Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Zoos

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. bd2412 T 19:13, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Zoos

Neglected portal.

Nine never-updated selected zoos. Eight were created in February/November/December 2010. One was created in December 2010. This is the only significant edit I could find that wasn't reverted.

Three selected articles. Selected article/1 was created in February 2010, and last updated in November 2015. Selected article/2 was created in February 2010, and never updated. Selected article/3 was created in May 2019 (this really belongs in selected zoos, not here). Mark Schierbecker (talk) 08:38, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

My latest creation of a zoo article was 2017, and theres several others, but I do confess, that wikipedians seems to be less interested to make articles of red links describing scientific institutions in the world, compared to who and why someone kicked an object created of leather into a square created of wood, rather than developing the encyclopedia describing Zoos in the world. By all means, if you really thinks that deleting the project contributes to a better encyclopedia, then by all means, go ahead... But I have been hoping that an existing project may attract some users wo may consider contributing, than a non existing. Myself, I have contributed 17 years now, and always get surprised how many new people seems to be focused more on removing than contributing? If I would have experienced that back in 2002, I guess I would have been less inspired to contribute, and that the general development of the Wikipedia had been much slower.

meanwhile, Im busy training 18 elephants in Cambodia, and had less time to update Wikipedia. But I do appreciate your concern for the project.

Just for the record, what harm does the Zoo Project inflict to the encyclopedia?

Dan Koehl (talk) 12:19, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Dan Koehl, the driving factor behind this portal's MfD is not a decline in interest in Zoology, but rather the obsolescence of the portal concept. Article mouseover previews is one of the technological improvements to this website that have led to a lack of interest in maintaining this space. Several hundred of the most outdated legacy portals - more than half - have been deleted at this forum, so you can be proud to have created something that outlasted most others. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 02:52, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
To add on to Mark Schierbecker, we're not deleting WikiProject Zoo (if that is what you mean by "the Zoo Project"). This is the deletion of a portal. Part of why I support the deletion of excess portals is because they take time that could be spent on articles (content), and waste it on a navigation system that in most cases goes nearly unused. -Crossroads- (talk) 20:57, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - No. We know "why someone kicked an object created of leather into a square created of wood". We know that. That is the purpose of the game. We want to know who, how often, and when. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:45, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as per User:Mark Schierbecker.
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 had an average of 6 daily pageviews in Jan19-Jun19, as opposed to 737 daily pageviews for head article, and 6 daily pageviews is noise.
Too few articles, not enough maintenance, readership at the noise level. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:45, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per delete votes above, and per the fact 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. -Crossroads- (talk) 20:50, 8 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:Animals), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:52, 16 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Neglect is not a reason to delete a portal. Furthermore, this potentially passes my proposal for whether a portal is suitable for a topic - the topic is broad enough to have a WikiProject, making it useful for navigation, and the number of good/featured articles is around the number needed to have a sustainable portal based on Category:Zoo articles by quality. SportingFlyer T·C 05:27, 16 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

See my analysis below. The WikiProject has been inactive for years, and has never shown any interest in the portal. This is an orphaned portal. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:03, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per the delete !voters above. To attract enough readers and maintainers to be viable, portals need to be about broad topics. The last 6 months of detailed scrutiny at MFD of over 1000 portals has repeatedly shown for too long, portal enthusiasts had radically underestimated the degree of breadth needed. That resulted in many hundreds of almost unused portals which rotted because nobody wanted to maintain them.

In this case portal gets almost no views. The figures quoted above by Robert McClenon are wrong; I presume that Robert forgot to include the old name "Portal:Zoos and aquariums". Using both titles, I find an average of 7 views per day, but a median of only 5 views/day. However, I agree with Robrert's conclusion that this level of pageviews is just noise.

There is a WP:WikiProject Zoo, but I have just tagged it[1] as "inactive" per the criteria at {{WikiProject status}}. The last human post on its talk page WT:ZOO was in October 2017. The last actual discussion there (I.E. where one human editor replied to another human editor) was in December 2013.

I searched the projects talk archives both for "Portal:Zoos" and for the former name "Portal:Zoos and aquariums". Both searches threw up the same sole hit: a 2010 request to "please discuss anything about the portal on the portal talk page". So I looked at Portal talk:Zoos, and see that in its whole 9-year history has had only 4 threads. The last two are announcements, and apart the announcements the most recent discussion ended on 7 February 2010.

So the now-inactive WikiProject has never shown any interest in the portal. That means that there is no team of editors who might support it and monitor it.

With readership at background noise level and neither maintainers nor a supporting WikiProject, this portal has clearly failed. Meanwhile, the head article is a fine B-class article, which is actively maintained. It gets a median of 732 daily views, over 100 times more than the portal. The portal is another failed solution in search of a problem, which wastes the time of the few readers who actually visit it. It should have been deleted years ago. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:01, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

My error, as User:BrownHairedGirl notes. Critics of portals, unlike advocates of portals, occasionally make errors in math or otherwise. The ability to make mistakes and acknowledge them and move on provides a freedom that is not available to those who never make mistakes. I did fail to notice the renaming. Renaming of portals has been annoyingly frequent, and, as I have said, it is like a rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic that interferes with counting the lifeboats. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:14, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nom. Add nothing to the Main Article + Navboxes (which are up to date and maintained and subject to active editing). Pity that Wikipedia:WikiProject Zoo seems to also be dormant for that last few years, but that is a better repository of the catalogue of FA/GA articles on this topic. Nobody seems to want to support this portal (despite there being a reasonable amount of active editig on the main article), and nobody seems to want to real it. Not even vandals are attracted to it (unlike the Main Article). Now out of date and forked. Britishfinance (talk) 14:39, 18 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]