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) 01:27, 3 May 2019 (UTC) reply

Portal:Oscar Wilde

Portal:Oscar Wilde ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Old style portal about a single author. We have repeatedly found that individual authors/painters/singers etc lack sufficient scope under WP:POG to meet the broad subject matter guidelines that attract readers and editors. You can see here that even with many editors participating in portal cleanup this is only running 10 page views a day and that it goes for multiple years in a row without an edit. [1] confirming that the topic can no bring in traffic against WP:POG. The head article is a much better way to explore the man's life and work. See earlier discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:George Orwell Legacypac ( talk) 14:56, 25 April 2019 (UTC) reply

• Comment - Old portal, 61 subpages, created 2008-01-15 20:13:33 by User:RedCoat10. [ pageviews]. Pldx1 ( talk) 16:10, 25 April 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete. Abandoned narrow scope portal fails the WP:POG guidance that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".

The portal is redundant to the navbox Template:Oscar Wilde and to the head article Oscar Wilde. This is a curated manual portal, but it includes only 8 articles in its list of selected articles: Portal:Oscar Wilde/Selected article. The navbox Template:Oscar Wilde, includes a much wider selection of topics, and offers better functionality because it lists all the articles simultaneously rather than one at a time. Even the preview function of the portal is redundant now that readers who are not logged in get a mouseover preview on any link.

Moreover, none of the snippets in the selected article list has been updated since creation in 2008, other than minor edits, mostly for disambiguation. They seem unlikely to be updated, because the portal's creator RedCoat10 ( talk · contribs) is semi-retired: their last 3 edits are dated 5 June 2018, 22 June 2017, 15 October 2016.

This leaves the portal displaying a static fork of the articles as they were 11 years ago.

The portal's only attempt to offer anything beyond what the article offers is the selected quotes, of which there are 31: see Portal:Oscar Wilde/Selected quote. But that's trivia; if there's anything there which isn't in already in the extensive list https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde, then it should be added.

Overall, this portal illustrates very well all the flaws of the old manual format of magazine-style portals: limited scope, static and ossifying excerpts, and massive redundancy. They are huge makework of work which is rarely done. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 16:49, 25 April 2019 (UTC) reply

• Weak keep and expand. As I have written on numerous occasions I see no reason to delete all single-person portals. Wilde seems like a potentially broad enough topic area, and being long dead lacks BLP issues. He is known for his many written works, several of which remain very popular, his piercing wit, and his well-publicised conviction for homosexuality. The last in particular makes him of broader interest than many other writers of his era. The portal looks attractive and has 8 selected articles, 8 images & 31 quotations – which I usually don't count, but here the subject is known for his bon mots, and the few I saw were well chosen. Hard to judge the content in detail as it lacks subpage summaries and my wrists don't cope with clicking refresh repeatedly. There are nearly 50 articles in the navbox which could form a good start for expansion. I don't wholly agree with BrownHairedGirl that hand-curated portals that contain articles that are also a navbox necessarily need deletion; in this case there are the quotations and the images in addition. Espresso Addict ( talk) 03:51, 26 April 2019 (UTC) reply
• Delete - The argument given by Espresso Addict is interesting, but the argument given by BrownHairedGirl presents the stronger case. We should not assume that portal maintainers will show up to keep and expand a portal. This portal has already been abandoned at least once, and one-person portals are not a broad scope. Robert McClenon ( talk) 04:35, 26 April 2019 (UTC) reply
• Comment. If this is kept, and someone messages me on my talk page (pings seem unreliable and I'm not watching these MfDs), I'm prepared to do a one-off conversion to a basic semi-automated portal (by which I mean one that draws extracts from one or more embedded custom lists) with at least the minimum of 20 text-based subpages. I don't promise to maintain it in perpetuity, but if properly set up with care, it should need little future maintenance given that the subject is unlikely to write any more works. Pinging previous commenters @ Robert McClenon, BrownHairedGirl, and Pldx1: to notify them. Espresso Addict ( talk) 04:50, 26 April 2019 (UTC) reply
  • @ Espresso Addict, in what way would any such portal

1. have a scope significantly wider than the navbox Template:Oscar Wilde
2. add any value to the navbox and the head article?

Note that minimum of 20 pages within scope is a figure advocated by some portal supporters. It has never had wide community support, and I for one regard it as being at least an order of magnitude too low. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 11:01, 26 April 2019 (UTC) reply

To be honest, I don't know, and won't until I do the background reading & start trying to create something. This is a good-faith offer to put nearly 13 years of Wikipedia editing, for ~12 of which I've been involved with portals, particularly the featured portal process & portal peer review, together with decades of publishing experience, together with the new methods for portal creation, and see what comes out.

I have a lot of print resources on Victorian literature (including Wilde's complete works), online access to a number of publishers, and friends who teach English literature or queer studies at university level. My model of portal development involves working on the articles of the topic as I go along, particularly copy editing, sourcing, & writing or improving summaries.

