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 UT Austin, UW Madison, Nebraska-Lincoln, UH, UCB, UCLA, UC, CSU; delete the rest . I'm digging deep here to get a result, but I think this is a reasonable judge of the discussion, and (not a)typical of bulk nominations. There are a lot of universities here, of hugely varying fame/attendance/ranking/etc. Most of these being kept are ones specifically called out by keep participants and that have some agreement and/or comparative significance making the arguments stronger. The delete !votes are generally broad and nonspecific, which is quite valid (most are indeed being deleted) but has a harder time countering specific keep !votes than an individual or specific delete !vote. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 02:22, 11 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portals, University of X at Y[edit]

Yet another pointless micro-portal, this time for the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a small and unfamed uni with only 2800 students in 2016.[1] The Category:University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff contains only one article other than the head article, tho is there is asubcat on the inevitable sports team.
There are more biogs in the sub-Category:University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff people, but it is doubtful whether they would be a useful addition to the portal.
The assiciated Template:University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff is actually far more useful for navigation, because it appears on the relevant pages rather than requiring navigation to a separate page.
This is yet another product of The Transhumanist's batch-creation sprees. Now that it is abundantly clear that there is a strong community consensus against this portalspam, TTH's failure to assist the community by identifying and deleting their spam portals such as this is imposing an excessive cleanup burden on other editors. It indicates a deplorable lack of good faith. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:27, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete all the University of X at Y. Do we really need a portal on each campus of the Univ of Wisconsin? No. I bundled pages that are essentially the same arguments to delete as the first example. For many schools we don't even allow articles for each campuses of a university so why a portal by campus? Legacypac (talk) 00:31, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Robert McClenon (talk) 04:04, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Utterly unnecessary. Reywas92^Talk 08:33, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Do we need a portal for each of the 5,826,133 articles on Wikipedia as well? CoolSkittle (talk) 18:12, 17 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete I have no problem deleting this clump of portals. Portal:University is all we need here.--Auric talk 11:26, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep the broad ones (e.g. Portal:University of California, and merge the specific ones (e.g. Portal:University of California, Los Angeles) into those portals. Portals about major educational institutions are viable but we should not get too specific. Thryduulf (talk) 15:52, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Thryduulf, how do you suggest to merge these portals? Could you create a mock-up? I really can't imagine what a good "merged" portal should look like. —Kusma (t·c) 13:57, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  A merged portal would simply look like a portal about a broad topic does. No need for a mockup just look at one of the existing broad ones. Thryduulf (talk) 18:56, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  @Thryduulf: Usually when we "merge A into B", we take content from page A and put it into page B. Which of the content of Portal:University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point and Portal:University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh would you like to use in the overview portal? (That should be at Portal:University of Wisconsin system instead of its current location Portal:University of Wisconsin by the way, and Portal:University of Wisconsin–Madison should be moved to Portal:University of Wisconsin if it is kept). If there is no content you want to keep, what is the difference between "merge" and "delete"? —Kusma (t·c) 19:19, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• What Thryduulf said. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 21:13, 19 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. The bundling here is deceptive; the ones on a single prestigious university should not be bundled in with single campuses nor with lower-prestige institutions. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:21, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Portal:University of California and California State University. Major public university systems, and these portals meet WP:POG. I agree that some of the bundling here is a bit incongruous. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 04:56, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Also Keep Portal:University of California, Berkeley – meets WP:POG. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 05:00, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Notwithstanding that there may be some merit to a portal on a larger school, these were created indiscriminately and are poorly done. TNT is appropriate. Legacypac (talk) 11:44, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

TNT is not appropriate in the slightest - that is for where a single article or other page is best deleted and restarted, not for situations where you have many pages of varying quality. Thryduulf (talk) 21:57, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

