Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Peak District

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.

Portal:Peak District

Neglected mini-portal on a very narrow topic: the Peak District of England. It has trivially low readership, almost no maintenance, and no WikiProject interest.

The Peak District is an upland area in England at the southern end of the Pennines. It is mostly in northern Derbyshire, tho extend into a few neighboring counties. It had a history of mining and mills in the early days of the industrial revolution, but it is now a largely rural area dominated by farming and tourism. So it has a sparse population, and not much Wikipedia coverage.

Category:Peak District+subcats contains only 1,193 articles. I used AWB to compare them agaisnt them agaisnt Category:England-related articles by quality, and found only 1 FA-class article, 8 GA-class articles, and 5 B-class (see list on talk page). Even adding in the 17 C-class articles gives a total set of only 31 pages that is simply not enough to sustain a portal, esp since some of the topics have only a loose connection to the Peak District: e.g. 4 of 8 GA-class articles are biog of footballers. So the portals' "Featured article" is Chatsworth House, which is only C-class. I used WP:AWB to analyse the 359 pages linked from the portal, by removing from the list all the articles stubs, or assessed as stub/start-class. That left only 68 articles, so over 81% of the articles shcased here are stub- or start-class.

I can find no trace of WikiProject interest. There is no WP:WikiProject Peak District, but there is a WP:WikiProject Derbyshire. However, I have just tagged it as inactive[1], because the last non-mass-message human post on its talk page was in April 2018, and the last actual discussion 9.i.e. where one human replied to another human) was in 2013.

I checked for mentions of the portal on other WikiProject talk pages, by using whatlinkshere on the Wikipedia talk namespace, but found only 4 posts announcing the portals' creation: #1, #2, #3, #4. All were made in March 2016 by the portals's creator Bermicourt (talk · contribs); none received any replies.

Portal talk:Peak District has had only one post ever, which was a meass-message from User:The Transhumanist (TTH) about the portals project.

Like most of the many portals created by Bermicourt, this one uses what Britishfinance calls the "mega-navbox" format. It's a vastly superior format to the usual portal structure, which is a baroque farm of rotting content forks wrapped in a complex Rube Goldberg machine structure, and with the articels displayed one at a time to the por reader who has to purge the page to see another. However, the sheer narrowness of the topic means that this portal is almost unused: in Jan–Jun 2019, it averaged only 6 views per day.

The portal has had almost no maintenance. For example, the "Featured article" is hosted on Portal:Peak District/Article of the Month, which has had the same content in each of the 43 months since its creation, and Portal:Peak District/History is wholly unchanged since its creation in March 2016. Portal:Peak District/Places has to links to disambiguation pages (Hayfield and Longstone), both of which have been dabs since long before the portal was created.

This portal's narrow scope means that it should never have been created. The lack of interest from maintainers, WikiProjects and readers give no basis for sustaining it. It should be either deleted or moved to project space, where it may be use to editors, for example to build a navbox Template:Peak District. The navbox would be massively more useful to readers than this portal, because it could appear on each of the pages in the set rather than being on a separate page. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:52, 27 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) (in this case Portal:England), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:56, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I hope you don't mind, but I've moved this to project space as I definitely want to use this to expand and improve the topic. Bermicourt (talk) 20:01, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

User:Bermicourt - Yes, I do mind. Unilaterally moving a portal that has been nominated for deletion is very disruptive. It interferes with the ability of users to read MFD. It explicitly violates the wording of the template on the subject page, which states that it should not be blanked, merged, or moved. Yes, I do mind. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:13, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oh I apologise. No one's ever objected before; in fact it's been well received. What would you like the process to be in future? Should not an exception be made when the move is out of portal space by the creating editor? What are the thoughts of other interested parties? Bermicourt (talk) 20:18, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No one has objected to portals being moved from portal space into project space after the discussion was complete or almost complete, and after the community, including the MFD regulars, had an opportunity to comment. What should the process be in the future? I would suggest conducting the MFD discussion with the portal in place, and propose, as you have in the past, to move the portal to project space. The unilateral move disrupts the ability of viewers of WP:Miscellany for Deletion to view the pages that have been tagged. An attempt to create a new tab to view the portal creates a tab to view the redirect, and leaves the MFD regulars to have to walk through page history to figure out that the portal was unilaterally moved. (I have always objected to the moving of portals. I have just usually objected to it two months after it happened, rather than 20 minutes after it happened.) Just offer to move the portal, in the MFD discussion, as a Move alternative, and let the discussion run its course. You haven't done this minutes after the portal was tagged until now. Don't do it again, please. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:58, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Bermicourt: in this case, I am happy enough with the move. As I noted in the nom, the portal may be of use to editors, so the move to Wikipedia:WikiProject England/Portal:Peak District is a good alternative to deletion. No other editor has made a significant contribution to the portal, so it woukd be eligible for a WP:G7 speedy deletion. I regard the move as equivalent to a G7 deletion.

@Robert McClenon is right that in general pages should not be moved or deleted while under discussion. However, eligible speedy actions are often performed without a formal close of the XFD, so this doesn't seem out-of-order. In any case, I think it's v unlikely that the portal would be kept, so please can we remember WP:NOTBURO, and just be pleased that we got to an outcome everyone is happy with?

If Robert would like to withdraw the objection, I will close this discussion as moot. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:16, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - In the first half of 2019, the portal had an average of 6 daily pageviews, as opposed to 488 for the head article. My notes show that the portal was apparently incomplete, and that it was apparently intended for expansion that never happened. I had been considering nominating the portal for deletion.
- - Specific objection withdrawn now that the move has been discussed. I reserve the right to object to speedy moves or redirections of XFD target pages after the page is tagged and before discussion. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:33, 27 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.