Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Painting

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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: no consensus. This is a fairly textbook example of a discussion failing to lead to consensus about the applicability of a broad range of policies invoked over the course of the discussion. I note that Robert McClenon offered to withdraw the nomination and revisit the quality of the portal in 90 days. Although no one seems to have responded to this offer, it is entirely within reason for any participant in this discussion to revisit the portal in that period of time and assess whether any improvement proposed by those preferring to keep the portal has actually been carried out. I further note that substantial activity has been undertaken at User talk:Scottywong/Portal guideline workspace since the initiation of this deletion discussion, which may yield greater clarity on which portals should be kept and which should be deleted on a broader scale going forward. BD2412 T 05:04, 25 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Painting[edit]

Portal:Painting (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
(Time stamp for bot to properly relist.) –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 15:18, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Painting is an almost unviewed portal. This portal was created by The Transhumanist, in September 2018, as a portal with multiple excerpt slideshows, in the process of creating thousands of portals, most of them useless. Because this portal did not satisfy any of the specific design patterns that were used by User:BrownHairedGirl to identify more than two thousand portals for mass deletion, it still exists.

    • The intended Portal Guidelines were never approved by a consensus of the Wikipedia community, and we have never had real portal guidelines. We should therefore 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. It is still a matter of common sense that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract large numbers of viewers and will attract portal maintainers. (There never was an actual guideline referring to broad subject areas, and the abstract argument that a topic is a broad subject area is both a handwave and meaningless.) Common sense imposes at least a three-part test for portals to satisfy common sense: (1) a broad subject area, demonstrated a posteriori by a breadth of selected articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad) (the number of articles in appropriate categories is an indication of potential breadth of coverage, but actual breadth of coverage should be required); (2) a large number of viewers, preferably at least 100 a day, but any portal with fewer than 25 a day can be considered to have failed; (3) portal maintenance, (a) with at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained (b) the absence of any errors indicating lack of maintenance (including failure to list dates of death in biographies). Some indication of how any selected articles were selected (e.g., Featured Article or Good Article status, selection by categories, etc.) is also desirable. Any portal that does not pass these common-sense tests is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
    • In the first half of 2019, the portal had 5 average daily pageviews, which is no more than noise, as opposed to 1605 pageviews for the article, Painting.
    • The portal is a single-page design, and has two embedded lists, one of general painting articles, and one of painting techniques. There are a total of 187 articles in the two lists, which is a large selection, and is not subject to content-fork rot.
    • Any backlinks to this portal can be redirected to Portal:Arts, which is a main page portal.
    • The portal is almost unviewed. Maintenance includes the removal of links to excerpt articles that have been deleted. Robert McClenon (talk) 07:01, 8 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep for now - The portal is an interesting case of single page layout, and it has a number of views proportional to your theme depth. Portal:Arts -> Portal:Visual arts -> Portal:Painting. The problems cited by the nominator are general problems of the entire Portal: space , not exclusive to this one.Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:58, 8 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, instead of deleting a portal for a prominent subject please work on it to fix what is seen as wrong. Instead of being "almost unviewed" the portal is now viewed on average 34 times a day (or well over 12,000 times a year). Notifying the appropriate Wikiprojects is the way to go, and should have been included in every portal deletion discussion (there have been far too many to "argue" every one, but painting? Of course this should be kept and improved). Randy Kryn (talk) 12:10, 8 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per arguments raised by Guilherme Burn and Randy Kryn. Coldcreation (talk) 12:39, 8 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep the issues raised are common to most if not all portals. ɱ (talk) 16:03, 8 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - User:Randy Kryn states that the portal is being viewed over 12,000 times a year, by extrapolating a recent period of two weeks, when portals have been much viewed due to their deletion discussions. In the period of October 2018 to September 2019, which is one year, there have been a total of 3205 viewings. That is better than the first half of 2019, but it is closer to an average of 9 pageviews a day. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:49, 8 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • I made several changes to publicize this portal, example [1]. These changes seem to have had an effect. It seems to be one argument that links in better visualized portals attract more readers than links in articles. So I request to keep this portal for now, it is an interesting case study. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Guilherme Burn (talk • contribs)
