Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Architecture

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: keep . ~ Amory (u • t • c) 00:47, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Architecture

Topic with enough scope but no maintenance. The 50 plus members of WikiProject Portals found time to create over 1000 pages we have now deleted but no time to do work like updating the news here which is over 2 years out of date. Anyway why bother to maintain the page when so few readers are looking at it? This is a "high traffic" portal at 2600 views but the head article has 55,844 views in the same 30 days so which do readers like better? Legacypac (talk) 21:49, 12 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Keep and restore the former featured portal before it was trashed. As I recall this used to be one of the best portals, with a good design, a broad topic base and plentiful high-quality content. The current version is unrecognisable. If the news isn't updated then it could be hidden/deleted; there is no requirement for a news section. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:26, 12 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Keep and revert to This Version, the pre-automation version. This would require the Portal:Architecture/Intro and Portal:Architecture/Related portals pages to be WP:REFUNDed, because they were deleted per WP:G6 after automation occurred. Other concerns can be addressed by WP:COPYEDITING the portal and its subpages. Additionally, this had been designated as a Featured Portal until the featured portal process ended in 2017. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 23:49, 12 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Where are the maintainers that never noticed the trashing of their work? Legacypac (talk) 23:57, 12 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Both retired in 2010 (1, 2). BusterD (talk) 03:35, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Keep as suggested above. This vast and diverse subject matter is precisely the sort of material we SHOULD have a portal about. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater here. BusterD (talk) 03:37, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Weak Keep - Keep, but with the proviso that it can be nominated for deletion in another 60 days if it hasn't been restored to a workable version. The fact that they damaged a good portal may indicate that the portal platoon, or at least its lieutenant, should be topic-banned not only from creating portals but from modifying them. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:00, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - It is an indication of the antiquity of this portal (like the antiquity of some architecture) that is really was created by an IP. "This portal was created by dinosaurs". (Not quite. Wikipedia never ran on IBM 370, which were known as dinosaurs.) Robert McClenon (talk) 04:00, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It was worse before BHG reverted the bot updates [1] windows architecture anyone? Click the history link for more. Legacypac (talk) 04:07, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete this unmaintained thing. None of the Keepers (Espresso Addict, BusterD, North America) were sufficiently convinced of their !vote to step forward and put their name in the maintainer= item of the {{Portal maintenance status}} line (situated at the top of the code). Pldx1 (talk) 14:20, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment – Per WP:NOTCOMPULSORY, the notion of a mandatory maintainer for content is against Wikipedia policy. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 16:03, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

But POG has (maybe always) required interested editors for maintaining a portal. The lack of maintainers is a critical failure for retaining a portal. Legacypac (talk) 20:16, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. In pagespace, listing oneself as a maintainer has long been deprecated. By asserting "keep" in any of the thousand or so AfDs in which I've participated, I have not necessarily offered to take each stray dog home. One can value life without taking personal responsibility for every individual. BusterD (talk) 15:02, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep for now. A Level 2 article with a dedicated WikiProject; the fact that editors were distracted with less critical tasks is irrelivant. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:37, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep or possibly draftify if it really does need updating. Architecture is a broad field and we have a lot of articles on it, including many high quality ones. Page view counts are not a good reason for deleting things. Hut 8.5 19:40, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. (almost) All portals get less traffic than their articles, so this is not a valid deletion argument. This is also a Featured Portal. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 19:45, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep this dismal mediocrity for now. Architecture is a level-2 vital article, i.e. one one the top 100 most important topics. Basically, if we are going to have any portals, this should be one of them, unless there is a clear community consensus to reduce the number of portals to well below 100. (I would personally support that cull, but since it has not been established as consensus at RFC, I will oppose it being applied by WP:LOCALCON).

I rate the quality of this portal as mediocre. A sort of two-steps-above-the-bare-minimum pass grade. It's not actually broken, and it does include a GA/FA list and an okayish 2-tier list of major topics ... but measured against WP:PORTAL's principle "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects", its few enhancements are offset by its many failings.

This collection of high-importance low-quality portals will stay unless and until either a) the community supports the sort of radical cull which I would personally prefer, or b) the portals project begins a sustained process of prioritised major improvement of key topic portals. I'm not holding my breath for either development.

The only consolation is that only in January–February 2019 there was an average of only 74 pageviews of the portal, versus 1,880/day for the head article archiecture. That's still about 70 more daily pageviews than the portal deserves, and about 70 higher than most portals, but it's still pitifully low for such a major topic. Once again, readers know that Wikipedia portals mostly offer too little to be worth a visit, and they rightly recognise that head articles serve as pretty good portals. But until the en.wp recognises this too, we will continue to showcase the mediocrity.

That's WP:CONSENSUS, folks. Sometimes it produces daft policies, but in my experience these things usually correct themselves eventually, even tho in some cases that happens only after exhausting every alternative to an actual solution. So, some time getting on for a decade after the 2018 WP:ENDPORTALS, I reckon that we'll have finally have a policy which actually aligns the low reader interest in portals with the community's very limited ability to produce portals worth visiting. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:12, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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.