Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Robotics (2nd nomination)

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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) 03:47, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Robotics


Terribly out of date. Notably:


 * The New Horizons selection (created in 2007; never updated) says nothing about the spacecraft visiting Pluto.


 * The Mars Science Laboratory entry (created in 2007; never updated) says nothing about Curiosity leaving Earth, much less about landing on Mars.

Merely updating this portal would not be enough as the content will fall out of date faster than our most active portals are updated. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 18:09, 25 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete - One common method for the design of portals, in use at least since 2005, has involved sometimes large numbers of subpages of the portal, one for each selected article and picture, and sometimes for news items and Do You Know (DYK) items. Often the subpages for selected articles consist of a copy of the original article, or a copy of the first part of the original article.  The subpages for In The News (ITN) and DYK items may also be copies of the lead paragraph or a portion of the article page.  This approach to design of portals is sufficiently commonly used that it can be considered standard.  However, it is an honorable experiment that has failed, and should be abandoned.  In numerous cases, it has been found that portals have displayed outdated and incorrect information to the reader.  These discrepancies have been especially common with, but not limited to, political leadership.  These discrepancies are a serious problem because they cannot be readily corrected.  Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, meaning that any reasonably computer-literate person can edit an article; but editing the displayed information in a portal requires specialized technical knowledge of how portals are implemented, which is presumably why errors persist, sometimes for years.  An editor who has Twinkle installed can tag articles in need of editing if they do not have the time or knowledge to fix them; but tagging via Twinkle is not available for portals.  Experience has shown that the use of portal subpages that copy portions of articles results in outdated information being displayed, sometimes for years, because it is difficult to correct.  This design technique, partial article copies, has been an honorable experiment over the course of more than a decade, but the experiment should be assessed to have been a failure.  Some other design approach for portals should be used in the future.
 * This portal has not been substantively updated since 2010. It has an average of 89 daily pageviews, which is better than most portals (as opposed to 1689 daily pageviews for robotics), but the pageviews are pageviews of outdated information that cannot be readily brought up to date.  It should be deleted, without prejudice to a replacement by a portal with a design that does not use partial page copies.  Robert McClenon (talk) 05:51, 26 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete. Yet another abandoned portal.
 * WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". A theoretical argument could be made that robotics is a broad topic. I disagree with that theoretical argument, but we don't need to rely on theory because we have empirical evidence that in practice this portal does not pass that test: it has not attracted maintainers, and it has not attracted readers. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:47, 2 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.