Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Television in Australia (2nd nomination)

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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. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:21, 14 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Television in Australia[edit]

All prior XfDs for this page:
Portal:Television in Australia (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Micro-portal with v low viewings (only 11 per day in Jan–Jun 2019). It has been basically abandoned since 2007/08 apart from formatting tweaks and removal of redlinked sections. The WikiProject seems uninterested.

Created[1] in September 2007‎ by Tim-m-m-m-m (talk · contribs), and built within a few days by Stickeylabel (talk · contribs). Tim-m-m-m-m's last edit to any part of en.wp in 2014; Stickeylabel's last edit was in 2008.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Television in Australia shows as small collection subpages, mostly ancient:

So the portal seems to be a foundling: born alive, but abandoned shortly after birth. There is a WP:WikiProject Australian television, and it isn't entirely dead (there was a discussion there in Dec 2017), but it shows zero interst in the portal: I have found no trace of the portal ever being mentioned on the project's main page or on its talk page.

This is the last remaining "Television in Countryname" portal, after the deletion of the others at MFD:Portal:Television in the United States, MFD:Portal:Television in Canada and MFD:Portal:Television in the United Kingdom. Just like the other three, readers don't want to read this portal, and editors don't want to maintain it. Time to just delete it. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:51, 6 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:Television + Portal:Australia), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:06, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Discussion at the Village Pump seems to be moving towards the idea that failed portals should be moved to project space under the appropriate WikiProject and tagged as failed proposals. We might as well start here. Move to a subpage of Wikipedia:WikiProject Television (e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Television/Portal:Television in Australia) and tag accordingly. bd2412 T 14:13, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Vote changed to delete. I am persuaded by BrownHairedGirl's reasoning with respect to intersectionality. My position going forward is that we should only projectify portals that directly correspond to a single specific and active WikiProject. bd2412 T 21:11, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I continue to be utterly bewildered by the desire of some editors to memorialise a set of pages which were basically abandoned 12 years ago, and which consist solely of a malfunctioning Rube Goldberg machine of stale content forks and some tiny, decade-out-date lists. I note that BD2412 doesn't even attempt to describe any way in which this junk could be useful to anyone other than a student of junk.
I urge the closing admin to reject the merger proposal unless there is an established community consensus to memorialise foundling portals. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:28, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
As a respected admin recently said in the discussion ongoing at the Village Pump, "If you want to preserve a failed portal as a relic for the benefit of future wikiarchaeologists who want to study the failed history of redundant content forking, then the solution is to move it to project space". I am agreeing with that solution, per the reasoning of that respected admin. bd2412 T 14:37, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BD2412: I'm sure that admin will be grateful for the compliment. But the question answered there was how to preserve. The question here remains here why on earth preserve this junk?
Honestly, please tell me what you think worth preserving here. I have scrutinised every page of this portal, and I can see nothing worth keeping. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:26, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The fact that it resulted in a failure as a portal is itself worth preserving, so that any future editor who decides anew to create a portal on this subject can see that it didn't work, and what structure previously in place was deemed not worth having as a portal. We do have occasional unwitting recreations of previously deleted content where there is an insufficient record that what is proposed to be included has already been found unworthy of inclusion. bd2412 T 19:05, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BD2412: this MFD nomination and discussion includes a fairly comprehensive explanation of the portal's failings. So just as an AFD debate usually gives a good idea of why an article failed, the MFD gives sufficient record here.
As to recreation, I sincerely hope that never happens. Almost all intersection portals have failed, because the topics are simply too narrow. Given the community's very limited capacity for actually maintaining portals, we need to keep the number of portals low. So I would oppose re-creating any intersection portal. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:50, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
This discussion can never substitute for the ability to see what the original contained, since all of the links displaying the inadequacy of the featured articles and images will turn red once the discussion is at an end. I am not proposing that this should necessarily be retained as an example of what to do (or not do) to recreate the portal, but also to demonstrate that whatever someone may have in mind towards recreating it will likely also end up failing. bd2412 T 01:09, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BD2412: I hope that anyone considering re-creating it would see from the nomination and the discussion that this portal did not fail because it was built in a particular way. It failed because it should never have been built at all:
  1. an intersection of topics like this is far too narrow to make a viable portal
  2. portals need ongoing maintenance for as long as they exist, and that portals which don't retain multiple retainers are doomed
The precise construction details of a portal lacking those attributes is irrelevant as the interior decor of a house built on sand. It seems to me that much of your desire to memorialise rotted content forks is based on missing that wider picture. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:05, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree that the intersectionality is problematic, and have changed my vote accordingly. bd2412 T 21:20, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete I see no need to memorialize the content if the content was never functional or useful. If there is a desire to study the failed history of content-forking, then a stack of detailed MFD discussions all closed as "delete" should be sufficient. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 17:43, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - This would be obvious except that there are myths that should be mentioned.
  • Since the Portal Guidelines have been downgraded to the status of an information page and we have no real portal guidelines, we should 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. This 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 articles (not only by an a priori claim that a topic is broad); (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 maintainers, at least two maintainers to provide backup, with a maintenance plan indicating how the portal will be maintained. Any portal that does not pass this common-sense test is not useful as a navigation tool, for showcasing, or otherwise.
  • Portal:Television in Australia had 11 daily pageviews in the first half of 2019, while the head article had 154 daily pageviews, which is seldom enough to support a portal. Evidently viewers don't want to read about television in Australia, because they want to read about specific Australian TV shows or performers. There are 5 articles, none of which have been updated since 2015.
  • There appears to be a myth that failed portals should be preserved because they are the best possible start for a new portal. Maybe they are the worst possible start for a new portal, or maybe a new portal isn't worth starting.
  • There appears to be a myth that failed portals have some supernatural or mystical value, which goes along with the myth that portals have some supernatural or mystical value, and therefore common-sense criteria such as pageviews and maintenance are not reasons to delete.
  • Just delete it. But if anyone has a goat to feed the portal to and the goat wants it, feed it to the goat. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:55, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Australia-related deletion discussions. Scott Davis Talk 13:09, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per above and per the fact that there is no good reason to keep such a portal as this. Low page views and the 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, being for navigation instead, so it is improper to try to compare dilapidated and useless portals to articles and say they should just be fixed. There is no reason to think that hoped-for improvements and long-term maintenance will ever materialize anyway, even if promised 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. Content forks are worthless, since they go out of date, preserve potentially 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, as proposed by BrownHairedGirl, rather than redirection, to avoid surprising our readers.
  • The first MfD is yet another case study of a portal being kept because of vague promises of upkeep, last minute changes to prevent deletion, and assertions of ILIKEIT; and going right back to being neglected afterward. -Crossroads- (talk) 03:26, 9 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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