Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 162

• Oppose deletion of portal space, working for active portals Germany and Opera. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:15, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Those, Gerda Arendt, are third tier portals, in the top 10-100, that I consider of unclear merit. What do these portals do for readers? Either of them, for any reader? Any evidence or anecdote? —SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:22, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
    • What I know is that both a Featured portals, well maintained, and with significant pageview numbers. Different offers mean different things to different readers. Individual "evidence" or "anecdote" wouldn't mean much to me. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:36, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
      • I don’t think “featured portal” means anything, not with “portal” itself being undefined. I put it to you that both are inferior to the parent articles by every measure, and they they are just playthings of editors. As playthings of editors, they belong in their WikiProjects, not tricking readers who think portals are for navigating. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:58, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose deletion of portal space. In a way, this is a solution looking for a problem. The whole issue over portals just creates work - even just discussing it - which could better be used for improving and policing the quality of mainspace articles , combating vandalism, and deleting inappropriate articles. Existing portals do not do any harm, neither is it a case of server capacity. Time to put this whole business to bed. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:16, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Section break 2

• Support (deletion of portal namespace after moving a few pages to other namespaces). The costs of portals (luring some readers to poor pages, editor time spent creating/updating/discussing them, extra complexity added to Wp etc) outweighs any benefit they provide - of the OP's 4 points about the purpose of a portal the first 3 are what the corresponding article does (generally better than a portal) and the 4th is what the corresponding wikiproject should do. DexDor ^(talk) 11:57, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support - I like portals, but let's go to some points that demonstrate the death of the portals.

#1 Wikiprojects have abandoned the portals, several portals of active wikiprojects have been deleted without any objection from wikiprojects, while other portals are abandoned even with active wikiprojects.

#2 There is no relationship between pageviews and the quality of portals, or pageviews and the amount of backlinks to portals.

#3 In over a decade of namespace no solid guideline has been created, no logical organization, and not even portals have been correctly categorized.Guilherme Burn (talk) 12:03, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose: There is no other suitable namespace for well-maintained portals such as
  FPs
  13:24, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

  Adam Cuerden, well, back before 2005, all portals were subpages of Wikipedia:Wikiportal, see User:Portal namespace initialisation script and its contributions. —Kusma (t·c) 14:11, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

  • @
    FPs
    17:38, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

    Adam Cuerden, indeed. Portals do very little harm (even if they have little use), and deleting them is a great way to show editors that their hard work is not appreciated. So I don't understand why it is so popular. —Kusma (t·c) 19:34, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Deletion of abandoned junk portals is popular because most editors can see luring readers to sets of abandoned, outdated, unscrutinised content forks surrounded by fake or stale DYKs plus stale news labelled as if it was current is a waste of the time of our readers, and a blot on Wikipedia's hard-won reputation. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:37, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose There are very valid and good reasons to use Portals for broad topics, but from this mass creation incident, which created portals on a number of very narrow topics, we really need to have a process to approve the creation of new portals in the future, so that only those deemed sufficiently broad and appropriate are in play. --Masem (t) 13:40, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

  Masem, currently the question is more how to keep and improve portals on broad topics... Portal:Culture is at MFD right now (obviously a super broad topic), and from past experience I can tell you that fixing issues with portals during MFD is frowned upon (some people have been accused of "bad faith drive-by updating" or similar), so I won't touch it for my own sanity. We don't just need rules that justify deletion or harm creation, we also need some rules against deletion. —Kusma (t·c) 14:09, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose - Not this again.... not all portals are in the same boat here, doing this would go around consensus on AfDs that were kept. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:41, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose as written (and note that Bermicourt who originated this section is the creator of many portal, and many of those were deleted, and may be voicing their understandable frustration with the whole process here). There are numerous problems with portal space, the main is that there is no agreement what it is for and what any particular portal should do. In the past, this has meant that many portals got created, and having portals about major topics (like every country on Earth) was considered normal. In the last year, the old style guideline page
  WP:POG has been re-interpreted as a policy page that explains what portals should be like, and a particular interpretation of that page (I understand it as "portals must be about a wide topic including quality articles, must be maintained regularly, and have a nontrivial amount of pageviews") has become a popular deletion reason. Well, the only portals that get a significant amount of pageviews are those linked from the Main Page, so if pageviews are deemed important, all portals are doomed, even the well-maintained ones. In the current atmosphere, maintaining portals isn't a lot of fun, as you never know whether your portal will be nominated for deletion based on low page views soon, so people are stopping to do it, a self-reinforcing vicious circle very much against the spirit of Wikipedia to fix problems instead of deleting everything that is not perfect. In any case, if there is consensus that portals shouldn't be shown to readers, simply removing all portal links from mainspace would do the trick, and would allow the maintained portals to continue existing as tools and showcases for editors, linked only from talk pages and Wikipedia space. There is little need to delete old meta pages, even if they are useless, unless they are actively harmful, and I think the dangers of portal space have been rather exaggerated. In any case, anyone who opposes the deletion of all portals at once should show up at MfD every now and then to avoid deletion of all portals one by one. —Kusma (t·c
  ) 13:44, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• @Kusma: any editor is welcome to participate in any XFD. But you are blatantly AGFing that the deletion of abandoned junk portals has an ulterior motive, and I hope you will retract that. You seem to be trying to votestack by recruiting editors with a particular POV, which is highly disruptive conduct. I hope that you will amend your comment to remind editors that !votes should weigh policy and guideline against the evidence of the nature of the portal under discussion. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:44, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

  BrownHairedGirl, you'll have to help me out and explain to me which ulterior motive I am ascribing and to whom so I know which statement you would like me to retract. As for policy-based voting in portal MfDs, well, in my view, we simply do not have any robust policies that are specifically about portals, which is part of the reason the whole process is so frustrating. You may disagree with that, just like I disagree with your description of my comment as being "highly disruptive conduct", which is a completely unnecessary personal attack. —Kusma (t·c) 19:43, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• @

  WP:POG

  , which has been accepted as the framework for about 800 MFDs now. I am surprised that you missed that.

WP:VOTESTACKING

is highly disruptive conduct. Do I need to explain why? If you don't like being criticised for it, then don't do it.

The ulterior motive you are ascribing is to editors who nominate quality portals at MFD. You are presupposing that their aim is to use MFD to one-by-one delete all portals, rather than the stated reason of poor quality of individual portals.

