Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Volleyball (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: No consensus to delete. — xaosflux  Talk 15:43, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Volleyball


A navbox-cloned automated portal, redundant to its components.

Created in February 2016‎ by, but was just a load of redlinks. Per WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Volleyball, it was redirected in April to the article Volleyball. In 4 March 2019‎ it was re-created by as a fully-automated navbox-cloned portal. The redirct has been restored twice, but each time Bhunacat10 has reverted to the navbox-clone.

This is one of the last fully-automated portals to be created. It is one of only a few dozen remaining fully-automated portals, out of over 4,000 created by @The Transhumanist (TTH) and others. Most of the portals built off a single navbox were deleted at two mass deletions of similar portals: one, and two, where there was overwhelming consensus of a very high turnout to delete a total of 2,555 such portals. Over a thousand other automated portals have been deleted in other MFDs.

However, further analysis has shown that many other types automated portals are also redundant, including this one.

It draws its "selected articles" list solely from the lists on a set of 9 navboxes:


 * Template:International volleyball
 * Template:Professional Men's Volleyball Leagues
 * Template:Professional Women's Volleyball Leagues
 * Template:International Beach Volleyball
 * Template:FIVB Volleyball World Cup
 * Template:FIVB Volleyball World League
 * Template:FIVB World Grand Prix
 * Template:International youth volleyball
 * Template:International youth volleyball (Women)

It draws its "selected images" list solely from the images displayed in a series of articles:


 * Volleyball
 * Beach volleyball
 * Sitting volleyball
 * Sepak takraw
 * Footvolley

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 on e.g. Template:International volleyball or on any of the other pages listed above.
 * 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 the article Volleyball, or any of the other articles above.

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

This redundancy has been belatedly acknowledged by TTH, who wrote at the start of this month "New encyclopedia program features will likely eventually render most portals obsolete. For example, the pop-up feature of MediaWiki provides much the same functionality as excerpts in portals already, and there is also a slideshow feature to view all the images on the current page (just click on any image, and that activates the slideshow)."

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than the head article Volleyball. Volleyball is a popular sport, so it could in theory meet the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". However, creating portals which actually add value for readers requires some effort in curation and selection, rather than just telling a script to harvest pages randomly from a set which already has excellent navigation, previews, and image galleries. I thought that this principle had been very well-established at hundreds of MFDs in recent months, but evidently Bhunacat10 wants another discussion, so here we are.

I propose that this portal be deleted per WP:TNT, without prejudice to recreating a curated portal in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:21, 18 May 2019 (UTC)


