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 . ♠PMC♠ (talk) 05:47, 13 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:E (mathematical constant)[edit]

Portal:E (mathematical constant) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Way too specific a topic for a portal; someone may as well just go to this specific article, and we already have Portal:Mathematics. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 22:40, 24 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete portals are pretty useless and hyperspecific ones even more so. Legacypac (talk) 22:51, 24 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment - A few months ago, there was a plague of portals created, and they were all taken here, to MFD. The only reason that I could see for their creation was that creating portals is fun, but I wasn't involved in the creation. Some editors doubted that we need portals at all, let alone new ones. The conclusion was to hold off on the deletion of the portals until guidelines were developed for the creation of new portals. Where are the policies and guidelines about portals that were revisited? Robert McClenon (talk) 01:00, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Robert McClenon, The guidlines are at Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines. They were not easy to find, so I added a paragraph with a link to the Wikipedia:Portal page. The most relevant point seems to be portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers. and as fat as I can tell the current rule of thumb is that there should "around 20" articles that can randomly display in the portal as selected articles. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:15, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Question - Has there been any discussion of the need for this specific portal? It appears that the discussion a few months ago was inconclusive. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:13, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Just for background, I only noticed this because a bot added a link to the portal from the main article. It seemed pretty pointless to have one so specific, regardless of what one thinks about portals in general, so I nominated it. I'm not sure what the wider story is behind new portals and such, so if there's some sort of bigger picture that needs to be addressed, I can understand that. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 02:36, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Interim Delete - I am waiting to see where and when the need for this portal was identified. At this point, in the absence of a justification, deletion appears in order. If a good case can be made that the need for the portal was discussed and agreed on, I may strike this !vote and may change it to Neutral or Keep. For now, this looks like just another portal created because creating portals is fun. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:13, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. I am not seeing a policy, guideline or practical effect based reason for deletion here. Only that some people either don't like it or fail to see the need for it. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 04:35, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Interim keep until a better reason for deletion is established · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 04:35, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  @Pbsouthwood: There are no policies or guidelines for getting rid of portals (as far as I can find). And until such guidelines and policies are established, someone not liking it is as good a reason to delete as any other. There are plenty of guidelines on making portals, what to include, and so on, but nothing about limiting their scope. If you want a practical effect, how about trying to stem the proliferation of portals that have far too narrow a scope. This one is just about the very lowest of an awful lot of low-hanging fruit (just under math). And what was wrong with "Way too specific a topic for a portal; someone may as well just go to this specific article" as a valid rationale for deletion? I have a lot more of these I want to delete, so for future reference, what would you consider a valid reason to delete a portal? –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 04:59, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Deacon Vorbis, There are guidelines for creating portals. They were not easy to find, so I added a link from the WP:Portals page. Criteria for creation have the inverse value of criteria for deletion, if the article or portal does not meet the criteria. So in practice there are criteria for deletion, you just had not found them yet. The most relevant item is minimum number of articles in the group, which is currently "about 20". This specific portal is automatically updating, every time you open it, it randomly reselects some of the items to be displayed, but as a small portal, they can all be paged through using the slideshow arrows. Large topic portals have to be limited for technical reasons, so there is a tendency to provide more subportals on smaller topic areas. A single new model portal could not cover all of mathematics as it would take too long to generate, so higher level portals are restricted to a representative generic sample of the topic.
  Is "proliferation of portals" as such a real problem? Why? Too narrow a scope is a valid reason, and may apply in this case. This portal has 14 articles in the topic group, which is a bit shy of "about 20". The number of articles is not currently a hard limit. In some cases 20 may not be considered enough and in others a portal with fewer maybe considered reasonable. It is up to the portal creator to defend a low number, and up to the deletion requester to justify a higher margin. I have no strong feelings about this one. I found it moderately interesting.
