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. No adequate refutation to the argument that this portal complies with the guidelines at WP:POG, specifically that it is based on a broad enough subject. ‑Scottywong| spout _ 06:27, 30 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Mini portal (6 articles, 7 biographies, 6 pictures) on the twelfth-largest religious denomination. Can be more than adequetely covered by Portal:Christianity. Totally abandoned; Roscoe Bartlett would be very surprised he is still in Congress, as would any of the 20-30 daily bots who come across this page. UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:01, 3 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It has POV failings, worse than the pretty bad NPOV-failing, WP:PSTS-failing parent article Seventh-day Adventist Church, because at least the parent article is obviously and explicitly based on an excessive number of non-independent and primary sources. The Portal should no sourcing, thus no sourcing failures.
As pseudo-mainspace material, it failes core content policies, and attracts editors who should have their attention pointed towards the sourcing, and thus content, problems of the parent article. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:03, 16 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep This portal is not abandoned and this portal is still active. With all of the Did you knows that I added to this portal, it makes no sense to delete this portal. Catfurball (talk) 16:42, 3 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Abandoned, and redundant to the head article Seventh-day Adventist Church. The selected articles and biogs were all added in 2010, and none of those I checked has been significantly changed since, except for Portal:Seventh-day Adventist Church/Selected biography/7, where @Catfurball removed the references.[1]. (Bad mistake: portals are not exempt from WP:V). That leaves the subpages as unsourced, 9-year-old content forks.
Catfurball mentions DYKs, so I checked when they had appeared on the main page:
2016: 1
2014: 3
2011: 2
2010: 2
2009: 2
. Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but list of three-to-ten--year-old items loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section, contrary to WP:TRIVIA. Even if the portal is kept, his should be removed: portals do not exist to immortalise the trivia used as hooks to promote new articles.
Two newish features of the Wikimedia software means that the article and navboxes offers all the functionality which portals like this set out to offer. Both features are available only to ordinary readers who are not logged in, but you can test them without logging out by right-clicking on a link, and the select "open in private window" (in Firefox) or "open in incognito window" (Chrome).
mouseover: on any link, mouseover shows you the picture and the start of the lead. So the preview-selected page-function of portals is redundant: something almost as good is available automatically on any navbox or other set of links. Try it by right-clicking on this link to Template:Mumbai topics, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
automatic imagery galleries: clicking on an image brings up an image gallery of all the images on that page. It's full-screen, so it's actually much better than a click-for-next image gallery on a portal. Try it by right-clicking on this link to the article Mumbai, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow
Those new technologies set a high bar for any portal which actually tries to add value for the reader. But this portals fails the basic requirements even of the guidelines written before the new technologies changed the game:
WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers" ... but this portals has been unmaintained for nine years, and it has abysmal page views. In Jan–Feb 2019 it got an average of only 32 pageviews per day, which is a risible 1% of the 3,119 daily views for the head article.
WP:POG#Article_selection requires that portals have "a bare minimum of 20 non-list, in topic articles". But after ten years, this has only 13 articles, a little over half of the bare minimum.
Most revealing of all is the talk page, Portal talk:Seventh-day Adventist Church, which had one post in 2010, and one bot message in 2018. Nobody else has even commented on the outdatedness.
Delete as per nomination, and as per analysis by BrownHairedGirl. (Also another portal by a banned user, but that is not important.) Catfurball raises a novel argument in favoring of keeping a portal, and that is that a portal be kept as a display case to put DYK items on. I don't have a strong opinion on whether using a meganavbox-type portal as a display case for DYKs would be a reason to keep the portal. However, the partial copy approach for portals, which results in incorrect information facing the reader, which an ordinary editor does not have sufficient knowledge to correct, is sufficiently undesirable that it is not redeemed simply by having good DYKs. This portal should be deleted with prejudice to future re-creation, because an editor who wants to create an advanced design portal, such as a mega-navbox portal, can always go to Deletion Review. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:45, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Well, things have certainly changed a bit since the nomination. I checked the 6 selected articles, 6 selected pictures, and 7 selected biographies, and Catfurball has now edited all but 4 of them (with no obvious problems with the untouched subpages). Also, Portals aren't supposed to have references in them perWikipedia talk:Portal/Guidelines/Archive 7#References in portals (At least, that discussion was good enough for WP:ARA-JJJ). So long as Catfurball (& co.) keeps this updated, I'm not seeing the harm in keeping it. –MJL‐Talk‐☖ 01:32, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@MJL, a portal does not just need a flurry of activity when under threat of deletion. It needs ongoing maintenance, and we don't even have a promise of that, let alone actual evidence of ongoing attention.
