Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Epistemology

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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) 04:47, 18 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Epistemology

Portal:Epistemology (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Micro-portal abandoned for about a decade. Low pageviews, few articles, a fake DYK, and redundant to the head article Epistemology with its comprehensive navbox Template:Epistemology.

This portal was created in August 2007‎ by Gregbard (talk · contribs), a prolific but controversial editor of philosophy topics who has been indef-blocked since 2014. So far as I can see, Gregbard built the portal in 2007 and 2009, but made only a few minor tweaks thereafter.[1] I have found no sign of other ongoing maintenance.

The list of sub-pages at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Epistemology looks impressive at first glance. 20 selected articles plus 20 selected biogs. However, the vast majority are blanks, created by Gregbard in June 2009‎, presumably to assist others wanting to add to the portal. Unfortunately, that never happened: the 3 non-empty articles and 3 non-empty biog pages were all populated by Gregbard in June 2009, and nobody else has added anything. Excluding empty pages, what we actually have is:

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". But in practice, this portal has not attracted any maintainer since 2009. It has also has not draw the readers: in January–June 2019, the portal averaged only 18 pageview per day, whereas the head article Epistemology averaged 3,126 daily views. That's 171 views of the article for every view of the portal.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Epistemology and its excellent navbox Template:Epistemology, and its countless other links inckudin the Epistemology#See_also section.

Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navboxes offers all the functionality which portals like this set out to offer. Both features are available only to ordinary readers who are not logged in, but you can test them without logging out by right-clicking on a link, and the select "open in private window" (in Firefox) or "open in incognito window" (Chrome).

  1. mouseover: on any link, mouseover shows you the picture and the start of the lead. So the preview-selected page-function of portals is redundant: something almost as good is available automatically on any navbox or other set of links. Try it by right-clicking on this link to Template:Epistemology, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
  2. automatic imagery galleries: clicking on an image brings up an image gallery of all the images on that page. It's full-screen, so it's actually much better than a click-for-next image gallery on a portal. Try it by right-clicking on this link to the article Epistemology, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

Those new technologies set a high bar for any portal which actually tries to add value for the reader. But this portals fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game.

This abandoned portal adds no value for readers. Time to just delete it. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:03, 10 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete – There does not even appear to have been an a priori determination that this is a "broad subject area". However, we have seen a posteriori that there are only 18 daily pageviews of this portal, and that the portal has not been maintained since 2009, indicating that it does not attract readers and portal maintainers. But how do we know anything about this portal, or about portals in general, or about Wikipedia? Wait a minute. We are discussing Portal:Epistemology using the terms of art of epistemology. Is that dangerous? Will that result in an infinite regress? We can try to use an abstract machine to parse any information about this portal. But will the abstract machine ever finish the job? We know that we can't know that!

So maybe we should use scientific realism and conclude that User:BrownHairedGirl's is sound, in which case the portal can be deleted. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:39, 11 July 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.


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