Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/83 more navbox-based portals

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was: delete . No prejudice against creating properly curated portals that satisfy WP:POG. — JJMC89 (T·C) 01:15, 24 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

83 more navbox-based portals

Every one of the 83 portals included in this mass nomination is based on a single navbox. That is, their list of selected articles (using {{Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}} or {{Transclude linked excerpts as random slideshow}}) is drawn solely from a single navbox. For example, Portal:Limerick is drawn solely from {{Limerick}}, and Portal:Selena Gomez is drawn only from {{Selena Gomez}}.

This makes each of these portals merely a WP:REDUNDANTFORK of the navbox, with much less utility than the navbox because:

• the navbox displays a full list of the articles. The portal displays only one page at a time, out of a randomly selected subset of up to 50 articles.
• the navbox should be present on every page in the set. The portal always requires navigation to a separate page.

The topic's main page works much better as a navigational hub, because it includes:

• both the topic navbox and related navboxes
• A full summary of the topic rather than an excerpt of the lede.

I propose deleting all these portals in one go because:

1. Being each built on a single navbox, they add no navigational utility, and are an inferior WP:REDUNDANTFORK of another navigational tool
2. Portals are not content; they are merely a means of navigating between content. So their mass deletion removes precisely zero encyclopedic content.
3. The pages have no prior history. There is no non-automated version to revert to.

(I selected the pages using tools such as the tracking categories, WP:AWB and Quarry queries ... but I have manually verified that each of 83 pages meets all three criteria.)

All these portals were created by User:Happypillsjr between September 2018 and March 2019. They were not part of any bot-like process and I see no reason at all to doubt that they were created in good faith. However they all use the automated portal technology, and all but three (Nelly, Halsey and Green Party of the United States) were created with {{subst:Basic portal start page}}.

I started scrutinising this editor's contributions after examining Portal:Reykjavík at MFD:Portal:Reykjavík. That was one of the very worst microportals I have seen, with only one page in its selected articles list. I have not had time to count "Selected articles" list of more than a small sample of this set, but the few I checked did not include that error.

Some of these portals cover narrow topics which I believe should never have a portal (e.g. Statue of Liberty). Others cover broad topics (e.g. Portal:Politics of the United States) which would be capable of supporting a thoughtfully-designed and properly-curated portal which used a selected article list extending way beyond the navbox, if enough editors were willing to do the sustained the hard work needed to curate and maintain it.

So, I propose that these pages be deleted without prejudice to recreating a curated portal not based on a single navbox, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:04, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion (83 more navbox-based portals)

add your keep/delete/comment here

• Delete all as useless. CoolSkittle (talk) 12:35, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Portal:Love, Delete the rest. There is a little bit of a Catch-22 here: If a subject is very broad, and if consensus is that a portal on that subject would meet the guideline, then a single navbox is probably the best way to start what will become a multi-page curated portal. (A multi-page portal someone tried to start all at once would probably come here to MfD with a delete reason "a mess"). Love is a level-3 vital article, i.e. the top 1,000. So Portal:Love is similar to Portal:Money, recently kept. The problem with the rest is that they do not meet the WP:POG guideline's breadth-of-subject-area requirement, just like many, many other portals created by the same user that have already been deleted at MfD. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:49, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @UnitedStatesian, please will you reconsider that?

Portal:Money was kept yesterday at WP:Miscellany for deletion/36 more navbox-based portals because its creator pledged to improve that one portal out of the 36 nominated. No such pledge has been offered here, and since this editor has create so many portals I see no reason to simply assume that they intend to suddenly start making this one into a high-quality curated portal. This nomination is explicitly based on no prejudice to recreation as a curated portal, so why keep the automated junk without any assurance that the improvement will happen? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:02, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

My issue is with your "suddenly": it will certainly take time (and multiple editors) to bring Portal:Love up to high quality. I am willing to sign up for that effort once the current review process is complete. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:11, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• PS Note that Happypillsjr has not made a single edit to Portal:Love since they created[1] five months ago. It was one of five portals on unrelated topics which they created within 80 minutes of each other (the others are Portal:Buffalo, New York, Portal:Boca Raton, Florida , Portal:Tove Lo and the now-deleted Portal:Metropolitan Transportation Authority ) ... so I don't see any sign that this is a topic they are particularly interested in developing it.