I have no objection to any deleted portal being moved to

WP:REFUNDed to project space, and I have never seen any objection to it. I think that in nearly every case a set of a dozen decade-old content forks is thoroughly useless to editors .. but if someone wants to memorialise them, I don't see it doing any harm so long as they stay firmly in project space. Most of them contain woefully outdated text, which is not checked for errors, and it does harm readers and Wikipedia to continue to lure readers to such junk. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs

) 20:32, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

WP:POG was not written to be a guideline about which portals to keep and which to delete, but as a guide how to write a portal (originally as a Manual of Style page for portals). I agree that a rough consensus has emerged at MFD that is that portals need to be about a broad subject, be maintained (but what exactly that means isn't clear), and should have some readers. But I disagree that this is what any written guidelines say, and have tried to update the guidelines to reflect the MFD results. On the whole, portals are probably not worth the amount of debate that we have about them, and I wouldn't be terribly sad if we end up merging them all with a relevant wikiproject, as long as we can keep on linking to them from the talk page banners, if that finally results in peace on this front. —Kusma (t·c

) 21:15, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• Comment - This is going to need its own page again if we are discussing the matter again as it will impact the whole community. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:13, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Don’t overstate the situation - the reality is that the vast majority of editors do not give a flying flamingo about portals, one way or the other. Indeed most editors probably don’t even know what a portal is. Whether we keep some or delete them all, the decision will impact a very small part of the community. Blueboar (talk) 15:02, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

This isn't true per the long and lengthy discussion we had last time. This needs to be advertised as a major thing as portals are linked on hundreds of thousands of pages. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:15, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

I agree with Knowledgekid, and if it may result in the removal of a namespace or 90% of its pages then we should really advertise it more widely. Certes (talk) 15:05, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose total deletion; we should keep some small number of portals for our broadest and most vital topics. bd2412 T 14:47, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose. Portals provide a place to collate articles, topics,and items of concern that might be highly useful to whatever subset of editors might be useful for editing that topic. For editors interested in a a specific country or locality, we have portals like  Caribbean portal,  Italy portal,  Tuvalu portal,  United States portal,  Tokyo portal. for editors interested in highly relevant topics in, e.g., the natural world, we have portals like  Ecology portal,  Environment portal,  Biology portal,  Water portal, etc. do we need to get rid of them? really? how are they any less helpful than the WikiProjects for those topics? I actually find Portals much more helpful than Wikiprojects, as a centralized place for viewing current articles, topics etc, relating to a particular topic. --Sm8900 (talk) 16:42, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Wikiprojects and Portals are two very different things; the former is editor-facing, designed to aid collaboration and organization; the latter is (ostensibly) a reader-facing system. The problem is that few internet users use portals in general (we are very much in a post-Google world) and the question becomes one of how much they are "worth" versus how much they "cost". Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 17:15, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose. Deleting portals is not improving the wiki. Benjamin (talk) 17:21, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose complete deletion of portals. I would be prepared to support getting rid of most of the ones we have currently, but I think we should keep some:

• Very high level topics, such as the portals linked on the main page and some others.
• Portals which don't correspond to articles, such as
  Portal:Featured content, Portal:Current events
  .
• I think there is also a role for portals as showcases for collections of very high quality content, e.g. Portal:Battleships. We don't have anything else which shows them off in quite the same way.

The average portal though is little used and doesn't serve a useful purpose. People simply don't look at them. Hut 8.5 18:04, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• Question - What is the difference between categorization and portals? What do portals do that isn’t done by cats? Blueboar (talk) 19:53, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
  • @
    FPs
    20:23, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Re "links to a curated set of high-quality articles ... around a topic" - the vast majority of portals have come nowhere near that aspiration. The reality is usually that the portal creator (without any discussion or explanation) picks a few articles (sometimes just one article, sometimes low quality articles, sometimes off-topic articles) and then no-one else ever expands/updates/corrects the set (except, in some cases when an article is deleted). "putting them in context and previewing them" is hardly an accurate description either. DexDor ^(talk) 21:07, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

DexDor, let us just assume Adam Cuerden is talking about Portal:Opera, which is one of the best portals we have, and about one of the topics most suitable for being shown in portal style, a really impressive work. —Kusma (t·c) 21:23, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

@

FPs

00:02, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

So I've had a look at Portal:Opera and still don't see how claims like "putting [articles] in context" can be supported.  That portal shows a list of "Stubs needing expansion" that has not been updated for over 10 years; either editors are not expanding those stubs or not updating the list. Now, I wouldn't argue that that means that Portal:Opera (in isolation) should be deleted, but it does demonstrate how even "good" portals are more about show than about actually being used. DexDor ^(talk) 06:08, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Oops. Struck per comment below. DexDor ^(talk) 16:15, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

DexDor, the list of "Stubs needing expansion" on Portal:Opera does not require updating. The links are to categories which are updated immediately when a stub tag is added or removed from an article. They do not link to manually compiled lists. In fact, none of the tasks listed in "Things you can do" require manual maintenance. The only manual maintenance we do is adding new FAs, FPs, GAs, and DYKs when they reach that status. Voceditenore (talk) 14:53, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

I also took a look at Portal:Opera, and I also strongly disagree with Adam Cuerden. It's not broken and not full of redlinks, and has a few more articles than most of the bad portals, but that's about it.

As to it being an excellent example of what Featured portals, and thus all portals, tried to be ... heaven help us.

Take a look at WP:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Opera. That's a round of morale boosting in a pub chat, not assessment. There is no structured checking of listed points of evaluation, no measurable criteria, nothing. Just some discussion of the length of excerpts, and lots of air-kissing like "great and lovely portal" and "well built and beautiful portal".

As to "putting [articles] in context", that's nonsense. It just shows lead excerpts one at time, with no indication of why they were chosen, and not even a visible list of other titles. The purge-page-for-new-random-selection thing is such an extreme usability fail that it would laughable if it wasn't for the fact that some editors think this is an acceptable way of presenting a list. Sure, that's the std structure portal, but bluntly, it's a completely crap structure which has persisted only because portals were long ago abandoned by most editors, becoming the playground of a small set of editors who adopted uncritical groupthink, and who resent outsiders who try to inject some reality.

So it's wholly unsurprising that the portal got only 24 daily pageviews in the first half of 2019, while the head article averaged 1,438. Reader's don't waste their time on pages like that, which in practice exist only as hobby pages for a few editors. The head article does a vastly better job of navigation and showcasing.

