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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: no consensus. Based on my reading of this discussion, it seems like the key arguments for deletion are that the portal topic is too narrow, that there are only a few page views and little maintenance and that in it was created by a sock. The counterarguments are that the topic might in fact be broad enough to justify a portal - including the presence of many FAs and GAs that could be used (?) for improving the portal -, that the portal can be fixed and that the deletion arguments are not grounded in policy. These are all in principle valid points, but the delete camp appears to have a better argument in terms of how many people agree with it and I am not sure if the duplication concern has been addressed by the keep side. We currently do not have any policy or guideline which describes when portals may be kept or not beyond the very general site-wide policies - but I don't see anything in WP:ATD that excludes portals from its purview. This is perhaps close to a delete consensus but in the absence of arguments and !vote numbers that clearly favour one side of the discussion, this is a no consensus case. Given that the key concern here is the maintenance status of the portal, I'd imagine that this will be renominated for deletion if no improvement takes place. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:37, 12 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:The Simpsons

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Portal:The Simpsons (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Unmaintained, low usage portal, with only ~1,000 pageviews in the preceding 30 days. For comparison, my own userpage had 733 pageviews in the preceding thirty days. And, I'm a nobody! It looks like it gets an annual update following the conclusion of a preceding television season and that's it. Worse still, on its "Related portals" section there is still one (perhaps more) redlink to the Futurama portal, which was deleted following unanimous consensus at this MfD discussion. Even if bot-created portals are discouraged, if and when some willing editors want to coalesce together, perhaps as a sub-group of an applicable WikiProject, I'm sure there are some semi-automated portal creation and editing scripts that would simplify re-creation of a future The Simpsons portal. Doug Mehus T·C 02:05, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep - I am not convinced that page views alone is a criteria for deletion per WP:POPULARPAGE. Yes I am aware it is referring to an article, but you are treating this portal as one. What is striking to me for a keep is the amount of GA, FL, and FA articles that are present to choose from. Wikipedia:WikiProject The Simpsons has the amounts at 22 FA, 22 FL, and 344 GA. Portals are meant to introduce users to the most important topics in a topic area showing high quality content, and should act as a navigational aid. They also act as recruiting for editors to join related Wiki-projects. As with other portal discussions here, there are things out there that can be done as deletion should only be used as a last resort. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:45, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep has something of an active maintenance and is broad and popular. Kingsif (talk) 01:16, 22 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Delete - The first half of 2019 is a more substantial baseline than thirty days. During the first half of 2019, the portal had a daily average of | 17 pageviews, and MFD has commonly taken low pageviews into account in deletion discussions. The article had 6548 average daily pageviews in the same period.
    • A little-viewed portal either is well-maintained or poorly maintained. If it is poorly maintained and little-viewed, it has no purpose. If it is well-maintained but little-viewed, it is a distraction of the effort of its maintainer from what could be the improvement of articles, which are the real reason for Wikipedia.
    • Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:The_Simpsons/ shows 29 episodes and 26 general articles, which were content-forked in 2007 and 2008. Some of them were bot-edited in 2010 and have been unchanged since then. A few have been tweaked by a human in 2019. Have not done an exhaustive analysis on the subpages, but I have seen no evidence of substantive maintenance.
    • Episodes are in the past. The past does not change, but comparisons of the past with the present can change. The general articles include biographies of living persons, for which content-forks have been shown, over and over again, to be unsound.
    • Low viewing. Apparently poorly maintained, but, if well maintained, distracting from maintenance of articles. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:51, 22 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete and oppose re-creation Long abandoned junk portal. First 17 articles were forked in 2007 by a now indefed sock and have only undergone trivial updates (links, disambiguation, etc.) or none at all, while the later 10 were created between 2008-11 and have not been meaningfully updated. 24 episode articles forked in 2007 by the same sock and only 1 was ever meaningfully updated. 5 more forked between 2008-11, and have not been meaningfully updated. 11 gallery pictures added from 2007-11, and Portal:The Simpsons/Selected picture/1 was deleted from commons in 2012 and Portal:The Simpsons/Selected picture/11 in June 2014, yet these sub-pages remain part of the portal.
