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.
One common method for the design of portals, in use at least since 2005, has involved sometimes large numbers of subpages of the portal, one for each selected article and picture, and sometimes for news items and Do You Know (DYK) items. Often the subpages for selected articles consist of a copy of the original article, or a copy of the first part of the original article. The subpages for In The News (ITN) and DYK items may also be copies of the lead paragraph or a portion of the article page. This approach to design of portals is sufficiently commonly used that it can be considered standard. However, it is an honorable experiment that has failed, and should be abandoned. In numerous cases, it has been found that portals have displayed outdated and incorrect information to the reader. These discrepancies have been especially common with, but not limited to, political leadership. These discrepancies are a serious problem because they cannot be readily corrected. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, meaning that any reasonably computer-literate person can edit an article; but editing the displayed information in a portal requires specialized technical knowledge of how portals are implemented, which is presumably why errors persist, sometimes for years. An editor who has Twinkle installed can tag articles in need of editing if they do not have the time or knowledge to fix them; but tagging via Twinkle is not available for portals. Experience has shown that the use of portal subpages that copy portions of articles results in outdated information being displayed, sometimes for years, because it is difficult to correct. This design technique, partial article copies, has been an honorable experiment over the course of more than a decade, but the experiment should be assessed to have been a failure. It has also been noted that copying portions of articles to portal subpages without attribution is a violation of the CC-BY-SA copyleft and is not permitted. Some other design approach for portals should be used in the future.
Robert McClenon (talk) 08:25, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Portal appears to have been last maintained in 2016. Originator last edited in 2014.
13
Military
Military of the United States
46
3246
70.57
1.42%
Originator last edited in 2014. Appears to have been last maintained in 2010. Many articles, and calendar of dates, but not currently maintained.
82
Military
United States Coast Guard
18
2642
146.78
0.68%
Originator edits sporadically. Five biographies and one article. No articles added since 2011.
6
Military
United States Navy
43
4234
98.47
1.02%
Originator inactive since 2014. No maintenance to equipment and biographies since 2010.
26
Military
United States Merchant Marine
7
832
118.86
0.84%
Originator sporadic from 2012 to 2018, now inactive. No maintenance since 2008.
30
Military
United States Air Force
60
3909
65.15
1.53%
Originator inactive since 2011. This portal has many subpages, but they do not appear to have been maintained since 2010.
100
Military
United States Marine Corps
39
4573
117.26
0.85%
Many subarticles. Sporadic maintenance through June 2019.
100
Military
Delete. Yet another abandoned portal.
WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". A theoretical argument could be made that the US Navy is a broad topic. I agree with that theoretical argument, but we don't need to rely on theory because we have empirical evidence that in practice this portal does not pass that test: it has not attracted maintainers, and it has not attracted readers.
Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But this is massively less useful in every respect than the head article United States Navy and its excellent navbox Template:US Navy navbox.
Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navboxes offers nearly all the functionality which portals like this set out to offer. Both features are available only to ordinary readers who are not logged in, but you can test them without logging out by right-clicking on a link, and the select "open in private window" (in Firefox) or "open in incognito window" (Chrome).
mouseover: on any link, mouseover shows you the picture and the start of the lead. So the preview-selected page-function of portals is redundant: something almost as good is available automatically on any navbox or other set of links. Try it by right-clicking on this link to Template:US Navy navbox , open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
automatic imagery galleries: clicking on an image brings up an image gallery of all the images on that page. It's full-screen, so it's actually much better than a click-for-next image gallery on a portal. Try it by right-clicking on this link to the article United States Navy, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow
Those new technologies set a high bar for any portal which actually tries to add value for the reader. But this portal fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 00:28, 3 July 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.