  • Weak delete: While Guilherme Burn's claim above is somewhat true (average daily pageviews last month were at 31), that still isn't really enough to keep the portal alive. Portals need to have loads more pageviews than that to be considered successful (preferably more than 100), and making it a subportal of another more widely-viewed portal can only have so much of an actual effect. ToThAc (talk) 20:44, 8 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Please point out the policy that states how many views a portal needs to have. This one, with the changes mentioned above, will get 12,000 a year and counting upward. Seems like a personal opinion about page views, one which does not take into account 12,000 Wikipedia readers a year who are interested in what the encyclopedia has to offer on the topic. Randy Kryn (talk) 00:47, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    @Randy Kryn: It not a matter of policy, it's a matter of common sense. It's actually quite common that a portal gets deleted after multiple nominations. Also, I'm calculating the average pageviews per day, which is unmistakably different from total pageviews per year. ToThAc (talk) 01:52, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's a matter of WP:COMMONSENSE to keep the portal on painting. Hundreds of good portals have been deleted rather than the nominating and 'delete' editors taking the time to fix them. Let's withdraw this one and let an improved portal continue to educate the many readers who seek it out. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:59, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Randy Kryn: Alright, I'm going to be frank here: I respectfully think the burden of proof of portals actually helping anyone is on you. Just look at the recent deletion discussions about portals and you'll see. ToThAc (talk) 02:21, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@ToThAc: The burden of proof is on those who nominate for deletion to show that a portal is not useful. Coldcreation (talk) 13:22, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Coldcreation: I've already statistically proven multiple times why similar portals were objectively useless in the past, and I'm also not advocating that all portals should be deleted. Remember that portals aren't content, so deleting them would result in zero net information loss. ToThAc (talk) 22:51, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
"Zero net information loss". Tell that to the potential 12,000 plus people who will view it in the next year. Maybe on this one we can all work together to fix and improve the portal and make it shine like an artistic beacon. I've added the portal to the Art World template, which will possibly up viewership a little. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:46, 11 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Randy Kryn: Please don't cite data you can't provide. For all you know, that number could be as low as one thousand, thus that argument has no place in deletion discussions. I advise you to use a better argument.
Also, the reason I said "zero net information loss" is because users may be better off using the head article or the more broad subject portal instead. ToThAc (talk) 23:48, 12 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
If one person a day views the portal and gains from the knowledge it has to share, then it should be kept and improved so that that one person comes into an experience and leaves it a little bit more educated and a little bit artistically informed. I only learned of topics like Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the last few years. I didn't learn of them via Portal:Painting, but I could have and, for that one day, I would have been the reader that was happily just a little bit transformed. One person having a part of that experience is enough for me to continue to defend the existence of this creation. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:27, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - I find it hard to believe that we don't have multiple FA and GA articles that can be presented on the portal. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 19:17, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note to closing admin. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if you close this discussion as delete, please can you not remove the backlinks? I have a bot (BHGbot 4) which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries.
in this case I think that the appropriate new links would be to Portal:Visual arts. Alternative suggestions welcome. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:48, 12 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - The supporters of this portal are making a case that it is being better viewed in other periods than were the basis of my nomination. My main reason for nominating this portal for deletion was low viewing. I am willing to Withdraw this nomination and revisit this portal in 90 days if the supporters are likewise agreeable to revisiting it in 90 days. (That is of course based on the assumption that other things are equal, such as that there is no moratorium on portal deletion discussions.) Robert McClenon (talk) 05:19, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per KnowledgeKid87 and I don't really think we should be putting so much emphasis on page views. If a decent portal can be constructed, there's no need for deletion. Lepricavark (talk) 20:34, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note to closing admin. I am have just finished a preliminary analysis of this portal. Contrary to appearances, it is in fact spam. I am now writing up my notes, but there's a lot of detail involved, so it may take another hour or so to collate the evidence. Please can you leave this open a it longer? Thanks. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:51, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's a portal, not spam (insults as argument). If you just now, at this late stage in the discussion, started to look at the portal, and see faults, maybe consider improving it rather than supporting deletion. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:18, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Randy, I did not use the term "spam" as an insult. I used it as description of the indiscriminate way in which this particular portal was built by an editor who also has a long history of creating spam portals.