Had a very low 17 views per day in the first half of 2019, 0.26 percent of the 6,548 views per day the FA-Class head article The Simpsons had in the same period. This is a significant long term decline from the 39 views per day the portal had in the second half of 2015, the earliest data available. The associated WikiProject, Wikipedia:WikiProject The Simpsons, appears to be inactive as the last editor-editor conversation (where one editor responded to another) was a June 2015 question, which drew August and October 2015 responses. The portal was last mentioned (excluding a notice of this MfD) on the talk page in Dec. 2011 in a post primarily about other project stuff. All that readers need to explore this topic is the Featured Article The Simpsons, which also has a set of very rich and versatile navboxes. Not a rotted portal. Newshunter12 (talk) 05:48, 22 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment @Knowledgekid87, @Kingsif, @Robert McClenon Please read my above deletion vote and reconsider how you voted. This portal was primarily the creation of an indefed sock, has been essentially abandoned since 2011, most content dates to 2007, the inactive WikiProject has been completely uninterested in it for eight years, and the portal's head article is a Featured Article (the finest content on Wikipedia). That The Simpsons itself is popular is not a reason to keep, just as it wasn't for Portal:Middle-earth and Portal:Star Wars. How much more evidence and years of trying is needed to prove editors and readers do not want this portal? Newshunter12 (talk) 05:48, 22 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 a bot (BHGbot 4) which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s), without creating duplicate entries.
In this case I think that the appropriate new links would be to Portal:Animation + Portal:Television. Alternative suggestions welcome. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:23, 22 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. As noted above, this is too narrow a topic for a portal, and it is poorly maintained. It's not completely abandoned, but it has a lot of stale content. For example, the most recent DYK item is Portal:The Simpsons/Did you know/26, created in January 2013. Some older DYK pages are fake DYKs, which usurp the good name of the scrutinised process of WP:DYK for trivia which has never been part of DYK, e.g. /15 and /22.
Some editors above seem to argue that it's not narrow, pointing to the number of quality articles. However, I believe that is mistaken: narrowness is a property of the topic, not of en.wp's coverage of that topic. More articles on any given topic doesn't increase the number of readers interested in that topic, regardless of whether that topic is The Simpsons or Clann na Poblachta or Petah Tikva or vacuum cleaners or the lesser crested tern, or even Ballyporeen.
The topic here is a single television series, and while it's a very popular TV series, it's still only one of many many thousands of TV shows. Due to en.wp's well-documented systemic bias, it is covered on Wikipedia in copious detail (905 un-redirected articles) ... but a narrow topic covered in copious detail is still a narrow topic.
And as Newshunter12 rightly notes, a portal is redundant for a tightly-bound topic such as this where the comprehensive set of 12 navboxes in Category:The Simpsons templates can provide much better navigation. Navboxes have the key advantage that the reader can move directly from page to page, rather than having to load a separate portal page.
Robert McClenon and Newshunter12 both usefully point to the portal's low readership, and contrast it with the very high readership of the head article. Readers flock to the head article, which gets 377 views for every view of the portal. (And that's not due to lack of links: there are 638 links to the portal from from articles and categories).
There is a WP:WikiProject The Simpsons, and it's still just about active, with the odd human post (latest was 3 September 2019). But it shows little interest in the portal. I searched its talk archive for "Portal:The Simpsons", and like NH12 I found that the last mention of the portal was in June 2011. Nothing in the last 8 years.
The redundancy and resulting lack of interest from both readers and editors makes another excellent illustration of User:Britishfinance's concept of "rational abandonment", i.e. readers and editors don't use it because we already have much better tools for navigating the topic. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:36, 22 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@GreenMeansGo:, respectfully, I'm confused by this comment and !vote. How do you consider there has been no "policy-based deletion reason"? Lack of maintenance, lack of upkeep, low pageviews, and triviality, as I understand it, separately or when conjoined, do very much make a deletion argument valid. Irrespective of this, deletions can occur on solid arguments regardless of established policy. Put another way, if there has been a very solid argument for deletion that isn't specifically identified in a formal policy, deletion can still occur. I'm going to invite Britishfinance in here to peer review this reply, as he or she has contributed to way more XfD discussions than I have. Doug Mehus T·C 20:14, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Because you have given no policy based rationale for deletion? GMGtalk 20:16, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
GreenMeansGo, the deletion argument I provided, as well as the arguments provided by editors and administrators like Robert McClenon, BrownHairedGirl, and Britishfinance are solid and strong arguments. That's a valid deletion reason. Moreover, as Britishfinance has informed you elsewhere, guidelines on portals were depreciated by the community due to there being no consensus. Thus, WP:COMMONSENSE, WP:TNT, and WP:IAR, among other general policies and guidelines, guide our MfD deletion discussions with respect to portals. Doug Mehus T·C 20:23, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
