Portal talk:History of science

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The History of science Portal is a featured portal, which means it has been identified as one of the best portals on Wikipedia. If you see a way this portal can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, please feel free to contribute.

This talk page is for the Portal about History of science. Ensure this portals' details are listed in the Portal directory.
For discussion about Portals generally, please see the WikiProject on Portals.

This article is part of the History of Science WikiProject, an attempt to improve and organize the history of science content on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. You can also help with the History of Science Collaboration of the Month.

Welcome to the discussion page for the History of science portal! If you would like to make suggestions regarding portal content, you may do so below, or on one of the following pages:

Selected articles: Portal talk:History of science/Article
Selected pictures: Portal talk:History of science/Picture
Selected scientists: Portal talk:Science/Featured biography (This is part of Portal:Science)
Selected inventors: Portal talk:Technology/Selected biography (This is part of Portal:Technology)
Did you know?: Portal talk:History of science/Did you know

For general discussion of history of science content on Wikipedia, try Talk:History of science or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject History of Science.

1 Structure of this portal
2 merging
3 Layout
4 Wikipedia:Scientific peer review
5 Selected article suggestions
6 Images
7 Medicine in Ancient Greece
8 Science and Technology Studies
9 Standards

[edit] Structure of this portal

This portal is built using a series of subpages—one for each of the boxes. For details on this see Wikipedia:Portal. These subpages may be found at

The box formatting pages are

Portal:History of science/box-header (This page specifies colors.)
Portal:History of science/box-footer

Archives of the featured articles, pictures, and factoids may be found at

[edit] merging

This page should definitely be merged. It has no purpose as its own portal. Deano 18:20, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree with that. Merging into Portal:Science would seem sensible. Worldtraveller 21:01, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Disagree - there's plenty of subject matter to keep this portal well maintained. All that's needed are a couple interested editors. Go for it! 18:08, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Disagree - There is also a lot of history of science content that isn't yet categorized like it should be, and a lot of history of science that has yet to be included in Wikipedia. It's only going to diverge even more from the content of Science. It definitely needs to remain separate from the Science portal. It could be greatly improved, though, with links to history articles instead of science articles.--ragesoss 23:27, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Disagree - lots of material can go here and may be more interesting to many readers than pure science Anlace 17:42, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Layout

Can someone who knows HTML better than me fix the imbalance of the two columns for this portal? The picture box and the "did you know" box can be moved to the right, which would make the page considerably more attractive.--ragesoss 01:02, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Scientific peer review

A scientific peer review has been started and we're looking for Wikipedians who are members of the scientific academic community to run for the board. If you want to give it a shot come over and post a little about yourself. New nominations are being accepted until the 00:00 on the 17th March.

The project aims to combine existing peer review mechanisms (Wikipedia peer review, featured article candidate discussion, article assessment, &c.) which focus on compliance to manual of style and referencing policy with a more conventional peer review by members of the scientific academic community. It is hoped that this will raise science-based articles to their highest possible standards. Article quality and factual validity is now Wikipedia's most important goal. Having as many errors as Britannica is not good–we must raise our standards above this. --Oldak Quill 18:18, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Selected article suggestions

Please suggest history of science articles (non-biographies) for future selected articles for this portal. You can summaries for ones you like to Portal:History_of_science/Article. You can also suggest future selected pictures at Portal_talk:History_of_science/Picture. --ragesoss 07:39, 19 March 2006 (UTC) Possibilities:

==minor redesign== I've prepared a somewhat redesigned version of the portal, mainly just aesthetic. Here is is: User:Ragesoss/template. I'll implement it in a few days if there are no objections.--ragesoss 02:02, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Images

I went and promoted this without rechecking the portal. There are some things that, had I noticed them, I would have objected to. The images in the selected articles boxes are far too large; they should keep to 100px or less, just as on the Main Page. However, because you are using thumbnails and have given the excessive captions, such a reduction would still result in the image occupying significantly more space than its accompanying text. I also can't see a reason to thumbnail the selected picture; why inhibit its description? Instead of being limited as a small-text caption, why not let it stand free? The other concern I had was that the selected articles were not linked at first mention. Thanks, --cj | talk 04:20, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

I've shrunk the images in the selected articles to a max of 150px and smaller when it doesn't obscure the image too much; I think the main page convention is too small, and the inability to caption such small images is too restrictive. However, I've trimmed some of the captions as well, to partially address your concerns. I prefer the thumbed style for the selected picture, but since its a minor thing and all the other prominent portals do it without thumbs, I've let that caption "stand free," as you say. The first mention links are now included. Thanks for all your helpful comments.--ragesoss 05:04, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Medicine in Ancient Greece

I wanted to inform you all that Medicine in Ancient Greece is this week's Medicine Colaboration of the Week. I would like to ask for all your support and contributions for this important scientific historical article. --Francisco Valverde 18:15, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Science and Technology Studies

History of science is currently a subfield of the much broader interdisciplinary field called Science and technology studies, or STS (please visit the article). I noticed the History of Science portal as a "subportal" on the Portal: Science page. Is this simply because this is a well developed portal, and simply that the STS portal does not yet exist? (and maybe since fewer people know about STS?) HPS is one of the founding disciplines of the interdisciplinary STS field, so I wanted to start some discussion now as the STS articles on Wikipedia continue to multiply and expand how a functioning STS portal would fit into Wikipedia's portal organization scheme. Would an STS portal link from both the science portal and the technology portal, just as the biotechnology portal is now set up? - Doubleg 20:30, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

How might other portals change? For example, the definition of "technology" currently in the technology portal isn't necessarily agreed upon by those who actually specialize in the study of technology. Is taking STS into account helpful or necessary for conforming articles to Wikipedia:Neutral point of view or Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias? - Doubleg

[edit] Standards

Please keep an eye out for red links. As a featured portal, they should not be occurring as they presently are in Selected scientist. Also, Things you can do needs a trim so as to keep the portal columns balanced. Thanks, --cj | talk 22:57, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

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Category: Wikipedia featured portals