Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:East Frisia (2nd nomination)

Portal:East Frisia

Portal:East Frisia (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

All prior XfDs for this page: Miscellany for deletion/Portal:East Frisia Miscellany for deletion/Portal:East Frisia (2nd nomination)

Abandoned portal on a narrow topic, the German region of East Frisia. Trivially low pageviews (6/day). WikiProject Frisia is inactive, and the creator's promise at a 2017 MFD to maintain it has not been kept. Narrow scope and lack of quality content means that it is showcasing a bunch of start-class articles.

Portal created [1] in 2010 by @Bermicourt, who has pioneered the "mega-navbox" style of portal. This uses extensive navbox-like lists of articles to provide direct access to lots of them, complete with the built-in previews available to non-logged-in readers on all en.wp pages. It's vastly more usable than the predominant but hideous one-subpage-at-a-time model. Sadly, readers seem no more interested in it than in the subpage portals, so In Jan–Jun 2019 this portal averaged only 6 views day, which is barely above background noise.

I nominated this portal at MFD in 2017. That discussion was closed "Keep to allow Bermicourt time to restart" after Bermicourt acknowledged that maintenance had been poor, and said I'd be disappointed to see it deleted without a decent second chance. Two years later, it's had that second chance, yet it is still in poor shape.

For example, a narrow majority of twelve article-of-the-month pages are start-class:

• /February = Lower Saxon Wadden Sea National Park
• /April = Spiekeroog
• /May = Gulf house
• /June = Evenburg
• /July = Aurich
• /November = Leybucht
• /December = Christmas Flood of 1717

WP:POG requires that portals should be about "broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers". POG also guides that "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject (or have editors with sufficient interest) to help ensure a supply of new material for the portal and maintain the portal". This fails on all four counts:

1. N Broad topic. No. The scope of WP:WikiProject Frisia also includes North Frisia, but even so Category:Frisia articles by quality+subcats has a total of only 1,214 article-space pages, and the table on Category:Frisia articles by quality shows only 1 FA, 1 GA and no A-class.
2. N High readership. No. The portal's January–June 2019 daily average of only 6 views day is likely all background noise.
3. N Lots of maintainers. No. Since 2010, Bermicourt has been its only ever maintainer.
4. N WikiProject involvement. No. WP:WikiProject Frisia exists, but the last actual discussion on its talk page (i.e. one or more editors replying to another editor) was in 2014, so I have tagged it as inactive. [2].

The experience of 6 months of MFDs scrutinising many hundreds of portals has shown that many countries don't even make viable portals, and sub-national regions even more rarely. Despite en.wp's huge systemic bias towards American topics, even many states of the United States had portals which failed. East Frisia is a sub-sub-national region, being an area of the German state of Lower Saxony, so it's unsurprising that it failed.

This portal is a relic of a phase of portalmania when insufficient attention was paid to the WP:POG requirement for "broad topics". I am sure that it was created in good faith, but on closer scrutiny it's clear that it fails all the key tests of a portal. Time to delete it. And since the problems are structural, I oppose re-creation. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:04, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

• Note to closing admin. I don't want in any way to prejudge the outcome ... but if you close this discussion as delete, please can you not remove the backlinks? I have an AWB setup which allows me to easily replace them with links to the next most specific portal(s) (in this case Portal:Lower Saxony ), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:53, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
• Delete per the thorough and highly detailed investigation of the portal by the nominator, BrownHairedGirl. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one on an incredibly narrow topic has fallen flat with its second chance. It's a useless time suck that lures readers to an abandoned portal. I oppose re-creation, as years of hard evidence shows East Frisia is not a broad enough topic per WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers, and the topic is simply too narrow to sustain a portal. This portal is a solution in search of a problem. Newshunter12 (talk) 08:28, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
• Note I have changed some of those start class articles to C class. The Frisia project does not have an A class assessment, and would not have achieved any GA or FAs at all, they would have already had that status before the project began. The project is not totally dead, so not active, but sluggish. Anyway I don't care about the portal, and I think the effort should be put into articles instead. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:19, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
• Comment - Since the nominator recommends that the backlinks for this portal be moved to Portal:Lower Saxony, I am including metrics for that portal.

East Frisian Portals

Title	Portal Page Views	Article Page Views	Percent	Comments	Articles	Notes	Baseline	Deleted	Type
East Frisia	6	162	3.70%	Originated 2010.	12		Jan19-Jun19	FALSE	Region
Lower Saxony	8	931	0.86%	Originated 2010. A mega-navbox portal.	31		Jan19-Jun19	FALSE	State
Germany	102	14868	0.69%	Has 50 subpage articles and 23 food items in embedded list. Subpages are specified to be left unmaintained to preserve state of what was previously a Featured Portal. (However, this makes them subject to subpage rot.)	73	Jan-Feb19 views were 104/15549	Jan19-Feb19	FALSE	Country

• Delete due to very low viewing and not very many articles. It can be seen that Portal:Lower Saxony is not much better. As the nominator says, portals for first-level administrative subdivisions of countries seldom attract very many readers, with a very few exceptions of a few states of the United States, and East Frisia is a region within a state of Germany. Since this already is a meganavbox portal, re-creation seems unlikely to improve it further. (Readers don't see the difference between subpages and a meganavbox. It helps portal maintainers, but it looks the same on the outside.)
• Keep. The reasons given are invalid - there is no threshold for page views even on articles; if article status is really a criterion that's easily solved; there is no notability threshold either, but in any case this is a major historical and cultural region. And it's not even in mainspace, so why are we worried? This is simply part of a campaign to remove most if not all portals which goes against the spirit of the community consensus on portals, to wit there is no notice on the relevant project pages alerting editors to this latest deletion bid. Classic Wikipedia! Bermicourt (talk) 18:33, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Did you look at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Frisia#Alerts before claiming that there is no notice on the relevant project pages ? DexDor ^(talk) 21:18, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

• I'm sad to see @Bermicourt making ad hominem attacks as a diversionary tactic from the facts that this portal was given time for improvement, and the opportunity was not used.

And Bermicourt's assertion that reasons given are invalid is a falsehood which Bermicourt demonstrably knew at the time of writing to be false, because the nomination clearly asserts that the topic fails the "broad subject areas" criterion, and includes the data to support that.

Far from no notice on the relevant project pages, this MFD is listed via the article alerts system on 3 project pages, each of which is transcluded on the main page of that project (see Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Portal:East_Frisia_(2nd_nomination))

1. Wikipedia:WikiProject Frisia/Article alerts — added 08:07, 19 September 2019‎[3]
2. Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany/Article alerts — added 08:07, 19 September 2019‎ [4]
3. Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Article alerts — added 08:09, 19 September 2019‎ [5]

Note that the last of those notifications was made over ten hours before Bermicourt's post.

Angry editor fires off angry complaint without first spending a few seconds to check their facts. This isn't Classic Wikipedia ... it's Classic Portalista!. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:08, 20 September 2019 (UTC)