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Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Biological warfare (2nd nomination)

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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) 04:33, 4 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Biological warfare[edit]

Portal:Biological warfare (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
All prior XfDs for this page:

Alarmist, misinformative and neglected portal. Probably actively doing harm to public understanding of warfare. Portal came up at MfD in 2011, but was kept. If only it had been deleted then.

Ten selected articles.

Twenty-three selected biological agents.

All were created in December 2009, except for two change outs in February 2010. Last edit in 2013 by a bot. Most of these entries have no business being on this portal. Many of these diseases have been evaluated to study the threat they could one day pose, but in practicality, many of these have almost no value as weapons (e.g. prions and Diphtheria). Accordingly, many of these articles say nothing about their military value, so we should not be sending readers on a fool's errand. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 05:57, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete. Not a viable Portal. Inferior to Biological warfare as a landing page and starting point for navigating. It is a damaging page for Wikipedia being coverage on a contentious topic that is entirely unsourced, not explicitly, presenting of poor example of Wikipedia.
An alternative to deletion is "Redirect to Biological warfare", in case someone thinks there is valuable material in the history for re-use in projectspace.
Apologies to User:TenPoundHammer for Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Biological warfare. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:19, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • This portal's creator said at the last MfD that the "[n]ominator failed to note the portal is setup so that it doesn't have to be updated regularly."
This astonishingly myopic view is exactly the reason portals have failed. TenPoundHammer was right. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 06:51, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Lol, TenPoundHammer, you were ahead of your time. And the one delete voter struck their vote based on the creator's promise to maintain the portal. The creator only ever made five more edits to the portal, which just goes to show how meaningless promises at MfD to maintain a portal are. Newshunter12 (talk) 07:13, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per the nom. This portal has been abandoned for over nine years, save for some passing one-off updates many years ago. Since 2006, the lead of WP:POG has said "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... and this one has not been maintained by Cirt, who last updated it in October 2013 and has since been indef blocked for sockpuppetry. Many of it's articles are also of dubious connection to the topic of biological warfare.
It clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of readers and maintainers. This decrepit portal has had over nine years of no steady maintainers and it had an abysmal 6 views per day from January 1 to June 30 2019. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. I oppose re-creation, as over nine years of hard evidence shows Biological warfare is not a broad enough topic to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 07:13, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per nom. The intended purpose of portals remains somewhat foggy to me, but this does not appear useful as a navigational tool, highlighter of content, or home for unique content. Ajpolino (talk) 14:40, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per my last MFD. This has had time to grow since then and it obviously hasn't. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 15:18, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete as per User:Mark Schierbecker and User:TenPoundHammer. The intended purpose of portals remains foggy to me as to User:Ajpolino, because the portal advocates seem to attribute some mystical value to them that they do not explain in these MFDs. This portal should be a textbook example of why statements that portals will be maintained in the future cannot be trusted. Creating portals is fun. Maintaining portals is hard work. Has anyone noticed that a lot of portal originators are later banned? There is no short-term reason to expect that a re-creation of this portal will address the problems. Any proposed re-creation of this portal using a more modern design, and taking into account the failures of many portals, can go to Deletion Review. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:46, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note to closing admin. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if you close this discussion as delete, please can you not remove the backlinks? I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s) (in this case Portal:Biology and Portal:War), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:09, 31 August 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.


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