Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Shipwrecks (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 (without prejudice to a properly formed portal, as below). MER-C 19:58, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Shipwrecks

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Driveby junk portal, created by @The Transhumanist (TTH). Contains a useless subset of this rich topic, created in a slapdash way I hadn't fully understood before.

It has taken me a while to spot the pattern here, but this portal was created in a similar way to Portal:Weasels (see MFD) and Portal:Peaches (see MFD).

It goes like this:
 * 1) TTH creates a portal page, apparently using {{subst:Basic portal start page}}, which draws its "selected articles" list from.
 * 2) That either produces no list (as with Portal:Shipwrecks and Portal:Weasels), or else produces a clearly wrong list (e.g. Portal:Peaches used , which was then the title of the since-disambiguated Template:Peaches (musician))
 * 3) To create a list, TTH then does a quick screenscape of the eponymous category, dumps that into the portal page's "Subtopics" section, and changes the list-making code to use the embedded list.  In the case of Portal:Shipwrecks, that reads:
 * 4) Press save, and key presto, an instant "portal".

(I have since hacked the Lua Module:Excerpt slideshow so that portals built in this way are tracked at Category:Automated portals with embedded list. Some of them seem okay, but others are junk.)

In the case of Portal:Peaches and Portal:Weasels, this produced a reasonably coherent list of subtopics, which would be better done as a navbox.

But in this case it produced a bizarre topic list: some individual shipwrecks, some concept pages such as Receiver of Wreck and Coffin ship (insurance). All alphabetically-sorted as if they were the same type of thing. Some of the shipwrecks articles appeared to be stubs.

Category:Shipwrecks is the parent of quite a deep category tree. But I rapidly spotted that TTH has simply used the base category. Some list-making confirmed that, and also allowed a quick check: 22 of the 67 pages displayed as "subtopics" are stubs ... which should not be included in a portal, let alone listed so prominently.

I then used Petscan to see how many other articles we have on shipwrecks: 6,989. That's only a first pass, and may have big errors either way, but it's clear that we do have thousands of other articles on shipwrecks, and that TTH's selection consists only of those which have not been properly categorised by diffusion into subcats. If you wanted to chose a set of what are likely to be the least developed articles on shipwrecks, that would be a good approach.

So basically, as a an implementation of the WP:PORTAL principle that "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects", this is a complete fail. I had assumed that TTH's portals with embedded lists were rare instances of the spammer taking some care, but in reality at least some of them are just another form of rapid-fire spam.

TTH made this junk portal in only 3 minutes:


 * 1) 12:33, 4 January 2019‎ "start portal" —  apparently using {{subst:Basic portal start page}}
 * 2) 12:35, 4 January 2019 "add topics" — adding the screen-scraped category dump as an embedded list
 * 3) 12:36, 4 January 2019‎ "remove self-referential link" — removed the page shipwreck from the embedded list of subtopics

So there we have it. 3 minutes to create a portal which looks like it's curated, but is actually just disguised spam. It's hard to see how even its creator could have thought that this drive-by junk served any purpose other than boosting the count of the 156 new "portals" which he listed in his WikiProject Portals update #026 on 20 Jan 2019.

Maybe there could be a decent portal on shipwrecks. But this piece of 3-minute spam is so abysmal that it's worse than nothing. So I propose that this junk pseudo-portal be deleted without prejudice to creating a curated portal not based on a single navbox, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 03:56, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

Discussion (shipwrecks)

 * add your keep/delete/comment here


 * Delete These automated portals were advertised as being able to automatically expand as Wikipedia's coverage of the topic expands. Because this is built on a embedded list that is not the case with this page. At least a human editing the portal can control which articles are included, but he was "racing against time" to get to 10,000 portals so the topics were not carefully selected. Nuke it. Legacypac (talk) 05:07, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Shipwrecks seem a valid topic of perennial interest with an at least semi-active Wikiproject, but the nominator appears correct that these are just an essentially random tiny fraction of the >4000-tagged articles. What about the Titanic and the Mary Rose (FA), to name just two? Espresso Addict (talk) 09:25, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete  - Automated portal,  0 subpages, created 2019-01-04 12:33:25 by User:TTH, useless navigation tool, redundant to the existing articles and navboxes, and of lower quality: Portal:Shipwrecks. Pldx1 (talk) 15:32, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete this portal that was created as a coffin ship. The details of how this portal was created should be included in the report to be made at WP:AN requesting a topic-ban on its creator from all edits in portal space.  Robert McClenon (talk) 18:38, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom and Espresso Addict. There's potential but we need to ensure WP:MEATBOT behaviour and its effects aren't tolerated.    SITH   (talk)   12:36, 24 April 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.