As to the overwriting of formerly good portals with automatically created ones, the last such automation of a pre-existing portal was reverted in May. Many editors were involved, and I personally used a set of tools to identify and eliminate every last such automation. On reversion, it was clear why they had been automated: most of them were abandoned junk, and huge numbers were subsequently deleted. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:33, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

Just a note about a couple of assertions made above:

1. Concerning the Featured Portal candidate process, i.e. There is no structured checking of listed points of evaluation, no measurable criteria, nothing. The participants in the Portal:Opera discussion were measuring the portal against Wikipedia:Featured portal criteria. If they found any aspect which did not match those criteria, they mentioned it in the discussion. If not, they did not. I suppose they could have explicitly added "Meets all the Featured portal criteria", but that was implicit in the discussion

2. Concerning Portal:Opera having not even a visible list of other titles. At the bottom of each section on the left-hand side is a link More X which takes the reader to the complete list of articles, pictures, sounds, etc. in that section. For example, More featured pictures takes you to the complete list of pictures included in the portal which states at the top the criteria for inclusion. More selected articles takes the reader to the complete list of selected articles, which again states the criteria for selection at the top.

Voceditenore (talk) 06:00, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

There's a good point about what would attract a reader to visit a portal. The quality of one isolated portal isn't a draw for an initial visit, because the reader doesn't know its quality beforehand (although it will influence revisits). The collective quality of portals, however, will affect whether or not readers will choose to follow a link to a portal, since they will extrapolate from their past experiences with other portals. Wikipedia would be a lot less successful, for instance, if nearly all of its articles were stubs. So although there is no deadline to improve any page, there is a practical consideration in trying to establish a baseline median level of quality that is sufficiently high to attract readers to visit other portals. isaacl (talk) 16:29, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

P.S. Blueboar might like to also consider pages such as

Index of United States-related articles which are more of a fork of categorization (and, incidentally, were often created by the same editors who created portals). DexDor ^(talk)

21:15, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose. Portals are the best venue for active WikiProjects to display their work as a project. My experience with Portal:Opera with WP:WikiProject Opera is that it is a space that builds camaraderie, community, inspiration, and motivation (especially in generating better and more content) within our particular group. The encyclopedia benefits from portals, and I can see no value in deleting them.4meter4 (talk) 21:27, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Where the purpose is for displaying WikiProject work, they should be located as a WikiProject subpage. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:29, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
    • @SmokeyJoe:, with respect, I disagree with suggestion above. there is no logic to taking something that is considered valid in its own right, and then moving it to a valid namespace that is less visible, simply because one considers it less important. Sm8900 (talk) 13:11, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
      • Sm8900, Portals currently have no validity. They fail their ostensible purpose as a navigation aid. You may consider them as useful for browsing, but browsing is not navigation. Portals do not serve readers, either in theory of service, or facts of pageviews. So, are they worthless? No, they are negative, because for the few readers sucked in, they are presented with unsourced NPOV violating presentations of what editors think is important. To the extent that portals showcase WikiProject work, plausible but dubious as both are mostly inactive, they belong in not reader facing projectspace pages. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:19, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

• Support deleting portal space which actually isn't the same thing as deleting all portals. It doesn't need a separate namespace. I support deleting almost all portals, too, along the lines of SmokeyJoe's proposal above. – Levivich 01:18, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support Over 850 portals (over 50% of the pre-TTH spam portals) have already been deleted for being abandoned failures of
  WP:POG
  . My experience at hundreds of portal MfD's that closed as delete is that nearly all portals are abandoned relics of past editors' momentary enthusiasm, and that there is 15 years of hard evidence that by any sane metric, the Portals Project has been a complete disaster. Very few portals have even a single maintainer (and POG requires multiple maintainers), let alone large numbers of readers, at least 20 articles, or WikiProject involvement. Why force editors to waste their time going through the rest one by one when it's clear as day that portals are a failed solution in search of a problem?

Head articles, with vastly higher readership and quality then their associated portals, and their very common rich and versatile navboxes are all we need on Wikipedia. It's time to end this farce, and the disgrace that a brilliant editor like @BrownHairedGirl has spent over a thousand hours cleaning up the sewage in Portal space only to realize that there is no bottom to the barrel. This is just what Portal space is. I don't oppose the top 10 portals being moved elsewhere, but the rest of Portal space should be deleted. Newshunter12 (talk) 21:03, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

WP:IWORKEDSOHARD is not only not a valid reason to keep articles, it is also not a valid reason to delete entire namespaces.
Portals duplicate some functions of some other navigational aids, and duplicate some functions of WikiProjects. Their viewership is fairly low, just like the number of pageviews of many other navigational pages (outlines, categories) or of Wikiprojects is low. That is not necessarily a problem, as long as the viewers that are there get something good.
And there is one other aspect: It is a disgrace how brilliant editors like, say, User:Juliancolton are treated with disrespect just because they have created a portal in the past and no longer update it. —Kusma (t·c

) 13:02, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

@

WP:POG

's clear lead since 2006: "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create". The editor in question then refused to accept personal reasonability for their own reckless actions and deserved any criticism they got.

Portal:Opera isn't complete crud, but as described by @BrownHairedGirl above, it's terribly structured and has low page views. At best, it's a not yet abandoned hobby page and a time suck for readers lured there who would be much better served by the head article, not some glorious contribution to the encyclopedia that merits keeping all junk portals so this one can have pals. Given the stark facts about Portal space, it's not unreasonable to mention that no more of the clean-up-crews time should be wasted to please the whims of a few portal fans who don't care about reality. I'll say it again: There is 15 years of hard evidence that Portal space is a complete disaster by any sane metric, and is a failed solution in search of a problem. Newshunter12 (talk) 21:09, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose The original proposal starts from a somewhat holier-than-thou perspective that the existence of portals is objectionable and that they must be eradicated because "editors who see no value in portals" have to keep putting them up for deletion. What one person finds useless, others may find highly useful and a wholesale deletion for the convenience of a few who find them troubling seems unwarranted. The enthusiastic drive for an automated process of portal creation some months back certainly led to creation of a crop of portals that were of narrow interest and of, possibly, minor value; however, that does not invalidate a portal's value as a jumping-off point for users interested in a topic to find other articles in the same subject area. A good portal, such as Portal:Opera or Portal:London transport, gives a curated collection of information that is not otherwise easily accessed. Suggestions that a portal's daily pageviews is an indication of their value is risible; to assume that something that is little read is of no value is flawed. On that basis, substantial parts of Wikipedia could be deleted including large numbers of featured and good articles. Should we then start deleting obscure featured articles such as Wage reform in the Soviet Union, 1956–1962 (37 page views per day), 1860 Boden Professor of Sanskrit election (18 page views per day) or The Boat Race 1993 (12 page views per day).--DavidCane (talk) 14:38, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose. My views on this have not changed since the
  2018 RFC that proposed the exact same thing, so I will simply rework what I said there for the purposes of this RFC: Oppose wholesale removal entire portal system and favor (continued) case-by-case review. If a particular portal sucks, improve it or get rid of it, using existing procedures (including proper notice on the portal's talk page). If a portal is well constructed, leave it alone (or improve it further, like anything else). As with the 2018 RFC, most portals seem not to have been notified of their impending demise until 2 days into this discussion. Full disclosure: I have worked on Portal:Mathematics content quite a bit in the past, and continue to monitor it today, which is how I came to find out about this RFC today (thanks to Voceditenore). - dcljr (talk
  ) 00:29, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

