will help reduce time on the slideshow templates. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 09:09, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Reducing the amount of "stuff" on the portal will help. Quick ways to reduce time usage include: decreasing months on the DYK section and days on the news section. Also providing a limit to the slideshows will help reduce time on the slideshow templates. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 09:09, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Auto error reporter
Is it possible to write a script that could detect errors in a portal, and then report them here? &mdash; The Transhumanist  15:24, 25 October 2018 (UTC)


 * This PetScan query lists the portals with Lua errors. (It does not detect the many other types of error.) Certes (talk) 23:58, 25 October 2018 (UTC)


 * This WP search lists portals in which a section spews several excerpts one below the other rather than showing one at a time. Certes (talk) 09:29, 26 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Wow, these are great. These will be invaluable for tracking down and reporting bugs. The only other type of bug I've been running into are "truncation bugs", where the portal ends right after the Selected general articles section. Any idea on how find those?   &mdash; The Transhumanist   23:58, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
 * P.S.:
 * If you can provide a few examples of truncated portals then we can probably work out what feature they share and find a way to search for similar problems. Certes (talk) 00:07, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
 * If you can provide a few examples of truncated portals then we can probably work out what feature they share and find a way to search for similar problems. Certes (talk) 00:07, 4 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Here's a list of the ones from the Category:Portals with errors in need of immediate attention:


 * Portal:Cannons ✅ - Lantaka: the template Cannon was at the end of the lead without a line break. See this diff for the fixing of the article


 * Portal:Communication


 * Portal:Crime ✅ - Tax noncompliance: the lead started on the first line, with the template Taxation being on the same line (so no line break inbetween). See this diff for the fixing of the article
 * Portal:English criminal law
 * Portal:Helicopters


 * Portal:Nuclear weapons
 * Portal:Revolutions
 * Portal:Romantic music
 * Portal:Witchcraft
 * Portal:Thomas Aquinas (added by Dreamy Jazz) - ✅ Principle of double effect: the lead started on the first line, with templates before the text. See this diff for the fixing of the article
 * There are more, no doubt, but I'm hoping that you can figure out how to find them from an analysis of these. {  &mdash; The Transhumanist   12:54, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
 * The cause is definitely the selected articles section. See this edit I made which commented the section out and then allowed the rest of the portal to show. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 17:24, 12 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Smart!  &mdash; The Transhumanist   03:56, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Furthermore it does not seem to be a problem with getting links from one template, as the portals above use both Sidebar and Navbox for the template list. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 17:31, 12 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Good observation. Now we need to find out if the problem goes away if we remove one or the other.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   03:56, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Fixed in article for Portal:Crime, although code might want to be developed to combat this problem. Tax noncompliance had the template Taxation on the same line as the start of the lead. Putting the lead on the next line fixed the problem. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 17:45, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Also it seems that the error causes some of the selected articles to be pulled from captions. Unsure where these captions are from. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 17:47, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
 * , I think I have a pretty good idea of the cause of the issue I have seen so far. Sidebar templates when placed inline cause the problem. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 21:32, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, we need to remove sidebars. The problem is that some other templates at the start of the lead need to be retained, and sidebars aren't easy to identify. The heuristic that anything on its own line is unwanted seems about 99% reliable but you're still seeing exceptions.  I purged Portal:Communication and one of the excerpts from Template:Communication is now Portal:Philosophy.  We certainly need to stop portals randomly transcluding other portals, and perhaps anything other than articles and images. Certes (talk) 01:34, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps a bot could go around making sure sidebar templates are placed on their own line, rather than at the start or end of the lead paragraph. Identifying sidebar templates is possible but just way too expensive in Lua, whereas as a bot wouldn't have the same time restrictions. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 03:20, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Finding most of the sidebars is just a search, though it would take a bot (or a human who doesn't mind regular drudgery) to fix them. See also infoboxes. Certes (talk) 10:44, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
 * , I could do this with a bot. I'll add this to my list of bots to make. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 22:03, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I won't be making such a bot for a while, so if anyone wants to make a bot, feel free. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 23:48, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Portal:John Fogerty
The title shows up in italics. &mdash; The Transhumanist  04:52, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
 * . Stray text before the infobox in The Long Road Home – In Concert caused the infobox to be transcluded in the excerpt, which in turn made the title italic. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 07:11, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   09:01, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Link placer
Something weird has happened. Building portals with the new tools is so easy, that placing links to a new portal takes 3 times as long as creating the portal itself.

Therefore, it would be nice to have a...

