Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Indianapolis

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) 23:34, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Indianapolis

Neglected portal.

Twelve selected articles created in December 2007/January 2008. Last update was in May 2008, except for one minor edit to Portal:Indianapolis/Selected_article/5 in December 2011.

Fourteen selected attractions created in December 2007 through July 2008. Last updated in 2008.

Sixteen selected bios created in December 2007 - June 2008. Only update after 2008 is Portal:Indianapolis/Selected_biography/4

Errors

Senator Richard Lugar lost his seat in 2012. He died in April.

Senator Evan Bayh did not run for re-election in 2010. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 04:35, 26 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per the nom. This portal has been abandoned for over a decade. It clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of readers and maintainers. This portal has had over a decade of no maintainers and it had an abysmal 7 views per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (despite the head article Indianapolis having 1980 views per day in the same period). The DYK section was last updated in 2009, while WP:DYK states: "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 over ten-year-old set has nothing to do with new or expanded articles, so its only effect is as a WP:TRIVIA section. 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 a decade of hard evidence shows Indianapolis is not a broad enough topic to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 05:22, 26 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete due to low pageviews and nearly a decade without maintenance. The errors listed by User:Mark Schierbecker illustrate that the use of forked subpages is a maintenance trap. There are 53 articles, not the 42 listed by the nominator, because there are also 11 sports articles, but they also have not been maintained. A very extensive On This Day collection of pages does not compensate for lack of maintenance and viewership. 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) 00:00, 27 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment – A few comments on Do You Knows in portals are in order. As User:BrownHairedGirl and User:Newshunter12 point out, the Do You Know section of the Main Page has quality criteria, so that the hooked articles are recently improved articles, and the DYK section of the Main Page is not a general trivia section. The Do You Knows in portals are almost always a general trivia section. However, there is neither a guideline requiring Do You Knows in portals, nor a guideline specifying that, if there are Do You Knows, they have passed any test. They are therefore almost always a general trivia section. There is no rule against having general trivia. My own thinking is that portals almost always have Do You Knows precisely because providing general trivia on a one-time basis is fun for portal originators. The Do You Knows of portals are useless but harmless. They are neither a reason to keep a portal nor a reason to delete a portal. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:00, 27 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Robert McClenon, WP:TRIVIA bans trivia in article space. The portal guideline permits it, which seems to me to be a case of WP:LOCALCON ignoring a broader community consensus.

I disagree with your assertion that The Do You Knows of portals are useless but harmless. They may be harmless, or maybe not.

The lack of any scrutiny process means that the random trivia section of portals consists of unsourced and unscrutinised factoids. Those may be accurate, but they may also be erroneous, or simply made up. Having examined several hundred of them in the last few months, I found the quality to be highly variable: everywhere from DYK standard to semi-literate nonsense, with a fair number of more minor failings in between.

It seems to me to be a defiance of basic en.wp principles to tolerate these unsourced trivia sections. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:23, 27 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:Indiana), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:24, 27 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nominator and per NH12, with prejudice against re-creation.

We could have an an interesting theoretical debate on whether a city of less than a million people is a "broad topic" per WP:POG, but in practice scores of MFDs on similar-sized cities have found the question to be moot.

The same applies here. Regardless of whether the topic is seen as broad enough, the problem remains that portals need both readers and maintainers ... but this portal has abysmally low readership, and for over a decade it has not been maintained. Unless there is a team of maintainers committed to keeping this portal in good shape for the long-term, it will simply rot again, and continue to lure readers away from a fine B-class head article to a rotted portal.

WP:POG also guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest)[1] to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal". But in this case, WikiProject Indiana/Indianapolis has been tagged for two years as "inactive". A peek at the talk page's history suggests that label was long overdue, and that the project has been inactive since 2010. So there seems to be no chance of it supporting the portal.

So it is time to stop luring readers to this abandoned portal, and to stop hoping that magical maintainers will magically appear from the abandoned WikiProject. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:20, 29 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.