This looks to me like the pattern seen over the years with many portals:
Portal is abandoned
The abandoned portal is taken to MFD
Some enthusiast does a quick burst of updates in the hope of staving off deletion
In this case, the minimalism of the changes means that we still have the farm of outdated DYKs, which are now just a trivia section. So much for the maintenance. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 15:37, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: That's fair, but it does show the editor is trying. My barrier to entry for portal maintenance is lower than most. I also don't see the outdated DYKs as much of a problem tbh. If they were good for the main page once, then they must be accurate. Trivia generally applies to articles only, but in this case I would say it adds a functionality to the portal that would not be able to exist as either a navbox, being categorized, or in the mainspace. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ –MJL‐Talk‐☖ 16:03, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@MJL, I think it's important to distinguish between difft types of "trying":
Trying to make a few tweaks to stave off deletion
Trying to build the portal to meet minimum POG requirements (e.g. at least 20 article dispalayed)
Trying to actually become an active maintainer so that the portal stay up-to-date
I see only #1.
DYK is to showcase new articles. Continuing to showcase them ten years later is like ten-year-old news. And the fact that they were accurate ten or twelve years ago does not make them accurate now. Twelve years ago, DYKs could accurately have noted that Daniel Radcliffe is a child actor, George W Bush is POTUS, Donald Trump is a New York real estate businessman, Michael Jackson is a singer, the F-35 is a planned aircraft, Lady Gaga is a young singer hoping to record an album some day, Qadaffi was leader of Libya, General Motors owns Opel Cars, Joseph Ratzinger is the Pope, Bertie Ahern is Taoiseach, etc etc. Those statements are are now all untrue, but this trivia farm presents ancient factoids as if they were written now. It would be better if they we dated, but they aren't. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 16:26, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: I had not considered that in relation to the DYK. I've stricken my !vote for now. If two out of three of your versions of trying are met, I'll re-add my keep vote. @Catfurball: could you get this to at least 20 displayed articles which are high-ish quality? –MJL‐Talk‐☖ 16:36, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I have expanded the selected articles content (example diff), and will be expanding the portal more.
Wikipedia:Did you know specifically refers only to Main page content. It was not written regarding portals, and does not pertain to portals. Fact is, the word "portal" does not even appear on the page; it is a fallacious synthesis of policy to apply Main page guidelines to portals.
The portal receives a decent amount of page views, and with the addition of more links to it, page views will rise. More visible links = more views.
WP:REDUNDANTFORK and the entire Wikipedia:Content forking page was written specifically in regards to articles, and states nothing about Portal namespace content. Fact is, there is nothing about portals on the page at all; even the word "portal" is not present. Conversely, the word "article" is used 100 times throughout the page. Application of Redundant fork to portals is another fallacious synthesis of policy.
The portal is now being maintained (diff). It will take some time to expand it further, so hopefully it is retained, to allow time to actually do so.
It is untrue that to claim that Catfurball has improved the portal. The reality is that Catfurball has significantly degraded the portal by a series of edits such as this[2], which replace automatic transclusions with content forks. These forks are attacks vectors, and will become outdated unless maintained. I see no commitment from Catfurball or anyone else to engage in ongoing maintenance of these redundant forks. It is appalling that this sort of backwards step is being applauded.
You have added extra articles as content forks (e.g. Portal:Seventh-day Adventist Church/Selected article/19). We have had this discussion before: why do you continue to create redundant forks when templates exist to automatically transclude a lead excerpt from a list of articles, without even the need for subpages? Are you actively and deliberately trying to create a maintenance nightmare? In any case, why on earth are you persisting with this superfluous fourteen-year-old model of displaying excerpts, when you know very well that it is redundant now that mouseover provides automatic preview for non-legged-in readers?
Your claim that application of DYK principles to portals is fallacious synthesis of policy is either deeply dishonest or evidence that you have a of a severe comprehension problem. The section uses the same heading as "Did you know", and is presented in the same form as WP:DYK. If you believe that it should in fact be a collection of any trivia, then label it as trivia. If you believe that it should be used for some purpose other than showcasing minor new articles, then stop mimicking the presentation of WP:DYK, and for gods sake date the entries, because the facts in DYK are checked for veracity when published, but may be nonsense a decade later.
Average daily pageviews of portal on en.wikipedia in April–June 2019NA1K fantasy claim: The portal receives a decent amount of page views. What on earth is wrong with you that you utter such known falsehoods, when the evidence has already been set out? Your statement is simply a brazen lie, because as you already know full well, it receives an abysmal 1% of the pageviews of the head article. One per cent. Those are abysmal figures. And no, more links will not significantly increase that abysmal figure. See the graph to the right; all but a v few portals get abysmal pageviews, because the overwhelming majority of readers don't use portals. So only 6.2% of portals average over 100 pageviews per day. Even if you spammed links everywhere and miraculously managed to triple the pageviews of this portal, propelling it in to the top 6% of portals, that would still be only 3% of the view rate of the head article..
