Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § RfC: Ending the system of portals
 – Hi everybody. Because this discussion has become so lengthy (400,000+ bytes), I have moved it to a subpage of the village pump so that the village pump is more accessible. I apologize if any confusion has been caused by this. Mz7 (talk) 01:54, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
(The RFC originally started with :this entry on WP:PROPS --Ｔｏｍ (talk) 16:03, 20 April 2018 (UTC) )[reply]

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RfC: Ending the system of portals

Should the system of portals be ended? This would include the deletion of all portal pages and the removal of the portal namespace. 14:23, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

Survey: Ending the system of portals

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8 April 2018

In essence, portals try to straddle reader-facing and editor-facing stuff, but are terrible at both. They aren't really part of the encyclopedia; nor do they help in the backend - they don't benefit the encyclopaedia in anyway (the main page, which could be called a portal of everything, in contrast, encourages people to improve articles). Any navigational purpose, which I don't think portals help with at all, is better served through outlines. Featured articles and other stuff in a topic are cared more by wikiprojects, which generally link them already. Implementation could be reasonably easily done, as nearly all, I reckon, portal links in mainspace and in all pages indeed are through templates like ((portal)) (in all pages I estimate 99% of links are from being linked in wikiproject banners), which can be blanked to remove links; once the links are gone from mainspace, the portal pages can be deleted. Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:29, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Galobtter: You take one example for deleting a whole namespace, some portals are working and there is no need for deleting the work of hundreds of people!--Sinuhe20 (talk) 07:55, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This is an example of the Sunk cost fallacy. I get that many people have given an admirable effort to keep the portal system going, but this doesn't invalidate the well thought out reasoning for them being made obsolete. Many other elements of Wikipedia have been depreciated in spite of the hard work that users put into them. User:Axisixa [t] [c] 23:23, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I see this comment by a concerned editor, supporting his edits.. It is demeaning by reduction to say "this is an example of a fallacy" .. when it is his legitimate point of view, and volunteer labor ! A logical fallacy is not adequate to respond here, IMO. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1702:2770:9D0:C4A:68DE:2888:598F (talk) 18:20, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, kind of a-holish to coldly label someone's legitimate, not malicious concern as a fallacy... 71.15.110.98 (talk) 01:10, 27 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No, what's actually embarrassing is that some editors voting for deletion don't appreciate that Portal content is often made via other templates, which are themselves updated in varying amounts. The portal that forms Wikipedia's Main Page hasn't been edited at all this year yet. Nick Moyes (talk) 13:33, 12 April 2018 (UTC)  [reply]
Actually, Portal:Arts, which I hadn't looked at for years, still seems to function fine. The sections have automated rotation of decent lists of articles, the anniversaries are for April. It's like one of those spaceships in Alien and other movies keeping going while the crew are in suspended animation.... It's not a very time-sensitive area, and the reader is still well-served imo, for several visits. Johnbod (talk) 16:16, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Since there are people here apparently without a lick of commonsense, I guess I should be explicit that I would exempt the Current Events portal, and -- as much as I love to disdain the Main Page --I would also exempt the Main Page. Sheesh, people can be so damned literal sometimes. Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:47, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
what if Portal A was redirect to Outline of A. This was the name function still directs readers to an overview/index of a topic.--Moxy (talk) 18:33, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No problem with that if [1] Outline of A exists and isn't abandoned and [2] Portal A is seeing more traffic than we would expect from bots and mis-clicks. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:40, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I’d be interested to know how we would reform an area that is more or less abandonded. The community and the readers seem to have made it clear they don’t find these particularly useful, we can’t force anyone to look at them or maintain them. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:59, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Guns. We need squads of heavily-armed thugs who will kick down the doors of Wikipedia editors who aren't working on what we want them to work on and hold a gun to their head until they comply. Not a practical solution, you say? How do you explain the immense popularity worldwide of similar systems? :( --Guy Macon (talk) 22:46, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
However, I don't think mass-deletion is going to work (it rarely does). Instead I'd suggest updating any relevant guidelines to say they are obsolete, then introducing a speedy deletion criteria along the lines of "pages in the portal namespace that are no longer actively maintained". – Joe (talk) 21:37, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Very hard to get a new CSD approved but with a clear RFC result that would be a good mechanism to remove them systematically. Perhaps X3? We should statt by removing them from the top of the mainpage - the most important real estate for the least important namespace on the project. That will drop traffic on the portals a lot. Legacypac (talk) 21:44, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Because well meaning but not clued in editors will revert them, and keep add portal links without realizing what a disservice they are doing. Legacypac (talk) 00:07, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

9 April 2018

  • Consider the articles created by Coxhead such as James Eustace Bagnall. These get little maintenance now and, in any case, get few readers -- maybe one or two a day. When their enthusiastic creator moves on, shall we delete those too on similar grounds? Is Wikipedia only for high traffic, high maintenance pages like Kim Kardashian? All that other obscure stuff just gets in the way, right? Why not just delete everything that isn't vital and focus on getting that right before allowing anyone to start anything else? Andrew D. (talk) 13:17, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
A low-traffic target page hardly has the same maintenance reliance as a portal (which we intentionally try and funnel readers through en-masse). Cesdeva (talk) 15:05, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Andrew Davidson: you didn't pick a good example in James Eustace Bagnall – he's long dead, and the information in the article isn't going to change. I can give you better examples for your argument, e.g. Ponerorchis cucullata, where there's active research going on and the generic placement has changed recently and might change again, requiring the article to be moved and updated. But portals are different, as Cesdeva says. Since they deliberately cross-connect multiple articles they necessarily need regular maintenance, as relevant articles appear, get moved, get promoted or demoted, etc. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:00, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Portals for well-established topics like Mathematics don't need to change much. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia not a newspaper and frenetic activity is not required for such pages. The point is that once you start to claim that we can discard pages because they seem to be a backwater then you put most of our content at risk. And Wikipedia is nowhere near finished yet. People are still developing and arguing about structural aspects like infoboxes and Wikidata. It's far too soon to say that everything's settled and we can discard pages which are currently not mainstream. Andrew D. (talk) 16:12, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Well, we'll have to agree to differ, but the argument is not that portals are a backwater, but that, unlike articles, the nature of most portals means that they don't work well if they are backwaters. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:26, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No, the argument seems to be that because some portals don't work well, we should destroy them all to make sure that none of them work at all. The main benefit seems to be that we will then have some white space where the portals used to be. Presumably the people who didn't use portals will carry on as before while the people who did like and use them will be infuriated and leave Wikipedia. Me, I'm thinking that the next step should then be to tear down the Village Pump too before we get any more bright ideas like this. Andrew D. (talk) 20:17, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It's not "some" it is ALL. The topic traffic portals are dismal failures according to our readers considering the have the highest visability links on the project. The readers rejected this failed idea a long time ago. We just need to turn off the lights. Legacypac (talk) 02:01, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No, that's a fake fact – facile and false. Some actual stats are listed below to refute it. Andrew D. (talk) 23:25, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You have a funny definition of "false" and "refute". Something linked to on the main page and on thousands of pages and talk pages gets fewer clicks than the word "free" in "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" and your conclusion is that this shows that readers are interested in it? Can you think of anything -- anything at all -- that might serve as an alternate explanation? I'm just saying. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:09, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The list of main page stats below shows that the link free got over 100K views and that most of the portals got even more traffic. This is good evidence of significant usage. Q.E.D.. Andrew D. (talk) 07:22, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No it isn't. It is evidence that it has a link from one of the most heavily visited pages on the internet. Put a link to https://zapatopi.net/blackhelicopters/ or http://www.patience-is-a-virtue.org/ in the same place and those pages will get over 100K views. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:50, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
But that's still 10,585 and 17,155 people a year respectively who have an opportunity to discover, if they so wish, new topics and sample selected encyclopaedic information in a different way to normal, without having to wade through a lengthy and maybe dull-looking article. Yes, numbers are low on the scheme of things, but there are innumerable Featured Articles like this and this that get less traffic. Shall we delete all low-traffic pages next because they don't attract enough people? The logic makes no sense. Delete a rubbish page because it's flawed and can't be fixed, for sure. But all 1500 Portals (assuming just 50 visitors a day each) still amounts to 27.6 million people a year not having an opportunity to see or discover a broad sample of articles relevant to a topic, usually in a bright, uncomplicated manner, and possibly being enthused enough to learn and study that topic in a way that might even change their direction in life. Why take that away? Nick Moyes (talk) 03:02, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I am not alone, maintaining takes me 3 minutes on days that have DYK related to Germany. It takes someone else 3 minutes to update the news. Why not? To compare portal and country is like apples and pears, - where on the country article would a reader get news and DYK? Some hundred look per day, enough for me to invest 3 minutes now and then. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:30, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Can you give an example of such a latin name category page and how a reader might arrive there without knowing whether it's about rocks/plants/animals? As an editor (when fixing categorization problems) I wouldn't rely on the portal link being correct. DexDor (talk) 21:03, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
reply to DexDor - having been through birds, and other category page main spacetagging - I believe that some indication on a category page reduces potential confusion as there some binomial latin phrases could be a plant or a bird. I have not found deliberate or accidental project mis-tagging. JarrahTree 09:11, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I still don't understand how you think people would end up on a category page without knowing whether it's about a plant or a bird. "project mis-tagging" presumably refers to tagging by wikiprojects on talk pages which is a different thing to putting portal links on article/category pages. DexDor (talk) 20:43, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Deprecating and marking historical would allow anything of value to be harvested by active Wikiprojects, or by others outside Wikipedia who may be inspired to create something better, etc. Also, there are design element in these that may be useful to know about. And the wikimarkup and formatting may be useful for some. I cut my page formatting teeth on portals.     — The Transhumanist    12:43, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

10 April 2018

  1. The automatic production of article synopses of the appropriate length when articles relevant to the portal topic are accepted and the ability to edit these synopses if they need improvement.
  2. The automatic addition of these synopses to the pool from which the portal draws its content selections.
  3. The ability to sort or filter the article synopses on the "more articles" page (or "more pictures", "more DYKs").
  4. The criteria portals use to select content should default to chronological rather than random (ie it shows the last article to be featured in that subject).
  5. The automatic addition of DYK hooks after they've been displayed on the Main Page to the pool from which the portal draws its DYK selections.
  6. The automatic addition to the portal's content pool of featured and quality images when they get promoted at Wikimedia Commons.
  7. The automatic generation of an image summary for the featured pictures based on their synopsis at the Commons, but with the ability to edit and improve it if needed.
  8. The ability to automatically pull pictures from DYK articles to be associated with their hooks on the portal.
  9. The ability to randomize all of the individual DYK hooks instead of manually devising "blocks" of hooks.
  10. An automatically generated list of new and recently expanded articles relevant to the subject.
  11. Foundation sanction for direct outreach by Wikiprojects to portal-goers like offering topical reference desks, advertising within-project contests, user adoption drives, etc.
Sorry for the textwall, I just thought it was worth noting that the pro-portal camp has put forth a concrete plan for reform and I think implementing these changes would address most of the ccomplaints people have about our currently busted system. Abyssal (talk) 01:35, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

11 April 2018

  • @Nixinova: It would be deleted per the argument below that this proposal does not go into detail. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:29, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No, any competent closer will see the lack of support for their deletion or marking historical - rfc outcomes don't have to match the original wording and can exclude those specific portals. Galobtter (pingó mió) 13:32, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sure you have realized by now that you dove headfirst into a huge issue here. It concerns me a bit that you didn't offer up a proposal on what to do if the portals are deleted, there are also other things that editors have pointed out. Are you going to leave this up to the closer on what should or shouldn't be marked as historical? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:51, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't agree that you always find new content in some Portals, but that's not even relevant. But you are right to say they provide an overview - a different way in to a topic if you like. Having provided a taster of articles across a broad sectrum, like many articles here they do not need much modification. If we were to take the approach being proposed here, we would soon be mass deleting every article that hasn't been edited for a year or so and which receives under some unspecified number of visitors per day. How demoralising to all users. I also agree with you that WikiProjects could/should be supporting Portals more - and many are very closely linked - but they are entirely different beasts, and both have their very distinct value in my view. Nick Moyes (talk) 16:48, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This suggestion is to completely misunderstand the potential of Portals in providing an alternative and often very visual route into a broad topic, without having to wade through a hugely long, and often tedious article, or visit a complicated WikiProject. Portals are (or should be) a bright window into a broad subject area, allowing the user to 'dip a toe' into topics that might interest or enthuse them. As the main explanation of Portals states: The idea of a portal is to help readers and/or editors navigate their way through Wikipedia topic areas through pages similar to the Main Page. In essence, portals are useful entry-points to Wikipedia content. Compare Mountain or WP:WikiProject Mountains to Portal:Mountain; Biology or WP:WikiProject Biology to Portal:Biology, and Arts or WP:WikiProject Arts to Portal:Arts. I do believe Portals are best off being closely associated with a relevant WikiProject in most cases, even though the latter deliver an utterly different function of focussing editor collaboration. Deleting 1,500 Portals in one go and moving content into a WikiProject would create vast work for absolutely no benefit and similarly misunderstands the purpose of WikiProjects and the role of Portals. Nick Moyes (talk) 14:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The fact that the Featured portal process itself was marked as historical last year could mean that, while Portals aren't necessarily outdated, there could be a fundamental flaw in the system that might not be easily solved. As I've mentioned elsewhere, portal automation has been proposed, which would probably solve the editing activity problem but might not be enough to solve the readership problem. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 14:18, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The point is more than that they are outdated, it is that they don't add to the encyclopedia the way an article fills gaps in coverage; are more effort than they are worth; and readers are not particularly interesting in them despite how often we link them. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:50, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Of course they don't fill in the encyclopaedia in the same way that an article does - they're not intended to. They're collections of articles which should provide a visual taster and a route in to a wide selection of subjects falling under that Portal's umbrella. More effort than they're worth? Explain please. Interest and deletion arguments are being based purely on numbers again. Like a child at school - if you can open one child's eyes to the wonder of a subject like science, geography, the moon, or whatever, that's a real success. So supporters neeed to demonstrate that all Portals turn users away, or fail to let them access articles, or that the server drain is just too high - then they might have a valid argument for mass deletion. But no-one has. It's all WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT as far as I can see. Regarding 'outdated' - I do think there could be an argument to deprecate the use of 'News' sections within portals, or at least to have a guideline to remove these templates if not regularly updated. Nick Moyes (talk) 17:10, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I respect your opinion but want to remind you that there are sometimes many editors on any given project and not all of the portals are alike. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 16:52, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • If that's true (and I'm not saying that it isn't), that is an indication of an editing issue and not a deletion issue.--Paul McDonald (talk) 18:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
They don't further our goal of being an encyclopaedia. For me, this isn't about whether they are well-maintained, and applies equally to Portal:Arts. Portals are intended to help users stumble upon quality material on random subtopics within a field. That's not a goal I care about or think Wikipedia should pursue. I like Finnusertop's proposal of topic-specific reference desks managed by WikiProjects, but that seems like a whole new idea, not an adjustment of portals. Daask (talk) 18:38, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • They wont be missed by you, but yeah all of the other editors who use them... what about them? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:05, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Supports are at 130 and Opposes are at 62 as of this reply .... that would indicate I'm not the only person who wont miss them, Well I'm sure those that do want them will live (if they get deleted that is). –Davey2010Talk 02:52, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Davey2010, where do you get the 130 support figure from? Are you counting 'mark historical' as supporting deletion? As of the time of writing (this version) I make it 92 people explicitly supporting the proposal and 64 explicitly opposing (give or take a few sitting on the fence or with lots of caveats in their position). Carcharoth (talk) 10:04, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
My bad all's I've done is counted the use "Support" and "Oppose" - Probably should've search for "'''Support'''" but oh well, Consider that point struck. –Davey2010Talk 15:24, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

12 April 2018

  • Hi Nick-D: Out of curiosity, have you checked out any of the page views for portals? Your assessment stating "...they're unlikely to be being used by readers" is countered by page statistics for several portals. For example, Portal:Biography has received 62,874 page views in the last thirty days as of this post. North America1000 07:48, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Northamerica100: Give the page view totals for a portal not linked from the main page... :-) Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 14:46, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Northamerica1000: Few things. If you'll note my !vote below, I think that they should be marked historical. Whoever made this RfC and said the word "delete" made a really poor decision there. 12k views over 30 days is not "well-used," it's a rounding error. Portal:Contents is linked from the sidebar on every Wikipedia page. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 16:30, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@SusanLesch:
Library front desk display - come in and read more books like these
If whichever portal you refer to is flawed, you have a route to have it removed. It's at WP:MFD. That's not a rationale for mass-deleting the other 1,500 portals. Nor is a lack of recent editing, or having only 36,500 visits a year. Think of Portals like a window or table display in a library. They simply present a minute selection of their holdings to encourage broader use of any of the library's holdings. They're just another route in to content; pick one up and maybe you'll get inspired. Why deny readers that opportunity? Nick Moyes (talk) 00:10, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
errm, but these were Portal:Texas Tech University and Portal:University of Houston - neither being desperately broad topics to start with. You can still WP:MFD either if you wanted to. Nick Moyes (talk) 00:25, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Did I edit Portal:University of Houston? I don't remember that at all. Universities that have been around for very long are fairly broad in their topics. I'll hold off on WP:MFD as the problem may simply resolve itself. →Wordbuilder (talk) 17:24, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

13 April 2018

Further information: User_talk:Fram § Seeking advice
Perhaps the best way to promote them, as well as to increase their usage and importance, would be to improve their quality, in terms of interactivity and self-updating dynamic content, to keep them interesting and relevant. Inspire repeat visits. Currently, the vast majority of portals are static, and therefore they go stale over time.    — The Transhumanist   13:05, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is not a good link to make and have seen it talked about someplace on Wikipedia I think through an essay. The notion that "editors would be better off doing x" is a slippery slope, should we then go on and say something like: "Editors should focus their time away from plant related articles due to the complexity of the field"? Each portal attracts editors interested in that particular area, just because you may not edit portals nor care about them is a good reason for wholesale deletion. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:14, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
78,500 views since May 15 (Portal:American Civil War) doesn't seem too bad at all. Do they actually need any more maintaining than any other page? Johnbod (talk) 16:40, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
When you compare 78,500 views to the 15 million hits on the American Civil War article itself in the same period then yes, it's only 0.5% in fact. Not worth it. — Marcus(talk) 19:23, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  1. categorised as an active portal, with the general criteria for this status being that they have to be regularly monitored and kept up to date;
  2. marked as inactive through the use of the Historical template; or
  3. deleted outright (for example, if they are particularly poorly and/or rarely maintained).
Portals can come in useful for editors from time to time, but admittedly it is quite easy to gather that they are not quite fit for purpose any longer. I don't think it'd be unreasonable to suggest that many portals, if not most, are very infrequently viewed by most editors and (non-editor) readers alike. I don't think that there needs to be as many portals as there currently are.
Would this proposal to eliminate the portals system provoke such interesting discussion between editors had the system not been in such a sorry state? I can't tell you the answer to that, but what I can say is that the system is in dire need of improvement. A portal should be a useful navigational tool for readers and editors, but the way they are today, most are not. All too often, editing activity fizzles out, leaving a near-abandoned portal that is a sitting duck for POV issues and unsourced material.
Forgive me if this idea is too simple, but it may be wise to try and devise a system that unobtrusively increases the awareness of the portal system to readers so that people are encouraged to visit portals. This would be expected to generate some interest in using portals, so that people are more inclined to contribute to Wikipedia by editing portals. In turn, this would help to improve the encyclopedia by helping people navigate through it.
I don't tend to voice my opinion in community discussions like this, because it can seem quite intimidating to editors like me, who don't consider themselves to as well versed with Wikipedia as many of you, and haven't been contributing for as long as many of you have. So, once again, let me apologise if I am reminding you of something that is bread and butter to you. There are several templates that can be used to include links to a portal or multiple portals. Take the Portal, Portal bar, Portal-inline, Subject bar and Sister project links templates as examples.
Best wishes, Ntmamgtw (talk) 16:49, 13 April 2018 (UTC) (updated 09:24, 17 April 2018 (UTC))[reply]
I have no problems with reforming the portal system or even setting something up to increase reader/user awareness of the various portals (which will help mitigate any maintenance issues), but deleting or redirecting all of the portals outright is simply not a viable option? Are you even aware of how much infrastructural damage or reader shock you will cause if you were to delete all of the portals? LightandDark2000 (talk) 18:02, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, a large number of portals, such as Portal:Current events, Portal:Science, Portal:History, and Portal:Tropical cyclones are regularly maintained and have high viewership (to my knowledge). These are only some good examples. Are we going to mass delete all of the portals just because some of them aren't up to ideal standards? This proposal falls under the same fallacy that is often invoked for speedily deleting new/start or stub class articles that have plenty of potential, or eventually became great articles on this site. (There's a reason why you are not supposed to arbitrarily tag new or problematic articles for deletion because they don't look ideal.) I seriously doubt that all of the portals each have enough issues to warrant an actual deletion of all the portals. LightandDark2000 (talk) 18:19, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I would not support marking all portals as "historical" (or taking them all out of the portal system). Some portals, such as the current events and tropical cyclones portals are still actively maintained and highly essential to accessing the latest articles (in a chronological sense) in relation to their specific WikiProjects. I could support marking the archaic / extremely old portals as historic, but the active/relevant portals are still very much in use and should not be taken out of Wikipedia mainspace in any way. LightandDark2000 (talk) 18:24, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Alternatives exist that are perhaps even better than the portal system such as lists, navigation boxes, outlines, and categories. Lists and outlines especially are far easier to maintain as they require less esoteric knowledge of parser functions, transclusion, and subpages (seriously, look at Wikipedia:Portal/Instructions it's a nightmare). Even portals linked at the top of the mainpage barely make it above 2000 views per day, meanwhile DYK articles often get at least that many views, with many getting over 5000 views. Portal:Tropical cyclones during the Atlantic hurricane season averages 190 views per day; The Signpost front page has better pageview stats and they just published an article asking if it's on its last legs. A few outliers like Portal:Current events shouldn't be used as a bludgeon to keep what is essentially a dead feature with superior alternatives, that's why we have WP:IAR. Keep the few useful ones, move the rest to project space, and mark WP:Portal and WP:POG as historical. Wugapodes [thɔk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɻɪbz] 07:16, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You don't get 2 !votes. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:18, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not voting twice. I'm specifying my opinion on this a little more. I oppose deleting all of the portals outright, but I'm open to the option I just mentioned above (and other similar proposals by some other users in some of the votes earlier above). LightandDark2000 (talk) 04:38, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