  My problem with "Way too specific a topic for a portal; someone may as well just go to this specific article" is that it is very subjective. That tends to lead to long squabbles with no consensus. In this case there are currently 14 related articles, so my initial impression is that it is not that specific a topic, and in time there will probably be more articles. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:43, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per WP:LEAST: This portal cannot provide information that is not (or should not be) in the article of the same name, as if an information is relevant for the portal, it is also relevant for the article of the same name. If the portal is placed in another article, this means that this article is already linked to E (mathematical constant). In any case, it is a waste of time for the reader to open the portal, only for knowing that it does not contain any information that he/she has already. Some may argue that the information may be better presented in the portal than in the article, but if this were the case, this would only show that the article needs to be improved. D.Lazard (talk) 09:18, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Far too narrow a scope. Another useless portal that was created using automated tools just because it could be. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 22:22, 25 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete do we need a portal for every mathematical constant? Per WP:INDISCRIMINATE, no; no we do not. ——SerialNumber54129 14:58, 26 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Now being discussed at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Hiatus_on_mass_creation_of_Portals and a wider issue has been discovered. The creation of over 500 portals in the last two months by the same editor. There are huge backlogs in Draft and Userspace that, if tackled, could create much new useful content in mainspace. Portals create no new content they just rearrange it, providing little bits of data from various articles, little more than headlines. At best they are useless and at worst they pull readers and editors away from real articles into a rabbit hole. Legacypac (talk) 17:03, 26 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep – the subject has adequate material to support a portal, and the portal exists to display this information in a convenient navigational format, which it does quite well. This is a navigation tool. Another cool navigation feature of portals, is that as coverage for the subject expands on Wikipedia, the coverage of the portal automatically expands as well. The image slideshows are also a convenient place to add new pictures, whereas on articles, you have space considerations. By the way, portals don't create backlogs, as they are virtually self-maintained. A small team of editors can maintain thousands of portals, because they are virtually entirely automated. Portals are an innovative area of Wikipedia, and who knows how else the technological advancements from this department will be used in the future. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   18:25, 26 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete, particularly useless pseudo-portal. What stands out as particularly bad is the "images" section, which just offers random images from the main article, mostly technical diagrams, with the same captions they have in the article too, without any consideration of whether they are useful in this stand-alone form without the article's surrounding context. (In most cases, obviously, they are not). This page does nothing the main article doesn't do better. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:26, 27 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete, nothing much to add to what Future Perfect said. Two of the four images are not even directly relevant. The experiment to make fully automated portals with almost no human input looks like a failure to me. —Kusma (t·c) 14:01, 27 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per nom. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 00:17, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep: e is a notable number which deserves study by every budding mathematician. Especially future computer scientists; the point of a portal is to draw in readership to a topic. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 05:21, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. e is a notable number which deserves study by every budding mathematician, especially future computer scientists. Study is done by studying, not by reading at random some parts randomly selected from an article. Except from increasing some editcountitis, and distracting the readers from reading the articles themselves, this so called 'portal' is useless, and surely not a part of an attempt to create carefully written content. Exercise: what is the value of
  Pldx1 (talk) 14:44, 28 February 2019 (UTC) (signature omitted)[reply]

  According to Wolfram,^[1] its α=coth 1=(e^2+1)/(e^2−1)Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 15:09, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• (1) this number was clearly below 1. (2) from the given expansion, the Khinchin's factor of is infinite (instead of the more frequent Khinchin's constant). What are the odds that a set of randomly chosen snippets will address this fact ? And that a general purpose script decides correctly if this fact deserves to be put forward ? (3) to be honest, this so-called portal should display a disclaimer stating that it was generated by a robot, in order to enforce the Terms of Use: once released, any contribution can be freely butchered, infoboxed, em---dashed and even portaled. Pldx1 (talk) 17:42, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Pldx1, do you know of any elegant way to solve this? I remember these results but their background of development is quite tedious for the first few and missing for the rest. Don't recall coming across some easier alternative:( ∯WBG^converse 17:31, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Dear WBG, this is done at Gauss's continued fraction. Orthogonally, and to hit some nails, it would be specially farcical to select at random some equations displayed in that page and arrange them with a script to play portal. Pldx1 (talk) 20:08, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  More generally, the integer progression is the expansion of , see D.H.Lehmer. Pldx1 (talk) 23:00, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Best.MFD.Ever Never seen math here other than a little vote counting. Legacypac (talk) 18:47, 1 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Violates WP:Portal/Guidelines, which says: "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject ". This one is not. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:48, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per WP:CONTENTFORK. Doesn't provide any useful function over the article itself and expands the stuff that needs to be maintained. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:01, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete excessively narrow scope and as a result doesn't provide much in the way of useful information outside the article. The only content within the portal which isn't in the article e (mathematical constant) is the "Selected general articles" bit, and most of the articles in there are of dubious relevance. Several are included just because they involve an exponential or logarithmic process, of which there are many in mathematics, physics and other fields. Hut 8.5 19:09, 3 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Question. Can we keep this one as a joke? I mean, the way it just includes File:Part38figure02.gif and its lousy design are actually funny to me. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 22:04, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Extraordinarily specific and against the WikiProject association / broadness given in WP:Portal/Guidelines! — MarkH21 (talk) 08:01, 12 March 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.