Also, with such pages in place, who knows what enhancements could be made to them in the future. Technology is accelerating as we speak.
An automatically generated list of new and recently expanded articles relevant to the subject.
:* Authors of a subject area help to discuss problems together
But, most portals do not have that level of volunteer labor available to them. Therefore, automatically-generated dynamic content, for example, in the form of randomly generated on-topic selections, automated news feeds, and so on, would be a valuable service, turning the portals into a form of periodical or newsletter.
:* does not bother anyone, does not cost anyone anything
Foundation sanction for direct outreach by Wikiprojects to portal-goers like offering topical reference desks, advertising within-project contests, user adoption drives, etc.
:* Help readers to ask questions when they have a problem
:* Helping readers by giving them an overview of a topic
I believe the solution is automation, with configurability (to provide flexibility to portal designers). Refreshing the intro entry, using selective transclusion, so it doesn't go stale is one form of automation that can help.
: I do not understand why you have to delete something that:
"I don't use X" → "X must be destroyed"?: Noyster (talk), 18:25, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
:* leaving behind a lot of frustration after deleting and certainly chasing away old veteran writers
Looking over the problems of portals reported in the discussion, they boil down to 1) out of date / lack of maintenance (lack of volunteer labor) 2) useless (static / unchanging) and 3) low traffic (few repeat visits). These are problems we can solve. The support to do so is obvious from the above discussion.
Obviously, there is no consensus to delete. But, the message is loud and clear that the status quo is unacceptable. The portals need a lot of work. They need an upgrade, to turn them into what they were originally intended to be: main pages for their respective subjects. It's time to roll up our shirt sleeves, and get to it. I foresee a major and fun collaboration coming on. You can expect to see me there. Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 22:17, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
Please keep in mind that portals are an internal feature intended to enhance the user experience once the user is already here. Traffic is higher for those portals that provide ongoing services that users return to them for.
:* rarely until barely outdated and needs updating
Request: Someone please speedy delete Portal:Yerevan (It's an empty husk. P1 (as article), A3 (no content)). Thank you. — The Transhumanist 10:40, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
The criteria portals use to select content should default to chronological rather than random (ie it shows the last article to be featured in that subject).
:* Thousands of hours of free time spent on volunteer helpers
: Why would you think the "Book" portal would necessarily have something to say about a particular author? Sounds like a better solution to this problem is removing the link to the Book portal from the Kafka article (if it is there) rather than deleting the entire portal namespace. - dcljr (User talk:Dcljr) 22:46, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
Supports are at 130 and Opposes are at 62 as of this reply .... that would indicate I'm not the only person who wont miss them, Well I'm sure those that do want them will live (if they get deleted that is). –Davey2010Talk 02:52, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
Consider the articles created by Coxhead such as James Eustace Bagnall. These get little maintenance now and, in any case, get few readers -- maybe one or two a day. When their enthusiastic creator moves on, shall we delete those too on similar grounds? Is Wikipedia only for high traffic, high maintenance pages like Kim Kardashian? All that other obscure stuff just gets in the way, right? Why not just delete everything that isn't vital and focus on getting that right before allowing anyone to start anything else? Andrew D. (user talk:Andrew Davidson) 13:17, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
Deprecating and marking historical would allow anything of value to be harvested by active Wikiprojects, or by others outside Wikipedia who may be inspired to create something better, etc. Also, there are design element in these that may be useful to know about. And the wikimarkup and formatting may be useful for some. I cut my page formatting teeth on portals. — The Transhumanist 12:43, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
How did you come to the conclusion that their traffic has gone down? It is exactly the opposite: their traffic keeps going up. They are more visible now than ever. — The Transhumanist 23:20, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
Perhaps the best way to promote them, as well as to increase their usage and importance, would be to improve their quality, in terms of interactivity and self-updating dynamic content, to keep them interesting and relevant. Inspire repeat visits. Currently, the vast majority of portals are static, and therefore they go stale over time. — The Transhumanist 13:05, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
This is an example of the Sunk cost fallacy. I get that many people have given an admirable effort to keep the portal system going, but this doesn't invalidate the well thought out reasoning for them being made obsolete. Many other elements of Wikipedia have been depreciated in spite of the hard work that users put into them. User:Axisixa[t][c] 23:23, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
I am not alone, maintaining takes me 3 minutes on days that have DYK related to Germany. It takes someone else 3 minutes to update the news. Why not? To compare portal and country is like apples and pears, - where on the country article would a reader get news and DYK? Some hundred look per day, enough for me to invest 3 minutes now and then. --Gerda Arendt (User talk:Gerda Arendt) 12:30, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
reply to DexDor - having been through birds, and other category page main spacetagging - I believe that some indication on a category page reduces potential confusion as there some binomial latin phrases could be a plant or a bird. I have not found deliberate or accidental project mis-tagging. JarrahTree 09:11, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
Portals for well-established topics like Mathematics don't need to change much. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia not a newspaper and frenetic activity is not required for such pages. The point is that once you start to claim that we can discard pages because they seem to be a backwater then you put most of our content at risk. And Wikipedia is nowhere near finished yet. People are still developing and arguing about structural aspects like infoboxes and Wikidata. It's far too soon to say that everything's settled and we can discard pages which are currently not mainstream. Andrew D. (user talk:Andrew Davidson) 16:12, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
No, that's a fake fact – facile and false. Some actual stats are listed below to refute it. Andrew D. (user talk:Andrew Davidson) 23:25, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
The list of main page stats below shows that the link free got over 100K views and that most of the portals got even more traffic. This is good evidence of significant usage. Q.E.D.. Andrew D. (user talk:Andrew Davidson) 07:22, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
Additional comment I further disagree with the premise that collaboration should only come from one source (a "project" or a "portal") -- collaboration can and should come from multiple sources if possible. Further, I do not believe that "need" is the proper measure... do we "need" portals? We don't "need" Wikipedia (see WP:NEED).--Paul McDonald (User talk:Paulmcdonald) 22:28, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
