Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Nanotechnology

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. Ultimately, the fact that this portal served incorrect information to readers (albeit not many readers) for several years is the most concerning point brought up at this MfD, and while it's true that someone popped up to fix some of these errors once this MfD is created, I don't see strong consensus that there is an adequate plan to prevent this portal from misinforming readers again in the near future. The consensus among delete voters is more convincing in this case, that a combination of various factors sets this portal up for failure: no active WikiProject supporting the portal, no likelihood of long-term regular maintenance, an overly complex subpage structure that would be difficult for most other editors to comprehend, and a topic that is on the forefront of current scientific research and therefore is constantly changing and updating. ‑Scottywong| [talk] || 22:34, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Nanotechnology

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

(Time stamp for bot to properly relist.) – Joe (talk) 20:29, 21 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Twenty-six selected articles and 52 selected bios created in early 2012. I would estimate the average time since last update for these at about six years.

Errors

Heinrich Rohrer died in May 2013; Harry Kroto in April 2016, Mildred Dresselhaus in February 2017 and Calvin Quate in July 2019. Mihail Roco is not a chair on the National Science and Technology Council NSET subcommittee. Konstantin Novoselov teaches at the National University of Singapore not the University of Manchester. Lila Kari has taught at the University of Waterloo since 2017. Congressman Mike Honda lost re-election in 2016. Eric Betzig began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2017. Angela Belcher was promoted to the head of the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT this year. Paul Alivisatos was promoted to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost University of California, Berkeley in 2017. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 08:57, 1 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per the nom. This junk portal has been abandoned for about six years, save for copious and meaningless re-ordering of sub-pages, and is riddled with many serious errors. It clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of readers and maintainers. This abandoned portal has had about six years of no maintainers and it had a very low 20 views per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (while the head article Nanotechnology had 1881 views per day in the same period). This is a sharp long-term decline from 41 views per day from July 1 to Dec. 30 2015. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. I oppose re-creation, as about six years of hard evidence shows Nanotechnology is not a broad enough topic to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 01:15, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as per analysis and listing of errors by User:Mark Schierbecker and analysis by User:Newshunter12. This portal, unlike some, has more than enough articles, but this portal illustrates that more articles means more of a need for maintenance of the forked subpages and more opportunities for the information in the subpages to become obsolete. Low and declining readership, but maybe declining readership is usual for portals. No maintenance in six years, and we see why maintenance is necessary. The use of content-forked subpages is a rat hole. There is no short-term reason to expect that a re-creation of this portal will address the problems. Any proposed re-creation of this portal using a more modern design, and taking into account the failures of many portals, and including a maintenance plan (since lack of maintenance is a problem with most portals), can go to Deletion Review. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:40, 4 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Note the sub-pages have not yet been restored, and it's not possible to examine the portal until that's done. So I have left a note for the DRV closer @Joe Roe, who is looking into ways of restoring the baroque forest of sub-pages without spending days doing them one-by-one. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)
  •  Done – Joe (talk) 21:27, 21 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per User:Mark Schierbecker and analysis by User:Newshunter12. Low readership + no active maintainer = clear fail of 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".

The large number of biographies includes a large number of BLPs, and the errors of fact in BLPs are bad news.

The DRV was opened by Antony-22, who is listed as the portal's maintainer, and claimed that as such they should have been individually notified on their talk page to trigger an email about the MFD. I don't find it credible that a maintainer should need an email, and Antony-22's portal-space contribs show only that their last 3 edits to the portal were made on 1/ 29 March 2019, 2/ 23 June 2018, 3/ 12 July 2016. One tweak per year is not significant maintenance, and the consequences of the neglect were set out above by the nominator.

So the result is that while POG requires multiple maintainers, this portal has really had only one inactive, nominal maintainer. And clearly that is nowhere near enough, as shown by the rot noted above. If Antony-22's interests have moved on, then per WP:NOTCOMPULSORY that's fine, a choice they are entitled to make without reproach. But given that inactivity, Antony-22 should really have removed themself as maintainer when they moved on.

