Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Wisconsin - Wikipedia


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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) 05:12, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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

Long-abandoned mini-portal.

The news section tells us the exciting news that that "Obama and Romney enter final stretch in campaign for US Presidency". Hold the front page!

The DYK pages (see Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Wisconsin) are all 551 weeks old. i.e. they are unchanged since December 2008‎. . Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but this 11-year-old list loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA.

There are 10 selected biogs and 3 selected articles, which is a thin set. The latest addition is Portal:Wisconsin/Selected biography/10, added in March 2009. That's a set of ten-year-old content forks.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". But in practice, this portal has not attracted maintainers for a whole decade, and Jan–Feb 2019 it got only 13 viewers per day. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:57, 25 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It's easy to write of updating and improvement, but the reality is that this is just another of the many hundred of portals which languished for a decade without being improve or updated. It gets too few readers to attract the efforts of editors, so if it is kept it will simply continue to rot.
WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Buaidh's comment is just more of the magical thinking which a decade ago saw editors create hundreds of portals on a high-maintenance model ... but a decade later we can see the evidence that there simply aren't enough editors willing and able to maintain this portal. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:20, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
No. It is not far easier to rebuild a portal than to create a portal from scratch. If a portal has a failed architecture, relying on subpages that are partial copies of pages, the architecture is an honorable experiment that failed, and it is better to start from scratch. (Besides, if anyone wants to rebuild a deleted portal, they know where Requests for Undeletion and Deletion Review are.) No. Sometimes portals should not be rebuilt except ex nihil. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:52, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete: I created and maintained this portal long ago. After being chased away from Wikipedia by various admins I have no interest in contributing further at this time. Sulfur (talk)
  • Hi Sulfur, please ignore @Northamerica1000, who appears to have reading comprehension issues wrt the guideline. WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers", so the fact that you have ceased to maintain this portal and no-one else has stepped in is in fact a throroughly valid reason to delete. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)
User:Sulfur - Welcome, after ten years. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:02, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
User:BrownHairedGirl - First, you may decide whether to ignore User:Sulfur, who has returned briefly after an absence of ten years. Second, please don't cast WP:ASPERSIONS on User:Northamerica1000, who I am sure knows what the wording of the "broad subject area" clause is and chooses to re-interpret it. It appears that Northamerica1000 has decided that first-level administrative subdivisions of nations in North America are a priori broad subject areas and so it must be assumed that readers and portal viewers will come, and that the portal should be kept because the fault is that of the readers and portal maintainers for not coming. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:02, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
NA1K's personal view of the guidelines is not supported by the long-standing text of the guidelines. WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Per the evidence above this one has not attracted either readers or maintainers.
XFD decisions should be made on the basis of actual guidelines, not on the basis of one editor's desire to apply the Humpty Dumpty principle that ""When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." @Northamerica1000 is an admin, and should know better than to try reducing this discussion to Alice in Wonderland, so I hope that the closing admin will discount this flight of fancy. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ::(contribs) 13:23, 3 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: The point of tagging with the {{Update}} template is to hopefully attract updates and potential maintainers. Makes perfect sense, really. See also WP:IMPERFECT AND WP:NODEADLINE. Fact is, I could overhaul this portal in around one to two hours and massively improve it. However, since it's nominated for deletion and some delete !votes are present, I will have to wait and consider this notion later. It would be quite counterproductive to perform such improvements now, because that work could disappear if the portal were to be deleted anyway. Cheers, North America1000 14:02, 3 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Reply. What this portal needs, like other abandoned portals, is not just two hours of rapid update to raise it just above a deletion threshold. what it needs is:
  1. updating
  2. a complete overhaul to avoid replicating the functionality provided by the new wiki technologies (see below)
  3. ongoing maintenance
