Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Time portal

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was merge‎ to Time travel in fiction. Liz Read! Talk! 02:11, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Time portal

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Time portal (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Very poorly referenced fictional concept, mostly a WP:NLIST/WP:IPC failing list of appearances of this concept in fiction. That said, maybe a short rewrite could save this (User:Tompa Dompa?) given SFE's short entry on "time gate", which seems a similar concept (their Time portal effectively redirects here), but I remain concerned about GNG given that I did not locate any mention of these terms in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Science fact and science fiction an encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction (Library Movements) by Don DAmmassa, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The New encyclopedia of science fiction . The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature has two in passing mentions of works using this term. Is entry in SFE enough? Possible merge/redirect targets: time machine, time slip. PS. Time machine in fact seems to be just a redirect - that concept is very likely notable (separately from time travel) and should be (re)created... Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:03, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

PS. @Tompa dompa (I messed up with ping above...) Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:12, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@TompaDompa Try three. Pretty please, could you blue link (and blank if you hate it) your username, so I can quckly see if pings work...? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:13, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: There seems to be something in Worlds Enough and Time : Explorations of Time in Science Fiction and Fantasy (edited by Gary Westfahl, George Slusser and David A. Leiby), but I can't see if it's substantial or a shorter mention. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction by Paul J. Nahin has a number of what seems like relevant mentions, but yet again, I can only access snippets. Physical copies of both are available in the Swedish library system, but not in the city where I live, and I can't find a way to borrow the e-books. Anyone with better/easier access? /Julle (talk) 06:34, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @Julle The first book is limited access in IA [1], but it is in Z-library. The second one seems available from IA [2]. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 12:42, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Using the search function at the Internet Archive, neither seems to have content that is useful for our purposes here. The latter saysThe explicit use of the term black hole for a region of spacetime operating as a temporal and/or spatial portal can be found in science fiction before Wheeler's use of the term in the technical literature., but that's in the context of the spacetime effects of high-mass objects rather than the science fiction concept that is the subject of this article. TompaDompa (talk) 22:07, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep or merge to Time travel Time travel in fiction, where there seems not yet any mention of this specific device of time travel. In addition to the above, there are many short appearances in various secondary sources, so I don't doubt that at least a short article could reasonably be written. This has brief commentary on the function of a time gate vs. time slip, The Time Machine Hypothesis: Extreme Science Meets Science Fiction, p. 195, quantifies use in sci-fi, and this extensively talks about one instance by Heinlein. Here the preview looks pretty promising, commenting again on use and function ("Often, the time portal site “is the ancestral home of the child protagonists” (Cosslett 245), … Amy’s time portal combines all of these devices"), but I cannot further access it. Daranios (talk) 12:33, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @Daranios The latter is available through Wikipedia Library ([3]). But it's a short mention and it seems to focus on Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Truth About Stone Hollow (which we don't have an article about yet). The cited work (Cosslett) is also available there ([4]), but it seems not to mention time portals or gates, and is all about time slip trope. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 12:49, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    So it seems in total that we could easily support the improved version of a list-like article like we have now, with general commentary based e.g. on the SFE article, and many individual instances including commentary supported by various sources. Which would mean sourcing/improving what we have, trimming examples not supported by sources, and expanding based on found sources. Further such sources would be Unendliche Weiten: Lösungsorientiert denken mit Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock und Dr. McCoy, p. 193, supporting Star Trek, and Zeitreisen - Die Erfüllung eines Menschheitstraums. Also, my impression is that both time portal and time gate are in use, but the latter appears more frequently and such suggests itself for the article title. Daranios (talk) 15:55, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    A list-like article is, as usual for topics like this, a bad idea. The article should instead (as always) be built from the sources and reflect the relative weight given to different aspects of the topic found in the overall literature on the overarching topic, as mandated by WP:PROPORTION. There's a reason science fiction encyclopedias like the ones mentioned in the nomination don't really do TV Tropes-style lists. TompaDompa (talk) 17:21, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Another way of putting it would be as it was phrased in the most recent essay in the WP:SIGNPOST: build the article from the source, the whole source, and nothing but the source. TompaDompa (talk) 18:09, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Don't want to go too deeply into this, as keeping it a list is just one possibility: But I don't feel like the comparatively short overview in a tertiary/secondary source we have should prevent us from including appearances of time portals with short commentary based on other secondary sources. That's too much a zero/one approach for me here. I feel that on the one hand that allowing them would be more or less in accordance with "If you're writing about something more obscure where sources are hard to come by, you'll probably need to use every source you find, even the minor or hyperspecific ones." from the source, the whole source, and nothing but the source. And on the other hand, if we want this to be a list of time portals, it could include such instances based on the formulation of an inclusion critereon like "has been commented on in a secondary source". Daranios (talk) 21:17, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Firstly,sourcing/improving what we have means working backwards from improperly-added content, which is incompatible with proper article construction. Secondly, lists put an outsized emphasis—i.e. WP:Undue weight—on examples due to their visual prominence. Examples are supposed to support the analysis, not be included for their own sake (in that way, they are similar to images). TompaDompa (talk) 22:02, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    As a general rule, I mostly disagree. For this specific case, fair enough: My view here is just that we should (be allowed to) include time gates in works of fiction which do not appear in the one overview article we have found so far, if the other secondary sources dug up have something meaningful to say about them. Which, sure, supports the analysis. Daranios (talk) 07:32, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to Time travel in fiction, the natural home for such content. If such a section is expanded until it is disproportionate to the article, it can be broken out to its own new article. BD2412 T 15:55, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to Time travel in fiction (which in turn looks to be in need of quite a bit of work). Looking at sources brought up here and my own go-to sources, there are some mentions but not that much to flesh this out with, so at least for now it seems better to cover it in the parent article. The secondary literature on this topic appears to be much more limited than for time viewer (2022 AfD), for instance. TompaDompa (talk) 21:58, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to Time travel in fiction - a single, stronger article can be built from two weak forks. Bearian (talk) 07:06, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to Time travel in fiction – Be far the best WP:ATD. Svartner (talk) 05:37, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge per all. This is the best WP:ATD. The WP:SIGCOV is borderline, and this is a WP:NOPAGE circumstance where it's best covered in context with other time travel concepts from other fiction. Shooterwalker (talk) 18:08, 10 March 2025 (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 article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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