In general terms, any portal improves on a navbox or an article's embedded links because:

• it gives a proper summary of each article, rather than just a sentence and a half (which cuts) in hover text – which the reader will have in any case to expand in order to see at all
• it's more attractive, including full-size images, and the potential for far more images than can be squashed into the head article
• it filters for relevance and quality of the target article
• it allows readers to find the areas of the subject they might be interested in without wading through screeds of text; in the case of Wilde there are likely to be readers who want to access material on his trial, as well as readers who are only interested in his plays, or predominantly interested in Dorian Gray
• it can include contextual material (such as the subject's circle) without overwhelming lumps of text that stray off the main topic

In less-abstract terms, I intend to:

• do a manual search for relevant main-page DYKs
• include a bibliography, hopefully always visible at the top level (say, like the categories on the right in Portal:Design), but it might work better in the tabbed portal format (see eg Portal:Speculative fiction); the existing bibliography looks to be missing some of his minor works
• construct a timeline, again hopefully always visible at the top level, but it might work better in the tabbed portal format
• retain the quotations, as Wilde is known for his wit
• include multiple boxes dividing the subject matter into appropriate areas
• research the possibility of linking to free online versions of his works, which should ~all out of copyright, within the wiki umbrella &/or at Gutenberg (I'd envisage this in a separate tab)

Note that I said (added emphasis) "with at least the minimum of 20 text-based subpages"; I can't commit to how many until I research the depth/quality of Wikipedia's coverage (and how far I might be able to improve that in a reasonable timeframe with the reference resources that I can access). It won't come to >=200, though; I doubt any current portal has much more than ~120 textbox subpages (as opposed to images, quotations, DYKs and the like).

I'm happy to brainstorm with you (and anyone else interested) about how to make a useful portal about this important Irish writer. Espresso Addict ( talk) 23:36, 26 April 2019 (UTC) reply

ETA Forgot to ping, sorry: @ BrownHairedGirl: Espresso Addict ( talk) 23:49, 26 April 2019 (UTC) reply

Thanks, @ Espresso Addict. That sounds interesting.

As you know, I have grave doubts that the magazine approach adds significant value for the reader, let alone sufficient value to justify all the overhead of another page. The pic-plus-brief summary format may have been useful in print formats, but when I can control-click to open the link in a new tab, have the linked page displayed near instantly, and close it with a quick keystroke, I can't see the use on a laptop/desktop. On a tablet it's a similarly snappy operation.

It still seems to me that navbox is way more useful. It's a map; who needs preview when full view has such low cost?

The logic all looks to me very like paper magazine logic, rather than something designed for the web. The web has freed content to be wrapped and arranged however the reader wishes, and the whole business of making highly-polished wrapper seems redundant. It reminds me of a musician friend in the 1980s who was given a demo of a friend's then new-fangled CD player. Musician hadn't seen one before, and asked to be allowed to play with the shuffle button. After playing with it, musico pronounced that "the album is dead", because all those hours spent carefully arranging the order of tacks was redundant. An album was no longer a fixed-order publication, but a bag of bits you can shuffle to your hearts content. 30 years on, most popular music is sold as single tracks, but it feels to me like you are planning to go back to a 1973 vinyl double album with its magnificently elaborate cover. I am sure you would build it with exquisite care and great skill, but it still feels like a concept for a museum piece.

Plus I am not a fan of the subpages model. They add hideous complexity, are hard to to watchlist and monitor, and hard even for other editors to identify, let alone edit. (Remember that discussion we had at MFD:Portal:Lepidoptera about tracking subpages? Surely that baroque structure is not the future?)

And however you do this, it is going to be a very complex structure, which will require specialist skills to edit, as well as lot of time. That's a maintenance headache by design, and this is supposed to be a wiki: quick an easy. I got criticised for the maintenance issue caused by my making List of MPs elected in the 1832 United Kingdom general election as a multi-page format to evade server problems, and this feels like an order of magnitude more complex.

So if I was your employer, I'd instruct you not to spend any company time on this; the cost/reward ratio looks far too low. But I'm not an employer, and en.wp is not a company, so how a colleague spends their time is not my business, any more than how I spend my time is your business.

However, we do need to have a broad discussion about what model(s) of portal work best, and I'd hate to censor one format from being added to the list of option. If I did withdraw my "delete" !vote, I should be clear that I expect from what I've heard so far that my response to the finished product would probably be something along the lines of "kill this exquisite baroque monstrosity with fire, 'cos it's the most unwiki thing ever; and find some other outlet for the huge talent which built it". Obvs, I'd be only one voice then as now ... but I don't want you to doubt that there's a slim chance of me saying anything other than delete all those hours of Espresso's work.

So if you want to do the work and then put on your asbestos suit for the review, I'll say yes. But I see that you have made a similar proposal at MFD:Portal:George Orwell, so I hope you will choose one or other as your testing ground. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 01:52, 27 April 2019 (UTC) reply

Indeed, I'm kind of hoping I don't get called on both at the same time! And I know I have work to do on my existing portals too.

We both know we disagree radically on what might be achieved with portals. If these rather (scarily) generous offers are genuinely rejected by community, then I fear portals on Wikipedia, as I personally understand them, are simply dead. (And, yes, I do still primarily listen to music on a CD player, and I've never listened to music on shuffle (I ~only listen to classical, and loathe taking movements out of context.) I only abandoned vinyl with considerable regret when we moved into the wilds of Scotland and couldn't move our vinyl collection. The guy who helped with the removals said he'd never seen as many books in his life.) But I don't think that's for either of us to decide.

On subpages, I broadly agree with your assessment. I've asked and asked the tech people to help customise the auto-extract function but I fear they are all licking their wounds at the moment. I've even tried to get my OH to learn Lua, but so far no luck. I don't know what the community would think of simply proactively fully protected them, on grounds that if the extracts are coming from the article they should rarely need editing without consulting someone who knows what they are doing? But I know it's not policy, and I'm prone to wikibreaks.

Another approach to this general idea might be to pick an author whose work I know well, but has never had a portal, and develop a portal on them. But it's probably difficult to do userspace (by the multi-page model, at least) so I don't see how that's going to happen in the current climate. Espresso Addict ( talk) 02:18, 27 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.