User talk:Aabernat

Hi Aabernat! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.

• The Wikipedia Adventure Start Page
• The Wikipedia Adventure Lounge
• The Teahouse new editor help space
• Wikipedia Help pages

-- 18:41, Sunday, April 8, 2018 (UTC)

Hi Aabernat! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.

• The Wikipedia Adventure Start Page
• The Wikipedia Adventure Lounge
• The Teahouse new editor help space
• Wikipedia Help pages

-- 20:19, Sunday, April 8, 2018 (UTC)

The Portals WikiProject has been rebooted.

You are invited to join, and participate in the effort to revitalize the Portal system.

There are sections on the WikiProject page dedicated to tasks (including WikiGnome tasks too), and areas on the talk page for discussing the improvement and automation of the various components of portals.

Many complaints have been lodged in the RfC to delete all portals, pointing out their various problems. They say that many portals are not maintained, or have fallen out of date, are useless, etc. Many of the !votes indicate that the editors who posted them simply don't believe in the potential of portals anymore.

It's time to change all that. Let's give them reasons to believe in portals, by revitalizing them.

The best response to a deletion nomination is to fix the page that was nominated. The further underway the effort is to improve portals by the time the RfC has run its course, the more of the reasons against portals will no longer apply. RfCs typically run 30 days. There are 19 days left in this one. Let's see how many portals we can update and improve before the RfC is closed, and beyond.

A healthy WikiProject dedicated to supporting and maintaining portals may be the strongest argument of all not to delete.

We may even surprise ourselves and exceed all expectations. Who knows what we will be able to accomplish in what may become the biggest Wikicollaboration in years.

Let's do this.

See ya at the WikiProject!

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   10:11, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The RfC discussion to eliminate portals was closed May 12, with the statement "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time." This was made possible because you and others came to the rescue. Thank you for speaking up.

By the way, the current issue of the Signpost features an article with interviews about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

I'd also like to let you know that the Portals WikiProject is working hard to make sure your support of portals was not in vain. Toward that end, we have been working diligently to innovate portals, while building, updating, upgrading, and maintaining them. The project has grown to 80 members so far, and has become a beehive of activity.

Our two main goals at this time are to automate portals (in terms of refreshing, rotating, and selecting content), and to develop a one-page model in order to make obsolete and eliminate most of the 150,000 subpages from the portal namespace by migrating their functions to the portal base pages, using technologies such as selective transclusion. Please feel free to join in on any of the many threads of development at the WikiProject's talk page, or just stop by to see how we are doing. If you have any questions about portals or portal development, that is the best place to ask them.

If you would like to keep abreast of developments on portals, keep in mind that the project's members receive updates on their talk pages. The updates are also posted here, for your convenience.

Again, we can't thank you enough for your support of portals, and we hope to make you proud of your decision. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   09:53, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

P.S.: if you reply to this message, please {{ping}} me. Thank you. -TT