This is an example of a perennial problem with portals: they are fun to build, but very laborious and tedious to maintain. So they have rotted at industrial scale, which is why MFD has been so busy these past six months.

Antony-22 indicated at DRV that they would now do some fixes if the portal is restored. But portals don't just need quick fixes when deletion is imminent; they need ongoing maintenance, and multiple maintainers to do it. So a flurry of updating now won't in any way sway my mind, because it won't solve the underlying problem.

Note that WP:POG also guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal". In this case, there is not and never has been a WP:WikiProject Nanotechnology.

Please note that the failure of this portal is not any sort of personal failure by those involved in building it. It's a structural failing stemming from Wikipedia's daft decision to create portals in 2005, just as the rest of the web was abandoning them as redundant. Wikipedia itself developed technologies to marginalise their utility on Wikipedia: categories, navboxes, and an increasingly effective search function. So portals were built as they became redundant, guaranteeing low readership for all but the broadest topics, which in turn strangled the supply of maintainers: few editors know about a page that nobody views, and very few of those who do know of it want to maintain an almost-unused page. To compound the problems, portal enthusiasts concentrated on a broken magazine model of portal, which manages the extraordinary feat of being exceptionally unhelpful to readers (purge the page to get a new selection from a list you can't even see on the face of the main portal page? Mad! Belongs in the stone age of usability) and a baroque nightmare to maintain or even to effectively watchlist. (Editors cannot even watchlist the portal in one click; they have to individually watchlist all the sub-pages listed in Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Nanotechnology. Mad). A design and structure which requires massive editor effort even as the editor-to-pages-ratio continues to decline.

A very few portals somehow have enough dedicated editors to avoid rotting despite the structural flaws. This isn't one of them, so delete it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:43, 21 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Your criticisms are mostly directed at the system of portals in general, as you imply yourself, "the failure of this portal is not any sort of personal failure by those involved in building it. It's a structural failing stemming from Wikipedia's daft decision to create portals in 2005...". We had an RfC last year where removing the system of portals was defeated. I know there's been controversy over the creation and deletion of a large number of automated portals, but this portal was never involved in that. I also realize that the requirements for portals have been in flux, but portals have never been expected to have a constant stream of new content like the Main Page does; they're intended to cycle through a cache of content, with the cache being refreshed periodically. What level of maintenance would you regard as acceptable? Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 23:22, 22 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• @Antony-22: if you want to have a discussion, then please try to read the whole of the comment you are replying to. Snipping out parts which can be coerced into suiting your purpose by stripping them of their context is not a civil form of discourse.

Your reply entirely omits my concluding sentence: A very few portals somehow have enough dedicated editors to avoid rotting despite the structural flaws. This isn't one of them, so delete it.. That omission makes your whole comment a straw man. I hope this was unintentional, because straw-man-making is hostile mischief.

You also entirely miss the point that a portal does not cycle through a cache of content. It cycles through a cache of content forks, which have been allowed to rot while you focused your energies on breaking attribution by engaging in a make-work series of copy-paste moves.

It's not for me to unilaterally pronounce a precise maintenance cycle. My point is that your practice of zero actual maintenance while letting content rot is completely useless. It has meant that the portal has been spewing out incorrect info on living people.

