Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Redundant Portal:Contents subpages

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: keep. ‑Scottywong | [yak] || 01:34, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Redundant Portal:Contents subpages

In a previous discussion, inside Wikiproject Portals, the redundancy between some Portal:Contents subpages and some portals was verified. There was no consensus whether this redundancy is a problem. I believe so, because it divides the attention of readers and editors in a space already marked by abandonment. So, per WP:REDUNDANT, I bring this subpages for a broader discussion and suggest deleting or tagged {{historical}}.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:36, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: Portal:Contents subpages by topic, are basically used only in English and Spanish wikipedias.

Topic	Contents subpage	Page views (08/2018–07/2019)	Page creation	Portal	Main page portal	Page views (08/2018–07/2019)	Page creation
Culture	Portal:Contents/Culture and the arts	231	December 2007	Portal:Arts	yes	1606	June 2005
Geography	Portal:Contents/Geography and places	165	December 2007	Portal:Geography	yes	1258	May 2005
History	Portal:Contents/History and events	164	December 2007	Portal:History/Portal:Events	yes	2146 / 0	April 2005 / June 2006
Mathematics	Portal:Contents/Mathematics and logic	144	December 2007	Portal:Mathematics	yes	1403	February 2005
People	Portal:Contents/People and self	384	December 2007	Portal:People(Portal:Biography)	yes	2237	May 2005
Philosophy	Portal:Contents/Philosophy and thinking	132	December 2007	Portal:Philosophy		132	November 2005
Religion	Portal:Contents/Religion and belief systems	173	December 2007	Portal:Religion		86	February 2005
Society	Portal:Contents/Society and social sciences	128	December 2007	Portal:Society	yes	895	June 2005
Technology	Portal:Contents/Technology and applied sciences	156	December 2007	Portal:Technology	yes	1531	June 2005

Keep all. These sub-pages of Portal:contents are vastly superior to the listed alternatives. They provide a lengthy list of key topics, well laid out, with a brief explanation of the significance of the topic. They use simple wiki markup, so they are easily edited the average wiki editor.

This is all massively more useful than the Rube Goldberg machine structure, which has hideously complex markup, slow loading times, and presents the reader with a much much smaller selection of topics solely in order to implement the magazine-style presentation which was in fashion among portal fans 14 years ago, but is now redundant to the built-in preview-on-mouseover which is available by default to every reader who is not logged in.

The nominator @Guilherme Burn is correct about the duplication, but offers the wrong solution. Instead of deleting these sub-pages of Portal:Contents, we should delete the vastly less useful Portal:Biography etc, and redirecting the links to the appropriate sub-pages of Portal:Contents. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:59, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Keep All as per the analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl, at least as of this stage of analysis. The analysis by BHG appears to be correct. The breakdowns of topics in the subpages of Portal:Contents appear to be based on category trees and so are comprehensive. In the cases of the Main Page portals that I have looked at, the subpages appear to be content forks based on a selection of topics. Even if the content forks are replaced by transclusions, even a careful selection of topics is not as good a survey as a category tree. The subpages of Portal:Contents appear to be as close to a maintenance-free introduction to a subject as we are likely to get. If they do require maintenance, it is less than the Main Page portals require (and haven't gotten). The selection of subpages from the Main Page portals are simply the selections of an editor who might or might not still be active. A question that should be asked is whether the Main Page portals should be redirected to the subpages of Portal:Contents. However, that question isn't being asked. What is being asked is whether to delete the subpages of Portal:Contents. No, unless there is some better argument that hasn't been presented. This may be the wrong answer to the right question, in which case the nominator should be thanked anyway for asking the question. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:46, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep all per above. I also agree that we should consider changing how the main page portals work. -Crossroads- (talk) 21:49, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep all per above. One group is portal contents, while the other is portals themselves which link to articles. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 16:11, 4 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - I was pleased with the comments. Perceived redundancy this was a question that needed to be asked. The next question is whether Portal:Contents should remain in the Portal space. For it seems to me that it was never de facto one (ignored per WP:POG and portals policies), but is invoked to save the namespace.Guilherme Burn (talk) 17:35, 4 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete (merging anything worth keeping into "normal" portals or elsewhere) or at least trim back these pages massively and ensure there is a page somewhere explaining what they are for and what they are expected to contain. I looked at Portal:Contents/Technology and applied sciences and am very confused about what it's supposed to be for - e.g. it has lists of lists that are massively incomplete (e.g. Category:United States Air Force lists contains about 100 list articles only a handful of which are listed in the page), but when it comes to indices the page contains dozens of redlinks. In many cases the page hasn't been updated (e.g. where what was a list article has been converted into a glossary). Note: The page does use nested subpages. Much of the page appears to be a copy of Outline of technology (e.g. see the references to "FAO"). DexDor^(talk) 17:23, 5 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The more I look at that page the more crazy stuff I see. For example, there's a paragraph (approx 50 words) about natural language processing, but with no links at all; isn't the main point of a portal that it takes you somewhere? There's a paragraph saying "Bridges – a structure built to span physical obstacles without closing the way underneath"; that may be correct (ignoring the grammar) and is the sort of thing an article lede should say, but what's it doing on a page that (I think) is supposed to be for navigating to content (rather than being content)? DexDor^(talk) 19:15, 5 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The level of duplication/redundancy here is staggering. Take, for example, the information that "According to the FAO, a fishery is typically defined in terms of ...". That info appears, unsurprisingly, in the Fishery article, but it also appears here, here, here, here, here ... I'm pretty sure that if the FAO changed the definition only the article would be updated. DexDor^(talk) 19:23, 7 October 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.