And, I did not just now, at this late stage in the discussion, started to look at the portal, and see faults. I first examined it shortly after opened, but owing to another on-wiki issue which in have been involved, I have found it hard until now to make time to write the detailed explanation which this needs in order to make sense to those not fully versed in portal technicalities. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:26, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Arguably, the consensus of the editors in this discussion, both before and after your analysis and definition of this as a spam portal, see this Portal as good enough to keep and improve. To build on this creation rather than destroy it. I've asked you to consider focusing some of your good faith edits and energy into improving Portal:Painting as a member of a large collaboration to make it one of the best portals on Wikipedia. Your support it that effort would be extremely valuable. If the portal is kept, as it had been earlier until you asked for it to be reopened for your evidence to be presented, I hope you reconsider and either join in or, better yet, lead, a collaboration to improve this portal. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:27, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete as textbook example of the failure of the portals created with the Module:Excerpt progeny of templates (which I may even support in principle) without actually checking the results. I'm talking about {{transclude selected recent additions}} in particular, here invoked as {{Transclude selected recent additions | Painting | months=36 | header={{Box-header colour|Did you know... }}|max=6}}: Every Frame a Painting may be a nice piece of trivia about copyright or the internet industries, but it's questionable whether it should be advertised for the next 36 months to people who are looking for information on painting. Whether this irrelevancy was intentionally accepted by the creator, or merely ignored due to the "black box" nature of those Lua templates, the result doesn't change that the portal is ineffective at best and harmful at worse. Nemo 12:43, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment, may I note that the reopening of this discussion, which had been closed as not delete, has been asked to be overturned at the closer's talk page. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:20, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note from Previous Closing Editor: Since Randy Kryn has made mention to my talkpage discussion, I have re-opened this discussion for two reasons:
  1. Given the controversial nature of the portal namespace, per WP:NACPIT, it was probably best left to an administrator; and,
  2. As BrownHairedGirl had been in the process of composing a lengthy reply, with new evidence in support of a particular position, per how consensus works, it seems inappropriate to not allow that evidence to be submitted, particularly since, a deletion review was a likely outcome. This would only needlessly delay finality in arriving at a decision. So, as I said, I re-opened this discussion for those reasons and those reasons alone. I take no position one way or the other. Doug Mehus T·C 03:37, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thank you, Doug. It is more productive to have the substantive discussion here than to go to DRV for a procedural diversion. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:41, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • This discussion was closed as not deleted. It was a good close, and would hold up on review. It was reopened after a claim of new evidence was presented to the closer. Once closed, then reopened on that basis, means that any claim by an editor that they have new evidence would automatically reopen any decided deletion close, whatever the decision. This may be creating a precedent which can reopen any former close by claiming new evidence. Is this creating precedent, or is this a common practice in closings and reopenings? Randy Kryn (talk) 04:10, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, with prejudice against re-creation. This is pure portalspam (i.e. indiscriminate, drive-by, semi-automated portal-making) by the notorious portalspammer User:The Transhumanist (TTH)), though not of his usual common navbox-clone variety. It has
  • It has a pair of article lists made by a driveby scoop of Category:Painting and Category:Painting techniques, which is stuffed with stub-class and start-class articles.
  • It includes zero paintings, and only one painter (and that only as a result of a redirect after the page was created).
  • Its image gallery is a pointless clone.
  • It has a good structure, but it is wholly uncurated.
  • It has low pageviews (tho they are rising), and zero discussion at Portal talk:Painting. A check of from WikipediaTalk namespace shows that the only topic project talk page to have a mention of this portal is WT:WikiProject Visual arts, and that is only the MFD notice at WT:WikiProject_Visual_arts#Nomination_of_Portal:Painting_for_deletion plus multiple comments by one editor. The only links from user talk pages relate to this MFD.
  • So apart from this MFD, there has been zero discussion of this portal. Even with the MFD open for ten days, only one editor anywhere has expressed any interest in maintaining the portal, and that's not enough to sustain a portal. The history of MFD is littered with the ghosts of many hundreds portals where one enthusiastic editor built or maintained a portal, but then gave up editing or moved on to other topics, and the portal rotted for years. WP:NOTCOMPULSORY, so any editor is fully entitled to move on without reproach, but that's no basis on which to sustain a portal. We have already seen that with this very portal, which as existed for over 14 months, was promptly abandoned by its creator ... and in those 14 months, nobody spotted that it was spam.
  • Painting is only a level 3 vital article, which places it in the 100–1000 range of top priority topics. There are currently only 512 extant portals (yes, Category:All portals reports 546, but that is due to bug phab:T18036; the correct figure is available via a simple Petscan query or by using WP:AWB) So this topic of painting is right in the middle of the grey zone where some portals survive, and others fail; and this one fails.
Image gallery
As with other TTH-built spam portals, this one has no curated list of images to display. Instead it uses the template code {{Transclude files as random slideshow | Painting | History of painting | }} to make its image list simply by combining the sets of images used in the two articles Painting and History of painting, and then doing lots of processing to prepare a subset to use in the portal (which is why the portal takes so long to load).
