Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Two overlooked automated portals

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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) 17:34, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Two overlooked automated portals


Both these portals are:
 * automated portals whose "selected articles" list is based solely on a single navbox (Portal:Aylesbury on Template:Aylesbury, and Portal:Stevie Nicks on the malformed ).
 * Even if Portal:Stevie Nicks was fixed, that still leaves them both simply loated versions of a navbox, which does a better job of facilitating navigation because it is present on all pages within the set ... whereas the portal is on a separate page and adds nothing.


 * the product of mass creations by the now-topic-banned portalspammer @The Transhumanist. 1,390 such spam portals were deleted in one go at Miscellany for deletion/Mass-created portals based on a single navbox (closed yesterday)

So I propose that these pages be deleted without prejudice to recreating a curated portal not based on a single navbox, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time.

Both were overlooked in my mass nominations because they are slightly differently formatted to the thousands of other spam portals. This glitch was kindly drawn to my attention by @Legacypac at MFD:Portal:Academic dress, where I describe why my list-making process produced false negatives in what I have now found to be 4 cases out of the 3336 pages scanned: Portal:Stevie Nicks, Portal:Aylesbury, Portal:Academic dress and Portal:California State University.

Note that Portal:Aylesbury was previously nominated for deletion at WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Alhambra, California, which was closed on 11 April as "no consensus", without prejudice to renomination.