WP:TNT is an essay, it's not a guideline or policy. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 21:59, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - Delete all.Guilherme Burn (talk) 22:24, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Why? Thryduulf (talk) 22:40, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thryduulf: Well, two !votes herein just say "delete" with no other qualification, and almost all have provided no policy- or guideline-based rationale. Almost all that's here so far are I don't like it-style arguments. Hopefully the closer will keep in mind that Polling is not a substitute for discussion, right? North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 23:19, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • Sorry! I don't see No make sense in the existence of a portal for a single thing, (a single biography, a single company, etc)Guilherme Burn (talk) 23:31, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        • Well firstly that's an "I don't like it" argument and secondly that doesn't even apply to all the nominated portals. Thryduulf (talk) 23:54, 21 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
          • @Thryduulf: It is not "I don't like it". Otherwise, there could be a portal for each wikipedia article.Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:27, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
            • So there shouldn't be a portal for any "single thing", like Portal:United States, Portal:Geography, Portal:Atlantic Ocean, Portal:Queen (band), ...? You also haven't given any policy-based reasons why there shouldn't be a portal on "single things" just that you don't think there should be. Also note that Portal:University of California for example is about a system of universities not a single university any more than Portal:Education in Pakistan is about a single institution. Thryduulf (talk) 11:50, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
              • "You also haven't given any policy-based reasons why there shouldn't be a portal on "single things""This is the point of conflict. There is no policy of notability for portals.Guilherme Burn (talk) 12:42, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
                • Quite. Would you now like to express an opinion regarding these portals that does reflect existing policies/guidelines and the actual nature of these portals? Or are you happy with your vague handwave towards a policy that doesn't exist based on an incorrect assumption about what has actually been nominated? Thryduulf (talk) 19:11, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose deletion, prefer merging by state Wherever possible, merge all "University of X at Y" into "University of X." That would make for a better portal, which benefits the readers, and deleting them would prevent good-faith editors from performing such a merge. For example, I think it would have been better to merge all "Portal:University of Nebraska at ..." portals into "Portal:University of Nebraska" rather than first speedily deleting the latter and individually deleting all of the former. If merged, they could've been a decent portal, but deleting them all erases any chance in hell that they'll become a decent portal. Brendon the Wizard ✉️ ✨ 19:55, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I find I'm of two minds on the subject. If this were a "normal" bundled nom I think I'd be opposed to just lumping these all together. For example, the nom that brought this to my attention was the portal for University of Alaska Fairbanks. UAF is not some suburban sattelite campus, it is one of the main campuses of the University of Alaska, and in actuality the founding campus of the broader institution which was only incorporated in 1975, 60 years after UAF was founded. They do quite a bit of research into large animals of the north, aurora borealis, changes in sea ice, and even have a rocket test range. It's a for real university in it's own right. That being said, this is a slapdash portal thrown together and not really maintained in any real way, as it appears are most of the others. So while I could see having such a portal, it would only be if there was actually sufficient interest to maintain it and keep it vibrant, as opposed to something dashed together in a few minutes that is only edited every few months. So, really I'm saying delete with no prejudice against recreation by persons with an actual interest in having these specifc portals as opposed to auto-generated mass creations. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:48, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as broadly a bad idea. While I am interested in the possibilities of structured navigation tools, as categories are barely useful, and AI searching while great are kind of anti-intellect, the question is still: Can auto-Portals work, without forking content OR other volunteer editor maintenance cost, and produce something better than the actual parent article for each case. At the moment, for these portals for sure, the answer is no. Go back to the drawing board and stay there until there is consensus to launch for real. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:04, 22 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Portal:University of Houston and Portal:University of California as they are about large institutions and some work seems to have gone into creating them. Delete the rest. I don't think a campus is a sufficiently broad topic for a portal and the portals which have larger scopes were put together poorly by the portal creation script. Hut 8.5 11:18, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete all except Portal:University of Houston and Portal:University of Texas at Austin (these two have some human curated content). No prejudice against creation of good portals about the major universities mentioned in the nomination. —Kusma (t·c) 13:55, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Whatever the outcome, do not "merge" without agreement on what that should mean. —Kusma (t·c) 14:33, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Though I already voted against the broad deletion, I would like to note that all three University of Nebraska related portals (especially the Lincoln and Omaha ones) actually look perfectly fine. They have no missing templates, they're well organized, and they do the job of providing the readers with well-sourced information from a variety of articles covering the universities, so Keep Portal:University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Portal:University of Nebraska Omaha, and weak keep Portal:University of Nebraska at Kearney (or merge all 3).
  
  If this discussion is to effectively establish a rule against making portals about universities, that's nonsensical. I pose a serious question to every user here: who here has actually viewed each and every one of the portals being nominated and judged it on its merits? If this discussion is against the concept of auto-portals entirely as SmokeyJoe's !vote seems to suggest, this is not the place to have it. Unless someone can explain why - on a case by case instance - it's better for the readers (the people who we're trying to help) that these pages cease to exist, equally importantly why they shouldn't be merged, I find all of the delete !votes entirely unconvincing. They boil down to "I think it's a dumb idea for a portal, so let's delete them all so editors lose the possibility of making them better and no reader can find them again."
  
