Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ships

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 without prejudice for recreation. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:47, 22 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Ships

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

A huge topic, but just another drive-by spam portal, created by @The Transhumanist (TTH).

It looks at first glance like it may a curated portal with an embedded list, but it's actually just spam.

It contains a useless subset of this rich topic, created in the same slapdash way as many similar fake-curated portals I have brought to MFD. See e.g. Electricity, Julius Caesar, Habitats, and Shipwrecks, and earlier today Australian literature.

It goes like this:

1. TTH creates[1] the portal page, using {{subst:Basic portal start page}}, which draws its "selected articles" list from Template:{{PAGENAME}}.
2. That produces no list, because Template:{{PAGENAME}} resolves to Template:Ships. That page doesn't exist, so the "Selected general articles" section just shows a Lua error "No page specified."
3. To create a list, TTH then does a quick screenscrape of Category:Ship types, dumps that into the portal page's "Topics" section, and changes the list-making code to use the embedded list. In the case of Portal:Ships, that reads: {{Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1 | more= | | Portal:Ships | section1=Subtopics | }}=
   I verified that's how it was done by copying the list from the portal into WP:AWB, and using AWB's "list compare" to compare it with Category:Ship types. Perfect match, except for 5 extras pages in the category, which I checked had all been added to the category after the portal was made.
4. Press save,[2] and key presto, an instant "portal". Five minutes after the first save, he's now got a portal with an embedded list, which looks at first glance like a curated portal.
5. Three minutes between first save and last save.

(I have since hacked[3] the Lua Module:Excerpt slideshow so that portals built in this way are tracked at Category:Automated portals with embedded list. Some of them seem okay, but others are junk.)

In some cases, this technique produces a reasonably coherent list of subtopics which would be better done as a navbox.

But in this case it only gathered the sweepings of the topic.

Category:Ship types is the parent of a deep category tree. But I rapidly spotted that TTH has simply used the base category, and taken nothing from the subcats. Some list-making confirmed that, and also allowed a quick check for stubs. 131 of the 407 pages in TTH's list are tagged or assessed as stubs:

TTH didn't even bother to remove from the selection topics which are not ships, such as Cat-ketch and Knarr (keelboat). Both are sailboats, not ships.

So once again, this was 5 minutes to create a portal which looks like it's curated, but is actually just disguised spam. It's hard to see how even its creator could have thought that this drive-by junk served any purpose other than boosting the count of the new "portals" which he listed in his "Newsletters". However, TTH's update #026, 20 Jan 2019 does explain that I was wrong to assume it was screenscraped: TTH used the script User:DannyS712/Cat links, which TTH called a Harvesting categories tool prototype.

Once again, never mind the quality, just count the numbers. Don't curate, just harvest ... and leave others to clean up the tsunami of spam.

I am sure that could be a decent portal on ship. It is a huge topic. But this piece of 5-minute harvested spam is so abysmal that it's worse than nothing. So I propose that this junk pseudo-portal be deleted per WP:TNT without prejudice to creating a curated portal not based on a single other page, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:16, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - I doubt that a useful portal can be developed in 5 minutes, but the creator wasn't trying to develop useful portals, only to develop countable portals. (Hey: Countability is a mathematical property of sets, and a grammatical property of nouns.) Fortunately perhaps, the portal has only 2 average daily page views and so isn't wasting much time. Yes, I did adjust the baseline for the fact that the portal was created on 4 January 2019. I used 1/10/2019 - 3/10/2019. At least no working portals were broken in making this thing. Sink it. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:04, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - When portal pageviews, or pageviews of anything, are this low, bot views need to be taken into account, so that it might be closer to 1.5 daily pageviews. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:06, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• • @Robert McClenon: Bot views are counted separately (see the "Agent" drop-down in the menu to the left). In April this portal received 154 views identified as "User", 121 identified as "Spider" and 0 identified as bot. Obviously there are some caveats with this: Firstly, I've never seen any page with more than 0 "bot" hits - Wikipedia:Sandbox is regularly edited by bot but it's had 0 "bot" hits this year, my suspicion is that they are counted with spiders. Secondly there are some bot views misidentified as "user" - experience from years at RfD puts this in the range of about 3-6 views per year. I don't have similar experience of the figures for portal space, but I've got no reason to believe that it's going to be significantly different. So unless you've got evidence to the contrary, the proportion of non-human views is going to be so small it's insignificant. (I'm not !voting on this specific portal (yet) as while the topic is very obviously broad enough, I haven't spent any time examining the implementation). Thryduulf (talk) 16:06, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, User:Thryduulf - Then it is 114 total human pageviews or 2 daily pageviews, as contrasted with 1037 daily pageviews for the head article. The conclusion doesn't change. The portal isn't useful, certainly not in its current state, and probably not in a curated state, but we are not discussing a curated portal, except to say that we have not ruled one out. My conclusion is that breadth of an area does not and cannot be used in itself as an argument why a portal is appropriate. Wikipedia readers don't use portals. They use articles, links, categories, and articles. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:43, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete:

1. Undeclared automatic creation warrants automatic deletion.
2. Portals require active maintenance to fulfil their purpose.
3. The topic is potentially wide enough, so this is without prejudice to thoughtful recreation, but in its current state this needs dynamiting.

SITH (talk) 11:35, 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.