Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:William Shakespeare (2nd nomination)

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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: not to be. ‑Scottywong| chat _ 17:44, 11 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:William Shakespeare[edit]

Portal:William Shakespeare (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Individual nomination from Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Biography portals. Ping participants @Xover, Robert McClenon, BrownHairedGirl, Bertaut, and UnitedStatesian:

Portal abandoned for over ten years, Biographical Portal("per se" a narrow topic) and totally redundant to the article. Guilherme Burn (talk) 16:39, 25 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Section Contents Last add of content
Introduction Transclude from William Shakespeare
Selected article 3 articles (All already listed in article William Shakespeare)(1) ‎2006
Selected picture only one 2006
Selected quote only one 2006
DYK 3 DYK 2008
Plays in focus From the same templetes from William Shakespeare

1 - The portal shows only one selected article, Shakespeare's sonnets since 2006.

Sorry @MJL:! (facepalm)Guilherme Burn (talk) 17:06, 25 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment – I partly agree and partly disagree with the analysis by User:Guilherme Burn. This portal, Portal:William Shakespeare, formerly Portal:Shakespeare, has an embedded tree design that is unlike and superior to the usual scheme of subpages. The portal had 18 daily pageviews in January-February 2019 before it was renamed, as opposed to the 15,651 daily pageviews for the article. That is a poor pageview rate, and is less than 0.2% of the pageview rate of the article, but that is because of the popularity of the article. If the reader of the portal clicks on the links for Shakespearean tragedies, historical plays, or comedies, a list of plays is displayed, containing links to the plays. The lists haven't been updated since 2006 because Shakespeare hasn't written any plays in the past thirteen years or four centuries. The list could be updated if a previously lost work were found. The links are to the articles, not to copies of the articles, and the articles are updated in the normal course of editing, e.g., to reflect twenty-first century literary criticism. This is a portal design that minimizes the need for maintenance, and any future portal designers would do well to consider it. It may, to be sure, be particularly appropriate for historical and literary topics, where the subtopics do not change frequently. A more detailed analysis may follow within a few days. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Robert McClenon (talk • contribs) 02:34, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Look, I'm no fan of portals in general (or the damned outlines from the same source), and this particular portal is largely not being maintained because I've chosen to not expend any time on it (I tend to be the one doing the gnoming on WikiProject Shakespeare). But this slow proxy war against all portals by way of what you imagine to be reasonable classes and exemplars is as bad as the mass-created mess of semi-automated ones: you're taking as little care with your noms as those involved did with their mass creations of them. Portal:Shakespeare predates the mass-creation and pseudo-automation surge (and, frankly, can be reverted back to its pre-"automation" state).
    Your main argument is that as a biography portal its scope is too narrow, which means you didn't actually read and take on board the discussion in the previous discussion. William Shakespeare is not a biographical article, it is an overview article for the topic. The biography article is at Life of William Shakespeare (note that the overview article is FA and the biography one is not). Shakespeare isn't one among many people you study in a field: Shakespeare is the field, and the person is one among many things you study in that field. There are literally universities that offer degrees not in "English literature" but in "Shakespeare". They have programs called "Shakespeare studies". OUP, CUP, et al, have Shakespeare as distinct topic areas (CUP once sent me a catalog only of new Shakespeare books for the year!). People have entire careers in Shakespeare (Stanley Wells is the most prominent example, but there are plenty of them at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and any university with an ambitious literature program). In stage and film you have dramatic actors, comedic actors, and Shakespearean actors (e.g. Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier, etc.).
    Looking at Wikipedia, as I mentioned in the last discussion, there are nearly 1500 articles in the scope of WikiProject Shakespeare. It covers his family; his plays, each with individual articles and, where needed, sub-articles (Hamlet: the play, characters, sources, critical approaches, literary influence, performances, on screen, etc.). There are the famous scholars in the field (Stanley Wells, Edmond Malone, Samuel Johnson, etc.), and the famous editions of the works (the First Folio, The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), The Oxford Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, etc.). The early history of moving pictures essentially is a history of Shakespeare films (
    ). And the number of modern popular films that fall within the field is wast: IMDB gives Shakespeare writing credit on 1000+ films, including Akira Kurosawa's most famous works, The Lion King, Shakespeare in Love, not even to mention the straight up adaptations of the plays by Kenneth Branagh etc. The field has its own conspiracy theories. It figures prominently in the visual arts (Droeshout, Chandos, Cobbe, Sanders, Flower, Ashbourne). There are too too many operas to mention, and several modern songs (Dire Straits) and concept albums (1, 2, 3). It touches on law. There's a programming language, a video game, astronomy. There's gardening and foot paths fer cryin´ out loud!
