Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Social and political philosophy
- 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. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 06:44, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
Static micro-portal with one article and one biog. Abandoned since 2009, creator blocked since 2014, redundant to head articles and navbox.
Created[1] in June 2009 by Gregbard (talk · contribs), who has been blocked since 2014 for copyvios[2]. However, that leaves five years in which Gregbard didn't develop this portal, but should have — the lead of WP:POG says "Portals which require manual updating are at a greater risk of nomination for deletion if they are not kept up to date. Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... and this one has not been maintained.
Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Social and political philosophy shows a rather impressive list of sub-pages ... until you look more closely, because most of them are blank, and have been blank since 2009:
- 1 and Portal:Social and political philosophy/Selected biography/1 have both shwon the same text of the same topic since since 2009
- Portal:Social and political philosophy/Did you know is just an template-like page saying "... that ... that". It seems to have never been used.
WP:POG guides that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". In Jan–Feb 2019 this one got 86 pageviews per day, well in excess of the abysmal median of 13 views per day for all portals, but still less tha 10% of the 879 daily views for Political philosophy.
Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than the head articles Political philosophy and Social philosophy, and their comprehensive shared navbox Template:Social and political philosophy which has links to 192 articles.
Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navboxes offers all the functionality which portals like this set out to offer. Both features are available only to ordinary readers who are not logged in, but you can test them without logging out by right-clicking on a link, and the select "open in private window" (in Firefox) or "open in incognito window" (Chrome).
- mouseover: on any link, mouseover shows you the picture and the start of the lead. So the preview-selected page-function of portals is redundant: something almost as good is available automatically on any navbox or other set of links. Try it by right-clicking on this link to Template:Template:Social and political philosophy: open in a private/incognito tab, and then mouseover any link.
- automatic imagery galleries: clicking on an image brings up an image gallery of all the images on that page. It's full-screen, so it's actually much better than a click-for-next image gallery on a portal. Try it by right-clicking on the article Political philosophy: open in a private/incognito tab, and then click on any image
Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.
The availability of built-in-preview and built-in image gallery sets a very high bar for any portal which actually aims to meet that WP:PORTAL principle and add value for the reader.
But it is theoretically possible that some day a group of editors may collaborate to build and — crucially — maintain a portal which genuinely adds extra value for readers. So I propose that this portal and its sub-pages be deleted per WP:TNT, without prejudice to recreating a curated portal in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:57, 23 May 2019 (UTC)
- Delete: unmaintained portals fail their reason for existence. SITH (talk) 11:15, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
- Delete - Concur with analysis by BHG and with comment by SITH. Creating portals is easy. Maintaining them is work, but unmaintained portals are troublesome. In view of the high pageview rate, a new properly maintained portal should be welcome. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:33, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
- Delete - Abandoned draft of a portal, 37 subpages, created 2009-06-14 02:55:34 by User:Gregbard. Don't pretend that having so many empty subpages is a philosophical feature rather than a bug. Never went alive. Nothing to keep. Portal:Social and political philosophy. Pldx1 (talk) 11:11, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
- 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.