Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Set theory

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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) 06:24, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Set theory

 * – (View MfD)

Long-neglected bonsai portal on the mathematical field of set theory, with low readership. Only 6 sub-topics (last addition 2008) and a trio of fake DYKs. Redundant to the head article set theory and its navbox Template:Set theory.

This portal was created in March 2008‎ by, who also created the sub-pages. However, their last edit to any part of the portal was in August 2008 (see portalspace contribs). Since late 2006, the lead of WP:POG has said "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create." I will AGF that despite being a prolific portal-creator, Cenarium somehow managed to remain unaware of that headline guidance when they created Portal:Set theory, Portal:Discrete mathematics, Portal:Category theory, Portal:Number theory, etc.

Whatever the reasons for the creator's rapid abandonment, portals need ongoing maintenance, and this one hasn't had it.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Set theory shows a slim set of sub-pages:
 * /Selected article/1, /Selected article/2, /Selected article/3, /Selected biography/1, /Selected set/1, /Selected set/2 were all created in March 2008. Since then, the only edits to any of them have been trivial such as disambiguation.  Nobody has updated any of the content.
 * Portal:Set theory/Did you know consists of 2 items added in 2008 by Cenarium, and one added in 2013 by . None of them have any connection to the scrutinised curation process at WP:DYK, which exists to showcase new or expanded content. These three items are just factoids selected and summarised without scrutiny, usurping the good name of WP:DYK to create a collection of random WP:TRIVIA.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". It also guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal". This portal fails on at least three of the four counts:
 * 1)  Broad topic . I'm not sure.  Category:Set theory and its subcats contain a lot of articles, though attempts to count eluded me because the search strayed heavily into topics such as music, who's relation to set theory is weak. This may indicate a broad topic, or maybe a narrow topic covered in copious deatil.  But either way, it matters little, because of the next three points.
 * 2)  High readership .  Fail. The portal's January–June 2019 daily average of only (16 views per day is trivially low.
 * 3)  Lots of maintainers . Fail. Since the creator abandoned, there have been trivial drive-by dabs etc, and precisely one act of maintainenance: Monochrome Monitor's 2013 addition of a third fake DYK.
 * 4)  Associated WikiProject . Fail. There is no WP:WikiProject Set theory, and WP:WikiProject Mathematics hasn't even added its banner to the portal's talk page. search of the archives of WT:WikiProject Mathematics gives only 4 hits.  there is 2008 announcement of the portal's imminent creation (duplicated on another archivepage), and two posts from 2019: a Feb 2019 lament about the flood of portalspam, with subsequent discussion, plus an April 2019 question by Legacypac asking "Which of these approx 30 Portals does the math project provide support to or are you interested in managing?". Legacypac's plea brought only one response, and no offers of maintenance.

Meanwhile, two newish features of the Wikimedia software 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 Set theory, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link. Or try it only on any link in the head article Set theory.
 * 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 Set theory, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow of 3 images.  It's still small, bit it's a much better image gallery than the long pic on rotation in portal.

It's long past time to stop luring readers to this abandoned page. Time to just delete it. I also oppose re-creation, because of the long-term failure of the fundamental requirements for a portal. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:01, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Note to closing admin. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if you close this discussion as delete, please can you not remove the backlinks?  I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s) (in this case Portal:Mathematics), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 23:26, 11 September 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 decade-long abandoned junk and damages Wikipedia's hard won reputation for quality. I oppose re-creation, as a decade of hard evidence shows Set theory is not a broad enough topic under WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. This portal is a solution in search of a problem. Newshunter12 (talk) 11:57, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - Unmaintained low-readership portal.
 * This portal really has two head articles rather than one, Set (mathematics) and Set theory. The combined average viewing of the head articles was 1795+1046=2841.  The portal had 16 daily pageviews, or 0.56% of the viewing of the articles.  The portal has 6 articles, which have not been tweaked since 2016.
 * Areas within mathematics seldom can support their own portals. Re-creation does not seem useful. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:57, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

Set theory

 * Comment - As to whether this is a broad topic, in the abstract a priori sense of philosophers and mathematician-philosophers, this is an extremely broad topic, because set theory is a logical meta-framework for discussing anything. But that doesn't have much relevance to whether it should have a portal.  Robert McClenon (talk) 16:38, 18 September 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.