Tool to automatically place the following standard links to a portal: a link on the corresponding category page, a link in the See also section of the corresponding root article, and a link at the bottom of the corresponding navigation footer template. &mdash; The Transhumanist  05:07, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

P.S.: How is this going? &mdash; The Transhumanist  12:28, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Have not started the bot yet. I will wait until the guidelines are set until I start properly making the bot, but I will start on the basics now. We would need a discussion on the bot for approval in WP:BRFA as it could be considered controversial. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:31, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, best to get some backing from a wider forum before turning the bot on. In particular, my reverted attempts at linking attracted a few comments that navboxes should link only to mainspace and not to portals. Certes (talk) 12:44, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

The link to a portal from the corresponding category is pretty standard, simple to do, and non-controversial. Perhaps you should make the bot for just that link type to start out with. &mdash; The Transhumanist  21:15, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I would want to wait for the discussions on WP:Portal guidelines to close, as WP:BRFA would want the discussion closed and links from categories being "required" or "should" as well as a discussion on whether a bot should do this. Once the discussion there has wrapped up I will go for BRFA. In the mean time I will continue to write the bot, with a view to start with categories and root articles. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 09:21, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Automating the placing of links on the main article, main category and selected articles list
I know you have been doing of placing Portal-inline et. al. on the main article, main category and articles in the selected articles list but what is your opinion on having a bot do this. We could automate this via petscan (new portals) and check to see if the articles are linked to the portal. If they are not the bot could add one of these templates to the see also section of the articles/categories concerned. What is your view on this. Note that the articles we link automatically is up for debate, as well as the idea for the bot. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 22:58, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Also pinging as they contributed to Wikipedia_talk:Portal_guidelines Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 22:58, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I think a bot would be a great way to tackle that backlog, assuming it does so in a straightforward and uncontroversial manner. We want to reduce the risk of complaints of "portal spam" from other editors, but balance that with the need to improve the web of portal links. I think the suggested addition of linking requirements to the guidelines are solid and won't draw any ire if we went ahead with them. We should probably actually add them to the guidelines first though. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 23:54, 8 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Not exactly (the way you described my link placement). I've been placing  in the See also sections of the corresponding root articles. On category pages, I've been putting   at the very top of the page. And for selected articles, I insert   section at the bottom of the corresponding navbox footer which in turn is usually already in place on the selected articles (and gets added to new ones as standard practice, and therefore takes care of future link placement on selecteds without further maintenance runs).
 * A bot would be helpful. Very helpful.
 * I'm working on a script to place these, but there is no reason not to have a bot as well. See User:The Transhumanist/P-link.js. The script is far from done, and so I've been using AWB to pick away at this chore, and while placing the category link is rather straight-forward, placing the other 2 links is not. A bot that could do all this would be most welcome.
 * Go for it!
 * These 3 link locations for portals have been the de facto standard for over a decade, and so there shouldn't be a problem with getting bot approval for those.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   00:34, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * P.S.: (ping).   &mdash; The Transhumanist   00:47, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I am not very even slightly expert on bots, so have a few queries:
 * Would the bot run be limited to a specified set of articles? (I am guessing the results of the Petscan query mentioned above)
 * Would the bot be able to check for existing links?
 * Would the bot only be run for new portals, or could it be run for all portals?
 * Would the bot, on finding an existing link, change it to a specified format and position, or bypass the page, assuming that the existing links are correct, necessary and sufficient?
 * How would the bot handle cases where editors claim that the portal links on that page should be different?
 * Cheers, &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 09:58, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * In answer to your questions:
 * Yes. The articles to add links to would be generated by the required suggested links on WP:Portal guidelines (if implemented) for each portal. I would scan for new portals using PetScan and then periodically check portals in batches to ensure the links are still there.
 * Yes. Using Special:WhatLinksHere I can check if the portal is linked to by the article. Separately, I am probably going to not use this though and check directly in the wikicode, as navigation templates are fulfilling the links (I think Portal-inline or similar does). However, this is open to discussion I am going to only ignore navigational templates on the root article, as root articles nearly always have Portal-inline in the "See Also" section due to the direct relevance. For now I don't think I will place selected article links due to comments raised by about how too many links would be spamming the link to the portal. Editors can add these links if they want, but I will automate adding the link to navigational templates used in the portal
 * Potentially all. Adding links to new portals is a definite, but I think that at least the selected article links should be checked for additions and add links added to these added articles. but also possibly having periodic checks on the 3 listed as "should" on the proposal, but the bot will respect nobots so, editors can deny the bot from editing pages when they don't want the link being placed there.
 * It would bypass the page, as it only is adding the link (not changing the template used etc.)
 * I hope I have answered your questions. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 10:15, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I have striked my comments above about selected article link placing etc. due to the updated proposal. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 20:01, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * For the case of an editor reverting the bot or otherwise modifying its edits, the bot could maintain a log of every article it edited, and generate a report for any whose state has regressed, which would then be manually checked (since clearly someone didn't like the edit). The bot probably shouldn't touch an article more than once, to avoid the potential for accidental edit warring. — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 23:12, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * the category link placer part of the bot is programmed. Starting on the root article now. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 22:07, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
 * (can't spell...) Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 22:22, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
 * What templates should we use for the automated links? I currently use the template already on the page, but if there is not one then on category pages I add Portal and on root articles I add Portal-inline. Is this want we want? Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:31, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't see a problem with that method, as long as everything is MOS compliant (which doesn't say much on the matter). — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 13:20, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Just to let you know that another batch of wikilinks to portals that I placed in templates such as Bread is currently being systematically reverted, in case you need to add them to a list of orphan portals. Certes (talk) 13:07, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
 * , have left the user a message on their talk page, asking about their reasoning for reverting. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 13:54, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
 * the reason why your edits were reverted was because of WP:NAVBOX which states that external links should not be added to navboxes. If you want you could redo the run, adding back the portal links if your edit was reverted and remove the commons category if your edit was not reverted. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 14:03, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for checking. I know from previous discussions that some editors prefer navbox templates to link only to articles.  If others think that it's a good idea to remove the link to portal whilst removing the link to commons, then I'm not going to edit war.  I just wanted to mention these cases so that others can choose to reinstate the link to portal, to link the portal in some other way or leave it as an orphan. Certes (talk) 14:56, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

