Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Current events portal pages before January 2001

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. ✗plicit 03:12, 21 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Current events portal pages before January 2001

All these pages are fake archives of nonexistent versions of Portal:Current events. Wikipedia was founded in January 2001, these month pages from before January 2001 denoting "This is an archived version of Wikipedia's Current events Portal from <month> <year>." is false information. Most of these pages were created by users duplicating content from mainspace year articles, some of them being unattributed WP:COPYWITHIN. A discussion at Portal talk:Current events last year about pre-wikipedia pages had few participants and was archived without resolution.

This MFD hopes to resolve whether we should keep or delete any Current events portal "archives" from before Wikipedia was founded. For precedent see 1995 pages MFD and 1994 pages MFD. Same arguments as in the old MFDs apply here. This nomination includes all base month pages before January 2001, and their calendar and daily subpages in the categories included above, which amounts to ~900 pages. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 12:30, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. To add to the argument of Wikipedia's foundation date – the portal was created on 30 June 2006. —⁠andrybak (talk) 13:12, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nom. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:40, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Portal:Current events/January 1999 through Portal:Current events/December 2000 should be history merged with the corresponding mainspace pages (January 1999 through December 2000) before deleting. All older content was either originally created in portal namespace or were empty shells with no content worth preserving. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 03:51, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete I think I brought this up before but forgot about it. Extremely confusing hoax pages. Dronebogus (talk) 18:24, 13 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete all per above. As an aside re the history: the "Current events" page was basically moved from the main to the portal namespace in June/July 2006. A lot of its early history is at the respective month/year pages, notably October 2003, which contains its edits before then ... also see Nost:Current events. Perhaps some of the 2001 pages can be added too ... it's not in the 17 August 2001 database dump so wasn't created by then, but it *is* listed at nost:Wikipedia/Most popular pages October 2001, so it was obviously a going concern by that time. I'm not really in any position to tag any more pages at the moment though. Graham87 01:55, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  I took a closer look at the history of Portal:Current events/October 2003. It appears that:

  1. For May 2002 and later, the page was created during or shortly after the month in question, generally as a cut-and-paste from what is now Portal:Current events/October 2003
  2. There seems to have been a page originally titled "Topics removed from current events", whose history is now at Portal:Current events/April 2002. Events in February, March and April 2002 went through that page, before being split out into separate months in October 2002.
  3. Portal:Current events/January 2002 was created in December 2002 with just one event and then retroactively filled with content dug up from the history shortly after. It's not clear if that content existed anywhere other than in the page history between February and December 2002 since I can't find the page Special:Diff/10718 was cut to, if it ever existed.
  4. Portal:Current events/January 2001 through Portal:Current events/December 2001 were created between 2003 and 2004, and then had a bunch of content added to them by often-unattributed copy-paste from 2001. Very little of the content there was originally written in 2001 (Special:PermaLink/298678 is the last version of that article from 2001), although it may be worth checking the August 2001 database dump entry for "2001" to see if there is more relevant content for the early months. During 2001, Portal:Current events (then in mainspace as current events) appears to have served primarily as a list of recently-updated articles rather then its current function.

  So, it looks like the earliest true archive of Portal:Current events is Portal:Current events/January 2002 and everything earlier should be deleted. More accurately, they should be history merged with the mainspace titles they originated at (such as December 2001), reverting a series of moves from 2015. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 03:40, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  There are a lot of other very odd wikiarcheological artifacts in old Portal:Current events pages, but that is everything that is relevant to this MfD. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 04:30, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  I didn't know the old current events pages had been moved to the portal namespace. I'm not hugely gfussed about where they are, as long as the history is kept. Re the diff linked regarding 2002, I can't find where that text was moved to (if it was moved at all); even using the "what links here" feature in the March 2002 database dump on terms removed in that diff like "Speed skating" doesn't help. Re the August 2001 version of the "2001" article, it won't be of any use here; all it talks about is the Academy Awards and there are only three page history entries. Graham87 08:26, 14 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete All as per above. Robert McClenon (talk) 08:25, 16 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete: Useless junk that has been never used. Perhaps even WP:HOAX since Wikipedia never existed before around 2001 nor have the current events portal either. Pizzaplayer219^Talk_Contribs 13:37, 18 November 2022 (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.