No, the argument seems to be that because some portals don't work well, we should destroy them all to make sure that none of them work at all. The main benefit seems to be that we will then have some white space where the portals used to be. Presumably the people who didn't use portals will carry on as before while the people who did like and use them will be infuriated and leave Wikipedia. Me, I'm thinking that the next step should then be to tear down the Village Pump too before we get any more bright ideas like this. Andrew D. (user talk:Andrew Davidson) 20:17, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
Vice versa? Portals don't even function well for their primary purpose, nevermind incorporating the workings of a wikiproject. Many portals already come under the 'jurisdiction' of wikiprojects, yet they still have major issues. Shifting namespace won't solve anything. Cesdeva (User talk:Cesdeva) 16:03, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
Well, we'll have to agree to differ, but the argument is not that portals are a backwater, but that, unlike articles, the nature of most portals means that they don't work well if they are backwaters. Peter coxhead (User talk:Peter coxhead) 16:26, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
First of all Wikipedia is a social network as well (but one with a specific purpose). Secondly it is true that much or all functions of portals could be taken over by Wikiprojects (or vice versa actually), but the conclusion from that is (at best) a merging or migration (with a potential phasing out of one) and not a wholesale deletion as suggested above.--Kmhkmh (User talk:Kmhkmh) 15:36, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
@Andrew Davidson: you didn't pick a good example in James Eustace Bagnall – he's long dead, and the information in the article isn't going to change. I can give you better examples for your argument, e.g. Ponerorchis cucullata, where there's active research going on and the generic placement has changed recently and might change again, requiring the article to be moved and updated. But portals are different, as Cesdeva says. Since they deliberately cross-connect multiple articles they necessarily need regular maintenance, as relevant articles appear, get moved, get promoted or demoted, etc. Peter coxhead (User talk:Peter coxhead) 16:00, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
Wikiprojects already serve the purpose of gathering together editors to collaborate on a topic. Portals aren't needed for this reason Cesdeva (User talk:Cesdeva) 15:11, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
A low-traffic target page hardly has the same maintenance reliance as a portal (which we intentionally try and funnel readers through en-masse). Cesdeva (User talk:Cesdeva) 15:05, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
**::::And my point is that we should not be deleting pages based on pageviews, nor using pageviews as a basis for how useful a page is (unless, perhaps, it always receives zero). PaleCloudedWhite (User talk:PaleCloudedWhite) 07:58, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
Comment The term "usefulness" is really arbitrary because it's up to one person or another to determine what that is, and that becomes personal preference. That starts to delve into the range of WP:IDONTLIKEIT which is never a reason to delete anything in Wikipedia. As to "content accuracy" -- this is a valid issue, and if the content is not accurate then the obvious conclusion is to edit the content. Once in a while we find content that is so poorly assembled that deletion is the best step, but that's not the case here... certainly not a blanket deletion for every portal.--Paul McDonald (User talk:Paulmcdonald) 14:30, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
I'm posting this again after the Section break because I didn't see this within the first 15 minutes of reading through this discussion.
I'm sure you have realized by now that you dove headfirst into a huge issue here. It concerns me a bit that you didn't offer up a proposal on what to do if the portals are deleted, there are also other things that editors have pointed out. Are you going to leave this up to the closer on what should or shouldn't be marked as historical? - Knowledgekid87 (User talk:Knowledgekid87) 13:51, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
My bad all's I've done is counted the use "Support" and "Oppose" - Probably should've search for "'''Support'''" but oh well, Consider that point struck. –Davey2010Talk 15:24, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
No problem with that if [1] Outline of A exists and isn't abandoned and [2] Portal A is seeing more traffic than we would expect from bots and mis-clicks. --Guy Macon (User talk:Guy Macon) 22:40, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
@Northamerica1000: Few things. If you'll note my !vote below, I think that they should be marked historical. Whoever made this RfC and said the word "delete" made a really poor decision there. 12k views over 30 days is not "well-used," it's a rounding error. Portal:Contents is linked from the sidebar on every Wikipedia page. Ed[talk][majestic titan] 16:30, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
Thank you to who ever just moved this to the bottom of this section. Duh, I didn't see that either. Thanks again.--66.76.14.92 (User talk:66.76.14.92) 01:03, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
While it's true that Wikipedia is not a social network, I disagree with the logic to the step that because it's not a social network there is no value in collaboration with other editors who are enthusiastic on the same general topic or topics. Collaboration is a good thing and if portals help promote collaboration, then that's another reason to keep them around.--Paul McDonald (User talk:Paulmcdonald) 14:33, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
Alternatives exist that are perhaps even better than the portal system such as lists, navigation boxes, outlines, and categories. Lists and outlines especially are far easier to maintain as they require less esoteric knowledge of parser functions, transclusion, and subpages (seriously, look at Wikipedia:Portal/Instructions it's a nightmare). Even portals linked at the top of the mainpage barely make it above 2000 views per day, meanwhile DYK articles often get at least that many views, with many getting over 5000 views. Portal:Tropical cyclones during the Atlantic hurricane season averages 190 views per day; The Signpost front page has better pageview stats and they just published an article asking if it's on its last legs. A few outliers like Portal:Current events shouldn't be used as a bludgeon to keep what is essentially a dead feature with superior alternatives, that's why we have WP:IAR. Keep the few useful ones, move the rest to project space, and mark WP:Portal and WP:POG as historical. Wugapodes[thɔk][ˈkan.ˌʧɻɪbz] 07:16, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
By the way, a large number of portals, such as Portal:Current events, Portal:Science, Portal:History, and Portal:Tropical cyclones are regularly maintained and have high viewership (to my knowledge). These are only some good examples. Are we going to mass delete all of the portals just because some of them aren't up to ideal standards? This proposal falls under the same fallacy that is often invoked for speedily deleting new/start or stub class articles that have plenty of potential, or eventually became great articles on this site. (There's a reason why you are not supposed to arbitrarily tag new or problematic articles for deletion because they don't look ideal.) I seriously doubt that all of the portals each have enough issues to warrant an actual deletion of all the portals. LightandDark2000 (User talk:LightandDark2000#top) 18:19, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
By word count, there are currently 150 'Oppose' and 206 'Support' including multiple usages by single users.