This project's biggest backlog right now
In an interesting turn of fate, building new portals has become amazingly easy (for many subjects, it takes less than a minute), while placing the links to a portal is much harder (takes 5 minutes or more).

This has resulted in a huge number of orphan portals (thousands of them), creating a backlog of links that need to be placed to them (see above).

If you wish to boost the project, automating (or even semi-automating) this task will do it (such as with a user script). This is easily this project's main challenge / greatest need / highest priority. &mdash; The Transhumanist  12:58, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Maybe something like WP:Hotcat, but for portals? - Evad37 &#91;talk] 13:09, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Please describe. What would it do / look like?  &mdash; The Transhumanist   13:41, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm thinking of a bar at the bottom of the page (when viewing an article/category), like hotcat, but listing the existing links, if any, from (and similar templates), and with an input box to add a new portal (which you could type or paste text in, and/or look up existing portal). Like File:HotCat.png, but with portals instead of categories. If there is an existing   template, then it would be edited; otherwise a new  template would be added to the "See also" section, if present, or else the last section of the page (if it has sections), or else at the end of the page (but above navboxes, categories, etc). If you already know which portal you're adding to the page, the process for adding a portal becomes:
 * Load page
 * Paste portal name into input box
 * Click "Add" button
 * Click "Save" button (or first click "Show preview" and/or "Show changes" buttons)
 * (or add more portals, or click buttons to edit or remove existing links - Evad37 &#91;talk] 14:08, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * was the standard used for the old-style portals. For the new-style single-page portals, is the predominant link being used on root articles, typically as the top entry in the list in it's See also section (note the preceding bullet), and minding column formatting (that is, placing it right after the beginning column template call). Where there is no See also section, adding one is preferable (since the link is a list item entry, rather than a box off to the right).   &mdash; The Transhumanist   14:25, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * If you took this on, how long do you think it would take you to develop a HotCat-like program for placing links to portals?

I have started coding this. I'll probably need a couple more days to have a beta version ready for testing. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 10:42, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
 * This would allow us to make linking part of the creation process, and would make it easier for editors to handle those situations that User:Dreamy Jazz Bot could not (it handles exact title matches only, if I'm not mistaken).  &mdash; The Transhumanist   17:04, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
 * , it matches all categories and the main article on a portal. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 17:07, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Did you know: (illustrated)
The application of "Did you know" entries in portals is a repurpose. Some entries include the note "(illustrated)", to indicate that the picture included with a particular batch was for that entry. For example...


 * ... that Carl Edgar Myers invented an air-bicycle (illustrated) that navigated through the air like a bicycle?

Currently, those pictures are not included in portals, which renders the note erroneous.

Is it possible to include the pictures? &mdash; The Transhumanist  20:52, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
 * At the moment, Module:Selected recent additions removes (pictured) when it occurs within a blurb. It would be easy to extend this to (illustrated). Including pictures would require a bit more effort, and some thought as to what to do when 2, or 3, or more items all have (pictured) or (illustrated) in the blurb, since they can come from different batches. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 00:32, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Whatever you have time for. Perhaps the easy fix first, until the more elaborate feature can be figured out.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   03:24, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
 * ✅ the easy fix - Evad37 &#91;talk] 08:50, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Auto-categorization of portals
A script and/or bot to add to portals the same (subject, non-hidden) category tags that the like-named article has. Having both a bot and a script would be great.

We are way behind on the categorization of portals.

By using the article categories, we wouldn't even need to have a redundant category tree for the portal namespace. We would be able to find all the portals in the article categories, sorted by title, not namespace (they should not sorted by "P" for "Portal", but by the subject title).

I look forward to your replies. &mdash; The Transhumanist  17:19, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

P.S.: (ping)


 * , I could extend my bot to add every portal to the categories that the bot would add a link to. I would say that the hidden categories should not be deleted as my bot relies on Category:All portals. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 17:25, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I thought it already did that, and that it stuck to like-named categories. That would certainly supplement this bot.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   17:30, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
 * , what I mean by this is that I could place  on the portal for each category detected on the portal (i.e. categories wrapped in  ).
 * Separately my bot could add the categories from the root article onto the portal, but the point raised by Certes does put into question whether putting portals in article categories is allowed. I would be wary that, very quickly, a category could be flooded with portals (especially if it's already filled with articles which have associated portals). For example, Category:Asia could be filled up very quickly with several portals. This in a way is the desired effect, but editors may complain about categories being filled up (and so harder to navigate) and could argue that this is something that shouldn't be done. I think if we wanted to carry this out, an RfC (or similar) would be a good idea, as this isn't just affecting the portal namespace and would affect many categories. I am neutral about this and also neutral about whether a bot should carry out this task. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:08, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
 * It may be worth a quick check at WT:Categorization to see if certain types of category should be reserved for articles only. Certes (talk) 18:14, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
 * It may be worth a quick check at WT:Categorization to see if certain types of category should be reserved for articles only. Certes (talk) 18:14, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

