Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design/Archive 5

Indefinite hiatus on portal program development?
posted this comment at the BHG arbcom case: "As for me, the reason for my hiatus on portal editing (as per FoF #10) was to let this case run its course, though I don't know if it's the same for others."

Thank you, for the explanation or your reaction to BHG. Mine is similar, but probably more permanent...

It wasn't just that BHG was creating a toxic editng/discussion environment], but that other admins weren't stopping her (who ya gonna call?). The portal project listed 16 admins at the time, and yet they did nothing, until she attacked one of them. Her behavior, combined with the admin community's reluctance to enforce the rules on a historically respected admin, created a toxic editing environment that lasted for many months.

An editor could have stood up to BHG and effectively pushed back in the deletion discussions and portal project talk pages, at the cost of a great deal of time, while enduring being smeared and other forms of abuse. Not worth it for pages that were temporary from early on -- pending zero-page portals. Once zero-page ("quantum") portals, or similar technology, is developed, it will render the single-page portal concept, and likely all other portals, obsolete. BHG wasted nearly a year of her time deleting pages that were going to be deleted in due course anyways.

Taking a step back to look at the scope of her involvement, it appears as if BHG made a strategic sacrifice: a fait-accompli-mass-portal-deletion via WP:POVRAILROAD and WP:BULLY in exchange for being (temporarily?) penalized by arbcom. And I say "as if", because who knows what her actual motive was for using unethical tactics like smear campaigning to drive away opposition in order to impose her own agenda more easily. She's smart, so she must have known that the way she was going about it was wrongful and against the rules, but she continued to do it anyways, which means very likely that she consciously accepted the risks/price. It looks like an entirely calculated fait accompli. Then again, she was acting mean, and perhaps at the core, she is. But it is hard to reason with bullies, as all they understand is force.

What were the costs to Wikipedia? BHG stopped a very talented programming team's development project. Note, that no new program components or major script developments have been made by the portal project since she began her anti-portal crusade. Note, by BHG's analysis of the inner workings of portals, you can see that she was treating the single-page portals as content pages rather than what they were in essence: scripts (programs) under development.

She basically attacked version 1.0 of a browsing interface and general content surveying tool, and stopped development in its tracks. If she hadn't, the development team would probably be up to version 4 or 5 by now. Now that BHG is out of the way, will the programming effort pick up where it left off? Probably not. At least, not by the portal project. I for one have moved on to the Web-at-large. The development environment out there in the big wide web turned out to be much more conducive to creativity than what WP became under BHG. With commitments made elsewhere, I will unlikely be free to work on WP anytime soon.

What about evolution? Where is the technology heading? To article pages themselves. That's where the bulk of the traffic is, and so, that's the best place for innovations on Wikipedia: where the most people will benefit from them. Articles are the only portals you need -- in that they can be enhanced via scripts (or universal gadgets or MediaWiki features/extensions) to provide everything portals have provided. And then some. With the benefit of traffic. While there are good arguments for developing prototypes in an out-of-the-way area like portal space, scripts applied directly to articles offer another route to adoption of portal-like features: user-by-user installation of scripts →→ promotion to gadgets →→ promotion to universal gadgets. If a gadget or universal gadget becomes popular enough, it may catch the attention of the developers of MediaWiki itself, and become a feature of the very program that displays English Wikipedia (and many other wikis).

A good place to start would be navigation footers that correspond to an article's title. In portals, they are the basis of content slideshows, which are great for surveying a subject's coverage quickly. Now, all that is needed is a toggle-activated slideshow that doesn't have to load all the slideshow excerpts all at once (that makes for a very painful wait on slow bandwidth connections). Then, a navigation footer becomes a slideshow at the push of a button. The beauty part is that the itinerary of the show is already included in the nav footer.

Good luck, everyone, and happy editing / program developing.

