Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Asia

Portal:Asia

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

Stillborn portal. Ten selected articles created in 2011, never updated. Twelve out of fourteen never updated selected bios created in 2011. The other two were created in 2012 and never updated. Ban Ki-moon is not leader of the UN. Shahrukh Khan entry is completely broken. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 03:13, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

• Comment – As of this post, in the last thirty days, the portal has received an average of 96 page views per day and 2,983 actual page views – see Pageviews Analysis. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 06:12, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
• Delete per the nom. While it's true this portal has a much higher viewing rate than most other portals at 84 per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (while the head article had 6621 per day in the same period), it still fails other parts of WP:POG, which states portals should be about a "broad subject area, which is likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers." (Emphasis mine) This portal has been abandoned for nearly seven years. High viewing rates are a big negative when the information being displayed is outdated or inaccurate, such as with this portal. How much damage has been done to Wikipedia's reputation for quality when readers saw this junk portal, we will never know.

One off maintenance is not enough to stave off deletion. This portal would need a large team of maintainers to meet WP:POG and it doesn't have it as a decade of hard evidence shows, so it is time to delete it. Remember, crud, even high viewed crud, is still crud. Newshunter12 (talk) 07:09, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

• Keep Subject is obviously broad enough. WP:POG requires "maintainers", not a "large team of maintainers" as User:Newshunter12 falsely states. UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:08, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

@UnitedStatesian WP:POG specifically requires large numbers of readers and maintainers, as I quoted above. Such a large number can fairly be described as a team. This point is rather moot, given that this portal has no maintainers to speak of. Thanks for your WP:ABF vote, not based in reality. Newshunter12 (talk) 16:14, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

"Large numbers" applies only to readers, not maintainers. There was no assumption of bad faith on my part; you made a good-faith error, as we all do from time to time. UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:20, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

On the contrary, @ UnitedStatesian, you are mistaken and @Newshunter12 is correct. "Large numbers of A and B" means large numbers of A and large numbers of B. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:54, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

User:UnitedStatesian, User:BrownHairedGirl - I think that the "large numbers" qualifier can be parsed either as applying to readers or as applying both to readers and to maintainers. However, "maintainers" is definitely a plural noun. It certainly requires that the portal have multiple maintainers. And if the guideline isn't a guideline, that is common sense. The idea of one portalista signing up to multiple abandoned portals is silly. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:07, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

I think we agreed that the "p" word could be taken as an epithet by some, and thus shoud be avoided. That said, I agree more than one maintainer is required by WP:POG, but this portal has that, especially since WP:POG says nothing about "signing up", nor does it say the only action that qualifies as maintenance is creating new subpages (some editors at MfD seem to believe that). I also think a single editor, if that is all that they wanted to do, actually could maintain every current portal (I have over 3,000 pages on my watchlist, and I am sure there are many editors with many more than that.) Impossible with 5,000 portals, impossible with 1,500, but once you get below 800, becomes much more tenable for a single dedicated editor (especially once such an editor no longer has MfDs to contribute to). Who are we to stand in such an editor's way? 02:31, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

@UnitedStatesian I disagree on POG, but that's not important. You still haven't addressed the no maintainers for nearly seven years issue, which is a clear failure of WP:POG. Newshunter12 (talk) 17:41, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

The guideline is disputed with ongoing discussions on the talk-page, so how can you use it for weight? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 01:17, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

User:Knowledgekid87 - The WP:POG is disputed because of issues about whether it was ever properly adopted. Now the portal platoon are arguing against adopting it because it contains common-sense guidance that doesn't support crud portals. But if it isn't a valid guideline, then there isn't a guideline, and then we should Use Common Sense. Unfortunately, the portal platoon have not provided a common-sense explanation of what theUnit value of portals is. So we can either use the long-standing but now disputed guideline, or we can use common sense. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:07, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

@Knowledgekid87, a small number of editors who opposed the deletion of even abandoned junk portals have made repeated efforts to strip WP:POG of any provisions which would facilitate the deletion of abandoned junk. Their proposals are a million miles from achieving consesnsus.