What we are talking about here, is going to the like-named article page, copying the non-hidden category tags, and then adding them to the portal. Except the ones that are already there, of course. &mdash; The Transhumanist  17:30, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Danny, could your script that appends categories be cloned and modified to do this? &mdash; The Transhumanist  17:32, 10 February 2019 (UTC) P.S.:  (ping)
 * Sorry, didn't see this until now. I'm going out of town for a week, but I should be able to do this. Just to confirm: ((Portal:name))'s main article is ((:name)), and we want to add ((:name))'s categories to ((Portal:name))? --DannyS712 (talk) 08:42, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, but subject categories only; not hidden/project/tracking categories.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   08:47, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
 * P.S.: (ping)
 * would it work to only get those listed on the page ? --DannyS712 (talk) 08:58, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Not sure if the categorization of categories is as robust as with articles. But if you go that way, subject categories only; no hidden or project categories.  — The Transhumanist   09:11, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I meant the categories of the page ((:name)), that were defined as ((Category:XYZ)) rather than categories that the page is in because of templates, lua errors, etc --DannyS712 (talk) 09:29, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Take a look at the start of User:DannyS712 test/copycat.js. At a portal page, run it, and you can see in the console (hit f12?) all of the categories that the base page is in . --DannyS712 (talk) 07:24, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Lol just found out about  - that would have been so much easier to use --DannyS712 (talk) 07:28, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

This could be controversial, so I would agree with Certes's suggestion of discussing at WT:CAT, and making sure there is consensus before doing mass edits. Also, how are portals sorted in the cats? They probably should have a unique sort key, rather than being lumped in the middle of a bunch of articles. Especially if its a Portal:Foo in a Category:Foo situation. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 09:19, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
 * For placement of miscellaneous portals, see Categorization, #11. The common practice for like-named portals, established through years of practice, is to place the portal at the top of the list, below the root article, using "*" as the sort key.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   06:55, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
 * P.S.: (ping)
 * Thanks for clarifying, and for that link - Evad37 &#91;talk] 07:51, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Related portals based on hierarchy
Are there any ideas on how to automate related portals?

I thought of something related to a hierarchy tree. WikiProject Portals/Portals tree Guilherme Burn (talk) 18:25, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

I make this Template:Portals tree. Who can help me improve it? I tested in the portals Portal:Society and Portal:Prostitution. Guilherme Burn (talk) 17:36, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

Commons Gallery Slideshow Gadget
Not sure if this is the right place for this discussion so feel free to move it to somewhere more appropriate. When we relaunched this project one of the ideas I had in the back of my mind was the ability to create a portal-like page dynamically from a Category, pretty much as a user preference. There is something pretty similar already over on the Commons - the Gallery Slideshow Gadget (see this example). This script essentially grabs the content of the pages within the category and displays it all as a slide show. I think this gives a good starting point for a "virtual" portal. Obviously on Wikipedia we'd want the text to be given more prominence than the image, and there would be some other formatting bits and pieces to sort out, but most of the functionality we would want to use is there already in this gadget, which is enabled by default on the Commons. What do others think? <b style="color:#98F">W</b><b style="color:#97E">a</b><b style="color:#86D">g</b><b style="color:#75C">ge</b><b style="color:#83C">r</b><b  style="color:#728">s</b><small  style="color:#080">TALK  12:12, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

tabs portals layout
How to convert a layout with "tabs" to a single page portal? P:SEX is the example case. The challenge, for a creative issue, is to convert it into a single page portal keeping the tabs. Any idea how to do it?Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:18, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I got a good result with Template:Start tab in portals Portal:Sexuality, Portal:Religion for example.


 * But it's still not a single page layout solution.Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:48, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
 * We don't necessarily have to reduce every portal to strictly a single page design. I think a tabbed layout looks pretty neat and works well for some portals. The method you're looking for to accomplish a tabbed layout on a single page (without additional page loading) would probably be to put each tab's content in a separate and use CSS to show/hide each div as you click on the tabs. This would, however, require JavaScript to change the classes on each div (e.g. to add/remove a hidden class). The common.js on enwiki already has code to work with the mw-colllapsible and mw-collapsed classes used in tables, but I'm not sure if that could be leveraged to do what we want here.  You guys have any ideas on this one? — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 01:43, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
 * It is possible to do it in a bit of a hacky way with templateStyles. Something like

<templatestyles src="TemplateStyles sandbox/Evad37/singlePageTabs.css" /> Tab1 content. Tab2 content. Tab3 content.
 * - Evad37 &#91;talk] 04:38, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
 * It works in preview, but not when saved for some reasons - Evad37 &#91;talk] 04:39, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

What I do is simply get rid of the tabs, and include everything in sections on the one page. Though, I don't include WikiProject page content. Instead the standard section with a link to the corresponding WikiProject is fine. &mdash; The Transhumanist  07:06, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

[Excerpt slideshow] Portal:Cross-Strait relations
Portal:Cross-Strait relations spew with the blank.png image being shown. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:22, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Transclude files as random slideshow
A recurring problem with the image slideshows is the display of images without captions, thus displaying pictures without context. These include icons, such as highway symbols, which shouldn't be showing up in the slideshow anyways.

