Wikipedia is restructuring it's portals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Archived_debates/September_2019

Wikipedia contains of the mainpage, which has a large amount of traffic and from the main page the users are directed to subpages, called portals. There are portals about art, mathematics, physics and sports. Since around August 2019 there was a discussion started to delete all portals. Or to be more specific, all the 500 portals are discussed individual to keep them or delete them.

The reason for deletion is mostly the same. The page view of the portals is low, the last edit was made 5 years ago, and the interaction on the portal page is low. A similar concept to portals are wikiproject which are also subpages to coordinate the efforts about the same topic, for example about computer science. Some of the wikiprojects were deleted too, but it seems that the deletion energy is focussed first on portals.

The discussion can be described from a more abstract point of view. If the portals and wikiprojects are gone, where is the place to discuss about new articles, maintainance and peer review request? There is a place, called “request directory”. In that domain, all the domains (art, sport, science, film) are combined under a single page. That means, in the article request page, the different subjects are combined: mathematics has a subsection, literature has one and so forth. According to the pageviews, such maintenance pages are used very often by the users.

The deletion of the former portal pages is a major step in the development of Wikipedia. On the first look a portal make sense. It helps to combine different articles under a single page. The concept is comparable to a specialized library. That means, under the term “computing” only computer experts are discussing how to write content from that domain. So it's surprising that this concept has failed.

In the deletion debate, only the majority of users is pro deletion. In contrast to normal deletion debate the opposite opinion is very low. So the prediction is, that in 2020 all the other portals and perhaps the wikiprojects too gets deleted.

To understand how the meta section is working we have to take a look at the remaining Wikiproject computerscience, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computer_science

Right now, the Wikiproject wasn't deleted, so it's a good time to observe the idea behind it. SImilar to a portal, a Wikiproject aggregates the efforts for a single domain. It described how many high quality and low quality articles are available in the domain of computer science, and it has a to do list.

The to do list contains of sections for article request, cleanup, expand existing articles, infoboxes, photo request and stubs. There is a also a list of participants who have put their username into a list as an indicator that they are motivated to contribute to the wikiproject.

The perhaps most important part of the Wikiproject computerscience is the to do list which includes article request, cleanup and so on. The interesting point is, that every wikiproject has such a list. But the list is filtered by the domain. The more general idea is, to take a look at the Wikipedia wide general to do list, which contains the same categories and combines all the domains in a single page.

So we can say, that portals and wikiprojects are obsolete and will be replaced by the general to do list to maintain all the domains like computer science, sports, films and so on.

specialized library

How can it be, that in the year 2005 many hundred of portals were established in the WIkipedia and now the same community is motivated to delete all of them? It's about how to organize knowledge outside the Wikipedia project. Suppose, there is no Internet available and a classical library is used to create an article about a subject. In the university domain, a specialized library was the normal way in doing so. The advantage of a specialized library is, that it provides only a small number of books in a single building. This reduces the costs. It's possible to create a specialized library with printed books about a single topic for example computer science. The amount of journals, books and dissertations about this subject is small. It's possible to collect all of them and put them into the library.

This was the workmode before the Internet was invented. If somebody was interested in getting an overview about the topic or likes to create a new paper, he was going to a specialized library. This was without any doubt the motivation in 2005 to establish portal pages in the Wikipedia. It copies the well working principle from the offline world.

In 2019 the situation is different. Most information are stored online, and specialized printed libraries are under pressure. What the experts users in the university are doing to today is to visit a general library and use Internet for getting access to specialized papers. The same is true for Wikipedia users. Most of them are working with fulltext search engine to get the information they need. The most used entry page is not a specialized search engine for a certain domain, but a search engine works by entering the needed keyword. The same search engine allows to browse in different subjects. This makes a domain specific portal obsolete.

Expanding WIkipedia

In the self description, a portal provides an entry page for a domain, which is adressed to the readers, and a wikiproject is part of a portal to coordinate the effort of editors to improve the articles. The idea is, that it's not possible to coordinate the maintainance of all the 5 millions articles in the Wikipedia, so the task is split into domains likes art, history, science and music.

A large scale project is Wikiproject history, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_History SImilar to other other wikiproject it looks a bit inactive. But we are ignoring the low traffic and take a look what the self-understanding of the project is. The project goals are to improve the history articles in the Wikipedia by creating new ones, expanding old ones and improve the quality if needed. Also the goal is to serve as a central discussion point and to answer queries from the reference desk.

The interesting fact is, which kind of topic is offtopic at the history wikiproject. Everything outside the domain of history. That means, if somebody likes to expend an article about robotics he won't get help in the history project. This is logical but it explains what a possible bottleneck is. But let us go back to the goals. Create new articles and improve the quality of existing one is an important task in Wikipedia. It's not possible to ignore this goal but this would be equal to a failure of the Wikipedia in general. So the question is how to do this task more efficient?

The best way in doing so by formulating requests from the environment. That means, a user tries to find an article about a subject, is disappointed because the article is missing and then he formulates a request like “i need an article about topic abc. Please create one or explain to me, why the topic isn't available in WIkipedia”. There are two options how to handle such requests. One option is to focus on the subject or to focus on the request in general. A wikiproject is focus on the subject. That means, if a user formulates a request about a missing article from the subject history he has to ask the history section, and if he likes to read something about computer science, he has to go to a different wikiproject.

The more efficient way for interaction is a centralized request page, in which all the domains are combined. For doing so, the existing portals and wikiprojects have to be deleted, while the request directory should be improved and become more user friendly. A centralized request desk allows to improve all the articles in the Wikipedia.