User:Lurking shadow/PoG

This is a page that will be proposed to be a guideline for portals. It is not a current guideline. It is not finished. You may edit it unless I object. Please use the talkpage for additions or changes you or someone else identifies as problematic(including mine)

Portals are a functionality of wikipedia, using the portal namespace

Purpose

The primary purpose of portals is to give readers an overview about the well written articles being highly significant subtopics of the main article topic. The secondary purpose of portals is to give readers an overview about the very well written articles that are significantly connected to the main article topic.

Construction and maintenance

Construction stage

Preparations

If you want to create a portal, you need:

-2 people who are its initial maintainers(one of these can be you)

-A topic with a main article that is suitably large to be able to support a portal(Earth is the main article of a very large topic,Alpine Mastiff has no suitable subtopics and should not get any portal).

-a well written main article on that topic that is not a biography on living persons.

Construction

Do not link to your portal, anywhere, except for maintenance categories, deletion purposes, user talk pages, its talk page and a related project, during construction. Add a clearly visible notice to the top of the page that it is under construction and not yet suitable to be used.

Adding topics and recruitment

You will want to add the most important subtopics prominently. However, before adding these subtopics, ensure that they are either good articles, featured articles, or articles you personally checked for accuracy and WP:NPOV. If these articles aren't in good shape, please improve them to an acceptable state before adding them. You will want to show the really good articles(FA, GA) in that topic. However, take due care that this selection does not create inaccurate assumptions about the topic(e.g. Portal Africa only or mainly including featured articles connected to Ghana in their selection) You may give a small notice on your portal that people are welcome to help as maintainers, including in a WikiProject associated with the portal.

Maintainers

Add the maintainers to a maintainers list on the talk page. Do NOT add someone to that list without their consent. Everyone who is in the maintainers list and everyone who edited the portal the last 30 days counts as maintainer. Everyone who didn't edit for the last two months, or for the last three months within the article topic(including drafts and the portal), can be removed from the list.

Activating the portal

If everything looks in order, you have two maintainers and the suitable topics are presented in an appropiate way, you may activate the portal. At this point you can add links to your portal.

Active portals

Active portals are visible. They largely need to be kept up to date(some more than others).

Resolving issues

As with any type of page, sometimes portals will not be in a form they should be. Apply the solutions below.

Fix it

If you can, fix the problem.

Add it to Portals needing maintainers

If the portal is in good shape but has no maintainers, add it to the list of these portals. A portal being in this list for more than three years should be deactivated unless there is consensus to keep it active.

Contact maintainers

Tell the maintainers that a part of their portal is in need of repair. If they don't react well, or in a timely manner, consider to nominate it for deactivation.

Deactivate the portal

If the portal is not in good shape, and you can't fix it well, or in an acceptable amount of time, propose to deactivate it by moving it to construction stage. This should be proposed at WP:MFD. Do not do this yourself. If the portal does not have maintainers, you may add it to a list of portals to be deactivated in seven days(after the notice). A portal with a badly written main article should be fully protected and deactivated.

Deletion

Some portals fail the basic criteria or are otherwise disruptive and have to be deleted:

- Anything that falls under the general speedy deletion criteria.

- Portals with a deleted or otherwise non-existant main article can be speedily deleted. Please check if the article was moved before deletion.

- Portals based on a main article that is a biography of a living person should be speedily deleted.

- Portals that were found to have an unsuitably low number of applicable connected topics, including subtopics(anything below 20 is definitely unsuitable, and better resolved by using links in the article), can be deleted and fully protected at WP:MFD.

- Portals that were subject to repeated disruptive attempts(by more than one editor) to bring them out of the construction phase(for example, by linking towards them outside of the expected places) may be deleted, and fully protected against recreation at MFD. In this case, people who wish to restart that portal must gain consensus to recreate first.