    I would probably !vote in favour on a RFC about removing all portals and their namespace, but so long as we have portals, Portal:William Shakespeare is a prime example of a portal to keep. --Xover (talk) 07:56, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Xover: my substantive comment is below, but I wanted to note here that you have been very unfair to the nominator @Guilherme Burn:
  1. You say to GB: predates the mass-creation and pseudo-automation surge (and, frankly, can be reverted back to its pre-"automation" state)..
    The reality is that automation forms no part of the nominator's rationale, because the portal was never automated. So there is no "pre-automation state" to revert to.
  2. You say to GB: You're taking as little care with your noms as those involved did with their mass creations of them.
    On the contrary, GB's detailed analysis of the portal is wrong in only one respect: the three selected articles are unused, and a lone "featured article" is used instead. So in that respect the portal is even worse than GB's depiction. Otherwise, GB's analysis is spot on.
The portalspammer TTH was spamming out automated pseudo-portals at a rate of up to one per minute just for the heck of it.
There is no way that GB could have written that nom is less that 5 minutes, and 15 minutes is more likely. So your accusation of little care seems to be an unfounded and unpleasant assumption of bad faith. I understand that you don't want this portal to be deleted, but please make your positive case for keeping the portal without lashing out in unfounded attacks on the nominator. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:49, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: Please take seven steps back and reassess your ability to read anything on this topic objectively. Your above message is, in addition to being incredibly condescending, casting aspersions. I do not think that that is what you think you are doing, but that is in fact how you are coming across: you are reading things into my above message that are not there and attributing positions to me that I do not hold. Further, I do not think Guilherme needs you to step in and defend them: if they feel unfairly treated they can explain their objections themselves.
Meanwhile, both this and your "substantive comment" entirely fail to address my point, and give every indication of not having actually understood it. --Xover (talk) 22:08, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Xover: you are showing an extraordinary combination of calculated offensiveness and lack of self-awareness. So please take several steps back, and reassess your ability to engage with reality and to conduct yourself with civility.
You made a series of unfounded and personally abusive criticisms of the nominator, which I rebutted. If you find that rebuttal condescending, then the solution is for you not to engage in casting such gratuitously insulting aspersions based on falsehoods.
Your two substantive points in all of this seem to be that:
  1. there a lots of articles within the scope of this topic
  2. This portal should not be deleted unless all portals are deleted.
If you have another substantive point, then you would do yourself and everyone a favour by spelling it out rather than filling up paragraphs with lists of pages titles.
Both points are trivial. 1500 articles within scope is a tiny tiny fraction of the articles-within-scope of many of the hundreds of portals which have been deleted in the last few months.
The nomination is based on evidence that the portal does not meet the current portal guidelines. You may agree or disagree with that assessment of the evidence, but deleting sub-standard pages of any type is not a back-door way of deleting all pages of that type. There is no basis in policy or guideline for some binary choice between "delete everything" and "keep even the junk". --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:29, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: The nominator's stated rationale here and in the previous MfD a month ago is that because it is a biography portal it is ipso facto too narrow a topic to merit a portal. I addressed that in the previous MfD, and expanded on it here, by explaining the difference between a biography article (Life of William Shakespeare) and an overview article (William Shakespeare). The latter, which is the scope of the portal, includes the wide variety of articles I gave copious examples of above. Hence, it is neither a biography, nor too narrow, and that rationale is therefore invalid. And while I entirely agree with your assessment of its current quality, I also do not accept that limited current quality is valid grounds for deletion so long as the potential for improvement exists (cf. scope), and neither is that argument usually successful at AfD in my experience. Thus my !vote lands on keep for this portal.
I also do not like portals as they are currently conceived, and would !vote to delete them all in a RfC, but so long as we must have them at all, it is my opinion that this one is an excellent example of the sort of portal we should have. Once someone improves it from its current poor state, that is. --Xover (talk) 23:21, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Xover: you seem to be placing a sort of theological significance on this issue of it being a biog portal, and to be insisting that if there is any flaw in the assertion of the unviability of biog portals, then the whole nomination must fall.