Sincerely,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   14:15, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Regardless of whether BHG is allowed to comment on portal development, the development you are suggesting is evil. It hides the structure of portals in obtuse templates, making it impossible for an non-expert editor to determine what the characteristics of a portal or portal-like template are.  Slideshows, like collapsed lists, are considered inappropriate in articles by consensus at en.Wikipedia (although forced on IP editors by MediaWiki developers).  Unless you revisit that consensus, development of portal-like navbars should stop.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 02:34, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
 * It is important to separate portal improvement from the development of in-article navigation.
 * One positive idea from the recent heated debate has been to increase transparency in portals, and this is reflected in the available templates. A simple example is Portal:Speculative fiction/Selected biography.  The page shows all eligible excerpts but, when transcluded, shows one at random.  This format has been welcomed, the only dissenting voice being the editor who has left the arena.  With many of our disagreements now resolved, I hope that we can resume work, applying this technique more widely and making similar improvements elsewhere in the portal infrastructure.
 * In-article navigation would be a major new step, and as far as I am aware there is as yet no consensus for it. Certes (talk) 11:33, 26 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Toggling a navbox into slideshow mode would hide nothing. The user would already be looking at the navfooter before clicking on the button to go into slideshow mode, and presumably, the same button would still be available to return back to navfooter viewing mode. The big challenge would be saving bandwidth, by not requiring the user's browser from downloading all the excerpts before the user has read even one of them.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   16:27, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
 * , I can see your point: if that's the way it would be implemented, it wouldn't be evil. It still wouldn't be a good idea.  I suggest you seek a consensus that slideshows are ever good. before you work on implementing them.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 07:27, 27 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Thank you. I don't plan on implementing much of anything, and I can't say I miss it much. I just stopped by to post my observations on the debacle, now that it is pretty much over. I plan on returning to off-wiki projects, which are taking up the bulk of my time these days. Have fun editing. Cheers. Sincerely,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   15:44, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

I suggest to stop any consideration of "software development" in this area until the cleanup of the portal namespace is concluded (it would take probably 6 more months at the rate of MfD and portal rewriting seen until a couple months ago) and/or a very strong consensus on a new guideline for portals is achieved (this might take years). Nemo 12:40, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
 * The only software development taking place is that another editor is adapting a Lua module to also support some non-portal applications. As two thirds of the namespace has been deleted in less than a year, I agree that the MfDs will be over in six months.  Even that estimate relies on the very dubious maxim that "cleanup" requires every portal to go to MfD just for daring to exist, and I doubt that we have consensus for such an unprecedented presumption of poor quality.  Certes (talk) 13:37, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

, no matter what you think of BHG, it is nor appropriate or acceptable to compare her to a terrorist, which is what you have done above, along with numerous other unnecessary personal comments. Please remove this material. EdChem (talk) 13:36, 26 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Perhaps "terrorize" was too strong a word, but I was not using it in the context of terrorist activity, rather, that she drove people away. I've striked removed the term and have added "creating a toxic editing/discussion environment".  &mdash; The Transhumanist   16:16, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
 * TT, I don't know if you recall this, but you were one of the first Wikipedians to talk to me, and I've always thought of you as one of the most civil, helpful Wikipedians around, even when I've disagreed with your other actions. This kind of post, piling on to kick someone when they're down, isn't the you that I've known in the past. If you wanted to make your case against BHG, the arbcom case was the place to do it. This accomplishes nothing except to make you look petty and nasty. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:20, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
 * On the contrary, I covered points that the case missed. The full scope of the damage that BrownHairedGirl has done to Wikipedia, especially on its talk pages, needs to be analyzed, understood, and repaired. My involvement during the case would have been an undue distraction. By the way, she's not down. Read her posts on the arbcom case talk page. For example, she's still smearing the single-page portals as "spam" (rather than referring to them as "stubs"), a rhetorical tactic not based on deletion guidelines or any WP guideline. It is disrespectful, and disingenuous. See WP:POVRAILROAD.
 * Though, she has started to take accountability for her behavior (see this diff), which is admirable, and I hope her turnaround continues.