14 April 2018

The core question that isn't being asked enough here is what portals contribute to our purpose of building an encyclopedia. There is no shortage of lost causes to which we apply ourselves, from the marginally notable to the reams of talk page debate over single sentences, so there is no guarantee that portal maintainers will suddenly decide to steward a high-level topic overview article: The point of editor time spent is neither here nor there. The point of readership is more salient, but gets into a debate over what readership counts as significant, which is the wrong debate. Better to ask what portals contribute in service of a better encyclopedia. Are they actively funneling users from general interest into more specific articles? Are they surfacing content to draw readers further into their own general interests? How are readers even finding portals aside from the main page welcome bar and the bars that sometimes grace the underside of navboxes? I haven't seen any assuaging answers to these questions. Our existing systems of high-level topic overview articles (for readers) and WikiProject/noticeboards (for editors) appear to fulfill all of the objectives of portals, with the added benefit that they already exist and have a dedicated user base. I hope that the work of portal maintainers can be welcomed into these other areas of the encyclopedia. czar 17:27, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

15 April 2018

That the "deletion would annoy a lot of volunteers" is not a reasoned motivation for keeping the portals. What is put into question here is their usefulness and content accuracy. The goodness of the encyclopedia should come before any personal whim of the users.--2.37.216.231 (talk) 13:37, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Comment The term "usefulness" is really arbitrary because it's up to one person or another to determine what that is, and that becomes personal preference. That starts to delve into the range of WP:IDONTLIKEIT which is never a reason to delete anything in Wikipedia. As to "content accuracy" -- this is a valid issue, and if the content is not accurate then the obvious conclusion is to edit the content. Once in a while we find content that is so poorly assembled that deletion is the best step, but that's not the case here... certainly not a blanket deletion for every portal.--Paul McDonald (talk) 14:30, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This is really the worst of the motivations that have been put forward to save the portals! Wikipedia is not a social network! The aim of this project is to build an encyclopedia of good-quality (academically supported) content, not to make friends sharing the same interests!--2.37.216.231 (talk) 13:37, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
While it's true that Wikipedia is not a social network, I disagree with the logic to the step that because it's not a social network there is no value in collaboration with other editors who are enthusiastic on the same general topic or topics. Collaboration is a good thing and if portals help promote collaboration, then that's another reason to keep them around.--Paul McDonald (talk) 14:33, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Wikiprojects already serve the purpose of gathering together editors to collaborate on a topic. Portals aren't needed for this reason Cesdeva (talk) 15:11, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
First of all Wikipedia is a social network as well (but one with a specific purpose). Secondly it is true that much or all functions of portals could be taken over by Wikiprojects (or vice versa actually), but the conclusion from that is (at best) a merging or migration (with a potential phasing out of one) and not a wholesale deletion as suggested above.--Kmhkmh (talk) 15:36, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Vice versa? Portals don't even function well for their primary purpose, nevermind incorporating the workings of a wikiproject. Many portals already come under the 'jurisdiction' of wikiprojects, yet they still have major issues. Shifting namespace won't solve anything. Cesdeva (talk) 16:03, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Additional comment I further disagree with the premise that collaboration should only come from one source (a "project" or a "portal") -- collaboration can and should come from multiple sources if possible. Further, I do not believe that "need" is the proper measure... do we "need" portals? We don't "need" Wikipedia (see WP:NEED).--Paul McDonald (talk) 22:28, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

16 April 2018

Keeping portals on the off-chance that they become popular again is CRYSTAL, so you've actually invoked policy which is the antithesis of your argument. --Iryna Harpy (talk) 18:55, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
WP:CRYSTAL is a policy that only applies in full to article content, not a namespace. In this instance I think it's perfectly fine to argue it both ways. Daniel Case (talk) 18:27, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Portal Current Events would continue in Wikipedia space. No one wants to close it down. Legacypac (talk) 16:31, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Looking over the problems of portals reported in the discussion, they boil down to 1) out of date / lack of maintenance (lack of volunteer labor) 2) useless (static / unchanging) and 3) low traffic (few repeat visits). These are problems we can solve. The support to do so is obvious from the above discussion.
The 3rd problem (relatively low traffic) is misleading, for two reasons. First, portals as a whole get more traffic now than ever before, with well over 20 million views per year. Second, portals get their traffic internally, rather than from external search engine results.
Please keep in mind that portals are an internal feature intended to enhance the user experience once the user is already here. Traffic is higher for those portals that provide ongoing services that users return to them for.
But, most portals do not have that level of volunteer labor available to them. Therefore, automatically-generated dynamic content, for example, in the form of randomly generated on-topic selections, automated news feeds, and so on, would be a valuable service, turning the portals into a form of periodical or newsletter.
Also, with such pages in place, who knows what enhancements could be made to them in the future. Technology is accelerating as we speak.
I believe the solution is automation, with configurability (to provide flexibility to portal designers). Refreshing the intro entry, using selective transclusion, so it doesn't go stale is one form of automation that can help.
Obviously, there is no consensus to delete. But, the message is loud and clear that the status quo is unacceptable. The portals need a lot of work. They need an upgrade, to turn them into what they were originally intended to be: main pages for their respective subjects. It's time to roll up our shirt sleeves, and get to it. I foresee a major and fun collaboration coming on. You can expect to see me there. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   22:17, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Threats to leave, stop using the site, or even stop donating are generally responded to with an eyeroll or a laugh. Try using other Modes of persuasion such as logic-based ethics or practicality. Ian.thomson (talk) 23:22, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
They are? I don't see this as a threat but an actual statement that the editor gets value from the portals and will likely not return if they are gone. But I didn't know that I was supposed to roll my eyes at this...--Paul McDonald (talk) 01:00, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Readers are the most important part of the community; more important even than editors since an encyclopaedia without readership is nothing. This reader is stating that without portals, they will cease to be a reader. Readers rarely comment for the fact they are here to consume content not contribute it and the fact a reader has weighed in should be seen as a particularly valuable insight. -- BobTheIP editing as 2.28.13.227 (talk) 16:37, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

17 April 2018

I'm posting this again after the Section break because I didn't see this within the first 15 minutes of reading through this discussion.
I love Wikipedia and reference it as my first source when learning about a new topic, but I visit the 'Current Events' portal at least once a day because to me this is the equivalent of reading the morning newspaper that was the standard about 50 years ago. The diversity of events which individuals take the time to report there is unrivaled. Often I learn of events that only much later become TV-news worthy or never make the circuit. In a sentence, 'The 'Current Events' portal enriches my life and to lose that would be a shame.' Please do not remove this section just because you find it unnecessary, please rather consider the many people who don't contribute but appreciate the thing for what it is. This comment is only my second time ever editing a Wikipedia page. The other time was in the 'Current Events' portal. So there again is another benefit to it, it draws in visitors and entices them to become contributors. Please, PLEASE, let it be.
Something that I've done in the past, please forgive my ignorance here, in relation to clearing disk space on my computer, has been to search for empty folders in my directory and delete them using a third party utility. As this applies to what seems to be the appeal to many here of deleting the portals, mainly clearing up unused namespace, could something similar not be done? If a portal hasn't been edited in a certain amount of time, could there not automatically be a message posted at the top of it, like the one that led me to this discussion, notifying users that unless the portal logs some activity within the next short time frame, it will automatically be deleted? Seems like a good compromise without killing the whole program.
Thank you to who ever just moved this to the bottom of this section. Duh, I didn't see that either. Thanks again.--66.76.14.92 (talk) 01:03, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Notwithstanding that Portal:Current events was tagged, no one has proposed deleting it. It will likely be moved to Wikipedia:Current events Legacypac (talk) 03:43, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Something that I've done in the past, please forgive my ignorance here, in relation to clearing disk space on my computer, has been to search for empty folders in my directory and delete them using a third party utility. As this applies to what seems to be the appeal to many here of deleting the portals, mainly clearing up unused namespace, could something similar not be done? If a portal hasn't been edited in a certain amount of time, could there not automatically be a message posted at the top of it, like the one that led me to this discussion, notifying users that unless the portal logs some activity within the next short time frame, it will automatically be deleted? Seems like a good compromise without killing the whole program.
By word count, there are currently 150 'Oppose' and 206 'Support' including multiple usages by single users.
I can't see how rearranging the names will improve the usefulness Legacypac (talk) 03:43, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
How did you come to the conclusion that their traffic has gone down? It is exactly the opposite: their traffic keeps going up. They are more visible now than ever.    — The Transhumanist   23:20, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think that the main ones, maybe, but fringe ones about topics that no one is updating definitely shouldn't exist. We should at most keep it to a few core portals and then delete or archive the rest. Nomader (talk) 14:52, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The other problem is a lack of maintenance. Portal:College basketball's "featured biography" was last updated by me..... 12 years ago (history is here: [2]). That's insane, and shows that for many of these portals, they've gone too far in the weeds. It should really only be core subjects at the end of this. Nomader (talk) 15:26, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

18 April 2018

In addition, this also means that a couple of very popular portals like Portal:Current_events should be open to everyone. We need to distinguish portals for ease to access with the average viewers and portals for editing purposes. --Komitsuki (talk) 01:51, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Certain portals, such as the current events portal, should stick around. In fact, it probably should be on a case-by-case basis anyway, where the more active portals stay around while the inactive or rarely active ones can be closed.
  2. The various portals shouldn't be removed from existence, but instead left in a non-editable manner for historical purposes. Gamermadness (talk) 02:13, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note: The Current events portal and Tropical cyclones portal need to be actively maintained, since they both place a heavy emphasis on "active" or "current" events related to their topics (and both portals are actively maintained). LightandDark2000 (talk) 02:59, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Request: Someone please speedy delete Portal:Yerevan (It's an empty husk. P1 (as article), A3 (no content)). Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   10:40, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Done (I think it is the first time I used CSD P1 in more than 10000 speedy deletions). —Kusma (t·c) 11:30, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm glad to have made your day. :)    — The Transhumanist   12:54, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

19 April 2018

20 April 2018

P.S. The remark "I cannot recall visiting any portal twice" is meant to indicate that I have visited many portals, but have not found them useful; therefore I have not returned to them. They are not the resource I believe they were intended to be. I mention this because the opposing comment immediately below seems to make a straw man of my remark, viz.: "many of the "Support" votes have the following character: 'I've never visited a portal, and therefore they are useless and should be deleted.'"

21 April 2018

Seems wrong to attempt to herd portal editors into more main namespace editing by eliminating any option of portal editing. To eliminate portals for this reason comes across as unnecessarily patronizing, manipulative, and even draconian. Let editors decide for themselves what they want to do. North America1000 00:58, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with Dcljr and Northamerica1000. You can't force volunteers to do work that they don't like. If somebody only edited portals while they were hers, if the portals disappear they will most likely not move to editing articles. It won't necessarily raise productivity across other areas of Wikipedia. Gizza (t)(c) 02:17, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
By deleting the portals you have just as likely of a chance of losing editors which is a net loss. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 03:07, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
DcljrPiznajko, you clearly haven't spotted that many WikiProjects use portals as a tool to help them improve their topic area. Do your homework before making sweeping statements. Bermicourt (talk) 18:23, 27 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Um, @Bermicourt: you wanna try that again? Because your comment doesn't seem to make any sense as a reply to anything I've said. Were you trying to reply to someone else? - dcljr (talk) 21:03, 27 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Ooops, I'm sorry, I was replying to Piznajko. I'll change that. Bermicourt (talk) 06:35, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

22 April 2018

What's the Recent Deaths portal? If you mean Deaths in 2018 then that's not a portal. DexDor (talk) 20:31, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

23 April 2018

  1. The portal is useful, but hard to browse around. It has great topical information. Just needs a face lift.
  2. Is there a topical index that would replace the portals?
  3. Part of the problem is that many do not know that the portals exist. Maybe a marketing campaign would be worthwhile before the portal is deleted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.172.160.70 (talk • contribs) 05:43, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
And you being disinterested makes them without value? It's not a failed project; evident from the dozens of portals that link people from one article to a "topic page" of sorts about them. Vermont (talk) 23:55, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Vermont: Please don't be wary. What can I do if they are of no use to me? But in fact, I'm happy with the "Category" namespace. Portals are oudated and useless but Category provides specific and updated info. Harsh Rathod Poke me! 05:22, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

24 April 2018

I don't see how an old design is a bad thing by nature. Sometimes traditional is best.-Sıgehelmus (Tωlk) 15:20, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

25 April 2018

It's not an either/or situation. We already have indexes and tree structures in place and being developed further, with software being developed to enhance them further. They serve different purposes than portals. The Portals WikiProject is currently working on ways for the next generation of portals to transcend the capabilities of our current portals. This is happening fast. See #Portals WikiProject Update: Portals – The Next Generation is almost here, below.    — The Transhumanist   04:25, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

26 April 2018

So far, we've completed a template, and supporting Lua module, that together can selectively transclude desired paragraphs from an article's lead section to use as an excerpt in a portal section. Previously, excerpts in portals were static, and would drift from the original content from which they were copied. Transcluded content from articles never goes stale or forks, as the current version is always displayed.
To give you a sense of the reaction this template is generating, here is an excerpt of a discussion thread from the WikiProject's talk page:
  • This new template is fantastic. I've added it to the intro sections of the portals on Australian cities (eg P:PER) and it works brilliantly. My compliments to its creators. It can probably also be used in other sections of many portals (eg "Selected article" and "Selected biography"), and, for that reason, will probably make the task of maintaining portals a great deal easier. Bahnfrend (talk) 09:02, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Kudos on a wonderful template.    — The Transhumanist   03:27, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This is amazing stuff. I'm going to get to work on using it on the selected content at most of these portals very soon. WaggersTALK 13:40, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
We are currently putting our heads together to develop better ways to handle news sections, "Selected" sections, anniversary sections, and "Did you know" sections. As we do so, maintenance drives will be coordinated to clean these up across the entire portal system, to remove or archive outdated information, and automate those for which it is feasible to do so and that do not have active maintainers. The first maintenance drive is expected to start within a few days.
Concerning "Selected" sections, most portals provide a selected article and picture, and sometimes a biography, item (dog, plant, volcano, spaceship, etc.), and so on. Many portals have only provided one of each, which have never changed. However, some of the best portals provide (either manually or automatically) a different selection each week, or each day, or even each time a person visits the page, keeping its content vibrant. We are looking for ways to improve these types of components so that editors can easily implement them on the portals they work on (if they want to).
Our overall goal is to revitalize the entire portal system, and make it even better, providing support to portals editors, so they can provide readers with new and interesting ways to explore knowledge. Toward this end, we are also conducting discussions on potential future features and components. You are welcome to come join in on all the discussions.
So, please, before you cast your !vote, come visit the Portals WikiProject, especially the talk page, and take a look at what we're doing, and see what is in store for the future of portals. You are also invited to join the team and contribute to their development. Thank you. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   10:48, 26 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

27 April 2018

@Piotrus: Concerning the waste of time thing, there is now an automation lab over at the Portals WikiProject, where we are designing tools to take the work out of building and maintaining portals. The previous method for building portals was to manually copy and paste article excerpts onto a multitude of subpages that fed into a base page. That is a very tedious and time-consuming activity. Now, we are in the process replacing the need to copy and paste, in the form of automated templates supported by Lua modules, that fetch and display excerpts automagically via transclusion. This design feature is completed, and is undergoing beta testing now. When we are done automating the portals' other functions (like topic selection) we'll have fully automated dynamic portals that will need very little maintenance, with subpages made virtually obsolete or greatly reduced for many portals. By dynamic, I mean fed new material without human intervention once the configuration settings have been made. It's looking like we'll have working prototypes very soon. The big question after that, will be "What features can we add to make Portals really cool (and useful)"?. For example... The portals of the German-language Wikipedia are so heavily automated, that their portal operators can focus on more community-oriented activities. Their creatures portal, for example, has a sub-department where you can post a picture of an animal, and they will identify the species for you. We are limited only by our imagination and our creativity.    — The Transhumanist   14:55, 27 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Wnt: The new and improved rebooted Portals WikiProject is fixing the entire portals system with a redesign/upgrade. So, it won't remain broken for long: the new team is designing fixes as fast as we can. It's been just 10 days since the reboot, and we've designed some cool new components already, and you can expect more at a fairly rapid pace. We have some of Wikipedia's best and brightest on the team.    — The Transhumanist   13:56, 27 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
At first glance that project seems like a bull session, stuff like people asking whether you can automate DYKs. That's not to say it's a bad thing, but I don't see why having a "Portal:" namespace or the set of Main Page links is necessary for it. To the contrary, I think it's great that people want to branch out and reconsider what portals would be -- the format seems a bit stilted, a lot of work, and maybe people making pages like "My Study List for A&P 1" would be a lot more useful. I think you should be allowed to keep the portal pages (somewhere else, a common WP: space) but with lots of room to play around with them, the no-social-media enforcers should be batted off with a stick, but we should also keep an open mind to whether maybe it is possible to amicably transfer some of the content to Wikiversity and breathe some life into *that* project by relieving some of the restrictions of their rather unimaginative course format. But other stuff is also useful that doesn't fall into their purview, like if you make a "Hot Topics in Physics" portal/news forum where you list a bunch of physics articles and why they're hot now. (That would be a Wikinews prospect but AFAIK Wikinews is hopeless where anything creative is involved; we should keep such things in Wikipedia and practice batting) Wnt (talk) 22:01, 27 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

28 April 2018

Place new Support/Oppose comments (with reasons) in this section, below the older comments. Please remember to sign your comment.