 * This is not "another" discussion: it is in fact the first discussion of the present portal, which was created in a totally new form in March of this year. The MfD from 2017 is of no relevance. OK, fire away Bhunacat10 (talk),  11:58, 18 May 2019 (UTC)
 * @Bhunacat10, it's yet another discussion of one of the flood of pointless, redundant, automated pseudo-portals. How many hundreds of such discussions do we need before you overcome your WP:IDHT issues? -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 12:27, 18 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Well BrownHairedGirl if you ever get tired of reiterating the same arguments over and over at numerous MfDs, why don't you raise your general issues about portals in the form of a general community discussion at an appropriate venue? Some of us have been imploring you to adopt this course for weeks past. But maybe you didn't hear that? Bhunacat10 (talk),  19:42, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * @Bhunacat10, I tired of it a very long time long ago. But when editors try group nominations, some portal fans come along and shout that there must be individual discussions.
 * And when anyone tries proposing a generalised discussions, you and other portal fans shout "war on portals", "gaming the system", "just promote portals" etc.
 * I heard all that loud and clear, which is why I do individual nominations. After several thousand automated portals have been deleted at several hundreds discussions, include at two of the best-attended and most strongly-upheld MFDs ever (one, and two, I hoped that by now there just might be  a chance that you would accept the overwhelming consensus and let the redirect stand .  But no, you have absolutely no substantive argument to make, but you still insist there has to be another discussion. #YCMTSU
 * -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 19:55, 20 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete with silver bullets and with prejudice against re-creation. - This is a zombie portal. It was already killed once, and has been brought back from the dead.  This portal has the highest ratio of pageviews between the head article and the portal that I have seen yet.  The head article has 5679 daily pageviews.  The portal has 2 daily pageviews.  This portal is an undead creature.  Get rid of it, and do not leave the option for it to come back.  Robert McClenon (talk) 18:37, 19 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Robert McClenon, where do you get your "2 daily pageviews"? In the four weeks preceding this discussion it was averaging 13 per day, and never less than 5. Still not much, but you might try to get your facts right. I leave it to others to assess the constructive insight of the rest of your comment Bhunacat10 (talk),  19:42, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * @Bhunacat10, please try to be civil. The last 4 weeks have been a period when portals have been under intense scrutiny from editors, so  @ Robert McClenon and i have been consistently referencing the Jan–Feb 2019 period, before the counts got distorted by editors. So see the data: Portal:Volleyball  got 2 pagewviews per day in Jan–Feb 2019.
 * Compare that with a median of 13 pageviews a day in Jan–Feb 2019 for all portals. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:01, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * In this instance, however, the above discussion shows that during the Jan–Feb 2019 period this was not a portal at all but a mere redirect. The 2 per day must have been puzzled readers who expected to view a portal and backtracked to find out why they were looking at an article Bhunacat10 (talk),  09:37, 22 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment - Thank you, User:BrownHairedGirl. I leave it to others to assess the constructive insight of the rest of the comments by User:Bhunacat10.  Robert McClenon (talk) 20:31, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Question - User:Bhunacat10 - What policy or conduct forum would you prefer to have a general discussion of portals at, where critics of portals are welcome as well as defenders of portals? Would you prefer that we have another discussion of the mass deletion of portals?  Robert McClenon (talk) 20:36, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks for asking, Robert McClenon. I don't want to see further mass deletions, and I don't want the debate over portals to continue in these purely negative terms of which ones should be deleted. We need to pause the deletions and revisit the basic issues of what portals are for and whom are they for. If the WikiProject talk page isn't regarded as neutral territory then why not un-redirect WT:Portal for this purpose, with publicity at VPP and CENT? Assuming we achieve some consensus on this then we could go back to redraft the portal guidelines, lay down standards for portals to be on view, and – yes – start to plan how best to involve more editors and promote suitable portals to more readers. Here, I understood you to say "no portal on this topic should ever again be permitted" – such sentiments wouldn't help any such constructive process to get under way: would you consider amending at least this part of your !vote? Bhunacat10 (talk),  10:14, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment to User:Bhunacat10 - I don't think that any further mass deletions are planned. The two that we have had would not have been necessary if there had not been stealth mass creations of portals.  User:BrownHairedGirl, User:UnitedStatesian, and a few others are probably planning to continue proposing individual portal deletions under the existing guidelines.  I am ready to discuss a future Portal:Volleyball at Deletion Review.  Where do we want to discuss new portal guidelines, recognizing that portal readers and portal maintainers are not summoned by magic?  Robert McClenon (talk) 10:52, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
 * @Bhunacat10, so long as I continue to find automated clone-portals, narrow scope portals, and abandoned mini-portals, I will continue to bring them to MFD. This sort of cleanup work should be routine maintenance for the portals project, and the fact that you are still asking for a halt to it looks to me like clear evidence that you are more interested in quantity of portals than in quality of portals. If you have some proposals for what portals should try to do, how they should do it, and what topics are suitable for portals, then why not open a discussion at WT:WPPORT to see if there is anything there that could form part of an RFC? That can and should happen in parallel with the ongoing cleanup. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 12:40, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep for form's sake. This portal is based on nine manually-selected navboxes. The analogy with deletion of portals based on a single navbox is inaccurate, as is that with portals based on multiple navboxes all embedded in the main article (and if that were to be done with Volleyball, I have no doubt it would be rightly condemned as overloading). Note that the transclude-random-article process already excludes stubs, so some selection is already applied. Instead of just deleting every portal in sight we ought to be asking whether such automatic filtering could be extended to also exclude articles without a substantive lead, and those bearing certain cleanup tags Bhunacat10 (talk),  10:05, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I note that @Bhunacat10's "keep" !vote is for form's sake — whatever that may mean in this context — rather than on any substantive argument that there is anyway in which this pseudo-portal satisfies the core principle of WP:PORTAL: "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects".
 * The reasons why it doesn't enhance are clearly set out in the nomination, and Bhunacat chooses to ignore them. It's simply that this whole lark of making a dedicated page to show the lead of the articles and a slideshow of the images is already built in to every Wikipedia page . I am not sure what Bhunacat finds so hard to understand about that.
