Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Sportsteam portals

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: delete . I am sympathetic to the argument(s) about Portal:New England Revolution, as well as the effort put in, but feel that the delete !votes present broad and convincing arguments for all four. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 01:23, 11 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Nashville Predators

A single team portal (one of many), typical of the problems associated with these. Some of the issues I list are fixable, the underlying problems aren't, making the fixes rather useless.

No interest in this portal; 34 pageviews in the last 90 days!
No care in making this portal: the default view has a "selected article" where the text shown is 90% identical to the introduction, ("The Nashville Predators are ..." etcetera, even though the actual link is to a different article; it then shows _COC_, which is wikitext markup which should be hidden here. This is an error in the target page, but that error was already there when this portal was created.
Other "selected articles" have the typical rather broad entries, a number of lists where the text displayed at the portal makes no sense in that context ("this is a list of..." when that is the only line displayed), yet another article which starts with the same text as the introduction, a season, then a third article starting with the same text, another list, ... Of the 12 "selected" articles, probably half should never have been shown as is.

Mind you, it is still better than

Portals don't need maintenance any more!

So I nominated that one as well. Yet another large group of problematic portals, yay! Fram (talk) 13:58, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Let's add the

Portal:Arizona Diamondbacks (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs): less than 1 pageview per day, only 1 image, the selected articles have in about 50% of the cases a redlinked file at the right, or they simply repeat the main article intro... Another portal which isn't serving our readers at all, but luckily they aren't interested in it either. Fram (talk) 14:08, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete all three, terrible portals. It is a bit sad because pro sports teams could be a wonderful topic to have portals about (click through the current roster could be fun), but to make good portals would require putting in some work and doing some maintenance at least every year or so. If portal creators can't be bothered to even check the selected articles for suitability, we shouldn't have to spend so much time debating them. —Kusma (t·c) 14:14, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Portal:New England Revolution, SportingFlyer is busy improving it. Delete the others. —Kusma (t·c) 18:48, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The other ones I've targeted to fix up as well, I just haven't had time yet. SportingFlyer T·C 21:02, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete all as poorly created. I happened across the Dallas Stars while searching for airline portals so am bundling it here. Barely 20 artices in the scope if you try real hard. Legacypac (talk) 14:31, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Neutral as written. This nomination was originally valid but is now a train wreck because it consists of teams in three different professional sports that have different degrees of popularity and different audiences in North America. In particular, the Diamondbacks, which are a baseball team, should be put on a lower-priority track for deletion, being one of the major sports in North America. Ice hockey is the fourth of the four major sports, but the two teams nominated are in the Southern United States and so outside of the hockey belt. Association football, while the most popular sport in the world, is the fifth of the four major sports in the United States, and has a comparable position in Canada. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:42, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
'Depete per nom, broken and unfinished portals. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 18:21, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Neutral. These are some of the worst portals in the namespace and are not useful in their current form. Commercial interests make it difficult to add more relevant images. However, rather than taking the trouble to screenshot each imperfect portal and upload it to Commons with an insulting title to ridicule hard-working colleagues, perhaps it would be more helpful to report such errors politely to the WikiProject responsible for improving portals. Certes (talk) 14:47, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- Oh, you mean the project which actively monitors these low maintenance portals and is seeking out and correcting errors? If you find it, please post a link to it. Meanwhile, with many easy to find errors still remaining in many portals, and easy to find duplicate portals not being touched by this supposedly active project, and so on and so on, I continue to nominate many deficient portals for deletion, and upload a few of the worst elements to Commons as evidence, as it is uncertain from one day to another how these portals will look (since even adding or removing one category from them may change their actual look). Fram (talk) 15:02, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - Though I'm not actively involved with portals these days, I do seek out and correct errors, and I'm not the only one. This afternoon I've been seeking and fixing the redlinks left lying around after the latest portal deletion spree. However, I can hardly blame the project for losing morale when picked on by a group of determined editors whose contribution to Wikipedia consists mainly of criticising other editors and deleting their work. Certes (talk) 15:31, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    - So the portal people didn't maintain (check and correct) these portals between, say, August 2018 and February 2019 because from then on some people would start deleting "their" work (most of the deleted and nominated portals are actually the work of one editor only)? And of course, we aren't really deleting any "work", no actual effort went into these portals (effort went into the tools to create them, but the actual portal creations were mindless, careless, button-pushing stuff). Fram (talk) 15:57, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep This is a copy-and-paste keep vote due to the large number of nominations stating I have reviewed the portal and believe it passes WP:POG. (Will try and update one of the portals right now.) SportingFlyer T·C 18:50, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I tried to fix the Revolution portal and couldn't. My assumption is it's broken due to some code issue - looks to me like there's a stray } in there which causes the slideshow not to work properly, since it occasionally works in preview mode. I did add photos to the Diamondbacks portal. These can be cleaned up, and they all clearly pass WP:POG. SportingFlyer T·C 19:24, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

