Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Iowa

Portal:Iowa

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

This is an unmaintained and little-viewed portal on a state of the United States. This portal has 10 articles and 5 biographies, but none more recent than 2011. In The News Items are from 2011 and 2012, including the re-election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. The Governor of Iowa is correctly identified, but that is because the portal is picking that information up from the infobox for the lead article Iowa.

The following is a listing of the least-viewed state portals:

Title	Portal Page Views	Article Page Views	Comments	Ratio	Percent	Articles
North Dakota	8	1869	Originator inactive since 2011. Not mained since 2007.	233.63	0.43%	12
New Hampshire	8	2394	No maintenance since 2008. Two articles. Two biographies.	299.25	0.33%	4
South Dakota	8	1726	No maintenance since 2010.	215.75	0.46%	6
Montana	9	3786	Originator inactive since 2010. Last maintenance in 2008.	420.67	0.24%	12
Idaho	9	2377	Originator inactive since 2011. Two biographies. Two articles. Last maintained in 2008.	264.11	0.38%	4
Maine	10	2999		299.90	0.33%
West Virginia	10	2644	Originator inactive since 2011. No maintenance since 2011.	264.40	0.38%
Vermont	10	2081	5 articles and 3 bios, last updated in 2008. Last tweaked in 2016.	208.10	0.48%	8
Nebraska	10	2929	Originator inactive since 2012. No maintenance since 2010.	292.90	0.34%	2
Wyoming	11	3713	Editor edits sporadically. News is obsolete. 4 articles and 1 bio, last updated in 2008.	337.55	0.30%	5
Iowa	11	2516	No maintenance since 2011.	228.73	0.44%	15
South Carolina	12	2409	Originator inactive since 2013. Last maintenance 2009.	200.75	0.50%	4
Delaware	12	2483	Originator banned. Selected pages same as in 2007.	206.92	0.48%
Rhode Island	12	2760	Last article update 2012.	230.00	0.43%	24
Wisconsin	13	3132	Originator inactive since 2009.	240.92	0.42%
Oklahoma	13	2708	Originator inactive since 2007. Has had some maintenance since then.	208.31	0.48%	63
Nevada	14	2600		185.71	0.54%
Indiana	14	2787	Originator inactive since 2010. No maintenance since 2010, except news is 2016.	199.07	0.50%
Kentucky	14	2927	No maintenance since 2010.	209.07	0.48%
Kansas	14	2813	Originator inactive since 2014.	200.93	0.50%
Mississippi	14	2737	Originator inactive since 2012.	195.50	0.51%
Minnesota	15	3785	Originator inactive since 2018.	252.33	0.40%
Maryland	15	3315	Originator inactive since 2016.	221.00	0.45%
Connecticut	16	3109	Being reworked by MJL.	194.31	0.51%
Michigan	16	3912	Originator inactive since 2013	244.50	0.41%
Louisiana	16	3186	Originator inactive since 2007.	199.13	0.50%
New Mexico	16	3332	Originator inactive since 2013.	208.25	0.48%
North Carolina	16	3747	Originator last edited in 2011. One featured article at a time without other articles.	234.19	0.43%	1
Utah	16	2857	Originator inactive since 2007. Last maintenance 2009.	178.56	0.56%	46
Missouri	17	3424	Selected biography out of date. Last updates appear to be 2011.	201.41	0.50%	41
Georgia (state)	17	4088	Originator inactive since 2009.	240.47	0.42%
Washington	17	3881	After correction for renaming. (Total of 39 pageviews in two months.)	228.29	0.44%
Alaska	18	6775	Originator edits sporadically. Last maintained in 2012 except for AWB tweaks.	376.39	0.27%	28
Tennessee	18	2972	Originator inactive since 2016. Last maintenance 2011.	165.11	0.61%	11

A complete listing of state portals with metrics can be seen at WP:US State Portal Metrics. Portals that are not maintained are useless, and, if the information that is facing the reader becomes out-of-date, they are worse than useless, because anyone can edit an article, but heritage portals with subpages contain old copies of articles that require special knowledge to edit.

