Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cenozoic

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The result of the discussion was: Withdrawn by originator. Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 12:04, 17 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Cenozoic

~~Fails: Wikipedia:Portal guidelines#Required (no working Selected picture section)~~ – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 09:25, 15 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Withdrawn. The concern has been remedied. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 09:24, 17 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Did you raise your concerns at WT:Portals? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:42, 15 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: Needs a lot of work, obviously, but the scope is broad enough for a portal and their's certainly enough content out there. Abyssal (talk) 13:04, 15 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Keep - Wikipedia:Portal guidelines was just updated on May 23, 2018; prior to that selected pictures were only recommended, not required, meaning many portals may not meet that "required" point. The portalspace is going through a major revamp; issues should be raised at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals first instead of jumping to deletion nominations. — Godsy^(TALK_CONT) 15:28, 15 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per Godsy and Abyssal. Now has selected picture carousel. I will also point out that for some portals a selected picture may not be possible, and that should not be a deletion criteria. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 13:33, 16 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per arguments above. Lots of portals aren't updated frequently, so it will take a while to get them all up to the current guidelines. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 18:09, 16 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Request withdrawl – Finnusertop, now that the reason for nomination of the portal for deletion has been remedied (it now has a picture section), I humbly request that you withdraw your nomination. Thank you. Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 04:21, 17 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Comment – in the future, please keep in mind that the main responsibilities of participants of the Portals WikiProject are to upgrade and maintain portals, including rescuing portals from deletion that can be improved to worthy portals. That's why we have an article alert service on the WikiProject page. Members of the WikiProject generally consider MfD appropriate for portals that are not savable, and prefer to collaborate to improve the rest. Please feel free to post on the WikiProject's talk pages portal problems that you come across, and you may be pleased by the response you get there. Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 04:19, 17 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- @The Transhumanist: I think portals are in a stage where we're trying to work out "notability" standards in a new situation. I initiated this nom in the belief that failing the required guidelines would mean certain deletion. I am neither a portal deletionist or inclusionist. My idea was that if a portal has been neglected, to the point of failing the required criteria, it's objective proof that neither the readers nor the maintainers care about the topic enough. It's in this way that I was trying to assess "notability".

But there is a flaw to this approximation: there are hardworking people who want to maintain the status of portals on WP (and there is nothing wrong with that). It's easy for them to step in and fix the nominal problem with the portal, which indeed happened here. But this fix is, in a way, artificial and does not touch the fundamental issue of "notability": neither readers nor the actual maintainers of this portal cared about it to lift a finger. Worse still, the problem is now hidden from view.

I'm trying to say that we need portal "notability" guidelines. But because portals aren't subject to the same logic as articles (enough has been written about the topic in RS to allow you to write an article about it), we need something different. The sine qua non of articles is coverage in RS, but what is the sine qua non of portals?

The portal people got to have their way in the big portal RfC. But hardly anyone thinks we can go on like business as usual. The number one problem with portals wasn't that they're hard to maintain. But that's the problem the portals project has tackled head-on (and thank you for that!). But we're missing the more fundamental problem: we still have little idea what the reader expects to see when they click on that portal link. An average of 2 people per day have been clicking on Portal:Cenozoic for the last 4 years. I think we can attribute this to sheer curiosity: hey what does this link do? But I find it hard to infer from this data that the portal served any useful purpose. The fundamental problem is: we don't even know what that purpose is ourselves. But it can hardly be that the readers discover broken sections no one has bothered to fix. Even less so, to actually fix those sections just for the sake of fixing them. I think, frankly, the portals project should not be so focused on the technical aspects but learn some lessons from the RfC, or else we're going to be at square one eventually. Sorry for the long off-topic post. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 09:24, 17 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Finnusertop That doesn't seem like a good justification for an MfD nomination, and smacks of WP:POINT. But I feel you on the RfC issue. I'm not sure notability is the main criterion for justifying a portal's existence. I believe scope is. For example, Lily Flagg is a notable cow. The topic is suitable for an article, but the subject just does not seem to have enough coverage on Wikipedia to warrant having a portal about this cow. So, it's not notability, but how much coverage there is on Wikipedia that should determine whether or not there should be a portal for it. Mathematics, on the other hand has tens of thousands of articles about it on Wikipedia. It, and many of its subtopics are obviously large enough to warrant having a portal to help explore that coverage.

By the way, traffic data doesn't help. The reason for having a page on Wikipedia is for it to be there when someone needs it. Wikipedia is a reservoir for knowledge. What goes into it is independent of how many people drink from the reservoir. How big the reservoir gets is dependent upon how much knowledge there is, not how many readers there are. How many people access a particular page in a particular period of time does not matter. This has been well established in Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions#Pageview stats, which identifies focus on page traffic as an example of a notability fallacy. Page views have never been an inclusion criterion for topics on Wikipedia, And until they are, they are an invalid reason to delete.

The purpose of portals is well known: they are to subjects as the Main page is to knowledge as a whole. In the RfC, the main complaint was that portals were poorly maintained (and therefore out of date). It was not about maintenance being hard, it was about maintenance not getting done. Portals were, and most of them still are, crappy unmaintained piles of something that looks like it came out of Lily Flagg the cow. And so we are trying to transform them into golden temples of knowledge. Or keeping to the portal metaphor, "doorways of discovery".

I hope these observations have been helpful. And thank you for withdrawing your nomination. Sincerely, — The Transhumanist 11:01, 17 June 2018 (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.