@Northamerica1000 is bringing here the approach used in their days with the WP:Article Rescue Squadron, which was to preserve some stub on a barely notable topic by adding a few sourced factoids which brought it just over the WP:Notability threshold. That approach in article space just left us with perma-stubs, and when applied to portals it just preserves abandoned portals to rot again.
NA1K repeatedly says of abandoned portals that "there is only so much one person can do", and I agree entirely. One person may be able to rush around like a firefighter on amphetamines and push a series of portals over the threshold, but that one person cannot maintain the dozens of portals which have no other maintainer.
NA1K's approach is to preserve portals at any cost, regardless of quality and regardless of wheteher they are mainatined. They objected angrily to populating Category:All portals because it was "being used by deletionists". They propose the propose deletion of Category:Abandoned country portals, because they prefer not to identify abandon portals.
The lead of WP:POG has said since 2006 "Portals which require manual updating are at a greater risk of nomination for deletion if they are not kept up to date. Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create". Note that phrase "kept up to date". Not updated once in a drive-by-session, but regularly maintained. NA1K is not even offering to do that.
Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navboxes offers all the functionality which portals like this set out to offer. Both features are available only to ordinary readers who are not logged in, but you can test them without logging out by right-clicking on a link, and the select "open in private window" (in Firefox) or "open in incognito window" (Chrome).
  1. mouseover: on any link, mouseover shows you the picture and the start of the lead. So the preview-selected page-function of portals is redundant: something almost as good is available automatically on any navbox or other set of links. Try it by right-clicking on this link to Template:Wisconsin, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
  2. automatic imagery galleries: clicking on an image brings up an image gallery of all the images on that page. It's full-screen, so it's actually much better than a click-for-next image gallery on a portal. Try it by right-clicking on this link to the article Wisconsin, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow
Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.
Those new technologies set a high bar for any portal which actually tries to add value for the reader. But this portals fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game, and NA1K doesn't even suggest any way in which they intend to avoid duplicating the new built-in features.
After a decade of widespread abandonment of portals, hundreds of recent MFDs show that consensus has turned against indefinitely keeping this sort of abandoned junk in the hope that every few years it may get the sort of sporadic update which NA1K promises. it's time for NA1K to stop defending the junk. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:41, 3 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @BrownHairedGirl: & @Northamerica1000: With due respect to the both of you, both of whom I deeply respect, could you please keep this on the topic of whether this particular portal is worth saving? That being said, I must, with deep regret, go with Delete. I am a member of the Wisconsin WikiProject and I pinged fellow members on the project's talk page about this discussion a couple days ago. If these people haven't commented here to save the portal, I can't imagine that there is much chance of long-term success of this portal. -- Dolotta (talk) 16:25, 3 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, @Dolotta. Unfortunately in any XFD discussion, when an editor chooses to to !vote of the basis of flights of fancy, the errors need to be challenged. That is unavoidably verbose.
Well done with that notification at WT:WPWI#Wisconsin_Portal. I see that as well as posting on that page, you pinged no less than 6 editors. Also, the portal has been listed on the project's main page at WP:WikiProject_Wisconsin#Article_alerts since 26 June[1], and of course the portal page itself is tagged. The lack of response speaks volumes. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:37, 3 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete with no prejudice against recreation if someone wants to actively maintain. Regretfully, it has not been updated in a long time and has few readers. Thanks for the ping! Royalbroil 13:42, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - User:Mark Schierbecker has said that some portals have failed to mature. So has this one. I will note that Wisconsin's best-known agricultural product is cheddar cheese, which takes three to six months to mature by aging, and does not improve thereafter, and this portal has failed to mature for ten years. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:09, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. We are at the stage where the only activity on many portals is when they are up for MfD; that dynamic can work well at AfD, but a portal is different, without regular upkeep, an abandoned portal only diminishes from the quality of WP in the eyes of a reader. This is just another out-of-date cut-and-paste of the main article+navbox (in fact, the navbox is just pasted straight in). As with many other portals, this has a main article that is also tagged for issues, thus being itself under concern for quality. We have to face the reality of this portal – we just do not have the resources/interest to run it, and we don't even have the resources/interest to maintain the main article. That may change, but unfortunately, it does not show any sign of doing so. Britishfinance (talk) 17:38, 4 July 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.