This redundancy is pointless, because the two articles concerned:
  1. shows the full set of articles
  2. has a built-in image gallery for logged-out readers (i.e. the vast majority) which displays the images at nearly full-screen resolution, instead of the tiny box on the portal. If you haven't seen it in action, right-click to either of these links to Painting of History of painting, select "open in private window" or "open in incognito window" (different browsers use different terminology), and when the page loads click on any image to start the gallery.
Structure
I usually find myself in agreement with Robert McClenon, but in this case he seems to have misunderstood how the portal is constructed.
It's structure is actually what I think is one of the best portal designs in use anywhere. It uses the same technique as is used in Portal:Wind power: plain wikilinks in two defined sections, which are then used by the template to build the rotation. The use of the plain wikilinks as the source makes it very easy to use (because there's an alternative to the redundant excerpts), very easy to edit, and very easy to check for problems in the list.
Spam
However, the way in which the lists were created is pure spam. After 8 months of forensically examining about two thousand portals, I know some telltale signs. The first thing I noticed about this portal's history was that it was created at 11:26, 15 September 2018‎[2], and only seven minutes later at 11:33 the next edit[3] added a list of 191 articles. Seven minutes is a tiny fraction of the time needed to make a proper assessment of that many articles, and in all but one such case in a TTH creation I have found that the list was simply scooped indiscriminately from somewhere else. TTH didn't do diligent creation; his portal creation was all about speedily grabbing lists from some existing source, and he posted several times about his quest to reduce that time to below one minute in all cases.
Topics/General painting topics = spam
The list in the section Topics/General painting topics was a straightforward scoop of the Category:Painting. Using AWB's list comparison tool, I found that of the 74 articles listed in the "General painting topics" section, 72 are currently in the Category:Painting, and of the remaining two: one (Pliage) was redirected in 2019, and the other one is still in the category, but has appeared as an exception because it has been renamed: Blue Star Coloring, moved in October 2019‎ to Blue Star Press.
Of those 74 articles:
  • 6 are tagged as stubs (using {{stub}} or one of its many narrower alternatives)
  • a further 9 of the 74 are assessed on their talk page as stub-class
  • a further 29 of the 74 are assessed on their talk page as start-class
The former guideline WP:POG was a little contradictory on quality requirements. It explicitly forbade stubs, but also said articles "high quality, either a featured article, a good article or one which deals with its subject substantially or comprehensively". So it's unclear whether start-class was forbidden, and of course we now have no portal guideline. But I seen have no support anywhere for including stubs, and little for including start-class. If we just say "no stubs" that means that 20% of TTH's Painting techniques list shouldn't be in the portal; if we say "no start class", that rises to 59% (44/74 are stub or start-class).
Topics/Painting techniques = spam
Similarly, the list in the section Topics/Painting techniques was a straightforward scoop of the Category:Painting techniques. Using AWB, I found that of the 113 articles listed in the "Painting techniques" section, 110 are currently in the Category:Painting techniques, and of the remaining three: two were in that category until removed a few days ago (Ian Cook (artist), Michael Dupille) and one is still in the category, but has appeared as an exception because it has been renamed (Theorem Stencil, moved in March 2019‎ to Theorem Stencil as a capitalisation fix.
Of those 113 articles:
  • 30 are tagged as stubs (using {{stub}} or one of its many narrower alternatives)
  • a further 9 of the 113 are assessed on their talk page as stub-class
  • a further 46 of the 113 are assessed on their talk page as start-class
If we just say "no stubs" that means that 35% of TTH's Painting techniques list shouldn't be in the portal; if we say "no start class", that rises to 75% (85/113 are stub or start-class).
Bad choice of categories
Even if category-scooping was an appropriate technique, the choice of categories is very poor. Category:Painting is a mix of key topics plus random articles which have not yet been diffused to sub-categories. Similarly, Category:Painting techniques has a set of subcats which are not included. So the use of just these two categories excludes all paintings and all painters and all galleries and all art movements unless they have been miscategorised. As a way of making a list of quality articles on key topics in painting, this is not abysmal; it's 100% complete fail.
Lack of scrutiny
Doing and documenting this detailed analysis has taken about 6 hours of my time (most of it in failed list comparisons and double-checking). Very few editors have the time to do that, or the experience of doing this sort of analysis to thousands of portals (most of which were thankfully much more straightforward). But the result is that at 11 other editors have commented on this portal, and most saw no problem; User:Nemo bis came close, but missed a lot.
