Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ghana

Portal:Ghana

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

Improperly maintained portal that violates WP:POG.

• The semi-active WikiProject Ghana only lists thirteen articles in the upper quality tiers (FA, GA, FL, etc).
• Improperly maintained by the creator, and the only other legitimate maintainer was indefinitely blocked on New Years' 2013. Among the many African nation portals fervently maintained by NA1k, and just like the other similarly-nominated portals, NA1k's changes are merely aesthetic.
• Average daily pageviews in the first half of 2019 are 21 for the portal versus 5035 for the parent article, or .4171%. ToThAc (talk) 13:42, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
• Delete per the nom. This portal has been abandoned for a decade, save for a paint job by a serial portal one-off updater. The one biography sub-page was last updated in 2010, and it's world renowned subject died in August 2018, which speaks to the sloppiness of NA1K's update. Since late 2006, the lead of WP:POG has said "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" ... and this one has not been maintained by Natsubee, who (being very generous) abandoned it in Oct. 2009 and has made one edit to this portal and portal space since. The portal clearly fails WP:POG's requirement that portals should be about subjects broad enough to attract large numbers of maintainers and readers. This portal has had a decade of no steady maintainers and it had a very low 21 views per day from January 1 to June 30 2019 (despite the head article Ghana having 5,038 views per day in the same period).

POG also states portals should be associated with a wikiproject, but Wikipedia:WikiProject Ghana is best described as inactive (the last editor to editor conversation was in Oct. 2016), and the portal's only ever mention on the talk page was an August 2019 post by an outside editor stating the portal was abandoned and asked if anyone was interested in maintaining it, which got no response. The portal isn't mentioned on the main page by name, either. Portals stand or fall on their merits in the now, not what could someday hypothetically happen with them, and this one falls flat. I oppose re-creation, as a decade of hard evidence shows Ghana is not a broad enough topic to attract readers or maintainers. Newshunter12 (talk) 17:42, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

• When the portal was updated with transclusions, I added the entry for Kofi Atta Annan directly to the main portal page (diff), which via transclusion, posts the most up-to-date content relative to the subject's page. In the process, I commented-out the selected biography section (diff). The previously outdated content from the single entry at Portal:Ghana/Selected biography was not included on the page after the portal was improved. Not sure why the user above seems to think it was, but after I finished updating, it was not. This improved the portal, providing WP:READERS with up-to-date information, rather than denigrating it. This is certainly not sloppy; rather, it is precise. I went ahead and updated the subpage as well (diff), despite it not being used in the portal at this time. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 09:38, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

The bio was not a redirect and was still part of the portal, so it should have been updated or removed when you did your update, so as not to mislead readers who looked at the sub-pages. Your "update" was shoddy work, which is why I pointed it out for what it was. Also, the fact that you have had to edit the same brief comment seven times already after posting just adds to the serious WP:CIR concerns that @BrownHairedGirl has raised about you. Newshunter12 (talk) 10:01, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I could have previewed more when commenting, to avoid editing the page multiple times, so I'll keep this in mind. Fact is, though, per the page's revision history, BHG has also engaged in this same multiple editing of their own commentary, yet you only criticise me. A bit hypocritical. If you're unable to understand how transclusions work in portals, perhaps the CIR issues are actually your issue. I would critique some of your work, in a friendly, constructive manner, of course, but I notice that you have never created an article on English Wikipedia. link. If you're going to berate the work of others, at least get your facts straight. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 11:32, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

• Weak Delete - The recent work by User:Northamerica1000 is not just a paint job. The content-forked subpage structure has been upgraded to transclusion, which reduces but does not eliminate the need for maintenance, and there is no designated maintainer. The repair by NA1k amounts to putting a new transmission in a car with a failing engine, not purely aesthetic. The portal still has only 21 average daily pageviews. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:51, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
• Comment. The nominator @ToThAc has misunderstood the effects of @NA1K's edit, which are perhaps more easily understood if they are viewed as one big diff[1]. What NA1K actually did was to bypass the content-forked sub-pages, and instead use {{Transclude random excerpt}} to embed a list of 36 articles.

The edit history obscures this, because two of NA1K's long-documented anti-social editing habits are displayed here: their tendency to take ten or twenty edits to do what other editors would do in a single save, and their failure to use helpful edit summaries (e.g. including in the edit summary a link to the article being added).

