Grants talk:IEG/Portals - doorways to engagement

Doorway or crawlspace?

"[P]ortals ... entice readers with an interest in the topic into editing."

Do you have any evidence to support the notion that this ever happens? Literally every single contributor I've ever met started editing one of two ways: they got dragged into the project by a friend, or they got hooked after fixing a small mistake in an article they were reading. The key word in that last clause is "article". Readers are often oblivious to project pages, as evidenced by the fact that of the top 1000 most viewed pages in a given month, fewer than 30 exist outside the mainspace.

Portals, in particular, receive very little traffic from casual readers, for the simple reason that it is unlikely to find portals unless you are already aware that they exist. The mainpage lists some of the major ones at the top, which receive a fair amount of traffic. Minor portals, however, are only linked in tiny boxes at the bottoms of articles, resulting in negligible visibility.

My concern is this: Any effort spent improving the functionality of portals will be utterly wasted unless their visibility is increased. But, I'm not certain that it's worth the effort to improve the visibility of portals, as I am skeptical of their supposed ability to convert readers into editors. --Cryptic C62 (talk) 01:45, 13 July 2013 (UTC)