Discussion: Ending the system of portals

Notice to editors:

  1. Please do not add new Support/Oppose comments here in this section; this is for general discussion of the proposal or the RfC itself. Add Support/Oppose comments (with reasons) to the subsection above that is marked with today's date (UTC).
  2. Many users will find it difficult to edit this section, as it is very large and contains multiple subsections. Please look for a smaller subsection below that is relevant to the comments you want to add.
  3. Please try to avoid creating new subsections at the bottom of the page, as this further fragments an already fragmented discussion. If you must create a new section, you will probably find it easier to edit the last existing subsection below instead of this large "parent" section.
Some exception would need to be made for the Community portal. This has been getting over 10,000 views daily since it was linked as one of the three exits ("Start helping") from the New user landing page, introduced in conjunction with ACTRIAL. The Help Out section is essential and should be kept as visible as possible. Parts of the Community bulletin board are dusty, but just need more regular maintenance: Noyster (talk), 15:16, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Seeing as this Community Portal isn't even in the "Portal" namespace, I don't believe it would be affected either way. Good page too keep in mind, though. ~Mable (chat) 15:22, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, I did think of that, but I also saw that they're not in portal space, and wouldn't be affected. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:41, 8 April 2018 (UTC) Also, it is entirely different from general portals, being editor facing only (which is presumably why it is in WP space not portal space) and does an okay job of helping editors Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:46, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
...And of course even if there is the occasional useful portal, we can easily make an exception -- possibly with a move to a better namespace. What are the top ten most-visited pages in the portal namespace? --Guy Macon (talk) 16:03, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'd say 90% likely the top 8 are the ones on the main page, at the top right. But like I said above, I don't think people actually find the ones on the main page useful either, they just click it randomly Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:12, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Here's a pageview graph of those main page portals, anyhow - extremely interestingly, they group into 3 clear bunches Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:24, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think the top-visited portals are those linked from the left sidebar, Portal:Contents and Portal:Current events and, to a lesser degree, Portal:Featured content (pageview graph). The arguments for deleting the other 1500 portals may not apply to these. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:49, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Ahh, I forgot about them. These seem like they'd be fine in wikipedia namespace, honestly, and would be exempted; they aren't really like the other portals at all, and just seem sort of dumped there because they vaguely explore something Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:58, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Agree Current events is a very active portal and should be moved into a different namespace if all Portals are deleted.  Nixinova  T  C  04:39, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Galobtter: To set everyone's mind at ease, please add an amendment to your proposal (at the very top) exempting Portal:Contents, Portal:Current events, and Wikipedia:Community portal. Also consider exempting Portal:Featured content as it is the front page for the various "Featured" content production departments, and has a link on the sidebar menu that appears on every page of Wikipedia. Thank you.     — The Transhumanist    13:26, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Galobtter: @The Transhumanist: In addition, since there seems to be at present significant opposition to outright deleting the namespace and all related pages, maybe there could be some clarification that deprecation/marking as historical (as opposed to outright deletion) is an option too. Some of the oppose votes seem to be more due to the outright deletion proposal rather than or not just because of a support of the portal system. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 13:31, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm uncertain whether how exactly one should amend a proposal while it has received significant comment - Narutolovehinata5 feel free to add a note like "Note: Certain portals: ...have been suggested for exclusion; other options instead of deletion has also been suggested" or something along the lines of that, keeping neutrality of course Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:56, 11 April 2018 (UTC) and @Transhumanist: too Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:38, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think it would seem rather inappropriate were the nominator to suggest altering or adding to the wording of the RfC in this way now that it is running, and numerous people have expressed their views. Would that be with the hope of better securing the desired outcome? Was not the removal and relocation by the nominator of previous comments also intended to keep the proposal clear and concise? Nick Moyes (talk) 03:27, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Namespace ID Namespace Total pages Pages with redirects Pages without redirects
100 Portal 148868 13188 135680
101 Portal talk 36710 2701 34009
Yes, but the main thing is that they wouldn't be linked from articles - wouldn't be reader facing - and thus wouldn't be at all like the system currently here. Thus ending Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:19, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
WP:BLUDGEON. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:04, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
  • Please keep the existing portals.--Broter (talk) 17:26, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I invested so many hours into portals. Please keep the existing portals.--Broter (talk) 17:31, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
List of Portals which were created by myself or very much improved by myself:
--Broter (talk) 17:47, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Compromise? Perhaps we should "mothball" or eliminate portals which haven't been edited or maintained for a certain length of time. Pegship (talk) 18:03, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

We should only delete the portals which are not maintained.--Broter (talk) 18:06, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • Hmmm, I wouldn't oppose keeping them in wikipedia space - there's no particular reason to prevent people from harvesting the portals if they feel it is useful; and some could be useful to move into the main pages of wikiprojects as a "face". Beetstra I think it'd be better to store them in wikipedia space, free for people to use if there's anything valuable (or not). Easier than force delinking and full protection IMO Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:19, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Broter, you can move any portals you have created to subpages of your user page. Some subpages get a lot of traffic, such as my WP:1AM page. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:30, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • We could phase them out by a) prohibiting creation of new portals b) PRODing each portal giving anyone who cares a week (or more) to salvage anything useful. c) shutting down any remaining portals in 3 months. Legacypac (talk) 20:35, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Convert them to links to WikiProjects. This would help readers become editors without the need to route them through the Talk page and a collapsible banner first.
  2. Turn them into Reference Desks for specific topics. While article Talk pages are strictly WP:NOTFORUM, I believe that "off topic" discussions between readers and editors could benefit both groups. We'd get an idea of what readers really want to know outside of our sometimes rigid system of articles, and readers would become contributors before they even know it.
  3. Turn them into links to Outlines or Indexes to serve as centralized "See also" listings per topic.
  4. Automatic listings of Featured content grouped by topics. See Bluerasberry's comment above (cf. Galobtter's for an opposing view).
  5. Limiting the number of portals should help concentrate our efforts. Suitable sets could be those featured on the Main Page, some of the top categories at Portal:Contents/Portals, those corresponding with Featured articles categories, or Core topics.
Some more wild ideas? – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 21:28, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The mainpage is full of information. A little whitespace would be good, or make the rest of the box Wikipedia ... wider and thinner. Legacypac (talk) 21:23, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hey yes, this could be a great opportunity to update the 12-year old main page (only half-kidding!) Aiken D 21:40, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Portal:Arts 3,872 / day
  2. Portal:History 2,235 / day
  3. Portal:Biography 2,178 / day
  4. Portal:Science 1,413 / day
  5. Portal:Mathematics 1,404 / day
  6. Portal:Technology 1,398 / day
  7. Portal:Geography 1,063 / day

--Pharos (talk) 22:51, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Those are 7 of the 8 portals on Main Page. The 8th there is Portal:Society which is number 8 in page views with 665 / day. Portal:Food with 429 / day is the most for portals not on the main page. linksto:Portal:Food currently says it has 8,045 links from mainspace. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:07, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Major takeaway - put a link to something in the best position possible on one of the world's top visited pages and it only gets 665 to 3000 odd hits a day => total rejection by the public of this useless content. There is NOTHING wikipedia can do to drive more traffic than those 8 links. Legacypac (talk) 00:21, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Is there any way to find out how many real links go to a particular page as opposed to links because it was added to a template? For example, 1-bit architecture has a huge number of links to it,[3] but if you look at the pages that contain the links they are almost all because it is included in Template:CPU technologies and don't give an accurate picture of how many people are interested enough in 1-bit architectures to link to it. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:25, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that is possible, but It's somehing I've wanted to know for many years too (unrelated to the portals).--Pharos (talk) 23:36, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
User:PrimeHunter/Source links.js produces Source links on 1-bit architecture. It currently says 26 results in all namespaces (10 in mainspace). I also made ((source links)). ((source links|1-bit architecture)) produces Source links. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:57, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've done a more comprehensive query, and besides the higher-placed pages that are not conventional portals, the stand-out of those not linked from the Main Page appears to be Portal:Dance, which had 2,227 / day pageviews in 2017.--Pharos (talk) 23:36, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Portal:Dance was one of my random examples earlier with only 1,421 views in the past 30 days, meaning 47 per day. The page views graph since the first data in July 2015 [4] shows a jump from around 50 views per day to around 2300 from October 2016 to January 2018, and then back to 50. I don't know the reason but I suspect it's automated views and not humans. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:54, 8 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Projects can remain inactive and dont directly impact readers. portals can have an effect on readers. portals need to be either complete, as in not needing maintenance, or maintenance, or active work to improve. projects are forever. different animals. i advocate simply having Featured portals be linked to more visibly, and other portals linked at end of article. since portals are highly edited, they should be reviewed periodically by a dedicated editor to make sure they are up to snuff. if not, we should be able to mothball them easily.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 20:14, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Step 1 - take the portal links of the mainpage and Delete all the portal templates. Readers will not find the portals after that and we can roll up the actual portals whenever we get to them. Dead wikiprojects are another topic for another discussion. Legacypac (talk) 04:00, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

From use PrimeHunter's script, I see there seems basically 0-1 links per portal in mainspace that are not from templates. So it should be simple to use bot machinery to remove all portal links from mainspace, and then marking 1500 pages historical shouldn't be hard either. Most visible non-mainspace links are from linking portals in wikiproject banners which can be removed by removing the |PORTAL= parameter. Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:11, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
For such pages, page views are determined by visibility: how many incoming links are there and from where. With Portals, we have capitalized screen real estate that will be simply wasted if this proposal results in a mass deletion and unlinking operation. The Main Page, See also sections of countless articles, navigational templates, and WikiProject banners all give visibility to Portal links and that's where all the views come from. Even if we do away with Portals, we could use this visibility for something else. In my comment above, I suggested placing Outline and Index links where Portal links are now. We should definitely think about how to make the best out of these links. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 16:23, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
WP:BLUDGEON. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:04, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Keep the Portals that exist and are in good shape and delete only the poor portals.--Broter (talk) 15:50, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Do not delete all Portals. Then you will loose editors. Do only delete the poor portals.--Broter (talk) 15:53, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You don't need to keep repeating the same thing. One of the questions asked is about the future of the Portal: namespace. Are you suggesting we keep the 'good' portals in this namespace, but not allow any new creations? In my opinion, it would make more sense to use the Wikipedia: space and move the updated and maintained portals to there, perhaps in the form of Wikiprojects. But, I can't see how allowing some portals and not others would work. Aiken D 15:56, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This is technically no problem and we should talk about the criterias which portals need to stay.--Broter (talk) 16:22, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It is disrespectfull to delete all portals!--Broter (talk) 15:55, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • If anything can be deleted by a mob, why should someone create something on wikipedia?--Broter (talk) 16:43, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    "Mob" is emotive and disrespectful language – WP:AGF applies. It always has been the case that anything can be deleted by consensus. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:49, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Broter, please stop WP:BLUDGEONING. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:54, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Guy Macon: Portals were created to stay on wikipedia! Wikipedians were encouraged to create Portals and improve existing Portals! Now some people want it all to be deleted. Please understand me.--Broter (talk) 17:26, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
If almost no one uses portals because more efficient means of linking and organizing exist, why should we waste bandwidth and editor time and effort with keeping portals maintained? Please understand what others are getting at. Ian.thomson (talk) 20:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I may never edit wikipedia again if the deletionist extremists win this proposal.--Broter (talk) 19:05, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, no... What ever will we do without you... Ian.thomson (talk) 20:10, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I agree the left-wing one is definitely not maintained, but yeah, if anything, the bias that would result from one portal being deleted but not the other is an argument against selective deletion/archival and for unilateral action on all portals. Ian.thomson (talk) 20:10, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
WP:BLUDGEON. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:04, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Everybody can improve the Portal:Left-wing populism. There needs to be only an interested editor.--Broter (talk) 15:16, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
There exist the politically left wing portals Portal:Communism and Portal:Socialism. The Portal:Left-wing populism is really not needed.--Broter (talk) 15:41, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
See, though, that's effort that's not being put forth for something that readers aren't using because we have more efficient methods of linking to content. The only way to fix those issues would be automating portal generation, which would pretty much take editors out of the question at any rate. Ian.thomson (talk) 21:57, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That's the impression I've had. I've used a portal maybe two or three times the entire time I've been here, but I use those templates pretty regularly and "Outline of..." articles whenever I want to access a lot of articles on a topic really quickly. Ian.thomson (talk) 21:43, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Love the "outline of" pages, hate the templates. Look at 1-bit architecture. Instead of that huge wall of links at the bottom, Wouldn't it be nicer to have a simple link to Outline of CPU technologies, and have that page contain the wall of links? What percentage of readers who are interested in 1-bit architectures are looking for a see also link to SUPS? I would say that the answer is "zero". --Guy Macon (talk) 01:06, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not opposed to having both. Whichever format I find easier to read depends on the subject and how much caffeine I've had. Sometimes I have an easier time with tables, sometimes with lists.
Since the idea of automation has come up elsewhere in this discussion, I imagine it wouldn't impossible to write a template that'd turn an "Outline of" article into one of those templates. Like, some sort of mark-up that doesn't show up in the article, that you wrap around entries that are supposed to show up in the template, that's look something like ((Subst:OutlineEntry | (line number) | [[Article Title]] )). Then the template would just be (( (template name) | 1=[[Article|(name of first row)]] | 2=[[Article2|(name of second row)]] )). That should be far less work to set up than automating portals. Hell, I could probably work out how to how to do templates for an Outline-to-Table dealy, and the coding nightmare that is WP:BINGO is an anomalous highpoint for me. Ian.thomson (talk) 22:07, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, outlines are very different from portals.
Outlines are basically a structured list of links. If you don't click, you don't understand anything. Also they are completely static.
Meanwhile, portals show snippets of articles, interesting facts, images, etc. Also, they are dynamic, as each section rotates automatically. They offer a completely different way to explore the millions of articles. --NaBUru38 (talk) 13:27, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Seems a reasonable idea - what do people think of adding to Template:Editnotices/Namespace/Portal? I also wonder if the editnotice should exclude Portal:Current_events and its subpages (which are probably the most active portal pages..but wouldn't be affected by this proposal), Portal:Contents, and Portal:Featured_content from the editnotice Galobtter (pingó mió) 12:59, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Seems like a good idea. While relatively few people remain active in portal contribution, nevertheless there should still be the courtesy of informing them or at least letting them be aware of this discussion. We need more input from regular portal contributors so that their voice can be heard, and at the same time their feedback can be used in implementing whatever consensus this discussion results in. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 15:08, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
WP:BLUDGEON. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:04, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

I apologice for my previous behavour and cite now a reason why Portals should stay on wikipedia. Portals get more views than Outlines. For example the Portal:LDS Church gets 71 views a day while the Outline of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gets 30 views a day.--Broter (talk) 15:31, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Once Portals are completed, they are not difficult to maintain. The example for this case is the Portal:Freedom of Speech.--Broter (talk) 16:50, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Put well developed Portals on the Mainpage. This is what we should be doing.--Broter (talk) 18:36, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • Deleting portals is beyond pointless, we could end the use of them without deleting anything, the effort this deletion is taking is way more than what it would take to ever maintain the ones we already have.★Trekker (talk) 11:30, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I propose we find a new home for some portals that are well maintained. The obvious one is Portal:Current events would could end up as Wikipedia:In the news/Current events. The current events portal is widely viewed, receives lots of edits by many editors, and complements mainspace by effectively serving as a giant list of events. It is used to identify possible entries for WP:ITN/C and editors often also use it to identify information that can/should be added to mainspace articles. As such, it actively improves mainspace. I don't know much about other portals but I imagine similar cases could also find homes. -- BobTheIP editing as 2.28.13.227 (talk) 17:41, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

One problem is - there are eight linked words and 'All portals' in a corner on the top of the MP - so how many people notice them?
Perhaps the subsidiary question - given that 'a proportion' of Wikipedians (regular or occasional) are involved with starting, developing or improving particular categories of articles, for whom the various portals are, or are potentially, relevant means of navigating Wikipedia, how should the portals' presence be highlighted and/or made user friendly? Can they be variously developed so that the imbalances/absence of coverage on the MP regularly commented on can be addressed to some extent? To what extent should under-achieving portals be highlighted, so that contributors come to their rescue? Jackiespeel (talk) 16:51, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I share that concern. Open France and try to find the link to Portal:France. Tip: it's at the bottom of the page inserted in a navbox, with a minuscule font size. Hardly visible at all. I think that links to portals have hardly "capitalized screen real estate". --NaBUru38 (talk) 13:27, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
obliterating everyone's resource just because some find some examples of a kind of resource to be unacceptable to them, is called bullying: when men "protect" women by blocking women from having equal-validity, instead of honestly-protecting women's validity by fighting off glass-ceilings, that is an example of people obliterating someone else's resource ( men obliterating women's resource ). Just because you/someone doesn't want some portals doesn't justify obliterating ALL OUR resource. Some are derelict for a time, if they drift too far from currency, then there should be a system that 1. flags this, so any/all concerned parties can see/know this & understand that if it gets too out-of-date it will be a portal labelled derelict, 2. there should be auto-updating scripts ( oh, this link is to a page that got renamed? autofix the link, OR auto-flag it for some human to correct ), etc... The /actual/ problems include intermittent-interest, complexity in site causing drift between pages to become costly, etc, but the resource that the portal pages can provide ISN'T provided through search, because search _doesn't give you overview and context and interrelatedness_ ( this is the same problem as local businesses being wiped off the map because there is no Browse My Town site by one's village/town/city/county, whereas anyone wanting to find something CAN find it at the biggest online joints: browsing one's town used to be done physically, but the local representative/governments didn't bother making an internet equivalent, and now complain about the economic loss that is a consequence of their inaction! Another side of the same problem is that human memory works through prompting context, so if someone tells me to just remember everything I need to remember & search for them, but human memory works through context-prompting, and I am NOT ALLOWED context to browse in, then my learning is crippled! No, search isn't a complete replacement for context-rich browsing! ) Namaste. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.217.75.207 (talk) 13:44, 16 April 2018

Automated portals

The most common complaint about portals is that they have an insane ammount of maintenance required, and very few users willing to engage in it. And the problem is that we have hundreds of portals, each one with its own set of subpages, and each one is a domain in itself. So, a possible solution: why not automate and centralize the work? Take for example the featured article J. R. R. Tolkien. He may be a suitable featured article for the portals on middle-earth, biography, literature, speculative fiction, etc. Under the current system, each portal has to make their own "Portal:(name)/J. R. R. Tolkien" to place the blurb that will use. And also watch if the article loses the featured article to remove it, or add it when it gets featured. But we may have a single "Portal/J. R. R. Tolkien" general subpage, with a general blurb, and add tags to it to instruct the bots about the portals that should include it. Same for the page for image blurbs, quote blurbs, etc. That would greatly reduce the number of pages, keep them organized at a single place, and most of the work would be done by bots.

A second idea would be to restrict the topics that may get a portal to those truly diverse. A portal for music, or a music genre, is justified, but a portal for a certain band can hardly be. Add a requirement of "At least X articles in scope" and "at least Y good or features articles wihin the scope". Less portals, less pages to mantain, and easier to deal with. The fandom of Z wants a portal, but there are not featured articles enough? Then make those featured articles, and then the portal. Cambalachero (talk) 19:14, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This has been proposed above, and while it might solve the editing inactivity problem, it wouldn't solve the Portal system's other major flaw: outside of just a few portals (mentioned by Andrew D. below), the vast majority barely get any views. Even the ones with a high number of views might be better off in the Wikipedia namespace anyway. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 00:07, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I like the idea of automated portals to reduce maintenance. If you look at P:MDRD, the Selected picture and Did you know? hooks are set up to rotate randomly every time the portal is refreshed. I think spreading this idea to all portals is a good idea to keep the portals with minimal maintenance. Dough4872 20:33, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This does reduce maintenance work and slow the degradation of less-maintained portals, but there are tradeoffs. In one of the sections below there are editors complaining that portals are hard to edit for users who aren't familiar with templates. --RL0919 (talk) 20:50, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I set up Portal:London Transport so that the lists of featured articles, good articles, etc. are automatically updated weekly. A series of sub-pages are updated by User:JL-Bot and the bot's outputs for each of the lists are collated together using a set of string trimming and cropping templates to format them in an attractive manner - see Wikipedia:WikiProject London Transport/Recognised content/bot list and its sub-pages. It's not pretty, but it could be standardised for use on other portals and it means that the lists are never more than a few days old. The random selected articles, biographies, pictures and DYKs are relatively straight forward as there are templates specifically designed for this purpose. --DavidCane (talk) 21:01, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

While I would support some kind of automation of portals should the status quo remain, I'm concerned that it might not be enough to solve the problem that the vast majority of portals aren't getting a meaningful amount of views. It would help solve the editing problem (in that the currently inactive portals would get some love from editors), but that would affect the editing end and not the viewer end. What would be a suitable proposal in order to help promote portals and increase their readership? I know many articles have links to portals but in most cases it doesn't seem to be enough, so perhaps additional steps could be made here. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 12:12, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Narutolovehinata5 I know this thread is very long but please see my "oppose" comment above. I'm suggesting automating not only the portals themselves but the linking to them from all relevant articles, and also de-emphasising the term "portal" which may not mean much to a lot of the lay readership: Noyster (talk), 12:47, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Honestly I'm skeptical that will be enough. Take the case for example Portal:Anime and manga, which is linked to in several anime-related articles. In the past 30 days, it's gotten a mere 6,871 views (or an average of about 222 views per day). It may seem like a lot at first, but that's far less than what either anime or manga (thousands of edits per day). It also gets far less pageviews that most airing series and even series that have finished airing. Even if Portal:Anime and manga was linked from every single article, it might not make a difference considering it's already linked to from most of the popular articles of the project. I know there are counterexamples to this from other projects, but my point is simply that links to Portals don't seem to be enough to promote them well; there probably has to be another way. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 12:55, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, the proposal to increase automation is meant to improve portal quality, which is a major concern. Of course it won't increase page views overnight, since that's another major concern. Each issue requires separate solutions. --NaBUru38 (talk) 13:30, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Speaking of automated portals, I have a lot of experience with them on the Spanish-language Wikipedia. I have helped a lot to develop sports portals, anchored in Portal:Deporte, Portal:Fútbol and Portal:Automovilismo. They all share the same templates and article snippets, as do their subportals by region and discipline.
Each portal has a competition calendar of the week / month. Sportspeople appear on their birthdays. Several editors have copied and pasted them to create new portals with minimal effort. --NaBUru38 (talk) 13:34, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Main page link traffic in 2018