Here is a list of the 36 articles, prefixed with the quality assessment applied to them by WikiProject Ghana:

1. B — Kofi Annan
2. start — Anglo-Ashanti wars
3. start — Women in Ghana
4. start — Ghana Cocoa Board
5. start — Kotoka International Airport
6. stub — Dutch Gold Coast
7. start — Ho, Ghana
8. B — Ghana national football team
9. C — Akan people
10. C — Ghanaian cuisine
11. GA — Harrison Afful
12. start — Ghana national cricket team
13. C — Accra
14. C — Kumasi
15. start — Sekondi-Takoradi
16. C — War of the Golden Stool
17. start — Wa, Ghana
18. start — Mining industry of Ghana
19. start — Ghana Premier League
20. stub — LGBT rights in Ghana
21. C — Tema
22. start — 1948 Accra riots
23. B — University of Ghana
24. start — Teshie
25. start — Ghana Empire
26. B — Water supply and sanitation in Ghana
27. start — Languages of Ghana
28. C — Elmina Castle
29. C — New Patriotic Party
30. B — Kwame Nkrumah
31. B — Ashanti Empire
32. C — Peter Turkson
33. start — Cape Coast
34. start — Lake Bosumtwi
35. start — Abedi Pele
36. start — Kakum National Park

Note that in many cases, the assessments are way out-of-date. For example, many of the articles rated start-class are actually at C-class standard. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)

• Delete. Despite the errors in the nomination, @ToThAc is right about other points.

The list of the portal's current selected articles, which I posted above, illustrates the folly of trying to rebuild the portal. There simply are not not enough high-quality articles available, so NA1K chose a "never mind the quality, feel the width" approach. Yes, many of the articles are better than their current assessment rating indicates, but that failure of assessment simply another way in which how any portal on his topic is hobbled by limitations of the barely active WP:WikiProject Ghana.

Category:WikiProject Ghana articles shows that there are 5500 articles in the project scope, but few of them are high quality, as the table shows:

FA	A	GA	B	C	Start	Stub	FL	List	Category	Disambig	Draft	File	Portal	Project	Redirect	Template	NA	???	Total
0	0	13	111	484	2,526	4,611	0	227	3,163	5	42	26	0	41	232	214	8	528	12,231

Additionally, the years of neglect of the portal were followed by a one-off update of dubious quality. NA1K initially added themself as a "maintainer", but this was one of no less than 42 portals of which they claimed to be a maintainer: (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) They subsequently wisely removed themself as "maintainer" of all 42 after this was challenged as implausible.

So we are still left with a portal without a maintainer, and without an active WikiProject which might help recruit some maintainers.

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 at least three of the four counts:

1. ? Borderline no. As the table above shows, there is not enough high-quality content to build a balanced portal of high quality. When the numbers are this tight, it is not possible to build a portal which combines the three needed attributes: A/ number of articles, B/ balance of topics, and C/ quality of articles. At least one of the there attributes has to be sacrificed, and the post-NA1K portal sacrifices quality.
2. N High readership. No. The portal's January–June 2019 daily average of only 21 views per day is low.
3. N Lots of maintainers. No. Not even one. In the last ten years, its creator User:Natsubee has made only one edit to the portal, and NA1K has withdrawn their claim to maintain it.
4. N WikiProject involvement. No. WP:WikiProject Ghana is generously tagged as "semi-active", but "in-active." would probably be more accurate. And as @Newshunter12 helpfully notes, it has never shown any interest in the portal.

This portal is yet another relic of a rush of portalmania in the late 2000s, when editor numbers were at their peak, and were often assumed (wrongly) to be ever-growing. But for the last decade, with fewer editors, there has been no interest in maintaining a portal on this topic, and almost no interest in reading it. Time to just delete it. And since the problems are deep-seated and long-standing, I oppose re-creation. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:38, 17 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) 02:58, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
• Keep there is no requirement that portals need FA, FL, GA or A class articles to be sustainable. WP:POG says the portal must have "enough quality content articles above a Start-class to sustain the featured content section". The table above lists 246 articles of C-class and above, which is far more than you need for the featured content section. The GAs and FA alone would provide about half the material. Countries which aren't tiny do constitute broad topics (Ghana has a population of about 30 million, which makes it more populous than, say, Australia). Sure, it hasn't got many page views, but that is a fundamental flaw of the portal system in general and consensus is against getting rid of portals entirely. I don't really understand the logic behind the maintainer arguments, whether the creator has maintained it is irrelevant (if that wasn't the case then even highly active portals could be deleted) and the fact that somebody has been making substantial changes to it recently suggests that it is not abandoned. Hut 8.5 18:12, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

  @Hut 8.5: "there is no requirement that portals need FA, FL, GA or A class articles to be sustainable" – Yes there is. ToThAc (talk) 19:16, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