If and when POG is gutted as they wish, the revised POG should guide MFD. Until then, use the guideline as it actually is.

And at all times, please take a very hard look at why you advocate the retention of a navigational tool which has rotted for a decade. I look forward to your explanation of why readers are helped by being directed away from well-maintained articles to abandoned junk portals. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:42, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

There are many portals that are abandoned and should be deleted, you are correct. This particular one though shows some potential, I do not see why automation isn't a viable solution to get editors interested in subjects and Wikiprojects. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 13:18, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

@Knowledgekid87, I don't rule out automation in theory, but in practice nobody has yet produced a form of automation which adds value. The automation experiment last year was a failure, not just because it was abused by a spammer to create thousands of micro-portals, but because it added no value. I can imagine that a massively more sophisticated type of automated portal might add value, but that's a kind of sci-fi type of vision of a very different future.

But whether automated or not, I see zero evidence that any portal has ever helped to get editors interested in subjects and Wikiprojects. The cat of visiting a portal means that the reader is already interested in the topic, and very few readers view any portal at all. In January–June 2019 the Wikipedia main page averages over 16 million views every day, but the same period, the average total daily views for all currently-existing non-mainpage portals was only 107,331. That's only 1.5% of the mainpage views.

In case of Asia, the portal's January–June 2019 daily average was only 84 views, compared with 6,621 views of the head article Asia. So readers choose the head article in a ratio of 85:1, and rightly so: the head article does a portal's job vastly better than the portal page. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)

Portals have to be visible to readers on all articles under the scope, its why some portals have hundreds of pages associated with them and get hundreds of views. This process can easily be done with a bot and is working with larger more stable portals. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:44, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

My own experience of adding tens of thousands of links to portals is that they made remarkably little difference to page views. It would be easy to run a test by getting a bot to add lots of links to a few selected portals and monitor what happens, but I have yet to see any such test being run, so we have no evidence to support these assertions.

I am getting weary of editors defending portals by saying variants of "they just need more links". This portal has existed for thirteen years, but nobody has bothered to even ask for bot job to it. That's just another variant of lack of maintenance.

There always seems to be some excuse made for the lack of portal pageviews and maintenance. It would be great if instead of trotting these excuses, the defenders actually did something to apply these magic fixes which they claim are available. Then we would have some evidence of whether they actually work.

I suspect they will make little difference, because the fundamental problems with all portals is that a well-built Wikipedia head article is itself an excellent portal, so readers don't need a crudely designed standalone page proclaiming itself as a portal. But hey, do the experiment and try to prove me wrong. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:00, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

• Comment – This is a poorly maintained but well-viewed (more than 50 daily pageviews) portal. Any proposal to delete this portal should focus on whether it is doing any actual harm, such as presenting incorrect information to the reader. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:33, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
• Keep, per above comments, and per topic. Wikipedia doesn't just go around deleting portals about continents. Randy Kryn (talk) 23:17, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
• Keep - WP:POG on a whole is disputed and outdated (hence the tags there). - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 01:15, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
• Delete per WP:TNT, and redirect to Asia, without prejudice to re-creation if and when there is evidence that a team of maintainers will actively manage the portal.

So long as we have portals, the inhabited continents should be among the set of portals, even if (as I hope) the set is massively shrunk. However, that does not justify keeping a portal which is unmaintained. Unless a portal is actually maintained, readers should not be lured away from well-maintained articles to badly-designed abandoned portals. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:51, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

• The history page seems to show it's maintained. At least that's how I read it (I don't edit portals often so may be mistaken about how much maintenance and vandalism-watch is required to be an active portal). And having looked at the portal for the first time it seems to have interesting and appropriate articles, images, and links for a quick overview of a topic. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:05, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