The 4th portal in this set of overlooked spam portals is Portal:California State University, which I have not re-nominated. It was added post-nomination to WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a single-page nomination where discussion was disrupted by the hijacking of the discussion to create a bundled nom of several dozen pages. The result was inevitably a WP:TRAINWRECK, which ended up as delete most, but keep several including Portal:California State University. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:10, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Pinging the participants in the previous discussion of Portal:Aylesbury:.
 * Please note that this nomination is neutral about whether a portal on these topics should exist. It is a solely proposal to delete the current automated portals.
 * There is no non-automated version to revert to. The history of these portals is solely as automated, drive-by-created, single-navbox-based portals of the type which was mass-deleted yesterday at WP:Miscellany for deletion/Mass-created portals based on a single navbox. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:58, 15 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete all – Per strong consensus at prior bundled MfDs for portalspam. Leviv&thinsp;ich 15:53, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Speedy close because there are too many nominations opened to today already. Also nom statements should not be used to attack other good faith editors. Using the terms used to describe terrorist actions is not nice. Legacypac (talk) 17:45, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * There is no "attack". And if there are too many nominations opened to today, that is because Legacy opened 36 new single-article nominations this morning alone, and is furious that I asked them to stop flooding MFD. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:46, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * You really enjoy trolling don't you. Legacypac (talk) 16:22, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
 * No, I was responding to your petty revenge troll, which amounts to "Legacypac says close BHG's nomination because Legacypac has already spammed MFD with too many nominations today, and doesn't like the fact that BHG asked Legacypac to stop flooding MFD". I see that you have removed that discussion from your talk without archiving it, despite that the only two other editors to comment both supported my request..
 * And I did not accuse you of terrorist actions. See Hijacking (disambiguation), where the first 13 definitions are all about hijacking in computing. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 09:20, 17 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete as follows:
 * I respectfully take issue with User:Legacypac as to what he calls a Speedy Close, which is really a snow close (since there is no CSD criterion. This should be allowed to run seven days, especially in order to give reviewers time to catch up on the backlog of nominations.  The backlog of nominations calls for allowing seven days, not for rushing to judgment.
 * Neither of these is a broad topic.
 * These are autommated portals, and automated portals are a Bad Idea.
 * No conclusion as to whether manually constructed portals on these topics should or should not exist (although I think that they should not on these topics).
 * I see no attacks.
 * Robert McClenon (talk) 18:05, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Nom should be withdrawn. Legacypac (talk) 18:23, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * For anyone wondering what @Legacypac is on about, it's this, that and the other. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 18:43, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I have to agree with Legacypac.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:25, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Clarifications: I'm not a big user of portals, and was initially supportive of their complete dissolution in the old RfC, but have come around to the argument that some people appreciate and use them (I've started to do so a little myself), and that they are harmless. I remain convinced many should merge (e.g. Portal:Spaghetti to Portal:Pasta); there can't be a 1:1 correlation between articles and portals. (So, I might support a merger of the Nicks portal into a Fleetwood Mac portal.) Editorializing: The problem with the rapid-fire stream of deletion nominations, of course, is that it's WP:FAITACCOMPLI. No one not obsessed with portals, pro or con, can keep up, and MfD leans deletionist by default, so the automatic result is going to be many portals being deleted that should not be deleted, and almost entirely on an invalid "down with The Transhumanist and his script" pseudo-rationale. Pretty sad, really. WP is not supposed to work this way, and XfDs in particular most certainly are not. Imagine if AfD had degraded to the point where you could nominate 100 articles about Tonga or Liechtenstein or other small places, without a real rationale, and get them deleted just because too few people have the patience to wade through it all and argue to keep them. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:20, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep, both procedurally and on the merits, at least for now. Procedurally, I agree with Legacypac that the real "portalspam" is this firehose of deletion nominations when we're still pending an RfC to actually figure out what community consensus is about portals and criteria for their creation/continuance.  "Was created with the use of semi-automated tools" isn't a deletion rationale, for anything.  On the merits, because both are significantly "linkful" and informative enough that they might be useful.  I'm inclined to keep any geographical ones that are larger than big towns/small cities, though size isn't everything, and in this case Aylesbury is the county town of Buckinghamshire, a status comparable to a state capital in the US (and not all state capitals are big cities, which you might not know if not an American).  On celebs and bands and the like, I'm a little more skeptical, and have expressed that skepticism before.  But I don't see an actual deletion rationale presented. There is no argument that the Nicks portal (or the Aylesbury one) is useless, fails to be a portal, is misconfigured gibberish, or anything else. It's just more "I'm against it because The Transhumanist used a tool" hand-waving.  Pending establishment of criteria that set particular limits on celeb/band/company/product/website/movie/whatever portals, WP:EDITING policy is firmly in play: editors are free to create whatever they want here, within the policies and guidelines, as long as it serves an encyclopedic purpose. Portals that actually have something in them and aren't screwed up in some way serve such a purpose (see strong consensus to retain them at the VPPOL RfC a year or so ago). Disclaimers:  I'm a Stevie Nicks fan.  I used to live in Bucks.
