Portal talk:Science and technology

Maintenance Notes

History:

• I first found that the page was virtually empty.
• I wanted to collect all the articles in this area, but there was no easy way.
• I checked past versions of Main page, Template:Editors talk, Wikinews:Workspace, some people's contribution history, etc. to gather articles. When I find an article in sci-tech area, I attached category:Science and technology so that I can later sort them out further.
• I then had to check geographical location, date, and review status in order to properly list them here.
• After that, it kind of became up to date. But I might have missed some.
• (I am afraid it will be quire difficult for others to do the same much later...)

Tomos 10:33, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Maintenance tasks:

• Find new articles in the area. This can be done easily with Special:Newpages. Right now, there are about 5 to 10 new articles created every day. So you can use Special:Recentchanges for this task, too.
• Categorize them (date, place, and subject area).
• List sci-tech articles here.
• Find articles that have gone through review. Mark them as reviewed. This cannot be done easily. The best way perhaps is to use Special:Recentchangeslinked (aka Related changes).

Current issues:

Just a list of issues. See below for discussions/explanations.

• Category definition - what exactly should this page include/exclude?
• Geographical categorization - when a news story has two or more relevant geographical locaions, how to list it on this page?
• Shortage of reviewer - a major bottleneck for the sci-tech is the lack of reviewers.

Future issues:

• Sub-categorization/ long-term sustainability.

Discussions

Category definition

Just so that I will remember... here are some articles I did not caregorize as "Science and technology," though some might.

• Blog declared Word of the Year
• Outgoing U.S. Congress takes parting jabs at wildlife protection
• Ongoing desert locust infestation threatens African food supply

Tomos 06:34, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Geographical categorization

Some news has more than one geographical location associated with it. One example is that a U.S. official make a statement at Buenos Aires about Kyoto Treaty (global warming). Where should this be classified? What if a multinational team of researchers presents finding on the internet?

(Tomos)

Shortage of reviewers

Help for a review seems to be important. Only a quarter of articles written reaches to the "reviewed" stage. This is not because of disputes or objections. Articles in politics and conflicts get a fair amount of disputes, but not much in sci-tech area. So some help on review would push more articles to the reviewed stage.

Tomos 10:33, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Subcategorization

Should there be a list by sub-categories such as info. science, space science, etc. on this page? This is tempting, but has a potential problem. If those sub-categories are not mutually exclusive but overlapping, then there will be the same problem with geographical locations.

(Tomos)

---

Categories

Why is this section organised by region? For science and technology it would make much more sense to use something like:

• Physics
• Chemistry
• Biology
• Earth Science
• Medicine
• Technology
• Mathematics
• Engineering

Categorising scientific breakthroughs by region rarely makes any sense... --Steinsky 15:34, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

In fact, I would sugest splitting science and technology up: science and technology are not the same thing, and often the grouping together of the two is arbitrary and not useful, which I think is the case here. Steinsky 15:45, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm not invovled with these sections much, but I figured I'd put in a quick word about the categories. We need to be careful not to seperate sections too far down- currently we have very few writers/articles, and we need to concentrate on building sections. By breaking the section apart farther, we are creating more work, where it may not be needed yet, at least for awhile. If a large amount of both Sci and Tech articles get written, it might be better to split then. On the various sections- All the "subject pages" are currently divided by regions, as that was the general view of how it should be done way in the beginning of the demo, so that those who were interested in specific areas could keep track of what was happening. I've got no opinion on the matter- just figured I'd answer the question. Lyellin 15:50, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I agree with both of you in a way. I thought that we can use by-subject classification in place of regional one, and science and technology separately. But if it means to split pages, well, I want more people to do the maintenance, and more articles to list. Our current rate of new contribution is less than an article per day, in the whole sci-tech area. Tomos 16:25, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Topics

I've made an attempt at creating a topical system as opposed to a geograpical - please tweak as you see fit.

I have recreated the topical system using the new dynamic page generation system. It requires that we have at least a few subcategories from sci-tech and we certainly have enough articles now to warrant some subcats, so I created: Category:Biology, Category:Computing, Category:Physics and some others which should be used in addition to the sci-tech one. Lexor 11:35, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

Lexor; I may have reverted prematurely, but can you explain what you're doing? - Amgine/^talk 03:17, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

I've taken a closer look, and I think mixing two categories in a single section is a very bad idea. Often the categories overlap, and the same article appears twice. Have you looked as Simeon's category tree? I would strongly suggest creating single category topics, even if this means going to a three-columnn format (there is actually a lot of whitespace, so 3 column would be a good idea imo.) - Amgine/^talk 03:24, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

Sure, go ahead and do single category topics, I was just keeping the number of topics to about the same as were there before, but I'm not wedded to grouping that way. --Lexor 08:48, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

news is out of order - article need to be republished

articles past the latest date need to be removed from and readded to the publish category in chronological order. currentley the latest months are missing from the list because articels have been retroactively published. Kevin Baas^talk 23:16, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

add chemistry news section

Hi all, over in en.wikipedia.org we have news in the chemistry portal but this is not linked to WIkinews like physics, is it possible to have a chemistry news section in this portal? Any help getting this solved much appreciated. V8rik 16:54, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Ethiopian Hominid skull?

can we get an article on this? [1] (Sorry, couldn't find any other 'talk pages' to post this to, not a wikinews editor.) ThuranX on the English Wiki. 06:39, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

he:פורטל:מדע וטכנולוגיה

he:פורטל:מדע וטכנולוגיה

Portal:Chemistry

Can someone add the link to the bottom please? --User:Rifleman_82 in en.wikipedia.org05:54, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Physics news obsolescence

The last news from physics part is from year 2006. ?! It's ridiculous. I thought it was mistake. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.93.93.119 (talk) 23:25, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Anthropology and Archaeology

The {{Science and technology}} bar at the bottom of the portal should also have an "Anthropology and Archaeology" section on it. Sumerophile (talk) 16:13, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

new header needed

it would look sweet --72.73.72.27 16:04, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Header added. Anonymous101 (talk) 16:13, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

RSS link broken

I wanted to subscribe to the Sci/Tech RSS feed, but toolserver.org says that "The page you requested is hosted by the Toolserver user zach, whose account has expired." =[ B Fizz (talk) 18:19, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

sorry about that. I'll try and look into getting that fixed. Bawolff ☺☻ 18:46, 28 January 2011 (UTC)