Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Crown dependencies
Portal:Crown dependencies
Automated-spam format portal on an excessively narrow topic portal. This is one of several portals created today. I spotted them when checking Related changes for Category:All portals. They turn out to have all been created by one editor: User:Buaidh. It is not plausible that one editor can maintain all these new portals, and in the case of this portal there is clear evidence that it fails 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".
The Crown dependencies are three island territories off the coast of Great Britain, which are personal possessions of the British monarchy: Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man.
They are all small places, with a total combined population of only about 250,000. As a result, all previous portals relating to them have been deleted:
- Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Isle of Man (2nd nomination) — abandoned and unused multi-page portal
- Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Channel Islands -- Portal:Channel Islands and Portal:Jersey both deleted as abandoned and unused multi-page portals
- Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Guernsey -- an automated spam portal created in Dec 2018 by portalspammer @The Transhumanist (TTH)
We already have a severe shortage of maintainers for nearly all existing geographic portals, most of which also have very low pageviews. Most city portals have been deleted due to lack of readership and maintenance, as have many other sub-national regions and a few dozen countries. Many country portals remain in an abysmal, abandoned state.
There is no reason to believe that creating a pointless new portal will suddenly make a bunch of maintainers and readers magically appear out of nowhere.
In this case, we have the specific evidence of the four previous portals about these territories that these topics simply so not attract readers or maintainers in sufficient numbers to sustain a portal. This new portal has been created by one editor without any contact with the relevant WikiProjects, let alone evidence a team of editors has volunteered to maintain it. It is very easy to create portal pages, but the evidence of hundreds of portals is that it is much much harder to maintain them ... and their creators rarely maintain them.
This portal has been created using {{subst:Basic portal start page}}. This a template devised by the notorious portalspammer @The Transhumanist (TTH), who used it to personally spam out thousands of automated pseudo-portals, some of them just for the heck of it.
Those automated portals create a selected article list based on a navbox, of which they therefore become simply pointless duplicates. Most of the navbox-clone portalspam was deleted in April in two mass deletions of similar portals (one, and two), and the rest in smaller groups. All but one or two of the ~4200 portals created in this way have been deleted, so this type of portal is clearly deprecated.
This portal is currently tagged as under construction, which may possibly indicate an intention to covert it to a different format. (It would be helpful if Buaidh could clarify his intention). However, even if the automated spam format is temporary, the more fundamental problem remains: the scope is too narrow to attract readers and maintainers. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:36, 29 July 2019 (UTC)