 * It seems that Bhunacat is yet another of the editors who believe that portals should be kept because some editors like making them, rather than because they assist readers. The fact that Bhunacat is not alone in this keep-the-portal-because-I-liked-making it game does not alter the fact that there has never been been any support in the portal guidelines for creating portals for the pleasure of making them. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 18:21, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
 * OK, for form's sake again, let's recap this discussion.
 * First, it is suggested that I have vexatiously insisted on "another" discussion here, despite many other portals having been deleted as a result of recent MfDs. What does this portal have in common with those that have been deleted? Claims not made here:
 * Old, abandoned, outdated ❌
 * Uses subpages that are static forks of the parent articles ❌
 * Created in the course of a mass-creation "spree" ❌
 * Contains empty sections, redlinks, or software error messages ❌
 * Based on a single navigation template ❌
 * Based on multiple navigation templates that are all transcluded in the main article ❌
 * Displays only a small selection of articles ❌
 * Next, claims that are made here:
 * Topic not broad enough ❌ – This claim has been added above, but per nominator: Volleyball is a popular sport, so it could in theory meet the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas..." As frequently pointed out, WP:POG offers no definition of its "breadth-of-subject-area requirement". However, looking at the Subtopics section of this portal, "topic not broad enough" is not an easy claim to make. We have articles on volleyball in 154 countries, 15 variations, 91 international competitions...
 * Illegitimately re-created overturning the outcome of a previous MfD ❌ – the present portal is completely different from that brought to MfD in 2017
 * Exceptionally low page views ❌ – refuted above.
 * Degree of "pleasure" experienced by the creating editor ❌ – apart from being based on no evidence whatever, how on earth is this relevant to the value of any page as part of an encyclopedia?
 * If we disregard the empty unpleasantness of "pseudo-portal", "zombie portal", "IDHT" and so on, we are left with the argument from the "mouseover" and "slideshow" facilities.
 * Are these facilities an adequate substitute for the selected-article and selected-image elements of a portal page, on a topic extending over many navigation templates and many hundreds of articles? To what extent are they available to mobile users? What proportion of ordinary readers know about these facilities and know how to access them? Do we see no value in a page that brings these elements together with the Recognized content, In the news, Did you know and other elements present in most portals?
 * If we do judge the "mouseover" and "slideshow" facilities a sufficient substitute for portals, we should forget portals forthwith. But this is a community debate that has not yet taken place, needs to take place, and cannot meaningfully take place dispersed over a large number of sparsely attended MfD discussions such as this one.
 * My conclusion: there are no grounds in policy, precedent, or consensus to seek deletion of this portal Bhunacat10  (talk),  12:54, 27 May 2019 (UTC)
 * My conclusion: that @Bhunacat10's verbosity continues to mask a severe IDHT problem, exacerbated by a persistent failure to actually read the nomination.
 * The nomination states very clearly that the problem is that the pseudo-portal draws its "selected articles" list solely from the lists on a set of 9 navboxes, and that it therefore fails the core principle of WP:PORTAL, which is to add value for readers. The whole of Bhunacat's comments continue to be wiklawyering evasion, which ignores the failure of this pseudo-portal to add value and instead diverts into demolition of a long series of straw men.
 * The redundancy of pseudo-portals forked off a single navbox was clearly established about six weeks at the mass deletion: one, and two. Bhunacat doesn't seem to have heard that.
 * So the problem remains that a navbox-forked portal is nothing more than a bloated way of listing a subset of the links on those navboxes. And Bhunacat offers no attempt to explain how readers might be helped by this redundancy. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 04:30, 29 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete This portal does not meet the breadth-of-subject-area requirement of the WP:POG guideline and can be more than adequately covered in Portal:Sports. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:14, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep, looks to meet the guidelines, but selected articles should be checked. Is there a reason why 2005 FIVB Volleyball World League, 2008 FIVB Volleyball World League squads, 2014 FIVB Volleyball World Grand Prix, 2016 FIVB Volleyball World League are on that list? Not the latest or inaugural editions. Or short articles such as Elitserien, Tunisian Men's Volleyball League or Egyptian Volleyball Federation? Tbh there are many volleyball related stub articles out there, maybe not so much to "Read more...". The portal looks quite boring currently. I might help with the portal/articles in the near future myself. Pelmeen10 (talk) 18:57, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
 * @Pelmeen10 clearly did not read the nomination before commenting. The reason that this portal has been nominated for deletion is that there is zero selection of articles: the box labelled "selected articles" is in fact just an automated scoop of all the pages in a series of navboxes. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 01:48, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
 * It does not mean it's hard to fix. Yes, this portal needs some work, but it does not mean it should be deleted. Pelmeen10 (talk) 17:09, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
 * @Pelmeen10, this portal does not need some work. It needs a complete rebuild by someone who both knows enough and cares enough about the subject to more than simply splat in some navboxes.  If and when someone wants to do that, the basic framework can be re-created in seconds simply by typing {{subst:Basic portal start page}} and saving ... so there is absolutely no need to keep this automated junk.
 * In the meantime, it is unfair to lure readers to a page which offers them so much less than the head article(s). --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 03:46, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * As you surmised, I'm no expert on volleyball, but I do know that it's a major global sport with a great deal of presence on Wikipedia, and I think if we have portals at all, we should have one for volleyball. Happy to work with Pelmeen10 on refining the selection of "selected articles" (although stubs are automatically filtered out), but of course if the portal gets deleted there will be nothing left to improve, and any re-creation would be at grave risk of WP:G4. Those are my motivations: the more we shout at each other the less I understand yours Bhunacat10</b> (talk),  12:29, 3 June 2019 (UTC)


 * I'm willing to put my time into this portal. Just need to do some work before - look how different portals work, what would be the best things to include there etc. So I'm asking not to delete it. It's always easier to continue with something that exists (as bad it looks), rather that start from the scratch. Buiding a good portal is not that easy. I would not recreate or create a portal myself. I've done some work with different portals, trying to help Portal:Handball also, but volleyball is a subject that is much more familiar to me. I don't think there's rush or a need to currently delete this portal. Just give us some time. If we fail, you can always nominate it again. Thanks! Pelmeen10 (talk) 19:13, 3 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep - Keep per now. This portal seems to be a successful case of single-page layout. The concept of single-page portals is not entirely bad, it still needs to mature ... or die with all other portals.Guilherme Burn (talk) 23:19, 3 June 2019 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. <b style="color:red">Please do not modify it.</b> 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.