The nom is v clear that any editor is free to build a portal on any of these topics after deletion of the automated uselessness. If you want to rebuild this one, then great; but that's no reason to keep the automated junk. And let me rephrase that "suddenly" comment: given that this editor has created nearly 100 automated portals on disparate topics, I see no reason to simply assume that they intend to suddenly start making this any one of them into a high-quality curated portal. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:19, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Then it is a very good thing we have more than just that one editor available to do so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:27, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Note that at least one of these (Portal:Black Lives Matter) is a 2nd MfD nomination; didn't check all the others. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:53, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep but improve Portal:Madrid and delete the rest. Madrid, as the capital city of a major European power, is worthy of a portal, and is likely to find editors willing to maintain it. But fully automated portals don't meet a key role of portals which is as a valuable tool to enable editors and Wikiprojects to improve and extend coverage of a topic. So P:MADRID needs to be turned into an actively maintained portal. Bermicourt (talk) 14:08, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Bermicourt. The nomination is v clear that any of these portals can be rebuilt if someone wants to make a curated version. Portal:Madrid was created in a single edit with the sole content {{subst:Basic portal start page}} ... so if you or any other wants to commit to building and maintaining a curated portal, you don't need to keep this automated stuff as a starting point. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:23, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • @BrownHairedGirl:. Okay, I follow your logic. Since the portal took seconds to create, we're not destroying hours of hard work by editors who, in good faith, have created a decent portal. In which case I change my vote to delete all the above. BTW when you say "curate", do you mean "improve and maintain"? Bermicourt (talk) 14:46, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • Thanks, @Bermicourt. These are just a portalspace equivalent of a category populated by a parameterless template, e.g. my creation[2] of Category:1978 in sports in Montana. A trivial recreation if ever needed, easily robotised. So yes, there's no destruction of anyone's hard work.

Yes, by "curate" I do indeed mean "improve and maintain". I'd probably spell that out in more verbose form, but I reckon we'd probably both write a similar job descriptio under that heading, so I'll leave the rest implicit. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:05, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - From the stats at wmflabs, one can see that Love is 2.5 more important than Madrid for our readers but also... that Love+Madrid score together 7 views per day. In other words, nobody cares. That's probably the reason why nobody came forward to become the maintainer of these portals. Nevertheless, anybody will be welcome in any future to recreate and maintain such portals (at least as long as the Portal space continues to exist). This applies to the whole series. Pldx1 (talk) 15:00, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete all, yet again. It is not hard to make these. These portals are like buying a puppy from a pet shop and not feeding it. If someone makes something on Wikipedia, they should take some responsibility for making it a decent quality and maintaining that quality. Making something and abandoning it doesn't help anyone. Prometheus720 (talk) 15:36, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete all I believe Happypillsjr is the second most prolific spammer of useless automated portals. I've already run a bunch of their creations through MFD and some of them are particularly error prone. Creation sprees like this usually land at ANi but this editor has escaped closer scrutiny because TTH was so much more prolific. A total removal of their junk creations is in order. Legacypac (talk) 16:28, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Again, if any might be worth keeping, they can be recreated with more care per WP:TNT. SemiHypercube 17:14, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete all these portals do not meaningfully expand on the main article. You get the lead of that article, some images from that article (often missing important context), a randomly selected article from a navbox in that article, and some portal boilerplate. The only new content is the DYKs, which is often rubbish as it relies on very simple word matching. Some of these may make viable portal topics but they would need to be written by a human being. Hut 8.5 18:04, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment- I strongly understand the reasons all these portals I created needs to deleted and useless, but I create most of these portals with {{subst:Basic portal start page}} and I may be created these portals automatically but I thought these portals would be perfect for and meet WP:POG.If anyone high feels strong these portals are redundant then that's your opinions.I do hope these portals can re-create. -- Happypillsjr ✉ 18:49, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete all per consensus in prior bundled MfDs; these portals fit the profile. I hold nothing against the creator of these portals and thank them for their ongoing and past contributions to the encyclopedia, and for understanding why, after review, the community has agreed that creating these types of portals is not a good idea. Leviv ich 21:28, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete All without exception, with the following notes:
  • • There is no prejudice against re-creation, so that if a maintainer wishes to start with the existing automated single-navbox portal and improve on it, they can request it at Requests for Undeletion, but without delaying or complicating this nomination.
    • As noted, these portals do not create content. They repackage it in an inferior way.
    • Thanks to User:BrownHairedGirl. I have not inspected her nominations at this time because I have confidence in her accuracy and honesty, and in her being an equal enforcer of quality against both portal advocates and other portal critics. I haven't said that about certain other portal critics or certain portal advocates. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:28, 17 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete All per consensus in prior bundled MfDs.Editor-1 (talk) 04:13, 17 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete all, no snow. Feezo (send a signal | watch the sky) 06:31, 17 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete All per consensus above and in prior MfDs. Oculi (talk) 13:33, 17 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete all per the same rationale as the other two large batches (unless any of these can be demonstrated to be worth keeping). — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 04:48, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Be selective "Based on a single navbox" is an arbitrary criterion for deletion.

