Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Infrastructure

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. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:02, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Infrastructure[edit]

Stillborn portal solely created by an inexperienced editor with 330 edits.

Twenty-six never-updated selected articles created in July 2011. Ten never-updated selected bios. The editor seems to have copy-pasted the entire lede of these thirty-six articles with barely any formatting changes. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 09:01, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Abandoned for nearly a decade portal with only 19 views per day in the first half of 2019, while the head article Infrastructure had 1,077 views per day in the same period. No maintainer. The C-Class head article with its multiple rich and versatile navboxes are all readers need to explore this topic.Newshunter12 (talk) 16:26, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - no editors, no readers = no need for the page. – Levivich 17:19, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: Unfortunately, nothing really worth keeping for this portal. The backlinks can also go to Portal:Architecture. ToThAc (talk) 20:15, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as per User:Mark Schierbecker and analysis by User:Newshunter12. This portal was maintained reasonably well in 2012 (but has been abandoned since then).
- The intended Portal Guidelines were never approved by a consensus of the Wikipedia community, and we have never had real portal guidelines. We should therefore use common sense, which is discussed in Wikipedia in the essay section Use Common Sense and in the article common sense. The portal guidelines were an effort to codify common sense about portals, and we should still use common sense. It is still a matter of common sense that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract large numbers of viewers and will attract portal maintainers. (There never was an actual guideline referring to broad subject areas, and the abstract argument that a topic is a broad subject area is both a handwave and meaningless.) Common sense imposes at least a three-part test for portals to satisfy common sense: (1) a broad subject area, demonstrated a posteriori by a breadth of selected articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad) (the number of articles in appropriate categories is an indication of potential breadth of coverage, but actual breadth of coverage should be required); (2) a large number of viewers, preferably at least 100 a day, but any portal with fewer than 25 a day can be considered to have failed; (3) portal maintenance, (a) with at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained (b) the absence of any errors indicating lack of maintenance (including failure to list dates of death in biographies). Some indication of how any selected articles were selected (e.g., Featured Article or Good Article status, selection by categories, etc.) is also desirable. Any portal that does not pass these common-sense tests is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
- I recommend that the backlinks go to Portal:Engineering.
- Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Infrastructure shows 26 general articles and 12 biographies, mostly unchanged since 2012.
- Low readership, no maintenance. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:31, 14 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note to closing admin. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if you close this discussion as delete, please can you not remove the backlinks? I have a bot (BHGbot 4) which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries.

In this case I don't see any suitable alternative which could be used in all cases. @ToThAc suggests above using Portal:Architecture, but at least half of the topics in Portal:Infrastructure/Selected article have either no or little connection to architecture (see.g. Telecommunication, Internet access, Municipal solid waste, Public transport bus service and Smart grid). @Robert McClenon suggests using Portal:Engineering, which would be a better fit, but still not a great one: topics such as State school and urban park have little or no engineering content.

In the case of Portal:Nautical, I agreed after discussion at MFD:Portal:Nautical to do a selective replacement, but pollution of the relevant categories made that a nightmare job which took about 4 hours of my time to handle about 1,500 backlinks. In this case there are 3,443 backlinks, and I am not willing to handle such a big set selectively. I am happy to implement whatever consensus emerges, whether means zero, one or two replacement portals, but I won't commit to another manual selection.--BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:04, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I looked at a random sample of articles linking to Portal:Infrastructure, and they were all linked to multiple portals. For example: High-voltage direct current links to Portal:Infrastructure and Portal:Energy; Shanghai Metro links to Portal:Infrastructure and Portal:Trains; I have no idea why Crookhaven and Auskerry link to Portal:Infrastructure, but they also link to Portal:Ireland and Portal:Scotland, respectively. I don't see the need to replace Portal:Infrastructure when those pages already link to other appropriate portals; I'd say just remove the backlink to Portal:Infrastructure. Is there a way to find out how many of those 3,443 backlinks are pages that only link to Portal:Infrastructure and not also to any other portal? – Levivich 05:39, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Levivich: a definitive answer would need a query at https://quarry.wmflabs.org, but I never learnt SQL, so I can't do that. If anyone is interested, a well-phrased request at WP:VPT would probably get the help needed. Meanwhile, I just used WP:AWB in list-making mode to check each of the 3,443 backlinks for the case-insensitive regex \{\{portal *(bar|box)(\s*\|)+\s*Infrastructure(\s*\|)*\s*\}\}, which will match any use of {{portal}} or {{portal bar}} to link only to Portal:Infrastructure. That search found zero hits.

My search isn't definitive (because it doesn't include {{subject bar}} and {{portal-inline}}), but it does cover the 2,747 linked pages which use either Portal or Portalbar. So I'm fairly confident that any exceptions are v rare.

I also ran a Petscan query to seek pages which link to both P:Infrastructure and P;Engineering. That found 1,741 articles & categories. -BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:33, 17 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nominator. Yet another long-abandoned portal with trivially low readership. (To those editors who fume and rage about the deletion of so many portals: I thought that we would have removed the last of these abandoned and almost unread portals long ago. The fact that after 8 months of portal MFDs, we are still encountering badly rotted debris like this is yet more evidence of the general neglect of portals.)

Other editors above note the abandonment of the portal by editors, and its very low level of pageviews. I agree with their analysis.

I also note the complete lack of interest from topical WikiProjects: WhatLinksHere in the Wikipedia talk namespace shows mentions only in WikiProject Portals, not in any projects related too architecture or engineering or geography.

Without maintainers, readers or WikiProject involvement, there is nothing to sustain this portal. Just delete it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:00, 17 November 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.