Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Australian literature

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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. — xaosflux  Talk 17:48, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Australian literature


Huge topic, but just another drive-by junk portal, created by @The Transhumanist (TTH).

Contains a useless subset of this rich topic, created in the same slapdash way as many similar fake-curated portals I have brought to MFD. See e.g. Electricity, Julius Caesar, Habitats, and Shipwrecks

It goes like this: I verified that's how it was done by copying the list from the portal into WP:AWB, and using AWB's "list compare" to compare two. Perfect match.
 * 1) TTH creates the portal page, using {{subst:Basic portal start page}}, which draws its "selected articles" list from.
 * 2) That produces no list, because   resolves to Template:Australian literature.  That page doesn't exist, so the "Selected general articles" section just shows a Lua error "No page specified."
 * 3) To create a list, TTH then does a quick screenscrape of the eponymous Category:Australian literature, dumps that into the portal page's "Topics" section, and changes the list-making code to use the embedded list.  In the case of Portal:Australian literature, that reads:  =
 * 1) Press save, and key presto, an instant "portal".  Three minutes after the first save, he's now got a portal with an embedded list, which looks at first glance like a curated portal.
 * 2) Three minutes between first save and last save.

(I have since hacked the Lua Module:Excerpt slideshow so that portals built in this way are tracked at Category:Automated portals with embedded list. Some of them seem okay, but others are junk.)

In some cases, this technique produces a reasonably coherent list of subtopics which would be better done as a navbox.

But in this case it only gathered the sweepings of the topic.

Category:Australian literature is the parent of a deep category tree. But I rapidly spotted that TTH has simply used the base category, and taken nothing from the subcats. Some list-making confirmed that, and also allowed a quick check: only one of the 21 pages displayed as "subtopics" are assessed as FA, GA, A, B, C or list-class, which is what portals should be made of. 28 of the articles, all listed in the "Subtopics" section, are stubs:


 * AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource
 * Australian outback literature of the 20th century
 * Grunge lit
 * IBBY Australia
 * Indigenous Australian literature
 * Jindyworobak Movement
 * NSW Bookstall Company
 * Tasmanian Gothic
 * Varuna, The Writers' House
 * Wheeler Centre

But that's not the worst of it.

TTH's selection consists only of those which have not been properly categorised by diffusion into subcats. If you wanted to chose a set of what are likely to be the least developed articles on electricity, TTH's drive-by screengrab would be a good approach.

So once again, this was 3 minutes to create a portal which looks like it's curated, but is actually just disguised spam. It's hard to see how even its creator could have thought that this drive-by junk served any purpose other than boosting the count of the new "portals" which he listed in his "Newsletters".

Once again, never mind the quality, just count the numbers ... and leave others to clean up the tsunami of spam.

I am sure that could be a decent portal on Australian literature. It is a huge topic. But this piece of 3-minute spam is so abysmal that it's worse than nothing. So I propose that this junk pseudo-portal be deleted per WP:TNT without prejudice to creating a curated portal not based on a single other page, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 19:38, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - Again, the pageview metrics are "interesting". The head article Australian literature has mean daily 116 pageviews during the baseline period.  This is not a lot of pageviews for such a broad topic, which indicates that some sort of a navigation aid could be useful.  However, as BHG says, this is not a useful navigation aid.  The portal had 52 pageviews during the baseline period.  That isn't an average.  That's a total.  That is an average of 1 daily pageview.  That means that this portal isn't serving any purpose.  It might as well be fed to kangaroos.  Robert McClenon (talk) 20:10, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete this nothing-portal. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:10, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete: portals require active maintenance to fulfil their purpose.   SITH   (talk)   11:37, 17 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.