I was pretty astounded that such a wide-ranging proposal to delete an entire project space and its contents was not even alerted to the principal stake-holders by the proposer:

1. Wikipedians at large (no RfC notice—it was added 3 days later by another editor, was subsequently removed by a different editor with the rationale remove RFC tag. per WP:RFC, and RF should be opens with "a brief, neutral statement of or question about the issue". This one open with a partisan diatribe. It has subsequently been re-added by yet another editor on the basis that it begins with a neutral statement and time stamp. All of which begs the question: If this is not an official RfC, what is the purpose or force of this discussion?)

2. WikiProject Portals (added the next day by another editor)

3. Affected portals (Yesterday, I notified the talk pages of most Portals with a designated maintainer)

4. Associated WikiProjects (Today, I notified the active WikiProjects who had bannered the above portals. If there were multiple projects, I notified only the most relevant one.)

I found out about this discussion only via an early notice at WikiProject Opera by one of our members. Most editors who concentrate on content do not keep pages like the Village Pump on watch. Plus, there are so many edits to this page for multiple proposals, that this proposal is easy to miss. Voceditenore (talk) 10:46, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

• Support namespace decrepitation deprecation for the 3rd time in 3 years (move content portals to main namespace) Do not support deletion at the deletion board by a few editor's (have been vocal about this fact but to no avail). Also would be best if the portal project - if any left after this talk - is not dominated by those in favor of deletion as this has proven detrimental to any moment forward on anything related to portal improvements, guideline improvements. etc.--Moxy 🍁 00:39, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Moxy, did you mean deprecation? Voceditenore (talk) 10:51, 23 September 2019 (UTC)</nowiki>

Yes thank you--Moxy 🍁 11:30, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

One could make the argument that decrepitation of the Portal namespace has been ongoing for years... rdfox 76 (talk) 13:32, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Section break 4

• Strong Oppose because of logical fallacy (
  Portal:Featured content). It is quite clear from many examples raised above (Portal:United States, Portal:Opera amongst others) that many portals are not in the same group as the now-deleted mass-created portals. Furthermore, it assumes a linear rate of deletion with complete disregard on the quality of the "surviving" portals until none is left. Proposal doesn't consider the diminishing returns of poor-quality portals being listed on XfDs, which will eventually leave high-quality portals remaining. OhanaUnited^{Talk page}
  00:51, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@

WP:POG. This RfC was started by a portal fan, so they didn't create the best starting rational, but please see past that to the bigger picture. That a few portals like Portal:Opera still have fans is inconsequential. That hobby-portal, with a terribly inefficient page structure and low number of views, could be moved to project space with virtually no changes, so it should not be used as an excuse to keep all portals. As a group, portal viewing rates have been going down sharply for years (perhaps @BrownHairedGirl could give us some hard data on that). All the hard data points to Portals being a disaster on Wikipedia from the start, so please reconsider your vote and help end this problem and enormous time suck once and for all. Newshunter12 (talk

) 04:28, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@OhanaUnited: There is no logical fallacy, because the pageview statistics are being used at MfD, and NO subject-area portal meets the pageview requirements that are being imposed in the MfD discussions. Even quality portals such as Portal:Antarctica were deleted on the pageview basis, and Portal:United States and Portal:Opera will surely follow. Unless of course editors who believe otherwise could bring themselves to contribute to the MfD discussions. But so far, nothing. UnitedStatesian (talk) 04:39, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@OhanaUnited @UnitedStatesian That's not true and you know it, UnitedStatesian. As Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Antarctica clearly shows, that portal had been abandoned for over a decade and was in abysmal shape until nearly a week into the MfD, in under 40 minutes you slapped together some automated add-ons and put them in the portal, claiming all is well now. The closer rightly ignored your disruption and games. Please stop trying deceive editors with know falsehoods, and while we're on that topic, please stop trying to stack votes at MfD. Newshunter12 (talk) 04:57, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@

WP:ATD. UnitedStatesian (talk

) 05:10, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@UnitedStatesian I clearly didn't imply "all is well" was a direct quote and portals need ongoing maintenance, which that portal lacked for over a decade, not one-off updates at MfD. No, off the top of my head, I don't have a portal in mind because all of the hundreds I have examined at MfD have been generally all around crud, even top 45 in views portals like Portal:Death. However well intentioned, portals are a failed enterprise on Wikipedia (and on the web, writ large), and should be done away with. That Portal space has failed for 15 years is not the fault of the present informal clean-up crew, and if editors like you could finally let go of portals, it would make Wikipeida a better place and save us all a considerable amount of time. Readers read articles, not portals. Newshunter12 (talk) 05:43, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

But unfortunately it is not just me that needs to let go (if it were I would do so in an instant). This RfC so far makes clear we will be stuck with portals for a while longer, maybe forever (though I find one of many ironies that so many editors who here oppose deletion of the portalspace - not all, of course, but many - apparently do not want to make any contributions to it: that's Wikipedia for you). As long as that is the case, the portalspace should be the best it can possibly be, which is why I continue to make edits (a LOT of edits) to some of the portals that remain. It's also why I have nominated a LOT of the narrow-subject portals for deletion, and will continue to do so. Neither of these efforts are a waste of my time. Let's say I agree with you, that portals "should be done away with" (note: I have not yet opposed this proposal). What should I then do, given that the community clearly feels differently? Is it a waste of time for someone to continue pursuing an all-portal deletion effort if that end state has been rejected by community consensus? UnitedStatesian (talk) 06:21, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

@UnitedStatesian Interesting points. I agree that it is a great irony that so many oppose voters don't contribute to Portal space writ large. The sad reality is that unless this RfC eliminates Portal space, the one by one cleanup effort will continue. We've clashed at times, but you seem like an over-all reasonable, rational person. All the hard data shows portals have failed, and observation shows that those who want to keep portals both don't understand that failure and don't care enough to maintain portals writ large. I honestly think that a one by one evaluation of all remaining portals will show that very few portals meet reasonable maintenance, readership, WikiProject/editor involvement, efficient page design and broadness expectations.