SportingFlyer, "can be cleaned up" is correct for many TTH created portals. However, essentially it is not more work than restarting the portal from scratch. As we have thousands of these portals, fixing them all is going to require a dedicated effort by many people, and then maintenance is going to be required going forward (it has been demonstrated clearly that automated portals are not "zero maintenance", and require careful monitoring of the articles and navboxes they are based on). So "can be cleaned up" isn't quite enough for me -- would you be willing to maintain these portals or can you find someone who will? (As I said in my vote above, these could be viable portals, but not without someone putting in the work). —Kusma (t·c) 19:50, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Kusma: Having played around with these for 20 minutes, I'm not sure what needs to be done specifically to clean these up, apart from fixing the code issue I mentioned. Do they just need to be monitored? Keep in mind I wouldn't necessarily be against bulk deletion if portals have run their course, but as for now they pass WP:POG. SportingFlyer T·C 19:54, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

SportingFlyer, personally I support keeping almost all portals that have had some thought and work put into them, unless the topic is completely hopeless. The semiautomatic creations by TTH do not qualify for that. As a starting point, I think that an effective portal about a sports team is most likely going to be a bit different from a good portal about a country, or about a scientific discipline. Some creativity is going to be required for anything that is more than a clickthrough of a navbox that gives us loosely connected random articles that fail both as a semi-structured way of navigating the topic and as enticing teasers making you explore things you didn't know you were interested in. For sports portals, the current season standings should possibly be in the portal if possible (selective transclusion could do that I guess, or shared templates). Something like that will require an update whenever the "current season" changes. —Kusma (t·c) 20:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Kusma: That's fair and something to work towards. Let me see if I can do that for the Revolution. I also didn't realise these were bot-created in late 2018, that hadn't been mentioned and while it would change my vote in a majority of instances, I don't see a problem with expanding these particular portals - they would be something that I would expect to be recreated if we bulk deleted all of the Transhumanist articles. SportingFlyer T·C 20:23, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've updated the New England Revolution portal with the current season table and current roster. It's still broken sometimes and I don't know how to fix that. SportingFlyer T·C 20:35, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

When it works, this is a very nice step forward. Just sad that it doesn't work consistently. I asked at Module talk:Excerpt, maybe we can get some expert advice. Probably one of the articles involved does something that the module isn't escaping correctly. —Kusma (t·c) 08:01, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There's a way to fix it which I figured out yesterday, I just need a few days to implement since life'll get in the way. SportingFlyer T·C 21:48, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Never mind, fixed the Revolution portal. It should be fine for awhile. Though I can't figure out the colours generally :\ SportingFlyer T·C 22:01, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete all 4 a single, recently formed sports team does not meet the breadth-of-subject area requirement of the WP:POG guideline. UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:15, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all 4. Three of them — Portal:Dallas Stars, Portal:Arizona Diamondbacks and Portal:Nashville Predators — are just automated spam, created by the portalspammer @The Transhumanist. It is ridiculous that the community is forced to have lengthy discussions on even batched groups of this spam, when the portsalspammer created them in seconds simply by typing {{subst:quick portal}} (or a similar template).

I have checked each of the portals, and every one draws its article list solely from a single navbox. This makes each of these portals merely a fork of the navbox, with much less utility than the navbox because:

the navbox displays a full list of the articles, but the portal displays only one page at a time.
the navbox should be present on every page in the set. The portal always requires navigation to a separate page.

The topic's main page works much better as a navigational hub, because it includes:

both the topic navbox and any related navboxes
A full summary of the topic rather than an excerpt of the lede.

The 4th one, Portal:New England Revolution is handmade but still useless. It offers nothing that isn't on the head article, but which is a much better navigational hub.

As noted above, readers simply don't use these portals. The total (not per-day) viewing figures for the firts three months of 2019 are uniformly absymal:

Per WP:POG, portals should be about broad-scope topics. And yet again, the evidence is very clear that readers do not want these narrow-scope portals. -BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:01, 10 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.