Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Anthropology

 __NOINDEX__
 * 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. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 02:02, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Anthropology


11-year-old abandoned draft with misleading structure, converted into a navbox-forked automated pseudo-portal. Topic probably broad enough.

This is currently a fully-automated portal, building its selected article list solely from the navbox Template:Anthropology, of which it is therefore a redundant fork. (For a full explanation of why this type of portal is redundant, see 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).

It was converted to a fully-automated format in September 2018 by @The Transhumanist (TTH), the creator of the thousands of automated spam portals which were deleted in the mass nominations above, whose activities included racing against time to create 5,000 portals by the end of the year (just for the heck of it.

Previously, it was an old-style manual portal with subpages, created on 6 February 2008‎. See also last version by the creator, and the last version before automation.

The list of subpages at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Anthropology doesn't look too terrible at first glance: a news page, a Did you know page plus an archive thereof, plus a five selected biographies. However, it all falls apart on scrutiny:
 * Portal:Anthropology/Did you know/archive has only more page than the live Portal:Anthropology/Did you know
 * Portal:Anthropology/Selected biographies/5, Portal:Anthropology/Selected biographies/4, Portal:Anthropology/Selected biography/3, Portal:Anthropology/Selected biography/2 and Portal:Anthropology/Selected biography/1 are all clones of Portal:Anthropology/Selected biography/1: same subject (Franz Boas), and same text. None of the clones has any non-clone history.

So in reality this is a one-of-each portal. If that last non-automated version was still live, you could whack that purge button until the end of time and you'd still get the same selection every time. That's not a portal; it's a one-off, one-page leaflet.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But in this case, the head article anthropology is massively-enhanced:
 * It is mostly written in WP:summary style, so its TOC is an indexed sampler of the subtopics
 * It has a comprehensive sidebar navbox at the top of the page: Template:Anthropology
 * It has no less than eight more sidebar navboxes on subtopics of anthropology
 * Template:Anthropology of art
 * Template:Economic & development anthropology
 * Template:Anthropology of religion
 * Template:Anthropology of kinship
 * Template:Medical anthropology
 * Template:Political anthropology
 * Template:Cyber anthropology
 * Template:Anthropology of religion

Anthropology is a broad field, well-covered on Wikipedia, so in theory it meets the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers", even tho in practice those maintainers have been absent these last six years. However, the depth of navigational aids and topic-sampling available in the head article sets a very high bar for anyone who genuinely sets out to create an "enhanced Main Page" rather than creating portals just for the heck of it. But some editors are diligent and creative, so never say never.

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. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:50, 8 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Yet another case where a heritage portal has been abandoned by an inactive editor and replaced with a robotic thingy, so that we either have an unmaintained portal or a non-portal portal. Dynamite it.  Robert McClenon (talk) 01:58, 9 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per TNT. Wugapodes [thɑk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɹɪbz] 04:37, 9 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.