Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Antibiotics

 __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. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:01, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Antibiotics


Yet another automated portal, redundant to its components and prone to errors ... and based on mostly non-existent pages.

Created in December 2018‎ by @The Transhumanist (TTH), aka the portalspammer, who only 9 days later boasted We were racing against time to create 5,000 portals by the end of the year (just for the heck of it.

This is one of the last few dozen remaining fully-automated portals, out of over 4,000 created by @The Transhumanist (TTH) and others. Most of the portals built off a single navbox were deleted 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. Over a thousand other automated portals have been deleted in other MFDs.

However, further analysis has shown that many other types automated portals are also redundant, including this one.

It draws its "selected articles" list solely from 4 articles. And yes, 3 of the 4 are redlinked below, and have never existed. but the titles are as entered in the portal page by TTH. I guess that when you are were racing against time to create 5,000 portals, a few seconds to check page existence is too much of a burden.


 * Protein synthesis inhibitor antibiotics
 * Beta-lactam antibiotics
 * Sulfonamides and trimethoprim
 * Other antibacterials

It draws its "selected images" list solely from the article Antibiotics.

I explain the redundancy below, but note also that harvesting links from articles can lead to errors in the form of unitended selections. For an example where this went horrinbly wrong, see WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Lusaka.

Back to redundancy. Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navboxes offers all the functionality which portals like this set out to offer. Both features are available only to ordinary readers who are not logged in, but you can test them without logging out by right-clicking on a link, and the select "open in private window" (in Firefox) or "open in incognito window" (Chrome).
 * 1) mouseover: on any link, mouseover shows you the picture and the start of the lead.  So the preview-selected page-function of portals is redundant: something almost as good is available automatically on any navbox or other set of links.  Try it on any of the other pages listed above.
 * 2) automatic imagery galleries: clicking on an image brings up an image gallery of all the images on that page. It's full-screen, so it's actually much better than even a click-for-next image gallery on a portal.   Try it by right-clicking on Antibiotics, or on any of the other pages listed above

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

This redundancy has been belatedly acknowledged by TTH, who wrote at the start of this month New encyclopedia program features will likely eventually render most portals obsolete. For example, the pop-up feature of MediaWiki provides much the same functionality as excerpts in portals already, and there is also a slideshow feature to view all the images on the current page (just click on any image, and that activates the slideshow).

Antiobiotics might a broad topic which could satisfy WP:POG, though I have not checked. It could akso be viewed as a narrow topic which is copiously documneted, and can cause soem topics to fail 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". Th the lead of WP:POG, portals need to be maintained. Would a portal on one class of phramaceutical attract many maintainers?

But that question does not have to be answered now. So I propose that this portal 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) 01:46, 18 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - This portal has 3 daily pageviews, as opposed to the head article, which has 2189 daily pageviews. Readers don't look for portals.  Readers look for articles, links, categories, and articles.  Robert McClenon (talk) 14:54, 19 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete:
 * Automatic creation warrants automatic deletion
 * Unmaintained portals do not fulfil their purpose
 * Currently fails POG, could be wide enough
 *  SITH   (talk)   12:00, 24 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.