User:SportingFlyer/Portal proposal

Introduction

WP:POG has now been considered a failed guideline, meaning portal deletion discussions tend to get into WP:COMMONSENSE/WP:IAR arguments. These arguments typically become emotionally heated, as while some users think portals should be deprecated, other users still find them useful as navigational and informational encyclopaedic devices. Therefore, I am proposing new guidelines for portals in order to make portal guidelines a bit less emotional - a general consensus to keep portals has been found to exist, but now that the purge of automated portals has ceased, MfD discussions typically fall into whether enough people who like portals show up, or if enough people who don't like portals show up. Therefore, I'm proposing a new set of portal guidelines, meant to limit the number of portals for two reasons: increasing the navigational potential of each portal, and minimise the overall number of portals to make maintenance easier.

I am open to any suggestions - please find me on my talk page.

Proposal follows

The following is a proposal to amend WP:PORTAL to give structured guidance to those working in portal space.

Portal guidelines

• Portals must cover a broad topic area, typically topics broad enough to be covered by a WikiProject. Portals may also be created on sub-topics where an exceptional amount of good or featured articles exist (more than 25) and the amount of content would benefit from an organised navigational structure.

• Any good or featured article may be added to a portal without prior discussion. However, the good and featured articles in some topics may be biased towards a particular area, in which case other articles may be featured on the portal in order to produce diverse content. It is common courtesy to discuss why you are adding articles to a portal which are not good quality or featured articles.

• Any template used should make it easy for any reader or editor to view the list of articles selected by the template, in order to monitor the content used on the portal for suitability reasons.