 * there's a lot to unpick there, so I'll do it as bullet points
 * SMcC's cheering of Legacypac misses the point that Legacypac has been sulking because a) I asked Legacypac to stop on flooding MFD, and b) pointed out that the two substantive assertions made in one of their nominations were both false. If SMcC is genuinely concerned about what a firehose of deletion nominations, then the target of SMcC's complaints should be Legacypac's 36 separate nominations on individual portals this morning, not this one nomination.
 * SMcC writes I'm inclined to keep any geographical ones that are larger than big towns/small cities. Again, the nomination explicitly not is not about whether there should be a a portal for either of these topics.  It is about deleting portals which add nothing to the navbox and head article, and nomination explicitly says in bold "".
 * SMcC writes On the merits, because both are significantly "linkful" and informative enough that they might be useful. They entirely duplicate the navboxes, of which they are WP:CONTENTFORKs.  Their utility is by design less than that of either the navbox or the head article
 * SMcC writes Aylesbury is the county town of Buckinghamshire, a status comparable to a state capital in the US. No it's not. English counties have a mean population of <600,000, whereas US states have a mean population of about 6.5 million.  US states have limited sovereignty, legislatures, citizenship, constitutions, armed forces, their own judicial system, and general powers of taxation.  English counties have none of those things.  That comparison is like comparing an open fishing boat to a frigate.  Buckinghamshire County Council has no authority at all over the city of Milton Keynes, which is ceremonially part of Buckinghamshire, but a separate administrative area.  No US state includes whole cities over which the state has no jurisdiction (and before you say "DC", the capital zone is no longer part of either Maryland or Virginia)
 * SMcC writes There is no argument that the Nicks portal (or the Aylesbury one) is useless, fails to be a portal, is misconfigured gibberish, or anything else. On the contrary, the first bullet point of the nomination does indeed make the argument that both are useless duplicates, that one is indeed. misconfigured gibberish.  It is truly bizarre to see an oppose rationale based on complete untruth  about the nomination.
 * SMcC writes Portals that actually have something in them and aren't screwed up in some way serve such a purpose (see strong consensus to retain them at the VPPOL RfC a year or so ago). Two red herrings there:
 * the WP:ENDPORTALS asked whether all portals should be deleted, and the answer was a clear "no". However "don't delete everything" does not mean "keep everything".
 * the principle that portals which are merely drive-by spam add nothing to the navbox and should be deleted has already been established by dozens of MFDs in recent weeks, and at an exceptionally well-attended MFD, which closed yesterday: see WP:Miscellany for deletion/Mass-created portals based on a single navbox, and which about 60 editors agreed by a margin of over 7:1 to delete 1,390 driveby spam portals in one go.
 * It's just more "I'm against it because The Transhumanist used a tool" hand-waving. Yet again, that is a blatant untruth about the nomination.  Again, read the first bullet point of the nomination.
 * I don't know what prompts SMcCandlish to pack so many falsehoods into a single XfD reply. It could be a reckless failure to read before commenting, or it could be a choice to tell flat-out lies, but I don't know which.  Either way, it is highly disruptive. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 21:42, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm really, really uninterested in any further personalization and aspersions about portal disputes. Half the point of what I posted (and what Legacypac posted – despite him also nominating various portals for deletion, for much sounder reasons) was that this has gone too far already. Doubling down, to just turn up the finger-pointing, is the least useful response. No one has made a "keep everything" argument, least of all me. Cf. Straw man.  Maybe you had something in mind in the nomination other that "delete this because it was created by The Transhumanist with a script", but that's what the nomination goes on about, and what you've been going on and on about across so many of these MfDs and in other venues. So, I stand by what I wrote.  I don't read minds and can't magically know what you're really thinking. But you're not psychic either, and do not determine through force of your own will how I or anyone else may perceive a nomination like this. We read what is written and make up our own minds.  PS: I thought we agreed to avoid personal disputation like this. You pinged me to this discussion; I gave my input about both the portals in question and process, without surmising about your motives or personality, so please just drop it, and especially stop casting about with accusations of "falsehoods", etc.  No one is lying here; just not everyone agrees with everything you say.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:13, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Extraordinary. SmcC makes a long series of blatantly false assertions about this nomination, and then professes lack of interest in detail when the falsehoods are rebutted.
 * SMcC accuses me of hand-waving, but when called out on that objects to personalisation which he introduced.
 * Repeating a claim from his first post, SMcC says Maybe you had something in mind in the nomination other that "delete this because it was created by The Transhumanist with a script", but that's what the nomination goes on about
 * On the contrary, the first two paras of the nomination are about the substantive problem with these portals. Only one of the 8 paras even mentions TTH.  So SMcC's assertion is a repeated, blatant lie, the latest in a series of lies which SMcC has chosen to tell about me.  It's long past time for SMcC to stop disrupting en.wp's consensus-forming processes (and its dispute resolution processes too) by telling repeated lies.
 * The this has gone too far claim is plain deflection. Instead of engaging with the substantive reason advanced in this nomination and many other — that these portals are redundant duplication — SMcC is trying to claim that a problem which he refuses even to discuss has been identified in too many pages, and that we shoukd stop deleting further pages with the same problem. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 09:05, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Nope, I'm just not going there. One learns over time to not take fight-bait like this.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:10, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
