Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Pervasive developmental disorders

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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) 04:07, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Pervasive developmental disorders


Static mini-portal, abandoned since shortly after its creation in June 2007 by, who last edited in October 2007. There is no rotation of topics, and its only useful feature is Portal:Pervasive developmental disorders/Related Articles, which redundant to the navbox Template:Pervasive developmental disorders.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Pervasive developmental disorders shows a small set of sub-pages:
 * Portal:Pervasive developmental disorders/News, last updated in 2007, and displaying only one news item (from 2007)
 * Portal:Pervasive developmental disorders/Selected biography, which since 2007 has been about ,. That article was deleted in July 2019 at WP:Articles for deletion/Tito Mukhopadhyay, and redirected to Soma Mukhopadhyay.  A month later, the portal hasn't been updated.
 * Portal:Pervasive developmental disorders/Selected article, which since its creation in 2007 has displayed the same article Controversies in autism
 * Portal:Pervasive developmental disorders/Pervasive developmental disorders and the autistic spectrum, which had only minor copyediting since its creation in 2007
 * Portal:Pervasive developmental disorders/Did you know, which since 2007 has been about the same topic: savant syndrome.

Note that apart from the lack of updates, the selection of topics presents a highly unbalanced view of autism:
 * Soma Mukhopadhyay is a promoter of a fringe theory
 * Savant syndrome is a very rare variant of autism, but much-hyped
 * Controversies in autism is an odd choice for such a limited set of topics. Giving it such prominence presents a misleading picture that this is a field riven with controversy

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, but this mishamsh is more like a tabloid newspaper approach to the topic.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This one fails all three tests:
 * 1) Narrow topic .  Category:Pervasive developmental disorders+subcats has only 687 non-biographical articles, of which only 553 are non-stubs
 * 2) Low readership . In January–June 2019, the portal got only an average of  14 pageviews per day.  The numbers have been in a steady decline since stats began in 2015
 * 3) No maintainers .  As above, abandoned since 2007.

Tims to just delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:00, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per the thorough and highly detailed investigation of the portal by the nominator,  Brown HairedGirl . Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. It's a useless time suck that lures readers to abandoned junk and worse than that, it actively misleads them by giving them a very warped view of this topic. I am strongly against allowing recreation, as over a decade of hard evidence shows Pervasive developmental disorders is not a broad enough topic under WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 04:25, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analysis by BHG. I will comment that autism is a field with much controversy, which means that neutral point of view is very important both in article editing and in article selection for portals.  Non-neutrality is not in itself a reason to delete portals or articles, but it is a consideration when an article has marginal notability or a portal has low readership.  It is a contributing reason to delete portals that are marginal anyway.  Robert McClenon (talk) 02:35, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete this portal is terrible.Catfurball (talk) 21:29, 23 August 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.