Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Vajrayana Buddhism

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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. MER-C 10:31, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Vajrayana Buddhism


Abandoned portal with very low views, whose last significant modification was extensive rewriting 5 years ago by a warmongering sockpuppeteer. Redundant to the head article Vajrayana and the sidebar navbox Template:Vajrayana, and to Portal:Buddhism.

The portal was created on 6 April 2008‎ by. Since 2006, the lead of WP:POG has said that "Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance" ... but that didn't happen here: Emishi's last edit to the portal was on 11 April 2008, only 5 days after its creation, and they haven't edited at all since 2012.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Vajrayana_Buddhism shows a modest set of subpages, with five selected biographies, five selected articles, three selected concepts, three selected deities. However, closer examination shows that all but three of these sixteen pages is a content fork last heavily edited by a sockpuppeteer:
 * Portal:Vajrayana Buddhism/Selected biography/1, biog/2, biog/3, biog/4 and biog/5 were all extensively rewritten in 2014 by the sockpuppeter, who has been indef-blocked since in June 2018 for what they themselves describe as warmongering.
 * Portal:Vajrayana Buddhism/Selected article/1 and article/5 were wisely coverted in July 2018 by @Auric to use Transclude lead excerpt, so that it is no longer a content fork. However, article/2, article/3 and article/4 were all extensively rewritten in 2014 by the warmongering sockpuppeter Aethelwolf Emsworth.
 * Portal:Vajrayana Buddhism/Selected concept/1 was created by Emishi, but extensively rewritten in 2014 by Aethelwolf Emsworth. Concept/2 and concept/3 are the sole work of Aethelwolf Emsworth.
 * Portal:Vajrayana Buddhism/Selected deity/1, deity/2 and deity/3 were all created by by the warmongering sockpuppeter Aethelwolf Emsworth. The only one significantly edited since is deity/1, which Auric coverted to use Transclude lead excerpt, so that it is no longer a content fork.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". However, this the only significant maintenance to this portal in the last 11 years has been the warmongering sockpuppeteer Aethelwolf Emsworth's rewriting of unsourced content forks. Readers have stayed away too: in January–June 2019, the portal averaged only 9 pageviews per day, which is only half the abysmal median of 17 daily views for all portals in that period. By contrast the head article Vajrayana averaged 845 daily views in the same period. In other words, the head article got 92 times more views than the abandoned portal.

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But the Wikipedia main page requires huge amounts of work; it is maintained by several large teams of busy editors. A mini-mainpage also needs lot of ongoing work if it is going to value over the head article. And in this case, the portal is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Vajrayana and its navbox.

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 Template:Vajrayana, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
 * 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 Vajrayana, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

Those new technologies set a high bar for any portal which actually tries to add value for the reader. But this portal fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game. Whatever potential value it might have had back in 2008, it is now a failed, sock-hacked solution to a non-problem. Time to delete it. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:02, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete as per analysis by BHG. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:27, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment - Sadly, Christianity and Buddhism are too often brought into discredit by badly behaved disciples unworthy of the great founders. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:27, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete this portal, I've never heard of this branch of Buddhism before. To me there is only one Buddhism religion.Catfurball (talk) 15:16, 15 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.