This proposal to destroy all portals seems to be based on the misconception that they are not used. Here's some actual stats which refute this nonsense. It's a list of the pages currently linked on the main page, ranked by their views in 2018. I've only listed the top 100 as they seem adequate to make the point. One can see from this that the portal pages get plenty of traffic and that this is comparable with other pages. If numbers are what matters then there's a better case for deleting other WP pages such as Wikipedia:Village pump. Andrew D. (talk) 23:22, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Long list
Rank Page Readers in 2018
1 Deaths in 2018 10,440,731
2 Portal:Current events 4,387,154
3 Avengers: Infinity War 4,244,723
4 Wikipedia:Featured articles 2,677,238
5 Wikipedia 1,795,210
6 Patrick Reed 1,552,039
7 The Holocaust 1,129,274
8 Wikipedia:Community portal 1,089,287 (not a Portal)
9 English language 1,022,730
10 Benito Mussolini 821,011
11 Scotland 756,252
12 Association football 633,844
13 Wales 582,933
14 Auschwitz concentration camp 574,151
15 FC Bayern Munich 562,962
16 George Weah 541,623
17 Liberia 526,109
18 Boston 482,016
19 Augusta National Golf Club 471,459
20 Apollo 11 467,370
21 2018 Masters Tournament 463,447
22 Volcano 405,686
23 Big Ben 352,576
24 Portal:Contents/Portals 343,999
25 Portal:Arts 251,984
26 Saskatchewan 251,005
27 United States men's national soccer team 239,197
28 Lega Nord 231,813
29 Wikipedia:In the news/Candidates 225,142
30 Wikipedia:Your first article 224,475
31 2017–18 Bundesliga 223,623
32 Palace of Westminster 220,180
33 Portal:History 210,188
34 The Infinity Gauntlet 208,888
35 Encyclopedia 207,631
36 Portal:Biography 196,294
37 Portal:Geography 193,451
38 Portal:Technology 191,849
39 Hungarian parliamentary election, 2018 185,973
40 Golf 180,084
41 Humboldt Broncos 169,318
42 Isao Takahata 167,146
43 Æthelstan A 149,079
44 Portal:Mathematics 129,103
45 Viktor Orbán 126,546
46 Giuseppe Verdi 123,292
47 Portal:Science 122,774
48 Humboldt Broncos bus crash 120,134
49 Wikipedia:Help desk 119,773
50 Year Without a Summer 115,715
51 Free content 104,088
52 List of historical anniversaries 100,432
53 Wikimedia Foundation 93,859
54 Timothy Weah 91,143
55 Governance 88,460
56 Casting 84,104
57 Viola 79,785
58 Wikipedia:Recent additions 78,397
59 Cecil Taylor 76,464
60 Nagorno-Karabakh War 71,591
61 Mount Tambora 71,576
62 Wikipedia:Featured pictures 70,178
63 Wikipedia:Introduction 67,917
64 April 9 67,820
65 Portal:Society 63,415
66 Wikipedia:Reference desk 55,095
67 Template talk:Did you know 52,856
68 Withypool Stone Circle 50,064
69 Michael Goolaerts 45,856
70 1992 44,359
71 2009 41,091
72 Rif Dimashq offensive (February–April 2018) 40,581
73 Wikipedia:Village pump 38,022
74 Lesser Antillean macaw 37,282
75 Frederick D. Reese 37,031
76 Gustav III of Sweden 36,959
77 Drama dari Krakatau 32,315
78 Samuel Hahnemann 32,202
79 Charter 31,555
80 April 10 30,899
81 Host (biology) 30,205
82 Scribe 29,234
83 Wikipedia:News 25,514
84 Senate of the Republic (Italy) 25,324
85 National Assembly (Hungary) 24,719
86 Kingdom of Strathclyde 24,114
87 Wikipedia:Local Embassy 22,625
88 West Nile virus 21,866
89 1944 21,796
90 April 11 21,714
91 Frank Bainimarama 20,804
92 Un ballo in maschera 16,999
93 2018 Gaza border protests 15,062
94 Rudolf Vrba 14,921
95 Wikipedia:Today's featured article/April 2018 11,380
96 1815 7,559
97 Norman Bel Geddes 7,387
98 Toni Iwobi 7,293
99 President of Fiji 6,376
100 Prime Minister of Fiji 6,210
To give a fair overview, could we please see the above table containing only links that have been on the main page for six month or more? Comparing current movies and events with permanent mainpage links is comparing apples and oranges. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:47, 10 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, every single one of the portals listed in that table is either on the main page or the permanent sidebar. Of course they are going to have massive pageviews. --Izno (talk) 02:49, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The top item bolded as a "portal" is Wikipedia:Community portal which is not a portal and not included on this proposal. Legacypac (talk) 04:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Rank Page Readers in 2018
1 Deaths in 2018 10,440,731
2 Portal:Current events 4,387,154
4 Wikipedia:Featured articles 2,677,238
5 Wikipedia 1,795,210
8 Wikipedia:Community portal 1,089,287
9 English language 1,022,730
24 Portal:Contents/Portals 343,999
25 Portal:Arts 251,984
29 Wikipedia:In the news/Candidates 225,142
30 Wikipedia:Your first article 224,475
33 Portal:History 210,188
35 Encyclopedia 207,631
36 Portal:Biography 196,294
37 Portal:Geography 193,451
38 Portal:Technology 191,849
44 Portal:Mathematics 129,103
47 Portal:Science 122,774
49 Wikipedia:Help desk 119,773
51 Free content 104,088
52 List of historical anniversaries 100,432
53 Wikimedia Foundation 93,859
58 Wikipedia:Recent additions 78,397
62 Wikipedia:Featured pictures 70,178
63 Wikipedia:Introduction 67,917
65 Portal:Society 63,415
66 Wikipedia:Reference desk 55,095
67 Template talk:Did you know 52,856
73 Wikipedia:Village pump 38,022
83 Wikipedia:News 25,514
87 Wikipedia:Local Embassy 22,625


Just because a link gets traffic does not mean it is getting “used”. Viewing a page does not equate to using it. Page views is not the only argument in favour of making portals obsolete. Aiken D 15:17, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yes I was going to say the same. I'm not choosing sides, but the tables above say "readers in YYYY". I assume you mean pageviews, which is not the same thing. One reader could reload the page 100 times, and that's 100 pageviews, yet still the same person. Fly-by edits (that aren't through the API) also get counted as pageviews, even the editor may have read nothing more than a diff. Pinging Guy Macon in case you want to revise the wording — MusikAnimal talk 20:50, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
If you want to delete inactive portals then fine, but don't try and blanket them all as unused and obsolete as this isn't true based on editor comments here. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:20, 11 April 2018 (UTC) In my opinion even the inactive ones should be marked as historical rather than deleted. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:26, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Are there statistics that compare "logged in" with "logged out" users? I suspect that a huge portion of the visitors to portals are Wikipedia editors going there to maintain them as opposed to readers randomly looking at them. --B (talk) 19:35, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I feel like we've never really explored the reason for the huge popularity of Deaths in 2018 (beyond plain morbidity). We have similar articles that I'm sure just as many people would be interested in, but which do not receive prominent links like the recent deaths one does. We can intuit these topics via Wikipedia:In the news/Recurring items and the current events portal. We should provide main page links like:

I think this is relevant in questioning the purpose of subject-specific portals, as they often stray into a focus on recent events rather than serving as a contents page. If we properly link in our existing mainspace pages that cover recent events at a high level then this allows us to redefine portals as areas of long-term curation and contents provision only, rather than time-consuming elements like recent events. We should be leveraging the latent interest in current events to push editors to our content on that. SFB 13:10, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What about Portals that are exempt from this discussion or otherwise kept?

It seems that there's consensus or at least significant support to keep at least some portals: notably Portal:Current events and the like. Assuming the proposal to deprecate the Portal namespace passes, what will happen to these pages? Will the Portal namespace be kept for them alone, or will they be moved to another namespace like the Wikipedia namespace? Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 13:39, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This is the issue... nobody is thinking these things out. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:43, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm? Like I suggested above, the wikipedia namespace seems fine for these, seeing as they are barely like other portals, and the moves shouldn't be too onerous to do Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:58, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

These are part of Wikipedia's core navigation system:

  1. Portal:Contents

(see this page for the list)

Such as retain the Portal namespace just for these: Portal:Contents, Portal:Featured content, and Portal:Current events.

Thank you.     — The Transhumanist    10:36, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I've replaced the list to a more convenient link to prefixindex, that also doesn't burden the page more. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:58, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Move the useful pages to Wikipedia namespace. Remove the Portal namespace completely. Everytime someone brings a Portal to MfD the discussion runs along the lines of "we dislike portals but we wamt to deal with them all, not piecemeal. As long as Portals are allowed to exist we should keep this one." So here we are - discussing them all. Legacypac (talk) 17:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't understand this. Wikipedia namespace is targeted at editors and is mostly used for maintenance and discussion, so it wouldn't make sense for pages that readers use to be located there. The portal namespace, however, is more reader-targeted, similar to article namespace. Master of Time (talk) 06:31, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I second this. I do not see the basic validity of moving what is clearly reader-oriented content to the administrative space. It goes against the very purpose of namespacing. SFB 14:33, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
WP:Contents and WP:Featured content currently redirect to Portal:Contents and Portal:Featured content, so just move them to the Wikipedia namespace over the redirects. For Portal:Current events, I would move it to Wikipedia:WikiProject Current events (the WikiProject is currently inactive). --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 16:00, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There is one special portal that I watch and maintain: Portal:Example (I also keep an eye on Template:Example, Help:Example, Book:Example, Module:Example, etc. -- mostly reverting vandalism and dealing with misplaced talk page messages). If all other portals are deleted or moved into a different namespace, Portal:Example should be deleted. If a single portal is left in the portal namespace, Portal:Example should be left as well. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:22, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If portals are deleted, please move all the topics pages from subject portals to the outline WikiProject, for harvesting

Long list
  1. Portal:1980s/Topics
  2. Portal:A Nightmare on Elm Street/Topics
  3. Portal:AC/DC/Topics
  4. Portal:Abkhazia/Topics
  5. Portal:Abu Dhabi/Topics
  6. Portal:Academy Award/Academy Award topics
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  647. Portal:Language/Language topic/Nominate
  648. Portal:Language/Language topic/November 2006
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  652. Portal:Language/Selected topic/1
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  767. Portal:Monty Python/topics
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  769. Portal:Moon/Topics
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  868. Portal:Pharmacy and pharmacology/Pharmacology and Medications/Topics
  869. Portal:Philippine Basketball Association/Topics
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  887. Portal:Political science/topic/1
  888. Portal:Politics/Categories and topics
  889. Portal:Politics/Topics
  890. Portal:Pondicherry/Topics
  891. Portal:Pop music/Pop music topics
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  900. Portal:Primates/Topics
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  902. Portal:Private revelation/Topics
  903. Portal:Professional wrestling/Topics/10
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  906. Portal:Professional wrestling/Topics/13
  907. Portal:Professional wrestling/Topics/1
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  913. Portal:Professional wrestling/Topics/7
  914. Portal:Professional wrestling/Topics/8
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  916. Portal:Professional wrestling/Topics
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  924. Portal:Python programming/Python programming topics
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  928. Portal:Queen (band)/Topics
  929. Portal:Queens of the Stone Age/Topics
  930. Portal:Queensland/Topics
  931. Portal:Quran/Topics
  932. Portal:R&B and Soul Music/Topics
  933. Portal:Rabbits and hares/Topics
  934. Portal:Rabindranath Tagore/Rabindranath Tagore topics
  935. Portal:Radio/Radio topics
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  938. Portal:Religion/Categories and Main topics/Header
  939. Portal:Religion/Categories and Main topics
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  941. Portal:Republic of the Congo/Topics
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  944. Portal:Rhode Island/Topics
  945. Portal:Right-wing populism/Topics
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  950. Portal:Robert E. Howard/Topics
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  966. Portal:Rush/Topics
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  971. Portal:SNK/SNK topics
  972. Portal:Sabah/Topics
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  974. Portal:Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean/Topics
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  977. Portal:Sakis Rouvas/Topics
  978. Portal:Salamanders/Topics
  979. Portal:San Diego County/Topics
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  981. Portal:San Diego–Tijuana/Topics/Section 1
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  991. Portal:San Francisco Bay Area/Topics
  992. Portal:Santana/Topics
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  1009. Portal:Serer people/Topics
  1010. Portal:Serer religion/Topics
  1011. Portal:Serials/Topics
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  1013. Portal:Seventh-day Adventist Church/Topics
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  1015. Portal:Shakespeare/Topics list
  1016. Portal:Shakespeare/Topics
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  1019. Portal:Shania Twain/Shania Twain topics
  1020. Portal:Sharjah/Topics
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  1022. Portal:Sherlock Holmes/Topics
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  1031. Portal:Slipknot/Topics
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  1035. Portal:Soap operas and telenovelas/Topics
  1036. Portal:Soccer in the United States/Topics
  1037. Portal:Social movements/Topics
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  1039. Portal:Sociology/Sociology topics
  1040. Portal:Soft Rock/Topics
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  1044. Portal:Solar System/Solar System topics
  1045. Portal:Somalia/topics
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  1068. Portal:Speculative fiction/Science fiction/Topics
  1069. Portal:Speculative fiction/Topics
  1070. Portal:Spirituality/Spirituality-related topics
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  1075. Portal:Sri Lanka Railways/Topics
  1076. Portal:Sri Lanka/Topics
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  1079. Portal:Stamford/Topics
  1080. Portal:Star Trek/Topic news
  1081. Portal:Star Trek/Topics
  1082. Portal:Star Wars/Topics
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  1087. Portal:Strategy games/Strategy games topics
  1088. Portal:Strictly Come Dancing/Topics
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  1090. Portal:Submarine/Topics
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  1093. Portal:Superhero fiction/Topics
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  1104. Portal:Syriac Christianity/Topics
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  1111. Portal:Tamil Eelam/Topics
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  1114. Portal:Tank/Topics
  1115. Portal:Tanzania/Topics
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  1120. Portal:Television in Canada/Topics
  1121. Portal:Television in the United Kingdom/Topics
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  1123. Portal:Television/Topics
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  1125. Portal:Tennis/Topics
  1126. Portal:Terrorism/Topics
  1127. Portal:Texas/Texas topics
  1128. Portal:Textile arts/Textile arts topics
  1129. Portal:Thailand/topics
  1130. Portal:The Beach Boys/Topics
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  1132. Portal:The Gambia/Topics
  1133. Portal:The Jackson Family/Topics
  1134. Portal:The Kinks/Topics
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  1136. Portal:The Rolling Stones/Topics
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  1138. Portal:The Sims/Topics
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  1140. Portal:The X-Files/Topics
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  1143. Portal:Thinking/Topics
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  1163. Portal:Trucks/Topics
  1164. Portal:Tunisia/Topics
  1165. Portal:Turkey/Topics
  1166. Portal:Turkish Armed Forces/Topics
  1167. Portal:Turkmenistan/Topics
  1168. Portal:Turtles/Topics
  1169. Portal:Tuvalu/Topics
  1170. Portal:Twilight/Topics
  1171. Portal:Typography/Topics
  1172. Portal:U2/U2 topics
  1173. Portal:UK Waterways/Topics
  1174. Portal:Udaipur/Topics
  1175. Portal:Ukraine/Ukrainian topics
  1176. Portal:Ulaanbaatar/Topics
  1177. Portal:Ulcinj/Topics
  1178. Portal:Underwater diving/Topics
  1179. Portal:United Arab Emirates/United Arab Emirates topics
  1180. Portal:United Nations/Topics
  1181. Portal:United States Air Force/Topics
  1182. Portal:United States/Topics
  1183. Portal:Universities in Azerbaijan/Related topics
  1184. Portal:Universities in Azerbaijan/Topics
  1185. Portal:University of Cambridge/Topics
  1186. Portal:University of Chicago/Topics
  1187. Portal:University of Oxford/Topics
  1188. Portal:University/Topics
  1189. Portal:Unix/Topics
  1190. Portal:Uranus/Topics
  1191. Portal:Uruguay/Topics
  1192. Portal:Usher/Topics
  1193. Portal:Utah/topics
  1194. Portal:Uzbekistan/Topics
  1195. Portal:Vajrayana Buddhism/Topics
  1196. Portal:Venezuela/Venezuela topics
  1197. Portal:Venomous snakes/Topics
  1198. Portal:Victoria/Topics
  1199. Portal:Victorian era/Topics
  1200. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/10
  1201. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/11
  1202. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/12
  1203. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/13
  1204. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/14
  1205. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/15
  1206. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/16
  1207. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/17
  1208. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/18
  1209. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/1
  1210. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/2
  1211. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/3
  1212. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/4
  1213. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/5
  1214. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/6
  1215. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/7
  1216. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/8
  1217. Portal:Video games/Featured topic/9
  1218. Portal:Video games/Featured topic
  1219. Portal:Video games/Topics
  1220. Portal:Vienna/Topics
  1221. Portal:Vietnam/Topics
  1222. Portal:Virginia/Virginia topics
  1223. Portal:Viruses/Topics
  1224. Portal:Visual arts/Topics
  1225. Portal:Volcanism of Canada/Volcanism of Canada topics
  1226. Portal:Volcanoes/Volcanoes topics
  1227. Portal:Wales/Topics
  1228. Portal:War of 1812/Topics
  1229. Portal:War/Topics
  1230. Portal:Warhammer/Warhammer topics
  1231. Portal:Washington & Jefferson College/Topics
  1232. Portal:Washington, D.C./Topics
  1233. Portal:Washington/Topics
  1234. Portal:Water sports/Topics
  1235. Portal:Weapons of mass destruction/Weapons of mass destruction topics
  1236. Portal:Weather/Featured content/Topics
  1237. Portal:Weimar Republic/Topics
  1238. Portal:West Bengal/Major topics
  1239. Portal:West Virginia/West Virginia topics
  1240. Portal:Western Australia/Western Australia topics
  1241. Portal:Western Sahara/Western Sahara topics
  1242. Portal:Wetlands/Topics
  1243. Portal:Whitney Houston/Topics
  1244. Portal:Wicca/Wicca topics
  1245. Portal:Wiltshire/Topics
  1246. Portal:Wine/Wine topics
  1247. Portal:Wisconsin/topics
  1248. Portal:Women's association football/Topics
  1249. Portal:World War I/Topics
  1250. Portal:World War II/Topics
  1251. Portal:World War II/World War II topics
  1252. Portal:Writing/Topics
  1253. Portal:Wyoming/topics
  1254. Portal:X-ray astronomy/Topics
  1255. Portal:Xbox 360/Main Topics
  1256. Portal:Xbox 360/Xbox 360 topics
  1257. Portal:Years/Topics
  1258. Portal:Yoga/Topics
  1259. Portal:Yorkshire/Yorkshire topics
  1260. Portal:Yoruba/Topics
  1261. Portal:Yukon/Topics
  1262. Portal:Zambia/Topics
  1263. Portal:Zimbabwe/Topics
  1264. Portal:Zoos and aquariums/Topics
  1265. Portal:Zoroastrianism/Topics

Thank you.     — The Transhumanist    10:27, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Notices on every portal

Notices have been placed on every portal (including current events), there is a consensus that this did not amount to canvassing. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:15, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.


Important: A notice of this deletion discussion should have been placed at the top of every page being proposed for deletion three days ago, when this discussion was started. Such notices are now in place. Enough time should be provided for the users and maintainers of the various portals to weigh in.     — The Transhumanist    12:00, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
But The Transhumanist, you've put your notice at the top of Community portal as well, which although it has "portal" in the title is not in Portal: space and has been repeatedly stated not to fall within the scope of the proposal: Noyster (talk), 12:55, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the clarification. It should be exempted in the proposal itself, for clarity, and not just be buried in the huge discussion below. The notice has been removed from the top of the page there, and a more general notice has been included in the Community Bulletin Board further down the page.     — The Transhumanist    13:52, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
In any case Transhumanist is completely right in pointing out that such a survey should not be performed without informing those primarily affected (many editors and potentially portal users/maintainers do not follow village pump discussions regularly or at all).--Kmhkmh (talk) 13:48, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've moved this down; the top of the RfC isn't the place for this discussion and should remain neutral and short. RfC's usually are held open for 30 days, and thus three days is immaterial overall Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:41, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • The Transhumanist next time it'd have been better to use a template and transclude the message, since it is same for all 1500 articles - thus it can be changed as necessary (if the discussion moves, if the wording needs to be changed etc) Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:05, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I chose to post a static notice because it is preserved in the historical versions of the pages it is posted on. Templates morph, so what you see in a historical version is not necessarily what actually appeared there when that version was created. Context may be important here. Thank you for your comment.     — The Transhumanist    00:19, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The opening text should be "Should the system of portals be ended? This would include the deletion of all portal pages and the removal of the portal namespace" and then add "with the following exceptions:" (and list the exceptions) Cambalachero (talk) 15:58, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tagging this discussion to all portals is close to inappropriate canvassing→ to draw in the handful of users who work on this failed part of Wikipedia. This discussion needs to the input of all users which is why VP is an appropriate venue. Where else can we advertise this RFC to attract in a proper cross section of all users? Legacypac (talk) 17:16, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
So "all users" doesn't include users watching/editing/reading the portal pages themselves? Your point of view on this strikes me as completely illogical. - dcljr (talk) 23:23, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
If you are part of a project then there is a good chance it's connected to a portal. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:20, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Legacypac: By the same logic, it is inappropriate canvassing to tag a page when it is nominated for WP:MFD. RockMagnetist(talk) 18:10, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Which is why I did not call it out as canvassing. This whole area is so disliked we need to be careful not to influence the results to heavily by advertising. On the plus side, by placing a notification no one can whine when we remove any given portal. Legacypac (talk) 18:25, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Considering there appears to still be some support for the use of Portals, at least based on the discussion above, I think calling the Portal system "widely disliked" might be either a stretch or inaccurate to say the least. Also, regardless of our opinions of the system, as these editors are the primary editors for the namespace, they should have been informed sooner, and it's right to have left them messages about this discussion. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 00:26, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am concerned that a failure to communicate this RfC to the Portals from the outset (as we would for an AfD/MFD) has built up a 'head of steam' wherein many are already assuming Portals serve no purpose whatsoever, and are wielding their pitchforks and making plans for their imminent global demise. For Legacypac to suggest communicating this RfC at the Portals themselves is ...close to inappropriate canvassing is ridiculous, and seems close to the Vogon Planning Process. Many thanks to The Transhumanist for notifying some of the Portals three days after the RfC began. A quick check reveals many smaller Portal pages have still not been informed (e.g.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). Is this an oversight, or the misfortune of poor original categorisation? Nick Moyes (talk) 01:56, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I posted the notice to the 1143 portals listed at Portal:Contents/Portals, for expediency. I'm in the process of tracking down the portals not listed there.  Done I've posted to all other portals (without slashes in the titles).     — The Transhumanist    06:35, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've just added the notice to WP:AALERTS subscriptions. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:49, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"Close to inappropriate canvassing"?

