Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Minnesota

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) 05:30, 10 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Minnesota[edit]

Inadequately maintained portal.

Average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019 are 15 for the portal versus 3633 for the parent article (.413%).
Created in 2006 by Atomaton, who only maintained it for about a week and hasn't edited normally since 2012. SusanLesch then took up maintaining the portal in 2008, but has only made fairly sporadic maintenance since at least 2010. Though other users (not necessarily portal advocates) have attempted to maintain the portal as well, it hasn't been enough to attract any readers.
Selected content is a rather complex scenario, so I'll address this on a case-by-case basis:
- Selected articles are rather old, with only six added in February 2008. They have barely been updated since then.
  - Notable error: The lede for I-35W Mississippi River bridge fails to mention both the finding that weak gusset plates contributed to the bridge's collapse, and that it was replaced by the I-35W Saint Anthony Falls Bridge.
- Despite there being over a hundred selected biographies, most entries on the list are only superficially related to the state of Minnesota and thus boils down to content forking. In addition, most of these have rarely been updated after 2008, the most frequent error being some selection ledes missing death dates for currently deceased individuals.
- DYKs are also very old; no new ones have been added since 2008, which pretty much constitutes a violation of WP:TRIVIA.
This portal hasn't been mentioned on the corresponding WikiProject's talk page since 2008. Most of the relevant comments left were about attempts to raise the portal to featured status, which it was granted. And this was before the featured portals system was deprecated in 2017.

A bit contentious, yes, but I figured it would be a matter of time, especially considering Portal:Massachusetts was recently deleted. Time to just delete this already. ToThAc (talk) 02:46, 3 November 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:United States), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:08, 3 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per the nominator's careful research. This is yet another unwanted portal: low readership, woefully inadequate maintenance, stale DYKs, a WikiProject which has shown no interest in a decade, and no talkpage discussion for a decade.

The fact that there is vast forest of sub-pages is of little value when they are both poorly chosen and outdated. And the former "Featured portal" assessment was made in 2008, and as usual the discussion at Wikipedia:Featured portal candidates/Portal:Minnesota is of very poor quality:

No checklist of criteria was used. Many of the comments are just variations of ILIKEIT.
The discussion is almost entirely about technical issues. As with nearly other FP review, here is zero consideration of which articles are selected for inclusion, and why.

So the eleven-year-old FP review was woefully poor at the time, and is valueless now.

Over the last 7 months of portal MFDs, we have repeatedly found that sub-national regions rarely attract the high levels of sustained readership and maintenance which are needed to make a portal viable. This is just another addition to the long list of failures. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:36, 3 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comments. A year and a half ago, I supported the deletion of this portal when it came up at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/RfC: Ending the system of portals. A month ago, I defended this portal at User_talk:Northamerica1000/Archive_98#Portal:Minnesota with User:Northamerica1000 and Wikipedia talk:US State Portal Metrics. I disagree with the characterization "Inadequately maintained portal" by User:ToThAc because it is updated once a month with a new biography. -SusanLesch (talk) 15:51, 3 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@SusanLesch: May I cordially remind you to read my entire rationale? I said that the biographies added "[...]are only superficially related to the state of Minnesota and thus boils down to content forking." I already took into account the fact that there are over a hundred.

Also, keep in mind that portals are not content, thus deleting any would result in zero loss of information. ToThAc (talk) 16:40, 3 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - per nom. Bios should be about people who are strongly connected to the topic. Anyone short of being a major elected official, booster or early settler should not qualify. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 16:55, 3 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Per nom and several of the same arguments made at Portal:Massachusetts. This portal has no purpose, which is why it has become abandoned by editors, readers, and even vandals (who are very active on the Main Article). Repeating several of the issues are the Portal:Massachusetts MfD:

1. For content, the Minnesota Main Article is FA-rated, actively edited (by editors and vandals alike), and thus up-to-date and scrutinized under WP:PAG. The Main Article is well structured with mouse-overs for each related sub-topic area to give further depth on Minnesota. There is no need for an additional forked "content-guide" to the topic from Portal:Minnesota.

2. For navigation, the NavBox is detailed and being transcluded on related articles, is subject to greater scrutiny; Portal:Minnesota just pastes-in the NavBox, thus adding nothing in this area.

3. For directory of topic articles, the Wikipedia:WikiProject Minnesota has the full structured directory of topic articles; Portal:Minnesota ignores this aspect that other portals duplicate.

The purpose Portal:Minnesota served over a decade ago has been rendered redundant by advances in the Main Article+NavBox+WikiProject. That is why outside of edits for nostalgia etc. this portal will not recover and will present as an inferior and forked version of the Main Article+NavBox+WikiProject tools. Britishfinance (talk) 17:16, 3 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Weak Delete as per User:ToThAc and User:BrownHairedGirl.
- The portal is still underviewed. In the third quarter of 2019, it had an average of 16 daily pageviews, little changed since the first six months or the first two months of the year.
- The maintenance of the portal has consisted of edits to the portal skeleton by Northamerica1000, which do not even affect the forked content, and the forking of new articles, most recently multiple biographies, by the portal maintainer. The articles include are content forks of the first paragraphs of biographies of persons, some living, some dead. Because they are content forks, which have been demonstrated to be an obsolete form of maintenance, any change in the status of the people, such as death of formerly living people, will not be reflected. The "maintenance" does not update anything. It only expands the portal, like blowing more helium into a balloon.
- The "news" stories include the result of the 2019 World Series of baseball, which was won by the Washington Nationals. The only relevance to Minnesota is that the last Washington, DC team to win the World Series, the championship of baseball, moved to Minnesota in 1960. The team that is now in Minnesota is only a historical footnote, not the current champion.
- This probably isn't the least maintained US state portal. It may be the one that has the most pseudo-maintenance or the most interesting form of pseudo-maintenance. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:15, 4 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per the nom and @BrownHairedGirl. Horribly maintained portal that is thankfully almost unviewed by readers, save a handful of readers lured to this abandoned junk. For a decade, readers and maintainers alike have shunned this portal and it's high time to end the farce that this portal adds anything positive to Wikipedia. The FA-class head article Minnesota and its many rich and versatile navboxs are all readers need to explore this topic. Newshunter12 (talk) 02:58, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom and per all the other subnational regions that were found to be poor portal topics. If there is a subnational region that merits a portal, Minnesota isn't it. – Levivich 05:31, 9 November 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.