Can you adjust the module to only display images that have captions?

I look forward to your reply. Sincerely,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   18:08, 19 March 2019 (UTC)


 * This is an issue I’ve been noticing too. Portal restarters take note: getting the highway signs out of the selected picture section eliminates a reason for me to revert. (Also, list articles don’t belong as selected articles unless it’s a “selected list” section.) — python coder   (talk &#124; contribs) 22:23, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
 * ✅, Module:Random slideshow will now only take images if they have captions. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 00:30, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. Nicely done. &mdash; The Transhumanist  18:27, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Rather than revert a problem with a portal, if you brought it up on this page, it could be fixed. Then it would be fixed site-wide, not just on a single portal. Note how quickly this one was fixed. &mdash; The Transhumanist  18:27, 20 March 2019 (UTC)


 * I have checked my previous portalspace edits and restored the new versions of portals where this was the only issue. —  python coder    (talk &#124; contribs) 19:31, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Doughnuts and others spewing images

 * There are several portals where all the images spew out at once. Example: Portal:Doughnuts. Is there a way to fix this?


 * Please tag anyone involved and thank you

<b style="color: blue">AmericanAir88</b>(<b style="color: darkred">talk</b>) 23:05, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Is this in the 'Selected images' section? I can't see anything wrong with the portal currently (I use latest chrome). Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 23:14, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
 * The problem currently afflicts 15 portals including Portal:Egypt. A module used by Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow or similar fails to handle something in the lead of one of the articles, possibly a gallery tag. The problem will be intermittent because the article may or may not appear today depending on the random number generator.  I'll see if I can narrow the problem down further. Certes (talk) 00:02, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
 * I think I fixed Egypt by undoing a change which broke the format of Climate of Egypt. Unfortunately, that's not a generic solution.  The module packages a slideshow with dummy images and the excerpts as captions, making a gallery tag with content like
 * File:Blank.png|A cat is an animal.
 * File:Blank.png|A dog is another animal.
 * File:Blank.png|An elephant is a big animal.
 * but unfortunately several (all?) of the items end up as a single caption and get displayed together. My guess is that one of the excerpts contains an opening bracket, HTML tag or similar but not its closing partner, so the bracket/tag appears to enclose the following excerpts and their dummy image names.  However, the first article displayed, List of doughnut shops, seems to have no such error.  Certes (talk) 01:31, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
 * For further complications with Portal:Egypt, see below. Certes (talk) 14:21, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Sort key on Portal:Michelangelo
I can't see what is causing issues with the sort key on Portal:Michelangelo, as it is not Michelangelo but actually "Agony And The Ecstasy". I presume this is a template issue. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 17:08, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Transclude lead excerpt correctly bins everything from The Agony and the Ecstasy (novel) after the lead, and the DEFAULTSORT template is at the bottom. Same with the film.  How did you discover the precise sort key rather than just its initial letter?  I do hope some philistine hasn't set a sort code of "Angelo, Mike"... Certes (talk) 17:33, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
 * , page information for the portal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:Michelangelo&action=info. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 18:08, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I never noticed that. The problem is the image File:The Agony and the Ecstasy.JPG, which also contains DEFAULTSORT.  We're not displaying it, because it's non-free, but we have to parse its text to discover that, and it has to go through the full template expansion circus because people hide the non-free status in nested templates.  (I suspect that most of the CPU time for many portals is now spent checking copyright status.)  This may also be the cause of the mysterious featured image stars.  It looks as if we may have to cull selected templates from image descriptions, as well as from the article itself. Certes (talk) 18:50, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I've rewritten the relevant code in a way that works for Michelangelo because the image description for Agony And The Ecstasy is on the local wiki. Other descriptions are in Commons, and I don't see a way to extract them without parsing them which triggers processing of DEFAULTSORT etc. However, they don't seem to cause problems in practice. Certes (talk) 21:21, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Typography
I tried to convert it to single page, but the formatting went all wonky. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:Typography&oldid=884891031  &mdash; The Transhumanist   23:45, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