I agree with Legacypac that tagging this discussion to 1143 portals (and rising!) portals is close to inappropriate canvassing, but does not actually cross the line. Others, of course will disagree with my personal opinion on this, which is fine.

Instead of focusing on whether it was canvassing ("is close to" does not equal "is"), I would like to instead focus on whether adding the following notice

A proposal has been made to eliminate this portal, and all other portals. Please share your thoughts on the matter at: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RfC: Ending the system of portalsFeel free to edit the portal, but it must not be moved or blanked, and this notice must not be removed, until the discussion is closed. For more information, read the Guide to deletion.

to over a thousand pages caused (I would assume inadvertently) a biased sample of responses to this proposal. This is not a forgone conclusion. As someone pointed out above, we don't have a problem when we tag a page that is nominated for WP:MFD. The obvious counterargument would be that tagging 1 page and tagging 1143 pages just might have different effects on a discussion.

I don't think that anyone will be willing to argue that this has had no effect on the discussion, but I can see an argument that the effect is not harmful. I could go either way on that question. --Guy Macon (talk) 19:08, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment it has been argued above many times that portals are seldom visited and not used. If that's the case, then the potential "canvassing" has very little impact. Further, whenever a page is proposed for deletion a notice is put on that page so that those who follow that page can comment. I don't see it as "canvassing" at all.--Paul McDonald (talk) 20:44, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment This is the second time the same editor has brought up canvassing. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 22:00, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • Give it a rest. Your posting comment after comment criticizing me is becoming disruptive. Everyone is aware of your low opinion of me. You don't have to keep pounding on it. If you think you have a legitimate complaint, take it to WP:ANI.. --Guy Macon (talk) 04:22, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I do not see any problems with these notifications. They are worded accurately, and it is entirely appropriate to notify all editors who see portals on their watchlists. I would, instead, see a concern about a biased sample if such notice had not been made. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:58, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I see no problem putting notices on pages that would be deleted/redirected/archived as if it were an XfD. Killiondude (talk) 22:01, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is very much the business of portal watchers and editors to know that there is a discussion going on about whether to delete the entire portal namespace. There's nothing inappropriate about it. Master of Time (talk) 22:12, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • For the record I fully disagree with calling this "inappropriate canvassing". The idea here is to inform the community that would be impacted from this change which was done through a neutral message. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 22:17, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • When a page is being considered for deletion, it is tagged as such. If you are suggesting 1,143+ pages are to be deleted, then each and every one of those 1,143+ pages must be tagged. Suggesting that doing so is "canvassing" is ludicrous. Fish+Karate 09:37, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

An admin is needed to put a notice on Portal:Current events

I couldn't put one there because the page is protected.     — The Transhumanist    07:41, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • don't think a notice is necessary there, I don't see anyone really arguing for its deletion. Wasn't my intention at-least to really include it, if the portal namespace is deleted it'd be moved to wikipedia space. Galobtter (pingó mió) 07:44, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • The problem is that there is a difference between what you intended and what you proposed. Your proposal states: "This would include the deletion of all portal pages and the removal of the portal namespace." All portals. And that is what is being surveyed with "Support" and "Oppose". And Legacypac has been quite explicit. So, until the proposal states otherwise, or until you add an amendment up there, that proposal is what I'm notifying others about. As far as I'm concerned your proposal includes Portal:Contents and Portal:Current events because they are portals and your proposal says "all portals". So, please do not remove the notices until the proposal is amended. Thank you.     — The Transhumanist    09:12, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
 Done. As The Transhumanist correctly points out, the proposal is to delete all pages that begin with Portal:, so all should be tagged. Regards SoWhy 13:59, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Uh, hey guys, nice discussion you're having here, but how about putting these templates on talk pages? They'd still look awfully pointy, but at least they wouldn't be in the way. Isa (talk) 17:08, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Isa Few people use portals so it doesn't make much difference Cesdeva (talk) 17:17, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Cesdeva: Yeah, sorry, I'm really not in the market for baits right now. I don't care about this RFC, but may I suggest the templates be either removed or moved to talk pages until it runs its course? Isa (talk) 17:21, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I object to including a deletion template on a page thst is not proposed for deletion. That is being very POINTY SoWhy. Legacypac (talk) 17:31, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Where do you see in "Should the system of portals be ended? This would include the deletion of all portal pages and the removal of the portal namespace" that it isn't proposed for deletion? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:46, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
All through the discussion and ^^^ right here. Legacypac (talk) 17:48, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This is only chat, the outcome would go by the central survey question. Portal:Current events is still a portal and would be included in the discussion unless otherwise noted by the closing admin. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:51, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Right, let's start again. I don't care about what's a portal and what's not. I see little to no discussion on whether these notices should have been posted in the first place, and I'm also seeing some concern on the copy/pasting on thousands of pages. I would propose that these notices are either 1) completely removed, or 2) moved to the talk pages. Isa (talk) 17:59, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

(UTC)

@Isanae: Sorry! I wasnt aiming it at you, despite the ping. As for the suggestion I think there is confusion over whether to treat this as a normal RfC where talk pages would get notified or treat it like a deletion discussion where the page would get tagged. It really is a pseudo-MfD, don't you think? Either way i'm not the editor to be speaking to. Kind regards, Cesdeva (talk) 18:00, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree with your proposal because this is a deletion discussion. When this is RfC closed, we are going to open another to talk about deletion as it has already been done above. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 19:47, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • All pages threatened with deletion should get a warning tag so that their users and maintainers are properly warned. That includes Portal:Current events which is clearly in scope for this proposal. There's a better case for deleting Portal:Current events than most of the others because it's trying to be a news ticker, contrary to WP:NOTNEWSPAPER, and so is all about fresh, immature topics rather than the well-considered, encyclopedic material that the other portals are able to feature. Andrew D. (talk) 07:47, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Main Page is a portal

Remarkably little has been said about what portals do or should do. At present, they largely duplicate the functions of the Main Page, but for a subdomain of Wikipedia. These include boxes for a featured article; a featured picture; Did You Know; related portals; On this day/In this month; In the News; and related content in other Wikimedia projects. They also can have links to related WikiProjects and a list of suggestions for how editors can contribute. Not all portals have all of this content, of course; it depends on the energy of the editors.

So, in essence, the Main Page is a portal. Should we keep it? If so, why should we delete other portals, which serve a very similar function? If there is a benefit, say, to displaying a Featured Article on the Main Page for a few hours, then isn't there an added benefit to displaying it periodically on another portal? RockMagnetist(talk) 17:26, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

WP:DDMP - Enough said. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:34, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Radical idea, but (like YouTube for example) the main page could be a personalised portal, where you’d have links related to your own interests. Of course if you aren’t logged in, something would need to go there instead... Aiken D 19:09, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Aiken D: I like your idea, although I don't know how it would be implemented. RockMagnetist(talk) 00:04, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep the Main Page, but replace the portal links with links to the nearest equivalent categories. Lojbanist remove cattle from stage 22:17, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Main page encourages content - featuring on it is a something that people make articles for. Not the same for other portals. Galobtter (pingó mió) 02:49, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Move the Main_Page to the Portal: namespace (maybe Portal:Home) as default for logged out and new users, and then add an ability that allows users to set any other Portal: as their personal "Main_Page". This would certainly up the quality within the Portal namespace. Editors or groups of editors would work together to build the best alternative home pages. Imagine a portal for administrators, linking to various maintenance areas and alerting them to backlogs. Or just being able to set a home page devoted to a topic area you find interesting to edit in. This may not be 100% personalized, but it could build communities around the portals as the interested users keep them updated. That seems to me what they were for, we just have not been doing enough to bring people to the portals in a natural way. -- Netoholic @ 10:51, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like deleting the main page is perpetually a forbidden fruit that people raise as a necessary consequence of every proposal in any way that anyone can imagine is necessary. Why does this crazy idea get proposed so much? I wonder if at Google or Amazon or whatever their developers always talk about deleting the main page. Deleting the main page is starting to seem like a sport or perennial proposal. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:37, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately my attempt to promote the Main Page to Featured Portal status didn't work out so well. FallingGravity 08:53, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Research that hasn't been done yet

There have been a few hundred deletion debates for portals. What were the decisions and what were the reasons for them? My impression based on a short survey was that portals are generally kept if they have been constructed properly and don't largely duplicate other portals. RockMagnetist(talk) 17:36, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What exactly is the activity on a portal? Someone commented that Portal:Arts has only been edited twice in 5 months; well, the Main Page has only been edited 13 times! The content of portals is actually in their subpages; the Arts portal has 341 subpages. It would take a lot of effort to determine how much all those pages had been edited, but perhaps someone should do that before they argue that portals are not maintained. I can offer one anecdote: Over the years, I have edited Portal:Earth sciences 13 times, but its subpages 111 times. RockMagnetist(talk) 17:36, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What I'd really like to know when making decisions like this is what the readers think. The readers are a silent majority whose desires we are left guessing with very limited data. We know how many page views portals get, but we don't how much time readers spend there and what links they click. This is undoubtedly data that the WMF has serverside. More sophisticated qualitative questions like what do the readers actually think about portals, what do they want, also go unanswered.
In the event that portals will be discontinued, I'd love to see some actual research into what kind of features readers are missing. It would be crucial for the project to find that interface where readers become interested in editing. Portals were supposed to be that, among other things, but I doubt they ever met that goal. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 18:21, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The fact editors need to edit subpages and templates to work on a portal is structural reason they will always be a problem. I'm over 100,000 edits and only last year I started to figure out how to change a portal. It's not intuitive like regular wikipages. They are also a weird mix of public facing content, and backend to do lists. The overviews provide limited value, often skimming the surface of a topic using only commonly known info most readers would know already. Legacypac (talk) 18:34, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This is more an indictment of the software than of the portal concept. Yes, they are tricky to edit, and require a fair amount of work to learn how, so discouraging maintenance by people who were not involved in creating them, This is not so much a reason to abolish them, as to consider simplifying the system. But is it worth the effort for the advantage gained? I really don't know, and doubt if anyone else does. everyone is guessing. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 18:59, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What will replace portals?

When we want to find something on/in Wikipedia we need a guide, an index, someplace to start. That guide has to be logically organized. Language, Literature, Mathematics, Science, Social Science, History, Geography, Computer Science, etc.

AgentCachet (talk) 02:50, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Those few portals that are useful and maintained can be turned into "overview of" or "outline of" pages. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:31, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Guy Macon: Doesn't that simply move the problem to "overview of" or "outline of" pages? If that can be controlled by XfD, why not portals? ―Mandruss ☎ 07:16, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I am not sure what you mean by "the problem". The discussion above has established a strong consensus for the following:
[1] The vast majority of portals are abandoned, poorly maintained, seldom used, and better served by other kinds of pages.
[2] A very few portals (and things called portals that are not in portal space) are worth keeping.
Individual XfDs don't properly address #1. Nuking every single portal with no exceptions doesn't properly address #2. Leaving a few portals in portalspace will encourage the creation of new portals, bringing back the issues we are seeing now. Thus the final solution will almost certainly involve mass-deleting (or possibly fully protecting and marking as historical) the vast majority of portals and moving and/or renaming the few we decide to keep. --Guy Macon (talk) 13:57, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Where are you seeing this "strong consensus"? This discussion is ongoing and has yet to be closed. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:00, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I do not see anything that looks like a strong consensus, and if one considers the objections to the proposal and the middle of the road positions, it looks more like there is a lot more to the subject than simple summaries - there are a range of issues not even considered in the attempt at summarising.JarrahTree 14:03, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
By my count, there are currently 94 Support !votes and 61 Oppose !votes. --Guy Macon (talk) 14:13, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
WP:NOTAVOTE. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:14, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
...said everyone who was in the process of not getting their way in an RfC ever... --Guy Macon (talk) 20:39, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
As you have repeatedly admonished other users, Guy, please WP:AGF. - dcljr (talk) 22:20, 12 April 2018 (UTC) — Oh, and WP:CIVIL, while we're at it. - dcljr (talk) 23:48, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You appear to lack a clear understanding of what "good faith" means. WP:AGF does not mean "never disagree" or "never criticize". It is entirely possible -- I would even say common -- for someone to be acting in good faith and yet be wrong, as I believe that you were above. I am sure that you -- in good faith -- believe that !votes (please note the "!", which is shorthand for "not votes") do not count, but the actual policy says "While not forbidden, polls should be used with care. When polls are used, they should ordinarily be considered a means to help in determining consensus, but do not let them become your only determining factor." Now had I claimed that you are deliberately misstating our policy on !votes, I would have been assuming bad faith on your part. Recent examples of assuming bad faith in this discussion (not by you) include accusing other editors of "purposely driving off contributing editors" and claiming "this is a deliberate attempt to do an end run around our processes". So what I am saying is that I think that you are wrong, but I am not claiming that you knew that you were wrong and deliberately wrote something that you know to be untrue. In fact, I am not even claiming that you being wrong is an established fact, just that in my opinion the way you characterized NOTAVOTE is not supported by the actual text of that policy. So please stop accusing others of violating AGF when there is no evidence of any actual assumption of bad faith. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:26, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think the right wording here is Passive-aggressive behavior. You are telling editors to assume good faith (which is good) but at the same time accused me of adding toxic material to the above conversation along with a side remark about WP:NOTAVOTE which is how a lot of discussions end up resolved. I wont go further into this as we are going off topic here and recommend this discussion be hatted as unproductive. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:42, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I repeat, you should post calm, reasoned arguments supporting your position instead of accusing others of violating AGF when there is no evidence of any actual assumption of bad faith. Again I suggest that you study what the phrase "bad faith" means, with an emphasis on how it is entirely possible to add toxic comments and exhibit other undesirable behavior in good faith. By "toxic comment" I include glomming on to a legitimate comment posted to a user who unambiguously failed to assume good faith, engaging in a classic Tu quoque fallacy (again, no assumption of bad faith; I am assuming that you legitimately believe that your use of the tu quoque fallacy is something other than the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning), and accusing others of violating AGF when there is no evidence of any actual assumption of bad faith. Again, not every bad action is done in bad faith and not every criticism is an assumption of bad faith. I would also note that I am not the one who keeps bringing this up, and that if you stop making false accusations about me I will have no reason to respond. So just stop. Don't respond. Drop the stick. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:41, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Guy, please review all of your suggestions to other users regarding their behaviors in this discussion and then consider how you could apply them more consistently to yourself. - dcljr (talk) 23:01, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I must be incredibly dense, since it seems to me that "overview of" or "outline of" pages can just as easily be "abandoned, poorly maintained, [and] seldom used". Editors who have poured their time and energy into portals will simply pour their time and energy into "overview of" or "outline of" pages instead. The only differences are namespace and format. ―Mandruss ☎ 14:04, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
So you don't see any difference between a very small number of "overview of" or "outline of" pages and a huge number of Portal pages? No difference at all other than namespace and format? Try again. Can you think of anything --- anything at all -- that is different between "a dozen or so" and "many thousands"? --Guy Macon (talk) 14:13, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Of course I see that difference. How do you propose to maintain that difference for the long term? Are you proposing that editors should be prohibited from creating more "overview of" or "outline of" pages? Let's assume not, so we will have accomplished nothing in the long term. As I said, editors who have created, developed, and abandoned portals will simply create, develop, and abandon "overview of" or "outline of" pages.
If most portals are in fact "abandoned, poorly maintained, [and] seldom used", then take most portals to MfD or propose some one-off process to fast-path that one-time effort. After that, anybody can take an individual "abandoned, poorly maintained, [and] seldom used" portal to MfD. But I don't see the point in eliminating portals. ―Mandruss ☎ 14:44, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
...or your predictions regarding the future behavior of editors could turn out to be wrong. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:42, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Outline pages actually provide utility by linking relevant pages in a topic area. Portals don't really do that, and are not comparable Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:05, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Guy Macon: Are you really saying there are "a dozen or so" outlines and "many thousands" of portals? Someone in this discussion arrived at the figure of 1500 for the number of portals, while I get about 800 outlines using CatScan on Category:Wikipedia outlines. Of course, if some portals were converted to new outlines, the latter number would increase. RockMagnetist(talk) 21:48, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
OK, 1500, not many thousands. I misremembered. The number of existing outlines is irrelevant. Looking at the discussion above, it looks like we have a dozen or so (maybe even two dozen) portals that pretty much everyone thinks should be retained in some form -- possibly converted to outlines. --Guy Macon (talk) 01:52, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Because portals serve a different purpose than categories and the other navigation pages. Each portal is intended to be a "Main page" for its respective subject, with "topic tasters" (term coined by Nick Moyes) to sample the local intellectual fair. Portals are a place to sample the content of a subject the scope of which goes beyond a single article. For example, the subjects Mathematics and Geography have thousands of articles covering them. Portals dip into that coverage, like a magazine or themed website would. Bessy the Cow would not have a portal, because there'd be only one article about her. But, on many subjects, Wikipedia's coverage is immense. The best portals are dynamic and serve up a new dish every time you visit. Like the Main page.    — The Transhumanist   01:12, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Orderly decommissioning

I agree with the idea of decommissioning portals, but not mass-deleting them. And I think enthusiastic editors should be given alternative venues. Probably most portals can be decommissioned in short order, which would solve most the bad/obsolete content problem. The way I would handle this:

that tells editors they can keep the portal open if they remove the template, but that any portals with the tag remaining after say, 7 days, will be merged into other pages and turned into a redirect.

I think decommissioning of individual dead portals can be handled by groups of interested editors as a normal part of editing, and doesn't really need the blessing of an RfC.

As for where all the stuff currently on portals should go, I'm happy to leave that up to the associated WikiProject or the editor doing the decommissioning, but in general, I would suggest:

In general, any page (like an outline or index) that only links to articles (as opposed to copying the intro), and doesn't have cntent that needs to be rotated to avoid looking stale (like "Did You Know" or news or "featured" content) is going to have a much harder time getting out of date. In general, I would only expect outlines to become out of date if Wikipedia articles on the subject are created or merged or deleted. I agree there's an argument to be made that outlines, like portals, are duplicative and not worth maintaining, and I think the answer there is to redirect them into the category system, which is much more automated. Personally, I work hard to keep the category system well-organized, because we need to have at least one topical organization scheme, and this seems like the most universally accepted and useful one at the moment. But that is a topic for another day. -- Beland (talk) 20:51, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What will replace portals are better portals. The new and improved Portals WikiProject is currently designing dynamic features that can be used to improve portals and the portal browsing experience. We've also been contacted by the German Wikipedia, which has pioneered some dynamic features in their portals. Things are looking very interesting at the skunk works that the Portals WikiProject has become. Check out its talk page and join in on the fun. Testers are needed!    — The Transhumanist   01:12, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Look at Nihonjoe (talk · contribs)'s Portal:Speculative fiction - He stated he designed that portal to be highly auotmated and needing very little work to maintain. WhisperToMe (talk) 23:19, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK, who has been canvassing?

This section led to a "reasonable explanation" on the issue. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:09, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.