Portals are not unlike how the Articles of Confederation were in the U.S. It didn't work and there was no system to replace it, so they just drafted the Constitution anyway. Our RfC system for dealing with this issue hasn't been working, but deleting junk portals one by one is. The vast majority of portals were abandoned years ago or have almost no views, and portals have a small and declining viewership. I think it would be wiser if you stopped trying to maintain portals and just focused on the cleanup effort, which is where long-term on the ground reality is. Once portal space is in all likelihood down to only a small number of pages, it won't be able to hide from its fate anymore.

It's not so much that I feel that I have been wasting my time, but that this by-the-book one at a time is so tedious for all of us when no one besides MfD regulars (you, me, etc) truly cares (through actions) about Portal space at large. Interest in even a single portal is rare, and you alone are carrying a huge amount of water in a desert of portal-abandonment. Why not just help vacuum that sand up and see what's really left at the end when you're not holding it together? After all, if portal space ultimately = your work and 20-30 other active pages of reasonable quality and above 20 views per day, why keep polishing the whole room? Newshunter12 (talk) 08:22, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

WP:VOLUNTARY you are not being compelled to work on portals. All the best: Rich Farmbrough

, 20:18, 18 October 2019 (UTC).

Also the advocates against portals are frequently sighting poor page view count as a justification for deleting portals or atleast for proving that they are useless. The spirit of wikipedia is against the valuation of any item based on view count. If we go by that route, we will definitely bring in bias towards "popular" topics and items. A specialized portal may be useful to a handful of readers who come to wikipedia to explore within a specific topic area and these group of readers would often produce editors who are willing and able to contribute in that specialized area. Thus Portals can play a significant role in attracting readers and nurturing potential contributors in focused subject areas. Although limited in number such readers and contributors are valuable for wikipedia. [N.B: I posted a similar comment earlier apparently on a wrong thread which now seems to have been closed.] Arman ^(Talk) 06:50, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

• Mild dislike - I believe there may be some value in some of the portals, even though I barely ever use or maintain any of them. There seems to be an organised process under way to remove the least-value portals at a rate where this proposal might be worth revisiting in 6-9 months. As an Australian editor, I'd support removing all of the Australian state/city portals, but maybe we can make the top-level Australia one worth soemthing. If we try and fail, then this proposal might be worth revisiting. --Scott Davis ^Talk 12:44, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose While the overwelming majority of portals are basically useless there are a few that offer some value. Deleting the whole namespace is the wrong way of handling it. --Trialpears (talk) 13:38, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support - delete Portals. I do not find them useful, when compared to the Navbars and even to the Categories. Rowan Forest (talk) 15:02, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose Since
  WP:NOTPAPER it's better to just keep them. --Janke | Talk
  19:50, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose they carry a piece of Wikipedias history, they should just be marked as historical and retained. Portals were seen as a way to bring people into specific areas of Wikipedia, some worked and still continue to do so, others didn't. As a concept it was something the community tried, it's potential to further develop as a concept is there especially as more topic specific affiliates are being created. There is no reason to delete our history
• Support: I find portals generally redundant and not very useful, plus the support for their creation and maintenance is too low to merit existence anymore. Concentrating editor content efforts into article space benefits Wikipedia as a whole. One good article is better than an okay article and a mediocre portal on the same topic. Some way of archival may be preferable to an outright deletion that loses the history. — MarkH21 (talk) 11:23, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support superseding portal namespace, but oppose deleting every single portal. On the one hand, some portals, such as Portal:Current events would work better under a subpage of Wikipedia:WikiProject Current events since it's among the most-viewed portals. On the other hand, though, I honestly don't see how portals really benefit anyone. They may have been interesting in 1995, but today the power of logistic-based search engines significantly undercuts their purpose. I also don't understand what historical purpose they would provide, if at all. ToThAc (talk) 22:29, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
• This proposal is not clear. "Deleting the namespace" would just mean that all pages, existing or deleted, are moved to another namespace. Because of how MediaWiki works, you'd need to decide a new prefix to which to move all the pages (Wikipedia:Contents/?), otherwise they'll end up in main namespace. The effect of an unclear alarmist proposal is only that we waste a lot of time discussing something which won't happen, while possibly disrupting the ordinate work happening on portals. Nemo 05:32, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

• Comment An RfC has just
  guidelines" have been cited in 878 Portal MfDs (including one which deleted 1390 portals). This clarification finally removes the cornerstone of the argument for removing portals and their namespace. Certes (talk
  ) 09:30, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
  • Nonsense. The page was a proposed guideline that never gained consensus, and therefore is a {{
    failed}} guideline. It is sneakily mistagged, a fake guideline, providing a fake foundation of the following uncontrolled creation of ill-considered portals. The many MfDs poked ridicule at the worst of the portals by pointing out that they didn’t even meet the very loose guidance of the fake guideline. To move forward from here, we need an agreement in the purpose of a portal. —SmokeyJoe (talk
    ) 10:56, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

• Comment - At a time when discussing the abandonment of portals, we should also discuss whether their privileged position on the main page is deserved, see Talk:Main Page#General discussion.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:39, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
• I'd keep the most important ones like the main page and current events. Possibly a solution would be to restrict the ability to create them to new page reviewers (meaning they can be created through AFC) and template editors but given it appears many have been created by experienced users this would probably cause more problems than it would solve. I think the point is though that they shouldn't be mass created (unlike articles) and things like
  WP:OUTDATED don't apply as much with portals. Crouch, Swale (talk
  ) 14:08, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