P.S.: (ping)  &mdash; The Transhumanist   23:46, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
 * It's a standard splurge like we get in a few other portals. I'll see if I can work out which article's excerpt is breaking it. Certes (talk) 00:40, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
 * That's an odd one. Module:Excerpt failed to handle bold text inside a piped wikilink inside an image caption.  I've fixed this in the sandbox but I'd like  to confirm that the change won't break Module:Random slideshow before I release it.  The incompatible bit is that moduleExcerpt.parse will return (filetext, text) rather than (filetext..text, leadstart), which I think also helps Random slideshow by giving it less irrelevant text to discard.  I'm happy with the effect on the templates that call Module:Excerpt directly and I've done a quick test on a few random-selection portals so, if Evad thinks the change looks good, I'll release it tomorrow. Certes (talk) 02:20, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Looks fine. I changed the sandbox slideshow modules to use Module:Excerpt/sandbox, and the testcases still worked. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 08:19, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Evad. I've released that change and it fixes the problem, which was with Typographic ligature.
 * That revealed another problem. Letter-spacing also broke the new version of the portal due to the wikitable within nested divs before the lead. (One div gets removed but its /div remained.) Editors who write about typography know clever ways of laying out pages that we didn't predict when writing the modules. I've fixed this too.
 * The new version of the portal should now work, so please release if it's an improvement on the current one. Certes (talk) 13:18, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
 * ✅ Good work guys.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   13:45, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Michigan highways needs help
Portal:Michigan highways has broken links in some sections, like selected articles. Could a member of this project please fix these by reformatting the archive pages, then using your templates to randomly select from those? '''This is not an invitation to redesign the whole portal. I just want this small piece fixed.''' Please ping when replying —  python coder    (talk &#124; contribs) 01:21, 9 March 2019 (UTC)


 * There are several ways to do random selection. Do you want it to still be on a monthly rotation (like how it is currently set up), or some other time-period, or to have all available selected content in numbered subpages, with one randomly selected each visit? - Evad37 &#91;talk] 02:48, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Or a better way, with fewer subpages, would be to just have a single subpage per section, which randomly (via Module:Random) selects from defined content, e.g. a particular  template.
 * I've done this for a few of the previously selected articles at Portal:Michigan highways/Selected article, with that page now transcluded on the main portal page, so you can see what I mean (happy to revert if this isn't what you want). - Evad37 &#91;talk] 03:32, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
 * It's been reverted already, so don't worry. Pinging so they're aware of this discussion/request - Evad37 &#91;talk] 03:43, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Also pinging the other listed maintainer - Evad37 &#91;talk] 03:47, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Splurge
After a lot of varied and tedious fixes, and a few wrong turns, we're now down to two splurges which I can't solve. Maybe someone else can work out what is going on in those cases. The current splurge list, which may grow or shrink, is here. Certes (talk) 21:21, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Portal:Boston Red Sox: the "selected articles" section cuts off mid-flow and doesn't terminate its gallery tag. No individual article seems to misbehave in Module:Excerpt, but there may be rogue articles after the cut-off whose titles I can't see.
 * Portal:Egypt: intermittently, the "selected articles" section contains another nested "selected articles" section. List of universities in Egypt may be to blame but neither it nor any other article misbehaves on its own.
 * , Portal:Boston Red Sox does not seem to have this problem anymore (perhaps the issue is now fixed?) Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 21:05, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
 * It's intermittent. I'm seeing Red Sox splurge again now but it does go away randomly.  There are currently six articles with splurges.  Perhaps we just have to accept that our software will screw up 0.1% of all portals and those cases need to work off a manual list of articles. Certes (talk) 01:39, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
 * , Portal:Egypt splurges on a separate section for a different navigational template. Is this the same one you are talking about. The titles for the two sections were incorrectly the same. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:16, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
 * issues on Portal:Boston Red Sox may be caused by the lack of any lead in List of Boston Red Sox owners and executives, which just means that the template returns ==Owners== . Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:22, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I've fixed the Sox by making articles with an empty lead return an empty excerpt, which should cause the random selector to pick again. Egypt currently complains that "The time allocated for running scripts has expired.".  I can try purging again at a quieter time. Certes (talk) 14:50, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks to for the performance measuring tip.  Egypt timed out due to three slow templates.  (The second column is milliseconds.)

34.53% 3722.768     2 Template:Transclude_list_item_excerpts_as_random_slideshow — I added limit=25; now 2238 ms 31.97% 3446.366      1 Template:Transclude_files_as_random_slideshow — only one article; hard to see how to improve this 27.88% 3006.317     1 Template:Transclude_selected_recent_additions — I removed %s from the start of search terms; now 2250 ms
 * That gets us down to 9.3 seconds which I'm not comfortable with but it's better than timing out. Certes (talk) 12:50, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
 * If there's only one article in, then you could instead use and manually specify files/captions from that article. Reducing the number of months in  should also reduce the Lua time used. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 13:22, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks, those hints sound like the next things to try if we have further problems. I'll leave them for now though, so we can stay current with any image changes and keep a full events list (surprisingly little seems to happen in Egypt) Certes (talk) 13:36, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata templates in Philippines portals
This report is condensed from WP:AN (long section: search for Philippines).