When I see an RfC that starts out with overwhelming support and then suddenly gets hit with a bunch of oppose comments from editors who don't normally hang out at the village pumps, I begin to suspect that someone has been WP:CANVASSing. I could be wrong, of course. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:39, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

(yes, this is the same editor who has been posting "WP:AGF, Please" in response to other editors above). jcc (tea and biscuits) 21:05, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Not unreasonably, a notice has been placed on the talk pages of users who edit/maintain portals and on the portals themselves. That people who edit portals are now turning-up to have their say suggests that there may be some who feel portals might be worth keeping.--DavidCane (talk) 21:08, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
And it was properly advertised yesterday at Wikipedia:Portal. --NeilN talk to me 21:11, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I just found out about this today, because it showed up on a portal that is on my watchlist: [5]. I think portals are being properly tagged, and editors who watch those portals are just finding out now. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:36, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Me too. Predictably, the oppose votes started when the authors of the content being discussed found out about the proposal. Certes (talk) 11:50, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I have to agree with Jcc, Guy you throw up WP:AGF tags above then you post something like this here? Canvassing is something you either have evidence for or you don't... - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 23:40, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You can make all the snarky comments regarding a legitimate question about possible canvassing you want, but accusing other editors of "purposely driving off contributing editors" is not allowed here and I will not stop asking anyone who does such a thing to please stop. I suggest that you drop the stick now, because nothing you say will ever stop me from asking editors to AGF when they clearly fail to do so. --Guy Macon (talk) 01:58, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Well other editors have done the same to you so I guess both sides are at fault. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:20, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Guy Macon: the "overwhelming support" that this started out with was apparently due to many users commenting early on who had already extensively discussed this issue in the past (and who all agreed that portals were a bad idea). As pointed out by others, it was only as knowledge about this RFC spread (especially as the portals themselves got notified, which I see as entirely appropriate) that significant opposition started to be expressed. This is why in my !vote above I mentioned (echoing several other users) that this RFC had been poorly handled from the beginning. Remember that only a small proportion of WP users regularly check the Village Pump(s) or any other particular centralized discussion space, so (for this and other reasons) it was appropriate to post notices on the very pages whose existence was being discussed. (As for posting to individual users' pages, that seems to be in line with notifying the authors of pages nominated for deletion, so as long as the wording was neutral, I don't see a problem with that.) - dcljr (talk) 22:46, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
BTW, that being said, I am not claiming that no canvassing has occurred, as it clearly has (I will not link to any particular examples so as not to further stigmatize the offending users, who have already been admonished). I'm just not sure it has made any noticeable difference in the overall direction this discussion has taken. - dcljr (talk) 23:05, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds like a reasonable explanation. Thanks! --Guy Macon (talk) 00:26, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm glad there's recognition that communicating with all the 1500+ Portals potentially to be affected is reasonable and appropriate. It clearly meets the first bullet point in WP:APPNOTE. But so would communicating to all the WikiProject Talk pages as they, too, "...have interest in the topic under discussion" as they are already being lined up by supporters here to take over content responsibility if this RfC goes through. Who will ensure this will happen? Nick Moyes (talk) 00:53, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It might be better to think about how to do it with the least amount of effort. Let's see... 1) You could make a list of all portals, and then regex convert the names to WikiProject names. 2) Then you make a list of all WikiProjects. 3) Then you use the list compare feature on AWB to produce all the names that are on list 2 that are also on list 1. That won't give you all the WikiProjects corresponding to portals, but it should give you most of them. 4) Then you feed the resultant list into AWB and prepend a notice to each. 5 You may need to do a second pass, to regex a name marker for the portal to the portal name in the notice.     — The Transhumanist    06:26, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Alternative why not merge Portals with their respective Wikiproject? It seems sort of the same thing... --Railfan01 (talk) 20:06, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No there’s no need to advertise this more than it has been already. There is no way anyone closing would consider deletion and in fact there’s likely at this stage to be no consensus because of the polarised views. Aiken D 10:41, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Summary: Basically, nobody. Please Assume good faith.    — The Transhumanist   21:59, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Notification of WikiProjects

Before we proceed any further, we should ensure that all the relevant WikiProjects are informed as they are usually responsible for maintaining the portals and many use the portals inter alia to helps identify, improve and create new articles. --Bermicourt (talk) 18:03, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There's no practical way to halt the proceedings. People will post their opinions as they show up. Notifying the corresponding WikiProjects is time consuming, as you'll have to identify each one individually. I know of no automatic way to do this.     — The Transhumanist    05:25, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
User:Bermicourt do you have any evidence that Wikiprojects really use Portals to "identify, improve and create new articles?" I've never seen any Wikiproject do any such thing, but I'm not looking at every wikiproject. Legacypac (talk) 05:44, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I have, but how would anyone know who else does? I don't think it could be recorded anywhere. I do agree that WikiProjects are interested and affected parties and therefore must be notified. Is there not a WikiProjects page that lists all the projects or a category that a bot could work through? · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 08:05, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Transhumanist. I'm saying let's notify the WikiProjects - who are key players in this - as soon as possible on their talk pages. Not to do so would be irresponsible. Interestingly I've just seen notices under 'Article alerts' on some project pages, but they've been added in such a way that watching editors aren't notified. Is that a way of saying we've notified people, but in a clandestine way that they mostly wouldn't notice, I wonder? Clever.
@Legacypac. I'm not listing all the projects here, you can check them out yourself. But as a member of several projects, I can tell you that's how they're used. But just to offer two random examples, WP:WikiProject Geography, part of their aim is the "development the navigation aids dedicated to geography" and then lists "Geography-related portals" as one of their navigational aids. Later on participants are referred to Portal:Geography to improve the scope of geography articles. WP:WikiProject United States declares as its aim that "this project was formed to coordinate the development of United States related articles and help maintain the United States Portal."!!! Bermicourt (talk) 08:41, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No see my comment above. Not only is there no consensus for change, WikiProjects are very similar to portals in terms of activity and ability anyway, and unless you go around Wikipedia with your eyes closed there’s no way you’ll miss this RfC with the amount of places it’s been advertised. Aiken D 10:45, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Au contraire. Portals and WikiProjects are complementary; they support one another. Of course, both projects and portals need to be maintained, but no-ones suggesting we delete all projects just because some have become inactive or ineffective for a season. --Bermicourt (talk) 16:05, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I believe that the argument (and it is a good one) is that some wikiprojects are abandoned and/or useless but that most portals are abandoned and/or useless. Thus any solution to the useless wikiproject problem will have to be more nuanced than thye "nuke them all, move the dozen or so that are useful" solution to the useless portal problem being proposed here. --Guy Macon (talk) 19:15, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
While you are entitled to your opinion User:LightandDark2000 you are not entitled to your own facts. Removing portals is hardly a new idea - it's been discussed for years in varioius places including a page started by User:SmokeyJoe and every time a portal is brought to MfD. There is nothing DISRUPTIVE about a well attended RFC that when closed, I hope will end a 13ish year old experiment that many believe has failed. Comparing deletion of new pages under development to old low traffic portals is not a very valid comparison. Legacypac (talk) 19:24, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
These are not "my facts." The facts I presented are quite objective, only the analysis I used to back up my arguments are "my own." By the way, all of our various arguments are largely our own opinions, including what you just said. Declaring that the portals are a "failed" project is subjective in itself - it's quite debatable. The portals probably need to be overhauled, but that's definitely not reason enough to just delete them outright. We can't go around using WP:IDONTLIKEIT, WP:THEYDONTLIKEIT, WP:NOBODYREADSIT, WP:NEGLECT, or any such rationale as grounds for deletion. I believe that marking up old/archaic portals as "historic" and/or a major overhaul of the portal system would be much more appropriate as opposed to simply deleting them all. By the way, the portals are still very much a work in progress, especially those that are frequently being used or maintained. Another thing to note, we still need to assume good faith in this discussion, instead of attacking other editors or their opinions. LightandDark2000 (talk) 19:33, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note I was responding to your various recent comments all at once. Legacypac (talk) 19:52, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding this survey

The discussion in this section was mooted when the RfC was moved to this subpage to stand alone.--John Cline (talk) 13:09, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

It seems that this RfC will become "one for the ages", and that it would serve much better, in such a role, if it were published as a stand alone project page and transcluded here. It's not too late, or too hard to accomplish, and it needn't be rushed. If no one objects, I am inclined to see it through. If others agree, please suggest a few page names for consideration. Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 07:56, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Concerning gathering the names of relevant WikiProjects, and posting to them, using AWB and an editor... 1) You could make a list of all portals, and then regex convert the names to WikiProject names. 2) Then you make a list of all WikiProjects. 3) Then you use the list compare feature on AWB to produce all the names that are on list 2 that are also on list 1. That won't give you all the WikiProjects corresponding to portals, but it should give you most of them. 4) Then you feed the resultant list into AWB and prepend a notice to each. 5) You may need to do a second pass, to regex a name marker for the portal to the portal name in the notice.    — The Transhumanist   13:12, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
"[This RfC] would serve much better, in such a role, if it were published as a stand alone project page and transcluded here"
Actually, I think that all Village pump discussions should be published with that format. --NaBUru38 (talk) 14:11, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@John Cline: – excellent idea, please do. I would suggest something like Wikipedia:Consultation on the future of portals.--Newbiepedian (talk · contribs · X! · logs) 22:54, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Mobile view and portals

The portal links are not visible in mobile mode. Instead of portals and other hand-curated navigational tools, the mobile versions have a fully automated "related articles" section (usually showing pages you are not interested in). If that valuable space could be given to portal links (or other human-curated navigation aids) instead of this gimmick, we would probably see a lot more portal views. In any case, if portals are kept, we should make them more visible in mobile mode, and encourage improving their layout to look better in mobile. BTW the Android app is an especially horrible way to view portals, as it seems to have its own ideas how to use image resizing to make everything look bad. —Kusma (t·c) 14:00, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, at the Spanish-language Wikipedia I have converted several portals to make them screen size responsive. For example in Portal:Fútbol, if the desktop browser window is narrow, the two columns merge into one. The mobile version of the page appears as one column. --NaBUru38 (talk) 14:17, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That works here too, at least for Portal:Germany. What I am missing is links TO the portals in mobile mode. —Kusma (t·c) 16:28, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
More links is not the answer. Take Portal:Bacon which has just 1300 views in the last 30 days. [6] even though it's got nearly 1000 inbound links [7] Bacon alone has over 49,000 views [8] in the last 30 days. Editor interest is damning too. Portal:Bacon has less than 30 watchers (ie so low the system will not tell us) while Bacon has 389 watchers 29 of which have checked recent edits. Legacypac (talk) 07:39, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think the number of links is a problem as much as their lack of visibility. Portal links are very unobtrusive, and have to compete with the millions of reference links a typical article has these days. —Kusma (t·c) 14:35, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Afterwards

Assuming this proposal passes, I would think the Portal:Contents, Portal:Current events and two portals not in Portal namespace, Main Page and WP: Community portal would remain. If all other portals are deprecated pending later deletion; I should think that the Main Page should be moved into the cleared out PORTALspace, and the Community Portal as well. Also, all OUTLINEs should be moved into PORTALspace to replace all the portals, since they are if anything the same thing in a different format. And all INDEX pages should also be moved to the empty PORTALspace. "PORTAL" would then be our navigational pages namespace. -- 70.51.203.56 (talk) 06:57, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Alternative solution

As aforementioned several times in this discussion, portals could be merged into their respective Wikiprojects in order to simplify maintenance of pages and address both editors, members of the project and readers. Useless information shall be removed in both, but the Wikiprojects' main pages should be adapted for navigation. This shall gather members of a project, editors and readers (potential editors) in a common aim: to improve articles of a project and a theme and contribute with sources, their knowledge and more. At this stage, I am just proposing this action --Railfan01 (talk) 08:46, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I see that as a solution in name only... I'm not involved in "every" project nor "every" portal... but the projects I am involved in that have portals are maintained by enthusiastic editors on those projects already. This seems to be nothing more than a page move from PORTAL: to WIKIPROJECT:... am I correct?--Paul McDonald (talk) 01:01, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Paulmcdonald: I perfectly understand that portals aren't abandoned by editors everywhere — and this is good news as it benefits to the encyclopedia − but it seems reasonable to me to reduce maintenance and, supposing that readers are potential editors, to make the Wikiprojects' main page as a navigation tool for readers and an opportunity for the readers to contribute in their domain if interested, and improve articles if willing. The Wikiprojects' main page could be a place for navigation and and editing in a same subject. Concerning the nature of this proposition, I think it should be made by merging Portals into Wikiprojects. --Railfan01 (talk) 18:41, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think you'll find that's already done. There's a WikiProject page for those interested in editing and contributing, and a WikiPortal page for those interested in research and reading. It would not make sense to have the same page serve the purpose to reach both. For example, Wikipedia:WikiProject College football is a place for editors and Portal:College football is a place for readers. While I grant there is at least in this project and likely many others a significant amount of cross-over (both readers and editors) I don't see how it could help the encyclopedia to have the same place for both. If a project wants to make a portal, then let the project make the portal. If they don't maintain the portal then someone can propose it be deleted and then we can discuss it like we do everything else.--Paul McDonald (talk) 21:17, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Paulmcdonald: In some cases, the Portals are well maintained by editors. This means that, instead of deleting ALL portals, which I think is not beneficial to the encyclopedia, moving the least maintained Portals and creating a redirect may be beneficial to navigation, to bring the portals closer to their Wikiproject. Thus, I understand that the solution I proposed is not to be used in every situation. --Railfan01 (talk) 06:35, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It may be possible to consolidate some portals where there is overlap or the topic range of one is a subset of the other. Fewer portals would reduce the workload of updating, and more obscure portals might become more useful and get used more often. · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 07:03, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. Portals are content pages, not back office pages. --NaBUru38 (talk) 16:09, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I don' t understand. If all portals a very well cared of, why is this discussion even here? I proposed this to avoid deletion --Railfan01 (talk) 21:13, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

First portal bot request submitted

See Wikipedia:Bot requests#Bot needed for updating introduction section of portals.    — The Transhumanist   04:11, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is not a social network!

I just noted two comments among those who are against the deletion of portals. One complains that the deletion would "annoy a lot of volunteers"; the other one says that a portal "also acts as a place to find people that has same interest as you". It seems that many put users' personal whims before the project of Wikipedia, which is to build a good-written and sourced encyclopedia, and they interpret Wikipedia as a sort of social network. This is very discouraging. Portals may have contributed to this, and this is another reason for their total elimination.--2.37.216.231 (talk) 13:47, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It is more likely that WikiProjects contribute to and reinforce social network aspects of Wikipedia. I suspect people are confusing WikiProjects and Portals in some of the above !votes. The best portals are those that have a large listing of featured (and good articles) to showcase to readers. Plus editors willing to do a little bit of maintenance now and again. One thing that might rejuvenate portals is to have them featured on the main page. Much like featured lists are. Though that would require resurrecting the featured portals process.
I do also get a sense in this discussion that some people who prefer outlines and indexes would like to see these replace portals. But they are different things. It all reminds me a bit of the sometimes uneasy relationship between lists, categories and navboxes, as described at Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigation templates. Portals are essentially a form of navbox, with images and more of a structured layout.
Regarding the history, it is worth reading the views expressed 12 years ago in 2005 at Wikipedia talk:Portal/Archive 1. The first section there is particularly ironic in light of this discussion:

Anybody willing to make a Computer Science wikiportal? :) [...] I could make it but someone would have to maintain it... [...] As with anything else here, if you build it, they will come. (February 2005)

Carcharoth (talk) 14:43, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I find it rather discouraging that some people seem believe you can build a good written and sourced encyclopedia without happy authors and social interaction (and providing space for that). Similarly odd seems the notion that portals would be an obstacle to well written and sourced encyclopedia. There is nothing wrong with allowing voluntary authors some whim if that serves to retain them and foster (needed) social interaction as long as it doesn't impair the project goals.
To put it this way the notion that Wikipedia is not a social network as well and the encyclopedia can be build without without providing a social network on the side seems rather outlandish to me and completely ignores human nature. Wikipedia doesn't differ from facebook & co by not being a social network but by being a very particular social network with a rather specific goal (creating an encyclopedia).--Kmhkmh (talk) 15:27, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly second what Kmhkmh said; people are not robots! WhisperToMe (talk) 23:02, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed it is a distinct question. Our great mish-mosh of talk pages of editors and articles, village pumps, wikiprojects and other fora indeed work as a social network with a narrow focus on helping the encyclopedia. The network operates badly due to trying to apply encyclopedia software for the purpose. That's why we have all this silliness about four tildes and outdent and ping templates and do we alternate between your talk page and mine or do it all on mine. And yes, portals are a small part of the social network. I'm on the side that says they do so little, that our needlessly complex social network ought to be slightly simplified by transferring their good work, such as it is, to Wikiprojects. Jim.henderson (talk) 15:19, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia can never be a complete non-social network as it is also a collaborative encyclopedia. Editors communicate and work together to get articles improved, and discuss ways to make this place better. This is still social communication... - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:42, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The comments by IP:2.37.216.231 are clueless (which is rather obvious by the WP:SHOUTING). The portals are for readers, and they are read (although some think they should be read more), not to mention, editors are readers, too. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:45, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Portals do not include links or profiles of users (not the ones I'm aware of, anyway), so they are not meant to help finding users about some topic. That doesn't mean that a resourceful user can't use them for that purpose (the editors of "Portal:Foo" are likely interested in Foo), but that also applies for article history, wikiprojects, certain templates, good and featured article discussions, etc. Cambalachero (talk) 02:34, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Just a note to point out that Wikiprojects "also act as a place to find people that has same interest as you". There is nothing wrong with that and "no" they are not a social network either. MarnetteD|Talk 02:52, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
"The best portals are those that have a large listing of featured (and good articles) to showcase to readers"
Portals are not lists. They are multimedia pages, with article snippets, interesting facts, images, calendars, etc. --NaBUru38 (talk) 16:11, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The IP's comments are very discouraging. Users are supposed to interact with one another positively, not ensure that there is no interaction between anyone. Nigos (t@lk • Contribs) 08:21, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion at a glance

I attempted to move this RfC in order to allow for a more structured discussion of the various points and counter-proposals raised. This was reverted and, on reflection, I understand that it wasn't my brightest ever idea, in light of certain implications I hadn't really considered. Anyway, I've revamped the page as a kind of assortment of snippets from the conversation that appear most salient to bring to the attention of anyone joining the discussion at this stage. This can be found at WP:FPORTALS (no pun intended).--Newbiepedian (talk · C · X! · L) 05:32, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Right now this discussion is all over the place, I see no practical replacement proposals here nor do I see a centralized discussion on what the aftermath would be. I hope this is closed sooner rather than later as too broad so that we can dissect the responses here to come up with solutions. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:15, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
At this point, I'm concerned how it can be properly closed when the time comes. I shudder to think that one person will be tasked with determining consensus on this. Could it be closed by committee?--Paul McDonald (talk) 21:18, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Seems a good way to go about this would be to announce the discussion will be closed at a certain time and the responses reviewed afterward and another discussion will then take place at a set time about only the content of the responses that proposed changes to the current system along with maybe an overview or summary of the support and opposition. This will permit the list to shrink because a lot of people will have proposed the same thing in slightly different wording. At the next discussion, boil down the proposed changes until something workable emerges. Repeat as necessary. 66.76.14.92 (talk) 01:21, 17 April 2018 (UTC) @Newbiepedian:@Knowledgekid87:@Paulmcdonald:[reply]
Agree with "locking" the discussion at some point (perhaps May 8th, one month after it was opened?) and then multiple admins taking a significant amount of time to digest the various arguments put forth. I don't know if this has been done before ("closure by committee"), but given the sprawling nature of the discussion up to this point, surely a simple "this is the consensus" or "no consensus reached" kind of closure is not going to be sufficient. Whatever the outcome, I can't see how followup RFCs could not be required to clarify the path forward, so the emphasis in closing should be to create precise statements that could be discussed in one or more future RFCs. (Groan.) I support the idea of multiple admins being involved because (1) I'm not sure it's even possible at this point to get a single "disinterested" and "uninvolved" admin to even want to work on closing this, and (2) passions seem to be running high on "both sides", so having at least two admins involved who have already expressed opposite views on the proposal itself might help to alleviate fears that "one side" was being unfairly ignored or "misunderstood" in the closure process. In particular, then, I suggest that an admin who leans toward "support" should summarize the "support" arguments and one leaning toward "oppose" should summarize the "oppose" arguments, and then patterns of consensus in the larger discussion could be considered based on this shorter, more focused list of arguments, possibly with the help of one or more puportedly "neutral" admins. Of course, this process runs the risk of devolving into a long "admin-only" RFC, so everyone involved would have to be careful to limit themselves to summarizing and weighing the relevant arguments and not relitigating them. I do not envy whomever takes on this task. - dcljr (talk) 19:44, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

We're not getting rid of portals, are we?

Please share your opinion above under "6.1.2", "Section break - --> CONTINUE SURVEY HERE <--". - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:39, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Portals are a big part of Wikipedia. They always have been. Or at least for me. The site has remained visually the same since the first time I used it in 2010, and from my knowledge it was like that even before. Don't get rid of the portals.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Tin_Can (talk • contribs)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Test and transition

Portals provide a service, with over 16 million page view last 12 months for current events alone.

