Latest comment: 6 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion
I am currently considering launching a project revival. If any of the old leadership is still active and willing or if any of the old members are active and willing to assist, please contact me on my talk page. I will leave this message here for a short while after which I will assume the project is essentially dead and will begin to make changes to attempt reviving it.
@The Novac: Hey there! I haven't been active in several years, but I happened to drive by on a whim, and was dismayed to find that the the project was dead. So, you're thinking about reviving it? What are your thoughts on its possible future? Best, Braincricket (talk) 06:10, 16 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I've removed the inactive news items on the main project page and made some updates on the other pages. Cleared the dust and whatnot. The Novac, are you still interested in reviving the project? I'll leave a note on your talk page just in case. ZettaComposer (talk) 17:45, 4 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
@ZettaComposer: If there is still an effort to revive the project I think we ought to spin up a Freenode IRC channel to help with coordinating drives and help project members meet to discuss the project etc.. Wi7less (talk) 21:56, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 5 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Hi,
Recently I tried to de-orphan a couple of pages by adding Wikilinks, but did not do it correctly so was asked by someone called Thibbs to join here. They were maiden attempts so I will appreciate if someone could help me do that correctly. I would do more such but currently, I want to rectify my errors so far. How do I de-orphan these pages - Asymmetric negotiation, The Dovetail Group and The Green Project.
Also, how do I apply to join this project group? Please help.
Hey @ScrappyYapper:! Thanks for your help. What Thibbs was telling you is correct. You were adding links fromAsymmetric negotiation to other pages, whereas the orphan tag asks you to add links from other pages to Asymmetric negotiation. An orphan tag tells editors that no one would ever be able to find their way to the Asymmetric negotiation page without searching for it directly, since it is not linked anywhere else. So to fix that, you would go to related pages that may discuss Asymmetric negotiation or be relevant to the topic, and then add links to the Asymmetric negotiation page. If you search for "Asymmetric negotiation" you can see that no other page uses those exact terms, and so you would need to find relevant places that you could add that phrase + link.
I would also note one other comment about some of your edits. Make sure that when you create links, they go directly to the page you want. For example, here you added a link on the word "American" that just takes you to the disambiguation page when what you really want is Americans, the page for people from the US. Additionally, be careful that you don't overlink by adding links to extremely common or basic words. For example, in this edit I would say that words like "tactics", "government" and "decade" are words that are generally understood in context, and should not be linked. Hope this helps! Nolelover (talk) 18:59, 1 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
Hi @TheBirdsShedTears: We used to run drives every couple of months, but that hasn't happened since 2015. Unfortunately this project is a little quiet at the moment, and I think part of it has to do with some confusion over what exactly "wikification" means. I don't have the time right now to reboot the project, so drives may not happen for a while unless you find other interested editors. Nole(chat·edits)03:38, 7 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
@GoingBatty: That's a good question. It's all relative to the overall number of articles a general topic has. For example, a portal about computer science, a topic with many articles, would likely need more links in articles leading to it compared to a topic that has an overall lesser article count, such as chocolate. Too few links scattered over too few articles would not ensure that readers see and have access to portal links. Also, major subtopics within a topic should have a portal link in articles, in my opinion, and the more complex and greater a topic is in scope would equate to more necessary links. Maybe I should try to come up with some sort of general ratios relative to topical scopes. North America100015:10, 22 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Northamerica1000: Thanks for your answer. If you can think of a way to identify which articles need portal links, I could try submitting a bot request for it. Maybe portal links should be added if the article is of "Top" or "High" importance in the associated WikiProject? Or maybe if the article is included in the associated top-level or second-level category? Lists like that would probably need to be vetted by a human first, and the bot would have to ensure not to add a portal link if one already exists in {{portal}} or {{portal bar}} or {{portal-inline}}. GoingBatty (talk) 16:42, 22 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
@GoingBatty: Those are exceptional ideas. Yes, top importance and high importance articles receiving the link would clearly be a precise way of going about matters. Likewise for adding portal links to the articles listed within the top- and second-levels of their respective categories. Some immediate notes include:
Regarding finding articles that need portal links, working backward using the Category:Portals needing placement of incoming links page can provide a guideline for portals that are lacking links to them in articles. Then, adding portal links to stated assessed and categorical articles could ensue. For example, using the "What links here" tool, one can see how many links in article namespace exist to various portals. For example, see Pages that link to "Portal:Wisconsin" in Article namespace. There are presently 222 links in article namespace to the portal, a low amount, and many of the links are presently in similar types of articles, such as geographical articles.
If the Portal template is in place, then a bot would need to add portal links within that
The same goes for the portalbar template
Per WP:SEEALSO, portal links are placed in the See also sections of articles
A trend with usage of the portalbar has been for its placement at the end of articles, although some articles utilize this in See also sections.