Davey2010, where do you get the 130 support figure from? Are you counting 'mark historical' as supporting deletion? As of the time of writing (this version) I make it 92 people explicitly supporting the proposal and 64 explicitly opposing (give or take a few sitting on the fence or with lots of caveats in their position). Carcharoth (User talk:Carcharoth) 10:04, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
Guns. We need sqs of heavily-armed thugs who will kick down the doors of Wikipedia editors who aren't working on what we want them to work on and hold a gun to their head until they comply. Not a practical solution, you say? How do you explain the immense popularity worldwide of similar systems? :( --Guy Macon (User talk:Guy Macon) 22:46, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
I think that the main ones, maybe, but fringe ones about topics that no one is updating definitely shouldn't exist. We should at most keep it to a few core portals and then delete or archive the rest. Nomader (talk) 14:52, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
I'm not voting twice. I'm specifying my opinion on this a little more. I oppose deleting all of the portals outright, but I'm open to the option I just mentioned above (and other similar proposals by some other users in some of the votes earlier above). LightandDark2000 (User talk:LightandDark2000#top) 04:38, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
No, any competent closer will see the lack of support for their deletion or marking historical - rfc outcomes don't have to match the original wording and can exclude those specific portals. Galobtter (pingó mió) 13:32, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
Of course they don't fill in the encyclopaedia in the same way that an article does - they're not intended to. They're collections of articles which should provide a visual taster and a route in to a wide selection of subjects falling under that Portal's umbrella. More effort than they're worth? Explain please. Interest and deletion arguments are being based purely on numbers again. Like a child at school - if you can open one child's eyes to the wonder of a subject like science, geography, the moon, or whatever, that's a real success. So supporters neeed to demonstrate that all Portals turn users away, or fail to let them access articles, or that the server drain is just too high - then they might have a valid argument for mass deletion. But no-one has. It's all WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT as far as I can see. Regarding 'outdated' - I do think there could be an argument to deprecate the use of 'News' sections within portals, or at least to have a guideline to remove these templates if not regularly updated. Nick Moyes (User talk:Nick Moyes) 17:10, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
Per the above request from The ed17, a decent example includes Portal:Food, which has received 12,898 page views in the last thirty days as of this post. It's a well-used portal by Wikipedia's WP:READERS; its removal would not benefit Wikipedia in any particular manner, and simply remove a navigation option that many readers clearly utilize. North America1000 10:12, 13 April 2018 (UTC
Readers are the most important part of the community; more important even than editors since an encyclopaedia without readership is nothing. This reader is stating that without portals, they will cease to be a reader. Readers rarely comment for the fact they are here to consume content not contribute it and the fact a reader has weighed in should be seen as a particularly valuable insight. -- BobTheIP editing as 2.28.13.227 (User talk:2.28.13.227) 16:37, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
**:::Thank-you for that comparison as it should help you understand my point and might make you change your vote. 119 pages a day for page with 16 inbound wikilinks about a row of trees is impressive (and an impressive article). We don't need to delete Dark Hedges because it is meeting a need. 139 views a day on Portal:Christianity is indeed incredibly low given it is an an extremely important topic of global interest where the portal is wikilinked from a HUGE number of pages (I gave up counting at around 30,000 page). There are so many ways to get to Portal:Christianity that 139 views a day could be mostly bots and accidental clicks. Legacypac (User talk:Legacypac) 07:43, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
:::That is not the consensus. And it's the people who haven't been here for over ten years and haven't done any work on portals but still post cursory support votes who need to justify why their comments should not be stricken. Hawkeye7(discuss) 23:51, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
That the "deletion would annoy a lot of volunteers" is not a reasoned motivation for keeping the portals. What is put into question here is their usefulness and content accuracy. The goodness of the encyclopedia should come before any personal whim of the users.--2.37.216.231 (User talk:2.37.216.231) 13:37, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
:::That's not true. The attribution to the original article is clear, just as it is in TFA. Attribution is required when you're copying a block of text from one article to another. The portals are encyclopaedic content, there's a lot more involved than you think, and the reasons given, ie low traffic and lack of maintenance apply to most of the encyclopaedia and are not valid grounds for mass deletion of content. What value is there in contributing articles under such a regime? Hawkeye7(discuss) 23:51, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
The other problem is a lack of maintenance. Portal:College basketball's "featured biography" was last updated by me..... 12 years ago (history is here: [1]). That's insane, and shows that for many of these portals, they've gone too far in the weeds. It should really only be core subjects at the end of this. Nomader (talk) 15:26, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
:::#The proposal violates our first pillar, that Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. It is not enough that information be listed. It has to be organised as well. That is why we have portals and, less usefully, categories.
