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. Open for nearly three weeks with reasonable arguments for keep, and no strong arguments for delete. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:34, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Civilizations[edit]

Portal:Civilizations (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Automatically created by The Transhumanist in September 2018. Portals should be updated on a weekly or monthly basis and drive-by spam which just reads from categories yields puzzling results when it comes to the slideshow. No prejudice against curated recreation, as it is a conceivably broad topic. SITH (talk) 15:59, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion of Portal:Civilizations[edit]

This portal was created in September 2018 by User:The Transhumanist and is a slightly different style of portal, because the portal functions as its own navbox. Rather than using subpages, as heritage portals did, or one or more navboxes, or an outline, or a list article, this portal contains embedded lists that function in the same way as navboxes. So it isn't a content fork, because it is the list. This portal had an average of 2 pageviews per day in the Jan-Feb 2019 period, when the head article Civilization had 1301 (and that count of pageviews does not count views of the 49 articles that are listed in the lists). In my opinion, this is not significantly different conceptually from a single-navbox, single-list, or single-outline portal. I disagree with the statement that the portal was created automatically, because the work of selecting the articles was done de novo in this case. This portal is a navbox. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:56, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Paging User:BrownHairedGirl: This may be a slightly different model of portal. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:56, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

put your keep/delete/comments below here

• Weak Delete – Doesn’t duplicate anything, but 2 pageviews per day doesn't indicate that the navbox is being used. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:56, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment. Thanks for the ping, @Robert McClenon. The nomination by @SITH misunderstands the nature of this portal. This is not a navbox-clone; it is a single-page portal which uses an embedded list of articles, which is why it is categorised in Category:Automated article-slideshow portals with embedded list rather than in Category:Automated article-slideshow portals with article list built solely from one template.

This type of portal is conceptually similar to the old-style portal with squillions of sub-pages, except that instead of multiple sub-page slisting one topic each, the topics are all listed in on the main portal page. In principle, this is very good way of doing preview-style portals, and some fine portals have ben built in this way, such as Portal:Geophysics.

However, the devil is in the detail. TTH created many portals with embedded lists which were simply crude and indiscriminate dumps of categories. They looked like curated portals, but were in fact just another form of spam, and many of them have been deleted at MFD, including Electricity, Julius Caesar, Habitats, and Shipwrecks, Australian literature, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Unfortunately, it takes some research to compare the embedded list against categories, outlines, navboxes and other such sources to see whether this is actually one of the rare curated portals created by TTH, or just another form of disguised spam. I will do that research tomorrow. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:51, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - Keep per now. This portal seems to be a good case of single-page layout. The concept of single-page portals is not entirely bad, it still needs to mature ... or die with all other portals.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:06, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep – Keep per now per Guilherme Burn. Consider notifying some of the related Wikiprojects listed below to request improvements to the portal, and for the addition of links to the portal in main namespace articles, such as in their see also sections. More visible links to the portal = more page views. Less visible links = less page views.

• WikiProject History
• WikiProject Sociology
• WikiProject Anthropology
• WikiProject Archaeology

– North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 13:06, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Per discussion above, I feel more sympathetic to this portal only because there seems to be no proper "civilizations" navbox in Wikipedia, and therefore this portal provides an alternative. I would much prefer the creation of proper "civilizations" navbox that would go under all the head-civilizations articles on WP (of which there are a lot; so I think such a navbox would be very very useful), however, in the absence of such a navbox, then perhaps the portal should be kept? Britishfinance (talk) 20:23, 26 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.