Portals where the lead contains PH wikidata do not work. This technique is designed for use in infoboxes rather than in the body of the article. I suspect that it fails because the template uses the page title to retrieve information from Wikidata, and here it gets the title of the template rather than the title of the transcluded page. There are possible solutions, but they require changing wikidata templates rather than portals and the work might be wasted after the current deletion spree. For now, I suggest avoiding automatically generated portals about places in the Philippines. Certes (talk) 11:17, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
 * The solution to this is to remove the PH wikidata from the article text, since it is in violation of Wikidata anyway. &#123;&#123;3x&#124;p&#125;&#125;ery (talk) 01:49, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I was about to boldly subst those templates but there appear to be over 1000 articles with several instances each. (This search has false positives from the infobox, but not many.) It's doable but tedious with JWB; a bot request might be better.  What would be a good place to gain consensus for this change? Certes (talk) 11:22, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I do not believe that any separate consensus is necessary to enforce Requests for comment/Wikidata Phase 2, the RfC that led to the guideline I referred to earlier. &#123;&#123;3x&#124;p&#125;&#125;ery (talk) 18:52, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your useful advice, Pppery. I've had a go at this but don't feel that it can be done safely without a bot. Using JWB to insert safesubst: seems to work but the hard part is doing this only outside the infobox: I don't see any regex that we can reliably check for.  There is also the issue that someone has set up in good faith wikitext which (although deprecated) updates automatically.  If we undo their hard work by hard-coding 2019 values instead then I wouldn't blame them for leaving the articles to rot.  Finally, several editors are fighting enthusiastically to delete the affected pages which, whatever our views on portals, will make the problem go away.  If someone else wants to pick this task up, possibly with a bot request, then I'll be happy to assist, but it's not clear to me that this exercise would improve Wikipedia sufficiently to be worth a great effort.  It might also be polite to notify WP:Tambayan Philippines before proceeding.  Certes (talk) 21:03, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I've also had a few tries at dealing with the problem in Module:Excerpt, but that doesn't look easy and may not be possible. MediaWiki must be able to evaluate templates with FULLPAGENAME effectively set to a different value, as Special:ExpandTemplates does, but I don't think that functionality is exposed in frame:expandTemplate or any other API function available to Lua. Certes (talk) 21:18, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

Extend auto-creation of portals to the portals in WikiProject Portals/Wanted portals
WikiProject Portals/Wanted portals lists over 500 wanted portals.

Unfortunately, they don't have the necessary support for bpsp to create them.

Most of them lack a corresponding navbox navigation footer template.

So, a script is needed that would populate the Selected general articles section somehow.

Ideas? &mdash; The Transhumanist  07:01, 11 February 2019 (UTC) P.S.: (ping)


 * , apart from just finding relevant articles and creating a navbox, I can't think of anything. The way these tools are built is using navboxes (and/or pages which act as navboxes, such as lists of people). Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:11, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
 * One way that comes to mind is to build a script or bot to create navbox footer templates. Another is to harvest categories. Thoughts?  &mdash; The Transhumanist   12:20, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
 * , I would say that it couldn't be a bot to create navboxes, as the creation could be filled with errors. A tool, which allows you to review results would be a good idea. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:21, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Harvesting categories would be best done by a tool to create a navbox, as this navbox could then be used elsewhere (such as on the article). However, I am sure that an extension to Module:Excerpt could be possible. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:24, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Auto creation of portal talk pages
Hello,

I am planning to extend my bot to automatically create portal talk pages using the wikiproject banners found on article pages, along with the portal project banner and Portal talk. I have opened a BRFA, but before it can be tested and potentially approved it needs more input from others.

So, what are your thoughts on this bot? Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 10:19, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 10:19, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 14:58, 22 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Support, seems appropriate and helpful. It could perhaps have an opt-out/blacklist for Wikiprojects that don't want to assess portals (probably not too many, but individual projects do get to define their own scope per WP:PROJSCOPE). - Evad37 &#91;talk] 12:59, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
 * , I have added this functionality in the code I have written. I have also updated the bot request with this. Thanks for the suggestion, Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 14:09, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Support – I've posted my comments and requests on the bot approvals page.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   20:18, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Support - I Support, but this concept of portal maintainer... I do not like it, brings an idea of ownership and authority that does not seem very collaborative.Guilherme Burn (talk) 16:03, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
 * , in regards to portal maintainer, are you connecting this to the bot's functions or portal maintainers through Portal maintenance status. If you are relating this to the BRFA, I am not sure what you mean, but if you are thinking of the latter, then I'll explain what I think of them:
 * They act as the bridge from the project to the portal
 * The portal namespace is now a very rarely edited namespace, even more rarely when we only take into account non-portal project members.
 * Also existence of portal maintainers does not, IMO, hinder others from editing the portal, as they are only shown when CSS is added to show the template.
 * I do, however, understand your viewpoint. The name can suggest that one editor "owns" the portal. But, I think that this system is not pushed really at all and that the intended meaning of the word is to be a big part in the collaborative process of creating a portal. I think that it would be wrong for an editor to "claim" a portal and not let others improve the portal too. Thanks, Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 16:30, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Support this as well. Takes a load off the usual editors, and helps de-orphan the portals (WikiProject-wise). — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 01:20, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Portals with script errors
Here are some pointers for fixing problems with specific portals.