If the objective is to eliminate the name space a solution needs to be offered and a keep or discard seems an obsolete discussion.

Transitioning all "Portal" to name space "Template:PortalXXXX" could be one? Thought, comments queries.The Original Filfi (talk) 10:29, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

On a separate note, which may make the above harder, can the news pages port to wikinews? removes duplication of service, such that it is.The Original Filfi (talk) 10:41, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

!vote !tally


Really, in this discussion it is hardly worthwhile counting !votes headed "Support" or "Oppose", when there is such a wide variety of opinions in !votes of both types. You'd have to count all the permutations of Keep/delete/mark historic/move to another namespace vs. All/most/depending on page views/depending on frequency of editing/a few/none: Noyster (talk), 11:14, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]


Votes found, using CTRL+F, as of 05:32, 24 April 2018 (UTC): 265 "Support", 259 "Oppose". Seems to be quite divided.  Nixinova   T   C   05:32, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah but that doesn't factor in those who voted to support things like archiving rather than outright deletion. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:12, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, there is a large number who have something like Oppose delete, support reform etc. The base motion looks to be losing significantly - we might get actual consensus on no delete, the issues (and probably NC) come when the poor assessors consider whether we should take up archiving/historical etc.
Personally I think judging things like this can be so hard (particularly in terms on non-specific yes/no rulings) that it should be an aspect of the 'Crat tasks - have 2 of the 23 do the considering. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:55, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This hasn't been updated in 7 days. Is anyone going to count them? If not, I can later. Vermont (talk) 10:05, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
As of the end of April 24, it's approximately 156 supports vs 234 opposes (all variations included).    — The Transhumanist   13:01, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
My own count is within a few of The Transhumanist; as I did it manually, it is possible I missed one or two. I suspect that Nixinova's caught the words 'Support' and 'Oppose' from within the statements themselves, as well. Icarosaurvus (talk) 13:26, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Something needs to be done here

From the looks of things, it seems that there isn't consensus to outright delete the Portal namespace entirely. It does seem clear though that, regardless of the outcome of the discussion, it seems that things will have to change for Portals and some kind of reform needs to be done.

The question here is: what can be done to improve the Portal system? As has been mentioned several times above, automation may help on the activity end. However, while that would help the activity end, it won't necessarily solve the viewership issue. So my question is: what suggestions could be implemented to encourage Portal viewership? Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 04:14, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

True. In the French, Wikipedia, where Portals are quite used for navigation, more links direct to the portal. Indeed, Portal bar templates are more used and are often present at the bottom of pages, whereas in this wiki, Portal bars do rarely appear on pages. Other measures promoting portals and giving portal links may be used in order to repopularise Portals, including updating them regularly. --Railfan01 (talk) 07:03, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Responding to Railfan01's point, the usual guidance for placing portal links in articles on enwiki is to put them in the "See also" section of the article. But where there is no "See also" section - the case for the vast majority of articles - there's no agreed location for where to put ((portalpar)), so it's usually left off. WaggersTALK 14:38, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Narutolovehinata5 and Railfan01: There is no viewership issue. Portals are an internal feature of Wikipedia and they get their traffic from within Wikipedia, rather than from external search engines. Traffic has grown since the beginning of portals, and have remained fairly steady for the past few years, varying on a portal-by-portal basis. If and when portals get an upgrade to become more dynamic, that will likely inspire repeat visits, which will increase their traffic even more. To explore the traffic of the portals, try the Pageviews Analysis tool.
So, the solution is to revitalize the portals, and then we will likely have the Field of Dreams phenomenon: "If you build it, they will come."    — The Transhumanist   09:53, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
We should look at other language Wikipedias and figure out where portals work (and why) and where they don't. Then we'd have a hint of what we need to do. Whatever we do should include thinking about what things look like on mobile. —Kusma (t·c) 11:24, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe the Portal bars should be used differently, as an other bar over categories. Also, the possible viewership issue could be resolved by actualising and improving the portals constantly, not allowing stagnation.--Railfan01 (talk) 16:54, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, and regarding stagnation, I think automation is key. Automatically refreshing content and automatically selecting good/featured articles from related categories are both things that could be automated, and it seems the crux of the problem is with those two tasks. WaggersTALK 08:33, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, automatically refreshing content would help enormously. Phlar (talk) 22:14, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Phlar: Though some things can be automated on a portal, some others can't. for examples a 'recent events' section in a portal cannot be automated, because some stylistic manipulations need to be done on the events' formulation (synthetisation)--Railfan01 (talk) 07:24, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
But a News section can be automated through wikinews categories, for example Portal:Religion includes a News section that pulls content from Wikinews:Category:Religion. Of course, if the wikinews category content is stale, then the News section in the portal will also be stale, as is the case with Portal:Taiwan. Phlar (talk) 12:14, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I understand that French Wikipedia uses only portalbars, not the small links we more commonly use. Portalbars are more visible than our portal links. In both French and English, the standard place for portalbars is the foot of the article. Perhaps we should change our practice so that it's the same as French Wikipedia. Bahnfrend (talk) 16:02, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Bahnfrend: Good morning, It seems to me that the actual ((Portal bar)) template may have a few problems. Instead of enlarging as more portals are added as in French, the template squeezes everything in a line. This should also be fixed before using the template. --Railfan01 (talk) 07:34, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is asking the wrong question. "Portals not being viewed enough" is not a problem that inherently needs solving. What is the problem we are trying to solve? My guesses:

-- Beland (talk) 03:32, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Beland: I perfectly understand your point of view, but the original discussion said:

Portals are moribund. The lost their relevance about ten years ago, at least. For every portal, there is a parent article that does the job better. Rotating grabby stories and pictures are nice, but they are not in line with the purpose of Wikipedia. Instead, they are barely viewed content forking or WP:OR

, mentioning viewership as one of the issues with portals (see original text here --Railfan01 (talk) 07:28, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

To resolve possible viewership issues, I propose some portal of the day section on the main page--Railfan01 (talk) 20:41, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion of the Portal namespace entirely / International affairs

Wikipedia is an international projekt. IMHO it is impossible to decide about the deletion of the Portal namespace entirely here, because this would have effects on all international wiki-projects. Greet from Germany --Ｔｏｍ (talk) 09:37, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Each language wikipedia controls what namespaces it has as far as I know - that deletion would be just for the English Wikipedia. (e.g, some Wikipedias have a WikiProject namespace etc) Galobtter (pingó mió) 09:40, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry after having diskussed with you that There is no expiration date for consensus. at User_talk:Galobtter#Your_"nomination_for_deletion"_of_portals I get very careful reading your words accompanied with "as far as I know" or (did you check) "Not really." Portal:Contents and the history of consensuses might have been overseen. Regarding this this RFC could have matters of Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point. Sorry this is my own private feeling about it. I left a request to clarify history at talk:Tim Starling. Best --Ｔｏｍ (talk) 10:02, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The portal namespace exists on some wikis and not others, that won't change. --Nemo 16:15, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

tl;dr

This page is, at the time or writing, 480,473 bytes long. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:17, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I'm afraid I think this discussion has gotten too protracted to have any kind of coherent outcome besides "no consensus". Whoever closes this could probably try to skim through the discussion and identify some paradigms: what were the most common arguments, and what might be a better question for a more focused future discussion? But I don't see any consensus for a coherent action arising out of this mess. Mz7 (talk) 04:51, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
How about "Do not ever start deletion type discussions on the Village Pump"? —Kusma (t·c) 08:55, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah haha Galobtter (pingó mió) 10:05, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed, if you want to start long deletion type discussions take it to User talk:Jimbo Wales per WP:WWJD. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:15, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

From my attempt to read the discussion, it seems that the main complaint is that portals are often not complete or properly up-to-date. But - in general - neither goal is attainable. [No citation - but think of the difficulty of getting a full and accurate history of almost any interesting topic.] So if we back off from that, the question is "do the portals serve a purpose?". If they do, I suggest they should be kept. There can then be questions about how to improve them - and - possibly - what warnings/disclaimers to put on them to remind the users that they aren't complete or fully-up-to-date. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.112.153.203 (talk) 19:11, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This is a draft at summarizing this discussion. (I'm agnostic on the issue of Portals: while I've rarely used them, that is because I simply don't think about them.) I've read much of the discussion, & have found some good points & insights worth sifting out of this mass.

I'm certain I overlooked many equally valid or thoughtful points in this lengthy discussion. But I hope this will either assist another Admin in closing this discussion, or help to direct discussion towards a consensus. (Even if this proposal is rejected, or the discussion closed as "No consensus", more research needs to be done on this. Making our audience's work to find information easier is part of the job of writing an encyclopedia.) -- llywrch (talk) 18:00, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate the attempt to start to summarize the discussion, llywrch, but I'm a bit concerned about some of your statements that seem to be "editorializing" more than simply summarizing. In particular, you start out the first point with "what this discussion should address" and then describe one particular line of reasoning that was debated early on in the discussion. No single line of reasoning should be considered "what the discussion should address" in a proscriptive sense, and if you meant it more in a descriptive sense, then I disagree with the implication that it has not been addressed. And then your "seem to overlook" comments (both of them) strike me as somewhat… I don't know… irrelevant? Many commenters have mentioned that portals replicate (/contain summaries of) article content, and, indeed, that is a hallmark of the very idea of a portal. How is that something "those against removing Portals" have overlooked? Similarly, almost everyone who has commented about the Main Page, Portal:Current events, and/or Portal:Contents and its subpages, have acknowledged that they are very different from the rest of the portal pages, and should be exempted from deletion—in fact, that strikes me as the one thing about which any kind of true consensus has been arrived at: almost no one wants those to be covered by this RFC. So how is that something "those for removing Portals" have overlooked? Sorry for sounding so negative here. Like I said, I really do appreciate your taking the time and trouble to write up this summary. If you had phrased those particular items more "neutrally" as things that have been said, rather than seeming to make a "value judgment" about them, I probably wouldn't have bothered to comment. It just worries me to see these items in a summary from an admin when I know it's going to be an admin (at least one) who will have to close this RFC, potentially with a summary of the main points of consensus or lack thereof. - dcljr (talk) 09:17, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You are probably right about inadvertent my editorializing, @Dcljr:; however, my added comments were meant more as a teacher's comments on a paper she/he is grading. In closing this discussion, one can take one of 2 approaches: either count opinions as votes & decide the matter as a "yes", "no", or "no consensus"; or weigh the arguments & judge which arguments are the most persuasive. (Either approach has its strengths & weaknesses.) If I judge the arguments for their persuasive value, I will at least need to point out their weaknesses. And arguments on both sides have flaws.

I wish to state for the record I have no opinion about whether to keep or get rid of Portal pages. (I seem to have reached a point with Wikipedia where I have no strong opinion on matters like these any more, as long as decisions are reached in a rational & fair manner. I don't know if it's because I've been here so long & have become jaded, or that I've come to trust the process. Maybe a little of both.) If the rational result is that we keep them, that is good. If the rational result is that we get rid of them, that is also good. But in trying to understand which might be the better result, I can't help but bring my own opinions into the mix based in part on my own biases, but also based in part on my own 15 years of Wikipedia experience.

Now you are correct that the discussion can be seen as having moved from simply keeping/deleting Portal pages. This leads to a twofold problem: first is that if the discussion is no longer about that, then the RFC must be closed; the second is that there must be a new statement to start an RFC. Your response is the first acknowledgement that keeping/removing Portal pages is no longer the subject of this discussion.

As for my "neutrality"... One problem I kept encountering in this discussion is the lack of objective, productive facts. Over the years I have witnessed this disrupt several potential consensuses on matters. The present discussion began with more-or-less objective facts about page edits & page views, but then drifted off into less quantifiable matters such as these numbers prove that Portal pages have failed. By "fail", do we only mean that users no longer look at them, or can we properly infer Portal pages are not useful to readers? One must argue there is a connection between the two; maybe Portal pages are useful, but not used because they are not well known. Or maybe there is a connection between the two & I just cannot see it.

This leads one statement I made, which I believe is an example of the "editorializing" you object to -- "One point brought up is that we have little hard information about how our users go about finding the information in Wikipedia. (There are enough professionals in library sciences/information systems out there that I would expect some studies exist. However, despite trying to identify at least one off & on over the least 10 years, I haven't been able to identify any.)" (italicized for emphasis). I admit this touches on a hobbyhorse of mine: that the Foundation is far more eager to spend money on technological shiny objects than to spend it on studies that help contributors -- such as how information is best presented in reference works. We have no yardstick to measure if or how we are making it easy for readers to find the information in our pages, nor does it appear anyone at the Foundation is even aware of this issue. Without studies about this issue, we have no facts or expert opinion to properly argue whether keeping or removing Portal pages is the right thing to do. That should be the bedrock we build our arguments on, not the skill of individual Wikipedians at persuading each other -- which is how this RFC currently will be closed.

All of this is why I prefaced my summarizing of this discussion as a "first draft". I admit I have missed many important issues in this discussion, & admit the next to attempt to summarize it will modify what I wrote. But this discussion has skated over a number of important points that need to be considered. One is the lack of any real information about how reference works should be organized. And until those points are addressed, I suspect there will be no durable consensus on matters such as the value of Portal pages. -- llywrch (talk) 17:26, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the response. I think if I pressed this any more, we would just be going around in circles. Suffice it to say that I was not objecting to editorializing per se, but editorializing in a way that didn't seem to be justified based on the existing discussion as I see it. (That being said, I certainly have not read every single comment that has been made in this RFC, so I can't say my view of the discussion is in any way authoritative.) Regarding your "little hard information" comment, I did not, and do not, object to that at all. - dcljr (talk) 21:57, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
A last thought. Summarizing this discussion may be premature: people are still responding to the original proposal, meanwhile others are working on various solutions to save Portal pages. About the only closing decision that could be made, IMHO, is to close this RFC to further support/oppose votes & encourage interested parties to address the issue, "Since Portal pages will not be going away soon, what should we do now?" (At the least, doing that will save interested parties from slogging thru over half a million bytes of discussion.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:41, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia has content

As I keep following this discussion, I continue to come back to the essay WP:NOTHING, stating that Wikipedia is not about "Nothing" --it has to have content to exist. Sure, stuff gets deleted, but this proposal is just going way, way, way too far.--Paul McDonald (talk) 13:21, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing about this proposal changes the fact that "Wikipedia has content," is "not about 'Nothing'," and will continue to exist. -- ℜob C. alias ALAROB 22:56, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, if we remove all portals there will still be content--but this discussion is about taking out a lot of content because some editors don't use the pages where the content resides. It's a large step of bulk deletion and it still reminds me of the nothing argument.--Paul McDonald (talk) 06:16, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It may appear that way by the light of a burning straw man. -- ℜob C. alias ALAROB 15:34, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I could be wrong, but there's no reason to be uncivil about it.--Paul McDonald (talk) 16:03, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If it ain't broke don't fix it

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. There is no 'useless content' in an encyclopedia. Thus, some content, such as portals, may not be used by all, but is still part of the encyclopedia. The Portals are causing no problems. Everything can be improved. So why should we delete them? --Railfan01 (talk) 07:43, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

might as well comment here as anywhere. portals are curated pages, designed to introduce a reader to relevant content. this requires, and thus benefits from, a human editor that can make editorial decisions SEPARATE FROM ASSESSING NOTABILITY AND VERIFIABILITY. A portal editor is thus like a newspaper editor, who arranges the paper to fit their editorial preferences and knowledge. our main page is such a portal, highly formalized and rule bound, as is appropriate as its literally the face of wikipedia. other pages are good the same way a good newspaper editor help readers, or a good librarian or bookseller helps book seekers. removing any such curating function from WP reduces the potential quality of the project by a significant amount. failures of curation of such pages doesnt invalidate the concept. i maintain Portal:San Francisco Bay Area. if i leave it, i will simply mothball the "did you know" and "recent events" panels, and it will remain valid indefinitely. it reflects my editorial preferences, within WP guidelines (selected articles have either a high article rating or importance to the topic, etc). its my chance to be an editor in chief. if i do a poor job, the portal can go to someone else, i can of course share. The IDEA of curated content is vital to any knowledge base. museum curators make sense of museum contents. if a museum simply was a huge hall of objects, with new ones added at the end of the hall, with colored lines on the floor linking people to related displays, they would be much less user friendly. Portals have the potential to allow people to help people navigate, more so than navboxes (if done right, they dont provide context for what is most relevant or interesting), and of course projects, which readers should not be aware of at all (i thus oppose merging portals into projectd space)Mercurywoodrose (talk) 20:31, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Portals could be left as they are and well maintained by Portal editors, as well as updated and promoted throughout the encyclopedia.--Railfan01 (talk) 20:37, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Clearly, for some people it is broken. --Nemo 16:13, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Alternative Approach: Reduce Portal Maintenance

It's clear that a major driver behind this RfC is the poor state of some portals. This happens when the maintenance required exceeds the editor horsepower available. There is no issue with portals that are 'high maintenance' if they are well supported by a team of editors (usually from the relevant WikiProject). But if they are 'high maintenance' and few editors are helping, they fall into disrepair. The solution is not deletion, but reducing the maintenance level to match the resource as mentioned above by @Dough4872: @Jcc: @Railfan01: and @Paulmcdonald: amongst others.

There are ways to do this; let me name just one. Many portals have an 'article of the month' or 'image of the month'. Once created, they need to be refreshed monthly. If this is done manually, it won't be long before editors forget to do this. However, I came across a clever system on German Wikipedia that allows articles and images of the month to be created in advance and automatically uploaded. This means you can create them, say, a year ahead or even to just create 12 articles/images and put them into an annual loop. Of course the simplest solution is not to have weekly- or monthly-changing features on a portal, but just a link to the topic's main article.

Portals can be kept simple and low maintenance, yet still act as a great navigational aid for readers and invaluable tool for WikiProject teams. Bermicourt (talk) 14:19, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This was the case with Portal:Christianity. I myself improved the portal to show images in a dynamic style and not every month. This change can already be made on the english wikipedia.--Broter (talk) 15:39, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I think there are a lot of simple ideas for streamlining the curation and maintenance process. thanks for insisting we consider this area. i use lots of random functions i found at portals, to keep it fresh.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 20:33, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
+1 in germany we use bot-maintained-subpages for portal-sites. f.e. this to show new articles on de:Portal:Berlin Best --Ｔｏｍ (talk) 10:52, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Might it not be helpful to create a place editors could reference and view ways in which to reduce the high maintenance of portals? Also our thought has been editors need to be able notify wikipedia if they are no longer able to maintain a portal, and either canvas to obtain more help, notify of the reason that they temporarily may be unable to continue maintenance so they might in effect "vacation" and find an acceptable substitute editor within that time period, or indicate that they are permanently unable or uninterested in continuing--in which case a canvas could be made to find a new editor or editors. Then of course, if no one is interested in editing and maintaining a portal, then its content could be archived, in which case only a periodic review to remove outdated information or obselete links would be needed if an assessment determines the archival material is being widely used. Naturally, there needs to be clear and clearly stated definitions for whether a portal is popular or widely used. Then too, if a new editor for a popular archived previous portal does become available much later, then the archive exists for the basis of resetting up the portal. Oh, and in the case that it seems editing of portals is considered too complex for say an interested reader and viewer to become involved in maintaining their favorite portal, then could training or a training place or space be an acceptable solution? (or perhaps even a sort of internship with the current editor/editors or leaving editor?) Also as users/readers (which is probably evident by now) we do not find portals easy to even find. Certainly if we come to wikipedia through a search engine then we rarely encounter any link to a portal. Phones (android or otherwise) poorly support portals, and are increasingly the way users interact with internet including wikipedia, due to sizing issues which we see someone has stated are solvable (another item to be placed in the space to help editors). If we are using the wikipedia search then again we are rarely directed to relevant portals. In fact, most often to utilize portals we have to know they exist and then navigate to the main page or have to discover they exist by accessing the main page or find them through fan based pages. We also have to say that navigating to the main page is not the usual manner in which we or most readers we do know tend to use wikipedia, so perhaps more study needs to be done as to how accessible portals even are to readers and improvements made there. Please excuse me if these suggestions already exist or have been tried in the long course of this experiment with portals. And any misuse of terms is purely my own fault.(zionpegasus eagle in the city) As to the current dilemma that thousands of portals exist and many are poorly maintained or not currently maintained at all, then probably it would be easier for editors to contact wikipedia concerning their portal (I am suggesting editors be contacted) and then any editors that did not contact wikipedia, then wikipedia could contact them to determine if a portal is actively edited or needs to be archived. Or probably even easier, simply prominently post a notice of intent to archive by a certain date unless contacted by the editor/editors (and if the content is archived as opposed to deleted, then if a sole editor was on vacation or sick or something, then content for the portal would still be available). And naturally apart from that is the problem of portals which are never used (hopefully after access has been improved for readers.). No easy solutions there as editors might still be engaged but if no one is interested, then of course there is no reason to keep an unused portal. Also an active editor of an unused portal might not be interested in editing more widely used portals if he/she has no interest in other more widely popular topics. By the way our "vote" is to keep portals, but to address identified problems in more useful ways than complete (or really nearly complete) wholesale deletion or even importation elsewhere (because we do believe this will merely import the same problems in the long run). 67.140.143.169 (talk) 17:39, 26 April 2018 (UTC) zionpegasus eagle in the city and my brother mollusk43 67.140.143.169 (talk) 17:39, 26 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Possible massive loss of editors