I intend absolutely no criticism of the skill or good faith of any of the other editors. They simply didn't manage to overcome the huge barriers to analysis created by the baroque Rube Goldberg machine structure of portals, and the usual lack of any ongoing systematic analysis of the article lists of portals, and of any documentation of how the list of articles in a portal is created. Even in this case, with a visible list of articles, analysing them is just far too much work even if you are (like me) an old cow who has spent far too much time AWB-mongering. Without AWB, forget it; how can a mortal individually assess 184 articles without spending half the day at it?
The result of this obscurity is that while nearly all portals have a pretty design, most of them have little or no scrutiny of their core component: the list of articles. That's why when they do get detailed scrutiny at MFD, the outcome is often very different to what might have been expected. And that's why drive-by spam like this has been in place for 14 months, and why so many experienced, good faith editors failed to spot that it is spam. There are dozens of well-maintained, well-curated portals ... but even then, it is usually very hard for a newcomer to the portal to assess the quality of the list. That is not, as some claim, an argument for deleting all portals. But it is a strong argument for deleting those portals which don't have a team of hard-working editors diligently scrutinising and balancing its list.
Meanwhile, there are links to this portal from 603 articles or category pages, and in the 12 months to the end of October 2019, it had a total of 3,456 pageviews. Over three thousand views of pure spam, undetected even after scrutiny by ten editors. Please can we just delete this junk? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:01, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I can't speak for anyone else, but I am absolutely not going to read that massive wall of text. I wouldn't read a comment that is so TL;DR in any context and certainly not when it was posted by an unapologetic bully. Lepricavark (talk) 15:58, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment to @Lepricavark:, with respect, and I'm not sure if I'm applying this essay correctly, but that sounds like ostrich mentality. Administrator BrownHairedGirl's essay is worth considering as it contains useful information. I'd suggest maybe a nutshell, but I've been told those are discouraged in deletion discussions. I read it all, even though I won't be expressing an opinion one way or the other given my prior involvement in this discussion. I encourage everyone who has been involved this discussion (other than in closing or relisting, of course) to consider it. Certainly, everyone can skim some non-essential sentences.--Doug Mehus T·C 17:03, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. There is a lot to digest above from BHG, so will need to consider a bit further (am also contributing to the Scotty Wong workshop on portals where it might be worth sharing). My impression from the post above by BHG (which I may not have read right), is that this portal is technically good (and the way portals should be done), but its purpose/usefulness is contested? Have I got that right? Also, should we re-list this MfD to give a bit more time to consider this? Britishfinance (talk) 10:21, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Britishfinance I'd summarise it as "well-designed shell filled with random junk, and nobody spotted that it is junk". --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:27, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • So why not fix the junk? Not to be rude but there are over 150 visual arts FA articles out there: [4], has anyone bothered to go through them and replace the content with FA and GA rated things? There is a solution, but you self admit that you don't want to do the work. Even in this case, with a visible list of articles, analysing them is just far too much work. (WP:NOTCLEANUP) - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:16, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        • KK87, so far as I know, it has never been policy that spam must be kept and adopted. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:25, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
          • This is how portals work in general though, by showcasing featured content. If there is featured content available then it defeats the "junk" argument. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:30, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
            • KK87, there is no guideline on portals, so "how portals work" is at somewhere between uncertain and disputed. "Showcasing featured content" is one model of portal, but it is not the only one. Some portals are mega-navbox format, some do showcase featured content, but most showcase a set of articles of assorted quality, selected according to no stated criteria.
              There is no policy or guideline that says that there should be a portal on this topic (or any other given topic), let alone that there should be one just because a spammer dropped some spam at this title. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:40, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 15:18, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. In light of new information, I am relisting this discussion. (Non-administrator comment) –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 15:21, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per WP:ATD, which is Wikipedia policy. The maintenance issues above can be addressed by, wait for it, maintenance. I don't know what the word "portalspam" means; spam refers to something that is unsolicited, and I didn't think we required that someone first solicit the creation of a portal. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:25, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • @UnitedStatesian I have not aware of the community ever having supported the mass creation of portals, or the creation of portals cloned from a navbox (like most of TTH's creations) or the creation of portals by a WP:INDISCRIMINATE scoop of category contents.