1. Navboxes vary greatly in size from {{Geography of South America}} up to {{Surviving ocean going ships}}. The existence of a navbox is a poor guide to the breadth of a topic.
2. Many of the larger navboxes could easily have been set up as a set of distinct navboxes.
3. Portals currently based on a single navbox are open to being extended to take in multiple navboxes. If we take Portal:Madrid, it is currently based only on {{Madrid}} which is actually a redirect to {{Districts of Madrid}}, but could have embraced also {{Madrid orchestras}}, {{Madrid Metro}}, {{Madrid MA}} (the municipalities of the larger metropolitan area), and the two footy clubs. Is it no longer preferred to improve pages rather than delete them? Has "there is no deadline" been superseded by "you must improve it right now or it goes"? The structure provided by the automated process gives a guide as to extending the scope of a portal; it can be built on by those who would find it difficult to start a portal from scratch.

The deleters tell us that anyone is free to recreate deleted portals later. But how is anyone who has followed the past year's history of portals likely to be motivated to undertake any further work on them?: Bhunacat10 (talk), 14:28, 19 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Dear User:Bhunacat10. Using the word "deleters" to characterize a set of people is not a good thing for many reasons. It gives the impression that you want to characterize yourself as a keeper. But you aren't a keeper. A true keeper would have stepped forward and said "Je maintiendrai"... while writting her name in the maintainer= field of at least one of these portals. On the other hand, only asking to "protect the bathwater from the murderous plumber" is not a recognized argument to keep. Pldx1 (talk) 16:01, 19 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Bhunacat10, your #1 has entirely missed the point about why I have proposed deleting portals base on a single navbox, and why here is so much support for deleting them.

It's nothing at all to do with the size of the navbox. The point is that a portal which mirror the scope of a singe navbox is a WP:REDUNDANTFORK. It just recreates the navbox in a different format. That redundancy applies regardless of whether the navbox contains 5 items or 5,000.

Yes, many larger navboxes could be broken up. Sometimes that's a good idea, sometimes not. But if the portal is based on multiple navboxes which are all transcluded on the head article, the the portal is still a WP:REDUNDANTFORK of the head article. That applies regardless of whether the number of navboxes is one or one hundred.

