Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:World War II

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. ✗plicit 14:20, 27 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:World War II

Portal:World War II (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)​

Another derelict portal. This one hasn't been substantially updated since 2008. Portal:World War II/Featured article is about half GA+. The rest consist of 6 B class (Talk:United States Marine Corps, Talk:Hispanic Americans in World War II, Talk:Warsaw Uprising, Talk:Soviet invasion of Poland, Talk:Puerto Ricans in World War II, Talk:Blitzkrieg), five C class (Talk:Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, Talk:Operation Downfall, Talk:Invasion of Poland, Talk:Amchitka, Talk:3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines), and three start class (Talk:Imperial Japanese Navy, Talk:Mauthausen concentration camp). Schierbecker (talk) 23:53, 19 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Archive by redirection. Redirect the Portal to World War II. Redirect the talk page to WP:WikiProject World War II. If that’s too complicated, then delete.

Portals are a moribund relic of an archaic idea for useful navigation. They are a net negative, whether due to being neglected, or due to attracting volunteer time for the zero readers. SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:45, 20 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak Keep and tag for re-architecting. This is a much-viewed portal, which unfortunately has the same unsound architecture as most older portals, in which selected articles are displayed as partial copies, so that they are content forks that are not updated when the articles are updated. (The battles were fought 80 years ago. The historiography of the battles continues to evolve.) This portal had 167 daily pageviews in 2023, and had 146 daily pageviews in 2019, and 195 daily pageviews in 2023. Because it is a high-profile portal, it has occasional drive-by maintenance by a few editors who do drive-by maintenance on portals, probably because they like portals. Its history also shows that it is occasionally vandalized, and the vandalism is reverted. One of the drive-by portal maintainers should be asked to re-architect it to use transclusion. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:36, 21 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I concur with SmokeyJoe that portals are an archaic idea, and are a net negative to the encyclopedia. However, there are a few editors who like portals, and will do occasional drive-by maintenance, probably to prove that portals are sometimes maintained. Either they think that portals are technically neat (with which I disagree), or they have a mystical liking of portals, or they have a reason for liking portals that they have not been able to explain. If any old-style portals should be kept, this one should be kept. I will not !vote to delete a popular portal as long as portals are part of the English Wikipedia. Either delete them all, or improve this one, or leave it alone. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:36, 21 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

    Much viewed? It receives 0.6% of the views of its main article, World War II. Those pageviews probably come from clicks to the links (two) to the portal at article. Someone did a pageviews analysis and showed that navigation by portal links has a ~99.9% drop off with each step. 0.6% of the article readers are curious about the portal, but the conclusion is that it doesn’t serve 999 in a thousand.

    Recently, the top eight portals were removed from the Main page. It would be interesting to see the portals pages views analysis done again.

    I think most Portals should be archived. But there are exception. The first is Main page. A likely second is Portal:Current events (but does its 60 thousand page views happen only because it is prominently linked on the Main page?

    Then there’s Wikipedia:Community portal, which links to many things that are not portals.

    Portals are archaic, from the days before the internet had search engines. The idea was that every page would be part of a massive interconnected web. Portals were to be hubs in that web. That was not how the World Wide Web would develop

    Portals also role in drawing readers into being organised editors. That idea is redundant with WikiProjects. WikiProjects have the distinction of being clearly for editors, articles being for readers. Portals are confused and confuse. And being unmaintained, and having no clear purpose, their output does not support the encyclopedia. SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:45, 21 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

    There is no conceived re-architecting. SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:47, 21 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

    The portal pageview analysis to which User:SmokeyJoe refers may have been done in 2019 by BrownHairedGirl, but we know that she has been banned for personal attacks in two rounds of deletion discussions, the first about portals in 2019, and the second about categories in 2023. I have pageview data from 2019 on more than 900 portals, but I haven't analyzed it recently, or collected more recent pageview data except for those portals that have been nominated for deletion.

    I agree that portals are archaic, but search engines predate Wikipedia, so maybe SmokeyJoe means that portals have been archaic since they were introduced to Wikipedia. However, a substantial group of editors like portals. They have not given me an explanation that I understood, so I think that maybe they are seen as having mystical value. They haven't participated in these portal deletion discussions, but that is probably just because they haven't seen the discussions.

    User:SmokeyJoe writes: There is no conceived re-architecting. I disagree, but maybe I should clarify what I mean. Most older portals have an architecture which was always unsound since they were introduced in the 2000s, in which selected articles are implemented by subpages that are partial copies of articles and so are content forks. In 2018 and 2019, some portals were converted to a more current architecture relying on embedded lists of article names and transclusion of articles. This eliminated the content forks, and is a better architecture, and I was calling for the conversion of Portal:World War II. If SmokeyJoe means that that re-architecting is not sufficient, and that portals should be deprecated with a very few exceptions, I agree, but this discussion is not about deprecating portals, but deleting certain portals.

    If User:SmokeyJoe wants to propose deletion of portals with a few exceptions, I will support the idea, but that is not the topic of this discussion. I am only saying that if portals are being retained, even temporarily, this Portal:World War II is one of the ones that should not be deleted at this time.

Robert McClenon (talk) 05:36, 22 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak Delete - After thinking about it, I have decided that I will not oppose deletion of any portal that has copied or partially copied subpages, an unsound architecture that results in the displayed subpages and the pages being different after time. I have verified that Portal:Solar System and Portal:Olympic Games, which were nominated for deletion in 2019, and had No Consensus, have not been re-architected, and have only been maintained inconsistently, mostly with drive-by edits by members of the portal platoon. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:18, 23 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. This can be fixed through automation so it does not need to be updated frequently. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:40, 23 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It may be true, but I disagree per WP:TNT. I've already fixed some portals with automation like Portal:Geography and Portal:Religion, it's a lot of work, it's quicker to create one. A portal can be created in minutes, updating it involves conflict with editors attached to the old model.Guilherme Burn (talk) 20:36, 23 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete and direct users to the article on World War II. It doesn't get enough views nor is it useful enough to warrant keeping even if it was edited to update without manual editor input. (The views the portal does get are only because we link to it from a large number of articles. I assume the clickthrough percentage is quite low, and there's an argument that most of the links violate the spirit of WP:SEEALSO and WP:NAVBOX.) Ed ^{[talk] [OMT]} 16:14, 23 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak Delete according to the same arguments of Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:World War I where result of the discussion was no consensus.Guilherme Burn (talk) 20:14, 23 January 2024 (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.