This portal is not in its current state due to lack of maintenance. It junk because it was was created as junk, and has remained junk. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:53, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Please stop insulting the work of fellow Wikipedians. The portal is not "junk" (?), it is a good faith introduction to the topic. I wish you would spend just one hour in helping fix what's wrong with the portal in addition to the six hours (which it took to complete your analysis) to point out what's wrong. Has anyone pinged The Transhumanist in this discussion? Randy Kryn (talk) 12:19, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Randy Kryn, I applied the word "junk" to the result, not the editor. Even good faith work can produce junk results ... and I do not see any of sign good faith in TTH's indiscriminate list-scooping as a part of quest for speed over quality.
I am sorry my 6 hours work to identify the fundamental flaws which everyone else missed is not enough for you. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:07, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. Having read this more, I guess this portal does go to the heart of an important part of the portal debate. The good thing about this example, is that unlike other portal MFDs, its technical construction seems fine and the potential of the topic to be a portal is also probably fine (i.e. painting is a big topic??).
For the Keeps, these two items are effectively Q.E.D.; however, this is an AfD-type conclusion that I think really only applies to articles and not necessarily portals – E.g. notable topics are not AfD'ed regardless of poor state (unless we are at WP:TNT terrority), and therefore Portal:Painting is a Keep as it can be improved.
For the Deletes (and per BHG's exhaustive analysis above), portals are tools for commmunities/active maintainers to showcase the best of WP in a topic; however, where the content used is more random/pasted-in and mostly by a single editor (what could be called "POV filler" content, rather than "spam" which is a confusing word as these are ranked articles and there is no WP:PROMO here), then it is not a proper "showcase" and should be deleted until a proper maintainer group arrives.
The core question is therefore is whether portals that are technically fine, in broad topic areas, but with POV-filler content, should be kept for improvement, OR, deleted until it can be shown that maintainers will arrive. I guess looking at the past MfDs I have seen, the maintainers never seem to arrive (which I think goes to the real core of portals that I have discussed at the very helpful User talk:Scottywong/Portal guideline workspace, which is that portals are not relly "portals" in the sense that a reader would expect, but galleria or emporia of FA/GA content, which, unlike WP editors, the public don't seem to be really bothered about)? Therefore, I would delete this for now until proper maintainers arrive to create a better "showcase". - Britishfinance (talk) 20:34, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per BHG and Bf, but with no objection to re-creation or fixing by editors interested in the topic (e.g. active members of the topic's wikiproject), rather than by portal enthusiast(s). As BHG (who should learn to cut down her text to just the main points and avoid unnecessary use of words such as "spam") has pointed out, the method used to select articles for this portal (just the top category) actually prioritises articles that are poor quality (newly created, unclear topic etc). Incidentally, part of this portal is badly formatted on a mobile phone (Desktop View). DexDor (talk) 07:18, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • @DexDor, I was following the Sagan standard that "extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence". In 14 months, nobody spotted that it was spam; same after 10 days at MFD, with 10 editors commenting. My past experience is that without the detail, many editors will dismiss a result so radically different from other views, so my compromise was to have the length by omitting the full set of lists which are still in my work folder. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:43, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The problems of this portal are relatively easy to fix. I do not believe this portal does any damage in its current state so editing is the solution, not deletion. The topic of Paintings is at least sufficiently broad with a wide enough array of articles to choose from to warrant a portal. Arguments that are against portals in general rather than this individual portal should be ignored by the closer. This MfD is only about this individual portal. --Hecato (talk) 12:00, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Hecato: the damage is that TTH has created a page whose core is deceit: it misleads readers by promising something which it doesn't even try to deliver.
It has two key selections labelled "Selected general articles" and "Selected painting techniques", but those sections are not actually selected: they are just a scoop off the floor, contrary to WP:NOTINDISCRIMINATE.
