Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Narendra Modi

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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. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 20:41, 8 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Portal:Narendra Modi

Portal:Narendra Modi (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Junk. Nothing here except a sea of red links.

This red link collection was created in Feb 2016. In March 2016 it was redirected[1] by User:DexDor to Portal:Government of India with the edit summary this appears to have been created and then abandoned as a mass of redlinks.

However, earlier today it was unredirected[2] by @UnitedStatesian, so that the redlinks are now displayed in all their glory.

I hope that UnitedStatesian will explain why they thought that this was helpful, because I can't see the benefit.

Anyway, it's just an abandoned mess. Please delete it ASAP. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:00, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Restore the redirect, do not delete. The decision to redirect to Portal:Government of India was a good one.
There is no good reason to delete the history. Narendra Modi is one of the most important people in the world for the near future, at least. Many, of those who know of Portals, could very reasonably expect a Portal on this person. I disagree that there should be a portal for him, I think there should be way fewer portals, if any, and Narendra Modi is completely within scope for Portal:Government of India; which itself is completely in scope for Portal:India.
A soft redirect to Portal:Government of India, but a note point also to Narendra Modi, may be a good outcome, subject to a final solution for Portals. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:16, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Explanation As with Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:University of the Philippines, below, there were two choices: take it to WP:Redirects for discussion, or revert each highly inappropriate redirection and take them both here. I chose the latter, as I think discussion here is more likely to make it clear inappropriate redirection is not a pathway to save a bad portal page and its subpages. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:04, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • No. The redirects are not inappropriate at all. Given the dubious existence of the Portal, redirection is completely appropriate. Redirects are cheap. Redirects are effective. Redirection is supported by policy, WP:ATD. The creator and any other authors with bookmarks to the page will be well served by the redirect. They and anyone else looking for a Portal on Modi will be much better served by being sent to Portal:Government of India. And further again, anyone interested in that Portal (20 views per day) would be better served if it redirected to Portal:India (150 views per day). Redirection, whether hard or soft redirection, is a perfectly good way to deal with individual problem portals, until there is consensus on what to do about them collectively. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:41, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • What would you propose be done with the subpages? UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:59, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        • Back before the recent portalspam, I would say to either redirect subpages to the top level page (it redirected), or ignore them as orphan pages that not reader nor normal editors will ever visit. Now, I think an RfC is needed to decide these questions. I am in favour of deprecating all of Portalspace, archive the lot, and carve it off Wikipedia. I note the top Portal pages, Main page and Wikipedia:Contents(it is, I’d put it at WP:Comtents), are not even in Portalspace. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:34, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @SmokeyJoe, we already had just such an RFC last year: WP:ENDPORTALS. I supported zapping the lot as the least worst of a pair of binary options, but the consensus was not to zap the lot, and I accept the consensus unless & until it is overturned. I am not sure that it would be a wise idea to re-run that huge discussion only a year later, but if you do want to have a re-run, then please consult with others to draw up a range of options.
Meanwhile, we have 1/ a consensus not zap everything; 2/ no broad consensus on which portals should exist or even what portals should try to do, let alone what formats are appropriate; 3/ a rough consensus about certain types of junk which should be deleted.
So for now we are in the latter half of a cleanup phase. Most of the worst automated crap is gone, as are many portals on excessively narrow topics, so most of what we are culling now is the stunted pants which never grew. I have repeatedly voted to keep portals which I think are unwise, because they don't fit those narrow criteria on which there is a rough consensus. I don't want to pre-empt those broader RFCs.
So it would be much better to keep MFD for the types of pages that are actually coming to MFD, and take the broad musing elsewhere, e.g. to WT:WPPORT. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:36, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I thought, and hoped, User:BrownHairedGirl, that you were going to do this, better that the shotgun mess of WP:ENDPORTALS. I may try, but not this fortnight for sure. Note that at ENDPORTALS I advocated for archiving most portals by redirection, and I still argue for this, whether by hard or soft redirection. Thin portals detract from the encyclopedia due to them content forking mainspace and dividing editor resources, and portals are bad because they do not have the culture of sourcing demanded in mainspace. Until a decision is made, undoing past redirects and discussing them one at a time is completely stupid. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:16, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@SmokeyJoe, I was going to do something like a bit like that, but my process got derailed from several directions.
My current thinking, developed in the very productive non-deletion discussion at WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ireland, is that I was on the wrong path. I now think that we need to start by asking much more fundamental questions, something like those I set out at WP:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ireland#4bigquestions. I could expand more on that, but I think and a focus on those fundamentals would avoid the hideous binary of I-likes-em/I-hates-em/Nobody-uses-em/But-I-use-em/You-an-idiot/Your-granny-looks-like-an-ox nonsense of ENDPORTALS.