• @Randy Kryn, it seems that you misunderstand how portals are built. Most older portals, such as this one, are built using a baroque collection of sub-pages, which you can view at Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Asia. Those sub-pages contain the actual content, and it is their neglect which is described by the nominator. It sounds like you were looking only at Portal:Asia, which is just the shell that ties tie together, and has had many formatting tweaks. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:29, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

• Portal Asia is what is nominated for deletion. When I looked at it the page seems fine and educational. If some subpages need fixing beyond repair, then the nominator should put those particular subpages up for deletion. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:30, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

User:Randy Kryn - No, no, no. The portal doesn't do anything without the subpages (except display errors). If we were to nominate many of the 24 subpages for deletion without nominating the portal, it would break the portal, which would then definitely need deleting. Portals are complex. Sometimes they are too complex to be easily maintained, and require a lot of work. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:07, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

User:Robert McClenon Your statement is incorrect. The portal will still function even if all but one of each type of subpage is deleted. It will not give any errors unless there are NO subpages of a given type (and I don;t think the nominator asserts that every subpage is hopelessly problematic. You should not dismiss User:Randy Kryn's suggestion so flippantly. UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:24, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

I wasn't dismissing their comment, but their comment misses the point, which is that it is not any particular subpage that is a problem, but that the subpages were not being reviewed or updated. They apparently do not understand the complexity of subpage-based portals. It took me months to understand just how bad that design is, also. Robert McClenon (talk) 12:22, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

That contradicts what the nominator wrote; Mark specifically identifed 2 problematic subpages, which could be fixed (preferable) or individually deleted. We're just responding to the nomination. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:07, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

• Portal:Asia is a transclusion of lots of sub-pages. The set stands or fails as a whole, so as with hundreds of other multi-page portals brought to MFD in the last 6 months, the whole set is up for deletion. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:15, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

• I see what you mean, but it seems that an editor over at the Jupiter portal deletion discussion went in and fixed what was wrong in under an hour. Having no knowledge of page coding, is what they did at the Jupiter deletion request possible to do here? In the same way? "It's all Greek to me", but wondering if that Jupiter portal save could be doable here, and throughout Mars and the Solar System, by the same editor, or other editors who know about the goings on behind the scenes (where I but fear to tread, I'd trip over a loose code and break something) to duplicate the whatever-they-did at Jupiter? Randy Kryn (talk) 02:39, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

• You are of course correct that all the remaining maintenance issues could be fixed with very little time and effort. That does not matter one bit to the !delete voters in this discussion. Nor to the closing admin. UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:32, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

• That can't be true. If such a major portal (it's about Asia for goddesses sake, one of the seven continents and not the least of 'em) can be fixed with "very little time and effort" and not, as WP:TNT says "For pages that are beyond fixing, it may be better to start from scratch", then instead of deleting the portal and the others (I see they want to take apart the Canada portals in a rash of nominations that even a bot would have a hard time keeping up with) they'd be cheering and asking for someone to fix it who knows how. Kind of like a barn raising. Randy Kryn (talk) 10:49, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

• It is true. I and several other editors (more than a sufficient number) would be happy to take on and complete the maintenance effort (and to train other editors to do so) if we did not have to "beat the clock" that starts once an MfD discussion is created. (already did it once - I had help - with Portal:Nigeria). UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:01, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

• Keep. This is just getting silly at this point. If a major continent with the majority of the human population on it is not about a broad enough subject area, then nothing is. I said before that POG is getting (ab)used to delete the portal space (except maybe for the few portals linked from the front page), this is best demonstration I could ask for. There are readers, it's broad. The few issues it has can be fixed by editing. Keep it. --Hecato (talk) 13:18, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
  • @Hecato, precisely nobody in this discussion has suggested or asserted that the topic is not broad enough. Making your !vote on the claim that they ave done so is such an extreme straw man that it indicates either very severe reading comprehension problems, or extreme dishonesty.

Please take some time to actually read the discussion above before you disrupt it with misconstrued nonsense. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:14, 21 August 2019 (UTC)