Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Grenada

Add links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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) 06:03, 16 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Grenada

Portal:Grenada (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Abandoned, almost-static micro-portal with abysmally low page views, about the tiny island nation of Grenada. Fails all three pillars of the WP:POG requirement that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers"

  1. It's a tiny island country (2011 population ~100,000[1]). That's about the same as the Irish city of Limerick, or about the 300th-biggest city in the USA
  2. It has been unmaintained since 2011/2012
  3. It has almost no readers:

The portal was created in October 2011‎ by Kylekieran (talk · contribs). The first month's revisions were unusual as full pages which were nonetheless redirected, but the first which was not subsequently redirected was created on 21 November 2011‎[2]. The lead of WP:POG says "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... but this one has not been maintained. Kylekieran's last edit to any part of the portal was in August 2012.[3]

WP:NOTCOMPULSORY, so editors are entitled to move on. But portals need ongoing maintenance, and this one has not been maintained. Presumably that's why in January 2019, the portalspammer @The Transhumanist (TTH) converted it to an automated clone of the navbox Template:Grenada topics. The newly-created navbox-clone portalspam was deleted in April in two mass deletions of similar portals (one, and two), and the rest in smaller groups. The portals which had been converted to navbox-clone were then individually reverted by several editors, and in May 2019 BHG reverted[4] this one to the last non-automated version.

Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Grenada shows a slim set of sub-pages:

Per WP:PORTAL, "Portals serve as enhanced 'Main Pages' for specific broad subjects". But the Wikipedia main page requires huge amounts of work; it is maintained by several large teams of busy editors. A mini-mainpage also needs lot of ongoing work if it is going to value over the head article. And in this case, the portal is massively less useful in every respect than the summary-style head article Grenada and navboxes Template:Grenada topics.

In any case, 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).

  1. 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 any of this links to Template:Grenada topics, open in a private/incognito tab, and mouseover any link.
  2. 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 Grenada, open in a private/incognito tab, and click on any image to start the slideshow

Similar features have been available since 2015 to users of Wikipedia's Android app.

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. Whatever potential value it might have had it 2011 when its creator hoped that someone would build on it, it is now a failed solution to a non-problem. Time to just delete it. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:20, 8 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Expect portalista opposition. Other recent MFD nominations of abandoned portals on small-population geographic areas have attracted howls of outrage from a small-but indignant clique who I call "portalista". Their responses are usually predictable combinations of the following:
  1. Mendaciously misrepresenting about the text of POG, by pretending that it does not require that a topic be broad enough to be likely to deliver readers and maintainers. (Note that the editors who adopt this technique are overwhelmingly very well aware of what POG actually says. I describe this as "mendacity" because there is no good faith excuse for such calculated misrepresentation) Instead they take a personal view of broadness, and ignore the tests of broadness set out in POG.
  2. Word negation, claiming that when it comes to portals "large numbers" doesn't actually mean "large numbers". They claim that it really means "tiny numbers", because so many other abandoned portals on narrow topics also have tiny readership numbers.
  3. Distraction, promising to update the portal. This is an attempt to sidestep the fact that POG requires ongoing maintenance, not a one-off update as a makework ruse to postpone deletion.
  4. Unevidenced denialism Some of the more creative portalistas try to argue that the past is no guide to the future. They suggest that mainatiners can arrive and that readers can flock in. However, the portalistas are most unlikely to even try to produce any such evidence of any of this ever having happened with any other portals.
  5. Defiance, by insisting that it doesn't matter what POG says, they don't want unread abandoned junk portals to be deleted.
Each of those 5 points of view is of course interesting in its own way (tho mostly for their perversity), but they are all blatant defiance of WP:POG. If editors reject WP:POG, they should propose its deletion or amendment ... but in the meantime, the WP:ILIKEIT arguments should be ignored by the closing admin.
It will be interesting to see which portalistas deploy which of the usual bogus-keep arguments, and indeed whether they manage to devise new counterfactuals. I'm thinking of keeping a scorecard, like buzzword bingo. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:37, 8 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete – This portal is even more of a failure than most regional portals. I concur with the analysis describing the history of the portal, which indicates that even its supporters couldn't decide whether they could support a portal. As User:BrownHairedGirl notes, there are only four articles (not twenty). As BHG notes, it had 8 daily pageviews in the usual baseline period, as opposed to the 2745 for Grenada.
    • I recommend that any advocates of a policy of maintaining and not deleting regional portals propose language at Village Pump. I have asked. I just hear whining at MFDs.
    • Buzz Argument – But the United States won a small war on this island. And we are not proposing to delete the article, and the article can be just as well reached from the History in the main article as from the portal.

Robert McClenon (talk) 01:45, 9 August 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.


Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Portal:Grenada&oldid=911046399"