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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. Consensus is for deletion. North America1000 20:29, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Paralympic Games[edit]

Portal:Paralympic Games (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Neglected portal. Five never-updated selected articles: Four were created in April/May 2010, one was created in May 2011. Three never-updated selected bios: Two created in May 2010, one created in May 2011.

Errors

Mark Schierbecker (talk) 02:31, 16 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete. Far too narrow of a topic for a portal. bd2412 T 02:36, 16 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. To narrow a topic. Main article+Navboxes (which are very good), effectively replaces the portal (and are up to date). The remaining purpose as a "fansite" has failed as nobody wants to maintain it. Content now dated and error prone per nom. Britishfinance (talk) 11:13, 16 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per nominator and per BD2412.
Portals need to be on broad topics, and this one is far too narrow. The last six months of detailed MFD scrutiny of over 1000 portals have shown that the definitions of "broad topic" employed in practice were far too narrow. The result was far too many portals which attracted only trivial levels of readership, and little or no sustained maintenance. These two failing create a vicious circle of decay: low readership means little monitoring of its contents, and few potential editors spotting the need for maintenance, while those editors who do spot the decay are disinclined to devote their efforts to an an otherwise abandoned-page with almost no readers. So readers don't both returning to a page which is and always been very poor.
This portal had a median of only 10 views per day in the 12 month to the end of Sept 2019. (The average is higher, at 16/day, but that is due to editor-driven spikes in April/May 2018 (MFD:Portal:Winter Paralympics) and in July/August 2019 (Requested move_27 July 2019). The median of 10 views per day is barely above the background noise of editors poking around.
This portal is in very poor shape:
  • It has 9 DYK sub-pages, all created in 2011. 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 8-year-old collection loses the newness, and becomes WP:TRIVIA.
  • I checked the nominator's analysis of the 5 selected articles, and can conform that they were all created in 2010 or 2011, and have never been updated.
  • I also checked the nominator's analysis of the 3 selected atheletes, and can confirm that they too were were all created in 2010 or 2011, and have never been updated.
So after 9 years, this portal has only 8 articles, which is a trivially small set, less than half of the risibly small minimum of 20 which set by the former guideline WP:POG. And all of them are abandoned.
There is no sign of nay maintainer, let alone the multiple maintainers needed to avoid the "key man" risk. And while there is a [[WP:WikiProject Olympics/Paralympics], it shows no interest in the portal — WT:WikiProject_Olympics/Paralympics and WT:WikiProject_Olympics/Paralympics/Archive 1 contain only one mention each of the portal: the notice of this deletion discussion, and a 2010 note shortly after the portal was created.
Meanwhile , both Paralympic Games and Winter Paralympic Games are GA-class articles. It's ridiculous to waste the time of readers by luring them to this abandoned portal rather to Good Articles. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:39, 16 October 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), without creating duplicate entries.
In this case the best alternative is Portal:Sports. Portal:Disability was deleted in August 2019, having been abandoned --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:47, 16 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - The following table includes metrics for this portal. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:46, 17 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Games Portals[edit]
Title Portal Page Views Article Page Views Percent Comments Articles Notes Baseline Type
Paralympic Games 9 614 1.47% Originated 2010 by editor who last edited in 2016. 8 articles, content-forked in 2010 and 2011. Two edits in 2013 and 2014. Subsequently, only edits through 16Oct19 have been for a page move. Article 2 is in future tense with respect to 2012 games. Articles on athletes are out-of-date and omit a much-publicized murder trial. 8 Jan19-Jun19 Other sports
Commonwealth Games 10 1296 0.77% Originated 2006 by sporadic editor who last edited Jan 2018. 9 articles, of which 4 were forked in 2011, 4 in 2017, one in 2018. As of 16Oct19, none edited after 2018, some not edited since 2011. 9 Jan19-Jun19 Other sports
  • Comment needs more incoming links, at the very least. Would need to see the traffic figures in 2020, to judge the potential impact. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:36, 19 October 2019 (UTC).[reply]
Paralympic Games[edit]
  • Delete - Obvious lack of maintenance.