This is an encyclopedia, not a dustcart to store sweepings. A page which deceives its readers has no place on Wikipedia. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:20, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The comparison between portal views and category views is mistaken, because portals have a single entry point, where as categories have a diffused structure with multiple entry points. Most of the contents of any given major category is diffused across sub-categories, and each sub-cat is linked from each article which it contains. So readers may view part (or even most) of the contents of the category without ever viewing the main category page. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:04, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It is being said that the portal is useless. Hits were cited. I suppose one of the problems here is ease of editing. The editing of these portals is not intuitive in the same way as the article. BrownHairedGirl, this is becoming harassing behaviour, not necessarily of your design but of your participation. Portals are a theme. You literally can't delete portals. Is there anything to be said for making each portal a junction? That would be a limitation, but would it be a dysfunction? You'd think it would reduce them probably. How many articles are there now six million? What's like one in ten thousand? Six hundred? What's one in a thousand? Six thousand. Five thousand or less? ~ R.T.G 10:54, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@RTG: I agree that editing portals is not intuitive. However, this type of portal is by far the easiest to edit, apart from the mega-navbox style portals such as Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
I am not sure what you means by Portals are a theme. You literally can't delete portals. Is there anything to be said for making each portal a junction? Maybe you could clarify that. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:58, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl:, It's got as much to do with not being able to fit everything in one place as anything else. I mean, there has to be junctions. I suppose Transhumanist and co have been acting like they are invisible. This is because of neglect. They are invisible. The hits for portals and categories are often so low, you guys are shocked nearly every time, but it's meaningless because you are not working on a specific pattern. The biggest ammo against them this time has probably been that they didn't all make sense. They were pre-emptive portals. What you might not have realised is, that can't be done without bias. People keep saying about this, we need a strict guide here, but without any solid relevant ideas, we are just dropping the need for the guide because we weren't able. That at least one minion guards each bridge? What are we talking about here. There has to be a way to figure this out. ~ R.T.G 08:09, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I just came upon the statement by User:RTG, made about two weeks ago in this MFD: "Portals are a theme. You literally can't delete portals." That is syntactically valid, but I have no idea what its semantic meaning is. It may be based on the idea that 'literal' doesn't mean 'literal', but if so, anything can mean anything, and that is contrary to common sense, which we still are expected to use in Wikipedia. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:10, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Don't just delete portals. Fix them. ~ R.T.G 22:23, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
There was ample opportunity to do so. Nobody has made an attempt to fix the painting portal since it was nominated for deletion. Has the WikiProject Painting been resurrected to maintain the portal? If I provide the list of all featured articles on paintings, is somone going to step up and fix the portal so it highlights featured content? 22:37, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
  • Keep a perfectly functional portal, we can potentially reassess again once portal guidelines have changed, but I am not swayed by any of the deletion analysis. SportingFlyer T·C 12:09, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per the through investigation of the portal by @BrownHairedGirl. Just delete this unmaintained spam 14 months of actions have shown no one actually wants to maintain to a degree that would make it worthwhile for readers. Newshunter12 (talk) 15:53, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. That a portal needs improvment is not a reason for deletion. Thisis a topic whee we have a very rapidly increasing number of articles, and threwill be corresponding increasing interest in organization. DGG ( talk ) 19:40, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I am surprised by some recent !votes which seem to me to glossing over severe problems. Phrases such as "needs improvement" and "perfectly functional" are oddly euphemistic labels to apply to an indiscriminate list created with absolutely no attempt at actual curation.
I am also surprised by DGG's assertion that a growing number of articles will lead to increasing interest in organization. First, portals as currently structured do not organise content; they showcase a sample of content. And secondly, in 14 months nobody was interested enough in this portal to spot that the sampling is so dire that it could have been a breaching experiment.
So I am left wondering why I again see a showcase being assessed against such low expectations of quality, and why I see assertions of imminent editor enthusiasm for portals after years of decline. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:30, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
This was closed once in good faith as not-delete. You wanted it reopened. It has been reopened at your insistence, and yet continues to build support for what I would call "not delete but improve". This is a sign of good faith interest by many editors in maybe allowing one portal that you describe as "spam" and "junk" to grow into much more, even one which you would be proud to have on Wikipedia. Hopefully you can help in such an interesting effort. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:36, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Not everything gets improved as soon as it should, but there is one way to be sure that it won't ever be improved, which is to delete it. The first step in improving is to keep it. DGG ( talk ) 06:05, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@DGG: this is not an article. It is not content; it's just a showcase. We keep even poor articles because that's all we have on the topic, and deleting even a poor stub leaves us with no content on the topic.
OTOH, there is nothing here that couldn't be re-created in five minutes. If we keep this, we are basically continuing to lure readers to a fake portal: a showcase which was actually filled by fly-tipping. Keeping it is luring readers to a dump which we now know to be a dump. Why do this to our readers? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:26, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
If we delete this then we show readers that instead of making an effort to improve things first, we go straight to the dumpster because of laziness. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:53, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I don't agree with you on that point Knowledgekid87 – just look at the length of this MfD (vs. the average AfD) for the effort editors of both views are putting into discussing this portal. The issue is not "laziness", it is that dedicated maintainers never seem to appear to take on abandoned portals. There have been many discussions at MFD as to why this is the case, but it does not seem to change the reality that portal abandonment by readers and editors is increasing.