I think that's pointless theorising, because we have very clear empirical evidence that this portal has failed: in practice it has been too narrow a topic to attract readers and maintainers. That failure has been consistent for a decade, so the theorising is pointless. And the question of whether the head article is biog or an overview has no bearing on the portal, because it doesn't alter the portal's scope.
As noted below, your comparison with AFD is misplaced, because this is not AFD and the page under discussion is not an article. At AFD, the encyclopedic content in articles in kept so long as topic the topic meets WP:N. However, portals are not articles and they are not content. They exist only to serve a utilitarian purpose of guiding readers to articles, so portals are routinely deleted if they fail in that task.
I want to pick on your statement that this this one is an excellent example of the sort of portal we should have. Once someone improves it from its current poor state, that is.
This is the Waiting for Godot issue which arisen with so many hundreds of portals that we should have an essay called WP:GODOT. Just as Beckett's characters speculate about Godot's arrival, this argument amounts to "we could have a brilliant portal on this topic if someone made a brilliant portal" ... without acknowledging that we have waited a decade for that, and there's no sign of a change. Godot will move in and have grandchildren before all these dream portals appear.
So in the meantime, you want to keep this very poor portal in the hope that 12 years of neglect will be reversed. In the meantime, readers will continue to be lured to a page which adds no content, and is redundant to the head article. It simply wastes readers' time. Why do that? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:54, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
User:BrownHairedGirl - Click on WP:GODOT. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:46, 29 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: you seem to be placing a sort of theological significance … No, but that was the main rationale in the nomination so that was what I addressed. The distinction between biography and overview articles is that if the portal's scope was just biography it would probably be too narrow a scope even for Shakespeare (but probably not as obviously so as you might expect), but for Shakespeare as a topic area there are plenty enough articles to draw on for a portal. The particular rationale in the nomination is invalid, so it cannot be deleted on those grounds, but that does not mean there are not other valid rationales. On the other points you bring up I just disagree with your conclusions: there is no deadline and a poor portal does no harm so long as it can eventually be improved. I absolutely agree that its current state is poor, and that this is a valid argument in favour of deletion; and that Godot is unlikely to arrive any time soon, and that this too is a valid argument for deletion. I just don't agree that they are sufficient arguments for deletion. --Xover (talk) 00:17, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Xover I struck your second vote. Editors may only vote once at MfD, AfD, ect. Newshunter12 (talk) 23:36, 4 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Newshunter12: Kindly refrain from editing other editors' comments. That's clearly not a second vote but an explanation of my rationale. Please also see Help:Talk pages for how to properly reply in threaded discussion without breaking indentation and confusing the timeline of discussions. --Xover (talk) 07:57, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strongest possible keep User:Xover said it best: as long as there are portals, we need this portal. Plus this portal has the added advantage of demonstrating a unique (and superior) design that could be a template for a much improved portalspace. Does the nominator really expect to see constant updates on a portal having a subject who died 400 years ago? UnitedStatesian (talk) 12:51, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @UnitedStatesian:Does the nominator really expect to see constant updates on a portal having a subject who died 400 years ago? A topic that does not receive constant updates because it ceased 400 years ago is a narrow topic. And one question, why in these ten years the articles, categories and templates related to the theme received constant updates?Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:36, 1 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Guilherme Burn: I checked the main template {{William Shakespeare}}, and it had 1 update in 2018 (that was not a vandalism/revert cycle) and has had only 4 in 2019. Those are not "constant" updates in my book. And to take one example, for portals that show categories, every category update is immediately reflected in the portal; I caution against your apparent assumption that that only way portal content can change is through edits. UnitedStatesian (talk) 11:56, 1 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong delete. Abandoned, redundant, and barely used.
I am very surprised by this one: I thought that it would have been one of the better-built and more widely-visited portals, and that I'd be making a rare "keep" !vote. But this portal is actually the opposite of what I expected: it is very poorly built, and little used. It's redundant to the featured-class head article William Shakespeare.
I am very surprised to see the arguments from @UnitedStatesian and Xover in favour of keeping this portal. Their positive assessments are so seriously mistaken that i think they must be looking at a different portal.
This portal basically has 6 components:
  1. A "selected article" box displaying Portal:William Shakespeare/Featured. That has been showing the same topic since 2006.[1] there is no list of topics, no rotation, not even the abominable purge-for-new-selection change used on other portals with multiple sub-pages.
