User talk:SportingFlyer/Portal proposal

Portal advice
I suggest starting with proposing "advice" for portals, which can gain some level of acceptance without having to go through a formal RfC process to establish a community-wide consensus. True enough, it won't have the same degree of weight at a deletion discussion as a formal guideline, but personally I prefer gradually building consensus over time to progress from advice to guideline.

That being said, I don't favour hard numeric cutoffs being used as criteria. I believe the creation of portals should be handled by the same editors interested in a topic area who create and maintain articles, list articles, infoboxes, navigation boxes, and so forth about that area. Accordingly, I think they should be able to determine what makes most sense as a broad subject for a portal, based on their domain knowledge and available time to maintain the portal in question. In essence, let those vested in the work decide how they want to organize that work. isaacl (talk) 15:07, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

Purpose of portals
Especially with mobile, there are actually four issues that need to be addressed.

The first of them is the purpose of portals. It should primarily exist to showcase good quality articles that can help others understand the topic(Neither categories nor search functions look for quality...). And structure is very important. The first item anyone on mobile or not needs to see is a list of the most connected articles(subtopics) with acceptable quality - acceptable meaning that it should be accurate, non-biased and complete, and readable., that help to understand the topic. The second item should be some featured or good articles(subtopics) that are not as connected but still have a significant connection(e.g. Portal Earth -> Screwdriver would be bad even if the article would be featured) Then there should be some small notice leading experts to articles that need to be improved, ideally. Below all that can be some other things like DYK, a random featured article...

The second is visibility. Portals should be linked from every applicable article.

Third, applicability, which you already partially address - we don't need portals when difflinks are enough. We cannot sustain portals, however, that are not properly maintained: Here I would add the following: Portals that aren't maintained can be proposed for deletion. If someone wants to maintain that portal, they should ask an admin for undeletion or remove the prod while adding themselves as maintainer. Portals with repeated maintenance issues and portals that lack the basic criteria(broad topic) may be deleted and salted via MFD. Portals about living people should be speedily deleted and salted. If a living person gets enough attention to be otherwise applicable for a portal it is likely a controversial person and this is just an invitation for trouble.Lurking shadow (talk) 19:44, 16 October 2019 (UTC)