  • The intended Portal Guidelines were never approved by a consensus of the Wikipedia community, and we have never had real portal guidelines. We should therefore use common sense, which is discussed in Wikipedia in the essay section Use Common Sense and in the article common sense. The portal guidelines were an effort to codify common sense about portals, and we should still use common sense. It is still a matter of common sense that portals should be about broad subject areas that will attract large numbers of viewers and will attract portal maintainers. (There never was an actual guideline referring to broad subject areas, and the abstract argument that a topic is a broad subject area is both a handwave and meaningless.) Common sense imposes at least a three-part test for portals to satisfy common sense: (1) a broad subject area, demonstrated a posteriori by a breadth of selected articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad) (the number of articles in appropriate categories is an indication of potential breadth of coverage, but actual breadth of coverage should be required); (2) a large number of viewers, preferably at least 100 a day, but any portal with fewer than 25 a day can be considered to have failed; (3) portal maintenance, (a) with at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained (b) the absence of any errors indicating lack of maintenance (including failure to list dates of death in biographies). Some indication of how any selected articles were selected (e.g., Featured Article or Good Article status, selection by categories, etc.) is also desirable. Any portal that does not pass these common-sense tests is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
  • Errors illustrate the unsoundness of content-forked subpages. Low readership. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:48, 17 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep page views are irrelevant. No-one is asking you to maintain this, though it would be less effort than seems to be put forth to get it deleted. There is no reason that content forking cannot be simply fixed, to obviate the issues that arise from it. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:14, 19 October 2019 (UTC).[reply]
  • There is a very simple reason why those issues don't get fixed: not enough editors are interested in maintaining the portal, which is partly a function of the narrowness of the topic and partly of the low number of pageviews (if nobody reads it, they won't see that it needs attention).
As above, the WikiProject shows no interest in the portal, so there is no pool of editors keeping an eye on it. The hope that after a decade of neglect, magical maintainers will magically appear out of nowhere to bring the portal to life is a triumph of hope over sustained evidence, as described in the essay WP:GODOT.
The attempt to shift the burden onto those advocating deletion is based on a misunderstanding of the problem. It's not just the use of content forks rather than transclusion; there has only ever been a trivial number of articles, and even with transclusion, ongoing maintenance is needed to ensure that selection remains broad and diverse. The set of Wikipedia articles on which a portal is based is not a static entity which can ever be ticked as "done"; new events happen, new athletes become notable, and gaps are filled in coverage of older topics. Older articles get improved in quality, so articles which were previously too poor to include now deserve high billing. The idea that portals are a showcase but can display the same small selection for years makes a mockery of their stated purposes. So a one-off fix s not a viable alternative to deletion.--BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:19, 23 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per nominator, per the delete votes above, and per the fact that there is no good reason to keep such a portal as this. Low page views and the poor condition it is in mean zero value is added by such a portal. There is no policy or guideline which suggests this portal should exist. Portals are not content, like an article is, since they are for navigation instead. It is therefore improper to use rationales meant for keeping articles to argue that this failed navigation device should be kept. There is no reason to think that hoped-for improvements and long-term maintenance will ever materialize anyway, even if promised or done at the last minute just to stave off deletion. Simple assertions that the topic is broad enough are entirely subjective; rather, that it is not broad enough is demonstrated by the lack of pageviews and maintenance. The community's consensus not to delete all portals is not a consensus to keep all portals. Content forks are worthless, since they go out of date, preserve old and inferior versions of article content, add pointlessly to the maintenance burden, and are vandalism magnets; therefore they should not be saved. I support replacement of links rather than redirection, to avoid surprising our readers. -Crossroads- (talk) 05:23, 23 October 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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