Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Djibouti

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) 02:25, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Portal:Djibouti

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

Narrow topic, Long-abandoned with low readership, recently given a very poorly-judged drive-by makeover by a portal fan, but with no identified maintainer, and no active WikiProject to support it.

Djibouti is the smallest country in Africa by population, with only 884,000 people. Its smallness plus its underdeveloped status combine with Wikipedia's well-documented systemic bias against Africa to leave Wikipedia with very thin and poor coverage of Djibouti. Category:WikiProject Djibouti articles has a total of only 441 articles, and Category:Djibouti articles by quality shows a very small set of decent-quality articles: 0 FA-class, 13 GA-class (10 of them about the Olympics/Paralympics), 11 B-class and 14 C-class. That's a grossly inadequate set from which to build a portal.

WikiProject Djibouti  articles by quality     

FA	A	GA	B	C	Start	Stub	FL	List	Category	Disambig	Draft	File	Portal	Project	Redirect	Template	NA	???	Total
0	0	13	16	36	163	289	0	65	800	0	2	2	0	3	23	67	1	4	1,484

The portal also has abysmally low readership. The Jan–Jun 2019 daily average of 9 views per day is only a small decline from the 2015–2019 average of 10 views per day. By contrast, the C-class head article Djibouti has averaged a fairly steady 2,685 daily pageviews since 2015. That is 256 times as many views as the portal.

WP:POG 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." That is not the case here: I just tagged [1] WP:WikiProject Djibouti as inactive, because its talk page consists overwhelmingly of announcements from outside the project, and AFAICS it has never hosted an actual discussion (i.e where one editor replied to another). I examined the portal's talk page for signs of any interest in the portal, and found only one mention of the portal: a May 2019 post asking if the members of the WikiProject are interested in "un-abandoning" it. There was no reply.

This portal was created [2] on 10 March 2010 by Belovedfreak (talk · contribs), a prolific creator of subsequently-abandoned portals. (They created Portal:Chad, Portal:Togo, Portal:Burkina Faso, Portal:Gabon, Portal:Mauritius, Portal:Niger, and recreated after deletion Portal:Sudan and Portal:Botswana). Belovedfreak's last edit to this portal was on 23 March 2010, only 13 days after creating it. (See Belovedfreak's portal-space contribs). Since late 2006, the lead of WP:POG has warned "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... but Belovedfreak seems to have paid no attention to that.

Thereafter, the subpages were abandoned apart from some addition to the DYKs. Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:Djibouti shows 3 "Featured articles" + 1 "featured biogs" All of them are wholly untouched since Belovedfreak created them in 2010, including Featured biography/1, which is a BLP.

There are also seven "Did you know" pages. The first four were all created by Belovedfreak in 2010, and the last three by @Northamerica1000] (NA1K) in August 2019. However, NA1K's additions date from DYK in 2011, 2012, and 2014. Per WP:DYK, "The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section" ... but this list of 5–9 year old items loses the newness, so its only effect is as a trivia section. (The decision to add items which were already over 5 years old was utterly perverse).

The abysmal state of the portal is presumably why in January 2018 it was "restarted" [3] by @The Transhumanist (TTH, aka the poprtalspammer). This "restart" converted the portal into an automated clone tool, which drew all its selected articles from Template:Djibouti topics, and made the portal just a bloated version of the navbox, just like the navbox-clone portalspam which was deleted in April in two mass deletions of similar portals (one, and two). So in April 2019 NA1K reverted [4] the portal to a pre-automated version.

Back in May, I had identified this portal as a possible MFD candidate, and categorised it in Category:Abandoned country portals. When I visited it again today, I found that it had since been "updated". That was initially encouraging, but on further scrutiny the "update" is very poor.

In a series of edits across on 4 August, Northamerica1000 (talk · contribs) (aka NA1K) did various tweaks, including

• removing the stale DYK section (good idea)
• Removed the "selected biographies" section
• listed 24 articles for automatic excerpt in a "Selected articles" section

This is a long way from bringing the portal anywhere near an acceptable standard.

