Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Social sciences (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. -- Ed (Edgar181) 14:46, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Social sciences

 * – (View MfD)

Neglected portal. Four never-updated selected bios created in April 2008. The entry about an 11th-round NFL football pick has nothing to do with the topic. I have no idea how this survived MfD the first time. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 21:29, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

Sociology

 * Delete as per nomination by User:Mark Schierbecker. How bio 3 got through is that no one was paying attention to details such as content, and certainly not to User:TenPoundHammer, who was ahead of his time.
 * Since the Portal Guidelines have been downgraded to the status of an information page and we have no real portal guidelines, we should use common sense, which is discussed in Wikipedia in the essay section Use Common Sense and in the article common sense. The portal guidelines were an effort to codify common sense about portals, and we should still use common sense.  It is still a matter of common sense that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract large numbers of viewers and will attract portal maintainers.  This imposes at least a three-part test for portals to satisfy common sense:  (1) a broad subject area, demonstrated a posteriori by a breadth of articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad); (2) a large number of viewers, preferably at least 100 a day, but any portal with fewer than 25 a day can be considered to have failed; (3) portal maintainers, at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained.  Any portal that does not pass this common-sense test is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
 * Not enough articles to establish breadth of topic, no maintenance of articles, very little viewing. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:20, 30 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:Society), without creating duplicate entries. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:08, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete per above, per WP:TNT, and per the fact there is no good reason to keep portals that are in this state. Very low page views and the state it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. Portals are not content, so any comparison to how broken articles are handled would be improper. The downgrading of POG cuts both ways - there is no policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. The first MfD is a case study of why last-ditch efforts to save portals from deletion are not a long term solution for the problems with such portals. -Crossroads- (talk) 03:58, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I also oppose re-creation per BrownHairedGirl. -Crossroads- (talk) 21:46, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Merge and redirect Portal:Sociology to Portal:Social sciences. This is more likely to turn out a useful resolution of these portals while generating some value from the work already put into them. No prejudice against deletion if that does not improve the situation. bd2412  T 13:29, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I strongly oppose both merger and redirection:
 * Merger just means preserving a set outdated of content forks, which is a very bad idea.
 * Redirection means that portals links will display a link to a portal which doesn't exist, and then surprise the reader by opening up a portal on a broader topic. It's much better to simply replace the links, as I proposed above. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 14:29, 1 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete per nominator, and per Crossroads and Robert McC. This is yet another portal which has been abandoned since being stillborn.  Its set of only 2 selected articles and 4 selected biogs is abysmally small.  That total of six is less than a third of the risibly low minimum of 20 set by WP:POG; it doesn't even begin to provide readers with a meaningful sample of topics in the social sciences.
 * As with so many portals, the lack of maintenance is a long-term problem. Editors simply aren't interested in either building or maintaining a portal on this topic. The previous MFD, in early 2017 is as  notes a case study of why last-ditch efforts to save portals from deletion are not a long term solution for the problems with such portals, and is worth examining closely.
 * As has happened so many times, an editor who specialises in preserving pointless pages from deletion cited various pieces of alphabet soup, and was rightly challenged by the nominator : is it ever going to change, or is it still going to sit and rot for years and years just like 99% of other portals?
 * NA1K replied I hesitate to spend lots of time expanding it while it's nominated for deletion. I could expand it significantly in about an hour, if it's retained. I may volunteer my time to do so later, but these things take time, and again, it's still up for deletion.
 * The portal was kept on the basis of that vague maybe-I-will-do-something, but unsurprisingly nothing was done except a few cosmetic tweaks which entirely failed to address the problem of it being only a small set out of outdated content forks. It's long past time for MFD to stop indulging these vague hints/promises of future improvement. It's now 11½ years since the portal was created, and while in theory something could be done with it, in practice it's very clear that nobody will do anything with it, even when it's brought to MFD.
 * Since that previous MFD was closed 2½ years ago there have been a total of 22,066 views of the portal. That's 22,066 instances of readers' time being wasted because a small handful of extremist preservationist editors failed to distinguish between the theoretical possibility of improvement and the actual likelihood of that happening.
 * This portal is not an article, so it contains no encyclopedic content. It is simply a tool to navigate and or showcase content hosted on other pages, and it fails abysmally at that task. The C-class head article Social science with its navbox Template:Social sciences does a vastly better  job of both navigation and showcasing, and readers should be directed there rather than to this junk.
 * Portal:Social sciences is a failed solution to a non-problem. It is the product of a wave of enthusiasm for misguided wikiportals long after portals elsewhere on the web had failed en masse, and sustained on en.wp because a small band of denialists at WT:WPPORT have a deep-seated but misguided belief that portals have some inherent value, rather than judging them by their effectiveness as tools. Time to delete it ... and since the failures are structural I oppose re-creation (.e. this should not be a TNT deletion). -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 15:08, 1 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete looking back, the previous MFD was a farce. Everyone was passing the buck, expecting everyone else to do the lifting for them, and saying that a portal being completely stillborn for nine years was not a problem because it'll totally grow into a full portal someday, I promise. explained every reason behind the flawed thoughts of the last MFD, and the obvious call for a "delete" here. There simply is nothing, and there's been plenty of time for the "I will do something, someday, I promise" people to have done something. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 18:01, 1 October 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.