I am staggered at the sheer brazen dishonesty of the portalistas who repeatedly claim that unnecessary and redundant forks of content are not not redundant content forks. I look forward to your explanations of how black is white is hot is really cold, and Beethoven was actually a hardcore punk singer from Ulan Bator; it will be no more truthful than this content-fork-is-not-a-content-fork routine, but it might actually funny rather than just daft.
No, the portal is notbeing maintained. That's another routine piece of portalista doublespeak, a phrase constructed to deceive. What's actually happening is that this portal is currently being intensively edited with the aim of staving off imminent deletion. There is no commitment from anyone to maintain it in the future: no individual and no WikiProject or task force has undertaken to maintain it. And the edits which are happening at the moment are actively degrading the portal, by expanding the farm of redundant forks and actually reversing the progress which had already been made in converting them to transclusions. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 01:33, 10 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
BHG assumes that I compared page views to that of the article; I didn't. My comparison is relative to page views that other similar portals receive. Articles almost always typically receive many more page views compared to portals. There is no "brazen lie" in my !vote; BHG should try to avoid assuming that everyone else thinks like they do, and should try to assume good faith. This is not a groupthink exercise. Cheers, North America1000 03:08, 10 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The shameless liar NA1K is engaging in increasingly bizarre diversion tactics. The only groupthink exercise here is NA1K's attempts to redefine the meaning of plain English words in order to suit the tendentious agenda of NA1K's small clique of portalistas. This self-serving clique wants to preserve unread abandoned portals because it is their playground: they prefer creating and preserving these farms of unsourced content forks to creating actual verifiable encyclopedic content.
If we accepted NA1k's belated claim that they are comparing failing portals only to failing portals, the pageviews clause of POG would rendered pointless. That interpretation would mean that if all similar portals received precisely zero pageviews ever, any portal with zero pageviews would therefore meet the "large number of pageviews" requirement.
That would make a complete nonsense of having the clause in the first place.
If NA1K wants to get POG amended to support this absurd redefinition of language, then WP:RFC is thataway. Suggested proposal: "That WP:POG be amended to redefine large number of pageviews to mean near zero pageviews, in order to prevent the deletion of abandoned junk portals which nobody **reads".
Meanwhile, it is a disgrace that NA1K continues to disrupt MFDs by shamelessly posting such utter nonsense. If "large" doesn't actually mean "large", then language has no purpose. Such contempt for the ordinary meaning of words is dishonest wikilawyering at its worst. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 09:35, 17 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment to closer – Since I've been maligned here above in such a crude, uncivil and unnecessary manner, a closing statement. Under BHG's line of logic, then the {{Orphan}} template should not exist. If a portal were to have zero links to it in other areas of Wikipedia, it's common sense that it would receive low page views. Conversely, if 1,000 links exist linking to a portal, strategically placed in highly topically-aligned areas that receive decent traffic, it's common sense that page views will quite likely increase, at least sometimes. Makes perfect sense, really. Be sure to check out WP:ORP, where it states, "Orphaned articles, since they have no links to them from other pages, are difficult to find, and are most likely to be found only by searching, or by chance. Because of this, few people know they exist, and therefore, they receive less readership and improvement from those who would be able to improve them" (bold emphasis mine). This also makes perfect sense. I'm no liar, and the constant insults posted here and elsewhere are wholly inappropriate and do absolutely nothing to improve the encyclopedia. I anticipate the potential for yet another reply with yet another long rant of anger, which I won't be responding to if occurrent. Bye. North America1000 05:42, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Northamerica1000: I'm looking at List of Seventh-day Adventists to see who should be added. But I still got to get back to work on that list at some time, needs more references to be added and some people are in the wrong place.Catfurball (talk) 22:40, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I have done some work on the portal and I'm still note done must do more research.Catfurball (talk) 23:00, 15 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I am almost done cleaning up this portal, what a job.Catfurball (talk) 00:44, 17 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note to closing admin. Two editors -- Catfurball and NA1K -- have done various bits of editing to this portal for the purpose of trying to rescue it from deletion. However, WP:POG does not require a once-in-12-years flurry of activity. It requires ongoing maintenance, and it specifically says that portals need "large numbers of maintainers".
We do not here have that "large numbers of maintainers". Neither NA1K or Catfurball have made any pledge to engage in ongoing maintenance, and if NA1K does reply with such a pledge, it will have zero credibility since NA1K repeatedly does this exercise of patching up a portal just enough to stave off deletion, then moving on.
So right now, we don't have that large number of maintainers. We actually have zero maintainers. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 09:17, 17 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment That is not true there is a maintainer for this portal.Catfurball (talk) 16:08, 17 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Comment to closer – I signed up to be a maintainer of this portal on 9 July 2019 (UTC) (diff). I plan on maintaining it periodically if it is retained. North America1000 08:32, 19 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep There is ongoing improvement and an active maintainer now. --Hecato (talk) 14:23, 25 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
On a second look, I am Neutral. I am not convinced this is a broad enough subject area. --Hecato (talk) 22:15, 26 July 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.