  2. A "Quotes" box displaying Portal:William Shakespeare/Quotes, which has shown the same quote since January 2007[2].
  3. A "Did you know" section, displaying Portal:William Shakespeare/Did you know, which is identical to the Marvh 2008 version[3]. . Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but this eleven-year-old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.
  4. A "Plays in focus" section, which consists simply of the navboxes for each play. Exactly the same setup is provided on the head article; there is no need for separate portal page for this.
  5. A separate tab which displays Portal:William Shakespeare/Complete works list. That is simply a cut-down version of Shakespeare bibliography.
  6. Portal:William Shakespeare/Topics, which is basically a bulky-display version of the navbox Template:William Shakespeare. The navbox displays all its links on the same screen-full, so it's a much more usable navigational tool than the portal page.
So I read @UnitedStatesian's exultation of this as a unique (and superior) design that could be a template for a much improved portalspace, and I find it completely counter-factual.
What on earth is "unique" or "superior" about 1/ a 13-year static selected article, 2/ a 12-year static quote; 3/ a set of 11-yo DYKs; 4/ a cluster of nbavboxes, 5/ a restyled bibliography list?
Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But the Wikipedia main page requires huge amounts of work; it is maintained by several large teams of busy editors. A mini-mainpage also needs lot of ongoing work if it is going to value over the head article. And in this case, the portal offers no added value whatsoever. It has only one thing that isn't already available on the head article: the rotted DYK farm, which should be removed from the portal.
WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". But this portal has not been maintained for over a decade. And it has extraordinarily low page views: in January–June 2019 the portal got a median of 18 pageviews per day, compared with 15,018 daily views for the head article. In other words, the article got 778 times more views than the portal.
@Xover doth wax lyrical about the huge number of topics with the scope of William Shakespeare: his works, the films, the commentaries, the actors, even unto Shakespeare gardens. All of which is true, but also utterly irrelevant, because the portal adds little or nothing beyond the navbox. It doesn't help the reader reach those topics.
Xover says this is a prime example of a portal to keep, and Unitedstatesian agrees. I really wonder how on earth they reach that conclusion, because not only is the portal demonstrably inferior to the well-maintained head article, it is shunned by readers. Far from being some sort of example of a portal to keep, this is poster-child to the failure of most of portalspace: here we have the greatest writer in the English language, with extensive coverage on wikipedia, yet the portal is unmaintained for a decade and redundant to the main article and the humungous tide of readers don't use the portal. That shouts FAIL in flashing red lights.
UnitedStatesian says we need this portal. Fine rhetoric, but the evidence of available navigational paths and the empirical data of pageviews shows the exact opposite: it's wholly superfluous. Just another failed solution in search of a non-problem. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:24, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: Your analysis and arguments regarding quality are spot on and I agree entirely with them (I even acknowledged that state of affairs in an aside above). I simply disagree with your conclusion: we generally don't delete William Shakespeare because it has not yet been developed into an FA or it's been a long time since somebody worked on it. If this had been the nominator's main rationale I might not even have bothered to !vote here: the poor current state of the portal is self-evident and I have little inclination to go fix this one. But the "too narrow because it's a biography" argument that was the actually given rationale is hogwash that was debunked in the previous MfD and I'm a little irked I actually had to repeat it here (hence my criticism of the nominator's lack of care). --Xover (talk) 22:23, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Xover, "too narrow because it's a biography" is broadly correct, but not the best way of phrasing the problem. There have been loads of sterile debates about what constitutes a "broad topic", with plenty of bizarre arguments including that a tiny-village is broad enough to have a portal, and that 3 articles within scope is broad enough to have a portal. (Seriously, both happened.)
What we have repeatedly found in the last few months of portal analysis is that abstract estimates of a "broad topic" have been little help. A portal only works if it attracts readers and maintainers, and only the broadest portals manage that. For example, we have repeatedly found that very few city portals have reached critical mass, and most have been deleted for abandonment. So on biographies, the reality is that we have repeatedly found that the life-and-works-and-studying of one man almost never makes a viable portal ... and on scrutiny, this one is no exception. So you may be irked that the nominator disagrees with you, but the empirical data actually supports the nominator.
And your comparison with the page William Shakespeare is mistaken. It's a common mistake, but a fundamental one.
That's an article, and as such is the actual encyclopedic content of Wikipedia. We could delete all the categories, templates, portals, talk pages, etc, and we would still have an encyclopedia. If we deleted the article and kept everything else, we'd have no encyclopedia.