• Mostly support deletion, keep a few exceptions; keep the 3 exceptions mentioned by others (e.g. Featured Content) + the 8 broad topic portals linked on the main page. Note that this proposal is offered by a fan of Portals and seems to be some sort of rallying cry to confirm that the community still likes Portals? But that's not the same as liking abandoned, unused portals with 20 views a month. So even if this proposal "fails" (as nominator intends), that's hardly a sign that recent Portal MFDs were "wrong." It is probably mostly harmless if a few subject-specific portals are maintained as hobby projects, but all the other portals are an insidious honey trap - they offer some "work" for volunteers to do that seems cool, but is actually of almost no relevance whatsoever, because the sad truth is that readers hardly ever visit Portals. A little-used encyclopedia article is fine; a little-used meta navigational aid, however, is useless. SnowFire (talk) 17:05, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose: some portals are worth keeping and these should be continued to be housed in the Portal namespace. This seems like just a second RfC on whether to delete all portals, which we've already got consensus against doing, and I don't see that changing. A more useful RfC might be to speedily delete, say, all portals with <100 pageviews per month, but I doubt that would get consensus, and quite frankly though it's not a great situation, I don't see anything better than the status quo of slowly MfDing off the portals which are not useful. — Bilorv (talk) 22:22, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support - Portals are not useful. Delete them. Kaldari (talk) 18:59, 27 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support with a few exceptions as detailed a few sections up. I know some people are very passionate about this, but the fact is most portals simply aren't maintained in a way that is actually useful to the reader, the people that all this is supposed to be for. That so many of them have been successfully deleted in recent months is in fact relevant as it goes right to this point.
  talk
  ) 04:29, 28 September 2019 (UTC)
• oppose I think they have a lot of potential and some are quite good. I'd rather see them raised in stature than deleted. Hobit (talk) 17:27, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose some users, perhaps many or even most users, do not find portals useful. But we are not in the habit of deleting content simply because most people don't use it. Now that we are satisfactorily dealing with the portal spam issues, it seems like it is time for those who are heavily interested to invest their energies in improving the current contents of portalspace.
  Lepricavark (talk
  ) 04:30, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support per Beeblebrox. Organize the organized organization to organize ... ENOUGH — Ched (talk) 12:00, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose full deletion, support deprecation and thinning, basically on the lines of BrownHairedGirl; we should definitely keep the eight broad topics, the current events portal, and there are some portal concepts that, with decent curation and active WikiProjects, might be worth saving (like, maybe, Portal:Music, Portal:Military history, Portal:Sports), but a lot of the portals we currently have are are too specific and their lack of readership or curation shows. Sceptre (talk) 14:21, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support deleting all non-major portals and deprecation of the Portal: namespace - at this point the Portal: namespace is a sinking ship (Rschen7754 points out the downward spiral perfectly). We should scrap the Portal: namespace and move all the portal pages worth keeping to the Special: space - moving those portals there seems to make the most sense to me. I opposed its deletion about a year ago - but I now see the problem has only gotten worse. Kirbanzo ^{(userpage - talk - contribs)} 14:42, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

  "Special" is a virtual namespace: it is used as a common prefix for pages that are created on demand. isaacl (talk) 16:47, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

• Comment: Can an admin or other users go around tagging portals, like last time? Kirbanzo ^{(userpage - talk - contribs)} 14:42, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
  • No, please. We don't need yet another circus like last time. There is no need to advertise a vague proposal which may or may not affect the individual page. (See my comment "This proposal is not clear" above.) Nemo 11:23, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