I reckon that if there is a stable consensus to be found anywhere, it will amount to more than I would like, fewer than portal fans would like, but with a quality threshold that most people will like. If we have that, then the remaining scope scope issues won't be so critical.
See also WT:WikiProject Portals#Proposing_two-stage_process_for_deletion_of_portals, and esp my ALT proposal below it. I think that could bridge a lot of the gap. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:54, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I'm blanking as to a speedy category for this kind of thing. It's not literally blank. It's not a test, nor nonsense, nor vandalism. It's not promotional. The category contains plenty, so P2 is out. It doesn't even fall under P1–A3, because there is content beyond the title (the link to Make in India). Could it fall under the catch-all of "Technical deletions" (G6)? Could we apply for an unedited draft-like deletion process to be applied to nearly blank portal drafts that have been abandoned for at least 6 months? Is redirection commonly being used to cover this kind of problem? Espresso Addict (talk) 13:40, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think Draftifying first, along with the subpages, would be better. Then regular G13 would apply after 6 months. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:59, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I think that draftifying may be appropriate in some cases, if we can overcome the technical problem that simply moving it to draft space may break the transclusions ... but when all we have is a broken shell of a redlink festival, draftifying seems to me to be a waste of time. Espresso Addict (talk) 19:38, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
We don't need to preserve every trivial test page. Just get rid of it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:20, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Almost everything that policy says we can do with this is a colossal waste of everyone's time, unfortunately. Even moving to draftspace of something with subpages is likely to take time. But unless this is a common problem, there's no likelihood for getting a speedy category for "newbie started a portal, couldn't make the code work, and wandered off". Espresso Addict (talk) 19:38, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@EA, I thought for moment that it might be helpful to have a new CSD which was explicitly IAR: do this at your own risk, but prepare to get monstered if consensus goes against you. But then I thought of my poor bones being scorched by my sizzling flesh as I was burnt at the stake beside the village pump for suggesting it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:00, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@BrownHairedGirl: I tend to bear in mind the most deletionist admins I can think of and consider whether they would interpret the CSD rubric the same way I would. Invoking IAR... that would be a No. And also once one's been an admin for a considerable proportion of one's editing life (as BHG & I both have been) it's easy to forget that admins can easily check redlinks were properly deleted; regular editors cannot. Espresso Addict (talk) 10:20, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - I think that the redirect made by User:DexDor in March 2016 was a good-faith bad redirect. I agree that Redirects Are Cheap, and I know that for that reason, many editors think that redirecting, as a backdoor deletion, is almost always the proper method of dealing with bad pages that need deletion. I disagree, and think that redirecting is often the easy wrong way to deal with bad pages. My experience at Articles for Creation is that too often the existence of a questionable redirect makes it harder to clean up. In particular, a bad portal should not be redirected to a better portal, but discussed for deletion. I think that User:UnitedStatesian was faced with a situation where there was no right answer. I think that Redirects for Discussion would have been the less wrong answer, but I can understand why they chose to undo the bad redirect and take the bad portal to deletion. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:08, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - Converting to a redirect was a simple (i.e. not creating a MFD page and involving other editors) way to remove the page from cleanup lists and a way that could easily be reverted (e.g. if the portal creator decided to fix/complete the portal). My intent was probably that if the redirect stuck (i.e. the portal creator didn't revert it) then if any pages related to the portal (including the redirect itself) later appeared in cleanup lists it would be easy to argue at xFD (or possibly at CSD) that the pages should be deleted - e.g. "These are subpages of a half-completed portal that was converted to a redirect X years ago.".  If the pages didn't appear in cleanup lists then they could be left. You refer to it being a bad redirect, but don't explain why you think that. DexDor (talk) 18:41, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Another point: Where I've previously taken things to MFD (example) the consensus was that it is better to convert to a redirect than to completely delete; this unredirect+MFD is trying to do the opposite of that. DexDor (talk) 20:54, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - At this point, this is a bad portal that never was finished and never should have existed. It is a zombie that has been brought back to life by removing a lead bullet. It now needs a silver bullet. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:08, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete or convert (back) to redirect. DexDor (talk) 20:54, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete: not useful to readers. --K.e.coffman (talk) 03:12, 2 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - Don't we have a Portal:Donald Trump, you know, this guy who is a businessman and the nominee for the Republican Party in the 2016 United States Presidential election ? My crystal ball tells me that Narendra Modi will open a private golf club in a near future. Don't mess with golf ! Pldx1 (talk) 10:13, 3 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete this empty mess. No prejudice to creation of a proper portal if enough subject matter is available around this single person (which I doubt). — JFG talk 00:45, 6 May 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.


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