As to WP:ENDPORTALS, I'm sorry to see you joining the small crew of portal fans who systematically misrepresent it. ENDPORTALS was a binary proposal, asking whether to immediately delete all portals. It closed as a consensus not to immediately delete all portals. That is not a consensus to keep all or even most portals, let alone abandoned junk which for years has just been a playground for copypaste moves. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:21, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete, or archive or reuse elsewhere. Fails the ostensible purpose of portals to serve navigation needs. Redundant to the parent article. Redundant to a top level portal, Portal:Technology. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:36, 21 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep as maintainer. It is not accurate that the portal has been abandoned since 2012; in fact, that's when I took it over and overhauled the portal's main page. Apparently, the nominator wasn't familiar enough with portals to even know that content updates go on the subpages. The content issues are limited to a few missing death dates and a few employers that need to be updated, which took me all of 20 minutes to update. I'll go through all the articles this week and see if there's anything else that needs to be updated. These are issues that could have been fixed quickly by asking nicely, rather than jumping directly to deletion. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 02:54, 22 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Update: As Northamerica1000 kindly pointed out below, WP:POG has the status of an information page due to a clear consensus at WP:POG2019RFC that it is not an official guideline. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 18:47, 27 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• • @Antony-22's comment these are issues that could have been fixed quickly by asking nicely, rather than jumping directly to deletion defeats his claim to be a maintainer. It is of course quick and easy to fix such problems once they have been identified, but whole point of being a maintainer rather than a drive-by editor is that a maintainer proactively monitors the portal and actively seeks out such issues, rather than waiting for others to do the scrutiny.

Antony-22's portal-space contribs shows that his 2015/16 edits consist entirely of pointlessly shuffling content from one sub-page to another, cluttering the edit history whilst adding zero value to readers and making it near impossible to figure out when an article was added to the portal. It seems that the aim may have been to order the index page Portal:Nanotechnology/Selected biography alphabetically by surname, but if that was goal then it could been achieved simply by shuffling the order of entries in Portal:Nanotechnology/Selected biography (or alternatively making them a sortable table, orderable by either surname or number) rather than doing a flurry of copy-paste moves. (WP:BEFOREMOVING says "Do not move or rename a page by copying/pasting its content, because doing so fragments the edit history"). It's bad enough having a portal built from a forest of content forks without also having the edit history destroyed because a basic guideline was ignored. Antony-22's cut-and-paste moves go back at least to February 2012[1], so by now it seems that edit history of the sub-pages is comprehensively wrecked. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:36, 22 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I am very aware of how subpages work. This isn't my first rodeo. I did not say the subpages had been abandoned since 2012. I said the average time each subpage had gone without an update was six years, which is not far off. What was your reason for breaking the edit history numerous times with copy-paste moves like this? Mark Schierbecker (talk) 04:26, 22 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've periodically replaced biographies with new ones. I monitor a handful of nanotechnology-related prizes and if a recent winner has a higher-quality one than an an existing biography on the portal, I switch them out. I believe this is the kind of maintenance that is expected of portals. Portals are not expected to have a constant stream of new content like the Main Page does; they're intended to cycle through a cache of content, with the cache being refreshed periodically. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 22:38, 22 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Antony-22: It is expected that editors participating in a XFD discuss the issues civilly and in good faith.

Two editors have separately raised with you the problem of your copypaste moves (which are deprecated), and @UnitedStatesian asked you why you did. You have not explained why you have chosen to systematically break the attribution required by Wikipedia's copyright licensing.

Yes, replacing a selected article with something else is fine. But the copypastes are not fine, and you appear to be evading the question of why you broke attribution in this. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:27, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The text clearly comes from the article linked in big bold letters above it, that it's identified as being a summary of. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 05:48, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

cut-and-paste edits ALWAYS require an edit summary attribution, which you have not been consistently doing. Furthermore, there was no reason to cut-and-paste subpages the way you did, causing needless work for anyone attempting to reconstruct this page. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 15:47, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) @Antony-22: the text comes from an unidentified previous version of the article linked above, and may have been adapted by the editor who created the page. The copy-paste loses the date when this happened, which prevents finding out which version was copied and whether any adaptations were made. These copy-paste moves are not exempt from the general policy principles on copy-paste. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:01, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I actually agree that having 52 subpages make maintenance difficult and makes the history hard to follow. I've reworked the portal so that all biographies are directly part of Portal:Nanotechnology/Selected biography, so all content edits will go to that page. In the past in most cases the name of the article is in the edit summary, even if it's not linked. I still think the lack of an edit summary attribution in a few cases is a minor issue given that there's in-text attribution, but it's easy to fix in the future. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 19:00, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Not true. The portal is still drawing its content from the subpages. I checked the code, and verified the effect by this edit[2] to Portal:Nanotechnology/Selected article/20, which adds the 4 characters "XXXX" to the end of the text. That "XXXX" is now displayed in the portal.