 * McCandlish, the only fight bait here is that which you laid. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:06, 21 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete both on the grounds of the subjects and the ways these portals were created. Per WP:POG portals are supposed to be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers, the subject of a portal should be broad so that it presents a diversified content and The portal subject area should have enough interest and articles to sustain a portal, including enough quality content articles above a Start-class to sustain the featured content section. The Aylesbury portal is about a medium sized town, which I don't think constitutes a "broad topic", and none of the selected featured articles are above start class except the main article (and I really doubt List of civil parishes in Buckinghamshire is going to pull in readers). The Stevie Nicks portal has no selected articles at all, and since the scope of the portal is songs by Stevie Nicks I don't think that constitutes "diversified content" either. Furthermore both of these portals were written by TTH's portal creation script, which produces poor quality portals with little value beyond what can be gained from reading the main article.  Hut 8.5  21:39, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete 
 * - Automated portal,  0 subpages, created 2018-08-27 16:57:34 by User:TTH, to be deleted: Portal:Stevie Nicks
 * - Automated portal,  0 subpages, created 2018-12-05 13:48:41 by User:TTH, to be deleted: Portal:Aylesbury
 * Pldx1 (talk) 11:05, 16 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment - These two portals were created as 2 over a 3500+ series of broken automated portals. For the edification of User:SMcCandlish, let us recall that automated portals are not pieces of text written by a succession of editorial decisions, but are programs that will repeatedly call the random function, and will produce random results. It has been largely proved that, without a careful maintenance, these random results (in the mathematical sense of the word) are more than often random (in the common sense of the word). Did You Know that spiders in the genus Plato have cubical egg sacs? about the featherless biped, is surely a great success ! Therefore choosing these two portals as flagships to convince the Wide World that portals are the best things ever found since the invention of Kimchi seems to be a strange choice, while stating portals that actually have something in them ... serve such a purpose about golem-portals that were awakened with only the 14-characters magical formula  ... looks like a joke. Nevertheless, be at ease. What is discussed is not the deletion of the Buckinghamshire itself, nor even the deletion of the article about Buckinghamshire, but only the deletion of a portal that received  1,384 views in three months, i.e. 2 views per day  (look at Views par day for the details and remember that 18-03-2019 was the beginning of the MfD_1 ). Pldx1 (talk) 12:59, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Strikes me as a very poor example, since curious facts like cubical egg sacs are exactly the sort of things we put on the front page in "Did You Know?", one of our most popular features in the entire history of WP. That a portal includes such things (given what portals are for, which is primarily browsing not research – i.e., edu-tainment) would appear to be a plus, not a minus. PS: I don't need you to tell me that we're not AfD'ing the article Buckinghamshire. Last I checked, I wasn't lobotomized last night. :-) I made no argument that had anything to do with the continued existence of that article or the one on Aylesbury.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:17, 16 April 2019 (UTC); smiley added (that wasn't meant to seem offense-taking, but on a later re-read it came across that way.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:18, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Added a portrait of the famous featherless biped. Pldx1 (talk) 21:15, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I kept mistaking him for a velociraptor, but now that I see him up close ....  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:18, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Comments -
 * While I see where the discussion of Plato and the featherless biped came from, this discussion is not about his portal, which I added, regardless of whether that bundling was a mistake.
 * We don't need a portal on every US state capital either.
 * A county town in the United Kingdom really is more like a county seat in the United States than a state capital. UK counties, like US counties, are creatures of a higher-level entity, and are not self-governing.  I am aware that counties in the United Kingdom have been redefined by Parliament, which does not happen to states in the United States, and cannot happen based on Article Four of the United States Constitution, because states of the United States are self-governing, and some were formerly independent, more like constituent countries, but most state capitals don't have portals either.
 * I stand by my Delete vote. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:06, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I think a lot of editors would argue that US state capitals should have portals, if we keep portals at all. It's "interesting" that the VPPOL discussions about portals come out very supportive and broad, while ones at MfD come out very negative and narrow. Guess which one has more WP:CONLEVEL? Anyway, I wasn't trying to get you to change your mind, I just gave my view. Which at this point seems contrarian – in this venue, anyway, though not at the broader one.  I'll repeat that I arrived at the VPPOL RfC in an opposition frame of mind and was swayed by the arguments to keep portals and do new things with them.  That not all of the new things have been perfect isn't a good reason for us to go nuclear on them. But this does not appear to be a venue in which that view will be heard.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:29, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete both: they're not similar but would have been bundled as it was an oversight as part of a larger operation, so I don't really have an issue with bundling two portals, they can both be deleted per WP:POG.   SITH   (talk)   12:22, 24 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Your pinging didn't even work here. I hope this hasn't happened in other discussions here. ɱ  (talk) 17:53, 24 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. Narrow topics that are not suitable for portals. --RL0919 (talk) 12:08, 5 May 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.