Portal talk:English football

message: Some tips and suggestions for you on maintaining this, hope you don't mind some advice (as it seems a speedy keep is coming).
:Have a shufti at Portal:Association football, not just how it looks but how it's coded - I whacked a load of comments in the code to help people who may want to use the same format. I also created Portal:Association football/Instructions and Portal:Association football/Instructions/Advanced as well (and most everything else in :Category:Association football portal, I like structured categories, yes I'm odd like that). 
:One of the main things to get your head around with a portal is that at some point you might disappear or get bored with it, so making as much of it update automatically is quite a good idea. Sure this is annoying when you want the FA Cup Final to be linked in April, but having the page change on every view is kinda snazzy. On Portal:Association football - the Selected article/pic/bio/association boxes are on random, current tournaments are on a once a year update (running out in 2014), the news is brought from Wikinews whenever it's updated and the DYK is updated manually at WP:FOOTY. This means that if for some reason everyone in the world died tomorrow - DYK's wouldn't be updated, the news would stay as it is and the tournament boxes would break in 6 years time. Apart from that everything else will still be fine. (See Portal:Bridges for a portal that uses date queued subpages that's broken as no-one has updated the queue).
:Another thing to mention, there is nothing stopping portals showing the same content, if you think that there is info on Portal:Association football that is also within the scope of Portal:English football - NICK IT. If you wanted you could also use the Selected association format to use for Selected leagues of the English football league system (it's not like you'll ever run out of those). The majority of the content of Portal:Association football can be copied and edited for use on English football, even the task, topic and category boxes. There is also a huge archive of football DYK's that have appeared on the mainpage at Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Did you know.
:Portals are among the few things on Wikipedia where looks matter. Part of the Featured portal criteria is that it looks ok at low resolutions (800x600).
:I would suggest that you only use templates that are on subpages of the portal and are only ever to be used by this portal. As looks matter, you don't want to be in the position where someone has changed a template to make something look right on their portal which then breaks yours. I ended up using 4 different display templates for Association football, purely so I could change the image size defaults, links and text sizes for a certain box without screwing up everything else.
:Once the portal is up and running properly (probably when there are at least 10 selected/queued things for every possible use) then you could possibly request an edit to  to get it appended so that if someone uses England=yes it'll display "This article is supported by the English taskforce (Portal:English football)" or something along those lines. That'll help show that the portal exists.
:Also, once you have enough content to be going on with - you could ask User:Zachary if he'll consider running wikinews:User:SportsBot on this wiki to update league tables automatically for the portal only (as league pages have intricate formats for their tables).
I think your main priority once the MfD has closed will be to decide what you want to do with this portal, think of what you want to display and how you'll go about it. Mark it as under-construction ( and see what happens from there. WP:PORTAL has lots of good advice too. Hope this is of some use Nanonic (talk) 02:35, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tips and advice 

message: Isn't "English Football" a blatant neologism? Unless like the "English Muffin" and "French Letter" it is an expression used somewhere other than England... --BozMo talk 15:21, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Or perhaps the first sentence is just badly worded to imply that it is per sae a type of football? --BozMo talk 15:22, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

text: I believe the title was chosen to mean "Football in England" or more completely "Association football in England", the portal is still marked as being under construction though. Nanonic (talk) 16:01, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neologism? 

message: Hello!
I have a query about including any records from friendly matches in the stats pages of teams. I have recently been doing research into the history of Corinthian F.C. and found that they inflicted what appears to be Man Utd's biggest ever defeat, namely 11-3, in London in 1904. I have nothing against Man U and, from what I hear, Man U's perhaps biggest win ever was 14-1 against a team called New Brighton. Now, I am not arguing that these results are considered as their official biggest wins/losses, but that they are at least included in a team's stats page under, say, a separate "unofficial matches" or "non-competitive matches" or "friendly matches" sub-heading. I believe this should be the case for all teams' stats pages, as such matches have taken place and have had their results recorded by the clubs involved at the very least. This is especially important for a team like Corinthians, who were exclusively amateur until many years later.
(I have been discussing this issue here) - now, I do not want you to think I am picking a fight with Man Utd fans on their page - I am not. I want a general rule to be accepted throughout Wikipedia. I merely think that all important results should be included in the encyclopedia - even if it has to be in a footnote (but better to have a separate section for it in the main article, rather than a footnote!). Please read my arguments on the Man U page, and if you want, let's continue the discussion on this page, to keep it in one place. Thanks! BigSteve (talk) 21:28, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Friendly results in Stats pages 

message: WikiProject Portals is back!
The project was rebooted and completely overhauled on April 17th, 2018. Its goals are to revitalize the entire portal system, make building and maintaining portals easier, support the ongoing improvement of portals and the editors dedicated to this, and design the portals of the future.
As of May 2nd, 2018, membership is at 60 editors, and growing. You are welcome to join us.
There are design initiatives for revitalizing the portals system as a whole, and for improving each component of portals.  So far, 2 new dynamic components have been developed: Template:Transclude lead excerpt and Template:Transclude random excerpt.
Tools are provided for building and maintaining portals, including automated portals that update themselves in various ways.
And, if you are bored and would like something to occupy your mind, we have a wonderful task list.
From your friendly neighborhood Portals WikiProject. Hope to see you there. Sincerely,      — The Transhumanist    07:29, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notice from the [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals|Portals WikiProject]]