:::#There is a mechanism for the deletion of portals, and that is WP:MfD. This is a deliberate attempt to do an end run around our processes, and for a reason: none of the arguments advanced here would be acceptable at MfD. ie WP:NEGLECT, WP:NOBODYREADSIT and WP:IDONTLIKEIT. Could the portals benefit from more automation? Certainly. Is that a reason to delete anything at all? No.
They are? I don't see this as a threat but an actual statement that the editor gets value from the portals and will likely not return if they are gone. But I didn't know that I was supposed to roll my eyes at this...--Paul McDonald (User talk:Paulmcdonald) 01:00, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
This is really the worst of the motivations that have been put forward to save the portals! Wikipedia is not a social network! The aim of this project is to build an encyclopedia of good-quality (academically supported) content, not to make friends sharing the same interests!--2.37.216.231 (User talk:2.37.216.231) 13:37, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
The ed17: Another example of a well-used portal is Portal:Contents/Lists, which has received 11,330 page views in the last thirty days as of this post. It is clearly of use to many readers. How would its deletion serve those readers? North America1000 23:27, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
The ed17: Furthermore, Portal:Contents/Portals, a page that lists all portals, has received 112,995 page views in the last thirty days. That's a lot of readers looking for portals that interest them, or to learn more about their availability. North America1000 04:29, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
**:::We have pageviews that show that people visit portals - that is the only concrete information we have. Everything else is unproveable assumptions, which are not adequate basis for deleting a section of the encyclopedia. So what if Portal:Food gets less visits than Food? It doesn't get zero views. Editors could reasonably have a discussion about why a page might receive less pageviews than another, but it is reckless to use such comparisons as a basis for deletion. PaleCloudedWhite (User talk:PaleCloudedWhite) 08:02, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
what if Portal A was redirect to Outline of A. This was the name function still directs readers to an overview/index of a topic.--Moxy (User talk:Moxy) 18:33, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
:::#When writing articles, content creators often focus on a whole series of articles on a particular subject area. Portals and topics are often the locus or goal of such efforts. Hawkeye7(discuss) 05:35, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
WP:CRYSTAL is a policy that only applies in full to article content, not a namespace. In this instance I think it's perfectly fine to argue it both ways. Daniel Case (User talk:Daniel Case) 18:27, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
Actually, Portal:Arts, which I hadn't looked at for years, still seems to function fine. The sections have automated rotation of decent lists of articles, the anniversaries are for April. It's like one of those spaceships in Alien and other movies keeping going while the crew are in suspended animation.... It's not a very time-sensitive area, and the reader is still well-served imo, for several visits. Johnbod (User talk:Johnbod) 16:16, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
Because well meaning but not clued in editors will revert them, and keep add portal links without realizing what a disservice they are doing. Legacypac (User talk:Legacypac) 00:07, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
But that's still 10,585 and 17,155 people a year respectively who have an opportunity to discover, if they so wish, new topics and sample selected encyclopaedic information in a different way to normal, without having to wade through a lengthy and maybe dull-looking article. Yes, numbers are low on the scheme of things, but there are innumerable Featured Articles like this and this that get less traffic. Shall we delete all low-traffic pages next because they don't attract enough people? The logic makes no sense. Delete a rubbish page because it's flawed and can't be fixed, for sure. But all 1500 Portals (assuming just 50 visitors a day each) still amounts to 27.6 million people a year not having an opportunity to see or discover a broad sample of articles relevant to a topic, usually in a bright, uncomplicated manner, and possibly being enthused enough to learn and study that topic in a way that might even change their direction in life. Why take that away? Nick Moyes (User talk:Nick Moyes) 03:02, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
::Can you clarify what you mean by "mass deletion of content"? Portals mostly consist of just a copy (possibly out of date and copied without attribution) of the lede of an article surrounded by some pretty formatting and links. Hence, deleting a portal doesn't delete encyclopedia content (facts that are of use/interest to readers). DexDor(talk) 20:02, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
Can you give an example of such a latin name category page and how a reader might arrive there without knowing whether it's about rocks/plants/animals? As an editor (when fixing categorization problems) I wouldn't rely on the portal link being correct. DexDor(talk) 21:03, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
Done (I think it is the first time I used CSD P1 in more than 10000 speedy deletions). —Kusma (t·c) 11:30, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
I can't see how rearranging the names will improve the usefulness Legacypac (User talk:Legacypac) 03:43, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
I don't agree that you always find new content in some Portals, but that's not even relevant. But you are right to say they provide an overview - a different way in to a topic if you like. Having provided a taster of articles across a broad sectrum, like many articles here they do not need much modification. If we were to take the approach being proposed here, we would soon be mass deleting every article that hasn't been edited for a year or so and which receives under some unspecified number of visitors per day. How demoralising to all users. I also agree with you that WikiProjects could/should be supporting Portals more - and many are very closely linked - but they are entirely different beasts, and both have their very distinct value in my view. Nick Moyes (User talk:Nick Moyes) 16:48, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
I have no problems with reforming the portal system or even setting something up to increase reader/user awareness of the various portals (which will help mitigate any maintenance issues), but deleting or redirecting all of the portals outright is simply not a viable option? Are you even aware of how much infrastructural damage or reader shock you will cause if you were to delete all of the portals? LightandDark2000 (User talk:LightandDark2000#top) 18:02, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
I love Wikipedia and reference it as my first source when learning about a new topic, but I visit the 'Current Events' portal at least once a day because to me this is the equivalent of reading the morning newspaper that was the standard about 50 years ago. The diversity of events which individuals take the time to report there is unrivaled. Often I learn of events that only much later become TV-news worthy or never make the circuit. In a sentence, 'The 'Current Events' portal enriches my life and to lose that would be a shame.' Please do not remove this section just because you find it unnecessary, please rather consider the many people who don't contribute but appreciate the thing for what it is. This comment is only my second time ever editing a Wikipedia page. The other time was in the 'Current Events' portal. So there again is another benefit to it, it draws in visitors and entices them to become contributors. Please, PLEASE, let it be.