I have committed myself to never edit wikipedia if all portals are deleted. I think many editors who have built or very much improved portals think the same. I am shocked at the disrespect which is shown at my work. I think many editors will leave wikipedia if all portals are deleted. There would be no value to our work anymore. Portals are an important gateway to transform readers into editors.--Broter (talk) 08:46, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah I can see a bunch of editors leaving if this were the outcome as broken morale is an issue. -Knowledgekid87 (talk) 03:04, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe so, but threats to leave have never been a valid reason to make or not make any particular decision. Furthermore, the deleting of people's hard work, though unfortunate and potentially morale-draining, is sometimes an outcome that occurs in deletion discussions. Again, it's not a valid argument I'm afraid.  — Amakuru (talk) 11:04, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It is not a deletion discussion, as all the arguments advanced fall under Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions and would be totally unacceptable in one. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 12:41, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The arguments to avoid in deletion discussions are for the most part arguments to avoid in any discussion.  — Amakuru (talk) 18:13, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Editor loss isn't really a factor. New blood could easily replace those who leave. Kirbanzo (talk) 18:46, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • It could? How many new editors do you think join Wikipedia for the long term? [9] - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 00:23, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have to agree with Knowledgekid. Knowledgekid, the number of new users listed there might also include vandals, socks, and what not. So the number of "REAL" new users coming to Wikipedia are most likely to be less than what is stated on the link that you provided. Aceing_Winter_Snows_Harsh_Cold (talk) 00:36, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wikipedia may lose some veteran editors, but as we know, new ones will replace them. As for me I will stay even if the portals are gone. Felicia (talk) 00:54, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • If someone leaves merely because of losing a portal page, they were most likely not prolific contributors in the first place, and/or did not care about Wikipedia's overall mission. If you are willing to abandon Wikipedia entirely because of such a decision, then perhaps you would have been pedantic while you were here. I can't honestly see that it would have such an impact.ZXCVBNM (TALK) 14:05, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would leave this site if Portals were scrapped, without question nor hesitation, and I don't believe I am pedantic at all. I have seen enough sites been subjected to terrible streamlining and ugly redesign the past few years.-Sıgehelmus (Tωlk) 18:58, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Felicia: What makes you so sure, that new editors will come? Are you not sad when veteran editors leave wikipedia?--Broter (talk) 16:48, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I just wanted to add that WP:FLOUNCE #1 is an essay, and #2 would usually apply to a single editor who wants to "ragequit". Its never good when you lose a massive amount of editors if this is the case here as it can take a long time for new ones to learn the ropes of Wikipedia and keep them interested. I wouldn't quit over the issue here but see it as a net loss for Wikipedia (unless you think something can be gained by getting rid of the portals). - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 16:55, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think it's fair to say that editors who have devoted lots of time to portals will have their enthusiasm for editing knocked by the removal of portals from mainspace. Some of the comments above are simply impolite about this. A much better approach would be to encourage this group of editors to transfer their talents to things like helping Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines, which serves a somewhat similar purpose for article navigation. Note that the [viewerships for outlines and portals are quite similar and both suffer from a lack of standard integration into the wider mainspace. There are definitely improvements to be made in reader navigation and I'd encourage anyone involved in Portals to start thinking about that more broadly, regardless of the outcome. SFB 17:31, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
In my view, portals and outlines are quite different and serve different purposes. Portals help discover content (in a somewhat unstructured and random way similar to the Main Page), while outlines provide systematic overviews (more similar to categories). I find outlines unimaginably dull and fairly pointless, while well-made portals are fun to look at every now and then (just like the Main Page is, which I never use for navigation, only to look at news and DYKs). Compare outline of literature with Portal:Literature and tell me whether you really think they have the same purpose. Back to the question of whether editors will leave: I would certainly consider deletion of Portal:Germany, which I wasted quite some time on back in 2006/7 as quite a kick in the teeth. It would probably make me even more grumpy and more opposed to the direction Wikipedia is going in than I already am. It certainly won't rekindle my enthusiasm. While this discussion isn't likely to end up recommending deletion of the portal space, the level of support for the proposal is rather depressing. It is great to see that at the same time, some people are trying to improve and revitalise the Portal space, a much more wiki response to "portals suck" than just deleting them all. —Kusma (t·c) 19:25, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm also considering leaving Wikipedia if portals are deleted and that is not meant as a threat, it is simply frustration at so much work being wasted. What will be next? All stubs? All lists? All settlements below 10,000 people? As for the comment that veteran editors will be easily replaced - that's wishful thinking. I've created over 5,000 articles, mostly translated from German. There just aren't that many out there with that level of effort and the translation skills. Since much of the criticism is around pageviews, portal quality and how long since someone last edited them, if we applied the same deletion criteria to the rest of mainspace; most of Wikipedia would disappear along with many, many editors. The answer is to improve the weaker portals, not mass delete them. This discussion has resulted in a big impetus already to do that. Bermicourt (talk) 18:44, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That's fair enough, and the point that portals are useful to some is I think a valid one, and why this proposal doesn't seem to be succeeding. That doesn't mean a threat to leave is a valid argument against the proposal though. Make an argument on the merits of the proposal, that's what's been done, and why it's been shown that portals are useful. But don't argue on the fact that people will leave alone. The community won't be blackmailed that way.  — Amakuru (talk) 18:52, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Comparison of portals to other navigational tools

In the case of Germany, the portal is much more viewed than the main category or the Outline page, see [10]. Is this typical? Does this mean we should delete outlines and categories instead?? —Kusma (t·c) 16:00, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Good point. And as I said above there are thousands of mainspace articles that don't have many views, aren't complete, haven't been edited in a while, etc. We don't delete them, we use WikiProjects and their associated portals to improve them. I've created dozens of articles based on the gaps that a portal indicates. Bermicourt (talk) 18:48, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Could kill Wikipedia

If the proposal counts for all portal pages, this will basically shoot this site in the foot. We'd be removing an organizational backbone that could have devastating effects. Also, if the current events page is deleted (as it is a portal), that sets precedence that ALL major and vital pages can be deleted - including the main page. So basically, deleting all portals - not just the useless ones - would basically kill this site. So I highly suggest we don't go through with the proposal, at least in full. Kirbanzo (talk) 18:43, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Kirbanzo: please don't open up new sections just to repeat or expand on things you have already said elsewhere. Try to place your comments in the most relevant already-existing section of discussion. Thanks. - dcljr (talk) 19:52, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I have seen some hyperbole here, but this has to take the cake (as a side note, the main page being deleted wouldn't affect the site much either; if you'd note, 99.99% of people come here for the articles) Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:25, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think main pages are expected on websites. Even if say most people come for individual articles, people will go "WTF" if they see a blank main page. Also it's good to know if there are significant numbers of editors thinking of quitting over decisions like this, because you'll know what the potential "cost" is of doing something. WhisperToMe (talk) 23:00, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • This was meant to show a worst-case scenario. Kirbanzo (talk) 15:35, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yet another alternate idea

This is clearly headed for a “no consensus” result. Although I supported the proposal, I can see that there are some people who are really passionate about portals and put a lot of work into them. I can also see that a large number of portals are neglected and unused. I would therefore propose an alternative solution:

  • We establish some sort of bar for what constitutes an “actively supported” portal, based on activity from before this discussion as every one has had some activity since this started
  • Any portal not meeting this bar for activity will be marked as historical but will not be deleted
  • Users who wish to revive any of the historical portals must achieve a consensus to do so at the village pump, as is already indicated on ((historical))

That’s it. If it looks like this is something people can get behind we can close up shop here and hold a new RFC to determine what the threshold of activity will be and get one of you automated tool wizards to figure out which portals qualify and which do not and tag all the inactive ones, and we’re done. I think this is a good middle road where we don’t pretend all portals are working and helpful, but don’t sweep them all under the rug when they are being supported and used. Beeblebrox (talk) 18:44, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]


  1. "Base on pre-RFC activity", it's not that I don't understand your reasoning, but the RFC might actually have rescued some portals, which might be lost if they were stopped and had to be re-authorised. While the RFC-provoked activity would slow the clearing of non-active portals, I don't think that is particularly bad (we've made it thus far), and comes with some negatives
  2. Obviously you left it open to be considered, but what are some early thoughts on "actively supported"? Is it (unique) views, edits, etc? And what level of such?
  3. Presumably a rotating 6 months would be a logical time period for this activity (whatever is agreed, in both category and scale) Nosebagbear (talk) 10:39, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
On the first point, I suppose we could change that to “edits discounting those directly related to this RFC.” On the other points, my goal here was to see if there is any interest at all in such an idea, and then have a follow-up RFC in the future to pound out the details. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:36, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That makes more sense, to discount adding the RFC notifications. I'd be interested in the RFC - although I have more interest in a RFC to discuss changes needed to improve portal usage & quality. The two are not mutually contradictory. Nosebagbear (talk) 10:02, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Extremely plausible alternative idea

Why not just merge projects and portals that are centered around a same or similar topic together. Many people are actually confused about the difference between a portal and a project. That is for new users. This would make things look a lot better as well as more organized. Aceing_Winter_Snows_Harsh_Cold (talk) 00:23, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Those who are confused probably aren't working on projects to improve Wikipedia. The project is a team of people working to promote and improve articles in a given area. They have a project page with largely administrative information on it, which is in Wikipedia (WP) space. By contrast, the portal acts both as a navigation aid and to promote interest in the topic in mainspace, but it also helps project teams to build a coherent set of articles around a topic and may flag up e.g. wanted articles, articles for improvement, featured or good articles.
That said, I think there is a variation on your idea, which definitely be worthwhile and that is to ensure every portal is clearly linked to a project that is committed to supporting it. Let's not have 'orphan' portals that no-one is responsible for. Bermicourt (talk) 18:58, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Aceing Winter Snows Harsh Cold: could you link to some examples (talk page discussion, other page edits) illustrating this confusion of which you speak? - dcljr (talk) 19:07, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Portal talk:Plants is full of threads from people asking questions that would be better answered at the WikiProject Plants. Since 2006, activity at Portal talk:War is largely unanswered questions that would've been quickly answered at WikiProject Military History. Same with Portal talk:Video games (although many of questions were reposted on the project). People are getting confused by Portal talk pages with few watchers. Plantdrew (talk) 22:59, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I see. Hmm. Seems to me, the same thing could be said of a lot of talk pages around WP. There is often a more general, better-watched talk/discussion page that users could appeal to (if they knew about / noticed it) to get their questions answered. Perhaps a concerted effort could be made to include warnings in portal talk pages pointing to other places where things could/should be discussed (especially non-portal-related things—Portal talk:Mathematics uses a "custom" messagebox for this purpose, although I'm not sure how effective it is). - dcljr (talk) 01:19, 26 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Categorizing in general

If there is a necessity for portals as a method of navigation then it is because of the poor quality of category tagging. Attempting to explore a subject through the category links is an exercise in frustration since they are ad hoc and often incomplete. Leaving it up to users alone to create a taxonomy of a field of knowledge - and surely that is what a category list is - has been a failure. It must be possible to apply the standards of basic formal ontology and categorize any given article automatically or at least have a set of criteria for categorization. With those criteria it might be possible to have other methods of navigation, such as graph databases. Twospoonfuls (εἰπέ μοι) 06:35, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK, folks, RFC about deleting the category namespace next! (Sorry, couldn't resist.) It's not that portals are necessary to navigate; it's just that some users like to use them that way. The state of the portals have nothing to do with categories. And, frankly, this RFC has nothing to do with categories, either. Finally: what comments are you responding to here? By segregating your comment into its own section, no one can tell why you are talking about this. - dcljr (talk) 08:00, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Portals WikiProject Update: Portals – The Next Generation is almost here

There's all this technology that has been added to Wikipedia and the software that runs it (MediaWiki) over the past few years that is just laying around not being used. We are finding resources, that we already have, that can rapidly solve our problems with portals. That is happening, as I write this...

There are three things we are currently working on over at the WikiProject to add to portals:

  1. Self-updating excerpts, that always match the article they were taken from, so that the excerpts never go stale or stray as a content fork.  Done This has been provided as a very easy-to-use template. The portal editors who have tried it so far are exclaiming that it makes portal maintenance and creation much easier. We are now looking into adding more parameters to allow editors to configure it in additional ways.
  2. A way to automatically select articles for display. The German Wikipedia uses extensive bot support for its portals, and it looks promising that something similar could be implemented here to power portal display boxes.
  3. Newsfeeds. Some portals here already have a type of newsfeed feature, so this looks promising too.

Installation has already started on some portals, and will soon be extended to most if not all portals. And, rather than a one-off maintenance pass that may never be repeated, this is an "installation" of portal "software" that runs on its own. Spot inspections of portals should be able to tell if they are working correctly. We will also be setting up a place where people can report malfunctions and problem portals. In addition to this, we have set up a watchlist at the WikiProject page to allow others to easily monitor all of portal space without having to load 150,000 pages into their watchlists. So you can watch and see all the fun we are having.

Not only will the components mentioned above help transform existing portals, they will help build new portals too. They are easier to use than manually copying and pasting text, which was the method being used before this.

I hope this boosts your spirits, as it has certainly raised ours. The level of excitement throughout the portals department is ecstatic.

Feel free to stop by and check out what we are all up to. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   04:25, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Would you like to see what is going on with portals?

View the watchlist (split into 4 parts) and click on Related changes in the sidebar menu.

It contains all the pages in the portal namespace.

Courtesy of the Portals WikiProject.    — The Transhumanist   13:58, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Portals WikiProject has been rebooted and is going strong

On April 17, WikiProject Portals was completely revamped.

On April 21, discussions and development were begun on the design of automated components.

On April 22, the first newsletter was sent out.

As of April 24, the WikiProject has 40 members, and has been growing daily.    — The Transhumanist   13:58, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Awesome, transhumanist. I think we should keep the idea of portals, and think about how some simple tools could a) provide a unified format that is easier to create + maintain, and b) help migrate old portals to the new format, and merge different unmaintained portals together into larger-granularity ones. – SJ + 03:37, 27 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Individual Portals Nominated for Deletion

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Legacypac (talk • contribs) 15:30, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yeah... this isn't helpful. There shouldnt be overlapping deletion discussions here so would go for Speedy Keep until this thing closes. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:01, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Comment:There is no reason to delete all portals because some are in a bad shape. The well built and/or well maintained portals can stay and the bad portals can be dealt with individually.--Broter (talk) 17:09, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, Knowledgekid87 is saying the same thing. - dcljr (talk) 20:01, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, I'm not sure I agree that individual MFDs for portals should not happen while this RFC is going on. I would oppose a mass MFD of, say, hundreds or thousands of portals, but 3 of them? That seems fine to me. - dcljr (talk) 20:08, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Legacypac (talk) 23:17, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: The overwhelming majority of portals which are here nominated are in Category:Portals under construction. They were never intended to be viewed by a large viewership.--Broter (talk) 14:35, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Should they be moved into draft space then, until completion? Kees08 (Talk) 04:42, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The 'Under Construction' tag isn't much of a defence; Quiditch, for example, was put together in a partially-completed state in 2014 and then let to rot. If it's an unfinished draft of a portal, it shouldn't be live like other portals. --PresN 12:10, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Each of the 5 portals nominated for deletion is as live as any other. Inappropraite canvasing has now occured by Transhumonist here [11] tonalert the editors he recently handpicked to work on saving portals. He is also trying to shut down the nominations as out of process. If - as many believe - many portals need to go, the ones nominated for deletion are a good start. No one can say they were no individually examined. Had they been moved to draft or built in draft they would have been G13'd long ago. Legacypac (talk) 13:27, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

[Note: The link in Legacypac's comment was referring to this, which has now been changed. - dcljr (talk) 20:10, 23 April 2018 (UTC)][reply]
That isn't inappropraite canvasing as the message is neutral. Do you have a problem with the "(active now!)" bit? It was placed there to draw attention to other editors for the ongoing discussions. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:34, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've changed the wording to the familiar "Article alerts" in wide usage. Will add the automated function to the WikiProject page when I have more time, though the ((WikiProject Portals)) templates are now in place.    — The Transhumanist   13:54, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This RfC is a deletion discussion, nominating all portals for deletion. It is inappropriate to be up for deletion in 2 places at once. It's double jeopardy. There's even 2 deletion discussion notices on those portals.    — The Transhumanist   13:54, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
There is actually no policy that forbids individual deletion discussions for certain pages while a discussion to abolish this kind of page altogether is ongoing. I, too, was intrigued by this argument at first but on closer look it is not convincing, as long as those MFDs are focused on the individual portals nominated and the amount of nominations themselves are not disrupting. Just avoid spillage from the RFC to the MFDs and focus on the individual portals' reasons for existing. After all, if the RFC ends in "keep portals", individual portals can still be deleted and if it ends in "delete portals", all those would have been deleted anyways. Regards SoWhy 17:01, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep in mind that there is also no policy that an individual page cannot be nominated twice at the same time at MfD either. It is simply not allowed. Due to double jeopardy (two chances to execute the defendant, I mean, delete the page). The WikiProject is working on solutions to improve all the portals, and now we are forced to explain those solutions in 6 places (currently, there are 5 MfDs on portals with substance), instead of just here at the RfC, where they all have been nominated for deletion. It's double jeopardy, through and through.    — The Transhumanist   01:18, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It's not really "double jeopardy" because there is no policy that says that a page that was kept once cannot be deleted after a new discussion. On Wikipedia, there are literally infinite chances for a page to be deleted. Also, if I started an RFC advocating the deletion of all BLPs and the ban on creating any new BLPs, would that really mean that for 30 days, no BLPs could be deleted using other processes? I know that this example is absurd but that's the point: The question whether a certain class of pages should exist in general has no bearing on whether individual pages should exist under current policy. Individual discussions should focus on individual problems. That said, such nominations should obviously not happen just because this RFC is possibly not going the way some people have expected it to go and waiting for this RFC to end before starting any more such discussions would be a good idea in terms of saving editors time and avoiding duplicate discussions. Regards SoWhy 09:16, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
And an RfD on Portal:Random Legacypac (talk) 16:52, 23 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Notability for Portal

An alternate solution to poorly maintained portal on narrow topics can be establishing “Notability” / Significance criteria for Portals which currently does not exist. Since WP strictly enforces notability criteria for articles, it only makes logical sense to have at least some minimum criteria for portals. There can be several approaches on how notability can be established, like:

  1. . The core portal topic must be at least a Level-3 Vital Article.
  2. . There must be minimum X number of Featured / Good articles that can be shown on the portal.
  3. . The portal must be a level 3 or 4 sub-portal of the portals linked to the main page.

Please feel free to add why this may or may not be a good idea, or any alternative thought on how the “Notability” / Significance criteria can be established. Arman (Talk) 04:53, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I agree to the idea in principle, but not in the specifics suggested above. Portals need to be understood as merely "Topic Overviews" or "Topic Tasters", and we should make them far more visible in Hatnotes, DAB pages, See Also and, especially, in Search results. As "Topic Tasters", they should exist only to introduce users to a broad subject area or theme at any level, and in a manner that single articles spectacularly fail to do. So, it's breadth and depth of subjects covered that is really important, not the current quality assessment of individual components. Have a minimum number of article linked from it, by all means, but do not require each to have a predetermined quality grading. This applies to Levels, too, I suspect. Portal:Mountain and Portal:Alps are at different levels, but they each serve as good, visual Topic Tasters to a very broad range of detailed content. Most importantly, they reach out and link sideways across other content at varying levels. So maybe judging Portals by that ability to link sideways is key here. As I'm not that familiar with the Wikipedia:Vital articles and their Levels, I can't offer more specific suggestions. But Portals are not Articles, so judging them by single article level doesn't seem appropriate. It's their function as a Topic Taster (and making them findable in the first place, and therefore functional) that should count towards an assessment of notability. If they don't give an overview across a wide range of subjects then they're probably not likely to be deemed noteworthy. Nick Moyes (talk) 08:24, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Although it's tempting, I'm not sure notability is the right criterion as it's quite subjective and will result in energy-sapping discussions. What is more critical is the willingness of WikiProject teams to commit to supporting one or more portals. That's pretty easy to assess. If they do, the portal should be well maintained and high quality. If they don't, it could be a candidate for deletion if the quality is poor. Bermicourt (talk) 19:04, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I very much like the suggestion to view portals as "topic taster" pages. I essentially agree with Bermicourt that quality should be enough as a measure whether we should keep or delete a portal -- for topics of fairly low notability (say, my local shopping mall) it will be really hard to make a halfway decent portal. But if somebody succeeds in creating an appealing and balanced portal, we don't gain by throwing it away. —Kusma (t·c) 19:19, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]


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