Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Habitats

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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. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 00:06, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Habitats


Yet another driveby junk portal, created by @The Transhumanist (TTH). Contains a useless subset of this rich topic, created in a slapdash way which I last saw in Portal:Shipwrecks (see MFD:P:Shipwrecks).

It goes like this:
 * 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:Habitats.  That page doesn't exist, so the "Selected general articles" section just shows a Lua error
 * 3) To create a list, TTH then does a quick screenscape of the eponymous category, 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:Habitats, that reads:
 * 4) Press save, and key presto, an instant "portal".  Three minutes after the first save, he's saved the embedded list.  Done and gone.

(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:Habitats is the parent of quite a deep category tree. But I rapidly spotted that TTH has simply used the base category. Some list-making confirmed that, and also allowed a quick check: only 22 of the 82 pages displayed as "subtopics" are assessed as FA, GA, A, B, C or list-class, which is what portals should be made of. 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 habitats, TTH's drive-by screengrab would be a good approach.

So once again, this 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 "Newsletter".

Maybe there could be a decent portal on habitats. 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 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) 23:31, 5 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Some broad topics are broad enough and ill-defined enough not to be good portal subjects. This is one.  As BHG says.  Robert McClenon (talk) 01:12, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - fake portal, 0 subpages, created 2018-11-27 23:24:36 by User:TTH, useless navigation tool, redundant to the existing articles and navboxes, and of lower quality. Without prejudice to a decent portal, crafted by a working team. Portal:Habitats. Pldx1 (talk) 13:56, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. I think habitats could be a good topic for a portal, if carefully built by an editor with some knowledge of the topic. However this is not the case here. This is another very poor way of creating a portal. Espresso Addict (talk) 16:15, 6 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.