    As you say above, we need to be clear about what would happen to portals if the namespace were removed. If any variant of the proposal would result in bulk deletion then we need to advertise it on all portals. If the intention is to unlink them all then we should probably notify interested editors too. If it's just a technical change to store portals elsewhere and retain the links, that's less disruptive, but I don't see its advantages. Certes (talk) 12:32, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose Portals are inherently useful in looking into a topic, in ways that categories or navboxes might technically not cover, and are the most reader-friendly way of looking into a topic, far better than categories, books, navboxes, or anything similar. Low readership is due to difficulties accessing on mobile view and the Wikipedia app, the fact that portals are so low down in the article, and poor use among articles - readers are not as familiar with this tool as they should be, and it's just decreasing as important portal subjects are being deleted. ɱ (talk) 00:04, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose the deletion of portal space (again). I believe that portals still serve a useful function on Wikipedia, and should be retained. Tools and processes for managing the namespace continue to be developed, and once the deletions have run their course (and we can agree on proper guidelines), work can resume on improving and fixing the namespace. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 04:08, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose in general and particularly as written. Portals were never meant to be simply navigation tools. They were and are principally meant, like the Main Page, to showcase the best that Wikipedia has to offer in that subject via the "Selected article", "Selected biography" "Featured picture" sections (all of which should contain only items of FP, FA, or GA status). They are also meant to pique the reader's interest into some of the lesser-known byways of the subject via the "Selected anniversaries" and "Did you know?" sections, and a properly contextualised "Featured picture" section. However, the well-constructed ones (ones that achieved Featured Portal status under the now-discontinued system) have as key components a section with links to the principal topics of the portal's subject and a well-constructed category tree which makes browsing the subject's categories much more efficient. Are there many abandoned and very poor quality portals? Without a doubt. They probably should be taken to MfD. Having said that, there are hundreds of articles which haven't been touched by a human hand for nearly ten years, many of them tagged for no references or worse, yet there seems to be no push to eliminate them. And as for the number of page views argument, so what? I specialise in 18th- and 19th-century opera subjects, e.g. Margherita Zenoni, Giovanni Emanuele Bidera, Don Checco, etc.. They get at most 1 or 2 views a day (most of which are people simply adding categories, etc. or possibly me). But, if only one person finds those articles useful, I'm happy. If only one person finds Portal:Opera useful and/or it helps pique their interest in the subject, I'm happy. I think it would be a very poor outcome and a loss for our readership to eliminate portals across the board regardless of their quality, or to make them virtually inaccessible to readers by removing links to them from articles. Voceditenore (talk) 09:37, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose The first time it's funny, the next time its not. No, you can not just unilaterally delete the Portalspace with the justification of "at the rate they're going there won't be any to delete soon". Did I read any further than that sentence? Yes. Did I find any betetr reason to mass nuke? Nah. ^Thanks,L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 16:22, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose. This is a "throw out the baby with the bathwater" idea, as others have spelled out in detail that I need not repeat.  — 
  AReaderOutThataway ^t/_c
  04:22, 7 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose – For several reasons delineated herein, and also per the well-reasoned commentary by DGG within the thread below titled "Thoughts on the value of portals". North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 05:53, 7 October 2019 (UTC)
• Support While I feel sorry for those who have in good faith attempted to build an maintain them, the fact is portals just don't have the readership and use to justify the timesink they've become for everyone across Wikipedia. And Wikipedia only needs on front page. oknazevad (talk) 18:16, 7 October 2019 (UTC)
• Support. Move two dozen of the most general (Space, Nature, History, etc., but not individual countries), high-quality, well-maintained portals from Portal:Topic to Wikipedia:Topic_page and link all of them (not just nine) from the main page. These "topic pages" must be re-worked to be as densely packed with information and regularly updated as the main page. Delete the rest and the namespace itself. Less is more. — UnladenSwallow (talk) 01:45, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose per DGG below, and many other opposing editors. I am fairly new to editing, and I am still discovering many aspects of Wikipedia (including all the many forums where decisions are made). There are many ways that content within the mainspace of Wikipedia can be found (categories, lists, projects, portals, links between pages, etc), and there are many articles which do not make full use of all those ways. Rather than getting rid of means of navigating content, I think it would be much better to work towards improving the linking of content. Different navigational methods work for different people, or bring up different possibilities. Adding portals to more articles would surely make portals more useful (or do they just work one way?) and if articles which go through DYK, ITN, OTD, FA on the main page etc have portals added to them, surely they can be automatically added to the equivalent sections on portals, keeping those sections refreshed. RebeccaGreen (talk) 15:49, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose per Rebecca Green and I forget who said this above but basically this is a proposal and solution in search of creating problems. To begin with, the number a pages we are talking about even before the cull is minuscule in the scheme of the pedia, so any argument they cause any detriment, at all, is wholly overblown, and those who do not want to spend time on portals do not have to. But to RebbecaGreen's point, it is well established that people have different learning modalities and different reading styles (do research and learning differently - this is one reason why textbooks present information in prose, lists, boxes, etc., etc., etc., and not just in one way, in multiple ways) Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:02, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
• Support. Delete all but the ones mentioned by UnitedStatesian. They are useless waste of time, nobody reads them, just few portal-fans edit and maintain them for themselves. I am sorry, but we should take their toys away, and make them do something actually useful. And if anybody leaves Wikipedia because we take away the portals and they never did anything else, sorry, but this no loss. Wikipedia is not a playground for creating pages with no encyclopedic use... ok, seriously, you can maintain them in your userspace, what's the difference? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:33, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
• Support Except that it sounds like we should keep the top 3 (or 10 max). Anything that can be mass-created by automated tools is going to be nothing but trouble and full of crap anyway. North8000 (talk) 12:13, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
• Support - I don't think I've ever been involved in a portal deletion discussion, but I did read some of them and check the related portals. It does seem that this design did not take and for 2019 is very outdated. I'm not against a better design in the future, but for that to happen, a design discussion should be held first and not a patch-work of fixes to try and save some unread portals. --Gonnym (talk) 12:22, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose The idea that pages should or could be deleted en masse if they are maintained by a small number of editors or have a low readership would be quite corrosive to the general working of Wikipedia, which has a long tail of such articles. Consider: the same argument could be used to delete our featured articles because they are typically the work of one or two editors and often the topic is a niche one which usually has few readers. And notice that even our supply of featured articles is drying up as they are not now being written at an adequate pace. We have too many carping critics and not enough contributors. We must promote collaboration and cooperation not cavilling and censorship. Andrew D. (talk) 23:33, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose We needed to go through and delete mass-created portals on topics too narrow to maintain a portal, and that's happened. There were simply too many poorly-created portals. After learning about them, I've found good portals to be exceptionally useful navigational devices and highlighting the best articles of particular WikiProjects. The "useless" support votes frustrate me. A good portal adds value, and we're making improvements on how to keep these maintained without needing a lot of oversight. These shouldn't be deprecated. What we absolutely need are good guidelines going forward, though. SportingFlyer T·C 13:22, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose I am not terribly enamoured of portals (or navboxes, and I even question categories sometimes) but they are potentially useful apparatus, and if they help access content for even a few readers it is ludicrous to delete them. Probably we should be constantly finding better ways to make and maintain them. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:16, 18 October 2019 (UTC).
  

Intermediate proposal: de-link from article space

Articles with the {{Portal}} template, or perhaps the {{Portal bar}} or {{Portal-inline}} or {{Pbox}}, or in rare cases {{PBIE}} (optimized for portaling with Internet Explorer, in Ireland) tend to link to portals of very dubious relevance, which can't be excused no matter how well-maintained they might be.

Portals have been called the poor man's main page. Indeed, the navigational value of these linking to one from an article is rarely much better than linking back to the actual

I suspect some of these dumb/vague/irrelevant portal links I've found are the result of "upmerging" the incoming links when a more specific portal is deleted. This is probably based on the flawed assumption that every article needs to link to some portal page, and that we should struggle to find the closest match. But I'm here to suggest none of them do. Even if we do let higher-functioning portals continue to exist for a while longer, cataloging the best and worst articles related to… whatever, we should start by retiring the templates above, which are useless clutter more often than not. ―cobaltcigs 23:17, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

• Interesting. Definitely ought to strike links to bad portals/meaningless connections. Don't know I'd go all-out delete, but a good conversation-starter. Hyperbolick (talk) 23:21, 22 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose complete delinking: baby, bathwater, all that. I fixed your exemplars, and the remaining problematic ones should be fixed via maintenance also. UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:52, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
• I'd suggest an adjustment/refinement of cobaltcigs's proposal - delink portals from article space and category space (which would include removing from many templates) except retain links from Foobar (article) and (possibly) Category:Foobar to Portal:Foobar. That would remove irrelevant links and reduce watchlist noise (many edits to category pages are tinkering with portal links). DexDor ^(talk) 11:56, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

  Most of the watchlist noise is temporary, from portals leaving categories and being unlinked on deletion. The proposal would extend that noise to all portals. Certes (talk) 11:00, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

In the longer term it would decrease noise as most articles and categories would then never have portal tags on them. DexDor ^(talk) 18:58, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - Not helpful in creating interest. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 17:42, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support. If we don't have to see this cruft obscuring the actual content of our articles, it becomes much less important to prevent the cruft-enthusiasts from expanding their collections of cruft. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:11, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose - Not helpful in creating interest and will lower page views unnecessarily. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 21:18, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose delinking. In a way, this is a solution looking for a problem. The whole issue over portals just creates work - even just discussing it - which could better be used for improving and policing the quality of mainspace articles , combating vandalism, and deleting inappropriate articles. Existing portals do not do any harm, neither is it a case of server capacity. Time to put this whole business to bed. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:18, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose - Agree that links to poorly-thoughtout out portals are not helpful, but as long as we vet the creation of portal to make sure they are appropriately broad, these are extremely helpful to serve as broader topic outline pages. --Masem (t) 03:23, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
• Partial support. I would suggest that we catalog which portals are in the best shape and which are in the worst shape, and unlink the worst, since there is no point in taking people to garbage. bd2412 T 04:05, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