  Quite a lot of the delete !votes are just either "delete", "delete - utterly useless", or "delete - delete all" which - as others have pointed out - WP:IDONTLIKEIT and these editors should be reminded that Wikipedia:Polling is not a substitute for discussion. I would hope that, when this discussion is closed, whether by an administrator or as a non-admin close, that they keep that in mind when determining the consensus. Brendon the Wizard ✉️ ✨ 14:01, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  There is essentially zero damage done by these pages non-existing (very little effort went into them, basically just substitution of some skeleton template), and the advantage of them not existing is that someone else can have the pleasure of creating a good portal about these universities. Also, we stop pretending that this type of portals is a good idea. The automated portals are just different ways of looking at exactly the same content present in our navigation system, with the major downside of not having individual edit buttons. I know that this may only be my personal opinion, but I believe that portals should encourage editing and contribution. A distinct second reason to have portals is to make editors proud by showcasing their content (that is what the main purpose of our Main Page is these days). A portal that neither cares about turning readers into editors (say, by having an interesting selection of red links or cleanup projects) or about celebrating editors' work (say, by giving a prominent place to FAs or other high quality content) just does not seem worth it. The opposite view is that nobody looks at portals anyway, so it doesn't really matter what we decide here... but maybe we can still try to do better. —Kusma (t·c) 14:15, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Here's one way to create good portals about these universities: merging them? That cannot be done after they've been erased. I can assure you it's much easier to take three portals that currently exist and merge them into a better portal than it is to take three portals that don't exist and turn them into a better portal. As for automatic transclusion, the purpose of automated portals is rather obvious: a portal from which users can read about a topic should probably not be out of sync with the articles covering said topics; we wouldn't want them to contain the original research of one editor who effectively wrote their own article not subject to peer review or the quality standards of the actual article, and we wouldn't want them to become obsolete in the event that other editors help contribute to the articles. If you believe that self-updating portals are bad rather than good, I'm sorry if I need a little more than "stop pretending it's a good idea" to be convinced of that. More importantly, this is a discussion specifically about a handful of hand-picked university related portals, effectively making this an informal proposal to ban "University of X at Y" portals, not a discussion about automated portals themselves (really, unless we're having a discussion about whether or not to abolish automated portals, citing your opinion on automated portals isn't a reason to mass delete portals about some other specific topic). Side note, since when were red links desirable???? In virtually every deletion discussion I've seen, the red links in a portal were widely cited in delete !votes as proof that the portal was forgotten, abandoned, unfinished, poorly made, etc. Automatic portals were created by hardworking editors as a solution to the complaints from those that wanted to delete portals. Now the problem with these portals is that they don't have enough red links because that "creates editors?" What??? Brendon the Wizard ✉️ ✨ 14:33, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Nobody ever complained about red links like those in Portal:Germany/Things you can do. What people complained about was portals looking abandoned. Automation doesn't stop a portal from looking unmaintained either, with embarrassing things like DYK sections containing links to unrelated topics that happen to be caught by a text similarity. Similarly, scraping content from navboxes often leads to "selected articles" that only have a tenuous relation to the portal topic. List articles tend to look terrible in the "general articles" sections. Many "selected images" are random and not appropriate. All of these things could be fixed easily but require some work, and I don't see how you can fix them without partially curating manually. Portal maintainers should definitely closely watch the articles and templates their portal is made from. If the portal has no maintainer, that becomes a problem. Just a different problem from the one we had before. Anyway, if you want to "merge" the portals, what content do you need? The name of the navboxes used? —Kusma (t·c) 17:15, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Again, all of your criticisms are directed at the concept of having a portal that automatically updates its transcluded text rather than manually. Your opinion on automated portals is irrelevant in a discussion specifically about this handful of university related portals. If your problem is that they don't require manual transclusion, go complain about that on the respective templates. (but even had we been discussing automated portals in general, which for the umpteenth time we're not, your criticisms are highly unspecific and reek of WP:IDONTLIKEIT) Brendon the Wizard ✉️ ✨ 13:23, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  I have asked three different editors voting "merge" what exactly they want to merge, and nobody has mentioned a single byte they wish to salvage from the current pages. I must assume you do not know what you are talking about. As to your strawman: if you use automation based on some templates, make sure the templates are up to that task (and not designed for a completely different purpose), or your portal will look silly to the non-casual observer. And of course my opinion about automated portals is relevant in a discussion about portals that are almost entirely automated, unlike my opinion about portals involving bananas. —Kusma (t·c) 13:48, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  What are you even talking about? Since when was it incumbent on editors to mention the specific bytes they wish to salvage when opposing deletion? Just as you're advocating for removing every byte, I'm advocating for not removing every byte. As for your opinion on automated portals, by your own logic: your opinion on automated portals is relevant when the portals nominated for deletion are automated, unlike your "opinion about portals involving bananas" - that logic quite literally suggests that had a "Portal:Bananas" been nominated for deletion, you'd be able to say "delete because I don't like bananas" the same way you're saying that - because these dozens of portals use automation - that they should be deleted per your opinion on automation? That's the clearest example of WP:IDONTLIKEIT imaginable! Brendon the Wizard ✉️ ✨ 14:06, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  OK, so if you don't want to tell me what you mean, I will interpret the suggestion to merge in the best way I can. The current automated system works by choosing specific navboxes or articles and feeding them into Lua modules that output "selected articles" or "selected images". The most obvious way to "merge" all these portals is to make a portal about a university system that has a "selected article" box for each campus, based on the navbox currently used in the smaller portals. I don't think that results in a good portal at all (keeping them separate would actually work better), but it honestly is the only interpretation of "merge" I can come up with. I will not continue the other thread of our discussion here. —Kusma (t·c) 14:33, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  You don't necessarily need to make each campus a "selected article" (but honestly, that wouldn't look that bad, but as I've stated before I also don't think any of the ones I've mentioned are that bad either). You could make the description at the top mention "The University of X consists of ..." etc, grant different sections of the page to different campuses, etc. The exact design is really up to the creativity of whichever user performs a merge (because portals, unlike articles, require some level of design to look nice) and the finished product would be an easy-to-use page that lets the reader access all relevant information. The only conceivable reason for deleting such a portal - at least based on the comments here - would be that it's a dumb idea, doesn't look good, isn't useful, etc, all of which are examples of comments to avoid per Wikipedia:Arguments_to_avoid_in_deletion_discussions#Personal_point_of_view. Your initial "essentially zero damage done" comment was a clear example of WP:NOTHARMINGANYONE. There are official guidelines for portals, and we decided that portals that meet the "Incomplete" threshold WP:WPPORT/A should be deleted if they are not improved after a period of one month. Whether or not a portal is incomplete is determined per WP:POG. The portals in question are not incomplete. They hit all of the bullet points that we determined to be necessary. I would rate many of them as "Basic" but remember that we reached a consensus for "Basic" to be the minimum threshold for a portal to remain unaltered. In all cases, if a portal meets the guidelines that we spent a nauseating amount of time ironing out, then it meets the threshold to stay on Wikipedia. We created these specific guidelines specifically because we're tired of WP:IDONTLIKEIT based discussions (like this one). Brendon the Wizard ✉️ ✨ 15:01, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep, pending establishment of criteria. Universities are clearly going to be generally of sufficient encyclopedic interest among readers to support portals. We should probably figure out some criteria for them, though (not everything with "University" in its name is directly comparable). There's also the question of whether and when a "University of Foo at Bar" cases should be separate portals or should be merged into an overall "University of Foo" portal. In some cases such a merge would make no sense at all (UC Berkeley and UCLA have insufficient relationship to each other, and reader interest in them is as entirely separate entities). In other cases it would make much more sense (e.g. satellite campuses of the University of New Mexico). That is to say, don't be fooled by the names. Some states use a different naming pattern like "University of New Mexico", "Eastern New Mexico University", "New Mexico State University", etc., for distinct institutional entities, while other states impose a confusingly similar naming scheme on all of them (as does California) from which one can wrongly infer that they're all the same entity.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:05, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