There remains a long list of problems:

1. The topic of Djibouti remains too narrow.
2. No explanation has been provided anywhere of how the listed articles have been chosen, or what efforts have been made to select a balance of topics by factors such as chronology and POV, and to present a rounded view of Djibouti. Given that the entire exercise of selection and formatting took only a few hours, it would be foolish to AGF that any such scrutiny took place.
3. The assessed quality of the selected articles is very poor:
   • 4 are stubs: Moucha Island, Ali Sabieh, Air Djibouti, Ardoukoba
   • 17 are start-class: Ali Mohamed Daoud, Djibouti (city), Tadjoura, Djibouti–Ambouli International Airport, Djiboutian Civil War, Ayanleh Souleiman, Port of Djibouti, Gulf of Tadjoura, Dileita Mohamed Dileita, People's Rally for Progress, Djiboutian Army, Djiboutian, Afar people, Issa (clan), Mumin Gala, Grand Bara, Lake Assal (Djibouti)
   • 1 is C-class: Ethio-Djibouti Railways
   • 1 is B-class: Djiboutian–Eritrean border conflict
   • 1 is GA-class: Djibouti francolin
4. The WikiProject remains inactive
5. In keeping with the drive-by nature of these edits, no notification was made to the WikiProject that its portal had been overhauled. So there's no effort to recruit maintainers.
6. The portal still has no maintainers. NA1K added themself as a maintainer, [5], but removed themself a fortnight later [6] which is just as well, because the initial assertion had no credibility: NA1K had added themself as maintainer to no less than 42 portals (Afghanistan, Belarus, Belize, Biochemistry, Coffee, Colorado, Companies, Costa Rica, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Evolutionary biology, Food, Free and open-source software, The Gambia, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Housing, Hungary, Islands, Italy, Kuwait, Liquor, Lithuania, Moldova, Money, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Oman, Ontario, Panama, Physics, São Tomé and Príncipe, Somalia, Supermarkets, Tanks, Vietnam) Their subsequent removal of themself as "maintainer" of all 42 came only after this was repeatedly challenged as implausible.

What we're left with here is that NA1K's "update" is actually just a minor variation of TTH's automation spree: take a random topic in which you have no experience or expertise (or collaborators who possess those attributes), throw together a quick list of very poor quality, remove [7] the Category:Abandoned country portals move on ... leaving behind a portal which is still junk, and because the topic is too narrow it can only be junk .

This is a clear fail of all the key tests in WP:POG:

1. N Broad topic. No. See above: small underdeveloped country, with a tiny set of articles.
2. N High readership. No. The portal's January–June 2019 daily average of 9 views per day is trivially low.
3. N Lots of maintainers. No. Zero maintenance from 2010 to 2019, then a drive-by makeover from a serial driveby editor with a long track record of poor judgement.
4. N Associated WikiProject. No. WP:WikiProject Djibouti is inactive.

This portal is a solution in search of problem. The C-class head article Djibouti offers better navigation, better showcasing, and a better image gallery. In short, it does does a much better job of the portal tasks than the portal page does.

We do a great to disservice to our readers by luring them away from Wikipedia's finest quality of article, polished by many editors and monitored by many more, and directing them to a page which consists of a quick paint-job by an enthusiastic but naive stranger to the topic. It's time to end the farce, and just delete it.

Since the problems with this topic are endemic and have persisted for a decade, I oppose re-creation. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:01, 16 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:Africa), without creating duplicate entries. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:00, 16 September 2019 (UTC)
• Delete as per analysis by User:BrownHairedGirl:
  • The portal had only 9 average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019.
  • The year-to-year decline in the viewing is characteristic of most portals and may illustrate that portals are not the wave of the future. The wave of the future in the English Wikipedia appears to be articles; we will very soon have 6 million, and then 7 million, and then 8 million.
  • The lack of coverage of Africa, which is a systemic bias, can be best corrected by developing more articles about Africa, and its culture, history, and geography, rather than diverting attention to portals.
  • Upgrading a poorly viewed portal with 4 articles that were not maintained in nine years to a poorly viewed portal with 24 articles that will not be maintained is an improvement, but still leaves a poorly viewed portal that is being maintained randomly.
  • Any portals that are selected to be kept should be upgraded to use embedded lists of articles, but not every portal with an embedded list of articles should be kept.
  • Sometimes a portal MFD results in discussion about whether the portal may be re-created. This portal has already been re-created, and it is better, but not good enough. So delete it.

Robert McClenon (talk) 14:28, 16 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 falls flat. It's a useless time suck that lures readers to a decade-long abandoned Bonsai portal and damages Wikipedia's hard won reputation for quality. I oppose re-creation, as a decade of hard evidence shows Djibouti is not a broad enough topic under WP:POG to attract readers or maintainers. This portal is a solution in search of a problem. Newshunter12 (talk) 06:21, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

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.