Wikipedia:Portal guidelines

This page outlines general guidelines and best practices for portals.

Please bear in mind that portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers. Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance.

It is common practice not to include references in portals. As on the Main Page, readers should be able to verify the portal content by following a prominent link to a relevant article, and checking the references there.

Before creating a portal, see and .

For the Selected article, Selected biography or other Selected content items, find a good number of articles, as many as you can, that could be showcased on the portal. Each of these articles should be:

^ Good number means about 20 articles, though this figure may vary from case to case and is intended as a rough guide rather than a hard principle.

The more often portals are updated, with fresh content, the more interesting they will be to readers and attract returning visitors. Some portals update the selected articles and pictures once a month. Others update them weekly, which is preferred. Other update schedules—ranging from once every few weeks to daily—are also sometimes used.

For example [[Selected picture/{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}]] would link to [[Selected picture/May 2006]] during May 2006. This link would automatically update to [[Selected picture/June 2006]] in June.

Knowing this, you can set up several of the Selected picture monthly subpages in advance. You can instead use the {{CURRENTWEEK}} variable to make the selected picture update weekly, rather than monthly.

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