Not only has @Antony created a massive baroque edifice of redundant content forks; he also can't make it work in the way he thinks it works. This is broken already, and maintenance nightmare. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:31, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• keep Let's let the maintainer try to see if they can keep it up and revisit in 6 months if it isn't happening. Be a shame to lose what we have due to fear of nothing happening and the maintainer sounds motivated. Of course others could join in too. Hobit (talk) 03:16, 22 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Regardless of how dedicated one maintainer is, the topic is not broad enough to meet the breadth-of-subject-area requirement of the WP:POG guideline; as one piece of evidence, there is no Wikipedia:WikiProject Nanotechnology, and so 1) no automated tagging of article talkpages that is almost certainly necessary to keep the portal up-to-date with high quality articles and 2) no way to recruit other maintainers that are necessary to avoid the key-man risk this portal currently has. This subject matter can be more than adequately covered by Portal:Technology. UnitedStatesian (talk) 04:33, 22 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete – per SJ and US. Portal:Technology is where this topic area should be covered. – Levivich 04:40, 22 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - It appears that User:Antony-22 has killed a few rats in a ratty structure, and is waving them to show that they are dead. A portal has information that is outward-facing, facing the reader, and should be correct. The job of a portal maintainer always should have been to keep the information correct, not to be asked nicely to correct the errors. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:00, 22 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is almost sounding vindictive. It appears to be in decent shape now and we have a promise to keep it going in the future. Why not delete iff there is a problem down the road? I realize there are people that just dislike portals, and that's fair (though not really a reason to delete *this* one). But if the current state is good and we have a promise it will remain so, why not AGF and go from there? Hobit (talk) 11:05, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, issues are being fixed now. Somewhat specialised portals tend have more coherence than very broad ones, so I don't think it will serve readers to upmerge to Portal:Technology. —Kusma (t·c) 12:16, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per delete votes above. Actions speak louder than words, particularly actions during the long period when the portal was not under scrutiny at MfD. This shows that despite good faith, the topic does not meet the portal requirements and is not viable. For these reasons, I also oppose re-creation. -Crossroads- (talk) 02:48, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - How can anyone say Antony-22 has corrected the errors I raised? You obviously didn't check their edits. All four of the no longer living bios I mentioned are STILL written in present tense. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 15:57, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - Actions are being done to fix the portal per Kusma. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:44, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per the evidence that portals at this level (e.g. see also Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Biotechnology) don't get continual/regular maintenance (and hence are likely to show info that is less accurate/relevant than the head article) and the lack of any demonstrated need for portals like this. DexDor ^(talk) 20:07, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment to User:Antony-22, User:Kusma, and User:Knowledgekid87 - It appears that the would-be portal maintainer, User:Antony-22, is still not pro-actively maintaining the portal, but is only taking the bare minimum amount of action to appear to be keeping the portal up to date. What was done on September 22 was only to add the dates of death. What has now been done on September 24 is to change the verb tense appropriately. The biographies do not match the current biographical articles on the persons, which are updated by normal editing. The biographical snippets have not been content-forked from the current articles, which would be what would actually itself only have been a minimum, not even the 2010s decade step of transcluding the lede. No. This is not an actual attempt at maintenance, but only at the appearance of maintenance. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:56, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Do you expect perfection overnight? Editors have lives outside of Wikipedia, and AT LEAST Antony is taking up doing stuff. If you want then you can help out as well rather than sit here and complain. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 00:15, 25 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As noted above, I also overhauled Portal:Nanotechnology/Selected biography so that the content of all 52 summaries live on a single page, instead of 52 separate subpages. I've been traveling for the past week, but I get home tomorrow and I'll start going through all the existing biographies. There have been a few recent Nobel Prizes that are nanotechnology-related, so a bunch of them are going to be replaced completely. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 01:11, 25 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I done a first batch of replacements. Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Virginijus Šikšnys, Ben Feringa, Joachim Frank, Chennupati Jagadish, and Catherine J. Murphy are in; Sajeev John, Anne Condon, Norio Taniguchi, Eli Yablonovitch, Lila Kari, and James Gimzewski are out. More replacements coming later. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 01:00, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

