Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Electricity
Huge topic, but just another drive-by junk portal, created by @The Transhumanist (TTH) to boost the numbers in his "newsletter". Contains a useless subset of this rich topic, created in the same slapdash way as see Portal:Shipwrecks (see MFD:P:Shipwrecks) and Portal:Habitats (see MFD:P:Habitats).
It goes like this:
- TTH creates[1] the portal page, using {{subst:Basic portal start page}}, which draws its "selected articles" list from
Template:Electricity. - That produces no list, because
Template:{{PAGENAME}}resolves to Template:Electricity. That page doesn't exist, so the "Selected general articles" section just shows a Lua error "No page specified." - To create a list, TTH then does a quick screenscrape of the eponymous Category:Electricity, dumps that into the portal page's "Topics" section, and changes the list-making code to use the embedded list. In the case of Portal:Electricity, that reads:
{{Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1 | more= | | Portal:Electricity | subsection1=Subtopics | }}=
I verified that's how it was copying the list from the portal into WP:AWB, and using AWB's "list compare" to compare two. Perfect match, exceot for Berkshire Hathaway Energy, which was removed[2] from the category on 7 March 2019, a month after the portal was created. - Press save, and key presto, an instant "portal". Three minutes after the first save, he's saved[3] the embedded list, which now looks at first glance like a curated portal.
- One wee edit to change column widths,[4], and after five minutes he's done and gone.
(I have since hacked[5] the Lua Module:Excerpt slideshow so that portals built in this way are tracked at Category:Automated portals with embedded list. Some of them seem okay, but others are junk.)
In some cases, this technique produces a reasonably coherent list of subtopics which would be better done as a navbox.
But in this case it only gathered the sweepings of the topic.
Category:Electricity is the parent of a deep category tree. But I rapidly spotted that TTH has simply used the base category. Some list-making confirmed that, and also allowed a quick check: only 26 of the 106 pages displayed as "subtopics" are assessed as FA, GA, A, B, C or list-class, which is what portals should be made of. But that's not the worst of it.
TTH's selection consists only of those which have not been properly categorised by diffusion into subcats. If you wanted to chose a set of what are likely to be the least developed articles on electricity, TTH's drive-by screengrab would be a good approach.
So once again, this was 5 minutes to create a portal which looks like it's curated, but is actually just disguised spam. It's hard to see how even its creator could have thought that this drive-by junk served any purpose other than boosting the count of the new "portals" which he listed in his "Newsletter". It's in issue #28, just below the heading "10,000 portals, here we come...", which boasts "We're at 5,705 portals and counting."
Once again, never mind the quality, just count the numbers ... and leave others to clean up the tsunami of spam.
I am sure that could be a decent portal on electricity. It is a huge topic, and a very important one: the article Electricity is listed as a Level-2 vital article. But this piece of 5-minute spam is so abysmal that it's worse than nothing. So I propose that this junk pseudo-portal be deleted per WP:TNT without prejudice to creating a curated portal not based on a single other page, in accordance with whatever criteria the community may have agreed at that time. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:51, 6 May 2019 (UTC)