Wikisource:Portal guidelines

Image of Wikimedia Portals

Portals originated in the Polish and German Wikipedias. In early 2005, the concept was imported to the English Wikipedia and the first Wikiportals were established. Later that year, a special namespace (Portal:) was created for portals. The first portal on Wikisource seems to have been Portal:Speeches, which was created in December 2005. The migration of indices from the Wikisource namespace to the Portal namespace began in November 2010.

What is a Wikisource portal?

Portals are pages intended to serve as "main pages" for specific topics or areas. Portals may be associated with one or more WikiProjects; unlike WikiProjects, however, they are meant for both readers and editors of Wikisource. They should provide information, promote content and encourage contribution. Portals should be useful entry-points to Wikisource content for all readers and users.

In library terms, portals serve the function of a subject index. They also have some aspects of card catalogs, display cases, special collections and even simple bookshelves. The following are some different uses for portals:

• Subjects (based on the Library of Congress Classification). Example: Portal:Physics.
• Groups of works linked by a common feature. Example: Portal:National Archives and Records Administration Collection.
• Non-author people. People who have not authored any works themselves can be represented by a portal. Example: Portal:Joe Hooper.
  • These pages may move between the Portal and Author namespaces as more information becomes available.
• Corporate authors. Entities that are recorded as the author but are not real people. Example: Portal:NASA.
• Publishers. Example: Portal:Charles Scribner's Sons.

What goes into a portal?

Portals can contain a wide variety of content in order to fulfill their function. Material from any other namespace, as well as limited material from sister projects, can be included to give Wikisource users a complete overview of the subject.

One of the main roles of a portal on Wikisource is to index and organise a subject area for the benefit of everyone from new readers to experienced editors. Portals should bring together everything Wikisource has to offer about the subject.

A portal should list all of the available works in some way, with additions such as annotations if necessary. Red links can be used to show missing works as a guide to future additions to the library.^[1] The same goes for authors writing within the subject; relevant author pages can be linked to and listed as well.

Portals are more than just a list, which can be achieved more easily with categories. Portals provide more information and context for the items they contain than would be possible with a category. They can also be used to highlight certain works or authors, suggest ideas for work that needs to be done, explain Wikisource's policy or style, and more.

Portals also bring together:

1. Categories: The bottom-up identification of existing pages with topics. When adding categories to this section be sure to include the leading colon; a portal is about showing what is being categorized, and not about categorizing the portal itself.
2. Topics: The top-down structure that helps us to know the annotated relationships between its elements, and which, by the use of red links lets us know what is still missing.
3. Projects: The newsletters that tell us what is being done in a topic, what needs to be done, and which users are interested in it.

Classification of portals

See Help:Portal classification

All portals on Wikisource are classified within a locally-adapted version of the Library of Congress Classification system. This system is intended to make navigation within the portal space as simple as possible using a reliable and recognised classification system.

The classification is made up of a 2-3 letter call number, which is added as part of the {{portal header}}. This in turn adds standard links and categories to the portal to form a navigable and organised structure.

The top-level portal is Portal:Portals. There the 23 class-level portals on Wikisource, based on the 21 classes of the Library of Congress Classification system, that are linked to directly from Portal:Portals. All other portals come under the heading of one of these 23 portals. Finally, Portal:Index lists all portals on Wikisource.

How to create a portal

See Help:Portals

See also

• Help:Portals
• Help:Portal classification
• Wikisource:Portal classification system adaptation
• Portal:Portals
• Portal:Index

Notes

1. Where red links are used, they should be followed by a link to a source document (for example, a scanned copy in djvu format on the Internet Archive) to facilitate adding the work to Wikisource.