Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cryptography

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. ST47 (talk) 19:11, 24 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Cryptography

Draft portal since 2005. Not meets WP:POG Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:59, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - This is a strange case. First, it isn't technically true that this portal has been a draft since 2005. This portal was moved into portal space in 2005 by the portal initialization script, and has been in portal space since then. Second, it is true that this looks like an abandoned portal. This is a heritage portal that is designed to have subpages but doesn't have any regular subpages. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Cryptography shows 10 pages including the portal itself, and no articles, but some of the boilerplate subpages have been maintained. This does apparently qualify for speedy deletion as P2, an under-populated portal. But the portal has an average of 81 daily pageviews, as opposed to 2237 for the head article. That's a lot of daily pageviews for a seemingly abandoned portal. My conclusion is that this portal doesn't provide any information that isn't just a fork of the head article, but someone is looking at it every 20 minutes. Maybe they will see the MFD tag and come here and say who they are. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:11, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You've completely misunderstood P2 there, it's supposed to be for portals which have fewer than three non-stub articles eligible for that portal. There are far more than three non-stub articles about cryptography, Wikipedia:WikiProject Cryptography includes 741, 52 of which are B-class or higher. Hut 8.5 16:30, 8 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - Very well, thank you for explaining P2. I didn't nominate the portal for P2 and I didn't !vote Delete yet. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:32, 8 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Keep cryptography is a perfectly good topic for a portal, it's a major field and cryptography is one of the level 3 vital articles, meaning it's considered to be one of the 1,000 or so most important articles on Wikipedia. There are plenty of other articles about it as well. The current portal isn't very good but it isn't a draft and what's there is suitable for presentation to the reader. Deletion isn't a suitable remedy for fixable problems, and improvements to the portal would consist of building on the existing content rather than removing it. Hut 8.5 16:30, 8 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Just to respond to the other rationale for deletion which has been raised - WP:POG doesn't say that regular updates of portals are required, or that unmaintained portals should be deleted. It does say that regular updates are a good idea, but that's it. Hut 8.5 20:59, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - It is correct that some nominators are sloppily referring to draft portals. No portal in portal space is a draft. This doesn't change the fact that many portals are abandoned in portal space unfinished as litter on the information superhighway. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:32, 8 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - As another editor has noted in another portal MFD, portals are reader-facing content that are complex to maintain and require skill, so that unmaintained portals range from useless to harmful. Although many users are viewing the portal, it is not being maintained. The assessment of Vital Articles is, at best, only an a priori assessment of their breadth, that does not mean that they will attract portal maintainers. This portal is attracting readers, but no maintainer, and that is a problem. No one has volunteered to maintain this portal. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:01, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - The only two featured article in the portal, Cryptography and Enigma machine(Alan Turing) are already listed in Portal:Mathematics/Selected article archive.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:06, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Abandoned mini-portal. It's only attempt to showcase content is the "Selected article", which has displayed the same topic (enigma machine") since 2008.

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 Cryptogrpahy.

The lead of WP:POG has said since late 2006 "Do not create a portal if you do not intend to assist in its regular maintenance", but that has not happened here.

WP:POG#How_often_to_update? says that unless automated, the content selection should be updated monthly, or preferably weekly. Even on a monthly cycle, this portal has missed over 130 consecutive updates.

There is nothing here worth keeping. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:20, 20 June 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.