Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Human body

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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) 03:51, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Human body

 * Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:59, 27 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:59, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

A hugely ambitious portal which after 9 years has never worked.

Created in January 2010‎ by, it was tagged for speedy deletion in Octber 2010. That was declined, but in March 2011 it was listed at WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Human Body by @Jj98 as a Dead portal, contains a lot of redlinks in subpages. The MFD was closed as "keep" after a offer by @Moxy to fix it, but the closer seems to have overlooked that Moxt withdrew the offer.

Some work was done therafter, but there was no significant change until June 2018, when @Tom (LT) did a lot of restructuring over a 2-day period. Subsequent chnages tweaked formatting, but it is still roughly as Tom left it.

The current version has wisely abandoned most of the sprawling set of sub-pages listed at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Human body.

Howver, despite Tom's hard work, it's still a bit of a mess:
 * The tabs across the top ("Cardiovascular System", "Digestive System", etc) are all broken. They lead either to noneistent pages, or to pages full of redlinks. See e.g. Portal:Human body/Integumentary System
 * It includes the sub-page Portal:Human body/Cardiovascular System/Did you know, which lists the same 3 DYK items as in 2011. Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but this eight-year-old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.
 * The topical boxes wisely transclude the lead of articles rather than uisng sub-pages, ut each offers a very limited selection, e.g.
 * "Selected medical condition" lists only Obesity, Influenza, and Gastroenteritis
 * "Selected systems" lists only 7 items (Cardiovascular system, Digestive system, Integumentary system, Lymphatic system, Musculoskeletal system, Nervous system, Reproductive system) which is a very skimpy subset of the human body.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But despite the effort put in here, the result is a much less effective introduction to the topic than the head article human body with its navbox Human systems and organs.

Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navbox offer most of 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 e.g. Template:International volleyball or 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  a click-for-next image gallery on a portal.   Try it by right-clicking on the article human body, or any ogf the other articles above.

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

The human body is a braod topic, so in theory it coukd satisfy 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". But in practice, the last 9 years have shown that it has not attracted enough editors willing to commit the huge amount of work needed to make a portal here which succeeds in adding value for readers. In Jan–Feb 2019, this portal got an average of 43 pageviews per day, which placed it at #197 of the ranking of all 1,214 portals by pageviews. But that reflects the significance of the topic rather than the ppopuarity of the portal: the head article human body got 4,542 daily pageviews in the same period. The |Human_body comparative graph of views for portal and article is grim.

But there is always some remote possibility that some group of editors may come forward to do a lot of hard work on this ... 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) 11:39, 18 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Some thoughts. Thanks for this thoughtful nomination. I have opinions on both sides of the spectrum here so just want to put them into writing. Firstly, I do think this page is notable and general enough in topic to become a portal. It also receives quite a lot of views as mentioned above, and contains a fair amount of content. On the other hand, as mentioned above this portal was a mess, and I've done what I can to fix it up, tidy it up, automate things. I have significant concerns about many of the non-automated content (eg DYKs) which are not sourced and potentially incorrect or at least quite sensationalist, and I don't think this portal does a very good job of communicating its content or educating or helping readers. It's not finished and certainly not perfect, but I don't think these are technically reasons to delete. So I will sit over on a fence on this one, and look forward to hearing what the community feels about this page. --Tom (LT) (talk) 06:02, 19 May 2019 (UTC)
 * WP:ANAT notified. --Tom (LT) (talk) 06:05, 19 May 2019 (UTC)


 * My feelings are similar to Tom's. I wish I could offer up a solution, but I don't have one. For example, I don't have the time to work on it and see what I can do. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 08:10, 19 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I think that the problem here is one common to many portals: this is major topic on which a valuable portal could in theory be made, but in practice there is not and never has been a group of editors with sufficient subject knowledge, technical skill and time to make something which comes anywhere near achieving those goals.
 * That's no criticism at all of the editors involved. It's the simple reality that building something like this is usually done by commercial publishers who devote a lot of specialist resources to it, which en.wp portals don't have.
 * There is a similar failing with the attempts to build portals as weekly or monthly magazines. Print mags are expensive, because a lot of hard work is required to produce them ... and few if any en.wp portals have those resources.
 * Consider e.g. the Main page, which is type of portal. It is sustained by a massive editorial team.  Consider just Today's Feature Article: huge effort goes into assessing each FA and reviewing it, and the WP:TFA team alone has four busy co-ordinators.  DYK is the product of a similarly huge team effort.  But sadly, a lot of portals are based on the false assumption that a similar model can be sustained for a much narrower topic.
 * Those are the conceptual flaws of most en.wp portals. The only genuinely viable model I see is the lists-of-key-topic style of portal which @Bermicourt has adapted from the German wiki for a dozen or so portals such as Portal:Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Portal:Harz Mountains.  Those are quite easy to maintain, and do genuinely add value.  The rest are over-reach. -  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 14:59, 19 May 2019 (UTC)
 * PS I agree about the DYKs. Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but these portalspace lists lose the newness, so their only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.
 * Sadly, this junk is replicated across hundreds of portals. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Delete - Looking at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Human body shows that nothing has changed. User:Looie496 said then that portals were a failed concept, and that hardly anyone looks at them.  It is still true that hardly anyone uses portals.  This portal has 43 daily pageviews, which is better than most, as opposed to 4542 daily pageviews for the head article.  And it never was maintained.  Robert McClenon (talk) 04:06, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:59, 27 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Abandoned draft of a multi-portal master-portal, 98 subpages, created 2010-01-09 12:55:20 by User:Amol.Gaitonde. The navbar is made of:
 * Subportals Digestive_System and Lymphatic_System are totally missing
 * page: Portal:Human body/Musculoskeletal System has been deleted 11 June 2018 by User:Vanjagenije under P1: Portal page that would be CSD 'd as an article
 * page: Portal:Human body/Nervous System has been deleted 9 June 2018 by User:RHaworth under : unused portal or component thereof
 * Portal:Human body/Reproductive System is an ocean of redlinks
 * Portal:Human body/Cardiovascular System and Portal:Human body/Integumentary System are abandoned drafts (ONE article, ONE picture)
 * As a resume: Never went working, Nothing to keep. Portal:Human body.
 * Subportals Digestive_System and Lymphatic_System are totally missing
 * page: Portal:Human body/Musculoskeletal System has been deleted 11 June 2018 by User:Vanjagenije under P1: Portal page that would be CSD 'd as an article
 * page: Portal:Human body/Nervous System has been deleted 9 June 2018 by User:RHaworth under : unused portal or component thereof
 * Portal:Human body/Reproductive System is an ocean of redlinks
 * Portal:Human body/Cardiovascular System and Portal:Human body/Integumentary System are abandoned drafts (ONE article, ONE picture)
 * As a resume: Never went working, Nothing to keep. Portal:Human body.
 * page: Portal:Human body/Nervous System has been deleted 9 June 2018 by User:RHaworth under : unused portal or component thereof
 * Portal:Human body/Reproductive System is an ocean of redlinks
 * Portal:Human body/Cardiovascular System and Portal:Human body/Integumentary System are abandoned drafts (ONE article, ONE picture)
 * As a resume: Never went working, Nothing to keep. Portal:Human body.

Pldx1 (talk) 12:24, 29 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.