Wikipedia:Waiting for Portal Maintainers

Some portals that cover broad topic areas but have never, or have not recently, had human maintenance, and are nominated for deletion. Should these portals be retained, and possibly tagged, in the hope that someone will assume responsibility for their maintenance? This question primarily applies to old-fashioned (non-automated) portals. The argument is made by portal advocates that these portals can be taken care of by tagging and normal editing, and that these portals should be allowed to find maintainers. The counter-argument is that the portals that are being nominated have been essentially abandoned for years, and it is not likely that editors will show up to maintain them. One administrator has characterized the expectation that portals will find maintainers in time as magical thinking.

It is commonly stated that cleanup is not deletion, or that deletion is not cleanup. Articles should not be deleted when they can be cleaned up. However, there is a fundamental difference between articles and portals. Articles are the whole reason for being of the encyclopedia. Articles are the bricks of which the encyclopedia is built. Everything else is only mortar, or interior. The purpose of the encyclopedia is to summarize as much of human knowledge as is worth summarizing. Also, working on articles is the focus of most of the encyclopedia’s editors, and articles that need cleanup are likely to be cleaned up by editors who want to improve articles. Proper maintenance of portals involves a skill-set that is not the usual skill-set of new editors or existing editors. If an article needs improvement, it should be tagged, and may be improved. There is little evidence that editors are looking for portals to maintain. (If they were, then Portal X would not have been ignored for N years.)

Portals that have been neglected for an extended period of time are not likely to be discovered and maintained in the foreseeable future. Waiting for portal maintainers may be like Waiting for Godot, an exercise in nothingness.