More replacements: Arthur Ashkin, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna, Jacques Dubochet, Richard Henderson (biologist), Giulia Galli, and Robert Dirks are in; Angela Belcher, Harold Craighead, Cees Dekker, Thomas Ebbesen, Naomi Halas, Sumio Iijima, and Alexander A. Balandin are out. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 08:41, 27 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep the main argument for deletion is that the portal hasn't been maintained much in recent years. Someone who edits in this topic area is now willing to do the necessary maintenance and is actually making a decent start now, so that argument is much less relevant. Even if Antony-22 doesn't maintain the portal in future we should at least give them a chance and not belittle his attempts. Nanotechnology is a major field and I don't see any particular need to merge to another portal unless the maintenance stops. WP:POG does require that portals be associated with a Wikiproject, but this one is (Wikiproject Physics). Issues with the portal system in general are not relevant here because this isn't a general RfC on portals and the community has declined to get rid of portals in general. Hut 8.5 06:53, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Its worth noting that WP:POG isn't even a guideline. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:52, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Since the Portal Guidelines have been downgraded to the status of an information page and we have no real portal guidelines, we should use common sense, which is discussed in Wikipedia in the essay section Use Common Sense and in the article common sense. The portal guidelines were an effort to codify common sense about portals, and we should still use common sense. A portal that is only seldom viewed, less than 25 average views per day, does not seem to provide much value. A portal that is not actively being maintained (preferably by at least two editors to provide backup), especially one that has not been maintained for several years, especially in a subject area that is evolving or changing, does not provide current value. A portal that has only a small set of articles does not serve any purpose as a navigation tool and is not consistent with a broad subject area. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:36, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I have to disagree with the claim that deleting portals according to how many page views they get represents "common sense". It doesn't. Wikipedia simply doesn't use page views as a metric for deciding to delete anything. We don't delete articles just because they get few page views. We don't delete disambiguation pages just because they get few page views. We don't delete files because they get few page views. We judge pages based on the content they have and how suitable the topic is for an encyclopedia, not on how many people look at it. Nor does the idea have community support. Someone recently proposed deleting a load of portals based purely on their page view count. The proposal was quickly withdrawn after attracting very strong opposition, with the main reason being that page views are not a suitable metric to use. Deleting portals with low page views doesn't represent community consensus, it's just your opinion. Hut 8.5 10:54, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep Portals are difficult to argue since the guidelines for deleting portals are so vague, there's not really a WP:GNG we can look to: but this is clearly a large enough topic and it has a maintainer - not sure what the purpose of deleting it would be. SportingFlyer T·C 17:40, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Reluctant Delete - I believe that the topic is viably broad enough to justify a Portal and it's currently looking quite good. Antony-22 should be commended for the work he's done to improve the coverage of relevant content. However, it still suffers from the forked content problem for articles and biographies.The latter selection are a potential BLP nightmare lurking unseen until some ne'er-do-well discovers it as a fertile playgound to entertain themselves. So for that reason, I can't !vote keep until such time as the selected articles and biographies are properly transcluded, to keep them up to date and reduce the vandalism risk. I would not object to re-creation if these items were properly transcluded. --Cactus.man ✍ 13:02, 27 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Cactus.man: I've been reluctant to use the transclude lead template since the leads of these article vary widely in length and quality; by curating them manually I can at least ensure that they are relatively consistent in their content and appearance. I suppose I could directly rewrite the leads of all 78 selected articles, but that would take more time than is allotted for this deletion discussion and would be a future project done over time. (Also, now that all the summaries are on one page, it will be easier to detect and reverse any vandalism that may occur.) Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 18:36, 27 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• @Antony-22: I understand exactly what you mean. It's something I struggled with for a while after I first started deploying the various transclusion templates that were developed by WP:WPPORT back in 2018. Rest assured, there are ways around the problem. I won't derail this discussion, because it will take a bit of explanation of the various options and will be quite a long post. So I'll post on your talkpage if that's OK. (it's likely to be tomorrow before I get a chance to do it though).-Cactus.man ✍ 20:13, 27 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Note to closer – The WP:POG page has been downgraded to an information page (diff). Per WP:POG2019RFC, it was determined that "there is clear consensus that the "Portal guidelines" are not, in fact, official guidelines." North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 16:17, 27 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Note on POG. It is true that WP:POG has today been downgraded to an information page, per the belated closure of WP:POG2019RFC.

