Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Humanism

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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. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 04:52, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Humanism


Abandoned, almost unused, micro-portal, which seems to have just been a testing ground. Wholly redundant to the head article Humanism and the sidebar navbox Template:Humanism.

This portal was created in May 2018 by @The Transhumanist (TTH), who a few months later began a spree of portalspam which created over four thousand automated spam portals.

This one seems to have been a sort of test-bed for new ideas. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Humanism shows that it never had more than two subpages (both only for formatting), and the page history shows that TTH seems to have had seven or eight bouts of re-configuring it in the course of 2018 Every version that I have checked had redlinked sections, until TTH converted it in January 2019 to  a wholly-automated format which drew its "selected articles" list solely from Template:Humanism and its "selected images" list solely from the head article Humanism. That made it just a redundant fork of the head article. (For an 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).

So in May 2019 I restored it to a non-automated format. (The edit history is messy, because I took several goes at choosing the least-worst previous version). That has still left it as a mess, with 4 boxes which just display a redlink. The "selected article" and "Selected biography" sections now use an embedded list of only 4 articles each.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". But in practice, this portal has not attracted maintainers: TTH abandoned portals when his portalspamming was curtailed by a topic ban, leaving others to clean up the vast mess, and nobody else has stepped forward to make this test vehicle roadworthy.

It has also been shunned by readers: in January–June 2019, the portal got a median of only 3 page views per day (yes, three) which is barely higher than the background of curious editors taking a peek. In thye same period, the head article Humanism averaged 2,065 daily views. Readers prefer the head article by a ratio of 418:1.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Humanism and its sidebar navbox Template:Humanism — especally given two newish features of the Wikimedia software. These new tools 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 by right-clicking on this link to Template:Humanism, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
 * 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 this link to the article Humanism, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow

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

Those new technologies set a high bar for any portal which actually tries to add value for the reader. But this portal fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game. The head article is vastly better both as a navigational hub and as a showcase. So it's time to just delete this portal. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:04, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - I concur with the analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl. While partial page copies are a failed experiment of long standing, this portal appears to have been used for other experiments in portal-making techniques that are new failures.  The failed nature of this portal is obvious from the redlinks.  I could try to make some sort of academic pun about a portal on humanism and a self-declared trans-humanist portal-maker, but I won't.  Robert McClenon (talk) 21:05, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - I wonder where atheist portals believe they go when they die? Mark Schierbecker (talk) 11:18, 14 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment' - User:Mark Schierbecker - Atheist portals don't believe in the great bit bucket in the sky. I don't know what its association is with Portal:Uranus, in view of his fate at the hands of Cronus.  Robert McClenon (talk) 17:58, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
 * No offense, but not seeing a valid reason for deletion directly above. Cheers, North America1000 08:07, 16 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment – I have cleaned-up and streamlined the portal. It now has no red links or dysfunctional layout. Cheers, North America1000 08:04, 16 July 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.