As Dmehus has been noting at other portal MfDs, it is pretty easy to restore the deleted portal if a proper human maintainer(s) appears and is willing to take it on. Therefore, in the meantime, why present an abandoned tool (a portal is a tool, not content in of itself), that makes Wikipedia look like a failed project to the readers? Seems like an "own goal" we don't need to score, imho? thanks. Britishfinance (talk) 15:16, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Actually the discussion appears moot as we have WP:NORUSH and WP:DEADLINENOW, yes those mention articles but the arguments are the same. Wikipedia being a work in progress versus information that needs to be corrected ASAP. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:22, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete If this portal is meant to be a showcase of our featured content, it fails miserably. We have more than 50 featured articles on paintings, and not one of them shows up on the portal. If it is meant as an introduction to the topic, it doesn't do much better. For example: How is it helpful to point anyone to Accidentalism (painting) which explains that "accidentalism is the effect produced by accidental lights". Did someone read the article on accidentalism and think: "This is a really article that people who want learn about painting techniques will find helpful"? Of course not. The method used to assemble this portal obliviated the need for expertise or editorial judgement. It is a the result of an algorithm, not something created by thinking editors. That it is apparently under the purview of a wikiproject that consists of two editors who ceased contributing in 2006 and 2012 just makes it even more clear that that is not a portal that was created by dedecicated editors, but machine-generated garbage, tossed over the wall to a project that doesn't even exist. Vexations (talk) 15:40, 23 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - No policy based rationale for deletion given. GMGtalk 19:54, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note that all policies/guidelines related to portals have been depreciated by the community; portals at MfD require WP:COMMONSENSE arguements. Britishfinance (talk) 20:12, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Not so: policies such as WP:ATD, which apply to all pages regardless of namespace, continue to apply to portals. UnitedStatesian (talk) 22:40, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Not really so either, WP:ATD has little application to Portals, and concepts like notability (core of ATD), don't apply to portals (which are tools, not content). An article with zero page views but is notable is fine, a portal with zero page views (and also likely abandoned), is not fine, and usually delated at MfD. Britishfinance (talk) 22:59, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per BF and BHG. You had me at zero paintings and one painter. So long as the portal is not maintained, it's a disservice to our readers and actively bad for the encyclopedia. Sure, it could be maintained, but it's not, and it hasn't been, and that's the point. And the low pageviews emphasize the point. No one is maintaining it, no one is reading, any unlucky reader who happens upon it will be fed bad information (like no paintings or painters, things that don't have to do with painting like Every Frame a Painting, and a bunch of start or stub articles). The encyclopedia would actually be improved if this portal page were removed from it. – Levivich 04:16, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. This is a tricky one. Clearly the topic is broad enough; there are thousands upon thousands of decent articles that could be included, as well as huge numbers of featured pictures. However, as BrownHairedGirl's analysis shows, The Transhumanist has not created the strong portal this topic deserves, and no-one else appears to have stepped in to improve it. Happy to support keep, if anyone wants to try to use The Transhumanist's structure with properly selected content. Espresso Addict (talk) 06:18, 17 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Even though this is a fully automated portal of a type created by The Transhumanist, it has strangely escaped mass deletion. (One wonders what other TTH-created treasures were lost in the purges.) Even BHG seems to think that this portal's design is unique and its "structure is actually what I think is one of the best portal designs in use anywhere." She goes on to disagree with the way the portal's content was selected. As a singular example of a portal structure which works even for one of the most visible portal opponents, this is clearly SoFixIt territory. Given the ArbCom case underway, and particularly in view of the spectacular mistakes revealed by Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2019 December 18, I can't see any consensus for deletion here either. Enough of the ideologically-driven portal deletions. Give us time to fix such remaining portals. On Portal:American Civil War, the basic changeover from fully manually maintained, content-forked material to fully automated/extracted but still manually selected took just over an hour of effort. There are tweaks left to be performed but there are few obstacles to improving all remaining portals. BusterD (talk) 01:33, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • It would be nice if you addressed any of the comments above on the specific content of the page being debated in this MfD, rather than making general proclamations about what "treasures" this or that user produces. As it stands, this !vote says nothing whatever of any relevance to the discussion at hand and would need to be discounted by the closing admin, which seems a pity since you appear to have some insight into the portal that has so far escaped everyone else. Nemo 10:17, 22 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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