Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Nautical

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. — JJMC89 (T·C) 06:57, 14 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Nautical

Stillborn portal more or less created in its current state in March 2007.

There is a selected article for apparently every day of the year (I could not check because there is apparently no hub for all the selected articles). However the transclusion consists of a redirect, which transcludes the entire article, including non-free images. Someone blanked one of the selections to help rectify this. I highly doubt all 365 entries have been vetted, and the entry for today's date is a disambiguation page, so clearly not.

This portal is fundamentally flawed. Getting this portal up to par would, at minimum, require deleting or reworking nearly every single subpage. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 00:46, 7 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete ~~in the absence of an explanation from User:Northamerica1000 who tweaked the portal recently~~. I have spot-checked a few of the daily articles. Some of them, like today's, are not nautical at all. Some of them have been edited to be redirects, some to nautical articles, some to non-nautical articles. The portal had 49 average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019. There is no single head article, but the portal identifies four subjects, whose combined daily pageview level in the same period was 2010. As User:Mark Schierbecker notes, it is hard to tell what this portal is meant to be doing. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:12, 7 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment – I have had no involvement in the article selections for this portal. As such, there's nothing for me to "explain" about them whatsoever. I did perform three very minor layout changes on 29 July 2019‎ (UTC), and also added a category back in 2011, but that's it, four minor edits. Edit summaries were left describing the changes, so those were explained. See the page's Revision history for more information. It is bizarre for an explanation regarding article content to be expected from a user who has had no involvement with them. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 12:06, 7 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. What a mess. Links itself to four topic Main Articles (three of which are tagged for issues): Ship, Freight transport, Navigation (not all Nautical), and Sailor, but it’s two featured items don’t appear in any of these Main Articles, being an Oil Rig, and a Knot. Hopelessly mis-conceived, and rationally abandoned by any maintainer outside of mechanical edits by Beeblebrox’s, The Portal Rescue Crew (TPRC). Britishfinance (talk) 09:06, 7 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment – One problem that has not yet been discussed is arbitrary redirects between portals, redirects here Portal:Ocean and Portal:Seas.Guilherme Burn (talk) 16:51, 7 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Per the nom and all delete voters. This portal is a mis-mash of disparate topics and has been rationally abandoned for over a decade. It's a complete disaster and just needs to be deleted so that it can no longer lure readers to time wasting junk. Newshunter12 (talk) 05:20, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I concur with the comments that this portal is a mess in various ways. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:12, 11 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete – unmaintained, abandoned portal. – Levivich 17:40, 11 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Unmaintained portal in terrible shape. It's barely even technically functioning, and seems to have been little touched since its creation in 2007 by User:Haus, whose portalspace contribs show only two edits to this portal since 2008: in 2010 and one in 2016. It's a bit sad to look at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Nautical/ and see the vast set of 880 subpages behind the rot. That's a huge lot of human work put into a failed concept.

Others noted the lack of recent edits. I looked for WikiProject interest, and see that there is a WP:WikiProject Transport/Maritime transport task force, tho its not v active. I searched its talk archives for "Portal:Nautical", and got no hits. I also searched the talk archives of the Transport Wikiproject for "Portal:Nautical", and that gave me only 2 hits: a notice of this MFD, and a mention in 2007. I also checked whatlinkshere in the Wikipedia talk namespace, and apart from technical chatter at WT:WPPORT, I found only old current MFD notices plus passing mentions: 2007 in WT:SHIPS, 2010 in WT:OREGON.

Portal talk:Nautical also looks pretty abandoned. The most recent posts belong on the project page, because they are not about the portal, and the last post which was actually about this portal was in 2014.

So, yes, this portal is abandoned in its broken state. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:12, 12 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note on backlinks. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if this discussion is closed as delete, I think that the backlinks should be deleted.

I have a bot (BHGbot 4) which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries.

However in this case I don't see a suitable alternative. I considered Portal:Transport, but when I looked at whatlinkshere, it seems that a high proportion of articles are about non-transport topics, such as naval ships, sailing and other watersports, so it seems to me to be a poor fit. What do others think? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:20, 12 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Geography? – Levivich 23:26, 12 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Levivich: Geography seems to me to be a poor fit in many (most?) cases. Most of the articles are about ships or boats, which can move anywhere around the seas. There are some navigation articles, which probably would be a good fit in Geography ... so if you like, I could use p:Geography in those ones. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:56, 12 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@BHG: Yeah you're right. I was thinking nautical→ocean→geography. Looking at the whatlinkshere list, I'm hard pressed to think of a single portal that covers that collection of topics. (This must be an inevitable consequence of upmerging and getting to a high-enough level on the "portal tree"?) Is it possible to efficiently (i.e., not by hand) split up the list, maybe by the category of the pages, e.g., navy-related pages are pointed to Portal:War, civilian ship stuff to Portal:Transport? I worry, though, that gets too complicated. Sure, Course (navigation) could go to Portal:Geography but Anemometer should be linking to Portal:Technology and Tide to Portal:Science. What a mess 5000 portals make. – Levivich 00:17, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Levivich: I could try some such selection, but while its's theoretically easy to use AWB to compare category intersections, in practice it gets difficult because most deep category trees are polluted. I looked e.g. at Category:Navigation, but annoyingly that contains a few ships categories. Would it be OK with you if I tried a few such sets, but give up if it's too much hassle? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:39, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@BHG: Yes, of course! And thank you for testing it. No sense in continuing if it's a hassle, because a hassle solution is no long-term solution anyway. – Levivich 00:46, 13 November 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.