  Nope, your link doesn't say that at all. Please read it in full, it allows an article "which deals with its subject substantially or comprehensively". A typical B class article will certainly deal with the subject substantially. Later criteria make it even more clear that it's not expecting GA class and above, because it insists that the article shouldn't be marked as a stub and shouldn't have any cleanup tags. No article would ever get anywhere near GA with either. Hut 8.5 21:01, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

@Hut 8.5 This portal has been abandoned for a decade, save for a little paint job by a serial one-off updater with a history of shoddy work, and who likes portals in general so they try to throw wrenches into random or anticipated MfD's when they can. WP:POG requires portals have large numbers of readers and maintainers, and this has neither. There is also no community consensus to keep junk portals, nor has their ever been one. You are misstating the outcome of the crude RfC in 2018 that asked about eliminating all portals in one go, which was rejected. Subjective broadness about population means nothing here, only this portal's failing of WP:POG. Newshunter12 (talk) 09:13, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

I was planning on expanding the portal periodically, but since it's nominated for deletion, I won't be doing so, unless it is retained. This work was not some sort of "paint job" or "one-off" work at all. The work I performed significantly improved the portal compared to its former state, and was certainly not "shoddy"; it was precise and proper, and served to provide up-to-date content for Wikipedia's WP:READERS. If users don't like some of the article entries, they can be easily changed, and matters can always be discussed at a portal talk page. Since this portal appears likely to be deleted at this point, this process will unlikely have a chance to come into fruition. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 10:05, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

@NA1K, you added yourself as a maintainer to 42 portals, including this one. When the credibility of that was challenged, you removed yourself as maintainer. Now you state that you were planning on expanding the portal periodically, etc, as if you were the maintainer.

So what's the game here? Are you are the maintainer of those 42 portals, or not? Or do you plan to claim to be the maintainer of each of them only when you find it expedient to do so, while denying it the rest of the time?

You added 36 articles. 18 of them are assessed as start-class, and two as stub-class. You write If users don't like some of the article entries, they can be easily changed ... which is basically saying that you want other editors to follow you around as you do these driveby "updates", and then challenge you on the very very basic issues which a very modest amount of checking would have avoided in the first place. That's very bad conduct, and prolific editors who require a full-time cleanup crew behind them eventually find themselves exhausting the community's patience. If you really insist on doing these driveby makeovers of portals on topics where you have no experience or expertise and where the WikiPrroject is not active ... then for God's sakw would you slow down and do some of the very basic checks?

Your long-term never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width approach to portals is a significant factor in why we have so many abandoned junk portals. As you know, both your RFAs were notable for the high number of editors who noted your long track record of bad judgement, and the evience here and n many other recent issues is that your judgement has not improved. Please learn from these warnings: stop being so cavalier, and get outside opinions on your judgement rather than charging away with a forest of trivial edits which don't even have decent edit summaries. For example, in this edit[2] you added Cape Coast and Kakum National Park, bt with vanilla edit summary Portal further updated / expanded with new selection(s). It would have been spectacularly easy for you to simply write "add Kakum National Park + Cape Coast", creating links for others to assess. After 8 years as an editor, it's astonishing that you either haven't figured that very basic aspect of working collaboratively, or couldn't be bothered communicating what you are actually doing.

Instead of all this forest of black box edits, try being systematic. If you see a portal which you think you want to "rescue", go to its talk page, make a list of the articles you intend to add, explaining how and why you made the selection ... and the post at POG and at the relevant WikiProjects, asking for comments. That way, the proposals can be examined before you make the change, and others can call a halt if you planning to just splat in starts and stubs, as you did here. Then you can add the list in one go, rather than creating a whole screenfull of opaque edits on the history page. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:28, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

A reply, bulletized per the points by BHG above:

• I removed myself as a portal maintainer because I wanted to, and particularly per WP:NOTCOMPULSORY, nothing more. There is no "game" here.
• The assessments for Ghana-related articles are a mess, and are mostly inaccurate. For example, see Category:B-Class Ghana articles and note articles listed there such as 1996 in Ghana, 2005 in Ghana and 2010 in Ghana, all of which have exactly one reference each. These are certainly not B-class articles. It would be incompetent to blindly add these articles to the portal simply because they are (incorrectly) rated as B-class, and would not improve the portal.
• Africa-related articles and content on English Wikipedia suffer from Wikipedia:Systemic bias, whereby editors do not seem to spend as much time working on these topics compared to other topics. This is part of the reason why there are so few GA and FA articles for Ghana-related articles. Perhaps some sort of drive should occur to encourage more work on Africa-related articles.
• The articles I added provide a comprehensive overview of the topic. I specialize in geographic/historical and food/drink topics on Wikipedia. I also specialize in other topics. The articles added to the Ghana portal cover aspects of the country's peoples, geography, history, industries, sports, notable persons, and other aspects. The "never-mind-the-quality" comment above is incorrect, as I assessed these articles relative to their suitability for this portal, for a topic that is negatively affected by systemic bias and whose articles are rated in a highly inaccurate, misleading manner. Again, these entries were assessed before being added to the portal, but not blindly based upon (often incorrect) assessments on talk pages.
• The talk page for the portal has received no discussion at all, and consists entirely of notices. BHG's addition of a bunch of hoops to jump through for an unused talk page would be fine for a well-read portal, but this portal has not been maintained in years, and again, there's no discussion on the talk page at all. Collaboration is great and desired, but there has to actually be a potential for collaboration to occur. Additions to the portal are easily discerned by clicking on "edit this page" and noting the article additions that were performed. Adequate edit summaries were also provided, although a bit generic at times, they provide the gist of what had occurred. All of this, again, for a portal that has received little work and low readership.
• Regarding RfA, I notice that BHG is essentially a "legacy admin", one who was granted the adminship tools during a period of time when requests for adminship received little actual scrutiny compared to matters today, when adminship was not a "big deal". Yet, BHG feels entitled to talk down to me, like they are somehow superior.
• I feel that BHG has developed a bias against those who work on portals, referring to portal editors in a consistently negative manner, calling them names such as "the portalistas" and demeaning anyone that posts at the WikiProject portals page on a regular basis.
• I feel that BHG has demonstrated a confirmation bias against portal editors, as is demonstrated by the user formerly repeatedly referring to me as a "liar" in MfD discussions and elsewhere.
• Meanwhile, BHG has apparently ignored that WP:POG has been contested as lacking validity as an actual guideline page, as per recent Village pump discussions. The discussion was recently archived here sans any formal closures.
• BHG and others continue to treat POG as gospel, despite all of this. See the hatted commentary I have provided below for more information. That's fine, and others are entitled to their opinion, but it could also be argued that those that ignore this evidence of POG'S lack of validity are lacking competency, in favor of a predisposed opinion instead of the facts of the matter regarding POG.

– The fundamental problem of WP:POG's lede being decided upon by a single user –

At its inception, WP:POG never received actual formal discussion to be enacted as a real English Wikipedia guideline page. Instead, label Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines as an information page using the {{information page}} template. There are many reasons why. The gist of the lead for the portal was added subjectively and unilaterally by one user in 2006 (diff), and no discussion appears to have actually occurred about it until relatively recently. Guidelines should be decided upon via consensus, not by a unilateral addition of content from one user. Meantime, the page has been treated as an actual guideline, despite the content being based solely upon one person's opinion, which furthermore, was added to the page at its infancy. Furthermore, the page was shortly thereafter marked as historical (diff), with an edit summary stating, "{{historical}}, not an active proposal per lack of talk page activity; suspect lack of advertisement". After this, and importantly, the historical template was removed (diff), with an edit summary stating, "removed historical tag; this was not intended as a proposed Wikipedia Guideline, but merely guidelines as in advice for portal creators." (Underline emphasis mine). Per the diffs, the page was not even intended as a proposed guideline from the start, and no consensus was ever formed for the content therein. The page was intended from the start as an information page. It's actually rather a farce that the page was somehow converted to a guideline page, because there doesn't appear to be any meaningful discussion leading to that change. It's like someone just slapped the Guideline page template page on it and it just simply stuck thereafter, sans any consensus. Furthermore, the lead of the present WP:POG page is worded as an illogical and bizarre syllogism. Some users have been stating that if a portal does not receive what they deem to be adequate page views or maintenance, then the topic itself is somehow not broad enough. Of course, this standard could not be used anywhere else on Wikipedia, because people would reject this as absurd. For example, the Physics article does not receive a great deal of page maintenance, yet the topic itself is obviously broad in scope, both in terms of the topic itself and in terms of the amount of related content available on English Wikipedia. The manner in which this syllogism is worded on the page is subjective and inferior, and has been misused to define topical scope as based upon page views and page maintainers, rather than upon the actual scope of a given topic.

• Don't take all of this wrong, and I will keep the constructive criticism here in mind, and I wish everyone here well. It is my hope that we can all get along, learn from one-another, and function in a collegial, positive manner. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 12:55, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

  @Hut 8.5: POG is sloppily written in this area, with some fuzzy and even contradictory text. But WP:POG#Article_selection says "of high quality, either a featured article, a good article or one which deals with its subject substantially or comprehensively" ... which clearly deprecates NA1K's use of set which is 50% start-class, and where two of the remaining 18 are assessed as stubs. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:30, 19 September 2019 (UTC)