I would not support marking all portals as "historical" (or taking them all out of the portal system). Some portals, such as the current events and tropical cyclones portals are still actively maintained and highly essential to accessing the latest articles (in a chronological sense) in relation to their specific WikiProjects. I could support marking the archaic / extremely old portals as historic, but the active/relevant portals are still very much in use and should not be taken out of Wikipedia mainspace in any way. LightandDark2000 (User talk:LightandDark2000#top) 18:24, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
I’d be interested to know how we would reform an area that is more or less abandonded. The community and the readers seem to have made it clear they don’t find these particularly useful, we can’t force anyone to look at them or maintain them. Beeblebrox (User talk:Beeblebrox) 23:59, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
Keeping portals on the off-chance that they become popular again is CRYSTAL, so you've actually invoked policy which is the antithesis of your argument. --Iryna Harpy (User talk:Iryna Harpy) 18:55, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
No, what's actually embarrassing is that some editors voting for deletion don't appreciate that Portal content is often made via other templates, which are themselves updated in varying amounts. The portal that forms Wikipedia's Main Page hasn't been edited at all this year yet. Nick Moyes (User talk:Nick Moyes) 13:33, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
**::Okay, so I'm understanding that you personally don't use them or know anyone who uses them, I don't use them or know anyone who uses them, and nobody in this discussion seems to use them or know anyone who uses them. We also know that portals get remarkably few page views per link. Portal:Food, for example, is linked on more than 8,000 articles, and it gets a mere 400 page views per day. The article on Food, by contrast, is linked on only a third as many articles, but it gets about seven times as many page views. On a view-per-link basis, the encyclopedia article is 20 times more desired by readers than the portal. That limited popularity suggests that portals are not actually "useful to readers". Maybe they could be – I'd personally be happy to find something that worked for readers, and mw:Extension:RelatedArticles might be one option to consider – but the long-term lack of use, in the face of such heavy "advertising" in articles, suggests that portals (as they currently exist) do not seem to be useful to readers (including for entertainment utility). WhatamIdoing (User talk:WhatamIdoing) 15:14, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
@Galobtter: You take one example for deleting a whole namespace, some portals are working and there is no need for deleting the work of hundreds of people!--Sinuhe20 (User talk:Sinuhe20) 07:55, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
::@Hawkeye7: Are there any reasons other than mass deletion for which you're opposing? Much of the other editors here (including myself) support only the deprecation of portals, not outright deletion, so I politely ask you to either change or justify your vote. ToThAc (User talk:ToThAc) 18:15, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
Portal Current Events would continue in Wikipedia space. No one wants to close it down. Legacypac (User talk:Legacypac) 16:31, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
**::Portal:Christianity has received an average of 139 pageviews per day over the last 90 days - is that an incredibly low figure? Of all the articles that I've created, the most read is Dark Hedges, which over the same period has received an average of 119 pageviews per day.[2] Obviously Dark Hedges is useless to readers too and should be deleted, along with all the other articles that I have created, as they have even less readership. I am reminded of David Attenborough's comment on public service broadcasting, which he said should "cater for the broadest possible range of interests, popular as well as less popular, a network that measures its success not only by its audience size but by the range of its schedule". PaleCloudedWhite (User talk:PaleCloudedWhite) 07:05, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
::@Knowledgekid87: I was aware, but did not know what it was. I found the link on the main page (even though named different), and I do not think removing it would be a great loss. Even though I am involved in the spaceflight WikiProject, there is spaceflight information on that portal that I was not aware of. There are links to three pages nominated for deletion, several DAB links. Seems like a duplicate of Wikinews and could be replaced with that, since the page does not fit well with the encyclopedia theme. Kees08 (Talk) 05:35, 14 April 2018 (UTC)
@SusanLesch:Library front desk display - come in and read more books like these If whichever portal you refer to is flawed, you have a route to have it removed. It's at WP:MFD. That's not a rationale for mass-deleting the other 1,500 portals. Nor is a lack of recent editing, or having only 36,500 visits a year. Think of Portals like a window or table display in a library. They simply present a minute selection of their holdings to encourage broader use of any of the library's holdings. They're just another route in to content; pick one up and maybe you'll get inspired. Why deny readers that opportunity? Nick Moyes (User talk:Nick Moyes) 00:10, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
Something that I've done in the past, please forgive my ignorance here, in relation to clearing disk space on my computer, has been to search for empty folders in my directory and delete them using a third party utility. As this applies to what seems to be the appeal to many here of deleting the portals, mainly clearing up unused namespace, could something similar not be done? If a portal hasn't been edited in a certain amount of time, could there not automatically be a message posted at the top of it, like the one that led me to this discussion, notifying users that unless the portal logs some activity within the next short time frame, it will automatically be deleted? Seems like a good compromise without killing the whole program.