  A list of portals in good shape would have other benefits for readers. It would also allow editors to resume improving a subset of portals in the knowledge that our work is not about to be deleted. Certes (talk) 11:00, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

"resume improving"?! Many/most portals weren't being maintained (i.e. corrected/updated) let alone improved - whilst more and more low quality portals were being created. For example, one portal said "How is called the Biotechnology branch applied to industrial processes?" for 12 years and referred to a file that had been deleted for 8 years. DexDor ^(talk) 11:45, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

The MfDs are already culling the list of portals, and I doubt any completely new community process would be more efficient or effective, assuming a consensus could even be developed on what to do/how to do it. --RL0919 (talk) 19:28, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose I can't see how this is helpful. A single navigation link near the bottom hardly "obscure[s] the actual content of articles", as
  FPs
  11:04, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
• Comment. Portals are practically de-linked from article space!!! According to the useless, out-of-date
  WP:POG which has barely changed in 12 years, portals are meant to "attract large numbers of interested readers" (why? they're not articles) yet the only mainspace link that portals "should" have is one from the main topic. One link!!! How did they ever think they would attract lots of readers? The fundamental problem is that POG implies and most editors believe that portals are there to entertain readers yet POG has set up a system that guarantees failure. On the other hand portals have the potential to be very useful navigation aids if, like categories, they are well-linked, and very useful project tools that show coverage and identify where articles need to be created and improved. They can be a showcase, yes, but is frankly a cosmetic add-on. Bermicourt (talk
  ) 08:42, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

  The guidance says To optimise access to portals, each portal should have the following links leading to them:. It doesn't say that these should be the only mainspace links, and I don't believe others have interpreted the guidance in that manner. isaacl (talk) 01:24, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose doesn't make sense to me. Either have the portals and link to them in article space or don't have them at all. They're far less useful if our readers can't find them.
  Lepricavark (talk
  ) 04:26, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
• Support deletion of portals with the exception of some 50-100 exceptionally broad and vital topics. It is customary for all major websites to do away with parts of their websites that aren't popular with readers, and are therefore unnecessarily hogging maintenance costs. SD0001 (talk) 17:43, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose. This is a silly
  AReaderOutThataway ^t/_c
  04:26, 7 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose per characterisation of editors requesting deletion as a "small band of determined editors". I'm willing to reconsider if it turns out that's not accurate, but I do not see the value of this approach to ending a contentious debate (or series of debates). Airbornemihir (talk) 04:08, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
• Support. Too many links to obscure tools obscure useful links to stuff like Commons or Wikivoyage or such. We need to prune links to failed ideas like portals that nobody has any use for. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:35, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose Each case should be judged on its merits. Grand schemes, one-size-fits-all policies and dramatic gestures are not appropriate now that Wikipedia is so large and complex. Andrew D. (talk) 23:39, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

Significance of mobile Wikipedia to portals

• Comment - Do we have overall portal usage stats between say 2008 and now? I wonder if the adoption of viewing Wikipedia on a mobile phone makes/made portals less visible? WhisperToMe (talk) 12:02, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

WhisperToMe, I picked 3 Featured Portals at random and did some checking, albeit with a caveat. The mobile version appears to have been released in the Spring of 2014 [1]. The page stats tool was only implemented in July 2015. So I compared each of the three portals for the periods July–December 2015 and July–December 2018.

Portal:Medicine: July–December 2015 – 33,301 page views; July–December 2018 – 18,718 page views

Portal:American Civil War: July–December 2015 – 14,355 page views; July–December 2018 – 9,834 page views

Portal:Horses: July–December 2015 – 3,509 page views; July–December 2018 – 2,410 page views

The introduction of the mobile version and the increasing use of smart phones may have been a factor in the declines noted above. For example, Medicine, the parent article of Portal:Medicine, doesn't display the portal bar at the foot of the page in its mobile version. Nor does it display the footer Navigation box which also links to the portal. Another point is that the article Medicine for the month of September 2019 had 15,072 page views via desk top vs. 23,029 page views via mobile (a significant majority). I imagine the proportions for the articles Horse and American Civil War are similar.

As for the portals themselves on mobile, the quality of the experience can vary.

Portal:Horse on mobile is good. Portal:Medicine not so good. The mobile version couldn't cope with a section presenting images as a transcluded random slideshow. Voceditenore (talk

) 15:59, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Thank you so much for the comparisons! It's telling to see the portal views being halved like that, only from 2015. I wonder if people in favor of keeping portals have considered discussing things with the developers of the mobile version of Wikipedia? WhisperToMe (talk) 22:26, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

• While I'm leaning towards deprecation (not necessarily deletion) of portals, I'm wondering that instead of yet another end portals RfC, if instead there could be an RfC to reform the Portals process first. Like, perhaps more stringent standards for Portals, or a more thorough implementation of the Portal creation/maintenance guidelines? From what I can tell, while many are opposed to deprecating portal space as a whole, editors seem to be open to the idea of some kind of compromise: i.e. keep some but not all portals. On the other hand, in some cases that I've seen in the past (particularly around the time WP:ENDPORTALS took place), even when portals were kept, many ended up going back into inactivity. Perhaps, instead of this RfC, there should have been some systematic drive to reform the portals process, make them more active, while taking into account the concerns raised before regarding the "portal spam" and the apparently inadequately implemented automation? Then if that failed, only then would it have been the time to have ENDPORTALS 2.0?
  csdnew
  14:59, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Mentioned during many deletion talks was the fact that {{Portal-inline}} is visible in mobile view.....we were hoping that during cleanup (portal replacement after deletion) that the inline version would be used...but there seems no interest by those involved to help make portals visible for all.--Moxy 🍁 11:26, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

• The app has never had a significant number of users. The page views for a random article show that the app views are some 0.1 %, one in a thousand. Much more consequential have been the redirects which made m.wikipedia.org the default domain for a number of users around 2011, see mw:Mobile_default_for_sister_projects#Timeline. There were several discussions, the general issue probably being phabricator:T109152 and phabricator:T158181. Nemo 05:51, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Alt-Proposal 1 to total deletion of Portal space