Pinging Certes to this discussion as well, who I've worked with off and on for a few years regarding such matters. I'm not adept at script writing, so I seek out assistance from others when the need arises. North America100018:22, 22 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
We might automatically generate lists of articles in which to consider placing links but there are pitfalls. Looking at the first portal in the category, Portal:2010s is in WikiProject Years and so is 1492, but that article clearly shouldn't link to that portal. WikiProject Twenty-Tens decade seems more discerning and does suggest some non-obvious but sensible places to put a link, such as Premiership of David Cameron. A first step might be to identify portal-project pairs which are closely linked in this way, but I don't think that information is stored anywhere. (It would be nice if 2010s were "vital portal class" for the 2010s project and "vaguely related portal class" for Years, but it's just "portal class" for both.) I wonder if we could start with articles which are in all of the portal's wikiprojects (i.e. their intersection) and don't already link to the portal. A Quarry query should be able to find those, or PetScan might even be able to manage it. Certes (talk) 19:12, 22 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
Here is a list of articles in the 2010s project which don't link to the portal. I don't expect we want links from all of them; how do we narrow the search further? Certes (talk) 19:27, 22 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
Here is a list which covers 120 of the 209 identified portals, specifically those where categories "Top-/High-importance [portal name] articles" exist. It lists 2352 top- and 15771 high-importance articles, so you may want to look only the top importance initially. Most portals with many top-importance articles are countries, notably Sri Lanka with 315. There is further scope for manually matching portals to categories in a way that can't be done automatically, e.g. Portal:Buses with Category:Top-importance bus transport articles. As always, these require manual checking: Certes (talk) 11:12, 23 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Certes and GoingBatty: I get the gist, but not seeing where in the 1492 article where the 2010s portal is linked. At Category:Portals needing placement of incoming links, yes the 2010s portal is listed first, but not seeing any links in the portal that link to the 1492 article or vice versa. What am I missing? Perhaps this is a fluke. I think we should go for it, and any minor complications or minor extant errors can be corrected as people go along. My guess is that the example directly above is an exception, rather than the norm, but I could be incorrect. Bottom line: portals need more links, and it is a pain in the ass in terms of time consumption to do it manually. More later, as I have become busy "in real life" lately. Money makes the world go 'round; and after all, Wikipedia is a hobby! I have to pay my ISP bill to maintain the hobby! North America100011:20, 23 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
I get it now. The script list you created had it there. What about just going gung-ho and auto-adding portal links to articles that are top and high ranked in their respective WikiProjects, along with doing so in the top and first subcategories? Let's do this thing! Fact is, portals sometimes don't receive page views because WP:READERS aren't aware of their existence, per the lack of links in articles. North America100012:23, 23 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
Even top-importance only is 2200 articles to edit (very few need multiple portals), which is rather high for a semi-automated AWB/JWB run. Some suggestions are obvious omissions: although its editors may have more urgent problems right now, Kyiv should surely link to Portal:Ukraine. Others have me questioning whether "importance" can be a one-way street and we're going the wrong way. For example, Desk is rated top-importance by WikiProject Journalism. Should it really link to Portal:Journalism, or might desks be more important to journalists than journalists are to the world of desks? Then we have a few projects such as Sri Lanka which hand out a "top importance" rating far more readily than most. We have the technology to do this but I'm not sure about consensus, especially in view of the strong negative reaction to my previous bulk addition of portal links three years ago. Certes (talk) 15:07, 23 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Certes Any list should go through a human review to remove articles that should not have the portal added. Would it make sense to have the discussion of any list at each portal's talk page to drive consensus? GoingBatty (talk) 15:13, 23 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Certes and GoingBatty: How about only working to get approval of articles assessed with GA- and FA-status? These articles have gone through a review process, so they're very likely to be assessed correctly and be associated with an appropriate WikiProject. After that, then only have articles within the top and secondary categories within a topical range relative to portals have portal links placed. Some articles will qualify for more than one portal link, and if this were to be implemented, GA- and FA-class articles with portal links already placed from the GA- and FA-run would have to be skipped. This all would be a heckuva lot easier than manually adding thousand of portal links one-by-one by hand.
However, using the script that Certes developed at Quarry looks very, very promising, particularly because it finds pages that lack portal links, and from there, sure, a human can manually double-check for entries that don't fit topically. North America100008:06, 24 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
We could easily filter the list for GAs and FAs. However, specialists have written plenty of good articles on less important topics, and sadly some important topics still have lower quality articles. If we want to start with a test run of fewer than 2000 pages, which I think is a jolly good idea. I've added a Quality column to quarry:query/63285. (Blank means below GA.) Its 18,123 suggestions (2531 Top, 15,772 High) include 206 FAs (42 Top, 164 High) and 628 GAs (118 Top, 510 High). Starting with the 42 Top FAs and perhaps 118 Top GAs might be sensible. Certes (talk) 12:16, 24 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
Yes, but unfortunately that biased travesty of an RfC is forming a consensus to hinder readers who want to find portals, not to help them. Certes (talk) 18:29, 7 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
