Wikipedia:Consultation on the future of portals

Please feel free to contribute to this overview of the 2018 portal discussions. 

Key arguments
The original proposal suggested deleting all portals.

The main arguments in support of the proposal were:
 * 1) Very few Wikipedians use portals, and therefore very few Wikipedians maintain them.
 * 2) As very few Wikipedians maintain portals, they often contain out-of-date and/or irrelevant information.
 * 3) Many portals on certain subjects are less useful as an introduction to their subject than the main article(s).
 * 4) The time Wikipedians do spend on maintaining portals would (thus) be better spent on maintaining articles.
 * 5) Because they are poorly maintained and have few watchers they attract vandalism and POV pushers, which is not quickly reverted.
 * 6) The only portals with significant traffic are the 8 linked from the top of the mainpage, and these get far less traffic than the corresponding articles

The main arguments in opposition to the proposal were:
 * 1) Although few Wikipedians use portals, many visitors do. (See table below to that effect.)
 * 2) Portals are a useful and innovative way to get information on a topic.
 * 3) Blanket deletion of an entire namespace, containing a total of 185,578 pages, may have many unintended consequences – as mass deletions have done in the past.
 * 4) Many articles are also poorly maintained and get few viewers and nobody is suggesting the discontinuation of the article-space.
 * 5) Portals which nobody wants to improve can be deleted individually. The good portals should not all be deleted because of a minority of bad portals.
 * 6) There are clearly some portals that are well-maintained, such as Portal:Current events, and there is little reason to delete them.
 * 7) The deletion would discourage editors to spend their time and efforts on Wikipedia.
 * 8) Some value would (thus) be lost by deleting all portals. An overhaul, by contrast, could potentially create value.
 * 9) Portals which are in bad shape can be improved. The solution is improvement and not mass deletion.
 * 10) Wikipedias in other languages want to stay in the Portal system. The English Wikipedia would be isolated without Portals.
 * 11) New technology allows the building of Portals without subpages. The Portals need to be improved with this software and should not be deleted.
 * 12) The WikiProject Portals has been restarted, overhauled, and is under new curation. In addition to working on portals directly, the team is also upgrading portal design in the form of new components that require less maintenance.

Data
Some users collated useful data; this is reproduced here. Please feel free to add any further relevant data to this section.

Number of pages in affected namespaces
Count of portal pages from Database reports/Page count by namespace originally supplied by Renata3, supplemented with a total.

2018 main page link traffic
Supplied by Andrew Davidson, this table, edited to show only links that are permanently featured on the main page, demonstrates that the main page linked portals receive a substantial amount of traffic.

Examples of Portals which use the newest technology

 * Portal:Community of Christ is the first portal which was made dynamic with the Transclude random excerpt template. Only one subpage is needed to show multiple articles.
 * Portal:History of the Latter Day Saint movement is the first portal which uses the Transclude lead excerpt template for every selected article text and in the introduction. The texts of this portal are always up-to-date.
 * As you read this, the WikiProject Portals has already updated hundreds of Portals. The aim of the Project is to update all Portals.

Portals without subpages

 * Portal/Instructions - New technology allows us to build Portals without subpages.
 * Portal:Humanism is the example Portal for this approach

User essay

 * User:DexDor/Portals (user essay)