We heard and headed the call for time to create guidelines. Now we read that the guidelines the Portals project does have are worthless and not followed according to TTH. So no, we will not wait for new guidelines. Legacypac (talk) 23:30, 23 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Is it impossible for any discussion of portals to not mention TTH? There were a lot of us involved in the process to re-establish quality guidelines for portals. Whether or not people decide to use our guidelines is not the fault of the team that wrote them. There are no specific rules on what topics are allowed to have a portal because the only determining factor is - and should continue to be - whether or not your portal is demonstrably of an acceptable quality. We made quality guidelines. Use them. Brendon the Wizard ✉️ ✨ 13:38, 24 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

We are using the POG guidelines at MfD to delete hundreds of portals. The Wikiproject members failed to nominate for deletion even one portal that failed their own guidelines (as far as I know) so if you are a project member, get involved in the clean up now. Legacypac (talk) 04:18, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep: University of Wisconsin–Madison (151 articles in the Category), University of Nebraska–Lincoln (44), University of Nebraska Omaha, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill(36), University of California, Los Angeles (101), University of California, Berkeley, University of California, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (35) (which should be moved to: University of Tennessee, per the article name). Anyone who spends five minutes clicking through and understanding the content will see that these are all centuries old institutions with a broad regional interest. Since our goal here (obstensibly) is about our readers, we should perhaps keep them in mind when deleting things. Delete the rest. to be fair, and not overhandedly ironic, this list looks like it was assembled by a bot or something, so we should probably just nuke this nomination and start over individually Crazynas ^t 02:35, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Actually this list was created by hand using various searches for keywords, tagging and bundling edits. It is not easy to sort out all the rapidly created portal spam pages. Since these pages were created at rates of up to every 12 seconds, and even the creator says it takes him 1 or 2 minutes total, building the nomination took more time and thought then creating the pages in the first place. Legacypac (talk) 00:50, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete all None of these meet the breadth-of-subject-area requirement of the WP:POG guideline. UnitedStatesian (talk) 04:19, 8 April 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.