Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Women's sport

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) 05:11, 30 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Women's sport[edit]

Long-neglected portal. Created in 2011 with an absurdly over-complex structure (440 subpages!), it has long been abandoned by its creator, by readers, and by the WikiProject which has never shown any interest in it, let alone in staying on top of the 440 sub-pages.

I was prompted to examine the portal by a request on my talk[1] from Black Falcon (talk · contribs), who was considering adding links to it. The notes which I wrote in reply[2] form the starting point for this nomination.

It has 9 Portal:Women's sport/Selected articles, and 13 selected biogs, all content-forked. All 13 biogs are about people who were alive when the content fork was made in 2011, but none of the 13 has had any substantive update since. All are outdated. Here's there first 6:

biog/1: Cri-zelda Brits appears to have retired in 2016[3], but the portal doesn't mention that
biog/2: Alyssa Healy is still active, but the portal makes no mention of her many achivemnets since 2011
biog/3: Lauren Ebsary. The portal says she is a current member of the Australia national women's cricket team, but she last played international cricket in 2010[4]
biog/4: the portal describes Izzy Westbury as an Australian cricketer, but the article says she is a former cricketer. Cricinf lists her last match as being in 2017[5]
biog/5: the portal says that Steph Davies has played for Somerset women since 2001, but Somerset Women cricket team says she left the team in 2012
biog/6: Faith Leech died in 2013, but the portal doesn't mention her death

(Note also that 5 of the 13 bogs are about cricket, which is a serious imbalance).

The DYKs are all long-since stale; the sample of ten birthday pages which I examined were all untouched for between five and 8 years; the most recent addition to the biogs was in 2012 (see biog/13); the most recent /article is article/9, which was added in 2011, i.e. before the portal was even moved to mainspace.

The portal is almost unread. It had a daily average of only 10 views/day in Oct 2018–Sept 2019. That's risibly low, and it's not due to lack of promotion: there are incoming links from 1,322 articles and 2,046 categories.

There has never been any discussion at Portal talk:Women's sport. This portal seems to be the work of one lone edior who created it and then abandsoned it, with no editor taking an interest thereafter, apart from the usual formatting tweaks to the mainpage.

There is a WP:WikiProject Women's sport, but Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women's sport looks only semi-active. There are periodic announcements, but I don't see any actual discussion. A search of Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women's sport and all its sub-pages (i.e. archives etc) gives no hits for "Portal:Women's sport", apart from a 13 October 2019 note on adding links to the portal.

So AFAICS, this is an abandoned portal: abandoned by its creator, by readers, and by the WikiProject which has never shown any interest in it, let alone in staying on top of the 440 sub-pages. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:12, 22 October 2019 (UTC) BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:12, 22 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nom, to which nothing need be added. bd2412 T 22:18, 22 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as per User:BrownHairedGirl. The portal has only 12 daily average pageviews in the first half of 2019 (BHG was using a different baseline and had a similar number), as contrasted with 298 for the head article, which is not usually enough to sustain a portal. (Readers don't want to read about women's sports; they want to read about particular female athletes or particular women's teams or competitions.)
- 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.
- The discrepancies in the articles illustrate the unsoundness of using content-forked subpages.
- Low viewership, obviously no maintenance. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:39, 22 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Robert McClenon's comment that "Readers don't want to read about women's sports; they want to read about particular female athletes or particular women's teams or competitions". That was my thought when I first looked at the portal, and it seems to be supported by the evidence of a relatively high number of incoming links but low readership.

Obviously, some readers will be interested in the topic of "women's sports", but it seems that most readers are far more interested in the individual sports rather than all sports by gender. In any case, this portal does an abysmal job of depicting the topic of "women's sports". It just shows a pseudo-random selection of articles, rather than attempting to explain the history of women's sport and how it compares with men's sport.

Like most portals, this is a set of decontexualised samples rather a guide to a concept. If we are going to have portals displaying sets of articles, there should be some actual curation involved, but this portal reflects the normal poor standard of having a list which could have been generated by a bot trawling the categories and making a random sample of articles above a given quality threshold. They are like Churchill's pudding: no theme. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:03, 22 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete portals should not have so many subpages. Better to nuke. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 23:05, 22 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - There is a logical reason for 365 of the 440 subpages, even if we disagree with it. There is one subpage for every day of the year. I have occasionally seen this in other portals. It does make it very hard to assess the portal, because the content subpages, such as Selected Articles, get pushed onto the second browser subpage. Just explaining. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:10, 23 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Per nom. Portal is now technologically redundant to other superior WP options/tools (main articles, navboxes and WP Project directories). It is thus “rationally abandoned” in favour of better alternatives, and unlikely to recover from that situation. Britishfinance (talk) 15:56, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete this portal isn't needed.Catfurball (talk) 21:22, 24 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; instead they are to be evaluated individually, as is being done here. 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) 04:39, 29 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.