So deletion policy has always been different for non-article spaces, because while articles have inherent value, portals/categories/navboxes etc have only utilitarian value. If they don't do a useful job, we delete them.
There's so much of this going on with templates and categories that each has their own deletion process: WP:TFD and WP:CFD. Portals are different only in that they lack their own dedicated deletion zone, and are discussed at MFD. In the last five months, we first deleted the 4200 automated spam portals, and then proceeded to assess the rest and delete those which are not a benefit to readers. Many portals have been kept, but hundreds of portals have been deleted for reasons such as abandonment, so your assertion that we don't delete portals because of abandonment is simply factually wrong. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:00, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: Taking your second point first… If your argument is that these factors apply differently to portals than they do to articles then I acknowlege that to be a valid position, but disagree with it. There are many differences between articles and portals that merit differences in deletion criteria (and perhaps even creation criteria!), but I think the rationales relevant here, based in lack of a deadline and SOFIXIT (etc.), apply equally well to portals as to articles.
As to your first point, if your argument is that level and frequency of maintenance (presumably as a proxy for number of interested editors) and visitor counts / pageviews should be the measure of "broad topic" then I am somewhat sympathetic, but that was not the rationale presented in the nomination (nor did it present or refer to any empirical data on this point). I have only addressed narrow—broad in the plain meaning of the term. I'm not sure I agree that your alternate definition is a meaningful one, but neither is it something I am inclined to argue against. Getting a critical mass of interested editors is definitely a problem for any non-trivial task or discussion on the project, and is certainly one factor that should be taken into account. --Xover (talk) 23:52, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Xover: the definition of broadness is not mine. It's in WP:POG.
And the nominator didn't assemble the pageview data, but you have it now, and it's stark.
There has been over a decade in which a critical mass of editors has not assembled to make this portal some use. You acknowledge that it is very unlikely that the Wikiproject will spawn a task force to take the portal on.
So you too envisage that a "keep" outcome likely means continued abandonment. Now, for exactly how long do you propose to lure readers to waste their time on this abandoned portal? One more decade? Two more decades? A century? And why?
What purpose does this portals serve as it is? What great new functionality do you envisage can be added to it? Do you have any examples of what this glorious new portals might look like? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:06, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: In my initial !vote I listed the broad variety of content that could be added to the portal. I fully expect that it will not be added any time soon. I just do not think that is sufficient reason to delete it. I think it's a good argument to delete all portals (i.e. when lack of maintenance is considered in the aggregate it is a much bigger problem), but not when considered individually. --Xover (talk) 00:33, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I'm really conflicted by this nomination in all honesty. My time in Wikisource has consistently beaten into my head that no individual should get a portal (we have author pages for that: s:Author:William Shakespeare. However, I can't help but draw comparisons to Portal:The Yale Shakespeare in my head, though.
    I also appreciate the more unique design to it (much like I have been trying to do for Portal:Connecticut these past few months with collapsible boxes). That all being said, I have yet to sufficiently weight the arguments here. Idk. (edit conflict) –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 23:55, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    @MJL: Just to note, Wikisource's Author and Portal pages are not directly comparable to much on Wikipedia. If anything they perhaps resemble disambiguation pages, or possibly certain list articles. Or put another way, the existence of s:Portal:The Yale Shakespeare on Wikisource is not a particularly good argument to keep Portal:William Shakespeare on Wikipedia. --Xover (talk) 00:33, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    @Xover: True. I think I probably made the comparison muddled. Portal:William Shakespeare/Complete works moreso has a similar purpose to our portals and was what I was referring to with that. Part of the arguments that have been made with the great portal debate is whether portals here are navigational tools or content pages (That isn't an open question on Wikisource; they're clearly navigational tools). I think the portal being nominated does a rather comparable job in that regards.
