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Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Kilkenny

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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: Keep. — xaosflux Talk 14:09, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Kilkenny

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

Small Irish county under 100,000 population. We have repeatedly decided that counties are not suitably broad topics and that towns with such a small population are also too narrow a scope. Legacypac (talk) 00:34, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep for now (to my surprise). At first sight, good catch: far too narrow a topic, clearly fails the WP:POG criterion that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers".
I was not surprised to see that this portal was created by Mrchris (talk · contribs). That editor does great work documenting the lovely County Kilkenny and the historic city of Kilkenny, but has a vastly inflated view of the significance of Kilkenny cats and their county. This notably led him to create WP:WikiProject Kilkenny with himself as lone participant. That was userfied to User:Mrchris/WikiProject Kilkenny per an MFD in April 2011, but I see that the banner project of this still-born project Template:WikiProject Kilkenny, wasn't deleted, so it continues to be used on 84 pages. I'll MFD it shortly.
As usual for portals, this has an abysmally low viewing figure of only 5 per day in Jan-Feb 2019.
However, the portal itself is quite well built, again typical of MrChris's work. It has multiple selected article lists under different headings, and its layout all works. It's actually of significantly higher quality than many portals rated as much much higher priorities than this Level-5 vital article (County Kilkenny is VA level-5, i.e. it is in the 1,001–10,000 range of priority topics.) I am disappointed that the nominator either didn't notice or chose not to mention the quality. If we ranked portals like articles, this one would probably be at least GA-class.
So while my initial reaction to the narrow scope was to delete, I can't actually bring myself to delete a well-made and actively well-maintained portal. If it was yet more driveby automated portalspam, I'd delete it in a second, but this is far from that. It's actually a bit of a poster child for the core principle of WP:PORTAL, viz that "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects".
Pending a broader community consensus on which portals to keep, it seems like folly to delete a genuinely good portal as part of the current dejunking process. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:11, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. As BrownHairedGirl notes, this is a well-crafted portal on a small topic, but not vanishingly so (100k population and a long history). There are 5 selected articles, 8 history, 9 landmarks, 41 geography articles and some nifty manipulation of the auto-method that I'm keen to see how it works. The head article is B class and lacks orange-level tags. Espresso Addict (talk) 04:40, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, @Espresso Addict. This is indeed well-crafted.
Before I saw this nomination, I had recently reviewed Portal:Europe, which is a level-2 vital topic. When I saw Portal:Kilkenny, I was struck by how it handles its topic so much better than the Europe portal. Kilkenny has more sets of selected articles, and each of them showing multiple articles at the same time. If the Europe portal has a maintainer, they should come to Kilkenny and learn. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:51, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: There was a widely used model of portal building that just had Selected article, Selected biography & Selected image, with the idea that it was good to have as wide selection as possible in one box. I have always preferred this model, which I've used in Portal:Viruses. Espresso Addict (talk) 20:01, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - Old portal, 15 subpages, created 2010-10-08 10:27:55 by User:Mrchris. A comment by a maintainer, if any, could make the day. Portal:Kilkenny. Pldx1 (talk) 13:09, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Zombify by which I mean don't delete for the moment (at least whilst portals are in a state of flux and this might be useful as an example of a good portal). However, we should strongly discourage creation of further portals for individual counties (and other topics of similar scope) as the effort that abandoned half-completed portals use (for the creating editor and editors doing various cleanup tasks) could be better spent elsewhere. DexDor (talk) 11:17, 21 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Keep:
  • Comment the idea that purging narrow geographic topics is new is off. Some of my earliest portal MFD nominations were small population centers. I'm surprised to see a keep vote on a Irish county and a MFD on Portal:Ireland. Legacypac (talk) 15:32, 22 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete The WP:POG guideline says nothing about well maintained. What it does say is "broad subject area." This is NOT a sufficiently broad subject area. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:34, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. County level topics usually have plenty of scope for a portal and as others have pointed out this is a particularly historical county. Category:County Kilkenny and its immediate subcategories contain 256 articles, and many of those subcategories have further categories containing further articles within them - that's certainly broad enough scope for a portal. WaggersTALK 14:38, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Statements like that are easy to make, but closer evaluation often reveals a very different picture.
I did the same exercise of using AWB to scan Category:County Kilkenny + its first-level subcats.
Then I scanned to remove pages either tagged as stub or assessed as stub. That left 122 articles.
I then scanned the 122 articles to keep only those specifically assessed as FA, GA, A, B, C or list-class, leaving only 30 pages.
Some of those are biographies, which may be of people who had limited connection with the county, so I excluded the biogs.
That left 14 articles, of which 8 are lists.
Sure, some of the lists may be appropriate for the portals, and so many some of the biogs. But the reality is that only about 10% of the initial total are potentially suitable for the portal.
And yes, there are more pages in subcats. But there are a lot of stubs in there. The idea that Irish counties are broad scope topics is sadly misplaced; most of them are very thinly covered. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:51, 7 May 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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