The whole eventualist notion that inadequate portals will be fixed some day has been disproven. Before the portalspammer got to work, there ~1500 portals, mostly in very poor state. Some of them had broken or left without updates for a whole decade. It is sheer folly to assume that a community which didn't maintain 1500 portals is going to magically improve thousands more. As to the barriers to re-creation, if an editor can't figure the one parameterless command needed t create a singe automatic portals, then they almost certainly don't have the skills to build a more sohisticated one which actually adds vale for readers. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:58, 19 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@BrownHairedGirl: So even multi-navbox portals are doomed now if all their navboxes happen to be attached to the main article (or, perhaps, saved if some are removed)? The "content fork" notion applies to articles, not to ancillary pages like these. @Pldx1: So any portal is doomed now if there is no username shown as "maintainer"? Who decided that "ownership", discouraged as it is for articles, is mandatory for portals?

I find it hard to keep up with this juggernaut of destruction. It's all very sad: Bhunacat10 (talk), 08:52, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Dear User:Bhunacat10. Portal GuideLine is a guideline, and it's first line remembers us that this is best treated with common sense. Thereafter, we can find some explicit statements of what could be common sense in the present situation: the portal must be maintained and serve a useful purpose at WP:POG#In_general and Some portals update the selected articles and pictures once a month. Others update them weekly, which is preferred at WP:POG#How_often_to_update?. Your assertion So any portal is doomed now if there is no username shown as "maintainer"? is top and foremost a logical fallacy (even if, perhaps, slightly inflammatory). Anything is doomed when no sound argument to keep is presented. That is the rule. A simple common sense rule, that can be sustained by large amounts of letter soup. When someone says: this navigation tool should be kept and maintained, this can be parsed as (1) "Je maintiendrai" this one or (2) "You, the murderous deleters, your duty is to do the job I have no intent to do by myself". The first one is an argument to keep, the second is rather perceived as a joke, a logical fallacy, <add other possibilities here>, depending on today's mood. Pldx1 (talk) 09:35, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Bhunacat10, there is no juggernaut of destruction. There is a prolonged process of deletion debates removing the vast flood of portalspam created by a WikiProject which lost the run of itself.

These automated portals were each created in a matter of seconds simply by entering {{Basic portal start page}}. The collective time spent in discussing their deletion is vastly greater than the time spent in their creation. It is indeed all very sad that so much time of so many editors has had to be expended on removing so much crud created with so little care or analysis.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". These navbox-based pseudo-portals are not enhancement of the head articles; they are significantly degraded versions of the head articles, with far less utility as a navigational hub than the head article. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:07, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep Portal:Transportation in New York City – Plenty of content available to qualify this portal, simply pass WP:POG but this maybe need some improvement and it's most topic that relates for New York City . See the category tree below:

-- Happypillsjr ✉ 07:39, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• plenty of content available but an empty set of available people to do the job. The result is an useless navigation tool, redundant to the existing navboxes, and of lower quality. Pldx1 (talk) 09:35, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• It seems to me to be very unlikely that English is Happypillsjr's first language. Their ability to form coherent sentences is consistently very poor.

So it would help a lot if Happypillsjr would use some translation service to render in their own language the last, bolded sentence of the nomination: "I propose that these pages be deleted without prejudice to recreating a curated portal not based on a single navbox, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time". --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:13, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This user lives in, or hails from, New York City.

en-us -N

This user is a native speaker of American English.

   This user would be annoyed if NYC transportation was deleted. Pldx1 (talk) 15:19, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I do speak English and my English perfectly very good. Maybe you guys misunderstood for what I commented. User:BrownHairedGirl and User:Pldx1 if you guys think my English terrible, you guys are sadly mistaken.-- Happypillsjr ✉ 02:06, 21 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Thank you, Happypillsjr. That's priceless. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:44, 23 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Mass-created portals based on a single navbox. Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:46, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete all - Per Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Mass-created portals based on a single navbox, Keep per now Portal:Black Lives Matter already voted recently Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Black Lives Matter.Guilherme Burn (talk) 01:18, 23 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.