    As for the biography/portal issue, it is also one I lean towards being against in most cases (see my arguments for deleting Portal:Donald Trump). Words are hard.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 03:38, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    @MJL: I don't think this will actually help you much, but I think this portal, and probably most portals (certainly all the ones created with TTH's script), are clearly not "content" as such. There isn't original content in portals, and they don't contain a "References" section (cf. WP:V etc.), are by nature giving "undue" weight to certain things (by selection or highlight), and so forth. At least to me it seems clear portals are a navigation and discovery aid: they are an alternative to wikilinks in articles, navboxes, categories, and even outlines. And as alternatives they are partially redundant with (overlaps) these. If the navigation—content distinction is determinative for you then I would say this one is definitely navigation. --Xover (talk) 10:01, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - I am really somewhat puzzled by the intensity of the arguments both ways about this portal, and I haven't yet stated my view. Here are the facts and non-facts as I see them:
    • The topic of the portal is, a priori, a broad subject area. It isn't about the life of Shakespeare as such. His works have the scope to be considered a genre that crosses the usual genres of tragedy, comedy, and history. However, the guideline (regardless of whether it is a guideline) doesn't simply say "broad subject area".
    • The portal has a low pageview rate, 18 daily pageviews, a posteriori. It isn't attracting readers.
    • The portal doesn't have a maintainer. It doesn't need a maintainer to update the subpages because it doesn't rely on subpages, but it doesn't have a maintainer.
    • The portal doesn't use subpages, at least not for most of its content. That is an argument in its favor, or, at least, not against it.
    • One of the arguments against the portal seems to be that the portal is essentially a mega-navbox and isn't an improvement over the navbox. Is that correct?
    • The arguments about automation and the pre-automated version of the portal are off the mark. The portal has never been automated, and precedes the debacle of portal automation.
  • I agree with User:MJL that I am conflicted by this nomination, and the intense back-and-forth isn't helping me. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:27, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    @Robert McClenon: Amen to that! –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 03:38, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Robert McClenon: the crucial issue for me is your point that the portal is essentially a mega-navbox and isn't an improvement over the navbox.
The portal does have some sub-page-type elements (selected quotes, selected articles, DYK) which have been left to rot. Beyond that, there are navbox-style elements which add nothing to the navboxes on the head article, and in many ways the portal offers less than the head article, which has been developed into an exceptionally good navigational tool. Given the quality of the head article, the portal is a poor solution in search of problem.
Xover agrees that there is v little chance of anyone devoting the time to do more with the portal.
So I ask what on earth is the point of a portal which adds no value and isn't going to add value?
AFAICS, Xover's answer to that is simply to say that "no added value" might be a reason to delete all portals, but not individual portals. However, I think that ship sailed long ago; hundreds of portals which add no value have been deleted individually. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:40, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
On this point my stance is that on portals as in article stubs, having them does little harm and they can always be improved later. There is no deadline, and it is always preferable to fix it than to delete it. Or put another way, WP:TNT is rarely the best option even for the crappiest cases.
However, if the context is all portals and whether we should have them at all, the scales shift for me. At that scale and scope I think we have insufficient volunteers to take care of even mainspace, and we currently lack both a good conception of what portals are supposed to be and the software tools needed to create and maintain them in a good way. But as the RfC concluded we should have them anyway that's neither here nor there. --Xover (talk) 10:28, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Xover, that's not a good comparison. If the community wanted there to be an equivalent of stubs for other namespaces, it would have crated them. It hasn't done so, for the simple reason that stub articles are content, and we keep content for its own sake. We keep template and categories and portals only for utility.
Your other two points having them does little harm and they can always be improved later don't stack up well either.
MFD has seen a steady stream portals abandoned for a decade or more, and while they could in theory be improved later, in practice its very clear for most of them that the chances of improvement are near-zero.
Abandoned portals do cause harm. At best they waste the time of readers, by luring them to pages which promise an enhanced navigational experience, but don't deliver it. If the readers has used other refresh-for-new-content portals, they may be tempted to try "Purge server cache" button; but the can refresh all day long on this portal, and won't get anything different. At worst, they serve up outdated and incorrect info: I have long since lost counter of the number of abandoned portals which were found at MFD to be displaying garbage because their ten-year-old content fork had never been updated.
And any portal, even an abandoned one, adds to the maintenance burden. It's another page to update when a title is disambiguated, another backlink to be removed when article is deleted, another link splatted in portal boxes on articles and categories and navboxes, and it's another vector for vandalism and/or POV-pushing. Those sub-pages are almost entirely unwatched.
The WP:ENDPORTALS RFC asked if we should delete all, portals, and the answer was "no". That rejection of "delete all" was not a decision to keep even abandoned junk portals. If anyone want to start a WP:KEEPABANDONEDJUNKPORTALS RFC, then we can see what its outcome is ... but so far nobody has put that proposition on the table. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:37, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Delete – I find both the arguments to keep and the arguments to delete to be valid. However, the key fact is that the portal, while well-designed, hasn't attracted readers, and, although it needs less maintenance than some portals, it does need maintenance, and hasn't gotten it.