However, if POG is no longer a guideline, then we apply WP:COMMONSENSE.

1. In the last 6 months, over 850 portals have been been deleted for failing the principles set out in the nomination. Community consensus on those principles is very clear and very stable.
2. Without a guideline, we apply WP:COMMONSENSE. Common sense is that a portals on a niche topic with only sporadic maintenance does not serve readers, and that POG was correct to require multiple maintainers. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:54, 28 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. All points referencing the criteria stated in POG must be discredited because it's not a guideline. This is a clear example that even when the portal maintainer updates the portal, it was labelled as a "tweak" and downplayed the effort. I'm not amused by the wordsmithing going on lately with the portal MfD nominations. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 20:01, 28 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. It's a decent portal on a legitimate topic. Its deficiencies are minor and detailed, and they are being addressed. This MfD raises important issues. For example, is it mandatory for an editor to cycle the featured items manually, just to fill the edit history enough to qualify the portal as "maintained", or may we achieve a similar result more consistently with automation? It has been pointed out that 850 portals were deleted by citing POG. I don't see this as evidence that POG was right all along and we should continue to apply its requirements despite the clear statement in the RfC. On the contrary, it casts doubt on the legitimacy of having deleted most of the Portal: namespace, and it should make us very wary of continuing these mass deletions. Certes (talk) 18:02, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yet more malicious nonsense from Certes.

The last mass deletions were in late April or early May, as the last of the automated portalspam was removed. Since then we have had hundreds of individual discussions on portals, almost all of them taking one portal at a time and examining it in great detail — just as as has happened with this portal.

Calling this process of detailed individual scrutiny a mass deletion is a deceitful propagandistic technique which should have no place in a consensus-forming discussion. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:38, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep per Certes. Makes perfect sense. Also, the portal is auto-updated weekly. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 18:19, 29 September 2019 (UTC) — Struck part of my !vote. I assumed good faith that it was updated weekly, because it says so right on the portal page (link, see bottom of page). I admit that I should have looked into it more, but the incorrect statement on the portal page was what was blatantly false, not a user assuming good faith that the statement was true. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 12:09, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Yet another blatantly false statement from NA1K, who really should have desisted long ago from spouting their their stream of falsehoods at MFD.

NA1K claims that the portal is auto-updated weekly. This is untrue. I just checked, and every single one of the sub-pages is a static content fork, which has to be updated manually.

What the portal actually does is to display at any given time one selected article and one selected biography. This selection is changed every two weeks, using the formula {{#expr: trunc( (1+{{CURRENTWEEK}})/2 ) }}.

The result is a portal which manages to combine several of the worst features of portal design:

1. Content forks, which rot unless manually updated (and we have seen here how this portal rotted for years), and are vulnerable to vandalism because there is no single command to watchlist all the subpages (they all have o be individually added to the watchjist, which is so time-consuming that is highly unlikely that anyone other than their creator will watchlist them).
   After 6 months in which the failings of the content fork model have been repeatedly demonstrated in a long queue of rotted portals, it is extraordinary that anyone is foolish enough to still defend it.
2. A portal page which displays one at a time single under each of the two headings, with no indication of whether other articles are available, let alone a list of them.
3. No indication anywhere of why these topics have been chosen.

