Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Atmospheric science

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. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:42, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Atmospheric science

Static portal, abandoned since 2006.

Created[1] in February 2006‎ as a conventional-for-the-time set of boxes each populated by single subpage.

Converted[2] in September 2006 to an all-one-page format with the note "The major updates should appear every month. We develop this portal slightly differently from majority of portals by grouping all text in one page".

This format seem to have had two updates (2 October 2006[3] and 31 Oct 2006[4]), and then lapsed into static text with occasional tweaks. See e.g. the minimal textual change between 31 October 2006 and 13 May 2018[5]: no new topics, no change of picture.

In September 2018‎, @The Transhumanist coverted[6] it to a fully-automated format based on the navbox {{Atmospheric sciences}}, of which it became just a bloated redundant fork. (For a full explanation of why this type of portal is redundant, see the two mass deletions of similar portals: one, and two, where there was overwhelming consensus of a very high turnout to delete a total of 2,555 such portals).

In May 2019, I reverted[7] that automation, restoring the last non-automated version.

WP:POG#How_often_to_update? says that unless automated, the content selection should be updated monthly, or preferably weekly. Even on a monthly cycle, this pseudo-portal has missed over 150 consecutive updates.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than even thsi topic's C-class head article Atmospheric science, with its navbox {{Atmospheric sciences}}.

In theory, this might be a broad topic. But in practice, it has not met the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This has clearly not attracted maintainers, and I fear that however many articles are available, the topic attracts too little interest to do so in the future.

It is time to stop wasting the time of readers by luring them to this abandoned experiment, and time to abandon the [dream that this abandoned relic will some day magically attract magical editors who will want to resurrect it. If any editor does want to build a real portal, they will be far better off without this relic and its ancient content-forked subpages; instead they should build a modern portal without content-forked sub-pages, e.g. Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or Portal:Geophysics.

So I propose that this portal and its sub-pages be deleted per WP:TNT, without prejudice to recreating a curated portal in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:49, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - The pageview metrics tell a different story than usual, with a different general conclusion about portals, and the same specific conclusion (Delete without prejudice). This portal (in its previous location) has had an average of 11 daily pageviews. The head article, Atmospheric science, has had an average of 36 daily pageviews. Neither the portal nor the head article is being viewed much. This is a case where a properly maintained and curated portal could be used to facilitate viewing of the scattered articles on weather. But this portal is a static display. (In aviation, a static display is an airplane that won't fly, a museum piece. A static display misses the whole point that the atmosphere is what supports flight.) A properly maintained portal might provide readers with interesting views of varying subject areas. A non-maintained or improperly maintained portal doesn't do anything. Delete it without prejudice. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:38, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: we can't keep an abandoned portal, we can't keep an automated fork, so we have to delete it but without prejudice to recreation provided it passes WP:POG and has active maintenance. SITH (talk) 12:06, 17 May 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.