Wikipedia:Notability (portals)

This page gives some rough guidelines to decide if a given topic should have a Portal in Wikipedia.

Criteria

A portal should be about a broad subject area, and do not intersect too much with another available topic. Besides, it should meet at least one of the following criteria.

1. The parent article is a vital article.
2. The subject should have at least 15 articles that can be counted as recognized content (good or featured articles).
3. The subject should have a related active wikiproject.
4. The portal is about a country.

What is a broad subject area?

A broad subject area is a subject with a big scope, so that many other articles have it as their "parent" topic. For example, a concept that exists in nature for specific instances of it (e.g. "star", "mountain"), a country for things from that country, a genre for works and artists of said genre (e.g. "rock", "science fiction"), etc. Although content forks of the main article may fall inside the scope of the portal, they are not counted when considering if the subject area is broad or not. A good way to evaluate this is to check the topic's main category and see how many articles does it have, either in it or in related subcategories. Note, however, that not all articles within the category have the topic as its "parent" topic, so an evaluation should evaluate subcategories one by one. For example, we have Category:Cancer. Cancer is a parent topic for cancer treatments, cancer awareness, works about cancer, cancer researchers, etc; all of whom would suitably appear in a portal about cancer, but not for deaths from cancer, as most of those people would likely be notable for a reason unrelated to cancer and shouldn't appear in a related portal. Once the unrelated categories are excluded, the remaining ones should have at least a thousand articles with the portal topic as a "parent" topic.

The topic of a portal should not intersect with the topic of another portal, which means that they shouldn't work over the same set of articles. For example, a portal "Episodes of The Simpsons" would intersect with the portal about "The Simpsons". However, it is also possible for a subtopic of a larger topic to be broad enough in its own right to deserve a portal. For example, "Rock" and "Music", "Film" and "Arts", "Internet" and "Technology", etc. The best way to set the cases apart is to imagine the larger topic deprived from the smaller one. There are plenty of things about music, arts and technology that has nothing to do with rock, film and internet, but the Simpsons would hardly even exist without their episodes.

Detailed criteria

The previous requirement, that the article should be broad in scope and not having a significant intersection with another portal, is mandatory for all portals. In addition to that, it should meet at least one of the following requirements.

• The Vital articles are the topics that Wikipedia should have a high quality article about. They are selected by their real-world significance, so it makes sense to have a portal about them.
• A portal should highlight the recognized content related to the topic, so it should have some recognized content to highlight, such as featured articles or Wikipedia:good articles.
• There should be a group of active users that could give a hand if the portal needs maintenance. An active wikiproject would be a good place to find them.
• Given the size and large number of subtopics related to any given country, they can easily be broad subject areas for a dedicated portal. Wikipedia suffers from systemic bias and tries to counter it rather than reinforce it. As a result, we can allow countries with a small presence in Wikipedia to have a portal, regardless of their limited number of users or high-quality articles. This, however, does not extend to cities, subdivisions below national ones, micronations or microstates, which are evaluated like regular topics.

What to do with problematic portals

The requirements mentioned are not set in stone, and may change over time. Articles can be deleted, vital articles may be removed or swapped with others, featured articles may be reviewed, good articles may be delisted, wikiprojects may become abandoned. However, a portal should not be nominated for deletion immediately, as things may change back as well, and a portal is complex to build. For example, if an article was deleted and now the number of articles under the portal scope has fallen from 1,000 to 999, it is still possible to write a new article, or to fix whatever was wrong with the deleted article and write a new and acceptable version. If a portal has fallen below the standards for a long time, or never met them to begin with, it may be nominated for deletion in Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion.

If a portal about a legitimate topic has problems, be bold and fix them. If you don't understand how to do it, you may ask at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals or Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). Note that there are several ways to arrange the structure of a portal, so a portal should not be completely restructured without consensus. The best way to do it is to propose the change first, and proceed if other users agree with it, or nobody objects. Remember that, as a portal relies heavily on automated scripts and edits by bots, you may see little edits by human users since the initial set up but that won't necessarily mean that the portal is abandoned.