This sprawl of sub-pages is a baroque monstrosity of little use to readers. It gives no indication of the scope of the topic of nanotechnology or its development; it's simply an automated fortnightly magazine with two article excerpts per fortnight. Its creator may have much enjoyed playing with type software to create this, but as tool for readers it's an utter waste of their time. NA1K and Certes have known for months that for readers who are not logged-in, the Wikipedia software includes built-in previews of article leads ... yet they continue to defend this absurdist model of portal which is a disastrous failure of both maintainability and usability. It seems that they have learnt nothing at all from the last six months of scrutinising portals, and are determined to defend a model of portal which was broken even when it was introduced some ten years ago. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:22, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The presented article only updates every fortnight. If weekly rotation would be qualitatively better then changing the formula to {{CURRENTWEEK}} mod 26 + 1 is an attractive alternative to deletion. Logging out and hovering the mouse does shows text, but only the first 30 words or so of the lead and only if the reader happens to find a link to the relevant article. Transclusion is a simple and effective replacement for stale content forks. It has been successfully installed in hundreds of portals, most of which have been reverted to an ancient version or deleted (or both). Finally, I ask you once again to cease making personal attacks on my colleague. Certes (talk) 22:09, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Certes, I ask you yet again to actually read WP:NPA, and to desist from smearing me yet again with your bogus allegations of personal attack. I urge you to try to persuade your colleague to desist from posting demonstrable falsehoods.

This portal has only one so-called maintainer, who neglected it for years, got outraged when it was was deleted due to neglect, got a second run at the deletion discussion, and has now proceeded to re-enact the old portal fan tradition of a flurry of activity now that portal is at MFD ... but has succeeded only in creating a farm of absurd content forks which doesn't work as he intends it to.

You wrote hovering the mouse does shows text, [snip] only if the reader happens to find a link to the relevant article. Is that supposed to be humorous? I thought it would be obvious that my suggestion is to actually provide the links, something like this:

Leonard Adleman * Paul Alivisatos * Arthur Ashkin * Robert Dirks * Eric Betzig * Gerd Binnig * Katharine Burr Blodgett * Emmanuelle Charpentier * Michael Crichton * Robert Curl * Jennifer Doudna * Mildred Dresselhaus * K. Eric Drexler * Thomas Ebbesen * Richard Feynman * Andre Geim * Christoph Gerber * Richard Henderson * Stefan Hell * Mike Honda * Giulia Galli * Bill Joy * Harry Kroto * Ray Kurzweil * Irving Langmuir * Chennupati Jagadish

Full list visible, and preview always available. But no complex code (just simple wiki markup), no redundant content forks, no wait for Lua code to pre-process articles.

All those 126 sub-pages are just a Rube Goldberg machine version of the simple mark-up above. Like any Rube Goldberg machine, it almost guaranteed to break when its creator ceases to maintain it. If editors enjoy creating this sort of monstrosity, there should be somewhere in project space where they can experiment with parser code to their heart's content ... but it's utterly absurd to build reader-facing pages in this way. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:20, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As I mentioned above, I've done away with the 52 biography subpages and consolidated all the content into Portal:Nanotechnology/Selected biography, with a switch statement that only displays the desired biography when transcluded. You're right that having 52 individual subpages is a hassle. I'll do the same with articles and images soon.

I'm considering moving to the transcluded leads, but that will require improving the leads of many of the articles, so it can't be done immediately. Providing a list of all the articles is a good idea! Lastly, the biographies update every week; the articles and images update every other week in a staggered fashion. So every week, two-thirds of the displayed content rolls over. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 02:35, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Antony-22, as I noted above you haven't actually bypassed the sub-pages. Sadly, you chose the revert[3]] the edit which I did to show that this is still happening, so I have reinstated[4] the test as "[TEST: XXXX]". As you can see that is what is displayed on the face of portal, because your whole baroque edifice doesn't work.