Something that I've done in the past, please forgive my ignorance here, in relation to clearing disk space on my computer, has been to search for empty folders in my directory and delete them using a third party utility. As this applies to what seems to be the appeal to many here of deleting the portals, mainly clearing up unused namespace, could something similar not be done? If a portal hasn't been edited in a certain amount of time, could there not automatically be a message posted at the top of it, like the one that led me to this discussion, notifying users that unless the portal logs some activity within the next short time frame, it will automatically be deleted? Seems like a good compromise without killing the whole program.
The fact that the Featured portal process itself was marked as historical last year could mean that, while Portals aren't necessarily outdated, there could be a fundamental flaw in the system that might not be easily solved. As I've mentioned elsewhere, portal automation has been proposed, which would probably solve the editing activity problem but might not be enough to solve the readership problem. Narutolovehinata5tccsdnew 14:18, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
The point is more than that they are outdated, it is that they don't add to the encyclopedia the way an article fills gaps in coverage; are more effort than they are worth; and readers are not particularly interesting in them despite how often we link them. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:50, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
This suggestion is to completely misunderstand the potential of Portals in providing an alternative and often very visual route into a broad topic, without having to wade through a hugely long, and often tedious article, or visit a complicated WikiProject. Portals are (or should be) a bright window into a broad subject area, allowing the user to 'dip a toe' into topics that might interest or enthuse them. As the main explanation of Portals states: The idea of a portal is to help readers and/or editors navigate their way through Wikipedia topic areas through pages similar to the Main Page. In essence, portals are useful entry-points to Wikipedia content. Compare Mountain or WP:WikiProject Mountains to Portal:Mountain; Biology or WP:WikiProject Biology to Portal:Biology, and Arts or WP:WikiProject Arts to Portal:Arts. I do believe Portals are best off being closely associated with a relevant WikiProject in most cases, even though the latter deliver an utterly different function of focussing editor collaboration. Deleting 1,500 Portals in one go and moving content into a WikiProject would create vast work for absolutely no benefit and similarly misunderstands the purpose of WikiProjects and the role of Portals. Nick Moyes (User talk:Nick Moyes) 14:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
Very hard to get a new CSD approved but with a clear RFC result that would be a good mechanism to remove them systematically. Perhaps X3? We should statt by removing them from the top of the mainpage - the most important real estate for the least important namespace on the project. That will drop traffic on the portals a lot. Legacypac (User talk:Legacypac) 21:44, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
You don't get 2 !votes. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 21:18, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
Best wishes, Ntmamgtw (User talk:Ntmamgtw) 16:49, 13 April 2018 (UTC) (updated 09:24, 17 April 2018 (UTC))
categorised as an active portal, with the general criteria for this status being that they have to be regularly monitored and kept up to date;
deleted outright (for example, if they are particularly poorly and/or rarely maintained).
:Example: I started my Wikipedia journey with Portal:Bangladesh and then wanted to improve the portal. To find more materials to showcase on the portal I ended up exploring numerous Bangladesh related topics and often ended up contributing in many articles.
:Example: Say I want to explore the topic of Mathematics. As a curious reader I go to mathematics portal. From the selected article section I learn that there is a good article on qratic equation. I feel interested and I check out the article. If I only visited the Article on Mathematics. I would not have learnt about existence of an article on this topic so easily. Then I look at the DYK section. I see a DYK entry like: “...... that there are 115,200 solutions to the ménage problem of permuting six female-male couples at a twelve-person table so that men and women alternate and are seated away from their partners?” As a person interested in mathematics I immediately become curious. Without encountering this DYK I may not have even known about the existence of ménage problem. Then from Portal:Mathematics I jump into other related portals like Portal:Algebra and so on.
Forgive me if this idea is too simple, but it may be wise to try and devise a system that unobtrusively increases the awareness of the portal system to readers so that people are encouraged to visit portals. This would be expected to generate some interest in using portals, so that people are more inclined to contribute to Wikipedia by editing portals. In turn, this would help to improve the encyclopedia by helping people navigate through it.
Hi Nick-D: Out of curiosity, have you checked out any of the page views for portals? Your assessment stating "...they're unlikely to be being used by readers" is countered by page statistics for several portals. For example, Portal:Biography has received 62,874 page views in the last thirty days as of this post. North America1000 07:48, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
However, I don't think mass-deletion is going to work (it rarely does). Instead I'd suggest updating any relevant guidelines to say they are obsolete, then introducing a speedy deletion criteria along the lines of "pages in the portal namespace that are no longer actively maintained". – Joe (User talk:Joe Roe) 21:37, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
:However, we can consider the below:
I don't tend to voice my opinion in community discussions like this, because it can seem quite intimidating to editors like me, who don't consider themselves to as well versed with Wikipedia as many of you, and haven't been contributing for as long as many of you have. So, once again, let me apologise if I am reminding you of something that is bread and butter to you. There are several templates that can be used to include links to a portal or multiple portals. Take the Portal, Portal bar, Portal-inline, Subject bar and Sister project links templates as examples.