One common method for the design of portals, in use at least since 2005, has involved sometimes large numbers of subpages of the portal, one for each selected article and picture, and sometimes for news items and Do You Know (DYK) items. Often the subpages for selected articles consist of a copy of the original article, or a copy of the first part of the original article. The subpages for In The News (ITN) and DYK items may also be copies of the lead paragraph or a portion of the article page. This approach to design of portals is sufficiently commonly used that it can be considered standard. However, it is an honorable experiment that has failed, and should be abandoned. In numerous cases, it has been found that portals have displayed outdated and incorrect information to the reader. These discrepancies have been especially common with, but not limited to, political leadership. These discrepancies are a serious problem because they cannot be readily corrected. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, meaning that any reasonably computer-literate person can edit an article; but editing the displayed information in a portal requires specialized technical knowledge of how portals are implemented, which is presumably why errors persist, sometimes for years. An editor who has Twinkle installed can tag articles in need of editing if they do not have the time or knowledge to fix them; but tagging via Twinkle is not available for portals. Experience has shown that the use of portal subpages that copy portions of articles results in outdated information being displayed, sometimes for years, because it is difficult to correct. This design technique, partial article copies, has been an honorable experiment over the course of more than a decade, but the experiment should be assessed to have been a failure. It has also been noted that copying portions of articles to portal subpages without attribution is a violation of the CC-BY-SA copyleft and is not permitted. Some other design approach for portals should be used in the future.

A state of the United States may be considered a priori to be a broad subject area, but this portal has been shown a posteriori not to be attracting readers or a portal maintainer. A portal is a miniature Main Page and requires a substantial investment in volunteer time.

This portal should be deleted without prejudice to re-creating a portal maintained by a volunteer who is willing to invest the time to support a miniature Main Page under the portal guidelines that are in effect at the time, but not involving partial copies to subpages. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:27, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

• Delete. Yet another abandoned portal.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". A theoretical argument could be made that Iowa is a broad topic. I disagree with that theoretical argument (sub-national entities rarely seem to work as portals), but we don't need to rely on theory because we have empirical evidence that in practice this portal does not pass that test: it has not attracted maintainers, and it has not attracted readers. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:55, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

• Keep: This portal contains basic information about the state but needs updating and improvement. It would be far better to mark this portal as needing updating and improvement rather than simply deleting it. It is far easier to rebuild a portal than to create a portal from scratch, unless you want to delete all portals, which is a whole other issue. For the status of regional portals, see User:Buaidh/Geographic portals. Our regional portals are dying a slow death. It would be far more humane to kill them all with a single stroke. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk contribs 17:52, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

It's easy to write of updating and improvement, but the reality is that this is just another of the many hundred of portals which languished for a decade without being improve or updated. It gets too few readers to attract the efforts of editors, so if it is kept it will simply continue to rot.

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". Buaidh's comment is just more of the magical thinking which a decade ago saw editors create hundreds of portals on a high-maintenance model ... but a decade later we can see the evidence that there simply aren't enough editors willing and able to maintain this portal. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:00, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

• Keep: no valid reason for deletion -this odd rationale will have every portal gone.....read over WP:RIA "pages that contain unattributed text do not normally need to be deleted. Attribution can be belatedly supplied"...fixit as per Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RfC: Ending the system of portals take 2. It's very concerning that your deleting portal after portal but have no clue how to fix them or to lazy to tag them manually to inform the community that a portal needs updating.. --Moxy 🍁 09:11, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Moxy, the valid reason is that WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". This portal does not meet that criterion.

It is risible to the point of disruptiveness that Moxy continues to cite the WP:ENDPORTALS RFC while showing no sign of actually having read it. ENDPOIRTALS was a proposal to delete all portals in one go, and that proposal was rejected. It was not a proposal to keep every abandoned junk portal, and Moxy's repeated pretence that it means something other than what it said is dishonest. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:05, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

• Keep This is an asinine deletion request, and as stated above it's just plain lazy. If it needs to be updated than mark it accordingly and see if someone does that first. Also, the smaller states are going to generate less interest. Should we start eliminating other pages related to them because they don't generate as much interest? We need more editors to do the work rather than busybodies eliminating what we already have. Farragutful (talk) 15:41, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Fine rant, Farragutful. Hope you feel better after that.

But the bottom line is that issues such as this are not decided by rants but by policy and guidelines, and the fact remains that this portals does not meet 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". --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:08, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Your main problem is linking a disputed page...so hard to see its weight as it applies here. What do you personally consider a big topic and worthy of keeping or effort to fix ....I take it 15,186 articles is to smal as is 35, 000 as stated in the past.....how big?--Moxy 🍁 22:14, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Moxy, you are either being very childish or have exceedingly low comprehension skills. Or maybe both.

1. WP:POG is a longstanding guideline, and the fact that someone has tagged it as disputed does not invalidate it. AS you know, the discussion there is strongly in favour of upholding the clauses which you dislike.
2. As you well know, the breadth of a topic is not defined solely by article count. WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers" ... so a portal with a scope of a billion articles fails if it lacks readers and maintainers. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:18, 2 July 2019 (UTC)