 * But, she has so far failed to acknowledge that her demeanor drove away the very people who could have fixed the problems she identified. And she was set upon deletion rather than fixing -- she could have joined the development effort rather than shut it down. Talented people can be synergistic, or they can cancel each other out. So, her characterization of the design flaws and bugs as a mess to be wiped up and thrown away were misplaced.
 * Because of her approach with derogatory remarks and name calling, her accusations that they didn't stick around to fix them (in her words "clean up the mess") falls back on her. That would amount to them being berated by her while they followed her orders doing it her way. Her insistence that the portals be deleted rather than fixed, displayed her goal of reshaping the portal system to what she envisioned (her POV): major topic portals only. A goal I did not agree with, and had no obligation to participate in, especially while she engaged in personal attacks.
 * Her MO (method of operation) worked, and she didn't have to give up that much for it. Being banned from portal space isn't much of a penalty, as it has already been effectively gutted. And she'll probably have the mop back, if she wants it, eventually. Though her effort was pointless. Single-page portals were temporary, and probably would have been replaced by scripts by now. On retrospect, the main penalty BHG incurred was all the time she wasted.
 * Besides this, a very important discussion that needs to take place is how the debacle of any admin ignoring WP's behavioral guidelines and expectations for sysops will be handled by the admin community in the future.
 * And what about cleanup? The disparaging remarks she made about and to others are still out there, and can continue to do damage every time they are read. Neither BHG nor anyone else has cleaned up the derogatory comments she posted throughout portal-related talk pages and threads per WP:NPA.
 * I have completely removed the term "terrorizing" from my post above, per that policy (I've just given it a reread), and I apologize for my use of that term. If there are any other terms I used that are personal attacks rather than statements about BHG's behavior and her rules violations, please let me know, and I'll rephrase the statements to be in accordance with the rules.
 * I appreciate your compliments and concerns. I've said my piece.
 * Sincerely,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   16:54, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
 * All this talk about people driven away is misleading, in my opinion. The difficulties in cleaning up portals have also driven away a lot of users interested in cleaning up, reducing and deleting portals. It's normal for people to stop doing something when it gets too complicated or when a community process reaches an outcome they don't like (of which there was plenty for both sides). One-sided character assassinations don't help anyone. Nemo 17:59, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
 * You have used BHG's continuing participation at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals/Proposed decision to justify your posts at this page. Once the Arbitration Committee's decision takes effect, BHG will be prohibited from discussing portals at that and all other pages.  AGK  &#9632;  14:07, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * This is a better place to post, and will be even after her second gag order has gone into effect.  &mdash; The Transhumanist   21:09, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with . it is good to see your ideas here. --Sm8900 (talk) 14:18, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Purpose of portals
As this subpage is supposed to be for design and ideas, I am asking: what is the purpose of Portals? Once that is decided, we can discuss how portals can be designed so as to meet that purpose, and whether to propose deletion for those that don't. I have seen seen three incompatible purposes presented. But, I'm not going to mention those here, in case someone can propose a purpose which is actually helpful, and can be met with the existing level of volunteer editors. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 00:42, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Questions such as this are being discussed in detail at User:Scottywong/Portal guideline workspace. Certes (talk) 00:48, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I see little point in designing new portal template/LUA functions until it is decided what portals are supposed to do. My apologies to those who like to design templates, but that's the way I see it.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 15:51, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Very little is being done to templates and Lua functions. We are waiting as you suggest, but such discussions have been in progress since 2018 and it may not be sensible to wait indefinitely. Certes (talk) 17:30, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I do not see any way to get consensus on the purpose of portals. I suggest we simply move on to improving portals. if anyone has positive ideas for doing so, please feel free to present them. --Sm8900 (talk) 17:36, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * We've been discussing potential improvements to some individual portals such as Methodism. These would require no software enhancements but would involve deploying existing features more widely.  One change which I would like to make soon, unless there are serious objections, is to restore the edits made by  last autumn which replaced stale content forks by transclusions as described on each portal's talk page.  