"There is no policy" does not make your rationale based on policy. What is policy is WP:ATD. If editing can improve the page, this should be done rather than deleting the page. Your deletion rationale (or lack thereof) itself explicitly includes a SOFIXIT argument. So...fix it. GMGtalk 20:25, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
With respect, you've still provided no reason for why we shouldn't delete this portal. WP:SOFIXIT only applies if there are wiling editors and/or administrators willing to maintain and update the portal on a more regular basis. An unmaintained, and out of date, portal reflects poorly on the encyclopedia. It, therefore, holds, per common sense, that MfDs reflecting poorly on the encyclopedia, and with their being no take up to maintain said portal, that we should delete said portal. Yes, Wikipedia has no deadlines, but that policy was crafted with respect to articles. Portals are meant as navigational aids which, I'd add, if no one is using them and no one is maintaining them beyond trivial wiki markup improvements and annual maintenance, then what is the point of keeping them? Thus, a strong delete here, without prejudice to re-creation in the future, provided willing editors and administrators put forth a plan—and commit to said plan—for maintenance, upkeep, and improvement. Doug Mehus T·C 20:31, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Your opinion is noted, and still not based on policy. Mine is. GMGtalk 20:34, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Not to beat a dead horse, but it's worth pointing out, if no policies with respect to portals exist, how can either of our arguments be based on policy? Respectfully, you can't have it both ways. Thus, common sense and evidence-based arguments will rule the day. Doug Mehus T·C 20:56, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Because WP:DELETE applies to all deletions. GMGtalk 21:01, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Likewise, I, too, have noted your good faith opinion, but will wait until I hear back from BrownHairedGirl, Robert McClenon, Britishfinance, or similar long-standing administrator with extensive expertise with respect to the Portal: namespace. Doug Mehus T·C 21:04, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
User:Dmehus, User:GreenMeansGo - I am not a long-standing administrator with extensive expertise with respect to the Portal namespace. I don't find the argument that we must ignore common sense because there isn't a policy requiring common sense to be persuasive. There is a policy of Ignore All Rules, which has a clarifying guideline Use Common Sense. There also is a deletion reason for content forks, and the subpages of this portal are content forks. But I am not a long-standing administrator with extensive expertise with respect to the Portal namespace. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:10, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @GreenMeansGo: it would have helped if you had more thoroughly read the arguments for deletion which have been posted above. No amount of editing can alter the fact the portal is redundant to the exceptionally comprehensive set of navboxes which already exists for this topic.
Your references to ATD also miss the crucial point that a portal is not an article. So long as the topic is WP:Notable, we keep even poor quality, unread articles because the stub article is our only coverage of the topic, and deleting it would leave us with nothing. So a stub can linger for a decade as a stub, and the failure to develop it is no grounds for deletion.
OTOH a portal has no original content, so deleting it removes no content. It is navigational device and a showcase ... and if it isn't being maintained and isn't being read, it is serving no purpose. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:02, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Then you should reach a community consensus to that effect. GMGtalk 21:03, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@GreenMeansGo: no one editor can reach a community consensus. However, since the last of the portalspam was cleared, the community has examined at MFD about 1,100 portals and reached a consensus to delete about 1,000 of them. The process of individually examining portals to see whether they add value for the reader is long-established. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:28, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, and from what I've seen, much of it looks like capricious application of arbitrary standards not based in policy. ATD is policy. That many of the same editors agreeing about much of the same thing have flouted it in one particular area doesn't make it not-policy. Regarding no one editor... I'm sure you understand quite well how the policy writing process proceeds. I've written policy, and I'd venture to guess you have also. I won't condescend to you to explain how it works. GMGtalk 21:49, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Point of fact BrownHairedGirl can correct me where I'm wrong, but Wikipedia is run by consensus decision-making, not policy. It has policies, which guide us, but we're not bound by policies—especially those which don't exist, by your own admission. Thus, the result of this discussion can determine the deletion. --Doug Mehus T·C 21:58, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
When done correctly, policy is policy because it represents the broadest most long-standing consensus possible. There are some exceptions, and if you are interested in a rant on that subject you can visit my talk page. The deletion policy is mostly not one of them, and not at all in this regard, because it does not involve illegal content, which are the portions of the deletion policy not subject to consensus. GMGtalk 22:03, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@GreenMeansGo: AFAICR I have never written policy. I have made many proposals in discussions, but I have not written unilaterally.
As to your idea, that that part of deletion policy applies to all namespaces, there are clearly many exceptions. For example, WP:TFD routinely deletes templates which could be improved, but which haven't been.