I respect your opinion but want to remind you that there are sometimes many editors on any given project and not all of the portals are alike. - Knowledgekid87 (User talk:Knowledgekid87) 16:52, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:I understand this argument, but the problem is that portals are usually constructed by one or two enthusiastic editors who then move on to other activities or leave Wikipedia. Once they aren't maintained, their usefulness tends to diminish rapidly. We should not be encouraging editors to build stuff that in the long run is not useful to readers. Peter coxhead (User talk:Peter coxhead) 06:48, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
If that's true (and I'm not saying that it isn't), that is an indication of an editing issue and not a deletion issue.--Paul McDonald (User talk:Paulmcdonald) 18:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
In addition, this also means that a couple of very popular portals like Portal:Current_events should be open to everyone. We need to distinguish portals for ease to access with the average viewers and portals for editing purposes. --Komitsuki (User talk:Komitsuki) 01:51, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
:It seems that any collection of pages will now be subject to deletion. Hawkeye7(discuss) 07:35, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
:Keep in mind that portal pages are edited through templates. In the end, you should measure the template activity and not the portal page which just presents all the info. - Knowledgekid87 (User talk:Knowledgekid87) 14:50, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
Portals can come in useful for editors from time to time, but admittedly it is quite easy to gather that they are not quite fit for purpose any longer. I don't think it'd be unreasonable to suggest that many portals, if not most, are very infrequently viewed by most editors and (non-editor) readers alike. I don't think that there needs to be as many portals as there currently are.
:Server space is definitely not an issue for the WMF, and deleting things does not free up space, but actually adds to it, as everything is kept on Wikipedia (e.g. deleted pages are viewable by admins) and this would just add data to deletion logs etc. But I don't think anyone has argued that we are running out of space. — Bilorv(c)(talk) 13:38, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
Since there are people here apparently without a lick of commonsense, I guess I should be explicit that I would exempt the Current Events portal, and -- as much as I love to disdain the Main Page --I would also exempt the Main Page. Sheesh, people can be so damned literal sometimes. Beyond My Ken (User talk:Beyond My Ken) 02:47, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
:Sorry Jklamo, arguing to delete all portals and respecting portal editors are mutually incompatible. Instead of arguing for deletion of portals, why not spend your time more efficiently improving articles? Sarcasm aside, redirecting volunteer effort away from what they want to do towards what you think they should do is quite a lot of work, and deleting the work of volunteers is not usually a good way to make them volunteer for more. —Kusma (t·c) 14:16, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
:The below are a couple of reasons why the portals should not be deleted:
**:The incredibly low readership of portals - even the 8 linked off the top of the mainpage - proves they are not useful to readers who vote with their clicks. Also every person voting here is a reader too and I've yet to see anyone really say they use portals. The objections are around preserving history or some useful bits or not offending the creators. Legacypac (User talk:Legacypac) 06:51, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
They don't further our goal of being an encyclopaedia. For me, this isn't about whether they are well-maintained, and applies equally to Portal:Arts. Portals are intended to help users stumble upon quality material on random subtopics within a field. That's not a goal I care about or think Wikipedia should pursue. I like Finnusertop's proposal of topic-specific reference desks managed by WikiProjects, but that seems like a whole new idea, not an adjustment of portals. Daask (User talk:Daask) 18:38, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
They wont be missed by you, but yeah all of the other editors who use them... what about them? - Knowledgekid87 (User talk:Knowledgekid87) 02:05, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
This is not a good link to make and have seen it talked about someplace on Wikipedia I think through an essay. The notion that "editors would be better off doing x" is a slippery slope, should we then go on and say something like: "Editors should focus their time away from plant related articles due to the complexity of the field"? Each portal attracts editors interested in that particular area, just because you may not edit portals nor care about them is a good reason for wholesale deletion. - Knowledgekid87 (User talk:Knowledgekid87) 14:14, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
:While you maintain the portals, there may be some point. But the problem is that portals don't continue to be maintained, as noted repeatedly above. Note also that the Germany portal gets less than 1% of the number of views that Germany does. So the value to readers in relation to the work required by editors is grossly disproportionate. Peter coxhead (User talk:Peter coxhead) 10:20, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
Would this proposal to eliminate the portals system provoke such interesting discussion between editors had the system not been in such a sorry state? I can't tell you the answer to that, but what I can say is that the system is in dire need of improvement. A portal should be a useful navigational tool for readers and editors, but the way they are today, most are not. All too often, editing activity fizzles out, leaving a near-abandoned portal that is a sitting duck for POV issues and unsourced material.
**:Your last point does not apply to me because I haven't invested time in editing portals. I made the statement about some readers finding portals useful in response to statements higher up the page stating that they are useless. People cannot make such statements; there is no factual foundation. The WMF, as far as I'm aware, has not conducted in-depth market research on how portals may or may not be used by readers, but we do have pageviews showing that some are read at least as much as many articles. That does not quantify to what extent they are useful, nor in what way, but it does establish that they are used. It's really a rather narrow way of looking at something to say, as some have here, 'I haven't read them or edited them much, therefore get rid of them'. I do not look at portals as navigation aids, rather I see them more like the random article feature - showing readers something that they weren't necessarily looking for - but in a more topic-orientated way. If they aren't performing as well as they might, perhaps some thought should be given as to how to improve them and/or give them better functionality. Leaping straight to deletion seems wholly the wrong way to go about this. PaleCloudedWhite (User talk:PaleCloudedWhite) 19:49, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
# Also there is no way to measure how much time or actual reading a reader spends when clicking a portal page.
# Alternative solutions have been suggested, but the practicability of these have not been established. There should be no deletion until after these have been considered and discussed. The proposal is premature. There is no rush.
