Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/History of Foo navbox-forked portals

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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:  delete. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 02:58, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

History of Foo navbox-forked portals


Embdedded-list pseudo-portals, each of which is simply a redundant fork of a navbox. It's just another variant of drive-by portalspam.

Each of these 4 portals was created early in 17 September 2018 by @The Transhumanist. Each of them uses an embedded list, which in principle is an excellent way of building a portal, because it allows selection of content, without creating a forest of WP:REDUNDANTFORK sub-pages.

However, in each of these cases, the embedded list is simply a copy of the content of the eponymous navbox:


 * Portal:History of Asia — copy of Template:History of Asia
 * Portal:History of Africa — copy of Template:History of Africa
 * Portal:History of South America — copy of Template:History of South America
 * Portal:History of the Middle East — copy of Template:Middle East with "History of" prefixed to each link

This is just a different way of achieving the same level of redundancy as was deprecated in the two mass deletions of similar portals: one, and two, where there was overwhelming consensus of a very high turnout to delete a total of 2,555 such portals.

Portal:History of Asia shows how it was done:
 * 1)  create the page using {{subst:Basic portal start page}}, which builds the "selected articles" list off    In this case, that doessn't work, because the wikicode of Template:History of Asia doesn't contain a list.  Instead it uses Asia topic with the parameter  .  So the Lua modue foud no list, and returned an error.
 * 2)  (edit summary "pull in template") tries to emedy this by substing the navbox, which produces a list but not a usable one, 'cos it leaves all the template's   coding erc in the portal
 * 3)  (edit summary "cleanup code") strip out the navbox-specific formatting

The rest is just tweaking. By the time those three edits were done, the result was another portal which looks like a curated portal, but is actually just another navbox clone.

These are of course all broad topics. But per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects", and each of these pseudo-portals is just a degraded version of the navbox and of the head article. Look e.g. at the article History of Asia, with its divisions by era; or History of Africa, with rich thematic division by era. In the case of Africa and the Middle East, a list of currently-extant countries is a very poor choice of frame through which the sweep of the area's history, because most of the countries are products of the colonial era, territorial divisions less than 150 years old. In Africa, the current map was mostly created in the late-19th-century scramble for Africa by European great powers; in the Middle East, the map was drawn in the 20th century after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire

Creating real portals on these topics which actually serve as "serve as enhanced 'Main Pages" would involve studying the history, researching available Wikipedia content, and applying some scholarship rather than simply reformatting a navbox. If and when a non-spamming editor applies the required to required scholarship to build a real portal, it will take them only seconds to re-create the framework ... so as with the 2,555 navbox-forked portals deleted in the two mass nominations, I propose that all 4 portals be deleted per WP:TNT, without prejudice to recreating a curated and maintained portal in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 02:33, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

Discussion (History of Foo navbox-forked portals)

 * add your keep/delete/comment here


 * Keep because the topic is more than broad enough for a worthwhile portal, and once you have an embedded list you can amend the selection of articles on that list ... but I don't expect to be voting on any more of these – as I have said several times elsewhere, I don't view the daily batch of MfDs as any way to secure quality improvements in portal space Bhunacat10 (talk),  11:14, 10 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Bhunacat10, as noted in the nomination Creating real portals on these topics which actually serve as "serve as enhanced 'Main Pages" would involve studying the history, researching available Wikipedia content, and applying some scholarship rather than simply reformatting a navbox. If and when a non-spamming editor applies the required to required scholarship to build a real portal, it will take them only seconds to re-create the framework.
 * So why do you want to continue to waste the time of readers by directing them to spam? -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 12:34, 10 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Neutral. I agree these topics are broad enough for portals to exist, but my gut feel is these would generally be better as a section within the main topic portals (Asia, Africa, etc). I agree wholeheartedly with the comment above; a general discussion at WT:PORTAL on the subject of "History of" portals would be a less aggressive approach and much more likely to produce a result everyone is happy with, rather than jumping straight to MfD for yet more fractured and fractious discussions. WaggersTALK  12:26, 10 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Whatever any such discussion might conclude, there is no need to keep this spam pending its outcome. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 12:35, 10 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - No real work was done in creating this portals, and so no real work is being lost in getting rid of them. I would actually prefer History of Foo as a broad topic for portals rather than portals for the whole continent.  The History of a cultural region is an important area of scholarship that is not served by these non-portal portals.  Get rid of them, and if someone wants to create real portals, they can do so, and will probably be better off without the stupid skeleton.  Robert McClenon (talk) 00:48, 11 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - created robotically, useless navigation tool, redundant to the existing articles and navboxes, and of lower quality
 * - Automated portal, 0 subpages, created 2018-09-17 03:43:06 by User:TTH, Portal:History of Asia
 * - Automated portal, 0 subpages, created 2018-09-17 03:25:48 by User:TTH, Portal:History of Africa
 * - Automated portal, 0 subpages, created 2018-09-17 04:12:14 by User:TTH, Portal:History of the Middle East
 * - Automated portal, 0 subpages, created 2018-09-17 04:27:49 by User:TTH, Portal:History of South America
 * Each topic would be more than broad enough for a worthwhile portal. But no real work was done in creating them. The result is like the skeleton of a mammoth: useful to imagine what a mammoth could be like, but totally useless to recreate a living mammoth for real. Only worth deleting. Pldx1 (talk) 20:05, 11 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Pldx1 (talk) 20:05, 11 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete: this is a case of "would be", but we're dealing with what is. And per WP:PORTAL, portals should be actively maintained to fulfil their purpose.  These are not.    SITH   (talk)   12:54, 12 May 2019 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. <b style="color:red">Please do not modify it.</b> 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.