      • I will comment further on the unpleasant discussion above. First, I agree with User:BrownHairedGirl that the apparent attack by User:Xover on the analysis by User:Guilherme Burn was unfair and seemed to be confused in some details. It is sufficiently erroneous, in its comments about automation and about the time required for analysis, that I will discount it, and will advise the closer to discount it.
      • I find the argument by User:UnitedStatesian that "As long as there are portals, we need this portal" to be distressing for two related reasons. First, that implies that this is as good as portals will be and as well-viewed and well-supported as can happen. I hope not. This is better than most only because most are failures. Second, even the portalistas haven't given a good explanation of what the need for portals is.
      • I agree that Shakespeare is a priori a broad subject area, but, again, theory isn't enough.A posteriori observation shows it has 18 daily pageviews, 0.12% of the pageviews of the article.
      • I like the cut-down bibliography. It is a good navbox. I agree that this is a better portal design than most portals. It doesn't need as much maintenance as most, but it does need minimal maintenance, and doesn't get it. It isn't likely to be improved on. It does illustrate the argument by BHG that very few portals will both get the labor that they require and will warrant it.
      • If another editor can improve on this portal, they know where Deletion Review is.
Robert McClenon (talk) 00:41, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment – No prejudice against future re-creation of a curated, maintained portal with an adequate amount of content. The topic itself meets the WP:POG criteria for topical broadness relative to the amount of coverage it has on English Wikipedia, although perhaps on a somewhat weaker level compared to others. See Category:William Shakespeare and its subcategories for an overview of available coverage about the topic. North America1000 13:39, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Oppose future re-creation. Note that as usual, the serially dishonest editor NA1K continue their campaign of deception by trying to mislead the discussion. NA1K namechecks WP:POG with respect to topic broadness, but uses a definition of broadness which is unsupported by the guidelines.
The reality which the mendacious NA1K seeks to obfuscate yet again is that WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". And per the evidence above, this portal has not attracted "large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". So it should not be re-created. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:24, 2 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - I agree that someone who lived 400 years ago isn't going to get frequent updates. The portal is inviting to those who are interested in the topic, more links to the portal are needed to spread the word. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 01:55, 3 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's keep-cos-its-"inviting" rationale is a classic piece of WP:ILIKEIT subjectivity. The actual objective evidence of the hard data of viewing figures shows that not only do readers overwhelming decline the invitation, but that readership of this portal has been steadily declining for the past 5 years. That is unsurprising, since recent additions to the built-in-features of the Wikimedia software make portals technically redundant.
Portalistas assert as a mantra that increasing the number of links significantly increases the number of views of the portal, but I have yet to see them present any evidence of this.
So far as I can see, the only linking which has significant impact is links from the main page. The 8 portals linked from there have about ten times as many views as the next-popular portals. (Those links also way undeperform links from less prominent parts of the main page, underlining the broader point that readers son't want portals). My own experience of linking widescale linking to portals from categories is that it made little or no difference to pageviews.
So Knowledgekid87, if you some actual evidence that increased linking will significantly increase page views, please present it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:42, 3 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per the thorough and well reasoned argument put forth by BrownHairedGirl. This portal utterly fails the guidelines of WP:POG. It has been abandoned for a decade and is barely used by readers, with the bonus of having hard evidence of only sinking further into obscurity over the years. This portal is a time suck to nowhere and I'm honestly stunned that some editors are stating this abandoned rubbish should be kept because at some distant point maintainers and readers might arrive like mana from heaven and put it to good use. Portals stand or fall on their merits now, not vaguely later, and this one falls flat. Newshunter12 (talk) 01:33, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete this worthless junk portal.Catfurball (talk) 21:41, 6 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete for lack of any discernible edit history. However, I would not oppose if a user decided to userfy it (probably the main/only user to ever contribute content, back in 2006?). Otherwise, deleting the portal is the most effective way to significantly improve William_Shakespeare#External_links by getting rid of a harmful box and link which detracts from the vastly superior Wikisource box/link s:Author:William Shakespeare. Nemo 07:57, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete mainly per the part of the discussion starting with BHG's comment at 20:24 26 July 2019. DexDor (talk) 05:35, 11 August 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.


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