This seems like a quick way to improve a large number of portals with minimal further effort.  We could make further changes at the same time by having all excerpts appear on a subpage (aimed mainly at editors) and by adding a collapsed list of article titles below the selected excerpt. Certes (talk) 19:28, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , those ideas sound good. thanks for posting that reply here. sounds good. --Sm8900 (talk) 18:28, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm starting to work through the portals which were updated then reverted where the changes haven't yet been reinstated. First is Portal:1920s where I've started a discussion in Talk. Certes (talk) 19:03, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , bravo!! that sounds good. I am glad to hear that. thanks for all your work on that area. please keep us posted. thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 22:35, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Article transclusions
As discussed above and here, there is consensus to reinstate the transclusion of excerpts into portals which was carried out during 2019 and reverted in October. Several editors have already reinstated the changes to the affected portals and have added article lists to most of them (example: Portal:Cuba; search for List of selected articles). I am adding lists to the few portals lacking them. I also propose to move the excerpts into subpages. This does not affect the portal's appearance to readers but does provide editors with a page where they can see all excerpts simultaneously, even if the one they just added does not appear randomly on the main portal (example: Maryland). Certes (talk) 11:40, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
 * that sounds good to me. I agree with this step. thanks, . --Sm8900 (talk) 03:33, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * No to using subpages, which make it harder to follow what's going on (and therefore automatically reduce participation). Nemo 21:05, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I think the subpages make it much easier to see what's going on by displaying all extracts rather than just one, thus overcoming the main objection raised to the use of transclusions, but I'll hold off until we hear other opinions. Certes (talk) 22:27, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Image gallery bug
MediaWiki 1.35 released on 20 Feb has a bug (T245553). In galleries, portrait-shaped images are not displayed but are replaced by their filename. This bug affects portal slideshows as well as galleries in articles. We hope that it will be fixed soon. Certes (talk) 08:42, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
 * . Certes (talk) 12:45, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Set a portal icon?
How would I set a portal icon for Portal:Coronavirus disease 2019, to show in portal bars and boxes? Kingsif (talk) 18:00, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * You'll need to put in an edit request for Module:Portal/images/c. Certes (talk) 19:13, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I did that! Kingsif (talk) 19:16, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Module:Excerpt release: captions
has released a new version of Module:Excerpt. The main change is internal tidying to allow internationalization, which should have no visible effect. The release also includes a bug fix which restores captions to images in certain cases where they were being removed. Certes (talk) 19:55, 4 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks, it wouldn't have been possible without your help and guidance. In the future I hope to continue improving the module, mostly with the goal of increasing its use in the main space through the Template:Excerpt, while keeping the behavior on portals the same (or better). Sophivorus (talk) 20:09, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Module:Excerpt release: options
has released another new version of Module:Excerpt. The main change is to finish the internationalization, which should have no visible effect. The release also includes three new options. Details are in the template documentation such as Template:Transclude lead excerpt/doc. Certes (talk) 11:01, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Portal templates
Re : many of these templates are transclude on 1000+ pages, and can be used on a main portal page as well as on subpages. I don't think there's a consensus that they are obsolete. Would it be better to leave them in the listing but to change the header? Certes (talk) 13:43, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I did a survey and found them obsolete, many of them redundant. But perhaps a broader discussion is better. Feel free to revert the edit.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:51, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Automatic selected pictures
Using WP:RECOG and Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow it is possible to automate "Selected article" section of a portal. Is the same possible for section "Selected pictures"? —⁠andrybak (talk) 16:56, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

New Template:Portal POTD
New template Portal POTD allows re-using subpages of Template:POTD. This is the content which has already been generated for the Today's featured picture section of the Main Page. Examples of how it could be used are at Portal:Arts/Featured picture/POTD and Portal:Sports/Selected picture/Layout/POTD. —⁠andrybak (talk) 19:36, 13 June 2020 (UTC)