And I am fascinated that all of your arguments are based on your reading of one part of policy. You haven't offered any explanation of whether or why you believe that that there is any actual value in retaining a page which readers don't read, editors don't maintain, and WikiProjects don't care about ...and which is redundant to a vastly better existing navigation system. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:34, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: My principle concern is that you have your cart and your horse wrong way round. If TFD wants to claim an exception to ATD then they should find it. If they don't have it, and they do so anyway, then they are contrary to policy. I wrote Aurelia Henry Reinhardt. She gets all of four daily views and she's been barely touched since I left her. Should we delete her? No, because number of views and level of maintenance are not criteria for deletion according to policy. If you want to claim an exception to the policy that applies everywhere else, then you should find consensus for it. If you've never before written policy, then now is your chance. If you can't be bothered to do so, then you are contrary to policy and you are wrong. GMGtalk 00:51, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@GreenMeansGo: You still don't even try to make any substantive case that this near-abandoned page adds value for readers, and that there is any reasonable chance of it adding value in the future. WP:NOTBURO, but your argument is pure bureaucracy. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:14, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Does one really need to offer a counterargument at AfD when someone says "delete this page because it's biased" other than to point out that bias is not a valid deletion rationale? GMGtalk 10:10, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, unless you actually read Wikipedia:Content forking, in which case it's pretty clearly talking about duplicate articles, and not navigational aides, categories, navboxes, portals, lists, or anything else that is also not an article. This, like the nomination itself, looks like grasping at straws to justify what has already been decided: that portals should be deleted. GMGtalk 22:29, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - User:GreenMeansGo is advancing one of the more creative and tendentious arguments that I have encountered in a deletion discussion. They seem to be saying, first, that since the portal guidelines were never accepted, there are no policies concerning portals. That is sort of true, because there are no specific policies concerning portals, only general policies such as Use Common Sense. They are then further arguing that no portal can be deleted unless there is a specific policy-based reason, and the specific policy-based reasons do not apply to portals, so portals cannot be deleted, unless, of course, they violate copyright or violate BLP policy or contain spam or do other specific bad stuff. It is true that some of the specific policy reasons for deletion are oriented in particular to articles. It is also true that this deletion forum, Miscellany for Deletion, has always relied heavily on common sense when dealing with drafts (which are not articles), with user space pages (which are not articles), and with project space pages (which are not articles). This is a creative but tendentious argument, and I trust that the other editors and the closer will give it appropriate weight only. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:22, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - User:GreenMeansGo says that Deletion Reason 5, content forks, has to do with copies of articles, and does not apply to navigational aids, categories, navboxes, et cetera. Subpages that were created in 2007 and 2008 are obsolete duplications of articles; they are not navigational aids, but navigational dead ends. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:22, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - I tend to stay away from the portal deletions, and I think I haven't participated in any so far, but I have been checking every now and then on what happens with them. I salute both sides on their tenacious participation in each portal discussion, but I personally feel that the opposers should understand that it's over. Almost all (or maybe all?) of the recent MfD have resulted in deletion. That alone can be argued is the established WP:CONSENSUS and to the GreenMeansGo, the principle (guideline) for which the deletion nomination is based on. I'm basing my !vote on the above rationals, arguments and examples given for why it should be deleted and on past similar franchise/TV series MfD results. --Gonnym (talk) 13:04, 8 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - Portals for a specific TV show (even a very popular one) is pointless, i'm not sure what portals are supposed to do, they're ethier at the bottom of articles, or, in a area of the main page no one clicks. -Chazpelo (talk) 22:58, 15 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Former featured portal on iconic television series, topic has lots of featured content as well as 344 GAs, and the wikiproject is tracking nearly 1800 articles. Seems plenty of material for a portal. Espresso Addict (talk) 06:03, 17 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak keep - The Simpsons, I think, has enough presense on Wikipedia to have a portal. --BEANS X2 (talk) 22:09, 19 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment to BEANS X2 and Espresso Addict I used to favour keeping most portals until I realized how little maintained many are (they're supposed to be navigational aids and feature content, which requires regular, non-trivial maintenance and updating. When I saw that the Portal:Star Trek was deleted (I favoured "keep" in that case), that changed it for me. As I see it, I don't really see the point to maintaining any portals besides country-level and, in some cases, sub-national jurisdiction-level geographic portals. Why would we maintain a non-regularly updated portal for a popular animated television series when we've deleted a portal for a series of popular TV series that have been airing, more or less, since the 1960s!? Doug Mehus T·C 01:50, 23 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Dmehus: Well, I really don't think we should have deleted Portal:Star Trek, which happened while I was on a wikibreak at least in part because of Portal Deletion Fatigue Syndrome. Bad decisions make bad precedents. (I mean, why does an excerpt on an episode that aired in say the 1960s need updating quite so urgently?) Espresso Addict (talk) 04:48, 23 December 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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