Support deprecating them. They are utterly useless, and like many dead-end ideas from the early days, become more and more of a maintenance burden as time goes on. Next let's axe the sidebars, outlines, and bibliographies.
** And what is the basis for people's assertions that they are not of any use to readers? Do the same editors make such assertions about particular articles, and that therefore they also should be deleted? PaleCloudedWhite (User talk:PaleCloudedWhite) 06:41, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
*As far as I can tell, the placing of a notification tag on all existing portals seems to have only just been done today by The Transhumanist (maybe they could confirm?). Any timings for how long this RfC should run for should take that into account. My gut feeling is that moving the pages to WikiProject space is a waste of effort. Better to mark historical and let individual editors and Wikiprojects move what they want to keep. It is trivial (using the same templates and transclusions) to replicate portals in the Wikipedia namespace for those who want to keep something going at a WikiProject or User namespace level. All that is really needed is to remove links from the article namespace to the deprecated portals. Those who keep working on updated navigational content (where ever it is hosted) will add back in links as needed, and the normal editing process takes over from that point (is it useful to readers of the articles, etc.). I shouldn't really start threaded discussion here, feel free to move if needed. Carcharoth (User talk:Carcharoth) 11:56, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
* Associated Wikimedia --> Microsoft external links section
Broadly Support ending portals overall, but they should be marked as historical rather than deleted, removed from external search engine results, and links to them removed. The exception is if they are still actively maintained and well-used, although I'm not sure there are many of those. Or if we really want to keep them, then we should fully automate them to automatically stay up-to-date (maybe using Wikidata for things like 'on this day'). Thanks. Mike Peel (User talk:Mike Peel) 21:42, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
* Categories/Topics --> Microsoft navbox
Certain portals, such as the current events portal, should stick around. In fact, it probably should be on a case-by-case basis anyway, where the more active portals stay around while the inactive or rarely active ones can be closed.
Comment I'd like to point out that there is a common thread among those who support removing portals, and that is that since a group of portals (A, B, and C) are "poorly written/out of date/not maintained" then we must therefore remove all portals (A, B, C, D, ... Z). This argument is essentially WP:ALLORNOTHING, an argument to avoid in deletion discussions. This is especially critical in that it is known that at least some portals are indeed well written, current, and regularly maintained. Not only is the argument one that should not be used in general, it is also proven to be incorrect in this specific case.--Paul McDonald (User talk:Paulmcdonald) 13:47, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
I can't support the blanket deletion of all portals as some of them are clearly useful. Portal:Current events, for instance, is well maintained, provides a useful resource which isn't duplicated by anything else, and gets 30-50,000 hits a day. Having said that the OP does have a point that most portals aren't maintained and aren't terribly useful, and I think it's fair to say that the general idea hasn't caught on. As a result I would support the general deprecation of the concept. If we want to retain a portal then it should be possible to show that the portal adds significant value to the encyclopedia which isn't duplicated by something else. If a portal doesn't meet this standard (and IMO most of them don't) then it should be archived or deleted. Hut 8.5 17:52, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
# I have seen portals that are better maintained than many mainspace pages, with outdated information, tags without discussion or proper motivation, bad spelling, grammar, insufficient categorization, etc. And those pages were created years ago and not or hardly maintained afterwards.
# I never ever click on the Main Page, but browse, read and check my watchlist (hence I found out about this, I never visit the Village pump either) everyday and have written in the past over 200 articles and worked on thousands.
***I really don't care if people get angry because they think that they have WP:OWNERSHIP over a page. Accusing other editors of "purposely driving off contributing editors" and "not having the slightest respect for other people's work" is not allowed here. And as for your claim that "just because you may not like or use them doesn't mean you get to have your way over dozens of other editors that do", yes we do get to do exactly that -- if tyhat's what the community decides. This is called WP:CONSENSUS and it is how we make decisions here. Both Lamassus and you should post calm, reasoned arguments supporting your position instead of making this into a toxic conversation by refusing to assume good faith. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Guy Macon (User talk:Guy Macon#top • contribs) 03:57, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
*If the portals are all deleted, it would be a Good Thing if the Wikiprojects were notified with "heads up; the following portals are about to go away. Feel free to move them to subpages of your Wikiproject before that happens." --Guy Macon (User talk:Guy Macon) 18:21, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
If there's a decent proposal to replace portals with something more automated - a view of categories that automatically shows excerpts from featured/good articles within them and related to them, with "on this day", "current events" and other common portal features supported (again, see P:SEE) - then I'd consider supporting it. But I oppose wholesale deletion without a decent alternative in place. WaggersTALK 14:30, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
# It is illogical, and even dominating, that someone who doesn't like portals decides that the people who do like portals should be negated their liking. If you don't like portals, simply don't click on them or do not work on them. If you do like them, please let this discussion be a motivation to improve the portals. An automation for weekly/monthly updates is not hard to implement, after all there are "just" 1500 portals, almost less than comments on this very page (in just a couple of days).
# It looks like this would be a seriously divisive move. It may deeply antagonise a significant number of passionate editors for very little, if any, real advantage. This alone is sufficient for abandoning this proposal.
* It was posted at Wikipedia talk:Portal#Ending the system of portals, which is probably the single best place to reach people who care about the portal system (rather than just the portal for one subject). It appeared there one minute after the RFC began. It was also posted at WP:CENT within minutes, and of course at three different RFC lists. It sounds like you didn't happen to see it during the first 72 hours, but this was properly advertised. WhatamIdoing (User talk:WhatamIdoing) 16:05, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