Note that you repeat NA1K's false claim that the content will "update every week". Not true; some of it will rotate every week, but any actual update of the content has to be done manually, because it is all content-forked. Even if you succeed in making your huge switch statement work, the result is a massively complex page where one misplaced "|" character will break the whole switch statement, and other syntax errors may also break the whole thing.

As I noted above, this whole edifice is entirely unnecessary. It's just a massive Rube Goldberg machine which is maintainable no nobody other than you and which delivers less value to the reader than would be delivered by a simple list of links. The Wikimedia software provides built-in previews of the start of any linked page to any reader who is not logged-in (i.e. most readers). You can test this for yourself on any set of links, so try it by right-clicking on this link to Template:Nanotech footer, and selecting either "open in private window" or "open in incognito window" (depending on how your browser labels it). That will show the page as a logedout reader sees it ... including a preview when you mouseover any link. Similar functionality has been available since 2015 to users of the mobile app.

This whole edifice is based on a model of portal developed long before that built-in-preview technology was available. It's a model which failed in the majority of portals in which it was used, because it is so hard to maintain or watchlist. Your efforts have actually made the problems significantly worse than usual, because you have an added extra complexity to an already over-complex structure. This avoidable complexity extends even to your retention of the absurd use of Portal:Nanotechnology/Categories to replicate a list of the subcats of Category:Nanotechnology, which is just another content fork to maintain.

I know you have put in a lot of work in your belated attempt to improve the portal and avoid its deletion, but the result has been to make a fundamentally bad structure significantly worse. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:41, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You didn't read what I said above. I consolidated the biographies into a single page, but the articles and images haven't been done yet. Please keep in mind WP:POINT and don't introduce random text into Wikipedia pages. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 07:48, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not vandalize the portal, as you did here. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 08:07, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, @Antony-22, I misread that about biogs vs articles.

However, the rest of my comment still stands. I have just did a test edit[5] to Portal:Nanotechnology/Selected biography: a single typo, which closes an internal wikilink with a single bracket instead of the required two rackets. Result: the whole portal breaks.

This illustrates my point that your massive switch statement is a Rube Goldberg machine: an absurdly complex solution to a non-problem, which presents a high barrier to maintenance by making te whole thing insanely vulnerable.

Note that edit was explicitly labelled as a test. You reverted it, maliciously and falsely labelling my edit as vandalism. See WP:NOTVAND, and please learn some basic manners. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:12, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You are not a new user making their first tests with Wikipedia. Of course if you enter incorrect syntax it will display improperly; this is a fundamental property of computing and says nothing about this particular implementation. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 00:16, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Antony-22, you continue to stubbornly miss my very simple point. On a normal Wikipedia page, one missing bracket breaks just one link, which is a trivial problem. But on your Rube Goldberg machine, it breaks the entire portal.

Your wholly unnecessary complexity has made maintenance difficult, and introduced avoidable vulnerability. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:23, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• User:Northamerica1000 and User:Certes are making a particularly asinine strawman argument. No one said that the edit history would be improved with filler edits. The issue is with out-of-date content, not the particular rotation of the articles. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 22:17, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment – If the portal is retained, I recommend using the {{Transclude random excerpt}} template directly on the main portal page to transclude various content. Then, readers can purge the page to view new entries. This also makes updating the portal with new entries much easier. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 12:12, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• On the contrary, if this portal is retained (and I v much hope it won't be kept), then I strongly recommend dumping them all variants of the Rube Goldberg machine structures used to display previews. That whole model of portal has been redundant since the Wikimedia software started to show previews of any link on mouseover to ordinary readers i.e. those not logged in).

{{Transclude random excerpt}} is now just another solution to a non-problem. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:37, 30 September 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.