No images found
search The random slideshow chooses randomly from a list of zero images, and isn't very exciting.

No page specified
search The list provided contains no usable pages. This error usually occurs in Selected general articles.

The time allocated for running scripts has expired
search The portal needs to be less ambitious, perhaps by setting lower page count limits on its template calls.

Other errors
search – a longer list including the three specific types above and some miscellaneous errors.

Category:Pages with script errors also lists these problems but is less useful as it includes many errors unrelated to portals.

Both lists currently contain several instances of "Lua error in Module:Excerpt at line 117: attempt to concatenate local 'rtitle'...". That problem has already been fixed and should disappear from search results soon.

Some errors which appear in portals occur in modules which are related to the topic area rather than to portals, and also appear in the quoted article.

Hope that helps, Certes (talk) 15:13, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
 * , thanks for the links! Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 17:32, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Import articles from Popular pages
A template who imports articles from popular pages reports for wikiprojects. Guilherme Burn (talk) 17:30, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I'll implement this at WikiProject Portals/Popular portals. Thanks for the suggestion! Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 18:22, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * ✅ It will take until the next time the bot runs the task to create and populate the page. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 18:45, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * No . I'm suggesting a template like Transclude excerpts as random slideshow. a code like  would result in a slideshow with the ten most popular articles of the project,   would result in a slideshow with the Top importance pages of the project.Guilherme Burn (talk) 19:11, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Oh. I see. Thanks for clarifying. Currently something like Transclude list item excerpt would work, but sorting not randomly would need a new module function in Module:Excerpt or just extending functions already there, which is a copy of listitem but allows sorting with different parameters. what do you think of this? Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 19:37, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I'll try the ping again Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 19:42, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Interesting idea. Transclude linked excerpt almost works out of the box here because the top articles are wikilinked from the table, but you would probably want a slideshow rather than just one random pick, and we'd need to exclude stray links to things other than the top 10.  Enhancing the random pick templates to accept a "don't be random" flag would have other advantages, including making debugging easier. Certes (talk) 19:47, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * We could use the "sectiononly" = true and "section" = "List" along with something like "random" = false to achieve this. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 19:49, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Now that I've done, we can do to produce

- Evad37 &#91;talk] 02:20, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 09:11, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks ! This feature is very useful for a section such as "articles of the month." But I think it would still be interesting to have a specific template for popular pages.Guilherme Burn (talk) 10:59, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
 * WikiProject Portals/Popular portals not works.Guilherme Burn (talk) 12:26, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
 * , I'm not sure why it hasn't worked. I'm going to talk to the bot op about it. Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:37, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I have created the page as blank page and hopefully this will mean the bot will fill the page. We shall see (I think the next run is due). Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 12:45, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Kingston upon Hull wrong caption
The file on the lead excerpt is showing the wrong caption. It is selecting the caption from the pushpin_map_caption field rather than the image_caption field of Infobox settlement template. Keith D (talk) 01:24, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Music errors
Today's Birthdays on August 26 is broken and tossing up a wall of red errors. --Phospheros (talk) 17:57, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
 * The page is simply too complex to render correctly. Raised at Portal talk:Music. Certes (talk) 18:19, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Page options in excerpts
It is now possible to vary excerpt options between pages, for example to take the first paragraph of one article but the second and third paragraphs of another. I have also documented the existing capability to use sections and piped links. Details: Template:Transclude lead excerpt/doc. These features apply to most templates using Module:Excerpt. Certes (talk) 11:44, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Named images in excerpts
It is now possible to display a named image, even if it does not appear in the article. Only a single image is supported, but it can vary between articles using page options, e.g. Article{{!}}files{{=}}Myimage.jpg. This feature has similar scope and documentation to page options. Certes (talk) 13:38, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Related portals
Proposing that   and    be changed so that clicking on an image takes a user to the portal and not to the image itself. --Phospheros (talk) 21:14, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
 * That sounds sensible. The only objection I can see is that it makes it harder to get attribution information for the image, but I think approximately 0% of readers are looking for that rather than the portal. Certes (talk) 21:47, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
 * This has been tried before and reverted. Sadly, the attribution rules seem to prevent us from helping readers in this way. See Help:Visual_file_markup. Certes (talk) 15:22, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
 * ...on the other hand, certain portals get away with images which link to portals by essentially hard-coding the output that these templates might have produced had they been enhanced as you suggest. The matter may be worth taking up with the attribution specialists. Certes (talk) 01:25, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Display all selectable excerpts
It is now possible to display all excerpts from a selection simultaneously by passing a new showall parameter to the Transclude...excerpt templates. This feature is designed for use in subpages and produces a display more suited to editors than to readers. To display all excerpts on the subpage but only one on the main portal page, transclude the subpage as normal and add  to the template. Thanks to for the idea, previously discussed here. Certes (talk) 15:40, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

Request for comment

 * – North America1000 03:47, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Here's the updated link to the now archived discussion:


 * Village pump (policy)/Archive 155

Sincerely,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   14:15, 25 January 2020 (UTC)